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AI might make mainframes more defensible, not less

https://exodus2026.substack.com/p/if-ai-can-modernize-cobol-then-we
1•jehuie•18s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Orca, open-source AI agent for deep LinkedIn profile analysis

https://github.com/DimiMikadze/orca
1•DimitriMikadze•36s ago•1 comments

Trump's MAHA influencer pick for surgeon general goes before Senate

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/rfk-jr-ally-casey-means-faces-senate-for-surgeon-general-c...
1•Bender•52s ago•0 comments

Rowspace launches with $50M to help investors scale their alpha with AI

https://www.rowspace.ai/blog/series-a
3•rattray•2m ago•0 comments

White House list of media offenders

https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/
1•sensanaty•3m ago•0 comments

AI-Assisted Jira Workflows and One-Shot Fixes with Kotlin Koog and OpenAI Codex

https://bitmovin.com/blog/ai-developer-workflows-jira-to-pull-request/
1•slederer•3m ago•0 comments

AI helps scam centers evade crackdown in Asia and dupe more victims

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/02/10/asia-pacific/crime-legal/ai-scam-centers-asia-victims/
1•PaulHoule•3m ago•0 comments

Why Email Spam Looks Better Than Usual These Days

https://tedium.co/2026/02/25/vibe-coded-email-spam/
1•speckx•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Breathwork Tools – A free breathwork timeras a single HTML file

https://breathwork.tools
1•talktoconor•4m ago•1 comments

Why do office chairs have 5 legs? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKt46Lch2bo
1•vinhnx•5m ago•0 comments

Our Computer Using agent just solved CAPTCHA up to Level 6

2•PrateekJ17•7m ago•0 comments

Long-term brain effects of Covid-19 vs. flu-key differences

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-term-brain-effects-covid-flu.html
1•bikenaga•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CMS-free in-place editable websites with Svelte (v2)

https://editable.website
1•_mql•8m ago•0 comments

MAME 0.286

https://www.mamedev.org/?p=560
3•chungy•10m ago•0 comments

Electric buses are passing a brutal cold-weather test in Wisconsin

https://grist.org/transportation/electric-buses-are-passing-a-brutal-cold-weather-test-in-wisconsin/
4•speckx•10m ago•1 comments

New technique to easily partition CSV files for parallel processing

https://github.com/medialab/xan/blob/master/docs/blog/csv_base_jumping.md
3•Yomguithereal•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: How Much Did It Cost? Your Project on AI

https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/HMDIC/
2•keepamovin•12m ago•1 comments

Meta frees React to live in its own foundation

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/meta_sends_react_to_live/
5•EDM115•12m ago•1 comments

CoreCollective for the next era of open collaboration for the Arm SW ecosystem

https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/introducing-corecollective
2•fork-bomber•13m ago•0 comments

Tax credits for solar panels are available, but the catch is you can't own them

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5649474/solar-panel-tax-credit
2•toomuchtodo•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ShouldISwap – Compare crypto pair rates against historical averages

https://shouldiswap.com/
2•Herbyg•14m ago•0 comments

We Are the One and Only You

https://onefoottsunami.com/2026/02/25/we-are-the-one-and-only-you/
2•zdw•14m ago•0 comments

Dwitter Beta – Creative coding in 140 characters

https://korben.info/dwitter-beta-creative-coding-javascript.html
2•KilledByAPixel•14m ago•0 comments

Ghostly UV sparks light up forests as thunderstorms pass overhead

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ghostly-uv-sparks-light-up-forests-as-thunderstorms-pa...
2•mudil•15m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: I launched a focus app on Kickstarter – what I learned about friction

2•artzev_•16m ago•0 comments

CHERIoT Rust: Status update #0

https://rust.cheriot.org/2026/02/15/status-update.html
2•remexre•18m ago•0 comments

The CHIPS Act Spends $52.7B on Fabs but $0 on Defending Them from Ransomware

https://thehgtech.com/articles/semiconductor-ransomware-chips-act-2026.html
2•thehgtech•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Dance of Tal V2 – Dependency injection and lockfiles for AI agents

https://github.com/dance-of-tal/dance-of-tal
1•monarchjuno•19m ago•1 comments

Trump made tax day more complicated. ChatGPT and Claude can make it easier

https://www.vox.com/life/480317/trump-taxes-chatgpt-claude-turbotax
1•speckx•19m ago•0 comments

Turning a 2 ton robot into a 3D printer [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peY_KK_nGc8
1•rmast•19m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes

https://www.marginalia.nu/weird-ai-crap/hn/
32•todsacerdoti•1h ago

Comments

bediger4000•1h ago
This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.
embedding-shape•6m ago
Would be interesting to see "fastest growing accounts in last N months" or something similar. I'm guessing the ones that are actually humans would be closer to the top than the bottom, but maybe HN users aren't better than the average person to detect AI or not.
loeg•6m ago
Karma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening. I suppose the bots can also do voting rings, but they don't necessarily need to.
marginalia_nu•1h ago
(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.
Muhammad523•11m ago
I just took a look at /noobcomments and wow, there's ever a comment where a person argues with AI instead of, you know, using their own brain. It was abivous it was ai since it was formatted with markdown
embedding-shape•5m ago
> abivous it was ai since it was formatted with markdown

Plenty of people, especially new HN users, think that Markdown works on HN, I don't think it automatically means they're AI.

However, if they don't update the comment, I'd also put another point towards "Could be AI" as you get shown your comment immediately after.

lgats•5m ago
the link https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
cookiengineer•8m ago
I wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard. So the false positives and true negatives might have some overlaps without more details. I think a better indicator would be to only detect em dashes with preceding and following whitespace characters, and general unicode usage of that user.

Additionally, lots of Chinese and Russian keyboard tools use the em dash as well, when they're switching to the alternative (en-US) layout overlay.

There's also the Chinese idiom symbol in UTF8 which gets used as a dot by those users a lot, so that could be a nice indicator for legit human users.

marginalia_nu•4m ago
I think there is a baseline number of human users that for one reason or another uses em-dashes, but this doesn't explain why they 10x more prevalent in green accounts.
onion2k•10m ago
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.

lm28469•7m ago
> HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

hm, the whole internet really, youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, blog posts, food recipes, news articles, it's getting more and more obvious

skeptic_ai•5m ago
All will be fixed with real id attestation /s
egypturnash•9m ago
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Don’t mind me, just skewing the results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

marginalia_nu•6m ago
Haha, the code counts the number of comments with em-dashes and similar, not the number of em-dashes total.

Could be an argument made for aggregating by user instead however, if some bots are found to be particularly active and skewing the data.

bitwize•8m ago
How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?
cookiengineer•5m ago
> How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?

Maybe the em dash is the self censorship/deletion mechanism that we've all been waiting for. Better than having to write pill subscription ads, I suppose.

mm0lqf•5m ago
doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
antirez•5m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is every day more compelling.
limaho•4m ago
what is `/classic`?
CrzyLngPwd•5m ago
It's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse.

What will/can HN do about it?

CharlesW•4m ago
A couple thoughts:

(1) I don't recommend focusing disproportionately on one signal. They'll change, and are incredibly easy to optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

(2) I do recommend taking one minute to dash a note off to hn@ycombinator.com if you see suspicious patterns. Dang and our other intrepid mods are preturnatually responsive, and appear to appreciate the extra eyeballs on the problem.

Rooster61•4m ago
I would like to formally put forth the petition for the tech world to replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
716dpl•4m ago
As a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)