MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by haunter | 2026-03-11 22:33:52+00:00
US domestic politics

I won't give you examples because all of them can be spinned about being relevant

"Well HN is an american site after all"

"Most of the HN users are american voters so it's relevant for them"

"Hackers need to be aware of what's happening in the world"

"You only say that because you disagree with that side"

etc

Same with the stories about Tesla flagged. If you read the comments it's always the same: "Pro-Tesla crowd is flagging everything negative about Elon so the bad news never reach the front page" vs "Anti-Tesla crowd flagging everything because they hate Elon"

HN is the best without politics. But it's not up to me.
by jbarrow | 2026-03-11 22:34:09+00:00
I've been noticing a _lot_ more AI-generated/edited content of late, both comments and stories. It's gotten to the point that I spend a lot less time on HN than I used to, and if it continues to get worse I expect I'll quit altogether.

At the end of the day, I'm here because of all the thoughtful commenters and people sharing interesting stories.
by bartread | 2026-03-11 22:34:11+00:00
> taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.

And don't forget significantly shortening the usable battery life.

Windows 11 and the crapware it typically ships with are all very hard on battery life, and sleep support is unreliable so you can often find significant battery drain even when the machine is supposed to be sleeping.

For me it means that if I'm having to use a Windows laptop (and quite literally thank god that hasn't been true for 2 years now) then I've got to have the power supply and cables with me at all times, and I've got to be somewhere I have a realistic chance of plugging in just in case the worst has happened.
by KK7NIL | 2026-03-11 22:34:27+00:00
Perhaps you're joking, but Athenian democracy had a significant amount of randomness, with candidates being chosen randomly from the top vote winners.
Terms were also only 1 year for most positions.

These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power.

This is a good video on this: https://youtu.be/pIgMTsQXg3Q
by oliver_dr | 2026-03-11 22:34:42+00:00
Nice approach. The "don't trust an LLM to guard another LLM" principle is sound for tool-call safety specifically, where the threat model is well-defined (destructive commands, SSRF, path traversal, etc.) and pattern matching gives you deterministic guarantees.

Where this gets interesting is at the boundary between tool-call safety and output quality. Vigil solves the "agent tries to rm -rf /" problem, but there's a whole class of failures where the agent makes safe tool calls that produce wrong results - querying the right database but misinterpreting results, calling an API correctly but hallucinating the summary it returns to the user, following the workflow but giving a factually incorrect final answer.

For that layer, deterministic rules don't scale because you'd need rules for every possible factual claim. That's where LLM-based evaluation actually makes sense - not as the guard for tool execution, but as the quality check on the final output. Think of it as two layers:

1. Vigil-style - deterministic, sub-millisecond checks on tool calls and actions (is this safe to execute?)

2. Semantic evaluation - LLM-based scoring on the output (is this correct, complete, and grounded in the provided context?)

The combination of both is what production agent systems actually need. We've been building the second layer at DeepRails (evaluate + auto-remediate when quality checks fail), and something like Vigil would complement it well as the first layer.

One thought on false positives: have you considered a "soft block" mode where flagged-but-borderline calls get routed through human approval rather than hard-blocked? For long-running agent tasks, a hard block with no fallback can leave workflows in broken states.
by MadVikingGod | 2026-03-11 22:34:43+00:00
While I too love the promise of Nix, I never was able to handle the configuration of nix. And at this point I've given up on it.

What I wonder is if there is a medium between Nix's build everything from the ground up, and the traditional get everything delivered. I've been excited about the Fedora Atomic collections, silverblue etc., as it gives me a lot of the roll back and isolation of nix with the workflow closer to a regular fedora or arch. I'm not saying that everything is roses, but I've been able to use it more than I ever got out of a nix.
by pjc50 | 2026-03-11 22:34:45+00:00
I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down.

On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.
by JohnMakin | 2026-03-11 22:34:50+00:00
Paid option doesn't really deter this behavior, it encourages it - a botter will see a price tag on a "real" account (see what happened to twitter's blue checkmark sub) and go oh goody, I can pay for people to think I'm real.

If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and 2) be appealing to actual users.
by tombert | 2026-03-11 22:35:05+00:00
Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions.

It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".

They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).

Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
by nacozarina | 2026-03-11 22:35:14+00:00
Driving everything by reputation-weighted identities just creates echo-chambers you then cannot escape.

The most useful time for the blowhard spout off at me is at the moment it makes me most uncomfortable. Because the blowhard probably has a valid point at some level, he’s just being an ass about it.

When we meet that moment with discipline, are able to identify and respond to the kernels of truth and ignore the chaff belted out, focus on the merits of the argument irrespective of the source of an adversarial viewpoint, we thrive.

I like the blowhards just the way they are, unruly and insolent.
by riffraff | 2026-03-11 22:35:20+00:00
> For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption

OTOH, it enables vote buying and intimidation at scale: you vote from home in exchange for 5€/not being beat up and have to film yourself doing it, so that the local bad guy gets authorized to bulldoze the local nature reserve.

Vote buying and intimidation already exist, but proving it is harder, all remote voting on everything would just make it more convenient.
by tshaddox | 2026-03-11 22:35:29+00:00
Don’t JavaScript Date instances have the same problem? Date implements toJSON, but when parsing JSON you’ll have to manually identify which string values represent Dates and convert them back to Date instances. The exact same is true of Temporal (e.g. Instant).

And as far as I know, date-fns deals with native Date instances, not “data-only objects.”
by kjuulh | 2026-03-11 22:35:29+00:00
I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.

Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.

At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
by suobset | 2026-03-11 22:35:37+00:00
I love (read, hate) the trend of using Serif fonts and marketing material that pull on nostalgic vibes. Surely, AI has been revolutionary in its own regard, for better or worse. But, the more they go into 80/90s style advertising, the more the allure of it dies.

Also this "system" just seems vulnerable af.
by coldtea | 2026-03-11 22:35:42+00:00
Well, I wouldn't piss on the British for that, when Louisville is pronounced "LOO-vul" and not "Lou-iss-ville".

And don't get me started on Des Moines, Boise, La Jolla (at least that has an excuse), Spokane, Versailles, Tucson, Willamette, ...

And the worst of all: Arkansas.
by tzs | 2026-03-11 22:35:50+00:00
How about comments that include AI output if labeled?

Earlier today I remembered that there was a Supreme Court case I'd heard about 35 years ago that was relevant to on an ongoing HN discussion, but I could not remember the name of the case nor could I find it by Googling (Google kept finding later cases involving similar issues that were not relevant to what I was looking for).

I asked Perplexity and given my recollection and when I heard about the case it suggested a candidate and gave a summary. The summary matched my recollection and a quick look at the decision itself verified it had found the right case and did a good job summarizing it--probably better than I would have done.

I posted a cite to the case and a link to decision. I normally would have also linked to the Wikipedia article on the case since those usually have a good summary but there was no Wikipedia article for this one.

I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.

Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

I have also considered, but not yet actually tried, running some of my comments through an AI for suggested improvements. I've noticed I have a tendency to do three things that I probably should do less of:

1. Run on sentences. (Maybe that's why of all the people in the 11th-100th spot on the karma list I have the highest ratio of words/karma, with 42+ words per karma point [1]).

2. Use too many commas.

3. Write "server" when I mean "serve". I think I add "r" to some other words ending in "e" too.

I was thinking those would be something an AI might be good at catching and suggesting minimal fixes for.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867167
by unethical_ban | 2026-03-11 22:35:51+00:00
Some things to think about:

* A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic?

* Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here.

* People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.
by kelnos | 2026-03-11 22:35:54+00:00
The difference is that China's slavery and genocide is happening today, within its own borders.

Is that true of the US? Is there state-sanctioned/supported slavery in the US? Is the US committing genocide within its own borders? Arguably not?

This doesn't make the US perfect or wonderful. We've been politically and militarily supporting a genocide in Gaza, as a stark example.

But "the US did slavery and genocide in the past" and "China is doing slavery and genocide now" doesn't make the US and China equivalent today.

And on top of that, I can go out and protest my country supporting Israel's garbage in Gaza. If I were a Chinese citizen and tried to do something like that in China, I'd be jailed.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-03-11 22:36:02+00:00
I have been thinking about this myself. I'm working on some custom dictionaries for words I discover from my corpus of movie subtitles. Which I'm sure is not a new idea, but it's fun, because it gives me a dictionary that only contains the words that people "actually use", and with "real" example sentences. (words in quotes because movie dialogue isn't 100% as real as I'd like.)

I'm sure this is not a remotely new idea, but I'm having fun with it. I also like that I can see how common every form of every word is. I was surprised to learn that almost none of the most common words are nouns. And in my internal tools I can filter by movies released a certain date to track changes, which is neat.
by k_g_b_ | 2026-03-11 22:36:13+00:00
Compared to other Linux distribution's package tooling Arch's is pretty nice and painless, I think.

Agreed with namcap/chroot - I think there should be even more mandatory checks on pushing stuff to AUR. But even so - regarding your last point: you absolutely need to check all PKGBUILDs from AUR or potentially get malware.

https://bertptrs.nl/2026/01/30/how-to-review-an-aur-package.... is a nice recent article by one of the maintainers that follows up on last year's AUR malware.

The final point sums it up, though: the AUR was built without the security mechanisms - technical and social - we want and need today.
by cuuupid | 2026-03-11 22:36:14+00:00
It's more likely they will continue expansionist policy in Asia which counters several American diplomatic goals:

1. Democracy and freedom worldwide

2. Economic access+prosperity with Asia

3. Pro-American sentiment

(Not in order of importance, which shifts constantly)

I think assuming China would beat the US in conventional war if they reach 'AGI' first is a stretch, even if this actually grants them a force advantage it's not like the US can no longer reach AGI. The risk is really more that if they reach 'AGI' and subsequently a force advantage, that they would no longer be deterred and more decisively move on Taiwan next year. Taiwan is key to [1] and [2] above.
by degamad | 2026-03-11 22:36:18+00:00
Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-speaking, not English-native.

Pretending that it's English-native is why there's unspoken incentives to sound more "native", and thus use these grammar-correcting tools.

Some of the intelligent comments on here come from people who learned English in recent months or years, rather than in childhood.

Their English isn't always fluent or well-structured. If they rely slightly more heavily on suggested-next-word tools or AI translations, is that a reason to exclude them from the conversation?

Conversely, many English learning resources for non-native speakers focus on strict formal language, similar to AI-generated text. Do we risk excluding people who have learned a style more formal than we're used to?
by bartread | 2026-03-11 22:36:22+00:00
I had a series of two XPS laptops in my last corporate job, finishing two years ago. My uncle has also had one of them that passed on to me when he died.

I can't speak for the other series you mention, but the XPS series is complete garbage and should be avoided at all costs. Three for three laptops, all in theory well specced, that were all horribly flawed in various ways (WiFi flakiness, constant driver issues, crappy trackpads, mediocre keyboards), does not speak well of that model line.
by keeda | 2026-03-11 22:36:30+00:00
Could we also discourage comments and comment-threads accusing an article of being AI-written? Half the threads these days have a comment that latches onto some LLM-ism in TFA, calls it out, and spawns a whole discussion which gets repetitive fast. I think this falls into the same category as "don't comment about the voting on comments."

Personally, I try to look beyond the language, which admittedly can be grating, for some interesting ideas or insights. Given that people are already starting to sound like ChatGPT, probably through sheer osmosis, we will have no choice but to look past that anyway.

Yes, it's annoying to read LLM-isms. It's also fine to downvote or ignore or grumble internally, and move on.
by ang_cire | 2026-03-11 22:36:51+00:00
Frankly, I find that less 'naive' than I do 'dangerously possible'.

Autonomous weaponry is one of the few ways that a fascist state could reasonably maintain violent control over a large and hostile populace.

I guarantee Trump would rather have perfectly obedient killbots than critically thinking soldiers, or even just the 5 murderous assholes required to oversee tasking for 1000 semi-autonomous police drones.

The least plausible part is the private sector, which just doesn't work that way.
by thangalin | 2026-03-11 22:36:52+00:00
How Cosmic Ray Influenced an Election:

https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

My Līberum Cōnsilium (see references on page 55):

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...
by protocolture | 2026-03-11 22:36:54+00:00
>Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.

Depends how it is designed. The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp. I loved seeing randos from minor parties getting to grill public servants on whatever their constituents were complaining about, particularly firearm legislation.
by kace91 | 2026-03-11 22:37:36+00:00
There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).

Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
by phs318u | 2026-03-11 22:37:41+00:00
Totally agree. But I’m seeing (or more sensitive to) increasing cohorts that can’t string two words together to express a single thought coherently. There’s a difference between adapting language and use of linguistic tools (such as metaphors) versus semi-coherent blathering.

EDIT: spread > express
Which may be a segue to a point regarding using corrective tools as a form of preemptive editing?
by GMoromisato | 2026-03-11 22:37:49+00:00
I think it's a spectrum:

1. I enter "Describe the C++ language" at an LLM and post the response in HN. This is obviously useless--I might as well just talk to an LLM directly.

2. I enter "Why did Stroustrup allow diamond inheritance? What scenario was he trying to solve" then I distill the response into my own words so that it's relevant to the specific post. This may or may not be insightful, but it's hardly worse than consulting Google before posting.

3. I spend a week with creating a test language with a different trade-off for multiple-inheritance. Then I ask an LLM to summarize the unique features of the language into a couple of paragraphs, and then I post that into HN. This could be a genuinely novel idea and the fact that it is summarized by an LLM does not diminish the novelty.

My point is that human+LLM can sometimes be better than human alone, just as human+hammer, human+calculator, human+Wikipedia can be better than human alone. Using a tool doesn't guarantee better results, but claiming that LLMs never help seems silly at this point.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-03-11 22:38:13+00:00
> It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

Electronic voting has lots of advantages. It can be end-to-end verified, it can be a great help to disadvantaged people (blind, illiterate), it can deliver results faster, it can probably be made more robust to retail-level tampering than paper ballots provided a paper audit trail it kept (as all electronic systems designed with security in mind do).

The one question mark in my mind: the current US system resisted Trump's efforts to corrupt it pretty well. I think that was because of the inertia created all the people involved in staffing the ballot stations, counting and verifying the votes. The machinations of the electoral college being highly visible put people doing the wrong thing at high risk for decades after Trump leaves the stage.

An automated electronic system could remove a lot of that human inertia. Human efficiency is not an advantage in an electoral system, it's a weakness. You want as many people involved as possible.
by bartread | 2026-03-11 22:38:42+00:00
There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.
by tmoertel | 2026-03-11 22:38:51+00:00
> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.

I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:

What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
by npunt | 2026-03-11 22:39:11+00:00
Read/watch this interview [1] with Ada Palmer on her new book about the Renaissance. Florence did this for a time.

> You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower.

> They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It’s a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.

[1] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer
by riffraff | 2026-03-11 22:39:16+00:00
there's a much simpler solution for in person voting, used in Italy for example: you have a numbered sticker on the ballot, when you get the ballot the sticker id is written down, when you get out of the voting booth it gets verified and detached.

The ballot you throw in the box does not have the sticker (vote is anonymous) and you cannot come in with a pre-marked ballot (and being out one) cause the number would not match.