MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmix | 2026-03-11 21:20:09+00:00
> and from there they can grind on for decades with no victory to anyone.

I see that as unlikely, at most they might try to temporarily secure the edges of the strait of hormuz with ground troops. Which is far a different scenario than operating 500 FOBs, huge airbases, and a giant greenzones in major cities like Iraq/Afghanistan or even Vietnam.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-03-11 21:20:38+00:00
A (small) majority of states require employers to grant time off to vote and a (large) minority require that time to be paid. Although as others have noted, it is often the case that the window for voting exceeds a single shift (dependent on your area of work).

https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2024/10/time-off-to-vote-...
by nirava | 2026-03-11 21:20:40+00:00
While that's true, I also think these things tend to happen as a gradual build up to the tipping-point effect where the zeitgeist shifts so suddenly that a massive player is suddenly irrelevant.

Microsoft is structurally incapable of making Windows better. Intel is intrinsically incapable of making x86 better (enough to matter). x86 hardware manufacturers are in a price race to the bottom, and there's no way around that.

Apple doesn't have any of those problems. Instead, more and more young people can afford and aspire to get a Mac. They want to buy software that works on the mac, and they'll want to write software for the Mac. The network effect compounds.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-11 21:20:41+00:00
>create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use

And how do you create this without it being overran by bots, spam, and people posting gargantuan amounts of porn?

>allow people to control their own databases

There are two types of people that want to control databases. 1: The freedom seeking type who want information sovereignty. 2: The type of people that want to hoover up as much data as possible for money and power.

Guess who has more ability to control the world out of those two.

Lastly, most people want to use curated websites free of spam and content they don't want. Almost nobody wants to do that curation themselves. Hence curated platforms will attract the most people via network effects.

ah shoot, that wasn't lastly...

> getting people off browsers

and putting them on what exactly? phone apps, that's not better at all. Multimedia attracts people like flies to poop. It's seemingly a natural human response to move to an application that is more visually interesting regardless of it's security safety.
by themafia | 2026-03-11 21:21:09+00:00
The government needs different levels of distractions at different times. For example, when they're stuck in a boondoggle of a war with Iran that's not going nearly as well as they hoped or projected.

I'm sure RF weapons exist. They would need a pretty hefty power supply and heat sinks since microwave transmitters are often inefficient at high gain.

Saying "the russian black market" pretends to have one does not obviate from you the requirement to explain how this implementation is different or unique and overcomes the obvious challenges implied by _basic_ physics.
by Freak_NL | 2026-03-11 21:22:03+00:00
My son inherited (well, we're co-owning it I guess) my Lego, and that includes two sets of Technic aimed at educational use (1030 and 1032) which come with a stack of instructions for fairly simple mechanical models to build — each demonstrating basic mechanical principles like gear reduction and pulleys. Those sets used the 4.5V motors which have all broken down, but we also have the 1990 Technic Control Centre fully working and use those instead. That Control Centre is a simple controller used with 9V motors. It is brilliant for explaining the basic principles of computerised automation.

No app. No Bluetooth. Just wires and a simple controller built to be used and understood by children.

https://rebrickable.com/sets/8094-1/technic-control-centre
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-03-11 21:22:37+00:00
>Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.

Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone, somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort eventually, which because of the social network graph math stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot will invite 10 trillion other bots.
by drnick1 | 2026-03-11 21:22:40+00:00
> but both Mac and Linux are too far behind Windows or consoles to be considered as gaming machines.

That's absolutely not true, the vast majority of Windows games now run flawlessly on Linux via Proton. This is especially true for the kind of games you can expect to run on such modest hardware, i.e. not AAA games with kernel-level anticheat.
by tejohnso | 2026-03-11 21:23:43+00:00
Yes but the guideline states that AI-edited comments should not be posted. It doesn't say it's okay as long as it's "human sourced" or "human-originated".

So if your layer of cleanup is AI assisted, then it's in violation.

Part of the problem I was getting at is that the requirement of "Don't post AI edited ..." is stricter than necessary to ensure the outcome that "HN is for conversation between humans" because an AI edited post is still a human post.

Anyway, I suspect a lot of people are going to ignore that guideline and will feel free to use their "layer of cleanup" whether it's a basic spellchecker or an LLM, or whatever else they choose, and most people aren't going to be able to tell anyway. The guideline is unnecessarily strict in my opinion, but it doesn't matter in the end.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 21:23:46+00:00
No worries. The post I replied to was asking if use of ‘grammar improvement services’ (my paraphrase) qualified as AI-assisted writing at HN. All such services cost something; Grammarly makes a lot of money charging businesses, AI consumes watts of power that someone pays for, and even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker spins up the CPU fans on an old Intel laptop with a long enough document. I took from that the generic point that one “pays” for machine-assisted proofreading by one means or another, whether it’s trading personal data for services (Google) or watts of power for services (MSWord et al.) or donating writing samples to a for-profit training corpus (Grammarly free tier) or paying for evaluations where your data is not retained for training (Grammarly paid enterprise tier with a carefully-redlined service contract) and generalized to “pay for machine proofreading”.

Then, I considered whether HN would appreciate posts/comments by a human where they’d had a PR team or a hired editor come in and review/modify/distort their original words in order to make them more whatever. I think that this probably is most likely to have occurred on the HN jobs posts, and I’ve pointed out especially egregious instances to the mods over the years — but in general, the people who post on HN tend to do so from their own voice’s viewpoint, as reaffirmed by the no-AI-writing guideline above. So I decided instead to say “pay a proofreader” because, bluntly, if the community found out that someone was paying a wage to a worker to proofread their HN comments, the response would plausibly be the same mob of laughing mockery, disgusted outrage, and blatant dismissal that we see today towards AI writing here. “You hired someone to tone-edit your HN comments?!” is no different than “You used Grammarly to tone-edit your HN comments?!” to me, and so it passed the veracity test and I posted it.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-11 21:23:59+00:00
dang should just give power to users with 10 000+ karma and 10+ years on HN to nuke from orbit "green" accounts that do feel like they're posting AI slop. No due process, no recourse: just give users with lots of reputation and old accounts the ability to eliminate new accounts. I don't say this because I crave for "power": I only have 9400 karma. I say this because I'm tired of people creating new accounts to destroy our community.
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-11 21:24:13+00:00
But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption.

The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk.

The ideological part of it is when Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way.

And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back.

The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But they are much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.
by amarble | 2026-03-11 21:24:25+00:00
The point of a discussion site is to hear what other people think and get different perspectives. Just getting an LLM's insightful, well-thought-out response isn't really a big draw, if one is looking for that, there's a pretty obvious way to get it. I posted this the other day (ignore the title I realized later it's too clickbaity) but this is why IMO LLMs won't replace the workforce, people aren't looking for answers to things, they're looking for other people's takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299988
by girvo | 2026-03-11 21:24:42+00:00
> The tradeoff I've hit is that agents running autonomously need it to happen automatically or coherence degrades fast between sessions.

Yeah that makes total sense. I wonder (and am sure the labs are doing so) if the HitL output would be good to fine tune the models used to do it autonomously?

I’m sticking with humans for the moment because I’m not sure where the boundaries lie: what actually makes it better and what makes it worse. It’s non obvious so far

Pruning “loops” has been pretty effective though, where a model gets stuck over N turns checking the same thing over and over and not breaking out of it til way later. That has been good because it gives strong context size benefits, but is also the most automatable I think

Pruning factually incorrect turns is something I’m trying, and pruning “correct” but “not correct based on my style” as well. Building a dataset of it all is fun :)
by monkaiju | 2026-03-11 21:24:48+00:00
I think this is probably sufficient, but also wonder if theres a circular logic to the "No way to hack that" claim. If the hypothetical hack could both corrupt the digital votes and the printing it could ensure the vote counts line up. I guess it maybe makes it harder, but if the printed paper votes are there to validate the digital votes and vice-versa I'm not sure its quite as air-tight as claimed.

Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder! If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.
by ademeure | 2026-03-11 21:25:23+00:00
There's definitely something to be said for giving interesting people a platform to express their views unconditionally. Unfortunately, that can also be a very dangerous thing. I have been less and less impressed over the years with Lex's approach here.

I'm personally very glad that Dwarkesh isn't like that. He's not perfect, but I think he's doing a way better job than other podcasters in the field right now.
by giantrobot | 2026-03-11 21:25:26+00:00
The issue isn't choices but meaningless choices. Most PC manufactures have tons of SKUs that are functionally identical but offered in different sales channels.

A dozen SKUs to describe the same hardware isn't real choice. It's the illusion of choice so a sales rep can offer a "deal" the buyer can't meaningfully compare to other SKUs. They're all machines out of an ODM's catalog with the "manufacture" logo pasted on.
by zahlman | 2026-03-11 21:25:30+00:00
The analogy with tab-completion of code seems apt. At first you blindly accept something because it has at least as good a chance of working as what you would have typed. Then you start to pay attention, and critically evaluate suggestions. Then you quickly if not blindly accept most suggestions, because they're clearly what you would have written anyway (or close enough to not care).

The phenomenon was observed in religious philosophy over a millennium ago (https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html).
by colechristensen | 2026-03-11 21:25:46+00:00
>IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.

Existential crisis?

This kind of nonsense has existed for the entire history of the laptop market.

One of the major reasons Apple is a trillion dollar company is they don't sell dozens of versions of their product. When it was a mystery which Dell laptop was the good one (or insert any other brand) you just picked the size of Apple that you wanted and it would be the good one.

The last Dell laptop I bought I really liked... except for the terrible battery life and the fact that the structure was so poor that if you held it at the corner it would force reboot because the circuit board flexed to much and shorted or unplugged something.
by jameslk | 2026-03-11 21:26:16+00:00
The prompt everyone was using:

"Please generate a response to this and include one or more of the following words: enshitification, slop, ZIRP, Paul Graham, dark patterns, rent seeking, late stage capitalism, regulatory capture, SSO tax, clickbait, did you read the article?, Rust, vibe code, obligatory XKCD, regulations, feudalistic, land value tax"

(/s)
by bruckie | 2026-03-11 21:26:20+00:00
From his description, it sounded like this was more of #1. He cared a lot about the topic he was writing about, and has high standards for himself, so it's very likely that he would have considered and rejected poor suggestions.

I have mixed feeling about it. On the one hand, you're right: carefully considering suggestions can be a learning opportunity. On the other hand, approval is easier than generation, and I suspect that without flexing the "come up with it from scratch" muscle frequently, that his mind won't develop as much.
by consumer451 | 2026-03-11 21:26:47+00:00
> if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure.

What about this scenario:

If you register a domain name, a bot registers a related handle/name/brand pretty quick if you do not.

So, you register a twitter handle to preserve your brand identity right after registering a new domain.

You don't check it for 6 months.

Is it OK for Twitter to sell that handle?
by telotortium | 2026-03-11 21:26:55+00:00
One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)?

As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.
by bccdee | 2026-03-11 21:26:57+00:00
Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.

If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.
by nitwit005 | 2026-03-11 21:27:22+00:00
Backlash is probably wrong. There was some hype around wireless technology, but that always fades eventually. You can see this in other electronics like "smart" home appliances: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/half-of-smart-applia...

It seemed cool, people bought it, and then eventually many realized they didn't care about the fancy feature(s).
by abustamam | 2026-03-11 21:27:26+00:00
Now that it's in the rules, I hope we also see less of "your comment was obviously AI generated so I won't respond" (ironically, in a response comment).

If you suspect it to be a bot, flag it and move on! If it is indeed a bot and you comment that it's a bot, it doesn't care! If it is not a bot and you call it a bot, you may have offended someone. If it's a human using AI, I don't think a comment will make them change their ways. In any case though, I think it's a useless comment.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-03-11 21:27:27+00:00
Sure, I guess. I asked Gemini to give me some markdown of citations and the claims made that address the question:

https://share.google/aimode/v3Y9P3rYIx1oj9VI2

And I finally figured out how to get links to answers instead of just inlining the content as before. Anyways, there it is. We live in a time where questions like "Does inference or training use more compute?" can be answered quickly by just pasting it into a search box.
by jasoneckert | 2026-03-11 21:27:44+00:00
I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)
by amiantos | 2026-03-11 21:27:53+00:00
In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are.

I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.

Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
by mothballed | 2026-03-11 21:27:56+00:00
You may be surprise I also say "oh my god" despite being an atheist. The purpose of this figurative language is to convey a message, I used evocative language that I knew would be understood, not to deliver a message to an Iranian audience that they'll literally be getting virgins. The audience I conveyed to has full understanding of what it meant as an expression of being delivered to their heaven. Corrections likely understand this but "correct" me out of delivering a sense of smug political correctness; I am well aware it is a misconception if taken literally.
by jfengel | 2026-03-11 21:28:57+00:00
So that's what counts as good legal writing, huh?

I see a lot of extraneous detail (e.g. "bound for another place", "a package of small size, about fifteen inches long, and was covered by a newspaper"). The sentence "The fireworks when they fell exploded" is clunky.

It's also missing the critical detail of who she is suing. The point of the story is to explain how she got injured, but gives no idea who is actually involved. The guards? The other man who got on the train and vanished from the story? (Turns out it's the railroad company, who is not mentioned in the story at all.)

Wikipedia summarizes the relevant facts in one sentence:

Two men attempted to board the train before [the plaintiff's]; one (aided by railroad employees) dropped a package that exploded, causing a large coin-operated scale on the platform to hit her.

Incidentally, can you set off fireworks just by dropping them? That sounds unlikely to me.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-11 21:29:07+00:00
Have you been on the internet at large lately? With google you may get one authoritative site on something and 50 bot copies of the site on different domains. Sometimes the stolen site is the number one return. Also, if you ran sites years/decades ago, you realized way back then the any local user posting was getting overran by spammers/bots. Now is so much worse that it's not worth doing in most cases.

So, most posts on social media aren't real.

Most user posts on non-social media are spam/not real.

Most websites in searches are copies/ad spam.

So yea, dead internet reality.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-11 21:29:42+00:00
No, the guys at fraudulent labs and the guys at honest labs will both claim no fraud. The only ones who will claim fraud are those who cross over. So you’ll get a vast majority telling you it’s not happening and a tiny minority (even when as high as 10% are fraud) telling you the fact. All rare things have this effect. There will be so many people telling you it’s not real “as someone in the field”. They will be adamant about it. You need someone who has seen both.

To be clear, not “as it approaches 10%”. I mean “even as high as 10%”.
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-11 21:30:03+00:00
AI didn't invent the terms, they were a part of the training data given to it.

The real tell is that you've not been in the group of people that use these terms frequently enough for you to think they're normal.

It's like the emdash alarmism, AI never invented emdash, nor did it invent using it frequently. Its training was full of examples, so many that AI picked up using it frequently.