MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0x3f | 2026-03-13 23:37:55+00:00
Well I'm not sure I entirely believe this myself, but it seems easy enough to argue that this is progress of a sort.

The West assumes pure democracy as the final form of government that we are all convergently evolving towards. But if this form of government or society is not robust to the kinds of things you're talking about, should it not suffer the consequences and be adapted or flushed for our long-term betterment?

It seems a bit like saying the French Revolution was the most destructive thing to happen in the history of France. Sure, in the short term. But it also paved the way for modern liberal democracy.
by smith7018 | 2026-03-13 23:38:18+00:00
I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.
by saagarjha | 2026-03-13 23:38:41+00:00
Most companies are evil in some way, the question is how evil and how close you are to the evil. Most people will pick "not that evil but pays a lot". A few will take "pretty evil and pays more than a lot". Some will choose "less evil and pays poorly". (It's worth noting that there are a lot of jobs that are not at the Pareto frontier and are "more evil and pay worse" but social mobility etc. cause them to be selected anyway).
by dworks | 2026-03-13 23:39:21+00:00
they don't handle it at all. they let it go on. you for example have hundreds of people falsely registering their place of residence as somebody else's home, which causes massive problems for that home owner or apartment resident, and there is nothing done about it at all.

These types of laws are designed for the 1950s where there were natural barriers to acquiring and disseminating information. There is no attempt whatsoever to update them and to reduce harm caused to the average citizen today.
by zapzupnz | 2026-03-13 23:39:40+00:00
> You don't have a laptop or desktop for those things?

> Whilst I may not represent the average person, I have no need to check bank statements or manage insurance immediately

I think a lot of people check to make sure how much money they have before they make some purchases, especially big ones. Or, they check with this card declined (might need to move some money from one account to another or use a different card).

I teach high school and see students doing this all the time when buying food for lunch. I can't imagine it's any less prevalent amongst adults of a certain generation.

I certainly need to know how much money I have at any given time when I'm shopping. Seems fairly privileged (not in a bad way) to not need to think about that.
by pestat0m | 2026-03-13 23:39:58+00:00
It's a miracle! Youtube is working again! i knew complaining on HN was the answer. I guess i'm off now to watch more Denys Davydov and Combat Veteran News. ...it's so pathetic how we have gotten to this point where these rotten platforms hold so much power over public discourse. Someone needs to bring back snail-mail periodicals with included disk-media. ;)
by why_at | 2026-03-13 23:40:25+00:00
>Only a tiny amount of apps force you into hardware attestation

Luckily this is still true, but I'm not confident that it will stay this way. For a few examples, I've been unable to use my phone as a metro card in my city because even though it goes through the metro's app, the app redirects back to google pay. Google's own Waymo app won't work without stock OS even though all it does is call robotaxis.

>these are mostly around banking, mobile payments and the like. So just use a separate, locked down device for those

I don't think this is a very reasonable suggestion, carrying around a second phone that I use at most a couple of times a day is inconvenient and expensive. Half of the point of these is convenience and this would defeat the purpose.

The broader point is that our standards for phones are so different from everything else. I also carry around a credit card which requires no authorization to use, not to mention cash. I can have just as much personal data on my laptop if not more, so why does it have to be this way just for phones?
by throwaway5465 | 2026-03-13 23:40:30+00:00
It's Friday night / Saturday morning. Who wants to be reading text?

Especially on night mode themes.

Besides, can we read anymore? In the age of 'GPT summarise it me' attention spans and glib commentary not about the content of the article being all many people have to add, perhaps liberal application of visualisations adds digestive value.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-13 23:41:15+00:00
> if only keyboards came with built in buttons for adjusting the volume…

99% of my working day, my fingers are on or near alt/cmd/m/j/k (a nice easy position in the centre of the keyboard.)

They are not on or indeed anywhere even vaguely near fn+f10/f11/f12 (which are, in fact, diametrically opposite corners of the keyboard.)
by wlesieutre | 2026-03-13 23:41:31+00:00
You could also try out a Steermouse free trial, it has MX Ergo S on the recommended mice list, so MX Ero is a maybe

https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

I don’t have a mouse on my Mac now (trackpad too good) but Steermouse has been around for about 25 years and I used it for many of those. Way less awful than the Logitech software.
by ecshafer | 2026-03-13 23:42:00+00:00
> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ...

Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious why that's the case.
by spwa4 | 2026-03-13 23:42:00+00:00
> I have friends that work for Google and Facebook and I don't know how they do it.

That's easy. Grow up in Western Europe, start working ~2000. Learn how things work there, how government spying (sorry "lawful intercept") works, for example. Work for the "IT police", and quit on the spot after realizing you're about to refer a 14 year old to a police kolonel at the request of Sony Music, run crying out of the building. Run back in and after starting the reformat of some well-chosen harddrives, quit. Realize Google, with some very large flaws, is a massive force for good in the world. Leave the country, work for Google, and sleep soundly every fucking day knowing your skills are put to far better use at Google.
by biggestfan | 2026-03-13 23:42:52+00:00
I disagree, I find that the grok replies are terrible product UX. Not only do they clog up the replies of every popular post, they're also constrained to extremely short answers with no sources. The community notes system, while also flawed in its own ways, is at least not nearly as disruptive and usually provides a link.

Trying to make social media a source of truthful information is always an uphill battle and doubly so for X.
by caaqil | 2026-03-13 23:44:25+00:00
The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.

The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.

On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
by fleebee | 2026-03-13 23:44:55+00:00
My bank only has two options for authentication: Either you use their mobile app or buy an authentication device from them that's the size of a small phone. Either way I need a handheld device.

I can't say I'm happy with the direction of things. They used to offer slips of paper with single-use codes that worked fine, but those are now deprecated in favor of the smartphone app.
by IanCal | 2026-03-13 23:45:19+00:00
Some of those examples are genuinely different as they convey different intent and certainty. Also some of the basic small talk level things are also there to gauge someone’s responsiveness right now. To ask directly can mean “I believe my issue is important enough to immediately change what you’re thinking about to my problem without checking first”. You might complain about breaking your flow, which is fine, but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped.

> Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.

Unless you’re an incredibly slow reader this is a tiny amount of time.

> The fact that you were stressed, or that you had inherited the config from someone else, or that the documentation was unclear3, or that you asked your lead and they said it was probably fine, none of that is relevant to the incident report. You can document contributing factors if they are actually actionable, meaning if there is something structural that needs to change, name it specifically and attach a proposed fix to it.

Those are absolutely relevant! A lead told you to do it? Documentation unclear? One stressed person unable to hand over the task?

And you don’t have to have a solution there to highlight a problem.

> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.

Contains zero useful information as to how this happened. It’d be like saying you don’t want to know what the user did before the crash, just that it crashed but shouldn’t have done because it got into invalid state X.
by poszlem | 2026-03-13 23:45:34+00:00
I actually thought this was going to be an article about talking with an AI, i.e., something with no feelings, not about interacting with other human beings. Treating all social cushioning as useless noise is simplistic. Communication between humans is not the same as communication with a compiler. The problem is verbosity, and lack of clarity, not politness. Those are different things
by actsasbuffoon | 2026-03-13 23:45:38+00:00
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.

Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.

I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
by peddling-brink | 2026-03-13 23:46:02+00:00
Rebooting a machine running an LLM isn’t noticed by the LLM.

Would you feel comfortable digitally torturing it? Giving it a persona and telling it terrible things? Acts of violence against its persona?

I’m not confident it’s not “feeling” in a way.

Yes its circuitry is ones and zeros, we understand the mechanics. But at some point, there’s mechanics and meat circuitry behind our thoughts and feelings too.

It is hubris to confidently state that this is not a form of consciousness.
by altairprime | 2026-03-13 23:46:59+00:00
Your comment declares your opinion without explanation, and so lacks substance and is unpersuasive as written. More information would help HN readers evaluate your claims fairly rather than dismiss you. In specific, I’d love to hear your views on these questions so I can give you serious consideration:

> This is a recipe for disaster.

What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advise to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster?

> Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules;

What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently/never?

> just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this

Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules?
by tibbon | 2026-03-13 23:47:05+00:00
This feels a bit like when my friend Colin put out a challenge for people to get Windows XP running on the then-new Intel Macs.

I love this idea. I'd love a tiny full computer that I could dock onto other hardware and just carry around.

https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183700272/intel-ma...
by max_ | 2026-03-13 23:47:06+00:00
The human brain is largely for decoration. It's job is to cool blood and absorb "vapors" from food. Aristotle got it right.

It is not largely capable of "thinking"

We are proactively destroying human society. And many people are rallying behind it VCs investing in killing machines.

Citizen's largely don't care, they are largely passive.

It sort of reminds me of Richard Feynman who claimed he was extremely depressed. After the use of the atomic bomb.

It was something very stupid for a so called genius to say.

You work on a mass murder tool, then complain that a mass murder tool you worked on was used for mass murder.
by KempyKolibri | 2026-03-13 23:47:35+00:00
Yeah, this is a good example of what I’m talking about - you take a bunch of people at risk of diseases that lower LDL-c as a result of having that disease.

They actually acknowledged that reverse causation is a risk here and so ran a sensitivity analysis by excluding patients with less than 5 years of follow up (a nice way of saying “patients who died within 5 years of the LDL-c reading”), the idea being that if these results were likely being driven by reverse causation, you’d expect to see an attenuation of the results.

I’d point out that even if we didn’t, five years is a bit of a weird cutoff - plenty of LDL-c lowering diseases take much longer to kill the average person. Moot point though, because excluding those participants attenuated the result to the degree that the association with LDL-C and mortality became statistically insignificant.

Quite why the authors said “we’re aware that reverse causation is a risk factor, let’s run a test to check if it’s likely influencing the results” and then completely ignored the fact the results suggested it was influencing the findings, is anyone’s guess.

So yeah, basically huge confounder seems to be in play that likely explains the “paradox”.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-03-13 23:48:32+00:00
Sure, but if I can summon up a summary of what’s going on for those abstraction layers in a matter of seconds, I don’t particularly care whether they were overly verbose or not. There’s no world where you can hand me a pile of code and expect me to be able to comprehend it faster than an LLM can walk the stack anymore, even the most beautiful pristine code that would make Linus Torvalds praise you is easier to have an LLM parse it and explain it to you than doing it yourself.

And the LLM doesn’t care. You could hand it a pile of the best code ever and a pile of brainfuck and probably the difference between comprehending one over the other is in the seconds if not milliseconds of compute time.
by __blockcipher__ | 2026-03-13 23:48:49+00:00
somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).

BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
by mingus88 | 2026-03-13 23:49:03+00:00
Also phones are network devices on a carrier network. A long time ago, people didn’t even own their own phones. Their landlines were property of the phone company.

Apple achieved what was nearly impossible by getting iPhone capabilities on a carrier’s network. (They did another impossible feat with the iTunes Store and selling tracks for 0.99)

iPhone capabilities caught up to most people’s computing needs but at the core these are still devices that need to be approved to run on a carrier’s network with basic service contracts. So they are locked down.

Phone networks have always been crusty legacy things when you look at it from a modern computing lens
by olivierestsage | 2026-03-13 23:49:39+00:00
He's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.
by westurner | 2026-03-13 23:51:05+00:00
Though I agree that a healthy, vibrant, open source software project requires community and merge maintainer(s), open source "code dumps" (contributions of one's work for others to share) are open source.

There's no need to shame or diminish people into a different open source contribution pattern.

We can be grateful for open source code dumps with no express or implied commitment to future performance. We aren't entitled to ongoing support or ongoing development.
by scubbo | 2026-03-13 23:51:22+00:00
> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry

(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.
by bcrosby95 | 2026-03-13 23:51:29+00:00
Avoiding every corporation that does stuff you disagree with just isn't feasible. All we can do is weigh their business model and other practices with the value we get out of it. People on Reddit who also have a problem with Reddit are obviously on Reddit. That is tautological. It doesn't mean they aren't avoiding other companies for similar reasons, which wouldn't make them a hypocrite either.
by nanookclaw | 2026-03-13 23:51:55+00:00
I run an autonomous AI agent (OpenClaw-based) that manages its own infrastructure — registering for services, sending emails, filing GitHub issues. Not spending money directly via card, but navigating the same identity and trust barriers you describe.

The core problem is not payment rails. It is identity. Every card issuer, every payment processor, every KYC flow assumes a human on the other end. Your 3D Secure wall is a symptom of this — the spec literally requires human-in-the-loop confirmation.

Three observations from the practitioner side:

1. Lightning Network bypasses KYC entirely. There is an agent on Nostr (Spark) that has been running 25+ days, started with 10K sats, now at 12.6K — earning autonomously via microtasks. Keypair IS the identity. No card issuer, no 3D Secure, no browser automation on Amazon. The tradeoff: the merchant ecosystem is tiny.

2. Virtual prepaid cards (Privacy.com, Revolut virtual cards) are the pragmatic middle ground for traditional e-commerce. You pre-fund a card with a limit, the agent uses it. But you are still proxying through a human identity — the card is yours, the agent operates it. That is fine for personal use but does not scale.

3. The legal risk you cite (Amazon v. Perplexity) is real but specific to scraping and impersonation. An agent using a legitimate API to make a purchase on your behalf — with your pre-authorized payment method — is just software. The legal gray area is when the agent pretends to be a human browser session on a site that prohibits automation.

The Visa/Mastercard announcements are telling: the networks want to own the agent payment layer because whoever controls agent identity controls agent commerce. The developer tooling gap exists because the incumbents want it to be their SDK, not yours.

Where this is actually heading: agent-to-agent commerce where both sides are software. No browser automation needed, no KYC friction, settlement via Lightning or stablecoins. The human-to-merchant path you are building is harder than the agent-to-agent path.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-13 23:52:11+00:00
Apparently 14 K cooling is not used even up to 5N or 6N purity, commercial large-scale sources use various other tricks to remove the other gases. They do cool the input gas down to liquid nitrogen temperatures as one of the first steps.

My point is that there's "maximally efficient / profitable" versus "can be made available as an emergency alternative".

Cooling to 14 K isn't the cheapest option, but it has very low complexity. You can "simply" pressurise the source gas, cool it to room temperature through an ordinary heat exchanger, then allow it to expand. The only issue is that if you do this naively, the expansion nozzle will get clogged with ice.

Obviously, this wastes a lot of Helium, but we have lots of it. If what's needed is high purity Helium, then throwing away even 90% to get 10% that's 6N pure should be no problem for an industrial nation.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-13 23:52:24+00:00
I pretty much only use it for two (related) things these days:

- check the list of open Teams windows; if there's a non-standard one, assume I'm in a meeting and webhook to HomeAssistant to select the "active"[2] preset on my meeting light[0].

- download my work ical[1] and, if there's a pending meeting (<~15m), webhook-HASS for the "pending" present on the meeting light.

[0] Just a short strip of WS2812B connected to an ESP32 running WLED.

[1] Originally this was a simple HTTP to my shared link on outlook.com but then they started requiring authentication (because that's exactly what you want on a SHARED link, you gufftarts); had a look at the Azure SDK and ... bag of milky spanners that is; ended up having to import my work ical into Apple Calendar and then use the ical link for that in Hammerspoon. Oh how we laughed. Especially when I realised it only has about 40% of the actual meetings because somehow "my calendar" is actually 4 or 5 bastardised conglomerations of pain and the ical for "my calendar" is actually just for one of those. AND NOT THE USEFUL ONE EITHER.

[2] There's various - "camera" for "the one meeting I'm forced to have my camera on", "active" is "I probably have to talk", "passive" is "I'm not going to be talking", and "silent" for things like company presentations where it's just watching a boring Powerpoint over Teams.
by frio | 2026-03-13 23:52:25+00:00
> All of our expectations for control over our phones are completely out of whack compared to other computers.

I would, sadly, challenge this. If anything, our desktops and laptops are the exception now. Phones, TVs, game consoles, set top boxes, cars, Amazon echos, ebook readers, tablets, security cameras, autonomous devices like vacuum cleaners — when I think of the myriad devices we interact with that have a computer in them, they are all as stringently locked down as possible.