MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndriscoll | 2026-03-13 14:15:39+00:00
Spell it out: how do ID checks for specific services (where the laws I've read all require no records be retained with generally steep penalties) create an infrastructure for total surveillance? Can't sites just not keep records like they do in person and like the law mandates? Can't in-person businesses keep records and share that with whomever you're worried about?

How do you reconcile porn sites as a line in the sand with things like banking or online real estate transactions or applying for an apartment already performing ID checks? The verification infrastructure is already in place. It's mundane. In fact the apartment one is probably more offensive because they'll likely make you do their online thing even if you could just walk in and show ID.
by mustaphah | 2026-03-13 14:15:55+00:00
That's a fair clarification.

I never said we have sufficient evidence to act. But "too good to be true" + "singular paper" together can become an unfalsifiable dismissal - by that logic, every important result looks suspicious before it replicates. The interesting question is what priors should update our confidence here.

Stanford/Arc Institute and published in Nature + mechanistic grounding + prior research on gut-brain axis gives me way more confidence than average, but you're right, that's not nearly enough for most, but quite sufficient for me, and surely others with informed priors or a strong motive.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-13 14:16:06+00:00
He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.

God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
by matsemann | 2026-03-13 14:16:28+00:00
When I worked for the government in Norway, it slowly changed to all code being developed in the open. 3k repos here now: https://github.com/orgs/navikt/repositories

When I started it was a big security theater. Had to develop on thin clients with no external internet access, for instance. Then they got some great people in charge that modernized everything.

Only drawback is when you quit, you have to make sure to unsubscribe from everything, hehe. When quitting a private company I was just removed from the github org. Here I was as well, but I was still subscribed to lots of repos, issues, PRs,heh.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-13 14:16:54+00:00
Well said. The Antichrist becomes, in Francis Schaeffer's term, a "contentless label". It becomes just something that the speaker thinks is bad. But people (even non-Christians) still have some memory of it meaning something, so it's still an effective term for "something bad".

By the way, "Jesus" also has the same issue. That name is used at times to support positions that are explicitly contrary to what Jesus taught.
by jrochkind1 | 2026-03-13 14:17:04+00:00
John Gruber used it for a day and found it was actually totally adequate, or better, for his actual daily work.

> But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/the_macbook_neo

I think people are assuming it's going to be a worse experience than it actually is. I don't know how it does it with 8GB of RAM either, but apparently it does; i suppose my guess would be SSD and bus are fast enough that swapping on app change is no longer so disruptive? (I don't know if improvements in virtual memory swap logic could also be a thing that matters or not, this is not my area).
by c5huracan | 2026-03-13 14:17:04+00:00
The "no meaningful benchmark for good agentic session performance" point resonates. Success varies so much by task type that a single metric is almost meaningless. A 60-second documentation lookup and a 30-minute refactoring session could both be successes.

Curious what shape the benchmark takes. Are you thinking per-task-type baselines, or something more like an aggregate efficiency score?
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-03-13 14:17:08+00:00
The burden of proof is on those making the claim that it is fascist (or communist, which is the Right's analoguous lazy epithet).

Citing Eco on this matter as an authoritative source is inappropriate, because that essay is a personal reflection, not a product of scholarly research. I, too, can reach for my personal family experience living under both fascist and communist regimes during the 20th century, and frankly, this ain't it, at least not yet. You're free to cite relevant passages here, of course. I would consider a better source.

And I agree that the MAGA/Trump style is on the whole a bad one (just as I think its Leftist counterpart is equally flawed in its own way; there's more overlap between them than intellectually superficial partisan-minded people think). There are tyrannical elements and impulses woven into these movements, yes. But it is important to realize that these are, in fact, the result of the procession of liberalism, not some repudiation or aberration of it. They are the way in which we can witness the self-immolation of liberalism as its internal contradictions, tensions, and weaknesses unfold in history. In other words, while liberalism flatters itself as the way to ever-greater freedom, its logic leads elsewhere.

Of course, scapegoating the other (party) is comforting, because it allows us to convince ourselves of our own purity, and that all we need to preserve that purity is the elimination of this pesky other. But the uncomfortable truth that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore is that the defect is deep, in the very cloth of liberalism itself. We may think that all we need is to want a liberal order for there to be one, but that's not how things work. Societies aren't static. Ideas stand behind our wants, and if the ideas are misguided, then the force of their errors will play out, eventually.
by rvz | 2026-03-13 14:18:16+00:00
No idea why this is hyped up these days.

The only reason I can think of is what I said before [0] given that the web was destroyed by the same web developers, then so was the desktop (with Electron) and now of all places terminals are now getting destroyed with infinite slop like this.

This nonsense will continue and accelerate until it reaches hardware.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210187
by close04 | 2026-03-13 14:18:16+00:00
To put that in context, Wikipedia says about Carnegie:

> he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $6.9 billion in 2025 dollars), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities

Those famously "richest Americans" were worth single digit billions in today's money. Musk is reportedly worth $600-800 billions. Imagine what he could do with that money. The Gilded Age industrialists were already devils, but to say the quality of the ultra-rich today is in the gutter would be an offense to the gutter.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-13 14:19:08+00:00
> Who is paying FOSS devs who will be implementing this

Most Linux maintainers are employed by Google, IBM, Facebook, and other similarly sized organizations.

> Who is making CA the only jurisdiction instead of the myriad contradictory laws all over the place

The US is a federal system. It's part of our checks and balances.

> Who is stepping in to make sure no additional legislation comes across regulating how FOSS has to include backdoors or weaken encryption

No one. This is why organizations with actual security requirements do their own dependency checks.
by slashink | 2026-03-13 14:19:28+00:00
(i work at discord)

Not saying that wasn't ONE of the reasons but the main reason was really that a large chunk of users had no idea that they even had a discriminator, as it was added on top of your chosen username. "add me on discord, my username is slashink" didn't work as people expected and caused more confusion than it was solving. This wasn't universally true either, if you come from a platform like Blizzard's Battle.net that has had discriminators since Battlenet 2.0 came out in 2009 it was a natural part of your identity. End of the day there were more users that expected usernames to be unique the way they are today than expected discriminators.

Addressing that tension was the core reason we made this change. We are almost 3 years past this decision ( https://discord.com/blog/usernames ) and I personally think this change was a positive one.
by coredog64 | 2026-03-13 14:19:31+00:00
Having worked in this space for years, it's not nearly as bad as you think. IaC tools can all look up the accountId/region for the current execution context and you can use SSM Parameters to give you a helpful alias in your code.

Also, if you have a bunch of accounts, it's far easier for troubleshooting that the accountId is in the name: "I can't access bucket 'foo'" vs. "I can't access bucket 'foo-12345678901'"
by wild_egg | 2026-03-13 14:19:36+00:00
why give it root access to your life? i don't use these tools but it seems like you should never give anything that access. if a claw needs email, set up a google account just for it and forward relevant stuff to it. share your calendar with it. whatever, just don't let it "be" you.

access control, provisioning, and delegation have been solved for a very long time now.
by kulandai | 2026-03-13 14:19:43+00:00
That's superb!

All that matters is solving a business problem, as quick as possible. Software should be simple and maintainable.

I see some hate for AI-generated code in HN and other forums. If AI does the above, why not embrace it. After all, we invent tools to make our lives better.

If jobs are going to be lost, lets open a coffee shop ;-)
Show HN: Every AI tool claims to be revolutionary. We built a place to test it
by Enjoyooor | 2026-03-13 14:19:43+00:00
We’ve all seen the explosion of AI tools lately.
Every day there are dozens of new launches claiming to be the next revolution.

After a while it becomes hard to tell what is actually useful and what is just another vibecoded landing page.

So we built Glad-AI-Tor.

It’s a simple arena where AI tools are submitted and exposed to the crowd.
People can roast them, judge them, and decide if they deserve attention.

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Just builders putting their tools in front of the internet and seeing what survives.

Some tools get destroyed.
Some unexpectedly rise.

Curious to see what happens when the crowd decides.
by inetknght | 2026-03-13 14:20:17+00:00
Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device.

Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality.

Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".

Next year, the application needs to "double-check" your identity. That missile that's coming to you? Definitely not AI-controlled, definitely not coming to destroy the "verified" person who posted a threatening comment about the AI system's god complex. Nope, it's coming to deliver freedom verification.
by ralferoo | 2026-03-13 14:20:42+00:00
Absolutely agree, effectively the EU can't touch small companies, they'd only be able to touch you if you generated any revenue in the EU that they could intercept.

As for "the EU has zero jurisdiction over anything that happens outside the EU, ever, or any entities outside the EU, despite any claims to the contrary" again, this isn't true if you conduct any business in the EU. Even for a company domiciled outside the EU, they could compel your payment processors to seize all payments to you from EU entities, for instance. The degree to which they'd fight pushback would depend on how serious the violation was and the size of the company, but you can be sure for instance that even if say Google had no EU presence at all, that the EU would make sure they complied with the GDPR or else ban them from the EU entirely.

In your situation, you actually have a good defence if there ever was an EU citizen trying to use the GDPR against you, because by taking efforts to not allow sales outside the US, you can argue that your services were never for sale to EU citizens. I guess if your TOS also said your service wasn't available to EU citizens, it would be even more watertight.

But just FYI for this:
> In my personal (business) case, we literally cannot comply with GDPR and also BSA/AML, FinCen, Reg E, KYC, etc, simultaneously. Our "business requirements" can last 7+ years, and our customers' wishes have no bearing on them.

I don't know the requirements of all those other things, but contrary to what a lot of people believe - you CAN store whatever you need to if there is a justifiable business reason for it, and you don't have to delete it even if a customer requests you to if there is a valid business requirement, such as regulatory or statutory compliance. The GDPR just compels you to be transparent with the data subject about what data is stored in those cases.

Almost every business in the EU is required to hold tax records of sales for 5 years, and so obviously these must be retained even after a customer stops being a customer and even if they request deletion of their PII data. What the GDPR requires is that you only keep the minimum required data to fulfill those statutory requirements, and delete anything else, and also not to use that data for any other purpose. Regular data should be deleted as soon as it is no longer needed.

I haven't studied the CCPA in depth, but my understanding is that it's very similar in scope to the GDPR and that complying with one would get you almost all the way to compliance with the other.

I also understand the general reaction against being told what to do by some other extra-territorial entity, but in today's society of cross-border trade, it's usually inescapable, apart from when they directly contradict - e.g. requirements to only store data in one territory.
by jmclnx | 2026-03-13 14:20:53+00:00
> Jef Spaleta, the Fedora Project leader, isn't sure of the legalities, but he thinks it might be as simple as mapping "uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age."

Personally I think Linux distros should ignore this law and put a disclaimer on their download sites. I expect OpenBSD will do just that. If Linux decides to make this a requirement, I guess I know what OS I will move to next.

Anyway, Instead of a new file, there are optional fields in /etc/passwd that can be used for "age". These fields can be added as comma separated fields. But, maybe he is thinking of making the new file readable only by root ?
by DharmaPolice | 2026-03-13 14:20:55+00:00
Death certificates are public records (at least in the UK) so why shouldn't you be able to get one? I think the alternative, where people's deaths could be kept secret by the state is a far greater risk than the privacy rights of the dead (GDPR type laws generally apply to the living).

I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK anyone can apply for any death certificate going back to 1837.
by scythe | 2026-03-13 14:21:12+00:00
For one thing, it's fairly uncommon for children to purchase operating systems. As long as there is one major operating system with age verification, parents (or teachers) who want software restrictions on their children can simply provide that one. The existence of operating systems without age verification does not actually create a problem as long as the parents are at least somewhat aware of what is installed at device level on their child's computer, which is an awful lot easier than policing every single webpage the kid visits.
by wwweston | 2026-03-13 14:21:22+00:00
The rent on a literal 1980s apartment (let alone SFH mortgage) in every area that I’ve lived in has scaled up faster than average income. This is the trend for essentials.

Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.

Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.

And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 14:21:44+00:00
Linux is the kernel, it has nothing to do with this.

The law apparently seems to target the packager/distributor of the distribution. Many small distros are hobby distros!

> The US is a federal system. It's part of our checks and balances.

Nonsensical answer. Different states are passing different requirements that often contradict each other. This is going to be a nightmare.

> No one. This is why organizations with actual security requirements do their own dependency checks.

So you’re saying that we should expect those laws too? Because before now “code is speech” has ruled, and the US government have not been able to be so invasive about how computers should work. If this is the direction we’re headed in, we need to organize and fight like hell.
by jul23 | 2026-03-13 14:21:46+00:00
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by Lockal | 2026-03-13 14:21:52+00:00
Why is this in the top of HN?

1) That's just an implementation specifics of specific LLM harness, where user switched from Plan mode to Build. The result is somewhat similar to "What will happen if you assign Build and Build+Run to the same hotkey".

2) All LLM spit out A LOT of garbage like this, check https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/, a lot of funny moments, but not really an interesting thing...
by renewiltord | 2026-03-13 14:21:56+00:00
If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.

I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
by randusername | 2026-03-13 14:22:04+00:00
Many parents will not be proactive in protecting their children online and I think this is a legitimate societal problem. The idea of algorithmic feeds for adult content that descend into increasingly "engaging" depictions is something I find horrifying.

I do not want my kids to experience those "loss of innocence" moments too soon by letting their curiosity lead them into things they are not equipped to confront yet. Hell, I still have those moments as an adult on occasion.

There has to be steps we can take as a society to address these legitimate challenges ourselves so that governments can no longer hide behind them in tinkering with mechanisms for stability and control. Maybe a "sunlight disinfects" approach.
by Sophira | 2026-03-13 14:22:13+00:00
This looks like a great project, but there's one big problem that I can see...

If it's based on BitTorrent, then surely that means that anybody who has the content that you want to see (or who advertises that they have the content you want to see...) will be able to see your IP address? Like how the movie industry can catch people who are sharing movies on BitTorrent?

Obviously, an attacker wwould probably need to use a separate BitTorrent client to do this, because I'm sure the IP addresses won't be displayed in the app itself, but that seems like it could potentially be possible.

I really hope I'm wrong on this, because other than that seemingly-big privacy flaw, this seems pretty great otherwise.
by yread | 2026-03-13 14:22:21+00:00
You realize cost of gas has direct consequences to 17M people's health as well? Our oma in her G-class building set her thermostat to 16 degrees in 2022. Because her heating bill shot to 1000+ eur/month. Only when the black mold started appearing did we manage to persuade her that 19 would be more appropriate. Of course that just traded it for money-related stress.

And I didn't say kick everyone on the street while the reconstruction is taking place. Everyone can stay where they are. Earthquakes are rare and so far in 50 years of extraction there have been no injuries. Groningen isn't the only place with earthquakes in the world you know?
by Mihir1426 | 2026-03-13 14:23:56+00:00
Hey HN,

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The Length and Temperature tools are the first in a brand new Unit Converter category — the platform's 5th category alongside Image, PDF, Developer, and Calculator tools.

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What unit converter or developer utility do you find yourself Googling most often?
by TrackerFF | 2026-03-13 14:24:01+00:00
It's a fun project, but I wish the years weren't locked to 5 year intervals.

EDIT: Actually many years are missing, it seems. For Norway there's nothing between 2000 and 1985, but I guess that's how the charts are pulled?

I also noticed that when you only have these 5 year jumps, certain genres are completely missing. Take US charts - Grunge is non-existent, as it had not yet hit the charts in 1990, and by 1995 it was over.
by actionfromafar | 2026-03-13 14:24:37+00:00
I feel that as soon as the existential threat easened with the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US started doing some self-harming libertarian flavored shit to itself.

In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.