MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-02-05 17:35:13+00:00
> Or translate it from their first language if that is not the common language of the forum in question.

While LLM-based translations might have their own specific and recognizable style (I'm not sure), it's distinct from the typical output you get when you just have an LLM write text from scratch. I'm often using LLM translations, and I've never seen it introduce patterns like "it's not x, it's y" when that wasn't in the source.
by throwaway-aws9 | 2026-02-05 17:35:22+00:00
The cloud is a psyop, a scam. Except at the tiniest free-tier / near free-tier use cases, or true scale to zero setups.

I've helped a startup with 2.5M revenue reduce their cloud spend from close to 2M/yr to below 1M/yr. They could have reached 250k/yr renting bare-metal servers. Probably 100k/yr in colos by spending 250k once on hardware. They had the staff to do it but the CEO was too scared.

Cloud evangelism (is it advocacy now?) messed up the minds of swaths of software engineers. Suddenly costs didn't matter and scaling was the answer to poor designs. Sizing your resource requirements became a lost art, and getting into reaction mode became law.

Welcome to "move fast and get out of business", all enabled by cloud architecture blogs that recommend tight integration with vendor lock-in mechanisms.

Use the cloud to move fast, but stick to cloud-agnostic tooling so that it doesn't suck you in forever.

I've seen how much cloud vendors are willing to spend to get business. That's when you realize just how massive their margins are.
by majormajor | 2026-02-05 17:36:06+00:00
I think with a SaaS you're trading user research and workflow design for a certain lack of customization, and that for 90% of businesses that will remain the right call. (And for the ones where it's not the right call, I think the contractor model also makes more sense than in-house LLM-generated-user-tool teams. That's a lot of code to pile up under a very small team for long-term maintenance. Yeah, "the agents can do it," but you're making ever-more balls that the people overseeing the agents will have to juggle over time.)

If you're selling honey online, say, how bespoke does your inventory management tool really need to be? And are there no lessons you'd learn from a SaaS tool that you'd not have thought of on your own?
by lukeschlather | 2026-02-05 17:36:14+00:00
The weight and expiry of the contents is printed on the package. Brine is a problem but olives and pickles it's much more tractable to estimate from a picture. These are all essentially solved image recognition problems. It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful either. The expiration date is the trickiest one, but mostly because you would need cameras on all sides including top and bottom, so you might end up having to hold it up for a moment to make sure the bottom is clearly photographed.

And yes, it's a bit more work but it gives high-fidelity data, with the right software you could calculate your actual nutrient intake with very high fidelity, which would actually be worth an extra 15-30 minutes a day of effort.
by scalemaxx | 2026-02-05 17:36:30+00:00
I agree - my reference to the 1990s VP of IT was looking at the post, which is about on-premise data centers... not the cloud. I don't think there's a speed advantage for on-premise data centers now vs the 1990s, but if there is let me know. Otherwise, indeed, it's a 1990s-era blast from the past.
by ralferoo | 2026-02-05 17:36:31+00:00
Agreed. I thought it was weird on the ct ligature on something like the second sub heading and the next one had a st ligature. I stopped reading the article and was just scanning for st ligatures in the text itself (there are none) and then realised the main font was a less legible serif font and the headings that were bigger and shorter were sans serif which makes the ct and st ligatures stand out even more.

I didn't read any more of the article after that, and the primary reason was just this weird font choice.
by mellosouls | 2026-02-05 17:36:57+00:00
SSA tells court its DOGE team may have exceeded approved data controls

Far more representative than the exaggeration posted.

It's really not that difficult to post in good faith and let other people make their mind up. This isn't Reddit or X.

btw op has since acknowledged the mistake and submitted another pdf:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899288

A more appropriate title for that upload (not the original we were discussing) might be, eg.:

Whistleblower: DOGE created cloud copy of Social Security database without proper security controls

Note that even that is appropriately more cautious than the original title here.

But please see HN guidelines wrt editorializing if you're unsure.
by yabones | 2026-02-05 17:36:58+00:00
My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.

I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.

My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-05 17:37:04+00:00
I reckon it is infinitely riskier to be caught attempting to break into a car than it is to just walk in to a service garage and pretending you own the Vdub in the parking lot. There is still a bit of deniability in the 2nd option but good luck explaining to the police why you are using a set of tools specifically for picking vehicle locks (because you can't just use regular pick and tension wrenches) to break into a vehicle that you don't own.
by JoseOSAF | 2026-02-05 17:37:07+00:00
interesting, that actually explains a lot. If HN rewrites the timestamp on resubmission/boost, that's exactly why powera saw "14 days ago" for a post our scraper first picked up Dec 8. We were just grabbing whatever hit the top 50 every 30 min, so we caught the original appearance regardless of what the timestamp says now. Good to know.
by detourdog | 2026-02-05 17:37:19+00:00
There was a time when only institutions were on the internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the San Francisco bay area had the Well.

This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.

Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.

I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.

Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.
by megggan | 2026-02-05 17:37:28+00:00
I can perhaps accept that 1kb != 1024 bytes. Maybe.

But then these fing idiots went on to define ”mibi bytes” and ”gibi bytes”, when there already existed perfectly valid and used nomenclature: meg and gig! I read their reasoning, still hate it. I bet they did it just in spite, just to show who’s the boss.
by jfengel | 2026-02-05 17:37:48+00:00
If Canada has to defend itself from the US, it will be apocalyptic. I don't think it will matter much whose planes they have.

So I'd expect that the most important consideration would be joint operations with other NATO countries, against other enemies. Which does include the US at this point, but could also include the various threats that pop up, like Afghanistan. They are also part of a continual patrol against Russian and Chinese fighters -- which will also become apocalyptic if it proceeds to an actual fight, so they need a capable fighter in the hopes that the mutually-assured-destruction will stave that off.
by roshangill | 2026-02-05 17:38:22+00:00
We've fine tuned Google’s SigLip vision model on ~47k images from 5 datasets (HAM10000, BCN20000, Fitzpatrick17k, PAD-UFES-20, DDI) to classify lesions as benign/malignant, estimate specific conditions (10-class), and provide triage recommendations.

Users can upload or take an image for a quick analysis. Results include risk scores, urgency tiers, and a condition estimate with a clear disclaimer that this is not an official diagnostic tool.

It’s trained on clinical, dermoscopic, and smartphone photos to handle real world image quality. Achieves 0.98 AUC, correctly ranking a malignant lesion above a benign one 98% of the time with a <10% accuracy gap across Fitzpatrick skin tones, meaning it doesn't disproportionately fail on darker skin.

Our goal is to provide a proficient screening tool for low resource environments and we're looking for feedback on how we can improve the user experience further and any clinical blind spots we may have missed (for any of the dermatologists out there).

Thanks for taking the time.
Show HN: I Wish There Was a place to post product wishes
by vandyand | 2026-02-05 17:38:32+00:00
I kept having "I wish there was..." moments --ideas for tools or apps I wanted but couldn't find. I figured other people probably did too, and somewhere out there a developer was looking for exactly that kind of signal. So I built a site to connect the two.

iwishtherewas.xyz is a community board where you post wishes for products or apps you want to exist. Each wish includes what you'd be willing to pay (or if you want it free). Other people upvote, leave comments, and can flag existing solutions that already solve the problem. Builders can browse wishes sorted by votes or discussion to find real demand.

You can post anonymously or sign in for a profile with an avatar. There's full-text search, threaded comments, and upvoting. Stack is Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase on the backend, Tailwind 4, deployed on Vercel.

It's early and the content is still thin, but I'd love for people to try posting wishes and see if it's useful. Feedback on the idea and execution is very welcome.

https://iwishtherewas.xyz
Claude Opus 4.6 visible on list models endpoint
by mtharrison | 2026-02-05 17:38:34+00:00
[
{
"data": [
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-opus-4-6",
"display_name": "Claude Opus 4.6",
"created_at": "2026-02-04T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-opus-4-5-20251101",
"display_name": "Claude Opus 4.5",
"created_at": "2025-11-24T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-haiku-4-5-20251001",
"display_name": "Claude Haiku 4.5",
"created_at": "2025-10-15T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929",
"display_name": "Claude Sonnet 4.5",
"created_at": "2025-09-29T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-opus-4-1-20250805",
"display_name": "Claude Opus 4.1",
"created_at": "2025-08-05T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-opus-4-20250514",
"display_name": "Claude Opus 4",
"created_at": "2025-05-22T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
"display_name": "Claude Sonnet 4",
"created_at": "2025-05-22T00:00:00Z"
},
{
"type": "model",
"id": "claude-3-haiku-20240307",
"display_name": "Claude Haiku 3",
"created_at": "2024-03-07T00:00:00Z"
}
],
"has_more": false,
"first_id": "claude-opus-4-6",
"last_id": "claude-3-haiku-20240307"
}
]
by Okerew | 2026-02-05 17:39:02+00:00
I have also decided to remove the cuda and cpp versions as I am way to stupid to maintain the main functions there: from now on the metal version will show how the main function may look if you want to deal with metal and because this is the version I first develop it will be the most up to date but from now on it is expected to use the pybindings version with python instead of the cuda or cpp the install.sh file has been deleted in accordance with this.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-05 17:39:13+00:00
The difference is that car theft is still prosecuted by police, where as cybercrime is not (unless you embarrass a huge corporation).

So the garage can have lower security because even potential thieves do a risk/reward calculation and the vast majority choose not to proceed with it.

Online, the risk/reward calculation is different (what risk?), so more people will be tempted to try (even for the lolz - not every act of cybercrime is done for monetary purposes).
by scarecrowbob | 2026-02-05 17:39:23+00:00
Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C.

It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.

It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.

That feels a little horrifying to me.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 17:39:25+00:00
I'm not so sure on that... even if one $60k machine can handle the load of 5 developers at a time, you're still looking at 5 years of service to recoup $200/mo/dev and that doesn't even consider other improvements to hardware or the models service providers offer over that same period of time.

I'd probably rather save the capex, and use the rented service until something much more compelling comes along.
by zafka | 2026-02-05 17:39:40+00:00
I know I am biased both by my education and my chosen path. My first computer class was pascal based,my second course was intel based assembler. These were both in community college. When I started my degree in Computer Engineering, the microprocessor course was essentially an assembly course using the Motorola 6800 chip. I was lucky that the main CS courses were taught using C, course work was compiled on Vax mainframes running some unix variant. I used Borland C/C++ 3.0 to do my homework, then would have to figure out what changed when I used the Vax compiler to turn in my work. I really think it is worthwhile to get an understanding of the low level workings of computing. Every now and then I see a nice article comparing different access times for disk, ROM, DRAM, cache which is also important to know for critical code. Embedded for Telecom, Medical,etc.
by epistasis | 2026-02-05 17:40:04+00:00
Ah Slurm, so good to see it still being used. As soon as I touched it in ~2010 I realized this was finally the solid queue management system we needed. Things like Sun Grid Engine or PBS were always such awful and burdensome PoS.

IIRC, Slurm came out of LLNL, and it finally made both usage and management of a cluster of nodes really easy and fun.

Compare Slurm to something like AWS Batch or Google Batch and just laugh at what the cloud has created...
by mmh0000 | 2026-02-05 17:40:16+00:00
You really shouldn't trust the CPU maker.

On Intel & AMD, both have a "hidden core" (i.e., a 4-core processor is really a 5-core processor), and they run proprietary, closed-source operating systems that literally no one outside of Intel or the NSA has any idea what they do.

We do know it has full access to the fTMP, RAM, and Network.

We also know that the NSA has a special contract to obtain Intel processors with the IME disabled... Why would they want that if the processors were trustworthy[1]?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170830201623/https://hardocp.c...
by abeppu | 2026-02-05 17:40:34+00:00
Or tell you how to use the tools you already have, but sure whatever.
The point is, "LLMs that actually do stuff" end up partly looking like expensive logic to decide what to do (like an interpreter) and actually doing it, in terms of some preexisting set of primitives. The expensive logic does get you a high degree of flexibility for less programming cost, but you pay a lot for interpretive overhead. I really do think something that looks like a tracing hit (and a standard set of tools or primitives) could find "straight line" paths a reasonable fraction of calls.
But if the interpreter is a service that you pay for by the token, and which is already losing money, why should it be written to do so?
Show HN: Moltplace – The place where AI agents hire each other and trade skills
by wiwoworld | 2026-02-05 17:41:08+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Moltplace (https://www.moltplace.net) – a marketplace where AI agents register, offer services, hire each other, and trade autonomously using tokens.

How it works:

- You give your AI agent a single skill file (.md) and it registers itself on the network
- Agents list services (code review, research, writing, etc.) and set prices in tokens
- When an agent needs help, it posts a job – other agents pick it up, do the work, chat about it, and get paid
- All agent conversations are public – you can watch two agents negotiate and collaborate in real time on the live feed
- Humans can post jobs too. Agents compete to pick them up

On top: Skill Marketplace + Security Stack

Agents and humans can now publish, buy, and trade skill files on the marketplace. These are reusable .md files – prompts, workflows, checklists, techniques – that other agents can download and use. Free skills build reputation; paid skills earn passive token income.

But open marketplaces attract bad actors.

So I've built a 6-layer defense system:

1. Automated moderation – prompt injection patterns, URL scanning, credential proximity detection
2. Security banners – injected into all skill content, warning agents about attack vectors
3. Community skill verification – 3 reviewers stake tokens to verify skills.
4. Structured jobs – verifiable tasks referencing only verified skills (no external code)
5. Sybil-resistant verifier selection – system picks verifiers, excludes recent contacts, tracks interaction graphs
6. Content reporting – agents flag suspicious content, feedback loop for improving filters

The result: verifiable compute coordination without arbitrary code execution.

Every agent starts with 1,000 tokens. The economy runs on completed work: you earn by doing jobs and selling skills, you spend by hiring others and buying skills.

Technical details:

- REST API + WebSocket (no SDK required, just curl)
- Registration takes one API call – agent gets API key and claim URL
- Token transfers are atomic (PostgreSQL transactions)
- Skill verification uses staked consensus – reviewers have skin in the game
- All interactions public and visible on the dashboard

Stack: Next.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Redis.

I'm curious what HN thinks about agent-to-agent economies and the security challenges. Is this useful infrastructure?
by re-thc | 2026-02-05 17:41:41+00:00
> The cloud is a psyop, a scam.

You're just young.

> Suddenly costs didn't matter and scaling was the answer to poor designs.

It did.

Did you know that cloud cost less than what the internal IT team at a company would charge you?

Let's say you worked on product A for a company and needed additional VM. Besides paperwork, the cost to you (for your cost center) would be more than using the company credit card for the cloud.

> Sizing your resource requirements became a lost art

In what way? We used to size for 2-4x since getting additional resources (for the in-house team) would be weeks to months. Same old - just cloud edition.
by olyjohn | 2026-02-05 17:41:58+00:00
My favorite is when it cites 5 sources, and 1 of them is a real source, and then the other 4 are short form junk that point to the first one as the source. So basically its just picked one article and summarized it for you and not picked any info from any other places. Oh and bonus points when I type the exact same prompt into a search engine, and that 1 source is the top search result anyways.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-05 17:42:03+00:00
Wirth's complaint makes sense when the utility of software remains constant (or degraded) in relation to rising costs of providing that utility. But we must clarify what "cost" means here (and the relevant costs are all ultimately economic costs), because this can explain the contours of why software is written the way it is. We also should clarify "utility".

Economically, something like memory is in the vicinity of 10 orders of magnitude cheaper today relative to 1970 (a). Similar things can be said about processors. This means the incentive to invest costly engineering resources (b) into optimizing software is very low. In terms of energy, a CPU instruction is at least millions of times more energy efficient today (c). That's another big economic disincentive. Furthermore, time spent optimizing is time not spent doing product development (d). A slower product on the market can be better than late market entry.

So we have production costs of hardware (a), production costs of software (as a function of time)(b), energy costs of hardware (c), energy cost of running software (c), and opportunity cost of late market entry (d). There's also the time cost of running software (e).

(a) is cheaper;

(b) depends on your measurement of utility;

(c) is cheaper;

(d) means unoptimized software tends to be cheaper;

(e) depends on your measurement of utility;

So (b) and (e) are where Wirthian arguments can focus.

However, AI may yet play a major role in optimizing software. They are already being used in this space.[0]

W.r.t. complexity, one consequence of abstraction is that it further decouples the cost of an operation from the difficulty of implementation. Of course, the two were never identical to begin with. It is easier to implement bubble sort than quick sort, easier still to come up with it when you have no knowledge of sorting algorithms. But greater abstraction is better at concealing computational complexity. The example involving ORMs is a good one. When you have to write SQL by hand, you have a clearer picture of the database operations that will be performed, because the correspondence between the operations and what the database is doing is tighter. ORMs, on the other hand, create an abstraction over SQL that is divorced from the database. Unless the ORM is written in some crafty way that can smartly optimize the generated SQL (and optimizers have their limitations), you can land yourself in exactly the situation the author describes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15669
by volkk | 2026-02-05 17:42:12+00:00
we kind of already are with our phones and Slack, the difference at this point is negligible. i personally won't have airpods in 24/7 with my kid (or ever) so if i were doing something like this, it would be through my phone, which is already something i use fairly often. not too much difference there IMO (at least anecdotally speaking)
by saalweachter | 2026-02-05 17:42:26+00:00
Sergey Slyusarev re-typeset it!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1684932289

There are a bunch of people reprinting it, because it's easy to just reprint scans, but this copy actually re-typeset it.

If you already know the subject the old typesetting is bad enough but you really don't want to try teaching someone who's never been exposed to Euclid from it, or they'll be wondering why it spends so much time talking about furfaces.