MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HK-NC | 2026-02-01 21:00:57+00:00
There were nazis on 4chan before pol. There was everything on 4chan before pol. Thats what the site was about. After initially being very japanese focused, it became... the opposite of whatever reddit is.

The problem with pol was the timing that ended up creating a refuge for right leaning american MAGA christians to come one and all. Though IIRC the site linked is some hard left twitter alternative that would probably define those people as nazis.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-01 21:02:01+00:00
> Despite its history, it’s still a valid example of an exception to the First Amendment under current law.

Is it though? If you're putting on a play, and there is a fire in the script, e.g. in a play criticizing that decision, can the government punish you for putting on the play because of the risk it could cause a panic? If there is actually a fire in the theater, can they punish you for telling people? What if there isn't actually a fire but you believe that there is?

Not only is it useless as an analogy for doing any reasoning, the thing itself is so overbroad that even the unqualified literal interpretation is more of a prohibition than would actually be permissible.
by sparky4pro | 2026-02-01 21:02:01+00:00
This!
Also, for new APIs Apple reduces (or does not provide) Objective-C documentation.

I really tried to love Swift, but in the end I ended up with 1 project using Swift/SwiftUI, and all the other apps I started to write, I rewrote in Zig or Rust, because the Swift compiler kept giving me vague error messages with no hint which Swift file was the culprit or/and which line/column the error was.

YMMV
by rpdillon | 2026-02-01 21:02:28+00:00
I really wish people would stop trying to innovate with user interfaces. In a comment below you criticize this UI because it doesn't have delimited interface elements. I agree that non-delimited user interface is really bad, but I attribute that mostly to Microsoft's flat design innovation, which I didn't like at the time, and I still wish I hadn't had so much influence.

As for invisible scroll bars, again we agree. But I think that was Apple. I'm sure somebody will correct me if it wasn't.
by zmgsabst | 2026-02-01 21:03:17+00:00
An example of the contrary:

Your eyes would be misplaced if the process from cell clump to mat to tubule failed due to chemical signaling failure, but the whole embryo tends to be spontaneously aborted when gestation fails so catastrophically.

And despite genitalia being roughly one of two forms and similarly positioned, chemical signals can disrupt their formation.

> How does that happen if the chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals aren't determined, even if indirectly, by DNA?

They don’t produce the same results with perfect accuracy — 75% of pregnancies are spontaneously aborted, at least in part due to developmental failures.

But the problem with this argument is simple: you have a human cell everywhere you have human DNA, so those correlations with DNA are also correlations with cellular machinery and with particular chemical signals from the mother. There was no point in those 200,000 years where DNA operated independently of those other mechanisms — we can only say the system as a whole reliably creates those features.
by mircerlancerous | 2026-02-01 21:03:20+00:00
Well-written and valuable for insight whether you have similar personal experience or not.
As someone who does hardware and software as well, I relate to the challenges of making something you can hold; it's very easy to underestimate the challenge difference between the two.
Your Murphy's law references are spot on; I feel comforted reading I'm not the only one this happens to! Misery does love company, and it's important to hang on that I think, so that you don't lose hope :)
by Herring | 2026-02-01 21:03:39+00:00
Background:

Trump signed an Executive Order (Dec 2025) preempting state AI safety laws, threatening to withhold $42.5B in broadband funding from states that refuse to comply (specifically targeting Colorado and California).

In response, New York signed the "RAISE Act" after the EO was issued. It has strict safety, transparency, and reporting protocols for frontier models.

California is enforcing its "Transparency in Frontier AI Act" (Sept 2025) regardless of the Federal threat. It requires developers of large AI models (over 10^26 FLOPS) to publicly disclose safety frameworks, report "catastrophic risk" incidents, protect whistleblowers.. etc

Big Tech (OpenAI, Google, Andreessen Horowitz) is siding with Trump on this one. They prefer one weak federal law to 50 strict state laws.

This post:

Red states are creating deregulation areas. If a big tech company has data centers in Montana, and CA tries to impose an audit on their model, the company can sue, claiming their "Civil Rights" in Montana are being infringed by California's overreach.

Red states are tying "Compute" to the First Amendment (free expression), basically anticipating the Supreme Court.

Future implications:

The US continues to split into two distinct operating environments. https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2022/09/03/am...
by tliltocatl | 2026-02-01 21:04:48+00:00
pls dont

- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.

- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.

- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.

- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.
by whartung | 2026-02-01 21:05:04+00:00
I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.

Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.

Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.

99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.

Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.

My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-02-01 21:05:21+00:00
Anonymity was a given in the beginnings of the internet, and we now need to fight hard for any remaining form of it. Your post makes me longing for my past, whereas GPs post makes me longing for our future.

The virtual world(s) felt like equality of opportunity because everything was a blank canvas, or some canvas that barely had any fingerprints on it. For a lot of people the internet currently consists out of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google News. So tell me, what is truly radical, what is revolutionary anymore?
by hogehoge51 | 2026-02-01 21:05:36+00:00
my point was the efficiency from bypassing/cutting corners is different to the efficiency from understanding and synthesizing problems and solutions differently.

the "obviousness" in the first is seen by everyone, the "obviousness" in the second is seen only by people able to break out of a collective mindset and unground their thought processes.

in the first the "wolf" is missing some obvious things, in particular the negative externality of their action. in the second the "wolf" is generally working on maximising the positive externality by generalizing problem space and solution space outside of the conventional fitting.
by arjie | 2026-02-01 21:05:54+00:00
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.

Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.

One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.

Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
by ptx | 2026-02-01 21:06:00+00:00
> the strict BeyondCorp definition

The NetBird docs [1] talk about "Zero Trust" being defined by NIST SP 800-207 and NIST SP 1800-35. This is also one of the definitions Wikipedia describes, with only one (uncited) mention of BeyondCorp.

Anyway, I still have no idea how this stuff is supposed to be "zero trust". It seems to place almost complete trust in the external authentication provider and also in the agent software that's rummaging around on all the clients while, as Wikipedia puts it, "checking the identity and integrity of users" (perhaps by examining the purity of the their precious bodily fluids).

[1] https://docs.netbird.io/use-cases/implement-zero-trust
by trhway | 2026-02-01 21:06:56+00:00
>Shouldn’t the progressive position be to offer help from the states with higher incomes?

that is exactly what blue states have been doing by pushing for better social net, for medicaid expansion (all these things are de-facto financed by the blue states (net "givers") not the red states (net "takers")), yet the red states governments have been either blocking directly or obstructing that help to the poor and minorities by various things like onerous "work requirements", by suppressing reproductive care, etc.

>Arkansas has a state income tax.

4% :)
by maxkfranz | 2026-02-01 21:07:33+00:00
You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.

Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
by taylodl | 2026-02-01 21:08:09+00:00
What’s the real difference between life and afterlife? Death is what gives life its shape. It defines, sharpens, and focuses it. Humans need finitude to act with purpose. Without death, we’d end up with centuries-old adolescents — infinite time, no urgency, and no reason to actually live. And frankly, that sounds worse than dying.
by DwnVoteHoneyPot | 2026-02-01 21:08:25+00:00
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.

The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
by laughfactory | 2026-02-01 21:08:56+00:00
I completely and utterly disagree. Simon is no gifter. Intellectually lazy snobs think that any time someone has genuine delight and excitement about something that they’re “grifting.” Also, for anyone who is trying (regardless of whether they are succeeding) the to make money—that isn’t synonymous with “grifting.” God, some of you need a better relationship with a dictionary.

Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?
by mattmanser | 2026-02-01 21:09:44+00:00
There's actually loads of ways to solve this depending on what those apps are.

You haven't given us enough detail of what you are actually trying to do for anyone to give you concrete advice.

But the answer is probably a reverse proxy, checking the auth on the way. It's a standard solution for things like this, just ask your favourite AI for an example of how you'd do it.

That's what your teams are effectively already doing (redirecting through a single stable environment), they've just not realised they've setup one of their servers as an ad-hoc reverse-proxy.

Your teams could do with some senior engineers who know what they're doing.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2026-02-01 21:09:46+00:00
Brussels cycling infrastructure has improved a _lot_ in the last decade and the number of cyclists is growing every year while the number of households with a car is decreasing every year (less than half of the househols have a car now).

As they say, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. The weather in the Netherlands is not very different and it doesn't stop them.

Also the public transportation is by far the best of the country, but that doesn't say a lot.
by dagss | 2026-02-01 21:11:05+00:00
I mainly use Opus as well, Cursor isn't tied to any AI model and both Opus and Sonnet and a lot of others are available. Of course there's differences in how the context is managed, but Opus is usually amazing in Cursor at least.

I will very quickly @- the parts of the code that are relevant to get the context up and running right away. Seems in Claude that's harder..

(They also have their own, "Composer 1", which is just lightning fast compared to the others...and sometimes feels as smart as Opus, but now and then don't find the solution if it's too complicated and I have to ask Opus to clean it up. But if there's simple stuff I switch to it.)
by detroitwebsites | 2026-02-01 21:11:09+00:00
Great writeup on minimal agent architecture. The philosophy of "if I don't need it, it won't be built" resonates strongly.

I've been running OpenClaw (which sits on top of similar primitives) to manage multiple simultaneous workflows - one agent handles customer support tickets, another monitors our deployment pipeline, a third does code reviews. The key insight I hit was exactly what you describe: context engineering is everything.

What makes OpenClaw particularly interesting is the workspace-first model. Each agent has AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, and a memory/ directory that persists across sessions. You can literally watch agents learn from their mistakes by reading their daily logs. It's less magic, more observable system.

The YOLO-by-default approach is spot on. Security theater in coding agents is pointless - if it can write and execute code, game over. Better to be honest about the threat model.

One pattern I documented at howtoopenclawfordummies.com: running multiple specialized agents beats one generalist. Your sub-agent discussion nails why - full observability + explicit context boundaries. I have agents that spawn other agents via tmux, exactly as you suggest.

The benchmark results are compelling. Would love to see pi and OpenClaw compared head-to-head on Terminal-Bench.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-01 21:11:35+00:00
> maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?

That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.

It's like git except it works without me having to think about it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about it.)
Ask HN: The Next Big OS Leap
by rafaelmdec | 2026-02-01 21:12:10+00:00
After witnessing what is being said about the AI Botlers (like OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot), I believe UIs will start melting big time.

The point, click and type era is over.

Voice will take over as the primary interface.

UIs will be adaptive and enabled on demand.

There will be an AI agent layer on every single PC out there.

Since privacy will be an issue, "Shazam-like" filters will inhibit uncleared capture of voice.

Makes sense?
by detroitwebsites | 2026-02-01 21:12:27+00:00
The "alignment principle" vs "sequential penalty" finding mirrors my production experience exactly.

I run a multi-agent system where specialized agents handle different business functions (customer support, code review, deployment monitoring). The key insight: task decomposability determines architecture.

Parallelizable tasks (analyzing independent customer tickets, running separate test suites) show massive gains with independent agents. Sequential workflows (debugging a specific issue that requires following a chain of logic) degrade with coordination overhead.

The "tool-use bottleneck" is real. We hit it around 12-15 tools per agent. The coordination tax becomes severe. Solution: role-based tool access. Support agents get 5 tools, deployment agents get 8, code review agents get 6. Overlap is minimal.

One counter-intuitive finding: persistent memory per agent beats centralized knowledge. Each agent has AGENTS.md (instructions), TOOLS.md (available actions), and memory/ directory (session logs). Agents learn from their own mistakes without polluting each other's context.

The error amplification metric (17.2x for independent vs 4.4x for centralized) explains why we use a hub-and-spoke model with human checkpoints at handoff boundaries.

Documented these patterns at howtoopenclawfordummies.com for anyone building similar systems.
by codeulike | 2026-02-01 21:13:45+00:00
I was around in that era and yes when C# came out it was very obvious that Microsoft had been 'inspired' by the Java syntax ... Java had been the buzzword for the 5 years or so beforehand, like the only language that anyone talked about, so when Microsoft came up with C# it was glaringly obvious where they got the idea from.

On the other hand Java came with the VM ("write once run anywhere" as they used to say) but C# turned that inside out with the Common Langauge Runtime, so you had various languages like C# and VB.Net that compiled to the same bytecode.

The other innovation with Java back in the day was that it came with a huge library/framework of classes that did most of the stuff you would need to do. Similarly Microsoft's .NET library was a copy of that idea, although the frameworks themselves were pretty different.
by Merrill | 2026-02-01 21:14:03+00:00
Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.

A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-01 21:14:26+00:00
See also:

A walk in nature is better than microdosing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27435972

LSD microdosing does not appear to improve mood or cognitive ability: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31632680

Microdosing study shows the placebo effect of taking psychelics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26324219
by oaiey | 2026-02-01 21:15:13+00:00
The article is presenting some stuff mixed up. Had nothing to do with the language or the framework. WinFS was a database product. Over engineered and abstract.

.NET and C# were researched a lot for operating system usage (Midori, Singularity) but that was after Longhorn.

The operating system group UI toolkits was a further problem and they pivoted there dozen of times in the years. Particular for a C++ based os group.

But the death of longhorn was ultimately about the security restart of Bill Gates
by luafox | 2026-02-01 21:15:30+00:00
From the article:
> The program prioritized underrepresented populations. That includes young parents, who made up 43% of participants by the end of the period.

Homeless parents are almost always women with very few exceptions. Now, in my personal opinion, "underrepresented populations" in this kind of environment refers to people who are at greater immediate risk while homeless, which obviously include women & genderqueer people, as well as those who are young+single parents or are disabled.

Find and read the actual full report for more details though.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-01 21:15:57+00:00
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.

Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.

Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.

So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.

The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.

Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....

... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.

The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.

Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.