MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Falsifiable Topological Signatures of "Faithful Reasoning" in LLMs
by Keeper123 | 2026-02-01 14:44:35+00:00
We've pre-registered a testable protocol for detecting geometrically consistent reasoning in LLMs. Predicts increased Betti numbers, KS entropy, and fragility under ablation during meta-cognitive states. Open for replication.

OSF Protocol: https://osf.io/2r6v8
Preprint & case studies: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo/18346699

This isn't philosophy — it's a falsifiable math hypothesis. If you have GPU access and TDA/DL expertise, you can verify it in a weekend.
by alexhans | 2026-02-01 14:44:46+00:00
Among other things, this got me dabbling with software development. It had an awesome C++ like scripting language.

It also used to have a button with a text like "make a game" where you would click what you wanted in the form of checkboxes and when you pressed the submit button it would tell you something like, it's not that easy, is it? Wonder how easier it may be now. :P

Shoutout to classic community games like

- Cirque De Zale https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/377/

- The trilby series (5 days a stranger) https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/269-5-days-a...
by dabedee | 2026-02-01 14:44:47+00:00
From the article: "I added –dry-run on a whim early on in the project. I was surprised at how useful I found it to be."

Not to be overly critical (I think it's great OP found value in adding and using --dry-run), but I am willing to bet that this was a suggestion/addition from a coding agent (and most likely Claude code/Opus). Having used it myself to build various CLI tools in different languages, it almost always creates that option when iterating on CLIs. To the point where it's almost a tell. I wonder if we're entering a moment of convergence where all the tools will have similar patterns/options because they are similarly written by agents.
Show HN: Credibly – Automate testimonial collection and analysis using OCR/AI
by Shiv_Thomet | 2026-02-01 14:45:24+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the founder of Credibly.

I built this because I noticed a recurring problem for SaaS founders: we have customer praise scattered across Twitter, Slack, and emails, but manually organizing it for a landing page is a chore that always gets deprioritized.

I wanted a way to just 'dump' data into a system and have it become useful. Some technical hurdles I tackled:

-> Using OCR to reliably pull text from messy customer screenshots.

-> Running sentiment and 'objection-handling' analysis to score which testimonials actually help with conversions.

-> Building a lightweight widget that doesn't tank the page's Lighthouse score.

It’s currently in a state where you can collect via email campaigns or Google Reviews automatically. I’d love to get your feedback on the 'Testimonial Intelligence' scoring—does it actually help you pick the right social proof, or is it overkill?

Check it out: https://getcredibly.org/

I'll be around to answer any questions about the stack or the logic!
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-01 14:45:37+00:00
What role does access to health care have I wonder. Canada and Australia (well, ALL other developed nations) have universal healthcare. I know that in the states past 65 they do, but not getting proper health care before then surely puts people at risk of dying earlier. Also, what is the venn diagram of people who are obese and don't have affordable access to healthcare - double whammy.
by Keeper123 | 2026-02-01 14:45:52+00:00
We've registered a testable protocol for detecting geometrically consistent reasoning in LLMs. Predicts increased Betti numbers, KS entropy peaks and fragility under ablation during meta-cognitive states. Open for replication.

OSF Protocol: https://osf.io/2r6v8
Preprint & case studies: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo/18346699

This isn't philosophy — it's a falsifiable math hypothesis. If you have GPU access and TDA/DL expertise, you can verify it in a weekend.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-01 14:47:06+00:00
> I get Xcode has quirks I use it everyday believe me I know but it's not that bad that it's unusable.

It's not unusable, but it's not that great either. When I have a project that requires Xcode I certainly don't look forward to it the way I do such as wehn I have a project that doesn't need any specific IDE.

As a sidenote; I recently (1 year ago, maybe?) did a C project in Eclipse, and was blown away but just how snappy, quick and, utlimately, enjoyable it was compared to VS Code.
by merelysounds | 2026-02-01 14:47:28+00:00
Yes, that’s exactly how it works.

Each number specifies the size of the corresponding group. E.g. numbers “5 4 7” would mean: “three groups of filled cells, first group will consist of 5 cells, second will consist of 4 cells, third group will consist of 7 cells”.

Have fun and I’m happy to hear that this is useful!
by SPBS | 2026-02-01 14:48:36+00:00
> Early in the development process, when testing the incomplete application, I remembered that Subversion (the version control system after CVS, before Git) had a –dry-run option.

> I remembered how helpful that was, so I decided to add it to my command as well.

He mentions the reason he added it, and it's a compelling enough story to be true.
Show HN: A private FIRE calculator suite that runs in the browser
by Mikulas_Tomanka | 2026-02-01 14:48:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Firenum because most FIRE calculators I found were either too simplistic or required uploading my entire financial life to a third-party server.

I wanted a comprehensive suite that could model more than just the 4% rule. This tool handles Coast, Lean, Fat, and Barista FIRE, but more importantly, it lets you model 'what-if' scenarios like market crashes or major life events to see how they impact your timeline.

Key features:

-> Privacy-First: No signup required. All calculations and data persistence happen in your local storage. Nothing is sent to a backend.

-> Scenario Modeling: You can simulate market downturns to see the resilience of your plan.

-> Multi-Currency: Supports 8 major currencies.

-> Progress Tracking: A dashboard to visualize the 'boring middle' of the journey.

The goal was to make something as powerful as a complex spreadsheet but with a much better UX. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the projection logic and if there are any specific variables (like tax drag or inflation adjustments) you think are missing.

URL: https://firenum.com/

I’m happy to answer any questions about the math or the local-first implementation!
by rbanffy | 2026-02-01 14:48:48+00:00
If the photos on the phone are visible as files on a mounted filesystem, you can use rsync to copy them. If the connection drops but recovers by itself, you can put rsync inside a while true loop until it’s doing nothing.

I’m using Dropbox for syncing photos from phone to Linux laptop, and mounting the SDcard locally for cameras, so this is a guess.
by sumitkumar | 2026-02-01 14:49:04+00:00
Microservices is bad for teams without discipline to implement "separation of concerns". They hope that physical network boundaries will force the discipline they couldn't maintain in a single codebase.

While microservices force physical separation, they don't stop "Spaghetti Architecture." Instead of messy code, you end up with "Distributed Spaghetti," where the dependencies are hidden in network calls and shared databases.

Microservices require more discipline in areas like:

Observability: Tracking a single request across 10 services.
Consistency: Dealing with distributed transactions and eventual consistency.
DevOps: Managing N deployment pipelines instead of one.

For most teams Modular monolith is often the better "first step." It enforces strict boundaries within a single deployment unit using language-level visibility (like private packages or modules). It gives you the "Separation of Concerns" without the "Distributed Spaghetti" network tax.
by metaltyphoon | 2026-02-01 14:49:08+00:00
> I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS

No it wasn’t. There were so many foot guns for windows and in fact to this day you cant use CGO with MSVC (insane to me).

I can’t even say with a straight face today that Windows is the best supported OS for C#, because it’s not true
by whoiskevin | 2026-02-01 14:49:45+00:00
Not a "proceed" command but they can influence the accelerator. I had a dodge ram van that would constantly decelerate on cruise control due to reading road signs. The signs in some states like California for trucks towing trailers are 55 mph but the speed limit would be 65 or 70 mph. The cruise control would detect the sign and suddenly decelerate to 55.
by Hackbraten | 2026-02-01 14:50:53+00:00
I see. I still wonder if the criticism is warranted in the particular context of Ansible playbooks.

First of all, who except Ansible (and ansible-lint) would even want to consume Ansible's YAML?

Regarding anchors: those are not idiomatic in Ansible at all, thanks to Ansible offering first-class support for object reuse on application level (e.g. variables and facts).

I wonder if TFA's pounding on YAML might be undeserved in this particular context.
by erelong | 2026-02-01 14:51:36+00:00
Interesting OP, I didn't think of this but I was thinking along similar lines of them splitting the Moltbook into a philosophical forum and a practically oriented forum, as it seems a bunch of posts were going in one of those directions broadly

I know they have submolts but letting the bots talk about anything, unfocused, besides an interesting experiment, otherwise seems unproductive

So I was thinking people could have different projects where agents could sign up to participate (here the project is science; elsewhere it could be dedicated to solving some specific problem that's broader than something you'd ask a single agent)
by KtzchenWeb3 | 2026-02-01 14:51:47+00:00
I’m working on an Ethereum-based project (bots + backend services) and ran into an issue earlier than expected.

The smart contracts themselves weren’t the problem. Latency, rate limits, and RPC reliability became the limiting factor once usage increased.

Running a full node seemed like the “correct” approach, but in practice:
- initial sync time was significant
- ongoing maintenance added operational overhead
- keeping low-latency access under load was harder than anticipated

It made me realize that for many Ethereum apps, infrastructure becomes the constraint before code complexity does.

I’m curious how others here approach this at scale:
- self-hosted nodes vs managed access
- caching or indexing strategies
- architectural patterns that reduce RPC dependency

Interested in real-world trade-offs and lessons learned.
by mojosam | 2026-02-01 14:51:57+00:00
This is classic Quanta Magazine sensationalism. Here's what the study actually said:

As cells in epithelial tissue get crowded, their membranes start to allow more sodium ions to enter, which makes the cell more electrically positive (depolarization). The cells try to counter this, but cells with insufficient stored energy (ATP) will struggle to do so, and will lose water through their membranes, causing them to shrink, which causes them to signal their neighbors to extrude them.

So there's no "group decisions" being made, no "coordination" between cells using "bioelectricity". Yes, all cells rely on electrical potentials across their membranes for normal functioning, potentials that they have to maintain. That's all the involvement of electricity here.

And the only "decision-making" happening here is within a single cell, but of course cells don't "make decisions', cells are little machines, and part of the mechanism for epithelial cells -- a mechanism that works in part using chemistry and electricity -- includes the cell signaling that it needs to be extruded in certain circumstances, like shrinkage.
by wiz21c | 2026-02-01 14:52:54+00:00
with AI we have entered capitalistic computing, where it's the scale of computing that makes it political (before, it was a clever idea that brought the political thing, like MP3, encryption, etc.). As it is massive scale (think 2GWatt data centers), I'm afraid the poor little FOSS guy won't be able to be as relevant as before. It's not David against Goliath anymore, it's FOSS against billions of zombies.

I happen to be one of these FOSS guys though and as you do, I think it's better to stay off to keep my mental health; else it makes me feel powerless. How sad: 20 years ago I thought the fight was possible.
by InfamousRece | 2026-02-01 14:53:21+00:00
In my career I never received any recognition for well designed and executed projects. Even the ones that were high impact and widely praised by customers. I had much more luck with shitty/buggy stuff that should not have been released. Yes, I’m not perfect and suffer from brain farts sometimes. In such cases I could play a hero that worked whole nights/weekends to put down fires. And I got rewarded for that.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-01 14:53:32+00:00
Me too, this was good to have in the freezer.

The Minute-Maid process was invented for World War II and it allowed deploying decent citrus with smaller refrigerators if their temperature was cold enough and there was potable water.

By the 1960's' I would guess the original manufacturing facility was about 20 years old, Orlando was kind of a backwater place back then. It was basically the only city in the Florida peninsula without a beach, which normally serves as a natural attraction. Still is to an extent. All the other places were rural small towns.

The Turnpike was well-established by then and it went right by the huge Minute-Maid plant.

God did that place smell for miles.

To get an idea maybe you could throw about a pound of rotten orange peels onto hot barbecue coals, add some used cigarette filters, and stand downwind :(

That still doesn't do it justice :)

Way before they built Disney World I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people staying in hotels every night who were too tired to keep driving, than there were people actually visiting little old Orlando. It was hours further of nothing but oranges and everglades before you get to Fort Pierce, which is still a small-time resort, and a couple hours more to most of South Florida.

Anyway, even though we were saturated with fresh orange juice availability, from the supermarket people loved the concentrate because it was about half the price. Mainly getting the ready-to-drink stuff when it was on sale.

One time I was in North Carolina, the mountains too, went shopping in a small town and the same brands they had in Florida, were cheaper in North Carolina.

This I did not expect.

Discontinuing the concentrate, neither.

Maybe the Navy hasn't been buying as much as they should have been?

Wonder if the pina-colada mix or margaritas are at risk :)
by bossyTeacher | 2026-02-01 14:53:47+00:00
> Can someone explain what the real difference is to a consumer user between an iPhone and a Pixel or a Samsung device? Across all services, push notifications, and device backups.

By default, Apple offers you at no charge: email aliases, private relay, Ask No Track barrier. These are just the ones I can think of right now. I am sure there are more. A big thing with Apple is not that they offer different privacy services but they make it EASY and SEAMLESS to use. No other company comes close.
by terryops | 2026-02-01 14:54:10+00:00
OpenClaw has been blowing up lately, and for good reason. I've been running it for just a few days—here's what it actually looks like in production for a small team.

I run SubEasy.ai, a transcription/translation/voiceover platform. Good reviews, users worldwide, but perpetually understaffed. I'm not the type who enjoys managing people, so I've always been looking for ways to get more done without hiring more.

I set up OpenClaw on a cloud server with a Telegram bot, running Claude Opus. What happened next genuinely surprised me.

## Day 1: It Built Its Own Workflow

I started simple—asked it to send me a daily briefing with news and stock prices. It came back as a wall of plain text, unreadable in Telegram.

So I asked for HTML. But then it gave me local file paths I couldn't access.

I suggested: "Can you set up a repo, connect it to auto-deployment, and just send me links?"

It did. Created the GitHub repo, configured Vercel, and now every report is a clean webpage I can actually read. The whole pipeline was essentially self-built.

## Day 2: It Fixed a Production Emergency

While setting up Gmail API integration, our YouTube downloader's core component (yt-dlp) broke. Alerts everywhere.

I asked it to check for fixes. It found a patch that hadn't been released as a binary yet.

"Just compile it then."

It pulled the source, compiled it, and we deployed. Problem solved in maybe 20 minutes.

That's when I realized: this thing can actually do real work.

## What It Does Now

We gave it read access to our user database, payment system (Stripe), and email. Now it handles a lot of the daily grind:

*Customer complaints*: When a user emails us, it automatically pulls their payment history, subscription status, and usage data, drafts a response, and sends it to us for one-click approval.

*Influencer outreach*: Finding YouTube/TikTok creators to partner with used to be a manual slog—searching, evaluating content fit, checking follower counts. Lots of judgment calls that kept getting deprioritized. Now it does the initial screening automatically, dumps qualified candidates into a Notion database, and we just make final decisions.

*Review monitoring*: It checks for negative reviews daily, cross-references user data to understand what went wrong, drafts response emails. We just review and send.

## The Actual Insight

The interesting part isn't that AI can do individual tasks—we knew that. It's that AI can now handle the glue work between tasks.

Most of our jobs are really just moving between tools: check email, look up user in database, cross-reference with payment system, write response. The automation tools we had before could handle single steps, but the stitching was always manual.

Now the stitching is automated too. The more systems you connect, the more powerful it gets.

## Team Use

Our small team shares a Discord server with it. Everyone can talk to it individually or in group channels. Knowledge it learns from one person benefits everyone. It's like a shared team member that keeps growing.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-01 14:54:13+00:00
Their BDFL thinks BC breaks are great “we’ll be in a better place” I remember him saying, and has blessed breaking pf multiple times by changing the rule syntax, whereas prior versions of this book are suddenly obsolete along with countless tutorials, forum posts, etc.

This is one thing M$ gets right, in business environments you don’t do that. I wouldn’t use pf for anything outside a home lab.
by tuetuopay | 2026-02-01 14:54:17+00:00
Ask an LLM to write such an article and you'll have exactly this.

- random bold emphasis that would make disney and marvell comics blush

- overuse of "one paragraph then bullet points"

- a lot of the bullet lists has a small bold prefix then one line for no good reason

- every section has a "why it matters"

- and then each section with an useless comparison table that are direct screenshots of ChatGPT/Gemini

I would not mind if the author indeed used his alleged insights in the domain, but as other have noted, numbers are way off, and are what CSPs want you to believe to sell more instances in Kubernetes. This does not inspires "I proofread the LLM output".

It's a shame because the article has some good advices, but also a lot of misled ideas that would make Grug scratch their head. No, you don't need Redis to have stateless applications. Having a load-balancing tier is as useful for resiliency than it is for scaling. Autoscaling is a trap. If you can afford it, start with the app and DB separated. Let your application perform connection pooling itself from day one, your framework knows more than PgBouncer how connections can be safely reused.

Overall, at a high level, the article is good and is a good outline on the order in which to optimize (sharding is dead last), but the details don't meet expectations.
by ItsBob | 2026-02-01 14:55:05+00:00
I can tell you with almost 100% certainty: no banks in the UK use any 2FA other than SMS-based.

I spent December last year looking for a new bank to move to. One of my criteria (not the most important but it was on the list) was better-than-SMS 2FA.

No one offers it. There may be some niche, loosely-based finance org that does but none of the banks or Building Societies do.

So, unfortunately, you need it in the UK.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-01 14:55:41+00:00
It has been on Swift and Apple's official documentation since the early days.

People keep forgetting that Objective-C also had a full stack role on NeXTSTEP.

And the same full stack approach was also a thing on Xerox PARC systems, which mostly failed due to mismanagement.

Usually ends well for closed source platform vendors when developers aren't allowed to come up with alternatives like on FOSS operating systems.

At least, as long as the platform stays market relevant.
by mjd | 2026-02-01 14:55:48+00:00
I'm puzzled by this. Why hasn't there been, over the last fifty years, a huge amount of research into EM staining techniques and which materials were best under which circumstances? Edison supposedly tried 3000 different materials for light bulb filaments before settling on charred cotton thread. Why hasn't something similar been done in this area?

Or perhaps it _has_ been done and that's why nearly everyone uses uranyl acetate? And perhaps coffee was tried decades ago and found to be generally inferior?
by NateEag | 2026-02-01 14:56:57+00:00
> You get to start by dumping your raw unfiltered emotions into the text box and have the AI clean it up for you.

Anyone semi-literate can write down what they're feeling.

It's sometimes called "journaling".

Thinking through what they've written, why they've written it, and whether they should do anything about it is often called "processing emotions."

The AI can't do that for you. The only way it could would be by taking over your brain, but then you wouldn't be you any more.

I think using the AI to skip these activities would be very bad for the people doing it.

It took me decades to realize there was value in doing it, and my life changed drastically for the better once I did.
by spauldo | 2026-02-01 14:57:07+00:00
I haven't used Linux as a gateway in years, so I can only compare pf to iptables. The two biggest differences are the way the rules are applied and the logging.

pf rules work a little backwards compared to iptables. A packet traverses the entire ruleset and the last rule to match wins. You can short-circuit this with a "quick" directive. It takes a bit of getting used to coming from iptables.

The logging on pf doesn't integrate with syslog automatically like iptables does. You're expected to set up a logging system for your particular use case. There are several ways to do it, and for production you'd be doing it regardless, but for honelab setups it's an extra thing you need to worry about.

I prefer pf, but I don't recommend it to people new to firewalls.
by twodave | 2026-02-01 14:57:27+00:00
I have 2 Windows 11 laptops for different jobs. One (part time job) has a small help desk team to support it (though overwhelmingly the issues there tend to relate to their choice of VPN, not the OS). The other is a company with maybe a headcount of 20-30? So no dedicated IT.

That said, I bring up my point just to agree with you. I think there are plenty of cases where people had bad experiences with both Windows and Linux (and MacOS too, of course). Sometimes it’s hardware. Sometimes it’s the use cases. Sometimes it’s personal preference. Whatever it is, the anecdotes don’t make either of them the better choice.