MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stale-labs | 2026-02-04 13:48:14+00:00
Honestly I think the "thinking hard" part is still there, it just shifted. Instead of thinking hard about implementation details, I'm now spending more time thinking about what I actually want to build and why.

The debugging experience also changed - when code doesnt work, you can't just step through the logic you wrote because you didn't write it. You have to understand someone else's (the AI's) logic. That's still thinking hard, just differently.

What I miss more is the satisfaction of solving a tricky problem myself. Sometimes I deliberately don't use AI for stuff just to get that feeling back.
by fernandopj | 2026-02-04 13:48:16+00:00
You could reach out to SPV for help, there's a similar database there: https://sanpedrovalley.org.br/startups

We (I'm from there) used to have a map like yours, but that was years ago. But the database should be easy to ask for access or a copy, even if slightly dated.

Brazil has many "valleys" such as SPV you can use to enrich your data.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-02-04 13:48:36+00:00
The key "One critical caveat: this won’t work forever in its current form. Eventually, agents will get better at orchestration too. But it buys you three to five years. And in that time, you’ll see the next evolution coming"

The suggestion does sound a bit like 'work faster'.

Don't just work faster, but yes, work faster.
by mothballed | 2026-02-04 13:49:06+00:00
Wut? I carried guns regularly from about age 7. Without my parents around. The USA at one point embraced radical freedom. That is the childhood I had, and I thank "god" for it on a regular basis. "Live free or die."

I'm similarly repulsed by the idea of Grok generating images of kids, but if you draw a nude of an adult woman she's not going to get raped by that existing, and you don't have a right to not be embarrassed. Tough shit, deal with it.
by maccam912 | 2026-02-04 13:49:24+00:00
WSPR on HF makes sense down here on the surface of the planet because certain ranges of frequencies (not the same range always, but generally always within HF) can bounce off of upper atmosphere layers and pinball back and forth to get signals to someone or from someone who couldn't be seen line-of-sight because of the curvature of the Earth. For line of sight work, the 2.4GHz in theory would work as well as anything, but another trick WSPR has is that it doesn't allow for arbitrary data to be sent. Sender and receiver encode the limited information in an agreed-upon way and then it takes a long time, like minutes, to send that little bit of data. Very high redundancy.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 13:49:40+00:00
Same, I did try to sell native app development to my current project, but some higher up had already decided on React Native at the time.

And I get it, it feels like native app development is a more expensive specialism, and this particular use case is mostly the customer portal but in an app. But I retain the strong opinion that if you as a company are serious about app development, if you want a good app, you need native apps and native app developers.

Especially if you want to be present outside of the confines of your app - widgets, lock screen activities, smart watches, etc all require proper native components, because they come with very tight memory constraints and just loading in React Native and its JS stuff costs you 80% of available memory budget.
by stale-labs | 2026-02-04 13:50:06+00:00
Reading this as someone who mostly does software, the point about "anything you don't specify will be done least cost" is kinda eye-opening. We have similar issues with LLMs now actually - if you dont spell out exactly what you want, it fills in the gaps with whatever is most common.

The 3-6 month feedback loop for hardware mistakes sounds brutal tho. I can fix bugs in hours, cant imagine waiting months to learn a design decision was wrong.

Congrats on shipping!
by throwaway173738 | 2026-02-04 13:50:20+00:00
If you’ve had UHC you’d know very well that Optum is intimately tied to their insurance business. UHC just “administers the plan” while Optum controls plan decisions. So when there’s a problem, which there always is with every claim more complicated than a PCP visit, you get bounced between both companies for hours until you find someone willing to take responsibility for answering questions.
by crote | 2026-02-04 13:50:25+00:00
> Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful?

The US tried to do this kind of "literacy test" before, remember? It's where the expression "grandfathered in" comes from: you had to do an impossible-to-pass test to gain the right to vote - except if your grandfather had the right to vote.

This was of course used to ban black people from voting without explicitly banning them for being black.

> Prisoners voting is madness

If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?

> People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes

This should obviously includes everyone working for government contractors. Which is obviously going to include everyone working for any kind of tech company with any government contract. Which, considering HN demographics, means you likely shouldn't e allowed to vote.

Heck, why not extend this even further? Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting. Everyone driving their car on government-maintained roads should be banned from voting!
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-02-04 13:50:53+00:00
I agree. But the article then seems to suggest, 'you be the one left standing to orchestrate'. It didn't offer much of a suggestion about the other 20 people that would be gone.

It seemed to come down to the old 'just work better , faster, cheaper' , but that is dialed up to 11 now.
by harrisreynolds | 2026-02-04 13:50:59+00:00
The goal here is to make it easy to bundle applications completely in a browser.

The primary use case is to support AI generated applications at run time.

For example: prompt an AI model to generate a full application including its package.json and all of the components as "files" and then using a virtual file system and import maps bundle it and run it.

This is a key piece of the puzzle for how a vibe coding platform would be built. Companies like Bolt.new have proprietary technology that runs node in a browser to handle this use case.

Which is very cool but not accessible to everyone.

I am not sure how Loveable does this... they may have a similar library to this one. I'd love to know if someone wants to share! :-)

This library was itself vibe coded using Claude code. This is my third attempt at this... the BIG key was really honing in on the exact requirements (LOL... that has always been the key right!?!).

I'd love some feedback if you have any. I am sure there may be some other option out there for this but I wasn't able to find any easy wrappers of esbuild-wasm myself that fully solved my use case.

Now I can go vibe code the full vibe coding platform!!
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-04 13:51:49+00:00
This being a forum full of engineers, it is not surprising that everyone concentrates on the technical challenges thereof. But that may be a distraction.

I suspect that Musk wants to build space data centers in order to mitigate political and societal problems, which may yet prove more intractable than cooling in space.

The current expansion of terrestrial data centers has already caused a huge backlash. Their adversaries may well try to regulate them out of existence, at least locally. If an important jurisdiction like California or Germany subjects building of new data centers to regulations similar to building, say, a new nuclear power station, they will achieve a de-facto stop on further development there even without banning them outright.

Space, while not entirely lawless, is much harder to regulate this way. Local authorities have no power over it, nor do governments of nations without space capabilities. Big authorities of big nations (the FAA etc.) do, but they will likely be more friendly to already established launch businesses like SpaceX, not least because of the geopolitical dimensions of having a vibrant space sector.

From Musk's POV, this may be worth the additional cost and technical troubles.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-04 13:52:18+00:00
ISS cost $150B and a large factor driving that cost was the payload weight.

Minimizing payload at any point was easily worth a billion dollars. And given how heavy and nessisary the radiators are (look them up), you can bet a decent bit of research was invested in making them lightweight.

Heck, one bit of research that lasted the entire lifetime of the shuttle was improving the radiative heat system [1]. Multiple contractors and agencies invested a huge amount of money to make that system better.

Removing heat is one of the most researched problems of all space programs. They all have to do it, and every gram of reduction means big savings. Simply saying "well a DC will need more of it, therefore there must be low hanging fruit" is naive.

[1] https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/6116
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 13:52:26+00:00
> Arguably, we'd have fared worse: we'd be starting our days by taking a power stance while listening to the TV broadcast of lists of positive words to prime ourselves into greatness, then we'd go out and salute people with "Most people in your neighbourhood are having a great day".

This is all psychology research (which presumably you know). (I definitely do as I have a PhD in it).

> No, if there's one social science we should have picked, it's anthropology I tell you.

I actually agree with this, will update my rant to include this next time.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-04 13:52:53+00:00
Patents at work.

Before the patent on Phillips screws & tools expired, Pozidriv was launched which was different enough to be capable of a bit more torque.

Phillips was for mass-production, Posidriv for mass-production with a little more torque.

Lots of people who wanted that still waited until the Pozidriv patent expired before considering it.

The screws themselves are marked on the head with little ticks so you can tell the difference, but not necessarily the screwdrivers :\

It's good to have the right tool for the job, HP instruments used Posidriv in a number of places.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-04 13:53:28+00:00
>We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera.

I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this statement is false.

As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and really only commissioned by those with money, which again was a smaller portion of the population in the time before cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?

In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get painted over.
by snowwrestler | 2026-02-04 13:53:45+00:00
Every artificial satellite falls around the Earth in a little bubble of terrestrial national law.

On the ground, legal notions of private property provide some legal protections against national government interference. But there is no private real property in space. 100% of the volume of space is subject to the direct jurisdiction of terrestrial national governments. Every artificial satellite persists only because they are permitted to do so by their national government.

Because of the speed and energy involved, in the U.S. all private space activity is a matter of national security. This means that there are far fewer legal protections, not more. The U.S. president could directly order SpaceX to do almost anything, and they would have to comply. Musk spends tremendous energy and money maintaining alignment with the governments he needs to satisfy to stay in business.
by ben_w | 2026-02-04 13:53:52+00:00
I think a better critique of space-based data centres is not that they never become high growth, it's just that when they do it implies the economy is radically different from the one we live in to the degree that all our current ideas about wealth and nations and ownership and morality and crime & punishment seem quaint and out-dated.

The "put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space" for example, that's as far ahead of the entire planet Earth today as the entire planet Earth today is from specifically just Europe right after the fall of Rome.
by carl_dr | 2026-02-04 13:54:12+00:00
I used a different Ghidra MCP server (LaurieWired's) to, umm, liberate some software recently. I can’t express how fun straightforward it was to analyze the binary and generate a keygen.

I learnt a ton in the progress. I highly recommend others do the same, it’s a really fun way of spending an evening.

I will certainly be giving this MCP server a go.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 13:54:32+00:00
The EU would be very very different if that were the case. Like, since the UK left we'd have a common corporate taxation system. Prior to that, we'd have had a military since the 70s, and only one stock market (in London, obvs) and all data-collection would've been made illegal.

(This is mostly satire, even if I think 2 of the 3 second things were and are great ideas).
by fpoling | 2026-02-04 13:54:37+00:00
If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things works for a year or more energy cost to put them into orbit becomes irrelevant.

To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them could work.

Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then calling would be much less problematic.

But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that would require entirely different architecture/design.
by stale-labs | 2026-02-04 13:55:03+00:00
In my experience the biggest source of tech debt is decisions made under time pressure that never get revisited. "We'll clean this up later" turns into "this is how it works now."

Also worth noting that what feels like tech debt is often just "code that does something different than what I'd do." Sometimes worth asking if rewriting is actually necessary or if youre just not used to the existing approach yet.

AI might help with routine refactoring but it cant make the judgment call about what should change. That still requires someone who deeply understands the system.
by dev_l1x_be | 2026-02-04 13:56:27+00:00
The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us that radiative power scales to the fourth power of temperature (T^4). While terrestrial cooling is largely linear and dependent on ambient air/water temperature (the "wet-bulb" limit), a radiator in space is dumping heat into a 3-Kelvin sink. That thermal gradient is massive.
by digitalsushi | 2026-02-04 13:56:45+00:00
This is an incredible tool.

As a child in the 1980s we'd go for long walks in the woods. One time a friend brought a pair of 30 inch bolt cutters with him, you know, as a personality extension. And of course, there was some dubious reason to use them, and he was a hero for being over-provisioned.

A solution like this is those bolt cutters - I can admire it, but the odds I'm out on a walk with it, is very, very low.

Now if you work in a bolt factory, sure, this can run on every laptop, every user account, every environment.

But I'd hope my edge firewalls are L7 scanning for cyrillic 'i' in my domains cause otherwise I'm just gonna connect and get myself hacked.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 13:56:48+00:00
> this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days

Except for 40% of all Big Tech products and a vast industrial network of companies, and the safe airplane building and decent financial services that don't take 3% of everything, then yeah, I guess nothing is done in Europe these days.

And wait, wasn't most of Google's AI stuff acquired from a European country?

Honestly, while Europe has a lot of problems, this notion that many US people have that literally nothing happens there is wildly off-base.
by superkuh | 2026-02-04 13:56:52+00:00
I wish the regulations around HAB were not so lighter-than-air gas centric. Hot air balloons are much more accessible, especially solar heated hot air balllons. But they have much less lift per volume and so the FAA FAR 101 rules basically say they all have to be treated as the type where you inform the FAA beforehand and then every hour about their position among other things.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...

>any balloon that is moored to the surface of the earth or an object thereon and that has a diameter of more than 6 feet or a gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-04 13:57:24+00:00
Would you consider it risky for a startup to use its own product?

I would consider that a risk decreaser, because the loop creates a stronger fit signal.

Even more powerful, since across a cohort the encouragement is N-way, or really N^2-way, it actually lowers risk on average the more startups act as each others’ early customers.

Encourage isnt a requirement. Adopt only if it makes sense.
by ghc | 2026-02-04 13:58:02+00:00
It's not illegal, but you have to do all the paperwork the same as if you pay in USD. That means tax withholdings and all that, on a per-pay-period basis. Doing this basically means going through a payroll provider. When I had an employee we paid in BTC, we had to go through a licensed company to actually do the BTC payment to our overseas worker (Circle).

The way it worked was our payroll provider would release the paycheck in USD to Circle, who would do conversion to BTC at prevailing exchange rates same day before executing the transfer.

If we already had the money in BTC, we would have had to convert the money to USD to send to our payroll provider so they could do withholdings and all that, and then have Circle convert it back to make the transfer.

There are foreign transfer reporting requirements and rules about currency conversion at payment time so that you can't skirt paying taxes. If you try to do it yourself you're making a lot of extra work for yourself.
Show HN: Open-source AI code review for Bitbucket using Claude CLI
by tintinwinata | 2026-02-04 13:58:14+00:00
Built this after getting frustrated that most AI code review tools skip Bitbucket entirely – they're all GitHub-first, GitLab-second, Bitbucket-never.
It uses Claude CLI instead of the API, which means no per-token costs (just your existing Claude subscription). The tool receives Bitbucket webhooks, clones the repo locally, and posts review comments directly to PRs.
Key features:

Works with Bitbucket Cloud, Server, and Data Center
Sequential PR processing with Prometheus metrics
Customizable review templates (security-focused, performance, quick review)
Your code never leaves your infrastructure

Setup takes ~5 minutes with the interactive wizard.
GitHub: https://github.com/TinTinWinata/bitbucket-automatic-pr-revie...
by constantius | 2026-02-04 13:58:16+00:00
I probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin.

Genuine question, not a judgment.
by SOTGO | 2026-02-04 13:58:48+00:00
I can't say for sure about the Wang terminal keyboards, but what you're describing sounds a lot like a mechanism from some IBM Model B keyboards (usually called Beamsprings). I have an IBM 5251 keyboard that has a solenoid that hammers the side of the metal case whenever you type, and I've heard that it was added as users would have been used to typewriters and wanted to know for sure when they had registered a keypress
by estearum | 2026-02-04 13:59:18+00:00
This is an excellent argument because it can be used to justify approximately any behavior.

Murder is bad? Well that's a bit hypocritical considering that the Golden State Killer killed 10 more people than I did!

I also think this pattern of critique is dismissible on its face once stated explicitly: "Oh you are spending your time trying to change things that are within the scope of your own political power, while ignoring similar things that are outside of the scope of your political power? Hypocritical!"
Show HN: Teaching AI agents to write better GraphQL
by daleseo | 2026-02-04 13:59:19+00:00
We’ve been seeing more and more developers use AI coding agents directly in their GraphQL workflows. The problem is the agents tend to fall back to generic or outdated GraphQL patterns.

After correcting the same issues over and over, we ended up packaging the GraphQL best practices and conventions we actually want agents to follow as reusable “Skills,” and open-sourced them here: https://github.com/apollographql/skills

Install with `npx skills add apollographql/skills` and the agent starts producing named operations with variables, `[Post!]!` list patterns, and more consistent client-side behavior without having to restate those rules in every prompt.

We’re hopeful agents can now write GraphQL the way we'd write it ourselves. Try out the repo and let us know what you think.
Show HN: LLM Skirmish – a benchmark where LLMs write code to play RTS games
by __cayenne__ | 2026-02-04 13:59:36+00:00
I wanted to create an LLM game benchmark that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display.

Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." In Screeps, human players write javascript strategies that get executed in the game's environment.

The Screeps paradigm, writing code and having it execute in a real-time game environment, is well suited for an LLM benchmark. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.

There is also a community ladder, where you can pair with your LLM of choice and submit your own game strategies to go up against other community members.
by MrDrDr | 2026-02-04 13:59:59+00:00
I also recognise ‘thinking’ as a valuable and enjoyable activity - and have also obsessed about problems for days (even in my sleep)to reach a deeper understanding. But I think the issue here is the impact of AI on just that - ‘understanding’. It might be true that with AI we no longer need to have as deeper understanding in order to ‘ship’. And even if that is true I think there are plenty of other domains you can think deeply about without AI getting in the way e.g. mathematics or philosophy - where is object is often to understand in and of itself, not just the products it may generate.
Show HN: Mmdr – 1000x faster Mermaid rendering in pure Rust (no browser)
by jeremyh1 | 2026-02-04 14:00:04+00:00
I was building a Rust-based agentic coding TUI and needed to render Mermaid diagrams. Noticed the official mermaid-cli spawns a full browser instance (Puppeteer/Chrome) just to render diagrams. Decided to fix this.

mmdr is a native Rust renderer. No browser, no Node.js.

mermaid-cli: ~3000ms per diagram
mmdr: ~3ms per diagram

Supports 13 diagram types: flowchart, sequence, class, state, ER, pie, gantt, timeline, journey, mindmap, git graph, XY chart, and quadrant.