MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andyferris | 2026-02-04 07:06:32+00:00
My solution has been to lean into harder problems - even as side projects, if they aren't available at work.

I too am an ex-physcist used to spending days thinking about things, but programming is a gold mine as it is adjacent to computer science. You can design a programming language (or improve an existing one), try to build a better database (or improve an existing one), or many other things that are quite hard.

The LLM is a good rubber duck for exploring the boundaries of human knowledge (or at least knowledge common enough to be in its training set). It can't really "research" on its own, and whenever you suggest something novel and plausable it gets sycophantic, but it can help you prototype ideas and implementation strategies quite fast, and it can help you explore how existing software works and tackles similar problems (or help you start working on an existing project).
Show HN: Astrolabe – Navigate Your Data Universe in Nextcloud
by cbcoutinho | 2026-02-04 07:07:11+00:00
Astrolabe is a new Nextcloud app that I've developed that enables semantic search across your documents, notes, calendar, recipes, etc.

It leverages the nextcloud-mcp-server (same author) as the backend to enable AI workflows via MCP that you can use from any compatible MCP client such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Opencode, etc.

This is my first foray into NC app development, and I'd really appreciate any productive criticism. I learned a lot about php, authentication within Nextcloud, as well as semantic search. The Astrolabe app implements the interface to Nextcloud's Unified Search Provider, which means semantic search works from the global search bar. Search results include the page/chunk so if you click on a resulting PDF doc, the Astrolabe UI opens the PDF at the exact page that includes the result of your search.

In addition to various MCP tools, the nextcloud-mcp-server provides management APIs and the background processing required to embed your documents that can be searched via Astrolabe. It uses qdrant as the vectordb, supports NC webhooks for up-to-date vector embeddings.

For those aware, Nextcloud is pushing ExApps as the de-facto way of writing backends for Nextcloud apps. Astrolabe does not take this approach because it doesn't support more advanced MCP features such as streaming, MCP sampling, etc. Instead Astrolabe and nextcloud-mcp-server can be deployed as OAuth clients that only use app passwords for making requests to Nextcloud itself. This would enable more advanced multi-user scenarios for individuals, families, and small businesses that use Nextcloud as their source-of-truth.

I'm really looking forward to the increased interest in personal AI assistants, and this is my opinionated take on how something like this could be done in Nextcloud.

On a slightly related note, I recently completed a two-week POC on leaf.cloud, an EU-based hosting provider, to showcase how personal AI could work without having to buy GPUs yourself meanwhile keeping you in control of where data is processed.

https://blog.coutinho.io/eu-only-ai-stack-nextcloud-leafclou...
by cranberryturkey | 2026-02-04 07:08:58+00:00
There's an irony here -- the same tools that make it easy to skim and summarize can also be used to force deeper thinking. The problem isn't the tools, it's the defaults.

I've found that the best way to actually think hard about something is to write about it, or to test yourself on it. Not re-read it. Not highlight it. Generate questions from the material and try to answer them from memory.

The research on active recall vs passive review is pretty clear: retrieval practice produces dramatically better long-term retention than re-reading. Karpicke & Blunt (2011) showed that practice testing outperformed even elaborative concept mapping.

So the question isn't whether AI summarizers are good or bad -- it's whether you use them as a crutch to avoid thinking, or as a tool to compress the boring parts so you can spend more time on the genuinely hard thinking.
by phire | 2026-02-04 07:09:10+00:00
Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.
by _giuseppe_ | 2026-02-04 07:09:27+00:00
I miss the company that used to do this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwf0EZ50KUY

I remember installing Windows 98 and it would play an intro ad video to their products and games. Short clips that briskly walk you through them, nothing too crazy just to show you stuff they had. They had a way of welcoming without being over the top. Encarta on its own with the games it had embedded in there was amazing.

I don’t know what happened but man did we collectively fuck computers up somewhere along the way. We hardly dream anymore but maybe that’s just me getting old idk.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-04 07:09:33+00:00
For this, and for the criminal justice use case, it seems to me that it isn't possible for "work on open source" to receive this kind of formal recognition. Anyone is free to self-certify that they're working on an open-source project headed by, and exclusively contributed to by, themselves.

You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.

And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"
by maxglute | 2026-02-04 07:09:39+00:00
> smaller scale

Quantity has a quality of it's own. The sheer quantity of massive country agglomeration effects is what makes PRC system not replicable, i.e. you need country with 800 million people to sustain 500m "modern" workforce that can optimize for every industrial cluster that becomes mutually reinforcing. This not something smaller countries (i.e not PRC or India) can invest of enslave their way into. Current PRC is a model predicated off cultivating and integrating 800 million people into an all domain supercluster, that population scale is an initial investment gate.
by SturgeonsLaw | 2026-02-04 07:10:03+00:00
> “Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts

Fair enough.

1000 watts is a kilowatt

1000 hertz is a kilohertz

1000 metres is a kilometre

1000 litres is a kilolitre

1000 joules is a kilojoule

1000 volts is a kilovolt

1000 newtons is a kilonewton

1000 pascals is a kilopascal

1024 bytes is a kilobyte, because that's what we're used to and we don't want to change to a new prefix
by notorandit | 2026-02-04 07:10:32+00:00
Again?

1 kB is 1024 B. It's measurement unit thing. Not logics.
8 bits in a byte. Not 10, neither 6 nor 5. Just 8.

Like feet in yards, inches in feet, meters in kilometers and ounces in pounds.

It's 1024. Period.

Then of course you are free to count as many bytes as you want and call that bunch a kB.

Pretending anyone else will agree on that is a different thing.
by userbinator | 2026-02-04 07:10:33+00:00
In my experience you will need to think even harder with AI if you want a decent result, although the problems you'll be thinking about will be more along the lines of "what the hell did it just write?"

The current major problem with the software industry isn't quantity, it's quality; and AI just increases the former while decreasing the latter. Instead of e.g. finding ways to reduce boilerplate, people are just using AI to generate more of it.
by scott_w | 2026-02-04 07:10:54+00:00
For more evidence:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo

Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...

Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

This is because of government pressure (see Ofcom link).

I’d say you’re making yourself look foolish but you seem happy to defend nonces so I’ll not waste my time.
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-02-04 07:11:17+00:00
Though the petition is about Germany, in the US some entitlement programs come with work requirements that can be satisfied by volunteer work. Given the tech job market and how the US government's labor policies are detrimental to native workers, allowing them to keep their skills sharp through open source work while also satisfying the work requirements of various social programs, it seems like a decent trade-off. This presumes the government and the donors to the politicians that run it don't really want native workers to be unskilled. Their actions indicate the opposite, so that throws a bit of a wrench into things.
by laughingcurve | 2026-02-04 07:11:58+00:00
I had been eagerly moving over to using JJ when I discovered that 'hook' behavior was not present. Pre-push hooks for formatting and linting were very helpful for me because I needed to enforce these standards on others who were more junior. It would be great for JJ to incorporate it in some way if possible. I understand the structural differences and why that makes it hard but something about that pre-* hook just hits right
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-04 07:12:09+00:00
> This sentence is literally an opinion.

I could disagree but it doesn't matter. I said a particular thing was not an opinion. You pointing at something else I said and calling it an opinion doesn't affect my claims at all.

What matters is my claim that you made up stuff about _drg9's situation. That claim is objectively true or false, not an opinion. And the evidence I see all says the claim is true.

> Take your nonsense elsewhere, it’s totally derailling the thread.

Derailing what? Nobody else has posted in this part of the comments in days.
by trhway | 2026-02-04 07:12:18+00:00
May be.
We do have codified in law definition of machine gun which clearly separates it from a block of lead. What codified in law definitions are used here to separate photoshop from Grok in the context of those deepfakes and CSAM?

Without such clear legal definitions going after Grok while not going after photoshop is just an act of political pressure.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-04 07:13:13+00:00
The foam has disappeared, but the enthusiasts are going on. While it's not a craze, I believe mechanical keyboard is still superior for longer writing sessions (Apple's and Logitech's scissor switch keyboards are pretty good, too).

Gamers are moving to hall effect switches because of the things they enable, but from what I have seen, some people are still building their keyboards, and people still use mechanical keyboards.

I'd love to continue use mine, too, but they are bit too noisy for my office, and I don't continue computers at home as much, anymore.

Another chilling effect is caused by the tariffs, because people can't get their keyboards or parts as easily anymore. I got mine from Kickstarter directly, but it's impossible for me now.
by fodkodrasz | 2026-02-04 07:14:24+00:00
So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.

I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.
by purplehat_ | 2026-02-04 07:14:31+00:00
To be fair, the octet as the byte has been dominant for decades. POSIX even has the definition “A byte is composed of a contiguous sequence of 8 bits.” I would wager many software engineers don't even know that a non-octet bytes were a thing, given that college CS curricula typically just teach a byte is 8 bits.

I found some search results about Texas Instruments' digital signal processors using 16-bit bytes, and came across this blogpost from 2017 talking about implementing 16-bit bytes in LLVM: https://embecosm.com/2017/04/18/non-8-bit-char-support-in-cl.... Not sure if they actually implemented it, but that was surprising to me that non octet bytes still exist, albeit in a very limited manner.

Do you know of any other uses for bytes that are not 8 bits?
by dwrolvink | 2026-02-04 07:14:56+00:00
Interesting comparison. I remember watching a video on that. Landscape paintings, portraits, etc, was an art that has taken an enormous nosedive. We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera. On the other hand, the benefits of the camera need no elaboration. Currently AI had a lot of foot guns though, which I don't believe the camera had. I hope AI gets to that point too.
by theyregr8 | 2026-02-04 07:15:19+00:00
Let's raid car companies too. We were all born into this. We never had a vote. Thomas Jefferson is said to have written Constitutions ought to be re-written every so often or the dead rule by fiat decree. Let's.

The rich can join in the austerity too. No one voted for them. We been conditioned to pick acquiescence or poverty. We were abused into kowtowing to a bunch of pants shitting dementia addled olds educated in religious crack pottery. Their economic and political memes are just that, memes, not immutable physical truth.

In America, as evidenced by the public not in the streets protesting for single payer comprehensive healthcare, we clearly don't want to be on the hook for each other's lives. That's all platitudes and toxic positivity.

Hopes and prayers, bloodletting was good enough for the Founders!

So fuck the poor and the rich. Burn it all down.
by its_magic | 2026-02-04 07:18:51+00:00
> 1000 g, 500 g, 250 g, 125 g

Now do it without changing units.

> I also don't understand the fear around fractions - we deal with halves, quarters and fifths all the time in the natural world.

Yes, and a certain fast food company found that their 1/3 lb burgers weren't selling well, because their idiot customers can't maff too good and thought 1/4 was bigger than 1/3.
by jmward01 | 2026-02-04 07:19:10+00:00
I'm trying to figure the same thing out for my stuff. I figured out a simple way to train location prediction so I'm using it for guided window prediction which is great for attn (predict a distance in the past to look at) and for memory (predict an x, y location for a 2d window into a memory store to look at that will be helpful). I suspect there are a lot of people out there that have found that one weird trick but haven't released it because they don't know how to capitalize on the idea. Why give OpenAI and others the keys to the future for free?
by trymas | 2026-02-04 07:19:39+00:00
> A bloody terminal. Like the most basic feature...

Since when terminal is "the most basic feature"?

Reading threads in HN and seeing mild "wars" how Kitty/Alacritty/Ghostty/iTerm/Konsole/you-name-it are worse/better than Kitty/Alacritty/Ghostty/iTerm/Konsole/you-name-it, because they are slower/faster, (in)compatible with some ancient niche protocols/standards, etc.

Does not seem that basic to me?

Also it's personal preference, but I somehow used to have my editors and my terminals separate. I guess something about having a tool that does one thing best and all.
by mumernisar | 2026-02-04 07:21:01+00:00
Hey HN, OP here.

I built Gateway to solve the security issues with "Bring Your Own Key" (BYOK) apps. Currently, users are trained to paste raw, high-privilege keys into third-party forms, which is poor hygiene and violates OpenAI's sharing policy.

Gateway is a self-hosted middleware ( fork and deploy pull from vercel ) that keeps keys on your infrastructure.

Mechanism: Uses a cryptographic Proof-of-Possession (PoP) flow. Apps get a short-lived pairing string, never the raw key.

Controls: Enforces rate limits, quotas, and model restrictions (e.g., "only allow gpt-4o-mini") that provider dashboards don't offer per-app.

Compatibility: Works with standard SDKs by swapping the baseURL.

I’d appreciate feedback on the PoP implementation and the threat model.
by qq66 | 2026-02-04 07:21:14+00:00
I used 250lb zip ties to hold down my convertible top in the open position, as an alternative to paying $2000 to replace the motors. When I'd need to put up the top I'd cut the zip ties and when I'd want to put it down I'd put on a new set.

With California weather and an indoor parking spot I only ended up using about one pack (10? 12?) a year.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-04 07:21:14+00:00
I get it.

I got excited about agents because I told myself it would be "just faster typing". I told myself that my value was never as a typist and that this is just the latest tool like all the tools I had eagerly added to my kit before.

But the reality is different. It's not just typing for me. It's coming up with crap. Filling in the blanks. Guessing.

The huge problem with all these tools is they don't know what they know and what they don't. So when they don't know they just guess. It's absolutely infuriating.

It's not like a Ferrari. A Ferrari does exactly what I tell it to, up to the first-order effects of how open the throttle is, what direction the wheels face, how much pressure is on the brakes etc. The second-order effects are on me, though. I have to understand what effect these pressures will have on my ultimate position on the road. A normie car doesn't give you as much control but it's less likely to come off the road.

Agents are like a teleport. You describe where you want to be and it just takes you directly there. You say "warm and sunny" and you might get to the Bahamas, but you might also get to the Sahara. So you correct: "oh no, I meant somewhere nice" and maybe you get to the Bahamas. But because you didn't travel there yourself you failed to realise what you actually got. Yeah, it's warm, sunny and nice, but now you're on an island in the middle of nowhere and have to import basically everything. So I prompt again and rewrite the entire codebase, right?

Linus Torvalds works with experts that he trusts. This is like a manic 5 year old that doesn't care but is eager to work. Saying we all get to be Torvalds is like saying we all get to experience true love because we have access to porn.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-04 07:23:21+00:00
> Username checks out, at least.

Thoughtful retorts such as this are deserving of the same esteem one affords the "rubber v glue"[0] idiom.

As such, I must oblige.

0 - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/I%27m+rubber%2c+you%27r...
by sph | 2026-02-04 07:23:23+00:00
The personification of the quote “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should”

I feel the existential problem for a world that follows the religion of science and technology to its extreme, is that most people in STEM have no foundation in humanities, so ethical and philosophical concerns never pass through their mind.

We have signed a pact with the devil to help us through boring tasks, and no one thought to ask what we would give in exchange.
by audunw | 2026-02-04 07:24:01+00:00
3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)
by mauriciabad | 2026-02-04 07:24:24+00:00
In my multideck you can play Mu: https://diymultideck.mauri.app/games/mu-and-more-revised-edi...

Basically, you write the point values in the card and use numbers 0-11 where 1=2 and 8=9 (1s and 7s in original game). My cards are made out of plastic, so they don't break. And you get the bonus of being able to play many more games. ^o^
by snowwolf_zdg | 2026-02-04 07:24:31+00:00
Hi HN! I built TitanShell as a security-first desktop client for OpenClaw.

Why I built it:
- OpenClaw's web UI lacks enterprise-grade security
- Needed biometric keychain protection for API keys
- Wanted a zero-trust architecture with ephemeral tokens

Tech stack:
- Tauri 2.0 + Rust backend
- Svelte 5.0 frontend
- macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager
- Cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Linux

Would love feedback on the security model and UX!
by baotiao | 2026-02-04 07:25:33+00:00
On this page, we introduce how to implement a read-only Columnar Store (DuckDB) node leveraging the MySQL binlog mechanism. https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL/blob/master/wiki/duckdb/du... In this implementation, we have performed extensive optimizations for binlog batch transmission, write operations, and more.
by k310 | 2026-02-04 07:25:42+00:00
You might be interested in this: [0] ‘A special place in hell’: New taskforce to hunt down ‘scouts’ who sent girls to Epstein.

> London: A special taskforce will be set up in Poland to investigate a network of “scouts” who recruited girls for Jeffrey Epstein from across Europe, including one contact who told him of a dancer who had come from Queensland.

> Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the investigation would also examine potential ties between Epstein and Russian spy agencies amid claims the convicted sex offender gathered compromising material on people he could blackmail.

This is outside the U.S. One recruiter is serving time in a country club for recruiting girls [1]

> Maxwell’s mixture of social access, targeted approaches to vulnerable workers, explicit grooming and financial inducements created a repeatable pipeline that prosecutors say expanded Epstein’s pool of victims and even turned some victims into recruiters themselves. (various means of attracting victims are discussed in the above article.)

Another possible means was via a modeling agency.

[0] Archive: https://archive.md/ZGJch#selection-383.0-395.30

From The Age (AU) https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/a-special-place-in-he...

[1] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ghislaine-maxwell-r...
by kuerbel | 2026-02-04 07:26:12+00:00
Love your comment.

I took the liberty of pasting it to chatgpt and asked it to write another paragraph in the same style:

Perhaps it is easier to sneer than to feel, to dull the edges of awe before it dares to wound you with longing. Cynicism is a tidy shelter: no drafts of hope, no risk of being moved. But it is also a small room, airless, where nothing grows. Somewhere beyond that glowing rectangle, the world is still doing its reckless, generous thing—colors insisting on being seen, sounds reaching out without permission, hands shaping meaning out of nothing. You could meet it again, if you chose, not as a judge but as a witness, and remember that wonder is not naïveté. It is courage, practiced quietly.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-04 07:26:39+00:00
> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram

The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.

Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.
by anthk | 2026-02-04 07:26:54+00:00
>Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.

So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.