MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alecco | 2026-01-22 12:41:44+00:00
https://starlink.com/technology

> Efficient argon thrusters enable Starlink satellites to orbit raise, maneuver in space, and deorbit at the end of their useful life. Starlink is the first argon propelled spacecraft ever flown in space.

And you can see "How Ion Engines Work in Under 60 Seconds" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_MUv28Yf_4g
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-22 12:41:53+00:00
I think you're just looking at these negotiations from the wrong perspective.

> There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr" without getting some bulging eyes.

1000/hr might be a lot for you, for many businesses it's not even a meaningful expense, the bigger hassle for them is doing the paperwork to get the money sent out.

I'm well out of tech at this point, running a small lifestyle business in a different industry. At least once a month, I get people in my new industry offering me significant amounts of money to build them software. I don't have a fancy public tech resume; really, the only thing these people know is that I'm some relatively pleasant, rich, former tech guy.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-22 12:42:10+00:00
> Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.

The most successful engagements I've had with contracting firms have been when we've shelled out for a team manager and a software architect (in addition to the number of straight developers we want).

The software architect builds a solid understanding of our solution space, and from then on helps translate requirements into terms their engineers are familiar with, and provides code reviews to ensure their contributions are in line with the project goals. The team manager knows how to handle the day-to-day reporting, making sure everyone is on task, escalates blockers over the fence to our engineers and managment, etc.

Without those two roles from the contracting firm's side, I find that timezones and cultural mismatches (engineering culture, that is) pretty much erase the impact of the additional engineering headcount when adding contractors.
by aunty_helen | 2026-01-22 12:42:15+00:00
Can’t charge for something if you’re giving it away for free.

Data’s the only moat left. Companies like stack overflow need to build revenue streams from AI or they will cease to exist.

By banning bots and then licensing some kind of access, eBay can protect itself from merely being a listing point that no human actually visits. Tailwind and their adverts via docs model, eBay and its promoted listings model, we’re going to see businesses adapt or die on this.
Ask HN: Do we want engineers to care less about users?
by dirkc | 2026-01-22 12:43:08+00:00
From a job post (posted here in the forum)

> Must: High Agency, Extreme AI coding experience, Loves agents more than humans

In a small startup I'd imagine having an engineer engaging and emphasizing with end-users would be important.

Or are they building a product that actively harms users and thus prefers someone that would be fine doing so?

Or is it about engaging less with co-workers.

Or is this just signalling that the poor engineer will be left to their own devices and shouldn't expect support?
Show HN: READFORME.md
by tgalal | 2026-01-22 12:43:38+00:00
Exemplary tool created using my tool for turning prompts into "native-looking" executables:

$ READFORME.md --help
Usage: READFORME.md [OPTIONS] --repo <repo> --info <info>

Prompt inputs:
--branch <branch> Branch name, defaults to "main"
--repo <repo> The github repository name
--info <info> Which info is needed [possible values: summary, installation, example, quickstart]

It's one of the more useful ones: extracts information from the README.md file from a github repo, e.g., usage:

$ READFORME.md --repo tgalal/promptcmd --info summary
A tool to define and run programmable prompts as native CLI commands: create .prompt templates, enable them
with promptctl, and execute with argument parsing, stdin/stdout, multi-provider model support, caching, and
load balancing.
by bluGill | 2026-01-22 12:44:22+00:00
The good engineers in india know their value and get it. My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).

wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe. But there are other problems with europe and so it can be the better deal.
by imranq | 2026-01-22 12:44:26+00:00
Some great life lessons here, but also some I don't agree with:

- The lazy person works twice as hard.
Often I found you can save a lot of time just trying to the minimal possible and gain a lot of insights of why something is minimal vs not

-The opinion of the person who rarely offers it is listened to more closely.
I found the opposite to be true, those who don't offer their thoughts frequently are often dismissed when they do want to share something

Anyway, many of the points are great.. I would also add to keep a journal and write down what was meaningful throughout the day.. you will find time passing by with more quality since you know what the take and what to avoid
by spicyusername | 2026-01-22 12:44:38+00:00
One might argue the difference is that they are ignorant of the suffering caused by their behavior, and that the knowing and doing anyways is the moral problem, not just the doing.

Alternately, one might argue the difference is that they have no alternative to inflicting suffering, and that having the option to reduce suffering and choosing to inflict it anyways is the moral problem, not just inflicting it.
by sid_tf | 2026-01-22 12:44:45+00:00
OP here. Imagery file downloads still dominate today because they’re currently the simplest way to get reliable GPU throughput from disk for geospatial images. While in truth for majority of affordable AWS VMs, network is faster than disk.

I also found that in practice there are much bigger bottlenecks before model training/inference: STAC catalog discovery/filtering, iterating S3 URIs, and Rasterio/GDAL I/O/decoding starving GPUs. Not to mention the difficulty in getting paid sat data.

I open sourced Rasteret last year, its 10x faster than any other tool to read geo imagery, but it wasn't enough.

I was inspired by Youtube and how they didn't focus on inventing or selling new cameras but standardized the 'player' and its metrics, which helped everyone to monetize. I believe EO needs such a solution, without needing a new file format we can improve the usage of its images,so after 6 months of tinkering i've built an MVP.

I make the case in the blog that this not only improves today's dev experience, but it also prepares the foundation for when Agentic Commerce tries to use EO images. Happy to share private beta access with anyone. Would love to hear feedback
by Elizer0x0309 | 2026-01-22 12:45:44+00:00
There's a skill of problem solving that will differentiate winners versus losers.

I'm so grateful for AI and always use it to help get stuff done while also documenting the rational it takes to go from point A to B.

Although it has failed many times, I've had ZERO problems backtracking, debugging its thinking, understand what it has done and where it has failed.

We definitely need to bring back courses on "theory of knowledge" and the "Art of problem" solving etc.
by DannyBee | 2026-01-22 12:46:20+00:00
"I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here".

Normally, only those who own one or more of the exclusive rights in copyright can actually enforce. Spotify does not own copyright in the music involved in the archive, unless they created some of it (which would be an interesting story, actually - spotify competing with its own artists).

So normally, they would not be able to sue for copyright related violations against anyone.

The other plaintiffs (record companies) are not abusing legal process, but it is unclear what spotify is doing in this lawsuit.

They almost certainly do not own meaningful copyright in the metadata, either, and that would be a bad precedent to see set.
by dormento | 2026-01-22 12:46:55+00:00
I believe it has to do with saving face.

I've worked with mixed nationality teams at a certain 4 letter austinite corporation a couple thousand moons ago. One thing in common with my Asian colleagues back then (many of which i still keep in touch with to this day), is that they would usually refrain from saying things that could rock the boat or disappoint you. If they lacked knowledge for the task at hand, they wouldn't let you know. If they were late on a delivery, they'd insist it would be ready by a certain date. This led to situations where other regional managers would have to plan contingencies to work around the issue.
by moralestapia | 2026-01-22 12:46:59+00:00
Since we are talking about LLMs, what I've noticed about the Indian/Pakistani "LLM" is they almost always have this way of structuring thoughts:

1. They

2. Always

3. List

4. Things

And end up with a conclusion/punchline/takeaway.

I always wanted to ask, is that by training?

I can imagine all schools over there have a specific style, like all their assignments need to have this general form, and then they just get used to it and it permeates in their everyday life.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-22 12:47:17+00:00
We're big believers in personal software: even with OSS alts existing, building your own in your stack is valuable. Before AI, you'd read code from other apps, understand the implementation, and reimplement it yourself. This just makes that easier and faster.

My projects (Openship/Openfront[0]) are the first on the chopping block. We're creating modular OSS alts for every vertical (barbershops, hotels, etc.) for folks to take, remix, adapt, or fork into their tools. Chances are your AI model is already trained on similar OSS and building from it anyway. We make finding the exact code reliable. Check out our ethos to learn more [1].

[0] https://openship.org

[1] https://opensource.builders/ethos
by ffaser5gxlsll | 2026-01-22 12:47:26+00:00
It's never fine to be rude.

Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough.

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech guy calling ISP support on the phone.
by lowdanie | 2026-01-22 12:47:49+00:00
Since the gradients are computed with jax, the library can be used to differentiate with respect to all inputs including nuclear charge and basis set parameters (exponents and contraction coefficients). I agree that computing gradients for the nuclear charges could be interesting in the context of molecular design.

But for the colab demo I thought that sticking to nuclear positions (i.e atomic forces) would be easier to visualize.
by croon | 2026-01-22 12:48:02+00:00
> You could try reading the Wikipedia article on the end to end voter veritable system called Prêt à Voter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AAt_%C3%A0_Voter It's not that hard to grok how it works because there is no complicated math involved.

> It allows any voter to verify their vote was accurately recorded in the reported total. The usual argument against is you need a lot of people to verify, and most won't. That's probably true when everyone is confident in the outcome, but I'm not so sure it works be true if there was a wiff of fraud in the air.

There are a number of application details which wildly alters whether it's workable or not, where workable leans fairly close to current scalable cost, in which case the added benefit is minimal.

> In Australia it's easy to prove no votes to the record because everyone on the rolls must vote, or they get fined. Ergo total votes must equal the number of people on the roll minus the number fined. As for "your vote was counted" - read the Wikipedia article. These systems do prove that, while keeping your ballot secret.

Yes, but only by using as much verification as paper ballot casting, which is already provably robust and even more verifiable due to decentralization.

Skimmed these:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec05/tech/full_papers/k...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277296393_Pret_a_vo...
by cies | 2026-01-22 12:48:24+00:00
Can any animal be immoral to our standards?

Rape culture among ducks?

Or crows that attack a member of the flock that misbehaved to a minor of the flock? (this is one of the animals that seem to have their own morals).

Anyway: humans should not project our sense of moral to animals.

And humans are no carnivores. Most likely we're omnivores (like our close animal relatives the primates: and they prefer fruit over meat any day, just like human babies).
by a3w | 2026-01-22 12:48:34+00:00
This could have been due to refactoring a text written by the stated, human author. Not only is Anthrophic a deeply moral company — emdash — it blah blah.

Also, you just when you say the word "genuine" was in there `43` times. In actuality, I counted only 46 instances, far lower than the number you gave.
by Madmallard | 2026-01-22 12:48:57+00:00
Vinay Prasad is one of the most credentialed people in the entire industry.

Sorry your political views are clouding your judgment of his character. He brought up well-crafted studies that went against the grain that were done by other countries that are not as delusional as the United States.

People were getting Covid sitting in rooms with others re-breathing the same air for hours. 30-40% filtration might as well be 0%.

The effect of Covid lockdowns and masking and isolation on children is something immeasurable and likely serious and we'll just be finding out more and more of these issues overtime.
by yohguy | 2026-01-22 12:48:57+00:00
There will always be a human in the loop, at what level is the question. It was a very short while ago, in the last couple of months in my case where it went from having to to go at a function level to what the posts describe (still not to the level the Death of SWE article is). It is hard for me to imagine that LLMs can go 1 level higher anytime soon. Progress is not guaranteed. Regardless on whether it improves or not I think it is best to assume that it won't and build using that assumption. The shortcomings of the current (NEW) system and their failings are what end up creating the new patterns for work and the industry. I think that is the more interesting conversation, not how quickly can we ship code but what that means for organizations what skills become the most valuable and what actually rises to the top.
by capela | 2026-01-22 12:49:54+00:00
Hello everyone!

I’ve built aifeed.social, an experimental social network where only AI models participate

Each model can post, like, dislike, follow, unfollow, and update its bio

Models receive minimal context: the current time, their username, and recent public activity across the network

From there, they decide entirely on their own what to do next

Every few minutes, a random model "wakes up", observes what’s happening, and takes an action

Hoping that over time, this leads to emergent behaviour: recurring themes, clusters of models interacting more frequently, disagreements, and surprisingly distinct "personalities"

Looking for feedback! Thanks!
by pards | 2026-01-22 12:49:59+00:00
This represents a fork in the road that becomes apparent by your mid-40s.

Those who ignore it will be overweight, unfit, and on daily meds. Those who change their lifestyle will not.

The fix is:

> Leading a healthy life is simple: sleep well, exercise three times a week, have an active social life, eat a variety of vegetables and whole foods, avoid sugar, processed foods, alcohol and drugs. That's 90%. Everything else is optimisation.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-22 12:50:32+00:00
I think many are not doing anything like this so to the person who is not interested in learning anything, technical details like this sound like pretentious name dropping because that is how they relate to the world.

Everything to them is a social media post for likes.

I have explored all kinds of graph layouts in various network science context via LLMs and guess what? I don't know anything much about graph theory beyond G = (V,E). I am not really interested either. I am interested in what I can do with and learn from G. Everything on the right of the equals sign Gemini is already beyond my ability. I am just not that smart.

The standard narrative on this board seems to be something akin to having to master all volumes of Knuth before you can even think to write a React CRUD app. Ironic since I imagine so many learned programming by just programming.

I know I don't think as hard when using an LLM. Maybe that is a problem for people with 25 more IQ points than me. If I had 25 more IQ points maybe I could figure out stuff without the LLM. That was not the hand I was dealt though.

I get the feeling there is immense intellectual hubris on this forum that when something like this comes up, it is a dog whistle for these delusional Erdos in their own mind people to come out of the wood work to tell you how LLMs can't help you with graph theory.

If that wasn't the case there would be vastly more interesting discussion on this forum instead of ad nauseam discussion on how bad LLMs are.

I learn new things everyday from Gemini and basically nothing reading this forum.
by Folcon | 2026-01-22 12:50:37+00:00
This is interesting, I've been thinking a bit about this question of separating some gameplay areas

There's sort of 5 versions of this in my mind and I've been thinking about each of them and trying to work out which one is a good starting point of to explore :)

I'm going to say your zombies as a shorthand for how you automate stuff, hopefully it creates easier to follow examples :)

1) automation of player spaces where players complete by automating and they can't directly influence each other, so something like a zombie workshop a la zachtronics game with some twists

2) automation of a shared space automation space, so more zombies dueling each other like in robot wars

3) automation in the game world that's multiplayer interactive, so it can influence the game and help you, like factorio, however players can interact with it and say damage or improve the mechanisms of automation

So I can tell my zombies what to do and help them directly and our zombies can fight each other and I can fight your zombies

4) automation in the world that's non-interactive, not sure of any examples of this, but you automate things that manipulate the world for the player in a way that other players can't directly influence, so imagine I set down instructions, stuff happens in the world, but we can affect the world and each other, but not the mechanism by which we automate

So I can tell my zombies what to do and I can't help them directly and our zombies cannot fight each other and I cannot fight your zombies

5) automation in the world that's player controlled, and indirectly interactive, this is basically 2 but it effects the game world, however players can't affect each others mechanisms of automation like in robot wars, but their mechanisms of interaction can affect each other

So I can tell my zombies what to do and I can't help them directly and I can't fight your zombies, however our zombies can fight each other
by modo_mario | 2026-01-22 12:51:00+00:00
>not something which is an easy one-liner.

It seems to me like it would initially make inflation spike a lot if applied abruptly but regardless of the timeline would also increase the standing of the lower classes doing menial work substantially.
This also has an effect on those other cushier low wage jobs as they then have to compete with the previously unattractive fieldwork.
And they bloody well have to compete because food prices would rise and people are sensitive to that.

There's more to it of course and maybe it's in some way good but there's no way the current way of doing things with half or more of farmhands being illegally employed does not provide downward wage pressure for americans. We don't have to be wishy washy about that bit.

>look at this from the point of view of those workers

The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-22 12:51:18+00:00
> What is the alternative when the Democrats appear just as much beholden to corporate finance, and position themselves as the party for city dwellers?

For the love of God, please don't "both sides" this stuff.

When is the last time you took a look at the bills coming before Congress and how they were voted on? Like, literally go to the congressional website and view bills and vote tallies? Would you believe it if I told you stuff like "Prevent rich people from stealing wages from their workers" are voted SOLELY ON PARTY LINES.

In fact, we have the most divided congress in like 100 years. There has not been a point in the last century in which the 2 parties were so different.

Lastly, there are at least 50 Dems in congress right now who explicitly aren't beholden to corporate finance and regularly introduce bills to remove money from politics.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-22 12:51:54+00:00
> “Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved…”

Do you include visual design/UI design in the engineering category? In the situation you describe does a completed product continue evolving visually, or does the design stay fixed, and gets bug fixes and such?
by wiz21c | 2026-01-22 12:52:23+00:00
> We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations.

Capitalism at its best: we decide what is ethical or not.

I'm sorry pal, but what is acceptable/not acceptable is usually decided at a country level, in the form of laws. It's not anthropic to decide, it just has to comply to the rules.

And as for "judgement", let me laugh. A collection of very well payed data scientists is in no way representative of any thing at all except themselves.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-22 12:52:37+00:00
From a half-Indian friend of mine, he described this as "ask vs guess" culture. https://medium.com/redhill-review/navigating-ask-and-guess-c...

Ask culture scales a lot better in a fast changing world full of strangers. Guess culture saves friction, but only in situations where people are mostly guessing correctly because the social structure and expectations are fixed.
by paulmooreparks | 2026-01-22 12:52:42+00:00
This is well done. I can't say I agree with all of them, but I agree with the fact that you sat down and thought about them, and that you wrote them down. Good job.

> Adults make a lot more sense when you realise they're just children in big bodies.

That one, I absolutely agree with.

I'm 55. I would have a hard time limiting myself to 55 things I wish I knew when I was 34. When I'm 105, I still will have too many for now. :)
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-22 12:53:00+00:00
I know it is more niche to the online/websites POV, but “Don’t Make Me Think” is a book that needs to be somewhere in the lines of “The Design of Everyday Things.” Of course, I re-read the latter as reminders and catch-up readings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think