MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-03 16:58:10+00:00
They had near total subsidy from the USSR from about 1960 until 1990, and in that time they developed precisely no industry and no agricultural output. The Cuban government in the first few decades was primarily focused on exporting revolution, and not on economic development. Despite their ties to the USSR they never even produced anything that could be traded back to the Soviet block, unlike their Eastern European counterparts who also didn't trade with the west. Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.

In the 2000s China was buying hundreds of tons of sugar from Cuba but stopped because the Cuban government mismanaged production and couldn't meet agreed upon deliverables. There was also a steep decline in Chinese investment from 2017 to 2022 because euphemistically Cuba couldn't protect Chinese investment, or read another way the Cuban government kept stealing from the Chinese.

These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.

> pointing out objective fact

It's not objective fact though. You're falling for Cuban propaganda.

To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-03 16:58:25+00:00
> Whereas if I upload my ID to a tech company (that potentially answers to both my own government and foreign governments, as well as having its own ad-related agenda) I am a bit less certain about what will happen to this data.

"A bit less certain" is a really mild way of putting it. I'd be confident that whatever ID I upload to the Internet is going to be stored forever, shared with "partner" companies, linked with as much data about me as those partner companies can find, and then eventually leaked in a security breach, resulting in the company issuing a press release telling everyone they "Take Security Very Seriously."
by tech_ken | 2026-02-03 16:59:00+00:00
> I don't get why we aren't building mixed use buildings, maybe the first floor can be retail and restaurants, the next two floors can be data centers, and then above that apartments.

I mean a DC needs a lot of infrastructure and space. I think the real estate economics in places where people want to live, shop, and eat preclude the kinds of land usage common in DC design. Keep in mind that most DCs are actually like 4 or 5 datahalls tethered together with massive fiber optic networks.

Also people prefer to build parking in those levels that you're proposing to put DCs into.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-03 16:59:04+00:00
Yeah, one of the things I miss most from darcs was that being the default experience and also the only step in change creation (`darcs record` versus `git add -p; git commit`; darcs also had a `darcs add` but it was to opt-in source files to status tracking, a reverse of the `.gitignore` opt-out approach).
by tetridev | 2026-02-03 16:59:23+00:00
Location: Cascavel, Paraná, Brazil (UTC-3)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No (open to long-term remote contracts)
Technologies: .NET (C#, ASP.NET Core, .NET 8/9), REST APIs, Clean Architecture, DDD, SOLID, MAUI (Android, iOS, Web), SQL (PostgreSQL), Supabase, Authentication & Authorization, Cloud (GCP basics), CI/CD, Testing (unit & integration), Frontend experience with React, Next.js, Vite, shadcn/ui
Résumé/CV: https://tetri.net/cv (pt-BR), https://www.linkedin.com/in/tetri (en-US), https://github.com/tetri
Email: Please contact me via Reddit DM or LinkedIn for initial conversation.
by milch | 2026-02-03 16:59:24+00:00
The poster I replied to made an over exaggerated statement about the prominence of these two words, which I found hilarious, in the same way a teenager saying "I am LITERALLY DYING right now" after the barista spelled their name wrong on their coffee order would be hilarious. This was a very slight inconvenience to the poster's day (at best) that they could have dropped after deciding they don't care about events happening in a country they don't live in.
by Intralexical | 2026-02-03 16:59:55+00:00
> platform churn alone will usually demand updates, even if your code is otherwise airtight. Forces generally beyond your access will demand that your code is able to conform to platform standards.

Platform churn updates are a failure to limit scope and dependency. If you stick with stable standards like C99/POSIX/X11/SDL, test strictly and build liberally etc., then who cares what the Web/Electron/Qt/Metal people are doing?
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-03 17:00:00+00:00
The Girardoni repeating air rifle predates the ratification of the constitution by ~11 years and was taken on the Lewis and Clark expedition ~13 years later. Really the whole discussion around 2A is usually nonsense because it ignores the context that the entire Bill of Rights had a completely different meaning prior to the 14th amendment leading to incorporation over the last century (and other expansions of federal power via commerce clause); that is, the Bill of Rights originally did not apply to the states.

Very obviously individuals were expected to be part of the militia, which was the military at the time (c.f. the Militia Acts requiring individual gun ownership), but also states could regulate weapons if they wanted.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-03 17:01:10+00:00
I'd argue that "do it right" and "be nice" are incredibly subjective. I'd say they were already nice enough to write open source software. And I don't think it is wrong to to write what you want to write.

The comparison with WhatsApp has a a huge flaw: WhatsApp is not LGPL licensed software. No one can really take systemd away. There is very little risk in depending on it apart from less choice. But I already argued that the expectation of choice in free software is a big ask.

And there is no one stopping anyone from implementing systemd's api surface.

The reason why I say you got it backwards is that you are against systemd making available all their tools when in reality it is the distro maintainers choice to use them and the developers choice to depend on them. Most of systemd is optional and nothing prevents developers from writing abstractions. But the simple truth is that systemd is offering a compelling value that people are just accepting.
by cirrusfan | 2026-02-03 17:01:33+00:00
Anthropic might have the best product for coding but good god the experience is awful. Random limits where you _know_ you shouldn’t hit them yet, the jankiness of their client, the service being down semi-frequently. Feels like the whole infra is built on a house of cards and badly struggles 70% of the time.

I think my $20 openai sub gets me more tokens than claude’s $100. I can’t wait until google or openai overtake them.
by panarky | 2026-02-03 17:02:08+00:00
A small island has 20 residents.

One farmer works full time to grow enough food to feed everyone.

One carpenter works full time to maintain housing for everyone.

The other 18 people work full time reciting incantations to the gods to prevent their destruction.

The farmer and the carpenter are too busy growing food and maintaining housing to recite incantations all day.

So each of the 18 incantation reciters spends an extra two hours every week to recite incantations for the farmer and the carpenter to prevent their destruction too.

Then a magic stone is discovered that can recite the incantations by itself, the gods are appeased, and nobody has to work full time reciting incantations any more.

How can the islanders possibly survive now that 90% of them don't have full-time jobs?

The farmer and the carpenter are no worse off, but they think it's unfair that they must continue working full-time while 90% of the residents don't work at all.

Perhaps the farmer and the carpenter should destroy the magic stone so that everyone will have full-time jobs again.

Or is there some other way the islanders can survive after 90% of the work has been eliminated?
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-03 17:02:53+00:00
i had an original 7" eeepc from 2007, running archlinux-32 from ~2017, with Xfce and all that, and few months ago updated it.. took me almost a day, going through various rabbit-holes, like 1-2 static-built pacmans and python and manually picking and combining various versions. The result was okay but somehow took more space than before (it has 4G ssd, from which i did have 2gb free, now only 1.5). But it maybe that is not old enough as machine..
by lm28469 | 2026-02-03 17:03:07+00:00
> The median "health span gap" is about 10 years

It depends on the definition, if you're even just 20kg overweight you're living a wildly different life than you'd have if you were fit, you're closing so many doors by default and making a bunch of things much harder than they should be, But you're still considered "healthy" here
by harrisi | 2026-02-03 17:03:24+00:00
Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?

I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.

I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.
by theshrike79 | 2026-02-03 17:03:27+00:00
Mode like open local models are becoming "good enough".

I got stuff done with Sonnet 3.7 just fine, it did need a bunch of babysitting, but still it was a net positive to productivity. Now local models are at that level, closing up on the current SOTA.

When "anyone" can run an Opus 4.5 level model at home, we're going to be getting diminishing returns from closed online-only models.
by iainmerrick | 2026-02-03 17:03:29+00:00
I guess what I mean is that standardizing this bit of the problem right now feels sort of like XHTML. Many people thought that was a big deal back in the day, but it turned out to be a pointless digression.

Long term you're right though, agents will fetch this all themselves

It's not "long term", it's right now. If your docs are well-written and well-organised, agents can already use them. The most you might need to do is copy your README.md into CLAUDE.md.
by kibwen | 2026-02-03 17:03:32+00:00
Note that evolution isn't about individuals, it's about genes (which we should further note is more than just DNA, but that's a different discussion). If it weren't valuable for humans to live at all without being fertile, then the average age of menopause and the average age of death would likely be much closer together. As it turns out, the human genes that were best able to pass themselves along were those that kept old people around despite being infertile, presumably to the benefit of helping to raise grandchildren, among other things.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-03 17:03:35+00:00
Cloud gaming requires a rock-solid network connection, both LAN and WAN. Ironically in this case the LAN segment is going to be the problem.

You need either Ethernet or good enterprise-grade AP(s). It's unlikely a mesh system will work (might need tuning), and forget trying to use the ISP's router-AP combo unless you're willing to sit directly within line-of-sight of it.

The hard requirement on Ethernet or good Wi-Fi is likely to exclude a lot of casual gamers, and those who do fit the requirements are likely to be enthusiasts who most likely do have a gaming PC already.
by breakyerself | 2026-02-03 17:03:37+00:00
When I say they're mostly good, but we should fix what's broken and people start hitting me with examples of broken regulation I can only interpret that as an example for why environmental regulation should be opposed by default. So I respond accordingly.

I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.

Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.
by zbentley | 2026-02-03 17:03:43+00:00
Agree to disagree. I think that the nature of a given instance of a programmatic error as something that, once fixed, means it stays fixed is significant.

I also think that if we’re assessing the likelihood of the entire SDLC producing an error (including programmers, choice of language, tests/linters/sanitizers, discipline, deadlines, and so on) and comparing that to the behavior of a running LLM, we’re both making a category error and also zooming out too far to discover useful insights as to how to make things better.

But I think we’re both clear on those positions and it’s OK if we don’t agree. FWIW I do strongly agree that

> Relying on perfect discipline to secure C memory is functionally as dangerous as relying on prompt engineering to secure an LLM.

…just for different reasons that suggest qualitatively different solutions.
by jcattle | 2026-02-03 17:03:47+00:00
> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped

Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species.
Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.

Should the regulation be chopped?
by mothballed | 2026-02-03 17:04:23+00:00
The only weapon class I know of that's outright illegal to own is anti-aircraft missiles. That carries life imprisonment just for possession, with no violent intent. Because the government never wants to give up its air supremacy. This is why whenever you hear of feds concocting an international weapons conspiracy they always have to add anti-air bazookas to the charges because it's the only thing that actually can unequivocally be proven as illegal to own[0].

Basically everything else can be owned with an NFA tax stamp. Nuclear weapons my understanding is the difficulty is more with laws on handling the material than specifically owning one as a weapon, so I'm unsure those are even outright illegal either.

Explosives are actually one of the ones with looser restrictions. Even felons can own and re-instate their explosives rights, because bafflingly when congress de-funded the firearms rights restoration process for felons they forgot to do the one for explosives. Felons can also own and manufacture explosive black powder without scrutiny or paperwork, even ones intended to go in a black powder gun.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68365597
by mattlondon | 2026-02-03 17:04:29+00:00
You need an AI angle if you want investment and up-boats.

Suggest a LLM-based chat that consumes feeds and provides a terrification-score rating letting you know how to calibrate your panic-levels, based on real data. Allow for real-time questions on how to purify water, if it's better to carry gold or ammo etc

Good luck. I'll give you 80 mil based on a 40% stake with voting rights.
by atmanactive | 2026-02-03 17:04:35+00:00
This is great! Thanks for sharing. One usability issue for me is that the context menu entries are shown only in the file explorer, but NOT on the open files pane nor on the file tab right click menu. This kind of forces me to go back to file explorer whenever I want to work with file markers. It would be awesome if the context menu could be included everywhere where a file context menu is shown. Thanks.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-03 17:04:45+00:00
What if a working Neuralink or similar is demonstrated? Does that move the needle on the problem?

Betting against what people are calling "physicalism" has a bad track record historically. It always catches up.

All this talk of "qualia" feels like Greeks making wild theories about the heavens being infinitely distant spheres made of crystals and governed by gods and what not. In the 16th century, Improved Data showed the planets and stars are mere physical bodies in space like you and I. And without that data, if we were ancient greeks we'd equally like you say but its not even "conceptually" possible to say what the heavens are, or if you think they did have a at least somewhat plausible view given that some folks computed distances to sun and moon, then take Atomism as the better analogy. There was no way to prove or disprove Atomism in ancient greek times. To them it very well was an incomprehensible unsolavable problem because they lacked the experimental and mathematical tooling. Just like "consciousness" appears to us today. But the Atomism question got resolved with better data eventually. Likewise, its a bad bet to say just because it feels incontrovertible today, consciousness also won't be resolved some day.

I'd rather not flounder about in endless circular philosophies until we get better data to anchor us to reality. I would again say, you are making a very strange point. "Materialism"/"physicalism" has always won the bet till now. To bet against it has very bad precedent. Everything we know till now shows brains are physical systems that can be excited physically, like anything else. So I ask now, assume "Neuralink" succeeds. What is the next question in this problem after that? Is there any gap remaining still, if so what is the gap?

Edit: I also get a feeling this talk about qualia is like asking "What is a chair?" Some answer about a piece of woodworking for sitting on. "But what is a chair?" Something about the structure of wood and forces and tensions. "But what is a chair?" Something about molecules. "But what is a chair?" Something about waves and particles. It sounds like just faffing about with "what is" and trying to without proof pre-assert after "what ifing" away all physical definitions somehow some aetherial aphysical thing "must" exist. Well I ask, if its aphysical, then what is the point even. Its aphyical then it doesn't interact with the physical world and is completely ignored.
by yorwba | 2026-02-03 17:04:50+00:00
SWE-Bench Pro consists of 1865 tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16941 Qwen3-Coder-Next solved 44.3% (826 or 827) of these tasks. To solve a single task, it took between ≈50 and ≈280 agent turns, ≈150 on average. In other words, a single pass through the dataset took ≈280000 agent turns. Kimi-K2.5 solved ≈84 fewer tasks, but also only took about a third as many agent turns.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-03 17:04:59+00:00
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true.

I don't have to "check back in a few months." Look at what he's accomplished in only one year: https://www.project2025.observer/en . Far more than he was able to do in his four previous years in office.

Trump is basically doing all the things that he wanted to do in his first term, but that were slow-walked, stonewalled, and sandbagged by the so-called "adults in the room." There are now very few if any of those adults left, and that includes judges who are willing and able to put a leash on him.

If you're not deranged, you're not paying attention.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-03 17:05:11+00:00
It’s privacy concern theatre without comprehending how good modern facial recognition is from one photo even when running locally on a modern smart phone. The TSA already knows you are on the airplane regardless.

Just like covering up a camera from a bad actor on a laptop does little good compared to the information that can be gleaned by a microphone - the same with a phone.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-03 17:05:24+00:00
Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if you know you need the latest versions.

I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.
Show HN: AI that calls businesses so you don't have to
by marcuslima | 2026-02-03 17:06:05+00:00
I absolutely hate being forced to make a phone call. It’s a 1970s solution for 2026. When something goes wrong with a subscription, delivery, or account, the only remaining option is often a phone call where you have to navigating phone trees, wait on hold, and then you have to call again when inevitably the solve didn’t work or was ignored and inexplicably they do not have the context from your last call.

My friend and I hacked together Pamela over the new year to make those customer service calls on your behalf and report back with a summary of what happened (https://www.thisispamela.com/).

You prompt it with who to call and what you want to accomplish, provide any relevant context, and it places the call. You can monitor progress via live transcripts or listen in. The agent can navigate phone trees (“press 1 for…”) or speak directly to a human when needed.

I now use this for everything from calling up my local super popular bakery to reserve a croissant before they run out, to calling the New York Times to request a refund when they moved me from the promo rate to their regular rate (it worked!).

This is early and imperfect. Some calls fail, and some situations still require the account holder to intervene. But it already works often enough to be genuinely useful.

(There’s also an API underneath this for anyone who wants to experiment programmatically: https://docs.thisispamela.com/)