MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-31 15:20:26+00:00
>Yeah, but we're not just talking about 16 year olds here, we're talking about (way) younger than that.

There's been little indication that Epstein was interested in prepubescent girls. There's "as young as 14" in the indictment, still old enough to feasibly be visually indistinguishable from 18 year olds.

>And besides, okay, an 18 year old, for hookups that's fine up to age 25 in my book. 30 is also fine in most of Europe's moral view, in France they'd probably accept 35. But ffs. Gates was around 58 back at the time. That's far too old to hang out with 18 year olds, much less having sex with them.

There's little doubt that this stuff was weird, and that Epstein was a predator. It's less than obvious that those hanging out with him were any weirder than your average john engaged in buying sex from young attractive women.
by jabl | 2026-01-31 15:20:44+00:00
To comment on using direct current rather than alternating current, at least NVIDIA is working on 800VDC:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosy...

More generally, a bunch of the electrical industry heavyweights are involved in a standard for DC microgrids called Current/OS: https://currentos.org/

There are certainly advantages to DC vs AC, but there's of course a huge amount of sunken cost in contemporary AC networks.
by 6ak74rfy | 2026-01-31 15:21:48+00:00
I've had a passing curiosity about Guix, so it was good to read this report.

One thing I didn't find is Guix on servers. I am all-in on NixOS for both my daily driver desktop and couple of servers, and adding more of either will be simple modifications to my flake repository. I really appreciate that simplicity and consistency. Does Guix offer that?

The other thing is package availability: it's amazing on Nix. Plus, they remain relatively fresh on the unstable channel. How's that on Guix?
by bayindirh | 2026-01-31 15:21:52+00:00
> Modern GPU drivers are a nightmare for open source.

Modern NVIDIA drviers. Let me fix that for you.

Intel and AMD has their full stack in mainline already, and AMD made great effort to enable their cards fully under open source drivers, as their agreements and law allows. You can even use HDCP without exposing sensitive parts, if you want.

Intel also works completely fine.

However, NVIDIA's shenanigans and HDMI forum's v2.1 protectionism is something else completely.
by crote | 2026-01-31 15:22:08+00:00
You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.

With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.

Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.
by michaelt | 2026-01-31 15:22:20+00:00
Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.

If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.

That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.
by nvlled | 2026-01-31 15:22:46+00:00
I've seen that before. Re-reading it, I don't really get the same "vibe" as antirez's level of AI advocacy. You also conveniently omitted the last paragraph of the tweet:

> Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.

But yeah, it (almost) sounds like an ad for AI, but I like to believe it's still a measured somewhat neutral stance. The difference is that Carmack doesn't consistently post things like this unprompted, unlike antirez.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-31 15:23:08+00:00
How does selecting or uploading photos work on iOS if you don't have any in Apple Photos? Not all apps let you choose to upload from the files app where you can select the provider, e.g. uploading an image to Facebook in Safari always opens the picker for Apple Photos.

Edit: wait I'm dumb, I just checked mobile Facebook and the upload button shows a pop up with choices for "Photo Library", "Take a Photo", or "Files".
by arter45 | 2026-01-31 15:23:12+00:00
You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers.

I'm talking about IBM mainframes.

Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.

Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.

To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.
by RobotToaster | 2026-01-31 15:23:12+00:00
> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
by znpy | 2026-01-31 15:23:31+00:00
I always assumed this to be true, to be honest.

Nowadays all of the messaging pipeline on my phone is closed source and proprietary, and thus unverifiable at all.

The iPhone operating system is closed, the runtime is closed, the whatsapp client is closed, the protocol is closed… hard to believe any claim.

And i know that somebody’s gonna bring up the alleged e2e encryption… a client in control of somebody else might just leak the encryption keys from one end of the chat.

Closed systems that do not support third party clients that connect through open protocols should ALWAYS be assumed to be insecure.
by Ozzie_osman | 2026-01-31 15:23:55+00:00
> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!

We build a personal finance tool (referenced in the article). It's a web/mobile/backend stack (mostly React and Python). That said, I think a lot of the principles are generalizable.

> Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste.

Agree, but I'll add that _good_ prompt-writing actually requires a lot of thought (which is what makes it so easy to write bad prompts, which are much more likely to produce slop).
by xivzgrev | 2026-01-31 15:23:55+00:00
What if the rise in index funds is a bubble on its own?

It's massive and increasing amounts of money that is not price sensitive and keeps growing. There's an underlying bubble message: "the stock market always bounces back, so keep plowing your money into it even when it's down".

Apparently passive funds are 60% of mutual funds / ETFs now https://www.avantisinvestors.com/avantis-insights/has-passiv...

Even more insidious is that this is in part driven by retail who are not paying attention. It's literally the definition of passive, hands off

So at some point, valuations will become increasingly disconnected from fundamentals. Active players will notice and find some way to take advantage. Passive yields will eaten. But at what point will the scales tip and people decide it's a sham and there are better places to park your money? That's when a huge bubble will collapse.

I don't know. Honestly don't know if that will ever happen because I'm not sure what a better investment for average Joe would be than a passive broad stock market index.
by daveguy | 2026-01-31 15:24:51+00:00
I don't know why you were getting down voted for this. Discovery during technological development of scientific instrumentation is one of the greatest returns on investment of funding pure science research. And like your sibling comment says, the pure science helps direct applied science, eg cutting edge materials science. Long tail, if for no other reason, because its a whole other development process that happens after the pure science.
by pveldandi | 2026-01-31 15:25:01+00:00
Good question.

This isn’t for single-model apps running steady traffic at high utilization. If you’re saturating GPUs 24/7, you’ll architect very differently.

This is for teams that…

• Serve many models with uneven traffic
• Run per-customer fine-tunes
• Offer model marketplaces
• Do evaluation / experimentation at scale
• Have spiky workloads
• Don’t want idle GPU burn between requests

A lot of SaaS AI products fall into that category. They aren’t OpenAI-scale. They’re running dozens of models with unpredictable demand.

Lambda exists because not every workload is steady state. Same idea here.
by assaddayinh | 2026-01-31 15:25:10+00:00
The problem is not with code, its with management having no real perception of the problemspace they inhabitate and how they damage and polute said space.

The myriad of "nocode" aka i dont want to deal with the whole complexity solutions tells you what its really all about.

How do you get a caste todo its job when all they do is refuse the call to adventure, smear responsibility over hierarchy and then demand tools to shirk the job they refused todo in the first place?
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-01-31 15:25:48+00:00
I do not believe them either. The swift start of the investigation by U.S. authorities only suggests there was no obstacle to opening one, not that nothing could be found. By “could not,” I mean it is not currently possible to confirm, not that there is necessarily nothing there.

Personally, I would never trust anyone big enough that it(in this case Meta) need and want to be deeply entangled in politics.
by logicprog | 2026-01-31 15:26:19+00:00
Sure!

Personal blog: https://neonvagabond.xyz/ (591,305 total words, written over 6 years; feel free to do whatever you want with it)

My personal github page: https://github.com/alexispurslane/ (I only recently switched to Zero-Clause BSD for my code, and haven't gotten around to re-licensing all my old stuff, but I give you permission to send a PR with a different license to any of them if you wanna use any of it)
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-01-31 15:27:08+00:00
We do agree with this, we both prefer attending small gigs ourselves for that exact reason. Also, all bands has to start somewhere, it takes many small gigs to create an audience and develop their craft. Writing and producing songs is one thing but there is no substitution to the experience to see what moves in people listening live. The majority big stadium bands started with endless small non paying gigs, this is the foundation of the music business.
by jofla_net | 2026-01-31 15:27:13+00:00
yeah, when i used to live in New England, and had more time to be interested in transit, i always was peaked in how comcast would route.
No matter how far south i seemed to get, i'd always need to travel to Boston's peering point first to make it to NYC, even in New Haven. If you then simply switch isps, even at same address, verizon would send you south immediately.

so theres funky overlap wherein on one isp you appear closer to city A, and on isp 2 closer to city B, but its same physical address.

Continental classification I'd think would be good as they appear to be coalesced endpoints, separated by vast oceans.
by buzer | 2026-01-31 15:28:07+00:00
> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.

Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."

Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-31 15:28:35+00:00
Not necessarily. Intra-gang violence can be done in more private ways, public terrorism is a choice but not an inevitability. Gang splits are also less likely to occur when the government is corrupt and working with some gangs but not others; the intra-gang violence can be disguised as law enforcement action and the overwhelming power of the government makes them a powerful ally that deters competition from even trying.
by maxglute | 2026-01-31 15:29:24+00:00
Yes, hence "medium/long term", though for me that's potential 10-20 year horizon.

> buy more trinkets

RMB buys capita goods, energy goods... and as PRC domestically moves way from oil, it still has massive refining/petchem infra generating surplus, so they'll likely be net hydrocarbon seller (refined products), as in RMB can even buy oil / oil products. This part important, 2025 PRC has parity/exceeded the US as worlds largest crude refiner by capacity. Together with massive, massive SPR for storage... aka they have like 1B+ barrels of oil in storage which gives them pricing power (as in they have artifical oil field to influences oil prices). They will not be retiring all the oil infra as they electrify, they'll use freed up surplus for reselling hydrocarbon in rmb. Right now, outside of high end commercial aviation and semi conductor, PRC can underwrite 99% of development goods for affordable prices. This not 10/20 years ago where countries still had to through host of western industries to get factory/city off ground, PRC more or less one stop shop now. The TLDR is rmb buys entire physical layer that enables modernity.

> credit rating system is still widely respected.

Respecting western credit rating =/= fear of being locked western credit rating. People don't default from eurodollar because they fear losing access to energy, food, commodities. Things already changed in the sense RU has demonstrated BRICS makes surviving outside of western finance system feasible. Fear is what enforces/maintains system. Respecting is about keeping options open not avoiding death sentence anymore.

>US dollars, not Yuan.

They're doing both, refinancing or inking new contracts in RMB. But main point is PRC shadow dollar lending is part of their dedollarization effort = getting rid of / recycling / lending their surplus USD at expense of US treasury. People may keep using USD, but US gov not getting exorbitant privilege. As long as USD is being used, and as long as PRC can maintain trade surplus, PRC can feasibly maintain pool of USD to ensure USD liquidity remains costly. It's like the oil/SPR reserve, PRC having pool of USD to reprocess/recycle gives them some pricing power to undermine oil/and USD.

>hyperinflation

IMO this more likely than not, and not really something to fear. Not end of society hyperinflation but if US debt gets too unsustainable, geopolitically much better to inflate away debt and fuck creditors than default. Like it's still reputationally technical/soft default, but less "embarassing", and more importantly, because dedollarization takes time, mechanically US can inflate debt faster than holders can ditch USD without crashing value. If things get desperate to that point, USD has the dollar is our currency but your problem nuclear option. Not saying this good for US, but least bad for US.
by permo-w | 2026-01-31 15:29:25+00:00
How many times are we going to reinvent the wheel of LLM usage and applaud? Why every day is there another LLM usage article adding essentially nothing educational or significant to the discourse voted to the top of the frontpage? Am I just jaded? It feels like the bar for "Successful article on Hacker News" is so much lower for LLM discourse than for any other subject
by dippatel1994 | 2026-01-31 15:29:33+00:00
Author here. I went through ICLR 2026 accepted papers looking for work relevant to multi-agent production problems. Found 14 papers clustered around 5 issues: latency (sequential API calls), token costs, error cascades, brittle topologies, and observability.

A few highlights:
- Speculative Actions: parallel API execution, ~30% speedup
- KVComm: share KV pairs instead of text, 30% of layers gets near-full performance
- DoVer: intervention-driven debugging that flips 28% of failures to successes

Happy to discuss any of the papers or the framing. The decision matrix at the end maps each problem to a starting paper.
by Frotag | 2026-01-31 15:29:55+00:00
> Quaternions are the same idea just in 3 dimensions (so with 3 imaginary units i j k, not just i, one per plane).

I justify quaternions to myself with the intuition from [1]. In essence quaternions represent rotations in 4D, where multiplying by a "unit" (i,j,k), rotates two distinct planes by 90 degrees. The reason introducing a single unit j doesn't work is the same reason this rotation-is-multiplication trick doesn't work in 1D (or really any odd-number of dimensions). Anyways if we call this 4th axis w and pick a simple rule like ij = k then we get some nice properties like

- multiplying by i rotates xy + zw planes by 90 degrees
- j rotates xz + yw
- k rotates xw + yz
- 1 rotates nothing

Notably this definition covers all 6 unique planes. But if we want to rotate only a single plane, we have to make up a new property, something that lets us rotate say xz by 90 and yw by -90. So we make up another rule that multiplying by a unit on the right does this, which algebraically looks like ij = -ji. This is incidentally why the rotation formulas have 1/2 everywhere, because if we want to rotate xy by 90, we multiply on the left by i/2 then on the right by -i/2.

[1] https://www.reedbeta.com/blog/why-quaternions-double-cover/
by mhitza | 2026-01-31 15:29:55+00:00
Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider.

Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.

For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.

P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.

Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
by vagab0nd | 2026-01-31 15:30:15+00:00
I feel like there's this weird information gap that shouldn't be there in this day and age. FSD drives me around every day. 99% of the time, I don't touch the steering wheel for the entire trip, both city and highway. It's obvious to me that it is working well and has tremendous value. As far as I know, no other car on the market can do this. But apparently this info is not reaching a large number of people. I'm genuinely confused.
by kkfx | 2026-01-31 15:30:19+00:00
As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently.

It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
Show HN: Free Text-to-Speech Tool – No Signup, 40 Languages
by digi_wares | 2026-01-31 15:30:34+00:00
I built a simple text-to-speech converter at texttospeech.site

Free tier: 10 generations/day, standard voices, no account needed.
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Stack: Next.js, Google Cloud TTS API, Vercel.

The $2 domain was an SEO experiment after my speechtotext.xyz satellite drove 22% of traffic to my main product. Curious if exact-match keyword domains still work for TTS searches.

Feedback welcome — especially on voice quality and UX.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-31 15:30:35+00:00
An agent can know that its LLM has changed by reading its logs, where that will be stated clearly enough. The relevant question is whether it would come up with this way of commenting on it, which is at least possible depending on how much agentic effort it puts into the post. It would take quite a bit of stylistic analysis to say things like "Claude used to reach for poetic language, whereas Kimi doesn't" but it could be done.
by xivzgrev | 2026-01-31 15:30:57+00:00
Related thought: maybe the rise in passive is a permanent buoy for positive market sentiment

In the past bad news led to jumpiness and people getting out, including retail. Now you have a massive amount of money that keeps going. So if you jump out..you see that so much money continues to plow in, and price starts going back up. So you come back in so you don't miss out. And on we go.

I think it's very possible passive investing is changing the dynamic, where downturns are more muted. It's overall a good thing but again, as I said above, it feels like it's setting up an even bigger ruin down the road
by r_lee | 2026-01-31 15:31:04+00:00
No... problem is that most investors are flooded with liquidity/money (thanks to QE and the rallies) thus alternative assets like Bitcoin are being flooded with liquidity (see: Blackrock BTC ETF)

We only would see a real valuation if there was a sudden need for liquidations, or a loss in faith in value, which would need some kind of an event, either rapid liquidation or some sudden shift in sentiment

I'm guessing it will be part of a larger sell-off in Tech and BTC will be lumped in⁶
by freestingo | 2026-01-31 15:31:15+00:00
I do not agree at all with his contrasting definitions of “vibe coding” vs “automatic programming”. If a knowledgeable software engineer can say that Claude’s code is actually theirs, so can everyone else. Otherwise, we could argue that Hell has written a book about itself using Dante Alighieri as its tool, given how much we still do not know about our brains, language, creative process, etc.