MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gambiting | 2026-03-06 11:44:59+00:00
I don't know, but societies seem to determine these kinds of things just fine through democratic processes, usually - why is the tax system where I live structured such that everything below 100k is taxed at 40% but everything above is at 60%? How is that any different? These are just numbers we came up with.

And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.

Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".
by codebolt | 2026-03-06 11:45:00+00:00
One issue is that developers have been trained for the past few decades to look for solutions to problems online by just dumping a few relevant keywords into Google. But to get the most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, has become essential skills for engineering (and something many developers simply lack).
by apercu | 2026-03-06 11:45:07+00:00
I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces).

Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs.

But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-03-06 11:45:15+00:00
I'd much rather neither, but apparently that's utopian.

Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality.

At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do.

There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
by altern8 | 2026-03-06 11:45:27+00:00
No, there shouldn't be a limit. If there's a limit it means that somebody needs to decide what limit that is, and steal whatever is over the limit by force. I'm for freedom.

Should he be able to won every single media corporation? He shouldn't and he can't, because there are laws to protect against monopolies. Same thing for factories and farms.

Should he control politicians? No, but in theory people still control politicians since they can vote them out. If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed, perhaps the solution would be to impose more transparency and harsher penalties for that.
by danbruc | 2026-03-06 11:45:38+00:00
Let us ignore the specific case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, let us look at a generic founder starting a company that turns into a billion or trillion dollar company making the founder a billionaire.

The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.

If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?

On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take some money from very many others and that adds up.

Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making profits is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-06 11:47:13+00:00
Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ...

(Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.)

I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
by i_think_so | 2026-03-06 11:48:21+00:00
I think the excess "resources" it has is cash. Human brains are a bit more constrained inside the LF, from what I gather.

From TFA:
> Kernel end-of-life dates mean very little for users, even at the enterprise level. Enterprise Linux distros have already been supporting official expired kernels for decades.

It's strange to think of LF "throwing it over the wall" on a timeline of years and decades, but the vendors really do assume the LTS responsibility as part of their value proposition, no?
by muyuu | 2026-03-06 11:49:15+00:00
ok, that is the argument with merit in favour of shielding kids from the internet - now let's consider how does it look like when the locus of responsibility is governments

it's true that kids are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet

it's also true that adults are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet

it's also true that governments cannot police "harmful content" on the internet effectively, or even meaningfully, if most people can easily surf the internet pseudonymously

it's also very true right now that what's on "social media" is very Sybill-vulnerable, and inordenately so right now with the advent of LLMs

what do you think the playbook will look like once there is some sort of tight OS level system that is enforced across the board to certify or verify information about the user?

do you think this level of coordination to push for identifying the user at all levels that is happening across the world in a matter of weeks is genuine concern for the kids alone?
by apercu | 2026-03-06 11:49:40+00:00
My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it.

It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings.

YMMV.
by abc123abc123 | 2026-03-06 11:50:23+00:00
Yep, the digital wallet will become the authoritarian, beating heart of your life. If you don't comply with the EU, you can say bye, bye, to your bank account, any online interaction, they block your right to travel and so on.

The corona passports showed the way to achieve ultimate control of the population, and the EU digital wallet will be a permanent corona passport.

The public sheep, in their ignorance, are cheering this on, without knowing what will await them. It is our responsibility as technologists to fight this, and to educate the sheep.
by dspillett | 2026-03-06 11:50:27+00:00
> ants are smarter than they look.

Many moons ago I had a big pot of rhubarb in my back yard¹ and was initially irritated by the appearance of ants and aphids, until I took a moment to watch them and realise that the ants were bringing in the aphids and tending to them. The buggers were farming. The ants can't digest the leaves of the rhubarb, but the aphids can and excrete a sugary by-product that the ants “milk” from them. It is a fascinating bit of nature to read into. They even defend the aphids from predators and so forth.

--------

[1] Not a euphemism for a lovely garden in that case, it was literally about a square yard of concrete behind the mid-terrace I was renting.
by altern8 | 2026-03-06 11:50:28+00:00
Sure, so influencing politics with money should be outlawed (or perhaps it is already..?). Why not.

That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.
by gambiting | 2026-03-06 11:50:34+00:00
>> If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed

The problem is that bribery is completely legal in the United States, donating money to a PAC is completely legal and without a limit. I'm not talking about money under the table in a suitcase kind of thing - I'm talking about the situations like recent OpenAI donation of $25M to Trump's PAC - do you think after such donation he is more likely to do what OpenAI wants, or what his voters want? It's not even about Trump specifically - the entire American system is structured in such a way that this is allowed, billionaries from both sides donate to politicians to help them win and achieve their goals, this is the real power of the money they make and this is the problem I have with it.

>> I'm for freedom.

Someone already decides that you pay taxes on the money you make, and presumably will come and take it from you by force if you don't pay - the only difference is the percentage value. Or are you commenting from somewhere that doesn't have a functional tax system?
by cs02rm0 | 2026-03-06 11:51:27+00:00
I admire the attempt to make a logical argument against these laws taken at face value, but I can't help think that's giving them too much credit.

These laws have spread like wildfire around the world with many countries and regions rolling out similar legislation within months of each other, despite the stereotypical lethargy of any and every legislature. That's not the work of some popular uprising of parents clamouring for age verification.

I fear debating the merits of the argument is missing the point; they don't care. They don't care about children, they don't care about the argument, they just want the control.
by redhale | 2026-03-06 11:51:30+00:00
I don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing.

I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them.

Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-06 11:52:36+00:00
The "means of production" has been one of the clarion calls of Marxism. It is more about who controls those means than who owns them. They can be officially owned by a government (so called public ownership), a co-operative (or "people's committee"), shareholders or a board, but in reality controlled by an individual it or a handful of individuals. That pattern continues after revolutionaries "seize the means of production" as well.
by i_think_so | 2026-03-06 11:53:34+00:00
> It could be, but are vendors actually upgrading kernels along with firmware updates?

Certainly the big guys like IBM/RedHat are putting effort into maintaining their legacy trees.

> In my experience it's more like, ship 5+ year old kernel and then forget it forever.

I think that's the case with smaller vendors, like the teams that produce a custom kernel for the newest ARM single board kit. Once most of their inventory is sold they have little incentive to dedicate engineering bandwidth to updates. (And there's always the community effort to pick up the slack.)
by opan | 2026-03-06 11:54:13+00:00
I spent a couple months memorizing the test questions/answers with Anki, without learning the theory, and passed the second level test (the one below Extra, I forget the name). I got a cheap Chinese (ABBREE brand I think) radio but never learned how to use it, and am a bit worried about accidentally transmitting if I poke around on it, even if it is probably legal for me to do so (assuming I announce my callsign periodically and such). I'd been meaning to learn things properly once the test was out of the way but I kinda lost interest, I guess. I'll still renew my license if it's about to expire anyway. Might as well. Callsign not shared because I tied it to my real address and haven't gotten a P.O. box (also as previously stated I am not actually active).
by grey-area | 2026-03-06 11:54:14+00:00
I'm pointing out that they don't 'think' or 'reason' like humans, they're very impressive, but I don't think they've reached the bar for thinking yet, as simple logic puzzles or puzzles like this prove (until the LLM authors take note and add special workarounds for those particular use-cases).

I believe most LLMS no longer fail at this, because they've been given the tools to do so (for example use python under the hood to count letters), but it's an important observation because it shows us that they don't think like us.
by LucasAegis | 2026-03-06 11:54:16+00:00
AI is merely a sophisticated tool. If your original thoughts achieve a tangible result through this tool, the ownership should reside with the thinker. Reverse-engineering, in this context, shouldn't be seen merely as an infringement on AI-generated code, but as a violation of the human intellect and systemic design that orchestrated that code. We need to move past protecting 'lines of code' and start protecting the 'intent and architecture' behind them.
by Ukv | 2026-03-06 11:54:22+00:00
If I'm understanding the issue correctly, an action with read-only repo access shouldn't really be able to write 10GB of cache data to poison the cache and run arbitrary code in other less-restricted actions.

The LLM prompt injection was an entry-point to run the code they needed, but it was still within an untrusted context where the authors had forseen that people would be able to run arbitrary code ("This ensures that even if a malicious user attempts prompt injection via issue content, Claude cannot modify repository code, create branches, or open PRs.")
by latexr | 2026-03-06 11:54:46+00:00
I’m aware Google bans accounts for wrong reasons, what I’m asking is about a case (as implied by OP) where they seemingly did so because someone sang a copyrighted song in a video. There are different degrees of bad, and that one would be up there.

You say it no longer is the case because they changed the rules. So does that mean it did happen? Could you share a link?
by josexdev | 2026-03-06 11:55:08+00:00
I built Classic Play, a small web app where you can play classic board games instantly in the browser — no signup required.

https://classicplaygames.com/

I'd really appreciate feedback on a few things:

- Is the “choose a game → start playing” flow clear?

- Are there UX issues on mobile browsers?

- Which classic games would you want added next?

Tech notes (for those curious):

- Built with Flutter Web (Dart) compiled to WebAssembly

- All AI runs client-side (no server round-trips)

- Chess uses minimax with alpha–beta pruning

- Other games use similar minimax approaches with game-specific evaluation

- Minimal .NET backend only handles share/challenge links (30-day TTL)

- Claude Code most of it

Any feedback or bug reports would be hugely appreciated.
by overthinkerer | 2026-03-06 11:55:22+00:00
Yeah, other messaging platforms like Slack can do notifications, but the setup always feels like a chore. I feel like this can be generally useful, just log in with GitHub, curl and you are already getting notified.

The code needs a bit of cleanup, maybe I have to add documentation to make self-hosting easier. Generally, there are a lot of places for improvement.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-06 11:55:35+00:00
Actually, they were aware of the threat.

Several framers of the constitution expressed deep concerns about the potential for coordinated non-governmental "factions" taking over government via elections.

Unfortunately, despite going to great efforts to limit power centralization internally, concerns of external centralization were not heeded and there are no limits on the coordination of the US government via non-governmental organizations such as parties.

> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.

> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

> There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true, and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with layout, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.

-- George Washington [0]

States used to operate independently enough that the same party in different states might have varied views. But today, both parties are themselves highly centralized. So very effective centralizers of government.

And given it has become relatively easy to do so, the incentives are now there for parties to treat elections as war, and party control of government as the highest priority policy at all times. Incentives don't mean it happens, but they often do.

[0] https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw2.024/?sp=241&st=text
by dudefeliciano | 2026-03-06 11:55:49+00:00
Taxes are not a punishment, a person earning exponentially more than the average person can also afford to pay more taxes, and it will not even begin to affect their quality of life. How is that so hard to understand?

If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.
by pabs3 | 2026-03-06 11:57:52+00:00
According to Conservancy; Tivo didn't do "Tivoization", the GPLv3 doesn't prevent what Tivo actually did, and both GPLv2/GPLv3 prevent "Tivoization".

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t...
https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-06 11:58:37+00:00
As any empire who eventually fell, the US too will fall because of hubris, thinking they're invincible solely because technology and a big population. Seemingly there is little support for the war, and surely once boots on the ground are deployed, and bodies start having to be flown home, the support will drop even more. Personally the question remained to be answered is if people will actually actively revolt once that starts happening? Given the last year, I'm not so sure about that yet.
by ozzymuppet | 2026-03-06 11:59:34+00:00
I don't think the world has changed. There's just a madman in the white house. Look at the "Presidents" tweet for god sake... how is this normal?!

"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! "

"The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.

Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!"
by kleiba | 2026-03-06 11:59:37+00:00
The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meaning, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
by latexr | 2026-03-06 12:00:08+00:00
> tl;dr you don’t have a gmail account, you have a google account. if that account gets banned on one service, you may lose everything.

I’m perfectly aware.

> there are plenty of examples throughout history

I’m not asking about plenty of them, I’m asking about one. Has there been a case where, as you said, Google has banned an account because someone sang a copyrighted song in a video? That’s the one I want to read about.
by magicalist | 2026-03-06 12:00:11+00:00
> This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image.

This is incorrect. The monkey is unable to have a copyright on the photograph, but there was no court case suggesting the owner of the camera (Slater) has a copyright on the photo, and the Copyright Office's rules actually say the opposite, that it isn't copyrightable at all (the Wikipedia summary of the situation is good, pointing out they specifically added an example of "a photograph taken by a monkey" to make their point clear).
by petesergeant | 2026-03-06 12:00:34+00:00
As someone living in a city currently under an Iranian barrage ... come on man, this is a fuckin' reach. The amount of drivel commentary being generated from this war so far is shameful.

Also: I hadn't quite realized just how dead-internet Twitter had become. The amount of simply untrue comments, misattributed photos, etc. I mean it's always been bad, but the noise is just absolutely overwhelming now.