MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beambot | 2026-02-12 07:26:22+00:00
This is effectively PKI for personhood. The State DMV acts as the Certificate Authority (CA), signing a "leaf certificate" that is bound to the device's hardware Secure Element.

It’s less like a TLS handshake and more like OpenID for Verifiable Presentations (OID4VP). The "non-free" hardware requirement serves as Remote Attestation—it allows a verifier to cryptographically prove that the identity hasn't been cloned or spoofed by a script. The verification happens offline or via a standard web flow using the DMV’s public key to validate the data signature, ensuring the credential is authentic without requiring a phone-home to the issuer.
by ajkjk | 2026-02-12 07:26:25+00:00
yes, I am describing imagining something. Imagine taking decimals and letting them go on without ending. That is conceptualizing them intuitively. It is easy.

I don't really know what you're arguing about. You are describing the sorts of things that have to be solved to construct them rigorously. But I don't know why. No one is talking about that.
by jbaiter | 2026-02-12 07:26:39+00:00
On the other end of the spectrum, "experimental artist" (whatever that is) Lawrence English wrote "A Young Person's Guide to Hustling (in Music and the Arts", which seems more like what you're after.

https://collapseboard.com/a-young-person%E2%80%99s-guide-to-...
https://lawrenceenglish.bandcamp.com/album/a-young-persons-g...
Show HN: Fighting the War Against Expensive Reinforcement Learning
by aparekh02 | 2026-02-12 07:27:04+00:00
Reinforcement learning has become the secret weapon behind AI's most impressive specialized achievements.

From robotics with Tesla's Autopilot to DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 for predicting protein structures with 90%+ accuracy to even hedge funds deploying RL for algorithmic trading, there is a need for reinforcement learning.

And the market proves this demand further: RL grew from $1.5B (2020) → $12B (2024) with projections hitting $79B by 2030.

BUT THERE IS A BRUTAL REALITY!!!

Just to get one production line or train one model, the companies spend $100 million+ EVERY YEAR, many of which goes to computational engineering and RL engineers. Moreover, only after days or even weeks of training will you know the RL algorithm didn't work, and those days of costs and time need to just be ABSORBED into production costs.

This makes only tech giants and heavily-funded startups play this game, and that too with hard scalability.

With firsthand experience over a 3 day period training a CV line on a NVIDIA DGX Spark and months of experience with multi-agent frameworks, I know this problem as a developer just trying to work on projects. THIS IS WHY I BUILT CADENZA -> the RL-alternative, mem-native memory layer for agent specialization.

I am still developing and building the idea, but I know this problem is real so any support or guidance would be EXTREMELY valuable. Thanks!
by jbotz | 2026-02-12 07:27:32+00:00
> You should read on past the first bit...

Not GP, but... the author said explicitly "if you believe X you should stop reading". So I did.

The X here is "that the human mind can be reduced to token regurgitation". I don't believe that exactly, and I don't believe that LLMs are conscious, but I do believe that what the human mind does when it "generates text" (i.e. writes essays, programs, etc) may not be all that different from what an LLM does. And that means that most of humans's creations are also the "plagiarism" in the same sense the author uses here, which makes his argument meaningless. You can't escape the philosophical discussion he says that he's not interested in if you want to talk about ethics.

Edit: I'd like to add that I believe that this also ties in to the heart of the philosophy of Open Source and Open Science... if we acknowledge that our creative output is 1% creative spark and 99% standing on the shoulders of Giants, then "openness" is a fundamental good, and "intellectual property" is at best a somewhat distasteful necessity that should be as limited as possible and at worst is outright theft, the real plagiarism.
by torginus | 2026-02-12 07:28:51+00:00
Man, this is one of the ways society has fundamentally broken - all the 'think of the children' arguments, resting on the belief that children are so sacred, that any sort of leinency or consideration of circumstances is forbidden - lest someone guilty of molesting them might walk free.

Well now we know for a fact that some of the people making these arguments very thinking of the children very much.
by contrarian1234 | 2026-02-12 07:28:58+00:00
> It isn't "my scenario". These are real cases

maybe English isnt your native language, but "scenario" doesnt require the situation to be not real

> Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits"

We have no way to know if likeability played in to it. When rules are bendable then they are bent to the likeable and attractive. My example of a traffic stop is analogous and more directly relatable

> This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life

You seem to have some reading comprehension issues.. I never suggested its not currently working that way and i never suggested the current situation is not insane. If you think the current system is sane and great then thats your opinion

Everyone i know whos had to deal with the US legal system has only related horror stories
by FeepingCreature | 2026-02-12 07:29:07+00:00
I work at a D company. We tend to use OOP only for state owners with strict dependencies, so it's rare to even get cycles. It is extremely useful for modeling application state. However, all the domain data is described by immutable values and objects are accessed via parameters as much as fields.

When commandline apps were everywhere, people dreamed of graphical interfaces. Burdened by having to also do jobs that it was bad at, the commandline got a bad reputation. It took the dominance of the desktop for commandline apps to find their niche.

In a similar way, OOP is cursed by its popularity. It has to become part of a mixed diet so that people can put it where it has advantages, and it does have advantages.
by JetSetIlly | 2026-02-12 07:29:30+00:00
This is a timely article for me. I was consulting Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebooks just yesterday and wondered if these sorts of notebooks were a common thing or whether it was just Atari.

Joe Decuir was an engineer at Atari and was involved with the development of the 2600. His notebooks can be useful references for the 2600, even to this day.

https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977

https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978
by anonzzzies | 2026-02-12 07:30:26+00:00
Same for ERP/CRM/HRM and some financial systems ; all systems that were heavy 'no-code' (or a lot of configuration with knobs and switches rather than code) before AI are now just going to lose their programmers (and the other roles); the business logic / financial calcs etc were already done by other people upfront in excel, visio etc ; now you can just throw that into Claude Code. These systems have decades of rigid code practices so there is not a lot of architecting/design to be done in the first place.
by brailsafe | 2026-02-12 07:30:41+00:00
That's a tough one, but considering it's only the 7th major version to come out in 23 years, I'd say that's a fairly safe place to demarcate backwards compatibility, considering that it's (probably) a fairly major UI overhaul on both iOS and Mac. Despite the poor quality of the OSes themselves, it's just a small studio, gotta pick your battles carefully. You can still use the version you're using, and if you ever upgrade to the new OS you can get the new version, seems reasonable enough to me
by palmotea | 2026-02-12 07:31:09+00:00
> There could be a world where the muon radiation fallout of WWIV has contaminated all unmined terrestrial mineral sources.

All unmined terrestrial mineral sources? I don't know what the heck you're talking about, but that sounds like a world where everyone's dead. Pretty sure all the bomb shelters in the world are shallower than the deepest mine.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-12 07:32:01+00:00
Yes, if I want to read mountains of papers and meticulously watch and count what I eat and stay current on research and accept difficulty in deciding what and where to eat and treat the joyful act of eating as if it were a shameful act of desperation, then I could. But like I said, I have enough hobbies and I find no shame in recognising that my lineage evolved from a single cell organism to an apex predator.
by arcadia_leak | 2026-02-12 07:32:22+00:00
On the flipside, with OOP is usually quite easy to put a debugger breakpoint on a particular line and see the full picture of what the program is doing.

In diehard FP (e.g. Haskell) it's hard to even place a breakpoint, let alone see the complete state. In many cases, where implementing a piece of logic without carrying a lot of state is impossible, functional programming can also become very confusing. This is especially true when introducing certain theoretical concepts that facilitate working with IO and state, such as Monad Transformers.
by unethical_ban | 2026-02-12 07:32:28+00:00
This suggests that the immediate availability of a drop-in replacement today means there is no utility in encouraging that growth.

There are multiple open-source tools that do everything Discord does. There are few-to-none that offer everything Discord does, and certainly none that are centralized, network-effect-capture-ready.

Short term:

* Small group chats with known friends: Signal, whatsapp, IRC, Matrix

* Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat

* Community voice: Mumble, Teamspeak

* Video / screen sharing and voice chat: Zoom, BigBlueButton, Jitsi

I've heard about Stoat but haven't read up on it.
by hks0 | 2026-02-12 07:33:09+00:00
I think it's where one plugs the external world into in their brain. For my daily work, I plug the desktop to my current thought stream (or short term memory?). Anything not immediately relevant to what I'm thinking about is an unnecessary speed bump or stutter in my speech, which means minimal window decoration, no status bars, ... and anything not visible can be summoned by a quick single "label" somehow, not by navigating a structure. This is more similar to what the author suggested.

{And if I'm getting what you said correctly}
What you described, is similar to how I organize my drawers in my room. Everything is visible at once, but navigating them usually takes 2 or 3 steps. Without this visual map I'm completely lost.
by keiferski | 2026-02-12 07:33:20+00:00
It depends on your art form and what you’re trying to say. Because once you start optimizing your work for sales, you are deliberately going down a certain path.

I don’t want to criticize that path - because being paid as an artist is a millennia-old thing. The idea that true artists don’t work for money is something that came out of the Romantic era, and many, many world famous historical artists like Da Vinci or Michelangelo were doing a job for rich clients. But it seems to lock you into a path where you need to replicate the same style over and over again, because that’s what you’re known for.

There’s a great little scene in the Basquiat movie about this:

I'm talking about the same kind of work. The same style, so people can recognize you and don’t get confused. Once you’re famous, airborne, you gotta keep doing it in the same way. Even after it’s boring. Unless you want people to really get mad at you…which they will anyway.

https://youtu.be/hfI1YAo32fc?si=05msdQY9-SCJAMhX

I think the Phillip Glass solution of doing a completely unrelated job is probably a better solution, IF you’re trying to focus on expression. It also gives you more material for creating; if you read many writers and artists’ bios, their day jobs directly impacted their work.

My favorite example being Moby Dick - could someone without years of whaling experience even begin to conceive of that book?
by eddythompson80 | 2026-02-12 07:33:32+00:00
Python was common place long before ML. Ever since 1991, it would jump in popularity every now and then, collect enough mindshare, then dives again once people find better tools for the job. It long took the place of perl as the quick "linux script that's too complex for bash" especially when python2 was shipping with almost all distros.

For example, python got a similar boost in popularity in the late 2000s and early 2010s when almost every startup was either ruby on rails or django. Then again in the mid 2010s when "data science" got popular with pandas. Then again in the end of 2010s with ML. Then again in the 2020s with LLMs. Every time people eventually drop it for something else. It's arguably in a much better place with types, asyncio, and much better ecosystem in general these days than it was back then. As someone who worked on developer tools and devops for most of the time, I always dread dealing with python developers though tbh.
by microtonal | 2026-02-12 07:34:38+00:00
Siri on the Apple Watch is even more fun. It can never answer a question and always opens up a webpage. Then you try to read it on the teensy display and then you are rewarded for your effort by the Siri/WatchOS/whatever closing the view after just a few seconds (even when you were scrolling with the crown).

I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.
by bothlabs | 2026-02-12 07:34:57+00:00
Having worked with ML-based sensing for years, what stands out here isn't the accuracy (near 100%), it's the simplicity. No specialized hardware, no cameras, no cooperation from the target needed. Just passive observation of unencrypted beamforming feedback that every modern router already broadcasts.

The window to embed privacy protections into the IEEE 802.11bf standard is closing. Once this is ratified without safeguards, retrofitting privacy will be much harder.
by matt-attack | 2026-02-12 07:36:24+00:00
Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?

For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.

Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.

No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.
by teekert | 2026-02-12 07:37:11+00:00
I'm like that too. Sometimes I work for too long and go for dinner, get kids to bed etc... And then take some time to shutdown the computer. Sometime I write myself a note in a readme of the current task. But I close every window on every desktop manually (inc browser which start with clean session), thinking about if I still need anything from it. Then relaxing can begin.
by frm88 | 2026-02-12 07:37:11+00:00
No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...
by gmueckl | 2026-02-12 07:38:51+00:00
My experience is that all LLMs that I have tested so far did a very good job producing D code.

I actually think that the average D code produced has been superior to the code produced for the C++ problems I tested. This may be an outlier (the problems are quite different), but the quality issues I saw on the C++ side came partially from the ease in which the language enables incompatible use of different features to achieve similar goals (e.g. smart_ptr s new/delete).
by that_guy_iain | 2026-02-12 07:39:42+00:00
Let's be serious, most people are regulars and this has been on the front page multiple times like constantly. And it was upvoted 4 times on new to get to the front page rapidly. It's not something new that we're all "Oh that's cool".

We also know there are tons of sock accounts.

And no half of the posts on front page can't be put in that since they aren't constantly reposted like this.

So, while there are a few people who will have learnt about this for the first time. Most of you know what it is and somehow feel like this is your chance to go look I'm smarter than Iain. And I think you've failed again.
by knuckleheads | 2026-02-12 07:39:45+00:00
Red Alert II for me would be great.

A plea to the various lab engineering teams: please create a json format or whatever that lets me configure this with voices locally. I am a happy user as of late of the Codex app by Open AI. It would be great if I could just give it some JSON somehow and it just works. I suppose skills can do this and I will try that later on. But I think this stuff matters, and it would be nice to have it built in and encouraged.
by halapro | 2026-02-12 07:39:56+00:00
> It's not core to their business

You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:

I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm.

and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask.

This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.

If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
by jononor | 2026-02-12 07:40:54+00:00
The best commercial case for Open Source is as part of a commoditize-your-complements strategy, in my opinion. Give away the open source part in order to increase demand for your proprietary offerings. Use the open source project to build brand recognition, trust, active community, etc. But earn the money on something complimentary.

Examples:
- Agency / software house, sells consulting, makes open source libraries in their niche.
- Hardware/product vendor, sells devices, open software on the device.
- SaaS vendor for IoT, sells say managed database service, gives away reference software/hardware designs for IoT devices.

This concept is easy in principle, but requires there to be two things which have very strong synergy, and one needs to execute well in both.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-12 07:41:21+00:00
> Furthermore, ask the maintainers of OpenBSD or any hardened OS about attack surfaces.

OpenBSD still ships with telnet.

Their developers don't entertain nonsense virtue signaling about things that are "unsafe" and they know their users are not idiots that need to be coddled.

Hammers and matches are unsafe if you use them wrong.
by eminio31020 | 2026-02-12 07:41:30+00:00
Most social apps stop at conversation.

Grangou helps people actually meet in real life over food at local restaurants. Users choose what they want to eat, their budget, and when they’re free. We match them into 1:1 dinners or small groups and handle the restaurant logistics.

We’re early and would love honest feedback from the HN community, especially on how we should think about scaling city by city and balancing B2C subscriptions with restaurant partnerships.
by nomel | 2026-02-12 07:44:15+00:00
I think reducing the number of steps would be a very reasonable workaround.

There's also around 4600 that are pure white, and something near that that are pure black, for the scene above.

Even with 18,000, let it run for a little over an hour, and you're done!

18000 * 0.5s shutter / 3600 = 2.5 hours for worst case shutter, /2 for average = 1.25 hours.
by dirkc | 2026-02-12 07:44:41+00:00
Maybe this is why I still prefer working with a very vanilla vim setup, when I start with a coding task, I have to think for a moment about what files I need to work in and start by opening one. There is no IDE with 5 files already open. I do sometimes cheat and put a TODO comment in some files so that `git status` helps me remember where I left off previously.

Another thing that I've enjoyed a lot is a browser plugin called OneTab, when I start a new task or context switch I just hit the button and all the browser tabs are saved and closed. I then go through the list and only open up the tabs relevant to the task or I just start from scratch.
by dwb | 2026-02-12 07:44:43+00:00
It becomes moderately better than nothing when “everyone” (not even close to everyone) does it. And there are some decisions (taking fewer/no flights, no fossil-fueled car, etc) that are a lot more effective than others. Personally I try to do my best! But in general, individual actions are dwarfed by systems bigger than them. Even being able to shun cars is only feasible if you live in a city with good public transport, for instance.
by nottorp | 2026-02-12 07:45:42+00:00
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured?

How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?

And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?

Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
by boring-human | 2026-02-12 07:46:16+00:00
I think AI "slop" will improve medical diagnoses dramatically. Let's assume for a second that the first specialist did not graduate at the top of their class.

The year is 2030, when LLMs are more pervasive. The first specialist now asks you to wait, heads into the other room and double-checks their ET diagnosis with AI. Doing so has become standard practice to avoid malpractice suits. The model persuades them to diagnose PV, avoiding a Type-II error.

But let's say the model gets it wrong too. You eventually visit the second specialist, who did graduate at the top of their class. The model says ET, but the specialist is smart enough to tell that the model is wrong. There is some risk that the second specialist takes the CYA route, but I'd expect them not to. They diagnose PV, avoiding a Type-I error.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-02-12 07:46:35+00:00
I'd say painting is quite a different business model than making music. There are different channels, people nowadays don't understand the value of music because they "have" everything on Spotify/Apple Music/whatever and there must be a huge tech behind you to sell good quality of sound. You also can't make your own CD (yes you can, but will it work with a CDR recorder?) and sell it progressively for $100 then for $500...

Paintings are really different kind of animal.