MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-10 23:16:19+00:00
>historical path of discovery, to solve polynomial equations, starting with cubic.

Even with polynomial equations that have complex roots, the idea of a rotation is baked in in solving them. Rotation+scaling with complex numbers is basically an arbitrary translation through the complex plane. So when you are faced with a*x*x + b*x + c = 0, where a b and c all lie on the real number line, and you are trying to basically get to 0, often you can't do it by having x on a number line, so you have to start with more dimentions and then rotate+scale so you end up at zero.

Its the same reason for negative numbers existing. When you have positive numbers only, and you define addition and subtraction, things like 5-6+10 become impossible to compute, even though all the values are positive. But when you introduce the space of negative numbers, even though they don't represent anything in reality, that operation becomes possible.
by georgeck | 2026-02-10 23:16:19+00:00
Another interesting feature for HN users in the companion Bluesky bot we created [0]. It analyzes top stories from HN [1] and generates a new Bluesky thread every hour using the same cached summary. This bot is operational for the last 8 months.

[0] - https://bsky.app/profile/hncompanion.com

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/best
by badhorseman | 2026-02-10 23:16:56+00:00
If it was a an elf, knight or some sort of fantasy warrior sure with a comedic prompt sure, That is not the case. If you translate the prompt as people have here, you can see what was typed in,'Subdued white man' under 'muscular horse'. Who is the mare in the picture or even the gelding. If I was to do the visual gag it would be a knight or a a warrior not a peasant, there a no peasants in lord of the rings and very few medieval fantasy has peasant of any kind.
by beoberha | 2026-02-10 23:17:22+00:00
Ignoring the VC economics and awful name, I won’t be as pessimistic as everyone. I see the vision.

That said, nobody knows what the AI future looks like. Entire’s entire thesis is a solution for something we don’t even know we need. It’s a massive bet and uphill battle. Traditionally, dev tool success stories come from grassroots projects of developers solving their own problems and not massive VC funded efforts that tell you what you need to do.
by subhobroto | 2026-02-10 23:17:41+00:00
> I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools

Agreed. I think software engineers are misunderstanding why the SaaSpocalypse is (has?) happening.

It feels like software engineers think the SaaSpocalypse is due to technical commodity: "Oh no! Claude can bang out a fully functioning Slack/Monday.com over a weekend! There goes Slack/Monday.com"

The selloff is being driven by the "Seat Replacement" fear: SaaS charges "per seat" or "per human user" - but if an agent can do the work of X (>1) humans, then "seats" sold shrink, reducing the valuation and profitability of SaaS companies that are driven by seat multiples.

This has no impact on the valuation or stress of bootstrapped businesses like yours where you don't have to answer to either VCs or shareholders. It's more likely bootstrapped businesses will get a revival as people seek to work closer with founders who are focused on building a sustainable, long term value add than an unsustainable, blitzscaling play.

In fact, if I am not mistaken, it will reduce the edge VC funded companies have over bootstrapped businesses like yours (eg: the CAC is set on a more level field when blitzscaling funds reduce or disappear).
by bigyabai | 2026-02-10 23:17:43+00:00
I have no defense for HN; the website is designed poorly, moderated inconsistently, and the YC-affiliated retinue is sketchier than a pencil drawing.

That being said, people who take things personally for no reason is exactly the reason the "flag" button exists. We all know that the Half Life source code is out there on the internet, most of us agree that copyright is stupid, and a good handful of us are probably deliberately violating copyright law. That isn't your excuse to deride people who make things that don't conform to your (literally illegal!) outlook on society.

This is a really cool project that is in no way invalidated by the existence of leaked source code. Your copyright tangent is a non-sequitur and deserves to be flagged.
by troad | 2026-02-10 23:17:48+00:00
I just don't think I have the misunderstanding that you think I do. I spent most of my programming career working in statically typed systems, including two years in Rust recently. Nothing in that article is new or surprising to me. Some of it is downright elementary.

If I may be so bold, I'd posit the misunderstanding is on your part. No one is saying things are impossible to model in rigidly typed systems - this is your key misapprehension about what is being said. What I'm saying is that different languages have different paths of desire, and the kinds of problems identified in the original article are more the kind of problems that tend to crop up with heavy use of types, than they are the kind of problem that has much of anything to do with functional programming.

You're thinking categorically, but I am not, so we're talking at cross-purposes. Perhaps too much static typing has crept into your thinking! (I jest, of course! :) )
by DavidFerris | 2026-02-10 23:18:19+00:00
This isn't meant to be a commercially useful search engine- just a demonstration. You'll only be able to search for terms that the VLM could directly discern.

From the blog post:
Our search demo proves that it works quite well. As anticipated, text search works well, returning sensible results for even irregular or poorly formed queries. It’s worth mentioning that this is very different from 3D part libraries like Thingiverse or GrabCAD. Search in those repositories requires users to tag or annotate parts with a description, the text of which is used in search. Our system takes only an unnamed part as input, requiring no additional labelling.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-10 23:18:31+00:00
Vencord is more patching Discord: https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord

BetterDiscord is more... client modding to enable userscripts. Vencord is actually running find-and-replace on Discord's Webpack modules to implement deeper integrations. They're far more reverse-engineering than BetterDiscord's monkey-patching.
by coldtea | 2026-02-10 23:18:39+00:00
If what they do is "well described by a bunch of math", they're making calculations.

Unless the substrate is essential and irreducible to get the output (whic is not if what they do is "well described by a bunch of math"), then the material or process (neurons or water pipes or billiard balls or 0s and 1s in a cpu) doesn't matter.

>You've got the direction of the arrow backwards. Map, territory, etc.

The whole point is that at the level we're interested in regarding "what is the process that creates thought/consciousness", the territory is not important: the mechanism is, not the material of the mechanism.
by self_awareness | 2026-02-10 23:19:25+00:00
Europe, just adopt Blik.

Even Polish banks discourage using debit cards directly and just switch to Blik.

Lost card? There's no card, so doesn't apply. ATM skimmers? Nope, I think all ATM support Blik, so can't sniff anything. Want to send money to a friend? Instant mobile-friendly transfer. It's even possible that the family can pull the cash out from the ATM from your account when you're in a different city if you'll give out the code.
by baconbrand | 2026-02-10 23:19:32+00:00
https://youtu.be/e4X0hI40a8A

Just a handful of examples from last year. As a resident of Minneapolis I can assure you it is much, much worse than these few examples.

Are you not familiar with Liam Conejo Ramos? Or Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Just two other high profile cases, but this is far more prevalent than any reporting has outlined. Three of Liam’s classmates were also “mistakenly” shipped to Texas and returned. At least one of his classmates, a documented asylum seeker like the rest, is still in Dilley.
by snowwrestler | 2026-02-10 23:19:39+00:00
> The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.

But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.
by everfrustrated | 2026-02-10 23:20:10+00:00
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.

Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-10 23:21:11+00:00
This doesn't appear to address that concern.

I guess if I had to do it, I'd reject pushes without the requisite commit to entire/checkpoints/v1. I think their storage strategy is a bit clunky for that, but it can be done. I might look to do something more like the way jujutsu colocates its metadata. I don't think this particular implementation detail makes too much of a difference, though. I got along just fine in a regulated environment by setting a policy and enforcing it before git existed. Ideally, we'd do things for a good reason, and if you can't get along in that world, then it's probably not the right job for you. Sometimes you've got to get the change controls in order before we can mainline your contributions because we have to sustain audits. I don't think this is about forcing people to do something that they otherwise wouldn't do if you told them that it's a requirement of the job.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-10 23:21:26+00:00
Sometimes I choose to not respond to people who reply to me in bad faith or if it is a tired argument. This comment thread is about how to avoid having law enforcement query Google for your data. My suggestion was to avoid getting in trouble in the first place to remove the need for law enforcement to care about you in the first place.

I am not part of the law enforcement operation. I don't have all of the details about what the person in the article did or did not do. Regardless of lacking that knowledge I can provide advice to avoid law enforcement.
by ljm | 2026-02-10 23:21:47+00:00
It was only a matter of time before someone turned RCE exploits into a service.

Imagine someone running this shit gets a spam email that says "I'm the CEO of your company, you need to liquidate your crypto portfolio because shit is going down, even Coffeezilla said it. Post this on Twitter and retweet [tweet] so your followers don't miss out" and it drains their wallets and makes it viral.

Then someone else sends a non-spam email but their signature says to follow another account, so the agent does it and now OpenSlop is ingesting commands from another user, using social media for command and control.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 23:21:48+00:00
The article you link literally says that Tesla's teleoperation is the same kind as Waymo's, and there is nothing that the company has ever deployed that will enable "remote drone operators" so I don't know what your point is.

Tesla and Waymo both offer systems to provide sensor insight to remote observers, and the remote observers can send suggestions and nudges to the vehicles. The general public does not understand the nuance here, and they imagine someone is sitting with a steering wheel and pedals, like a radio-controlled toy or a USAF Reaper drone.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-10 23:21:55+00:00
That guy had been overstaying a tourist visa for something like 17 years, and only started the green card process in April 2025. I don't think people who have overstayed tourist visas for 17 years should be eligible for any kind of permanent residency in the US, and would support laws making it impossible for someone in his position to get a green card or a work permit.

The fact that he is a white Irishman is legally irrelevant and enforcing immigration law in a race-neutral way is pretty un-Gestapo-like behavior.
by fsflover | 2026-02-10 23:22:04+00:00
This is not all so straightforward. I'm afraid Apple's "privacy stance" is just marketing, even if they might be a tiny bit better than Google:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-10 23:22:06+00:00
Honestly, you are just confused.

With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability.

If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates doesn't help you explain why a specific circuit within that model represents "the concept of justice" or how it decided to pivot a sentence in a specific direction.

On the other hand, the very professions you cited rely on interpretability. A civil engineer doesn't look at a bridge and dismiss it as "a collection of atoms" unable to go further. They can point to a specific truss and explain exactly how it manages tension and compression, tell you why it could collapse in certain conditions. A software engineer can step through a debugger and tell you why a specific if statement triggered.

We don't even have that much for LLMs so why would you say we have an idea of what's going on ?
by colmmacc | 2026-02-10 23:22:11+00:00
Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
by cstever | 2026-02-10 23:22:33+00:00
That may be fine ... if it remains your choice. I'm saying companies are outmoding people (programmers, designers, managers, et al) who don't leverage AI to do their job the fastest. If one programmer uses AI to do boilerplate and then codes the interesting bits personally and it takes a week and another does it all with AI (orchestrating agents, etc) and it takes 2 hours and produces the same output (not code but business value), the AI orchestrator/manager will be valued above the former.
by digiown | 2026-02-10 23:22:51+00:00
Ah money laundering, the government's 2nd favorite excuse to bypass due process, remove freedom, and impose arbitrary punishments, after "emergency" and before "think of the children".

The government can prosecute money laundering and all the other crimes, but it's not an excuse to impose extrajudicial punishment. Until they stop, having some cash and crypto is your only means of defense.
by orwin | 2026-02-10 23:23:21+00:00
That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays).

In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars.

The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity.

Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
by p_l | 2026-02-10 23:23:43+00:00
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.

There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.

For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.
by nice_byte | 2026-02-10 23:24:01+00:00
> It's explicitly saying you want device memory

You are also explicitly saying that you want device memory by specifying DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT. There's no difference.

> Likewise, your claim about UMA makes zero sense. Device malloc gets you a pointer or handle to device memory,

It makes zero sense to you because we're talking past each other. I am saying that on systems without UMA you _have_ to care where your resources live. You _have_ to be able to allocate both on host and device.

> Like, why is there gpu-only and device-local.

Because there's such a thing as accessing GPU memory from the host. Hence, you _have_ to specify explicitly that no, only the GPU will try to access this GPU-local memory. And if you request host-visible GPU-local memory, you might not get more than around 256 megs unless your target system has ReBAR.

> a theoretical vkMalloc should always give me device memory.

No, because if that's the only way to allocate memory, how are you going to allocate staging buffers for the CPU to write to? In general, you can't give the copy engine a random host pointer and have it go to town. So, okay now we're back to vkDeviceMalloc and vkHostMalloc. But wait, there's this whole thing about device-local and host visible, so should we add another function? What about write-combined memory? Cache coherency? This is how you end up with a zillion flags.

This is the reason I keep bringing UMA up but you keep brushing it off.
by Twisol | 2026-02-10 23:24:28+00:00
> Someone upstream of a significant chunk of the internet’s transit infrastructure apparently decided telnet traffic isn’t worth carrying anymore. That’s probably the right call.

Does this impact traffic for MUDs at all? I know several MUDs operate on nonstandard Telnet ports, but many still allow connection on port 23. Does this block end-to-end Telnet traffic, or does it only block attempts to access Telnet services on the backbone relays themselves?
by ra7 | 2026-02-10 23:24:56+00:00
These videos from Waymo shows what kind of guidance they provide:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo

https://youtube.com/watch?v=elpQPbJXpfY

Notice how the system itself reasons about the scene and asks for help with possible options.

This whole story is a nothingburger. The only “news” here is that the operators are in Philippines.
by wasmperson | 2026-02-10 23:25:03+00:00
My understanding of API standards that need to be implemented by multiple vendors is that there's a tradeoff between having something that's easy for the programmer to use and something that's easy for vendors to implement.

A big complaint I hear about OpenGL is that it has inconsistent behavior across drivers, which you could argue is because of the amount of driver code that needs to be written to support its high-level nature. A lower-level API can require less driver code to implement, effectively moving all of that complexity into the open source libraries that eventually get written to wrap it. As a graphics programmer you can then just vendor one of those libraries and win better cross-platform support for free.

For example: I've never used Vulkan personally, but I still benefit from it in my OpenGL programs thanks to ANGLE.
by SpaceManNabs | 2026-02-10 23:25:19+00:00
I thought i understood complex numbers and accepted them until I did countour integration for the first time.

Ever since then I have been deeply unsettled. I started questioning taking integrals to (+/-) infinity, and so I became unsettled with R too.

If C exists to fix R, then why does R even exist? Why does R need to be fixed? Why does the use of the upper or lower plane for counter integration not matter? I can do mathematically why, but why do we have a choice?

This blog post really articulated stuff formally that I have been bothered by for years.
by Telaneo | 2026-02-10 23:25:20+00:00
The fact that I keep hearing people have issues because it's now the default doesn't fill me with confidence. It's probably a minority of people having these issues, and I imagine the problems with screensharing and the like are gone by this point, but accessibility tools which need access to everything X gave them are never going to be compatible without being completely rewritten with Wayland in mind.

I'm also not filled with confidence by posts like this[1], which confirm that Wayland was still deeply broken in many ways just in 2024. Two years is not a short amount of time, but given it took Wayland 10+ years to be anywhere close to usable for desktop usage, I'm not placing my bets on the pace having gone up so fast that long-standing issues are solved yet. That post takes somewhat of an extreme position, but kernel of truth is that it breaks a lot of things, many of which apparently still aren't solved.

This post[2] has a better outlook I believe. I.e. that things are broken today (since it is for accessibility), but that there is real potential and that it can be fixed. It just has to be done. Shame that doing that is hard and that accessibility ends up taking a back seat.

[1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...

[2] https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-02-10 23:25:54+00:00
I think it's doable with a heavy dose of LLM moderation. If you do something like this, I'd be happy to help get things started. The quality of discussion here is just... bleh these days. I don't need AI positivity, just something that sounds more intellectual than people shouting "nuh uh" "uh huh" at each other.
by ethanwillis | 2026-02-10 23:27:03+00:00
Save taxpayers money?

I don't think I've ever seen my taxes go down in any tangible way from all the supposed taxpayer saving initiatives over the years.

Somehow we broke the "cheap, fast, good" metric and we don't even get "good" nor "cheap".

I'd prefer good and what i'm paying regardless over some false "savings"