MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verdverm | 2026-02-05 01:12:57+00:00
> wow, you downvoted me.

1. No, I commented, it is not even possible to downvote a reply to your own comment, seems other people must disagree with what you said or how you said it

2. It's against HN guidelines to talk about your downvotes, especially making claims about who has done it

The most likely reason for your downvotes is promoting your own (incomplete) project under someone else's. What did you hope to bring to the conversation?
by dimitrios1 | 2026-02-05 01:14:10+00:00
You sit at a desk.

You get paid in the top 1% globally

You have benefits

Some hope or dreams for what to do with your future, life after work, retirement.

You get to work with other people, overseas.

Talk to those contractors sometimes. They are under tremendous pressure. They are mistreated. One wrong move, they're gone. They undergo tremendous prejudices, and soft racism everyday especially by us FTEs.

You find out that they struggle with the drudgery as well, looking for solutions, better understanding, etc.

We all feel disposable by our corporate masters, but they feel it even more so.

Be the change you want to see in the world.
by bandrami | 2026-02-05 01:14:53+00:00
> an employee to spend 100% of their time maintaining the app at 10k per month

If the cost to the company is $10K a month, the developer's topline salary is $60K, which is going to be a hard hire to make.

And, again, if they can integrate LDAP with an existing software package at that price point, I want them doing something more valuable than that.
by chatmasta | 2026-02-05 01:15:13+00:00
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”

It sounds to me like they still have the hardware, since — according to the article — "Mac Minis are selling out everywhere." What's the problem? If anything, this is validation of their hardware differentiation. The software is easy to change, and they can always learn from OpenClaw for the next iteration of Apple Intelligence.
by rockskon | 2026-02-05 01:16:16+00:00
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.

I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.

Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
by beeflet | 2026-02-05 01:17:03+00:00
real productive work like what? What do you think all this hubub with robotics is about?

I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.

There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.
by solarkraft | 2026-02-05 01:17:21+00:00
> user corrections are the highest-signal data

I can not understand how this hasn’t been capitalized on more yet! Companies with the data MUST be training on it as RLHF, right?

In general, the “chat history mining” sector seems to be way under-developed to me so far.

All the damn time I am annoyed I have to re-tell my LLM a piece of info I have already told it a few weeks ago - finding the chat takes too long and the full history may not be relevant, but the fact wasn’t interesting enough to manually add to memory.

With the right memory system, the LLM could just know!

Does anyone have other interesting examples of this principle being applied?
Show HN: Pygantry – Why ship a whole OS when you just need a Python environment?
by takouzlo | 2026-02-05 01:17:52+00:00
"Hi Hacker News,
I’ve always found Docker to be overkill for simple Python deployments. It's heavy, complex for non-tech users, and often results in 500MB+ images for a 10KB script.
That’s why I built Pygantry.
It’s a minimalist 'container' engine based on Python venv but made portable and relocatable.
Key features:
Lightweight: A full 'shipped' app is usually < 20MB.
Zero-Config: No daemon, no root, no Dockerfile complexity.
Portable: Build once, zip it, and run it anywhere with a Python interpreter.
Founder friendly: Built-in licensing and stealth modes for those building a business.
I built this to simplify my own VPS deployments. I'd love to get your feedback on the architecture and how you handle 'Docker-fatigue' in your workflow.
by pjsg | 2026-02-05 01:18:37+00:00
Many companies have internal directories which can be downloaded and (say) committed into git on a daily basis. This could be automated in a cron job. This then gives an immediate view into what is going on.

I believe that the Slack API (if your company uses Slack) can be persuaded to give you the list of deactivated accounts. Then you just check this into git (on a daily basis), and you are done.

And, of course, in this AI Agentic world, you can probably ask your HR bot about the recent layoffs and get the information even more easily!
by crazygringo | 2026-02-05 01:18:51+00:00
It made sense in an age of print. But in the era of Wikipedia it's not really needed anymore. If you want population statistics or whatever, Wikipedia will tell you and link to the country's own official metrics. You don't need the CIA to collate it all for you.

And, as multiple commenters here have noted, it's on the Internet Archive. So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end.
by alexbbb5 | 2026-02-05 01:18:53+00:00
Built this trading dashboard for my own use and decided to share it as a template.

Features:
- Bloomberg Terminal styling with glassmorphism
- 3,000+ lines of Python/Streamlit code
- Advanced CSS animations & particle systems
- TradingView integration
- Fully customizable

Tech: Python 3.8+, Streamlit, Plotly
Price: $49

Happy to answer technical questions!
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2026-02-05 01:18:57+00:00
This article is talking about the AI race as if it’s over when it’s only started. And really, an opinion of the entire market based on a few reddit posts?

Author spoke of compounding moats, yet Apple’s market share, highly performant custom silicon, and capital reserves just flew over his head. HN can have better articles to discuss AI with than this myopic hot take.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-05 01:19:17+00:00
Robotics is nothing new, we had robots in factories in the 1980s. The jobs of modern factory workers are mostly about attending to robots and other automated systems.

> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".

I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.

The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective
large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.
by dimitrios1 | 2026-02-05 01:20:35+00:00
I'm with you, I like your answer, especially the last bit.

But how to get there we may disagree.

The existing avenues have proven unfruitful.

Regulating more has just lead to more control in the hands of the elites and those with resources, who know how to game the system, and more draconianism for us smaller folks. "Rules for thee, but not for me"

Anarchy/Libertarianism isn't the answer either, its too impractical, unrealistic.

I won't pretend I'm smart enough to know what the answer is, but I am experienced enough to know whats laid before us hasn't worked and isn't working. Consumer protection regulatory bodies have been made toothless over the course of decades, I don't think I can trust them again anyways after what has happened in recent years. Financial regulatory bodies only purpose is to make life as difficult for the smaller guys. We have non-existent data and tech regulation.

It's time for new ideas.
by lukevp | 2026-02-05 01:20:47+00:00
How many chat products has Google come out with? Google messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts… Apple has iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP’s point. Apple evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be solved once and consistently. It’s not about coming to market soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
by eykanal | 2026-02-05 01:20:50+00:00
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development from Apple succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
by simonw | 2026-02-05 01:23:13+00:00
It hasn't been a print-first publication in many years - the site was updated weekly.

It's also where a lot of the facts on Wikipedia came from. This is a real loss.

I trust CIA over official population numbers from a lot of countries. There was a thread on here recently that pointed out a lot of countries haven't conducted an effective census in many years, if at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46810027
by Jacopo17s | 2026-02-05 01:23:36+00:00
Hi everyone, I’ve been developing a small independent project called Project Garden (linked below), and I wanted to share it here because it grew out of some big ideas I think many in this community care about.

The core of Project Garden isn’t tech news, tutorials, or quick opinions, it’s a digital garden for human thought. We transform ideas and intuition into deeper content meant to stimulate reflection, critical judgment, and awareness.

The vision driving us is simple but, I hope, meaningful: in a world that keeps delegating understanding, decision-making, and meaning to algorithms, exercising our own minds is a deep responsibility, because the way we think shapes the reality we live in and who we become.

www.project-garden.it

Looking forward to thoughtful responses and genuine discussion.

Thank you.

Jacopo
by codinghorror | 2026-02-05 01:23:36+00:00
The largest chunk of federal "cash transfers" is not welfare; it is retirement and disability spending. The rural population is significantly older than the urban population.

Bear in mind that rural poverty rates (~17%) remain persistently higher than urban poverty rates (~12%).

And in a high-wage urban area (e.g., Seattle), a $20,000 Social Security check is a tiny fraction of the local per capita income. In a rural area, that same $20k check represents a much larger slice of the total economic pie. This makes the reliance on government cash appear massive -- ~29% rural and ~17% urban -- even if the absolute dollar difference is more modest.

Also, metro areas receive MASSIVE amounts of federal contracting money (defense, science, universities, federal employees), whereas rural areas get virtually none.

Mostly this is caused by the "graying" of rural America and the persistent lack of high-wage employment in rural areas.
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-02-05 01:25:14+00:00
Sure but that's kinda my point. If they did this analsysis why isn't it blasted everywhere?

I've never seen a politician mention this kind of (we spend x for y returns) discussion or a doc on it holistically.

It's obvious to most people to invest money can give you more in return but that's not really discussed except peicemeal for one program at a time.
by gordian-mind | 2026-02-05 01:25:32+00:00
Yes, yes, everyone is a sycophant except you and your friends... For the record, you are lying about the quoted people having a financial interest in Elon.

No it's not "to each his own". Using your free expression to smear without admitting counterevidence, while painting everything that does not go along with your views as a doctored narrative is not a legitimate intellectual position.
by svat | 2026-02-05 01:25:42+00:00
Same, I already had a reMarkable tablet and got the reMarkable Paper Pro Move as an impulse purchase (ignoring its ridiculously high price) expecting to return it within the 50-day return window, but the fact that it fits in my pocket (or “most of my pockets”, as you said) has made a huge difference in how much I use it and how I spend my time. The sync is also nice (I think it works up to some limit even without a paid subscription, though it turned out I had one grandfathered in); I can basically send webpages I’m reading to it using the browser extension (at least on desktop). On mobile it’s a bit more annoying, but e.g. I’ve printed long newsletters from the Gmail to PDF (paper size A6) and imported the PDF onto it.

It’s perfectly adequate for writing on, but so far I’ve almost never used the fact that it has (a rudimentary set of) colours, though.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-05 01:26:42+00:00
"People are responsible for their governments" is what I like to call the "Osama bin Laden defense".

If that position is true then 9/11 was a valid military action because American citizens are responsible for their government's atrocities in the Middle East. Taken further, the US has actively deposed or supported the coups of over 50 governments since WW2 [1]. That includes Iranian Revolution of 1979 (where the US supported Khomenei) and Pinochet in Chile. It also includes puppets like Saddam Hussein who committed all sorts of crimes as a US ally including using nerve gas on the Kurds. US sanctions killed half a million children in Iraq according to a UN report. When confronted with this, then UN Ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright said "the price is worth it" [2].

Economic sanctions are a sanitized way of saying "starving people" and the track record is bleak. Arguably the only time they've ever worked is apartheid South Africa. What they do instead is entrench the very government we supposedly want to get rid of eg North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia [3].

So I would respectfully put this to you: you haven't thought this through.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...

[3]: https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/th...
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-05 01:27:40+00:00
> (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines)

PC or Mac? A PC, ya, no way, not without beefy GPUs with lots of VRAM. A mac? Depends on the CPU, an M3 Ultra with 128GB of unified RAM is going to get closer, at least. You can have decent experiences with a Max CPU + 64GB of unified RAM (well, that's my setup at least).
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-05 01:28:47+00:00
I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
by joriJordan | 2026-02-05 01:29:13+00:00
No way a well coordinated attack on Canada by US occurs without US fragmenting into tribal factions and fighting amongst themselves.

If we let it get that far and I am still around, will be gunning for my fellow Americans. Cause at that point, fuck them.

Even if I get got after one, will send a message to the rest not all their old neighbors are on their side.
by hibikir | 2026-02-05 01:30:30+00:00
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!

The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
by lizknope | 2026-02-05 01:30:37+00:00
I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/

I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.

I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
by nh2 | 2026-02-05 01:30:52+00:00
> But the people you responded to were talking about slowdowns that exist in general, not just ones that apply directly to the post.

I think that's incorrect though. These slowdowns do not exist in general (see my next reply where I run rsync and it immadiately maxes out my 10 Gbit/s).

I think original poster digiown is right with "Note there is no intrinsic reason running multiple streams should be faster than one [EDIT: 'at this scale']. It almost always indicates some bottleneck in the application". In this case it's the user running rsync as a serially-reading program reading from a network mount.

> rsync having trouble doing >1Gbps over the network

rsync copies at 10 Gbit/s without problem between my machines.

Though I have to give `-e 'ssh -c aes256-gcm@openssh.com'` or aes128-gcm, otherwise encryption bottlenecks at 5 Gbit/s with the default `chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com`.

> I don't see why you're saying this.

Because of the part you agreed making sense: It read each file with the sequence `open()/read()/.../read()/close()`, but those files are on the network mount ("/Volumes/mercury"), so each `read()` of size `#define IO_BUFFER_SIZE (32*1024)` is a network roundtrip.
by hnburnsy | 2026-02-05 01:30:57+00:00
When looking at the bylines of many of those laid off, I noticed that many had written about 2-3 articles per month. I don't know how journalism works but it seems to me that low of productivity cannot be sustainable. Example, an 8 year tech columnist had about 15 articles since August and one was a black Friday article. With all the tech news happening today, this output feels low.
by egl2020 | 2026-02-05 01:31:17+00:00
I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.
by jnaina | 2026-02-05 01:33:10+00:00
I used sell the Mac Voice Navigator (from Articulate Systems) in the 90s, which was a SCSI based hardware box that you plug into a Mac, Mac SE or Mac II. It used to use the same L&H speech recognition tech (if I recall correctly) and was called the "User Interface" of the future.

Horrible speech recognition rate and very glitchy. Customers hated it, and lots of returns/complaints.

A few years later, L&H went bankrupt. And so did Articulate Systems.

https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/macintosh-to-p...
by bri3d | 2026-02-05 01:33:29+00:00
A KDS subscription is $30 / 3 days.

https://kiatechinfo.snapon.com/J2534DiagnosticsAndProgrammin...

They claim that only an expensive J2534 interface is "recommended" (a weasely way to get around compliance requirements, although J2534 is also a terrible standard and frequently not compatible) but based on what I've read, the Kia software (KDS) is really simple and even cheap J2534 cables like a GD101 ($30) will work fine.

At this point you have the same software as the dealer would have, so any sensor related issues should be solved (besides ADAS, which like I mentioned is definitely a problem due to the need for calibration jigs). You could swap in a new ECM this way. Not even a dealer can swap a used ECM on some Kias; although in this case there are reverse engineered reflashing tools that work in most cases, too (this is kind of an intentional gap in right to repair, especially in Europe - there's a strong drive to eliminate the used car control modules market because it is heavily associated with organized crime).

I really don't find auto diagnostics to be as sinister as people think they are, or the regulation a complete failure. You can, due in large part to regulation, wade into the morass of horrible dealership diagnostics software if you want, for a limited entry fee.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-05 01:33:54+00:00
> Are there a lot of options how "how far" do you quantize?

So many: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ba55rj/overvie...

> How much VRAM does it take to get the 92-95% you are speaking of?

For inference, it's heavily dependent on the size of the weights (plus context). Quantizing an f32 or f16 model to q4/mxfp4 won't necessarily use 92-95% less VRAM, but it's pretty close for smaller contexts.
by overgard | 2026-02-05 01:34:10+00:00
I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-05 01:34:43+00:00
It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for people who like to play with new types of programs.

This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of people who’ve tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-05 01:36:52+00:00
> Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response?

Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.