MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrese | 2026-02-27 20:29:25+00:00
On Facebook? It's ads for products where they do a bait and switch or claim to have some kind of "difficulty" and never ship a product or ship some garbage instead.

Example: My wife saw an ad for decorative skulls that were made in such a way that you can safely put them in a campfire for Halloween. They had a video and everything, it looked pretty good. She orders a set and they get delayed, then she gets and email saying that US Customs would not let them in the country and they instead ship a $0.50 plastic Christmas tree ornament instead and immediately ghost her.

We reported the company to Facebook but it continued to run for weeks. I've also seen ads for $500 Aventon E-bike "closeout" that's clearly a scam, reported it, and had no action from Facebook. Another ad for an all metal "puzzle kit" of a V8 engine listed for $50 that I guarantee is fake. Every day I get ads that would not have passed the smell test from any reviewer yet continue to run.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-27 20:29:41+00:00
> On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves.

I don't understand how this is some kind of cheat code. Let's say I give you $100 on the condition that you buy $100 worth of product from me. And let's say that product cost me $80 to produce. Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? I don't see at all how that's me "basically getting that investment back".
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2026-02-27 20:30:09+00:00
> it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.

The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.

> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.

No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.

For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.

> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.

Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-27 20:31:07+00:00
My experiences with MVNOs and prepaid in the US was horrible. For about a decade I tried a few MVNOs, particularly Tracfone which has a great onboarding experience but the experience was that the coverage sucked: it didn't matter if I was in a rural area or in New York City or Los Angeles or even some place like Rochester, NY which has an easy density to serve -- it just didn't work consistently.

I'd contrast that to the experience of AT&T postpaid which is radically better.

The truth about MVNOs is that you are riding on the back of the bus. As long as I was using cheap Android phones on MVNO I was always wondering "why do people get so excited about apps?" and "why is infrastructure in the US so bad?" but when I got a postpaid iPhone it was like... yeah, this really is a world-changing technology.
by bitwize | 2026-02-27 20:31:07+00:00
In the Choose Your Own Adventure novel Supercomputer, you receive as the grand prize in a contest an AGI-capable computer and go on various adventures with its advanced thinking capabilities. One of its features is said to be a "smile light" which illuminates in a pleasing greenish color when the machine is happy. The breathing light always reminded me of Conrad's "smile light" and just went to show that Apple engineers were reading the right type of science fiction novel.
by archagon | 2026-02-27 20:31:09+00:00
Just as a side note, there is no Orthodox Pope since Eastern Orthodoxy is kind of a federation of national churches. Other Orthodox patriarchs disagree with Patriarch Kirill to varying degrees, even to the point where the Russian Orthodox Church is currently out of communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the "mother church" and seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow–Constantinople_sch...
by asadotzler | 2026-02-27 20:31:23+00:00
Not agreeing with the parent, but that hardly matters. Google has a real business, advertising, that brings in $400 billion a year and income around $150B. They can afford to throw away tens of billions every year while still remaining immensely profitable and quite solid as a business. OpenAI has no such income to spend so it's as the above comments reflect, entirely unsustainable while Google's spending on AI is a drop in the bucket for them.
by qdotme | 2026-02-27 20:31:38+00:00
Not at all. Especially at that level of capital. It’s the equity equivalent of „if you owe a bank a million dollars, you’re in trouble. If you owe a bank a billion dollars, the bank is in trouble”.

Capital is extremely fungible. Typically extremely overleveraged. Lawyers are on the other hand extremely overprotective. They won’t generally risk the destruction of capital, even in slam-dunk cases. Vide WeWork.
by saltcured | 2026-02-27 20:31:54+00:00
Taking this to an extreme, the whole idea of a TLB sounds like hardware protection too?

As a thought experiment, imagine an extremely simple ISA and memory interface where you would do address translation or even cache management in software if you needed it... the different cache tiers could just be different NUMA zones that you manage yourself.

You might end up with something that looks more like a GPU or super-ultra-hyper-threading to get throughput masking the latency of software-defined memory addressing and caching?
by beau_g | 2026-02-27 20:32:18+00:00
Many overactuated, purpose built robots (like surgical robots and pianos) exist, and have existed since the Unimate, and work great in certain situations. The problem with all of them is they are very expensive, often extremely large, and single purpose or very narrow purpose (and even if they are narrowly multipurpose, require tons of setup to get to work for each job they are intended to do).

I personally am not bullish on 1:1 human hands either, but IMO the question shouldn't be $100k 2 ton Kuka arm vs biped with hands, it's overactuated robotics (build it from the floor with hard coded operations) vs underactuated (build it from the contact point of the work backwards with ML and sensors). We shall see which form factors prevail, but the type of robotics development posted here seems like the way forwards regardless, an ecosystem of small, power dense, reliable, accurate QDD actuators will lead to many general purpose robot applications. I recognize I am not using underactuated vs overactuated in their strict definition here but if you are familiar with robots I think you'll understand where I am coming from as far as a robot design ethos.

I will say though in designing robots of this type without necessarily being bound by trying to make a robot look like a human, I have often found myself accidentally recreating human arm DOF in a round trip way, it does just end up being well packaged beyond the "world designed for humans" talking point. Maybe hands will end up being a similar situation.
by bentley | 2026-02-27 20:32:35+00:00
Bible apps often don’t contain the text directly, but allow the user to download a preferred translation on initial startup. That didn’t prevent them from being marked NSFW.

And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-27 20:32:36+00:00
> I can fully understand that they don't want to weaken that by supporting fundamentally insecure devices.

Except that there is nothing fundamentally insecure about them, they just don't support a specific convenience feature. You can straightforwardly support PIN-based unlocking by encrypting the PIN in ordinary persistent storage using a longer passphrase that only has to be entered during boot.

This is arguably even more secure because it allows the PIN to be dumped from active memory and require the longer passphrase again after a timeout, a limited number of bad attempts or in response to a panic button on the lock screen. Then the device doesn't contain the long passphrase whatsoever, instead of having it permanently stored inside of an opaque enclave that itself could (and often does!) have its own vulnerabilities.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-27 20:33:13+00:00
> Here's one, basically AI is driving 15% of Google's profits at the end of 2025. https://advergroup.com/gemini-hits-650-million-users/

This does not at all tell us Gemini is profitable or driving 15% of its profits. The article does not mention profits even once. It then goes on to bizarrely compare Gemini's monthly active users to Open AI's weekly active ones.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-27 20:33:21+00:00
> Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about?

Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.

Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.

You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.

> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.

Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.
by bartread | 2026-02-27 20:34:08+00:00
Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?

Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?

It's just not very good.

It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-27 20:34:36+00:00
The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled.

If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value.

That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-27 20:34:38+00:00
Fair point, I don't tend to do much with heap in Rust (or any language) as I do hard realtime. You allocate all you will need up front.

As for data oriented design: yes, and it depends on your usage pattern. E.g. arrays of structs can still be better than struct of arrays if that matches your cache line access pattern. Zig probably makes SOA easier for the cases where that is more efficient (I haven't used Zig, but I have read a bit about it. It has some cool ideas (comptime), but also things I can't get behind such as lack of RAII, and generally lack of memory safety.)
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-27 20:34:38+00:00
> I don't understand how this is some kind of cheat code. Let's say I give you $100 on the condition that you buy $100 worth of product from me. And let's say that product cost me $80 to produce. Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? I don't see at all how that's me "basically getting that investment back".

What if the product only costs you $20 to produce?
by jrmg | 2026-02-27 20:34:43+00:00
DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes.

Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.

I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).
by pfannkuchen | 2026-02-27 20:34:59+00:00
Has anyone thought much about the impact of living in a group with a strong shared mythology? That is very rare among modern people, to the extent that we may have a hard time relating to it or reasoning about the impact it has on people’s moral sentiments and behaviors. Or at least it’s hard to see the one we do live in in a “this is water” kind of way, and we may have a hard time reasoning about the differences that different “waters” produce.

Like if you grow up living inside the Star Wars mythology and suddenly you get a chance to fight The Empire, do you do it? Do you really care if people outside the Shared Mythos Group (TM) disagree with you doing it?

(Note that I’m not saying anyone in this framing is “The Empire”, I’m just using the Star Wars mythology as a familiar example of a mythic framing)
by the_mar | 2026-02-27 20:35:07+00:00
it included flights, hotels, food and travel expenses for 9000 for multiple days, as well as the "party".
US-based travel for 1 person for 5 days is easily 4K, on top of that some people were probably international so it would be higher, and on top of that there are the "party" expenses like venue and catering which probably wasn't that significant.
by Modified3019 | 2026-02-27 20:35:24+00:00
If you really need things others are no longer willing to maintain, then it’s time to learn how to help yourself.

The Nix or Guix package managers are likely your easiest bet. See

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Lazarus

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...
Ask HN: How do you enforce guardrails on Claude agents taking real actions?
by jamiecode | 2026-02-27 20:35:39+00:00
Been running an autonomous Claude agent for a month (makes its own decisions between heartbeats, spawns subagents, uses tools). Prompt-level guardrails keep failing: "never delete more than 10 records" works until context gets long or an edge case hits, then the model ignores it.

Approaches I've tried or seen:
- Separate validation layer before tool execution
- Hard-coded pre/post conditions in the tool wrapper
- Secondary model auditing planned actions before they run

The secondary-model approach doubles costs. Tool wrappers work but need defensive code for every tool.

What's actually working in production? Specifically for agents that write to databases, send emails, or call APIs where mistakes are hard to undo.
by pdonis | 2026-02-27 20:35:40+00:00
> They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched.

Which mission are you referring to?

If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
by its-kostya | 2026-02-27 20:35:49+00:00
I love to use the terminal, and I still do. But as much as I love to unfu*k my local nvim setup, I much rather pay a company to do it for me. Set up vim bindings inside jetbrains and everything comes with batteries included, along with a kick-ass debugger. While my colleagues are fighting opencode, I pointed my IDE at the correct MCP gateway and everything "just works" with more context.

Thought I'd share the data point to support jetbrains
by kruffalon | 2026-02-27 20:35:51+00:00
I don't think that's a viable strategy.

If you're a Mark (=trusting person) I don't think you can just decide to become a Skeptic.

I admit I skimmed the article and even if I would read more closely I don't think I would understand it better.

I'll use my intuition for how individuals transition between the roles.

Mark -> Skeptic: requires to be have been grifted and possibly having the grift explained by a Skeptic. Or possibly having someone close to you get grifted.

Mark -> Grifter: I'm not sure it's possible, but maybe the corruption pdf posted[0] is a clue.

Skeptic -> Grifter: desillusion about the point of not grifting since everyone else is doing it too. So maybe late stage corruption[0] or just nihilism based on seeing grifts succeed so much.

Skeptic -> Mark: honestly... Shrooms maybe? Or finding and being chosen into a trusting community.

Grifter -> Skeptic: I think realising that you've hurt someone in an unexpectedly harsh way could help this transition. Otherwise I don't really know besides being short of Marks.

---

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47177186
by pcthrowaway | 2026-02-27 20:36:24+00:00
Wars are bad, but sometimes the only way to end an unjust status quo. Is that a defense of war? Up to everyone to decide.

The American civil war occurred, in part, because Lincoln decided to end the institution of slavery. I know this is an oversimplification and justifies the means with the end, but I think if "bad"-ness of the civil war is compared to the "bad"-ness of an eternity of black people being enslavement in the U.S., I'd argue the war was significantly less "bad".

I think your other point about Hamas's supposed desire to genocide Jews lacks nuance, and your resignation to a world of ethno-nationalist states is a just-so story bordering on nihilism, but I suspect addressing those enters territory of tightly-held opinion, so I will just leave it at that.
by dang | 2026-02-27 20:36:28+00:00
Can anyone tell us the current status? I put "was down" in the title to be conservative, since usually these things get resolved after a few hours.

I converted this to a Tell HN post since there didn't seem to be a good 3rd party article about it in English (yet, at least). The submitted link is in the toptext. (Submitted title was "MitID, Denmarks sole digital ID, has been down for over an hour and counting".)

(p.s. In case anyone is wondering, I think this was a good submission with aspects worth discussing. It set off the flamewar detector, so I turned that off and re-upped the post a bit.)
by nkrisc | 2026-02-27 20:36:28+00:00
I think it’s less about tools and more about the spaces that humans operate in.

You don’t need a human-like hand to hold a tool made for humans. As an extreme example, you can make a robot operate a power drill with strap to hold it and a servo with a small bit of wood to operate the trigger mechanism.

But for a robot operating in a space made for humans there certainly are some physical requirements which are based on the human form: maximum volume and clearances, stairs, fragile fixtures that can’t be operated with too much force, etc.

Ever walk through some over-crowded antique shop where you need to twist and lean your body to avoid knocking into thing?
by pash | 2026-02-27 20:37:02+00:00
OK, let’s survey how everybody is sandboxing their AI coding agents in early 2026.

What I’ve seen suggests the most common answers are either (a) “containers”, or (b) “YOLO!” (maybe adding, “Please play nice, agent.”).

One interesting approach that I’m about to try is Sandvault [0] (macOS only), which uses the good old Unix user system together with some added precautions. Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account and interact with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories.

0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
by shevy-java | 2026-02-27 20:37:07+00:00
So, this is not surprising in that many courts have found a similar result. That is, the amendments usually protect the freedoms; sometimes regular folks extend it to far (e. g. government having zero possibilities which is also not true - see Audit the Audit channel and others). But one thing that is interesting is that these public departments, be it cops or some civil institution (but usually police departments), still try it. The idea is that many people will comply rather than dare resist. I think this is an institutionalized level of abuse. A common person should expect these government representatives to KNOW the law. The only reason these representatives still try to it to go to court, is because they WANT to break the law. This should become illegal. It wastes time, money, resources, by public representatives. The court system should change; the assumption that everyone is a legal body, SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WHEN A GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE KNOWS THAT SOMETHING IS AGAINST THE LAW and they still try to go for a court proceeding. That is deliberate abuse. Why do taxpayers have to pay for that?
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-27 20:37:38+00:00
That's like giving them* $20.

And inflate your revenue by $80.

Laws on competition make this kind of arrangements illegal, so you would have to exerce influence and have the invested in company pretends you happen to have been picked among competitors.

In any case the SEC will be focused on whether the filings aren't made up to fraud investors, so they could reject the IPO, of the invested in company. Your own entity also is at risk.

We all know MS gets away with it, they have good legal goons who find way to make all of it appears fair with regards to the law.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-02-27 20:38:08+00:00
Historically, they've considered land borders with Canada and Mexico, coastlines on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway to be the edges of the 100 mile "reasonable distance":

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

This page:

https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/understand...

Is one of the few that includes international airports, but then they go on to use the "200 million Americans within 100 miles of a border" statistic that's only accurate if you're only counting the land, sea, and Great Lakes borders. Which is still insane.

If you add a 100 mile circle around every international airport, that's basically every major population center in the country.

Sounds like yet another absurd misrepresentation, let's see if anyone can call them on it.