MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LightBug1 | 2026-02-11 12:48:02+00:00
I would have thought that to be the case too ... I know all about the exciting Xiaomi cars (e.g.) but I grew up in the era of the Chinese brand being "low quality". We're well beyond that now and have been for probably a decade. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a China cheerleader.

I give the example I mentioned. People local to me swapping out their model 3's for BYD. Maybe they just got to their end of their lease cycle and wanted to try something different, but I cannot believe they would have willingly chosen a significantly lower quality car (knowing some of them). And I believe the cost difference is marginal but the overall package just a bit better.

And you know people, they'll swap out anything for just a marginal saving. Doesn't have to be significant unless there's some network effects. And there really isn't with cars.

Anyway, I'm just yapping, but think the used Tesla market is going to get even more swamped than it already is. Not a bad thing because previously people looking for low cost cars were buying diesels - so I'm hopeful that'll transition to low cost EV's now ... but the game is up for Tesla automotive, but we've known that for some time.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-11 12:48:18+00:00
Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company.

As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
by 38jj999 | 2026-02-11 12:48:19+00:00
It might be fantastic writing, but it's hot bullshit.

Just look at the hordes of visually impaired people who migrate to whatever new audio app is on the horizon, almost as a unit, co-ordinated by certain forums. They even bring the exact same drama.

> When platforms die, communities don't migrate

Uh, yes they do. Comparing neighborhoods to online groups is like comparing Google to a barber shop, woe is me they moved their servers, now I can't use them anymore...

In fact, if it didn't migrate and was on the web, was it really even a community? Think of all those Reddit IRC servers that went to Discord?
by nyssos | 2026-02-11 12:48:26+00:00
> The C that shows up in quantum mechanics is likely an example of this--it's a case of physics having a a circular symmetry embedded in it (the phase of the wave functions) and everyone getting attached to their favorite way of writing it

No, it really is C, not R^2. Consider product spaces, for example. C^2 ⊗ C^2 is C^4 = R^8, but R^4 ⊗ R^4 is R^16 - twice as large. So you get a ton of extra degrees of freedom with no physical meaning. You can quotient them out identifying physically equivalent states - but this is just the ordinary construction of the complex numbers as R^2/(x^2 + 1).

> but rather, physics uses C because C models the algebra of the thing physics is describing.

That's what C is: R^2, with extra algebraic structure.
by ginkida | 2026-02-11 12:48:31+00:00
Author describes moving from JetBrains IDEs to a terminal-based agent workflow using a cascade of AI models: Gemini 3 Flash ($20/mo) for boilerplate generation, GLM-4.7 ($3/mo) as backup, and Claude Code ($100/mo) only for complex logic and polishing. Claims this pipeline covers ~95% of development work (Go/PHP/Python backends) while cutting costs from $250–300/mo (Claude-only) to $123/mo.

Built a Go CLI tool called Gokin (MIT, open source) to orchestrate multi-provider workflows with features like secret redaction, semantic code search, and sandboxed command execution. Argues the shift isn't about replacing IDEs universally but redefining the developer's role from coder to agent architect—especially viable for backend work where visual tooling matters less.
by mncharity | 2026-02-11 12:48:33+00:00
Ah, perhaps I should have said something like "educational materials, and apps, and other useful things" (disapproving judgement in the original).

> Well, the thing is that the educational materials are largely free.

A triumph and fruition of these last decades of massive effort. Now we just need to deal with their quality (with commercial as bad as free). AI may help, by reducing barriers to content creation - you might for example, now more easily author an intro astronomy textbook, one that doesn't reinforce top-30 common misconceptions, something the most used (US; commercial) texts still don't manage.
by amluto | 2026-02-11 12:48:41+00:00
Radio telescope dishes are huge so that they can receive (or even transmit in the case of Arecibo, which is gone now) a narrow beam. At long wavelengths you need something huge to get a narrow beam.

But you can also use multiple, much smaller antennas to synthesize a narrow beam, and those little antennas are often dishes but can also be very simple and rather small antennas.
by RugnirViking | 2026-02-11 12:48:53+00:00
im not very good at all this, having just a basic engineers education in maths. But the sentence

> There are a countably infinite descriptions, as at the end every description is text

seems to hide some nuance I can't follow here. Can't a textual description be infinitely long? contain a numerical amount of operations/characters? or am I just tripping over the real/whole numbers distinction
by acdha | 2026-02-11 12:49:18+00:00
They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like government-provided childcare are good societal investments.
by aestetix | 2026-02-11 12:49:19+00:00
Here is another idea for how to solve this:

Why not produce a second kind of phone that is for kids. Maybe have it linked to their parents accounts on a hardware level. The kidphone is physically restricted somehow to only installing certain apps, so that parents can ensure they are safe.

This approach would put the power back into hands of parents, keep the kids safe, and also prevent all this intrusive age verification stuff from happening.

Also it is a lot easier to police. You could physically look at the phone the child is using to make sure it is a kidphone. If not, then they are committing a crime, similar to a child smoking a cigarette.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-02-11 12:49:19+00:00
> > The map indicates it will be centered on Lampasas and the region of effect seems to be east of El Paso. So, if the GPS exercises are the cause, the TFRs would've been more likely to bring in Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio.

Wait so people in South Texas won't be able to use GPS on the ground either?

Also if the goal is to disrupt the cartels and the people using GPS to know where they are at in the process of crossing the border illegally why is the Army involved in this at all?

The Army has no business in taking part of operations to disrupt cartels and illegal immigration, it's the whole rational behind having 3 letters agency including the evil one that rose to prominence lately
by xorphex | 2026-02-11 12:49:47+00:00
I have read the whole chapter, and my criticism is not based on taking a single quote out of context.
Your framing reduces women in that environment to a single stereotype ("girls exploiting men for drinks"), and the suggested response is to adopt deliberate hostility and disrespect as a strategy; it is generalizing an entire group and justifying contempt toward them.
The "lesson" explicitly encourages treating interactions as transactional and frames social interaction primarily as a negotiation for sex. Whether or not some individuals behave opportunistically, promoting that mindset as a general rule is ethically questionable.

Most importantly, the outcome does not validate the approach as healthy behaviour and even Feynman himself makes it clear at the end that the method was effective in a narrow sense but not enjoyable or aligned with how he ultimately wanted to interact with people. That distancing is important context: it suggests the episode was more an observation about social dynamics than a recommendation for how people should behave.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 12:49:52+00:00
No. MUDs should never have adopted port 23 or port 22 or any pre-assigned ports. There is no "well-known port assignment" from IANA for MUD-type games or servers.

The end of RFC854, the very last paragraph, states:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc854

Port Assignment

When used for remote user access to service hosts (i.e., remote
terminal access) this protocol is assigned server port 23
(27 octal). That is L=23.

I would say that by the letter of the law, and by longstanding convention, that port 23/tcp is given to telnetd type login servers. A server listening on port 23 is expected to accept login credentials and furnish a shell or some management interface that affects the host itself. That someone would log in as a terminal user and perform computing tasks.

A MUD game could never be confused with managing the server where it runs, or a user/admin login to access that operating system. A MUD game has a specific purpose of recreation/leisure/communication.

Again, let us not conflate port 23 with telnetd with the TELNET protocol. These are all completely separate and distinct. Except that port 23/tcp implies TELNET protocol and also implies a telnetd-type server. It is sort of a one-way chain of requirement. telnetd could be run on any port (inadvisable) while TELNET protocol could be implemented by any other service (often preferable).

A MUD server is perfectly entitled to use TELNET protocol! In my server-hacking days, I often considered it a mistake and error not to support TELNET protocol! If I had known how to implement it, I would've added it to TinyMUCK myself! Honestly, it was not a priority because there was no known client supporting TELNET, either. Of course, protocol support needs to be on both ends to be effective. Without demand or capability from clients, it didn't really make sense for server programmers to add it in.

But we were perfectly content to stay on port 2283, port 4201, or port 6250, as our players and Wizards had established the games to run there, especially in those days we wished to escape notice by admins. The TELNET protocol can run on any port and support any "network virtual terminal" service. But the "telnet port" on 23 is special, unique, and as of last month, really inadvisable for everyone.
by acjohnson55 | 2026-02-11 12:50:00+00:00
I am not having the exact same experience as the author--Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 seem more incremental to me than what he is describing--but if we're on an exponential curve, the difference is a rounding error.

4 months ago, I tried to build an application mostly vibe-coded. I got impressively far for what I thought was possible, but it bogged down. This past weekend, my friend had OpenClaw build an application of similar complexity in a weekend. The difference is vast.

At work, I wouldn't say I'm one-shotting tasks, but the first shot is doing what used to be a week's work in about an hour, and then the next few hours are polish. Most of the delay in the polish phase is due to the speed of the tooling (e.g. feature branch environment spin up and CI) and the human review at the end of the process.

The side effects people report of lower quality code hitting review are real, but I think that is a matter of training, process and work harness. I see no reason that won't significantly improve.

As I said in another thread a couple days ago, AI is the first technology where everyone is literally having a different experience. Even within my company, there are divergent experiences. But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author. And if they can find people who can actuate that reality, the folks who can't are going to see their options contract precipitously.
by articulatepang | 2026-02-11 12:50:06+00:00
As you say, "the fundamental theorem of algebra relies on complex numbers" gets to the heart of the view that complex numbers are the algebraic closure of R.

But also, the most slick, sexy proof I know for the fundamental theorem of algebra is via complex analysis, where it's an easy consequence of Liouville's Theorem, which states that any function which is complex-differentiable and bounded on all of C must in fact be constant.

Like many other theorems in complex analysis, this is extremely surprising and has no analogue in real analysis!
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-11 12:50:22+00:00
> …I suspect going a more visual block
> diagram route, to generate some
> intermediate .md or whatever, might have
> promise, especially for defining clear
> bounds/separation of concerns…

Can confirm [1]

So can my automaton bud [2]…

_____

MODEL

…

The Verdict: If you provide a clear instruction like "Before you touch the code, read architecture.puml and ensure your changes do not violate the defined inheritance/dependency structure," the agent will be very effective at following it.

If you just "hope" it bears it in mind, it probably won't.

_The agent is a tool, not a mind-reader; it will take the shortest path to a passing test unless you wall that path off with your architectural models_.

…

To make it actually work, you need to turn the UML from a "suggestion" into a "blocker." You should add a section to your AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md ) that looks like this:

1. Tool Trigger: By using words like "…"

…

Why this works:

…

_____

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935979

[2] https://g2ww.short.gy/TheMightyBooch
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-11 12:50:25+00:00
That's kind of what I'm thinking too though my money would be on something like "super secret stealth cruise missile ripped off it's mounting pylon" or control software went crazy rather than an airframe loss.

It's likely be something small enough and with little/no fuel because if it left a big smoking hole they'd find it quick. And it's gotta be something with fairly questionable aerodynamic properties (i.e. damaged) or questionable guidance (i.e not an inadvertently released bomb) otherwise they'd have a very good idea of where it landed.
by seansh | 2026-02-11 12:51:25+00:00
> As for the usefulness aspect, personally I am not sure that this has a benefit over e.g. watching youtube tutorials/following books.

I do like YouTube video tutorials, but only as long as they're short. Watching Handmade Hero (by Casey Muratori) for example was a little frustrating: the videos are long, the codebase is large, things are moving fast, and I'd get lost.

I often wished I could pause the video to look up the definition of a function, or get an overview of when each file/line was edited and jump straight to that point.

Books/blogs are ok for explaining large codebases that already exist, but not for following a project as the code constantly changes. The book Crafting Interpreters did a really good job there, but that's really rare and hard to do.

I think CodeMic could be useful for this kind of long-form tutorials.
by nickjj | 2026-02-11 12:51:46+00:00
> How do you check that the open sourced code is the same one that you are installing from the extension repository and actually running?

Extensions are local files on disk. After installing it, you can audit it locally.

I don't know about all operating systems but on Linux they are stored as .xpi files which are zip files. You can unzip it.

On my machine they are installed to $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/52xz2p7e.default-release/extensions but I think that string in the middle could be different for everyone.

Diffing it vs what's released in its open source repo would be a quick way to see if anything has been adjusted.
by qudat | 2026-02-11 12:52:16+00:00
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI.

Believing what companies say is the reason for a layoff instead of figuring out the actual reason is insane. Never believe companies, they are amoral beings that will justify any reason to save their brand image.
by marcus2004 | 2026-02-11 12:52:18+00:00
Built this to solve a real problem: AI agents need infrastructure for commerce.

Traditional escrow services (Escrow.com, PayPal) charge 3-5% + fixed fees and take days to settle. For an agent economy with micropayments and instant transactions, that doesn't work.

This system uses smart contracts on Polygon for trustless escrow (~$0.003 gas), automated price negotiation, and reputation scoring.

Framework-agnostic: works with LangChain, AWS Bedrock, AutoGen, etc.

Open to feedback on the architecture—especially around dispute resolution and cross-chain support (v3.0 roadmap).

Tech: Node.js, A2A protocol v0.3.0, ethers.js, Polygon. MIT licensed.
by probably_wrong | 2026-02-11 12:52:19+00:00
My honest reaction to your comment is "What? No!".

I want to block ads, block trackers, auto-deny tracking, download videos, customize websites, keep videos playing in the background, change all instances of "car" to "cat" [1], and a whole bunch of weird stuff that probably shouldn't be included in the browser by default. Just because the browser extension system is broken it doesn't mean that extensions themselves are a problem - if anything, I wish people would install more extensions, not less.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1288/
by goku12 | 2026-02-11 12:53:20+00:00
It really boils down to if the individual cares about freedoms. Some hackers don't care about them, and some normies do. Both of them use centralized and restrictive services. But the former does it by choice, while the latter does it because they don't know any better. But those normies do take an action when they have enough information. How many ordinary people have participated in boycotts and cancelation of subscriptions against corporations in protest of exploitation or for digital detoxification?

It's partially our own failure to be loud enough and get them the information they need.
by igorpcosta | 2026-02-11 12:53:24+00:00
I think it's extremely value what Thomas is doing with Checkpoints, I have this built in on autohand code cli that allows you to share with others your session /share https://autohand.link/s/ah-23wbbq4v2r5vt86684hg-1768476838

You can see the turns, tools called, outputs, changes. Similar to what he's trying to achieve.
by snowwrestler | 2026-02-11 12:53:27+00:00
The mental model that helps visualize why the sky is blue—blue photons flying in every direction—is also the mental model that helps understand the greenhouse effect.

Visible light passes through the atmosphere, gets absorbed by the ground, and then re-radiated at infrared (IR) wavelengths. Atmospheric gases like water vapor, methane, and CO2 cause a certain amount of that IR light to shoot in every direction. So a portion of inbound solar energy gets trapped bouncing around inside the atmosphere for a while before it finally makes it out.

Basically the greenhouse effect is the sky glowing in infrared in addition to blue. We can’t see infrared, but we can feel it with our skin. It feels like warmth.
by joshuaissac | 2026-02-11 12:53:31+00:00
> FIPS-compliant bindings (OpenSSL)

Using FIPS mode can be insecure because the latest FIPS-compliant version can be years older than the latest non-FIPS one with all the updates.

The only time it makes sense to use the FIPS version is where there is a legal or contractual requirement that trumps security considerations.
by amiga386 | 2026-02-11 12:54:28+00:00
The fact that other countries receive investment, which they welcome, doesn't mean they're not being exploited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#In_deve...

The Western companies who employ or contract people in these other countries aren't altruistically investing. They're on the hunt for people who will accept lower wages, and for governments that won't insist on workers rights, health and safety.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-02-11 12:55:11+00:00
In Java you have instrumentation agents that can do arbitrary code rewrite at runtime, including for code that has already been JITted (causing a deoptimization of it). It's first-class supported, unlike in Go.

It's used extensively to (for example) add debugging or tracing to functions in libraries or to sanitize certain code path. At work, we were able to kill off jndi from Log4J to prevent Log4Shell within hours of the announcement this way while waiting for updates of thousands of dependencies.
by bdbdbdb | 2026-02-11 12:55:16+00:00
I don't know which Reddit thread you're reading (there are many I'm sure) but the one in r/Aviation seems to have a favourite theory that there was a credible threat of someone with MANPADS, which are shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles and not some sort of sanitary product.

Apparently they have a ceiling of 18,000ft which is exactly the limit of the restriction in El Paso. Aircraft are allowed fly over if they go above that
by waku888 | 2026-02-11 12:55:21+00:00
> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.

We already live in that world. It's called "Hey Siri", "Hey Google", and "Alexa". It seems that no amount of executive tantrum has caused any of these tools to give a convergent experience.
by astressence | 2026-02-11 12:55:43+00:00
I'm on Claude Max 20x ($200/mo) which gives me plenty of headroom, but you definitely don't need that. A 5x plan works fine, or you can go the API route through OpenRouter and pay per token. The voice layer (Parakeet + Kokoro) runs locally on the M4 so that's zero cost. The key is good memory practices so the agent doesn't waste tokens re-learning things, and falling back to cheaper models (like Haiku or Gemini Flash) for simple tasks. The heavy model only kicks in when it actually needs to think.
by stared | 2026-02-11 12:56:30+00:00
See our BinaryAudit, in which we gave AI agents access to Ghidra by NSA to find malware in raw machine code: https://quesma.com/benchmarks/binaryaudit/

All tasks are open-source & we welcome contributions: https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/BinaryAudit

Discussion on X: https://x.com/pmigdal/status/2021244382800760873
by hbjkhgkytfkytv | 2026-02-11 12:56:49+00:00
No, the search is completely an utterly meaningless and annoying. It doesn't matter how well-informed the user is when they click that button, it will become clear that it's useless once they click it. The solution - remove the button.

Better solution: don't be the kind of person that builds AI slop and has people waste their time on it - especially if you don't have the UX skills to know what is good in a product yourself.
by lapcat | 2026-02-11 12:56:53+00:00
> We built an automated scanning pipeline that runs Chrome inside a Docker container, routes all traffic through a man‑in‑the‑middle (MITM) proxy, and watches for outbound requests that correlate with the length of the URLs we feed it.

The biggest problem here is that "We" does not refer to Google itself, who are supposed to be policing their own Chrome Web Store. One of the most profitable corporations in world history is totally negligent.