MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spiderfarmer | 2026-02-02 10:27:10+00:00
You could, of course, demand/wish/hope that right-wing politicians did anything about slavery in foreign nations. But somehow “trying to do anything good” is on left-wing politicians, while right-wing politicians, without repercussions, can thwart all anti-slavery efforts made by the US over several decades.

Like ending 69 global initiatives to end child labor, forced labor and trafficking:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/trump-cuts-c...

US politics in a nutshell. In order to feel you’ve contributed to a conversation, you can just yell DEI and be done with it.
by iso1631 | 2026-02-02 10:27:22+00:00
> let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD

Sounds brilliant. 2024 LLMs were great, and hosted in gigantic datacenters. South Park did an episode on ChatGPT in 2023 to assist with the timescales.

If we can run Free LLMs on a desktop PC that's competitive with 2024 a massive win.

Unless of course you believe that AI will continue to increase exponentially, in which case we're heading for such a different world in 10-15 years that it's meaningless to worry about it and you might as well have fun before the AI decides to kill us all
by lelanthran | 2026-02-02 10:28:38+00:00
Okay, lets go with your reasoning - software should not be apolitical/should be more political.

Where's the bar where you shut down discussion? I mean, even politics is contextual, right?

You entering a campaign about the plight of Myanmar and getting annoyed at people who don't want to hear your message about Gaza puts the blame for any conflict arising on that purely on ... YOU!

IOW, Even within political discussion, you can still be off-topic!

> If you meant to scope your statement only to FOSS, then this still applies (in fact, FOSS is inherently political)

Entering a GNU project (which has the political context of Copyleft and IP reform), and attempting to use it to spread a message about ICE behaviour still makes that asshole behaviour.

Only the most extremist true-believers feel that every platform is for their benefit. Trust me, it's not.
by mozz100 | 2026-02-02 10:28:56+00:00
Could you say a bit more about "it is very unreliable"? I'm considering using django-tasks with an rq backend [1] and would like to hear about your experiences. Did you find it dropping tasks, difficult to operate, etc.

[1] https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/django-tasks?tab=readme-ov-...
by sixhobbits | 2026-02-02 10:29:16+00:00
yeah I've built a bunch of small and medium bots and every time I've tried to use a library I've run into way more problems than just using the telegram API directly, which is definitely one of the nicer APIs I've used

And between the really good docs and thousands of community wrappers, the agents can usually one-shot complex Telegram-API related features too.
by throwaway290 | 2026-02-02 10:29:35+00:00
> Now I live in a very soundproof apartment, literally never hear anyone else (our neighbours right next door had a party until 4am with loud music, etc. We didn't hear a thing). I love this now.

Unless your soundproofing is thicker than the bass sound wavelength (10m+) it's not physically possible.

I know people who live in standalone houses and complain about people across the street having parties because bass vibrations come over

It's all very psychological. Good for you though
by eaurouge | 2026-02-02 10:30:23+00:00
Nurseries sound similar to run-till-completion schedulers [0].

> IMO the urge to use both the actor model (and its relative, CSP) in non-distributed systems solely in order to achieve concurrency has been a massive boondoggle

Can't you model any concurrent non-distributed system as a concurrent distributed system?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-to-completion_scheduling
by srinath693 | 2026-02-02 10:31:29+00:00
Regardless of whether the DFU port documentation is technically wrong or the author misdiagnosed the root cause, the real failure here is that macOS silently spent an hour "installing" an update, then rolled back without any actionable error message. No "hey, try a different port." No diagnostic log surfaced to the user. Just a vague "some updates could not be installed" notification with a "Details" button that shows no details.
Apple knows which port each device is connected to. Apple knows which port is the DFU port. If there's a known incompatibility with external disk updates on that port, the OS should refuse to start the update with a clear message, not waste an hour of the user's time and silently fail. This is the kind of UX regression that erodes trust in the platform, especially for power users who are exactly the audience booting from external disks.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-02 10:31:42+00:00
myanmar has had an ongoing civil war for decades so location is moot. there is no central authority that has the ability to deal with these things. the scam centres can get a lot of freedom just by supplying tinned food and petrol to whichever group they are closest to.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/4/4/hundreds-of-enslaved...
one thing that is still happening is fishing fleets buy myanmar people and keep them as slaves on trawlers or in remote island prison camps

there are 100+ formal languages in Myanmar, at least 100 unique ethnic groups, and over 150 armed combat groups. and the ethnic diversity is very abrupt, people living 30km away from each other can be so different they can't communicate with each other at all. foreign governments have almost zero influence on the ground

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_armed_organisat...

because the languages are so complex and dialect driven, they are often impossible to translate and monitor too.
by arnorhs | 2026-02-02 10:32:08+00:00
Interesting, props for coming up with a good name.

But it's weird to me to call this a "ratchet", and not just a custom lint rule. Since it sounds exactly like a lint rule.

The hard-coded count also sounds a bit like something that I would find annoying to maintain in the long run and it might be hard to get a feeling for whether or not the needle is moving in the right direction. - esp. when the count goes down and up in a few different places so the number stays the same.. you end up in a situtation where you're not entirely sure if the count goes up or down.

A different approach to that is to have your ratchet/lint-script that detects these "bad functions" write the file location and/or count to a "ratchets" file and keep that file in version control.

In CI if the rachet has changes, you can't merge because the tree is dirty, and you'd have to run it yourself and commit it locally, and the codeowner of the rachet file would have to approve.

at least that would be a slightly nicer approach that maintaining some hard-coded opaque count.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-02 10:32:09+00:00
Sean Goedecke articulated a different theory of promotion (at large tech companies; it probably does generalize to large non-tech companies and almost certainly won't generalize to small companies):

He said that you get a promotion for one of two reasons:

(a) the company is afraid that, without the promotion, you'll leave; or

(b) the company wants you to accomplish some task, and believes that you will be better able to do it if granted additional political power.

This post seems to agree well with that option (b). It advises that you make the case for your own promotion based on two prongs:

(1) the success of my project is important to the business;

(2) my project is more likely to succeed if I am promoted.

(The post also throws full support to option (a).)
by Maro | 2026-02-02 10:32:15+00:00
Promotions are always discussed in the context of "How to get promoted?". In my opinion, an important angle is left out of these discussion and conversations: do you really want to get promoted? is it worth it?

To make it simple binary, I think there are 2 kinds of promotions:

A. the kind where you pretty much continue doing what you were doing before, but with a nicer title and more money

B. the kind where the new role will put you into a whole new situation, which may or may not be a good fit for you

People always assume it'll be like 1., but there are certain career inflection points where this is not true. Approximating these in 3 minutes of typing:

1. Going from junior IC levels (where others work extra hard to support you, and are doing much of the work with you, for you) to mid IC levels.

2. Going from IC to becoming a manager.

3. Going to executive level.

4. Going to board-level executive level.

Note: I'm putting aside the handful of tech companies where people can stay on the technical track and still get ahead; at most companies you end up going into management, if for no other reason to avoid an incompetent outside hire to end up as your boss..

In the above list, 1. is of course undesirable and unavoidable, but the rest should be thought over hard, for many months, and should be considered a major life decision.

Eg. recently I'v been promoted from Sr. Director (a non-executive management role) to VP (an executive manager role) — I didn't ask for it, it was a result of a re-org — and it's been super tough. Completely new rules, new crowd, new worries, but with all the worries of my old job..

As a people manager I constantly have staff ICs telling me they want to get promoted to become a Director, and I always tell them — from the bottom of my heart — enjoy the "simple life" of IC-ship while you can, once you go over to management [at any bigco], things will be much less fun. Because, if coding and building things is fun for you, then managing PIPs, procurements, vendor engagements, and corporate politics in general will not be fun.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-02 10:32:15+00:00
>Kalamazoo already had a thriving musical scene in 1974 and was the ideal location for a musical gear company to launch.

It was also the original home of Gibson guitars since their founding at the turn of the century, where Gibson remained until the 1980's when they moved to Nashville.

IOW the famous Les Pauls of the classic rock '70's were being manufactured concurrently across town.
by haspok | 2026-02-02 10:33:14+00:00
> They do expect bug fixes-- especially calculation bug fixes-- as the bugs are discovered.

Maybe I'm the weird one to expect reasonably bug-free software, and if a bug is found, an eventual bugfix "for free"? ESPECIALLY if they cause monetary or life loss!

A bug means the developer did not do their job. Let's not pretend this is OK.
by zoobab | 2026-02-02 10:33:17+00:00
"But in the end, FOSDEM is not just about talks. It is about meeting people, reconnecting with friends, and having spontaneous conversations that no video stream can fully replace."

I don't go to the talks because they are recorded, it's more about meeting friends around a coffee or a beer.

Maybe in the future, we will have more tables for hacking like at CCC...
by thepasch | 2026-02-02 10:34:21+00:00
“Human artisan era of code” is hilarious if you’ve worked in any corporate codebase whatsoever. I’m still not entirely sure what some of the snippets I’ve seen actually are, but I can say with determination and certainty that none of it was art.

The truth about vibe coding is that, fundamentally, it’s not much more than a fast-forward button: ff you were going to write good code by hand, you know how to guide an LLM to write good code for you. If, given infinite time, you would never have been able to achieve what you’re trying to get the LLM to do anyway, then the result is going to be a complete dumpster load.

It’s still garbage in, garbage out, as it’s always been; there’s just a lot more of it now.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-02 10:34:42+00:00
> The differency between FullHD and 4K is very noticeable with THX-recommended viewing angles. I watch 98” from 3 meters.

I think you'll find fairly few people (outside of serious TV enthusiasts) have their living room setup like this. It's a massive amount of wall space to dedicate to a TV, and a pretty tight sofa <-> coffee table <-> TV placement.
by yesturi | 2026-02-02 10:35:02+00:00
It is interesting that the vendor adapts the hardware token and then makes it weak on the software side.

I recently did similar thing for the FineReader 6 using a hardware dongle [0]. It was surprisingly easy, no disassembly at all, just injecting srand(0) and a hardcoding the responses from the dongle. I had no prior reverse-engineering experience at all.

[0] https://slomkowski.eu/abbyy-finereader-6-ikey-1000-hack/
by Rembertir | 2026-02-02 10:35:05+00:00
been there “just one more function” is dev-speak for disappearing into the void.

what helped me wasn’t forcing myself to shutdown, but giving my brain a clear signal that it’s time to switch gears. One simple trick that actually worked: before each coding block, I write down the last line I want to write before I stop. It gives me a natural off-ramp—and weirdly, my brain starts to anticipate that pause instead of resisting it.

On top of that, I use an app that’s built around nervous system regulation, not just timers or blocks. It actually changes how focused I feel while working. I don’t need to fight myself—it gets me into flow and keeps me there longer, without the crash, music is pretty awesome too
by curlii | 2026-02-02 10:37:02+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m Peter a designer and developer. I made this new tool i call Design In The Browser. I built this because I kept running into the same problem: explaining visual changes. I’d end up constantly taking screenshots, copying them into the terminal, and writing long prompts describing which element, where it is, what to change, then repeating when the AI guessed wrong, when all I really wanted to do was point at it.

Design In The Browser lets you click any element on your page and send it directly to Claude Code, Cursor, or Gemini CLI with full context. The AI knows exactly what you’re looking at, so you skip the back-and-forth. It also has an integrated terminal, viewport switcher for responsive testing. A cool thing is that you can also queue prompts while Claude Code is working and batch multiple edits.

It’s macOS only for now, free to use, and works with any local dev server. Would love feedback, especially on what features you’d want next.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-02 10:38:14+00:00
The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.

(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)
by maffyoo | 2026-02-02 10:38:44+00:00
this seems reasonable but isn't the conclusion a statement what we already know. These tools are really powerful, but with the ability to cause significant pain, need organisations to adapt, so that they can make best use of them but this is fraught with security problems. AI looks a lot like a technology problem but ultimately, to most small businesses, it's a procurement and change management problem.

Also (I appreciate the authors message here but..)

"Excel on the finance side is remarkably limiting when you start getting used to the power of a full programming ecosystem like Python"

With the addition of lambdas Excel formulae are Turing complete. no more need for VBA in a (mostly) functional environment.

Also on this, Claude for Excel needs a lot of work (as does any tool working with financial models) if you have ever used them in anger I dont think you'll be relying on them with your non-technical finance manager for a while...
What, if anything, is AI?
by hemmert | 2026-02-02 10:39:04+00:00
In case you haven't come across it yet, the text "What, if anything, is a zebra?" nicely portrays how some things that seem to be "one thing" are in fact different, and sometimes surprisingly unrelated, things at once (striped horses formed from two different evolutionary strands, so there is not one "zebra" species [1]).

I was reminded of this when the discussion about "AI is a horse" came up again. The horse metaphor is great, because it – besides more 'horsepowers' under the hood - has its own will.

But if I had to pick one metaphor that feels right, it would be the car. Not for automation alone, but because of systemic impact: cars reshaped cities, labor, health, social life, inequality, and people's understanding of "freedom". Once cars were everywhere, opting out became difficult.

At the same time, the car metaphor breaks quickly. AI affects many areas of life at once, often with conflicting tradeoffs.

- Smoother relationships vs. authenticity and vulnerability (AI-mediated communication, companions)

- Automation of cognitive work vs. meaning and self-efficacy

- Infinite, pre-processed knowledge vs. mental obesity

- New freedom vs. responsibility for what we choose not to automate

(This is also the rough outline of a TEDx talk I gave last year — back then I called it "AI – A Car for the Mind?" [3]. I’m very glad I put the question mark in.)

How do you explain AI to those who ask, if they need a simple answer?

[1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/SJ-Gould-What-if-anything-is-a-zebra.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686402

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IYqhdJuRfU
by DrScientist | 2026-02-02 10:40:18+00:00
Indeed.

In the UK there was a unfortunate trend of ripping out these energy storage devices and replacing hot water tanks with on demand electric hot water heating ( only heat the water you need ). And new builds often have no tanks ( as it saves space in the new tiny homes ).

Very short sighted in my view - a very simple way to store energy and everyone uses hot water directly.
by lapcat | 2026-02-02 10:40:33+00:00
> The author did not test the DFU flow

I'd rather not. I'm not even sure that I have all the prerequisites on hand.

> I'm not sure why they're blaming the DFU port documentation.

1) The documentation says that macOS cannot be updated on the DFU port.

2) Switching ports allowed my macOS update to succeed after repeated failures on one port.

3) The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 chip is documented as different from all other models, but strangely, not the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 chip.

You don't present any alternative theory for the behavior, just assert that I'm wrong.
by dependency_2x | 2026-02-02 10:41:18+00:00
Ratchet is a good name/pattern. It is also grandfathering.

It is similar to how code coverage can be done. Old coverage may be low e.g. 40%, but may require 80% coverage on new lines, and over time coverage goes up.

I wonder if there has ever been a sneaky situation where someone wanted to use forbiddenFunction() really bad, so they remove the call elsewhere and tidy that up, so they could start using it.
by DavidVoid | 2026-02-02 10:41:28+00:00
I would go even further and state that "you should never assume that floating point functions will evaluate the same on two different computers, or even on two different versions of the same application", as the results of floating point evaluations can differ depending on platform, compiler optimizations, compilation-flags, run-time FPU environment (rounding mode, &c.), and even memory alignment of run-time data.

There's a C++26 paper about compile time math optimizations with a good overview and discussion about some of these issues [P1383]. The paper explicitly states:

1. It is acceptable for evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between translation time and runtime.

2. It is acceptable for constant evaluation of mathematical functions to differ between platforms.

So C++ has very much accepted the fact that floating point functions should not be presumed to give identical results in all circumstances.

Now, it is of course possible to ensure that floating point-related functions give identical results on all your target machines, but it's usually not worth the hassle.

[P1383]: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p13...
Show HN: Ask research paper figures (step-by-step explanations)
by loganye | 2026-02-02 10:41:42+00:00
I’m building DeepTutor to reduce the time spent reading papers.
One feature we shipped: you can prompt a figure/plot and ask:
“Explain what the figures mean step-by-step.”

It outputs a structured interpretation: axes/curves, phase changes, and the takeaway.

I’d love feedback on:
1) what figure types are hardest to interpret
2) what you’d want in the output (e.g., assumptions, caveats, comparisons)

Demo: https://youtu.be/A6Y4NpLnU1M
by wongarsu | 2026-02-02 10:41:57+00:00
From the headline I expected some kinds of new communication satellites. But instead this is "just" a marketplace where government entities can purchase services. The satellites were already in orbit and already "EU sovereign", this is about making it easier to use them and centralizing capacity planning

In a way this is the dry run for when IRIS² starts service in another four years or so, the European Starshield equivalent
by tecoholic | 2026-02-02 10:42:08+00:00
This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style.

I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art.

As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did.

I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.
by ben_w | 2026-02-02 10:42:11+00:00
> Furthermore they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities.

Given the immediate response to Hiroshima was disbelief, surely an at-sea demonstration would have been even less convincing than the observable absence of a city?

Even once the Japanese government confirmed that Hiroshima had indeed been destroyed by a nuclear weapon, part of the reason Nagasaki followed Hiroshima was that the Japanese forces estimated the US couldn't have built more than one or two more (they were correct, they just hadn't internalised what losing an entire city meant).

Even after Nagasaki, there were some who attempted a coup to prevent surrender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-02 10:42:35+00:00
> That said, I definitely sit further than 60 cm too.

I've tried sitting closer than 1 metre / (3ft) from a flat 32" 4K display, and I find it kind of overwhelming. At 60cm viewing distance I end basically up keeping one window down the middle of the display that is in focus, and put utility windows off to the sides - and then I physically translate my head to look at then, because the corners of the screen are distorted if I just pivot.

I used to have a 40" 4K display, back when such things were available on eBay from SK, and I had to wall mount it some ways behind the back of my desk to use it comfortably.

I'm sure a curved panel would help with the corner distortion up close, but it kind of seems like a solution in search of a problem.
AI Just make it harder to work at tech
by localhoster | 2026-02-02 10:42:44+00:00
The amount of useless documents you had to filter yourself through, and the amount of bad code you had to work around were already massive.

But with AI, its out of proportions.
I got served with 6+ documents for requirements for some feature that could be described in 2 sentences.
Those documents were useless, obviously.

I do not understand why we are making it so much harder to do everything and calling it effective.