MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-09 17:38:24+00:00
There is this phenomena where users of a product say they want something. But what they want is very different. People are not good at telling you what really matters to them. That's the main obstacle of Matrix's adaption I think.

Matrix tries to copy-cat all these other products. But in the end it feels like something trying to be all sorts of things and not quite doing it as well as the originals in every way. Plus you have this "confusing" security/crypto aspect. And then you have the whole issue with inconsistencies between clients.

You have to really commit to it, or matrix has to be the backend of some other more refined/specific app (like chat section on websites, like Disqus).

In my opinion, if you want Matrix adaption, stop talking about Matrix adaption, that's like talking about HTTP adaption. You want people to use clients, talk about clients. Let's talk about "Element" adaption. (side-chat: Please make names more searchable. ok, you want to use this generic/confusing term "Element", can you at least make it unique by calling it "Elemnt" with a weird spelling so it's more searchable?)

People don't like learning new and complex systems for the sake of it. It's a chore. I want to be able to tell people "let's use Element" and explain why they should use it. It would help if it had original features other products didn't have that it does really well. It's been over a year since i used Element, but I didn't like the UI at all, it felt like Teams but more clunky? perhaps the mobile app is better, I never tried it.

All that said, I think it's a great system, it's perfect for government systems too. they're not usually concerned about things looking great or having cosmetic features. I would very much prefer to use it over Teams or Slack personally. So long as it handles scheduling meetings, and managing things like booking conference rooms just as well.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-09 17:38:32+00:00
There's an extremely low fertility rate paired with a rapidly aging population. When I visited there were endless advertisements for geriatric type care / end-of-life type planning / etc, and a notably older population working quite low wage jobs in a place where everything was crazy expensive, especially relative to its northern neighbor. It felt depressing.

It seems like one of those places that is probably quite nice if you're loaded, but it seems like a pretty rough place if you're not already well off. I was also surprised that many of the stereotypes about 'one fine city' were not quite on the mark. Jaywalking, crossing against a cross-walk light, and various other little infractions were ever-present which left me feeling a bit odd as when in Rome do what the Romans do, but yeah... not gonna risk that.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 17:38:44+00:00
Obviously you can build an AI model that rides a bike, just not an LLM that does so. Even the transformer architecture would need significant modification to handle the multiple input sensor streams, and this would be continuous data you don't tokenize, and which might not need self-attention, since sensor data doesn't have long-range dependencies like language does. The biking AI model would almost certainly not resemble an LLM very much.

Calling everything "language" is not some gotcha, the middle "L" in LLM means natural language. Binary code is not "language" in this sense, and these terms matter. Robotics AIs are not LLMs, they are just AI.
by retroflexzy | 2026-02-09 17:39:05+00:00
Back in my youth, after the Internet became common but before Wikipedia, I tried to discover the answer to this and came away disappointed again and again. Every article I could find simply stated "because light scattering", and barely much more.

How does scattering work? Why does light scatter? _What does scattering even mean in the context of light?_
by warangal | 2026-02-09 17:39:06+00:00
I was also reading through lobsters Memory management, which (i think) currently implements "borrow first" semantics, to do away with a lot of run-time reference counting logic, which i think is a very practical approach. Also i have doubts if reference counting overhead ever becomes too much for some languages to never consider RC ?

Tangentially, i was experimenting with a runtime library to expose such "borrow-first" semantics, such "lents" can be easily copied on a new thread stack to access shared memory, and are not involved in RC . Race-conditions detection helps to share memory without any explicit move to a new thread. It seems to work well for simpler data-structures like sequence/vectors/strings/dictionary, but have not figured a proper way to handle recursive/dynamic data-structures!
by y-c-o-m-b | 2026-02-09 17:39:14+00:00
A decent example of why implementing authoritarian policies is a bad strategy for the US; particularly coming from the current administration. We're only strengthening Chinese supremacy at this point and tearing the US apart in the process of trying to claw some back. We don't have what it takes to pull this shit off as well as China does. This is a failure at many levels: the uncoordinated surveillance, the gross lack of security, lack of skills, lack of knowledge, etc. and it extends to many aspects of American governance. Between the US putting significant traumatic pressure on its own citizens and companies doing mass layoffs in an increasingly unaffordable economy, this will push even more brain drain overseas, which only accelerates China's strengthening stance more.
by gfarah | 2026-02-09 17:39:16+00:00
Hi! Colombian here. I reviewed the second prediction and believe the tags are incorrect. They should be: Pico Lagos del Congo, Liborina, Antioquia to Pico Cristóbal Colón, Sierra Nevada, Magdalena.

Additionally, the GPS coordinates might need adjustment, as there are several prominent peaks near both Liborina and Pico Cristóbal Colón (the summit of the Sierra Nevada mountains).

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/6%2e75514,-75%2e7222/@6....

[2] https://earth.google.com/web/search/10%2e8467,-73%2e7029/@10...
by harshaw | 2026-02-09 17:39:17+00:00
Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braking event is an effective mechanism for behavior change (other companies have similar tech)
by pjmlp | 2026-02-09 17:39:49+00:00
NeXT added a Java variant to WebObjects and it was for several years the main server side infrastructure, after being acquired by Apple.

Nowadays you can usually still find Java and JVM languages like Clojure (Apple Maps), on Apple's job ads.

How much of it is still Java based, no idea.

I imagine XCode Cloud has nothing to with it for example.
by rhdunn | 2026-02-09 17:40:01+00:00
From [1] "Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project."

Forgejo became a hard fork in 2024, with both projects diverging. If you're using it for local hosting I don't personally see much of a difference between them, although that may change as the two projects evolve.

[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
by charcircuit | 2026-02-09 17:40:05+00:00
>You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor.

So what? If I store a document in a private Google doc. I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening. It's possible to design proper access systems where random people are not able to come in and utilize that access.
by alwa | 2026-02-09 17:40:16+00:00
Why would we expect it to introspect accurately on its training or alignment?

It can articulate a plausible guess, sure; but this seems to me to demonstrate the very “word model vs world model” distinction TFA is drawing. When the model says something that sounds like alignment techniques somebody might choose, it’s playing dress-up, no? It’s mimicking the artifact of a policy, not the judgments or the policymaking context or the game-theoretical situation that actually led to one set of policies over another.

It sees the form that’s written down as all there is to the truth (and it emulates that form well). In doing so it misses the “why” and the “how,” and the “what was actually going on but wasn’t written about,” the “why this is what we did instead of that.”

Some of the model’s behaviors may come from the system prompt it has in-context, as we seem to be assuming when we take its word about its alignment techniques. But I think about the bulk of the alignment techniques I’ve heard of even as a non-practitioner (RLHF, pruning weights, cleaning the training corpus, “guardrail” models post-output, “soul documents” …). Wouldn’t those be as invisible to the model’s context as our subconscious is to us?

Like the model, I can guess about my subconscious motivations (and speak convincingly about those guesses as if they were facts), but I have no way to know them as fact.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-09 17:40:18+00:00
> celebrity economist's

That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.

> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no

Nope.

If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?

Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.

Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.
by rv888 | 2026-02-09 17:40:20+00:00
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: A wide range but lately: Django, FastAPI Python, React, AI ~ Anthropic / OpenAI / ChatGPT / Higgsfield, Roku Brightscript, Linux, React, and various cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Digital Ocean. Streaming and broadcasting using Ant media server.

Résumé/CV: https://www.ryanvinson.com

Email: info@ryanvinson.com

Who I am:

Fractional CTO with 25+ years of layered experience across a multitude of technology solutions. I'm a Swiss army knife of technology solutions. I've consulted executives on the best approaches, interviewed and hired their staff, lead and managed teams of developers for quick turnaround projects as well as more in depth ongoing products. Language experience with Mandarin Chinese (advanced) and Khmer (basic).

What I am looking for:

I'm looking for projects that need a part time Fractional CTO. I especially excel working with multimedia and entertainment related companies.
by arseniibr | 2026-02-09 17:40:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on an open-source tool Veritensor:
https://github.com/arsbr/Veritensor

The goal is to help teams secure the AI/ML supply chain as models, datasets, and tooling increasingly come from third parties.

What it currently does:
-Detects malicious code, hidden payloads, and unsafe operations inside ML models (e.g. Pickle, PyTorch, Keras) using static analysis and a custom execution engine
-Verifies model integrity and detects tampering or supply-chain risks
-Scans datasets for data poisoning, anomalies, and potential PII leaks
-Analyzes documents used in RAG pipelines (PDF, DOCX, PPTX) for prompt injection and embedded threats
-Inspects Jupyter notebooks for unsafe code, secrets, and risky patterns
-Signs container images using Sigstore Cosign
-Integrates into CI/CD pipelines and ML validation workflows

This is an early-stage project and very much a work in progress. It does not aim to replace runtime sandboxing, isolation, or human review, and it's not intended to be a silver bullet.

I’m interested in feedback from people running ML systems in production:
-What parts of the AI supply chain are you most concerned about today?
-Are there checks or threat models you feel are missing here?
-Which parts of this approach seem flawed, incomplete, or unlikely to work in production?
-Would a tool like this be useful in your production workflows, or would it be hard to adopt in practice?
-Any suggestions on how to improve the project or make it more practical for real-world use would be really appreciated.

Thanks for you time!
by 10729287 | 2026-02-09 17:41:26+00:00
Sounds like a great way to impulse buy of extra data. It’s time to understand that all those strategies to avoid spending too much time on phone never works if you have a discipline issue. This is a trap, set up by an army of marketers stronger than your will. You’ll always end up reinstalling apps, adding more time, toggle monochrome mode for full color or now, buy more data. Just close your accounts. Period.
by mmooss | 2026-02-09 17:41:36+00:00
In handwritten notes I've done it many times. Mathematicians seem to create them.

On computers I haven't had the opportunity. When adopting new technology people commonly don't imagine the applications - even expert technologists, even those who developed the technology, often don't know.

> Would the added expressive power make up for the inconvenience of having to explain the meaning of the novel symbols?

It's a good question, but I could see definitions working efficiently in many situations. If the symbol is shorthand, it's easy to say 'the population of Hacker News P(H) ...', and it works well in mathematics, 'let Q be _____'. (These are imperfect examples because I can't create new symbols.)
by snuxoll | 2026-02-09 17:41:55+00:00
> I didn't get meds when I was younger. Now I have top 1% IQ (likely average here on hn), but work as a butcher at a slaughterhouse. My mom didn't want to stigmatise me with a diagnosis.

I really hope I'm not stating the obvious to you here, but don't let your current situation define you like it guarantees the course of the rest of your life.

> But if I had less problems at school, I might've been doing sth more fun now and less demanding on the body.

Even on Adderall in my teenage years, I fucked around in school - it didn't interest me, which is not uncommon in 2e individuals with ADHD. Dropped out at 16, got my GED a few years later, never went to college, resigned myself to the fact that I would be working class like my parents for the rest of my life.

But the right doors opened because I kept pulling at the knobs when I saw them, while the thousands of hours of my free time messing around with dozens of linux distros, writing toy programs for personal use, and a little bit of selling the unique talents my atypical neurology gives me, were enough to get me through one interview, and then the next.

The non-traditional path still very much exists in many fields, but it always starts at smaller companies that are less glamorous to work at, and often don't pay as well. None of us may be entitled to anything, but that doesn't mean we should resign ourselves to wasting our talents because the traditional paths didn't work out for our unique situations.
by freedomben | 2026-02-09 17:42:09+00:00
Hell yeah, this is some badass hackery, and the type of stuff I love seeing on HN. In the last decade or so as more and more stuff becomes locked down and hacker unfriendly, I've found myself longing for simple things I can hack on. If I ever get to a point where I don't have to work for a living, one of the things I'd like to do is build everything from little gadgets up to major appliances that are simple, reliable, and hackable for people who want to. It pains me that my appliances have full computers driving them but I can't get access to them. Kudos for this awesome work and phenomenal write-up!
by wsowens | 2026-02-09 17:42:27+00:00
It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.

It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.

Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-09 17:42:37+00:00
Feels like there's a number of these trend shifts that are hard to explain, that make a fantastic canvas for projecting world view onto. The school performance dip is one, global decline in birth rates another.

You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.

You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
by Findecanor | 2026-02-09 17:42:43+00:00
> ... [pointers] need to be clumped into one array ...

You could put each stack frame into a struct, and have the first field be a pointer to a const static stack-map data structure or function that enumerates the pointers within the frame.

BTW, the passed pointer to this struct could also be used to implement access to the calling function's variables, for when you have nested functions and closures.
by ortichic | 2026-02-09 17:42:43+00:00
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but do you guys not have radio controlled clocks outside of Europe?
If I got it right, the only purpose of this project is to always display the correct time. Radio controlled clocks do exactly that. They are cheaper than the one ESP board, and run years on a single AA battery. No WiFi, tinkering, setup, or cables necessary
by ElCapitanMarkla | 2026-02-09 17:42:57+00:00
I loved GTA II and spent hours playing it when I was about 14 or so. I don't recall keeping up with III's development at all and I remember seeing it popup on Kazaa one day, in an exe not much over 100mb. I was expecting another top down addition to the series and my mind was blown. Not only that it was this massive 3d game, but that someone had managed to compress it all down to such a small package.
by Supermancho | 2026-02-09 17:43:01+00:00
Who is "we"?

While the ugliness of Taiwanese justice (or lack thereof) makes it unappealing to me, from the other issues mentioned in these threads and the recent 3 year sentence for killing a little girl - https://jakartaglobe.id/news/sixyearold-indonesian-girl-kill..., I'm not sure it rises to the most troubling qualities of NK. eg The population doesn't starve en masse, no familial dynasty, and there is no alternate-fictional history.
by drewda | 2026-02-09 17:43:18+00:00
What is the actual use of this?

This research team used Google's first-party location data to identify San Jose's Interstate 880/US 101 interchange as a site with statistically extreme amounts of hard braking by Android Auto users.

But you don't need machine learning to know that... San Jose Mercury News readers voted that exact location as the worst interchange in the entire Bay Area in a 2018 reader poll [1]

It's not a lack of knowledge by Caltrans or Santa Clara County's congestion management agency that is keeping that interchange as-is. Rather, it's the physical constraints of a nearby airport (so no room for flyovers), a nearby river (so probably no tunneling), and surrounding private landowners and train tracks.

Leaving aside the specifics of the 880/101 interchange, the Google blog post suggests that they'll use this worst-case scenario on a limited access freeway to inform their future machine-learning analyses of other roads around the country, including ones where presumably there are also pedestrians and cyclists.

No doubt some state departments of transportation will line up to buy these new "insights" from Google (forgetting that they actually already buy similar products from TomTom, Inrix, StreetLight, et al.) [2]

While I genuinely see the value in data-informed decision making for transportation and urban planning, it's not a lack of data that's causing problems at this particular freeway intersection. This blog post is an underbaked advertisement.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/13/101-880-ranks-as-bay-...

[2] https://www.tomtom.com/products/traffic-stats/ https://inrix.com/products/ai-traffic/ https://www.streetlightdata.com/traffic-planning/
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 17:43:44+00:00
No, we can't, words have meanings, the middle "L" in LLM refers to natural language, trying to redefine everything as "language" doesn't just mean an LLM can magically do everything.

In particular, sensor data doesn't have the same semantics or structure at all as language (it is continuous data and should not be tokenized, it will be multi-channel, i.e. have multiple streams, whereas text is single-channel). The lack of contextuality / interdependency, both within and between these streams might even mean that e.g. self-attention is not that helpful and just computationally wasteful here.

Sure, maybe a transformer would still do well processing this data, but an LLM literally can't. It would require significant architectural changes just to be able to accept the inputs and make the outputs.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-09 17:44:07+00:00
The ability to convey oneself to water, collect it, and drink it is a natural right. If this right is removed by state incarceration then the state needs to provide a safe substitute, unless laws provide for punishment through dehydration (which seems cruel and unusual to me).

This isn’t cleanly mapped to typical notions of human rights, but it’s still a question of rights.
by leetrout | 2026-02-09 17:44:16+00:00
Not surprising but it is nice to have these data streams to explore locations that could potentially be remediated. I think anyone who drives interstates in metro areas would agree cloverleaf interchange are generally terrible with any significant traffic. Add in the general proclivity to drive much higher than the posted speed limit and these become dangerous due to the speed differentials and we've known this for 50 years.

"A 1974 study by Hall and Dickinson showed that speed differences contributed to crashes, primarily rear end and lane change collisions"

Hall, J. W. and L. V. Dickinson. An Operational Evaluation of Truck Speeds on Interstate Highways, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Maryland, February, 1974.
by samidatikakr | 2026-02-09 17:44:22+00:00
Hey, nice project! I actually built something similar — when Seedance 2.0 dropped, I noticed a ton of people struggling to access it, so I put together a platform as fast as I could to make it available.
It's live now at seedance2-pro.com. You get 200 free credits on sign up — enough to try it out and see what the model can do. Text-to-video and image-to-video are working. Reference video isn't supported yet, but I'm working on it.
Just an indie dev trying to help people get their hands on this model. Would love any feedback if you give it a try!