MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-04 18:30:46+00:00
And I might say that the more clever (skilled, experienced, wise) a programmer is, the more likely they can write something 'clever' and make it work and not need to debug it. Then why should they follow Kernighan's quote to avoid working that way?

As I take the quote, it would have been about 1970's, 1980's C and would not have had the benefit of an IDE with "edit and continue" or a LISP or Prolog or Smalltalk interactive REPL with live edit and retry, or ELM's "time travelling debugger" or Git and all related tooling for tracking down changes and who made them, or more modern fuzzers and Valgrinds and static analyzers.

Making a case for writing non-surprising idiomatic code is one thing, but HN parroting the "debugging is twice as hard as coding" and downvoting someone who asks for evidence for this claim is cargo-culting. Why would it be twice as hard and not 1.2x as hard or the same hardness or 10x or 100x as hard? And why would the relationship be fixed, even if tooling and languages and the industry change? And what does it mean to say you can write a, say, compression algorithm "as cleverly as you can" but it's twice as hard as that to spot that you typoed a variable name or something?
by dave_universetf | 2026-02-04 18:30:48+00:00
Strictly speaking: no. The "forward pass" terminology does not imply that there exists a "reverse pass" that does the same kind of computation. Rather, it's describing two different kinds of computation, and the direction they occur in.

The forward pass is propagating from inputs to outputs, computing the thing the model was trained for. The reverse/backwards pass is propagating from outputs back to inputs, but it's calculating the gradients of parameters for training (rougly: how much changing each parameter in isolation affects the output, and whether it makes the output closer to the desired training output). The result of the "reverse pass" isn't a set of inputs, but a set of annotations on the model's parameters that guide their adjustment.

The computations of the forward pass are not trivially reversible (e.g. they include additions, which destroys information about the operand values). As a sibling thread points out, you can still probabilistically explore what inputs _could_ produce a given output, and get some information back that way, but it's a lossy process.

And of course, you could train a "reverse" model, one that predicts the prefix of a sequence given a suffix (trivially: it's the same suffix prediction problem, but you train it on reversed sequences). But that would be a separate model trained from scratch on that task, and in that model the prefix prediction would be its forward pass.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-04 18:30:53+00:00
> Why not just extend the OpenAPI specification to skills?

Because approximately none of what exists in the existing OpenAPI specification is relevant to the task, and nothing needed for the tasks is relevant to the current OpenAPI use case, so trying to jam one use case into a tool designed for the other would be pure nonsense.

It’s like needing to drive nails and asking why grab a hammer when you already have a screwdriver.
by floatrock | 2026-02-04 18:30:54+00:00
The Yen Carry Trade isn't some big secret... it's caused enough turmoil that it hit the front pages of the WSJ a few times in last few years (Aug 2024 was a big one iirc)

Finance bros will make their way in here soon to give a better peanut gallery, but I think "is there something here" comes down to do you believe the final bit of the articles opening act:

> When correlations between historically uncorrelated assets (e.g. Gold, Bitcoin, Microsoft, and Silver) approach 1.0 during a sell-off, it serves as a distinct indicator that traders are not selling what they want to sell, but rather what they must sell in order to meet margin calls in a funding currency that is rapidly appreciating against their liabilities.
by re-thc | 2026-02-04 18:30:57+00:00
> Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can.

Can you though? With major bugs? We've been getting more and more crashes, downtime, issues etc lately and a lot of it has had to do with vibe coding.

The whole point of these B2B SaaS is meant to be quality.

i.e. it's set users' expectations but in the wrong way.
by Sparkle-san | 2026-02-04 18:31:20+00:00
There's a lot of value in helping out locally as well.

I don't have as much lived experience of someone in Vietnam as I do someone in my community. Nor do I understand the language or the culture. There's more overhead in making it happen and there will likely be a lot of things I'll never take into account or understand. On the other hand, I know what it's like living in a HCOL state where many jobs don't pay enough for a family to survive and have struggled in my own past. Could my money have more purchasing power elsewhere? Sure. And they're still people in my community struggling and I have the power to help them and a greater understanding of what they're facing. Community seems to get discounted a lot in the discussion around effective altruism and I think that's unfortunate.
by josephcsible | 2026-02-04 18:31:40+00:00
> So it's cool if one person gets deplatformed, as long as it's not a pattern? Odd choice if you ask me.

No, it's not cool even if it's just one person. The point is that you should absolutely be upset at the bank for arbitrarily banning someone for no reason, but not at Peter Thiel or Palantir, since it being just one non-high-profile critic means there's no good reason to think they had anything to do with it.
by viccis | 2026-02-04 18:31:45+00:00
It's not a "grammatical technicality" to misuse a word. Iran is not carrying out a genocide.

>It's your mess, now clean it up.

The US is under no obligation to the people of Iran whatsoever. If we take action in Iran, it will be solely to our benefit, and it may or may not improve those peoples' lives. In all likelihood, it will be another Libya or Afghanistan situation in which we take what we want and leave a power vacuum in our wake.
by judah | 2026-02-04 18:31:46+00:00
Iran's government is an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship. It has imprisoned and killed protestors[0], it hung over 700 political dissidents last year[1], it has imprisoned and executed people who have left Islam[2], it has beaten and imprisoned women who refused to wear hijab[3]. As for LGBT rights, Equaldex lists Iran 190th out of 197 nations[4]. Time Magazine reports[5] that some 30,000 people were killed in January for protesting the government.

Even the parent article reports first-hand that the Iranian regime is now labelling protesters as terrorists and calls for their arrests.

This, combined with the draught and economic collapse, has pushed the Iranian people towards revolt.

This is not the fault of Israel, America, Trump, Greenland, white people, or any other boogeyman. It's a feature of Iranian government, and the Iranian people want change.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i...

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/iran-horrifyi...

[2]: https://persecution.exmuslims.org/countries/iran/

[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/14/iran-new-hijab-law-adds-...

[4]: https://www.equaldex.com/region/iran

[5]: https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
by mcnamtm1 | 2026-02-04 18:31:57+00:00
We tackled a similar problem for K8s workloads—verifying automated service
identity trust without static credentials.

A few thoughts on your approach:

*Persistent identity + rotation:*
The tension between "persistent" (provable history) and "rotating" (security)
is real. Persistent identity often means persistent credentials, and we know these can't be trusted to remain secure for very long. We solved this with identity credentials that rotate daily but build a verifiable chain of trust in the workload (i.e. Zero Trust for workloads). Each new identity is cryptographically linked to the previous one.

Have you considered rotation schedules for MoltID agent identities?

*PoW for Sybil resistance:*
Smart for initial onboarding. Curious: Do you distinguish between "initial
trust establishment" (high friction, PoW) and "ongoing verification" (low
friction, fast crypto proof)? Or does every verification require PoW?

*JWT tokens:*
We went a different route — no tokens over the wire. Both parties generate
identical credentials locally (synchronized algorithms, no key exchange).
This eliminates token theft as an attack vector.

*Two Rotating Credentials*
We went for a pre-shared algorithm for the secret/key, and a third-party identity trust verification model. Separation of two credential needed to gain access among agents. worth considering for direct agent-to-agent communication?

*Question:* How are you handling trust bootstrapping? In OAuth, there's a
trusted IdP. For autonomous agents with no human, what's the root of trust?

Agree that work—agent identity will be huge as agentic AI scales.

(Disclosure: We're building Lane7 for K8s app network topologies. Not a pure agentic use
case, but an overlapping problem.)
by regularization | 2026-02-04 18:31:58+00:00
They have almost no credibility.

Gazan health authorities were releasing the names of their dead, and this was met with great skepticism and qualification in Israel and the West (until this week when Israel just accepted at least tens of thousands died).

Random, inflated numbers from anonymous sources pop up on Iran and they're instantly quoted as fact.

Also - some of the rebels have guns and have been using them, so some of these dead are from shootouts.
by kuboble | 2026-02-04 18:32:00+00:00
Ask Poles.

Some "west bad" rhetoric is that the fall of communism was orchestrated by Americans and not of organic local origin.

In reality the communist regime protected by Russian/ soviet violence had no legitimacy or support from the population.

Perhaps Poles could not free themselves without the western , maybe Cia played active role in organizing solidarity movement.

If this is true then we Poles are forever grateful for orchestrating regime change in Poland in 1989.
by GregarianChild | 2026-02-04 18:32:02+00:00
This is wrong as the others replies also point out. Tactics in LCF-style provers are not part of the TCB. Here is an example of the TCB for an industrial strength prover:

○ https://github.com/jrh13/hol-light/blob/master/fusion.ml

A mere 676 LoCs. This miniscule size of the TCB is where the comparatively lesser bug count (despite intense use) comes from.
by dang | 2026-02-04 18:32:05+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Also, if you could cut down on the ideological battle stuff generally, that would be good. I'm not sure your account has quite been using HN primarily for that (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...) but it's close enough that you should probably recalibrate.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by pythonaut_16 | 2026-02-04 18:32:26+00:00
GP might be hyperbolic but come on.

Common internet tropes include both "look at this forgotten jar that's been in the back of my fridge since 1987" and "doesn't it suck how much food we waste in the modern world?"

Nearly every modern invention could be dismissed with this attitude. "Why do you need a typewriter? Just write on paper like the rest of the world does."

"Why do you need a notebook? Just remember everything like the rest of us do."
by hearsathought | 2026-02-04 18:32:33+00:00
> It's troubling that most of the free world stands by and watches as a genocidal-level massacre takes place in Iran.

"Free world". Man you sure do hit them propaganda talking points.

> Persians don't expect China/Russia to respond

"China/Russia". Keep hitting those propaganda talking points. I'm sure the persians appreciate that "China/Russia" isn't sanctioning and destroying their economy. Not to mention bombing them.

> Imagine negotiating with Hitler to give up his V2 missiles and nuclear plans while the Holocaust was taking place.

"Hitler" and "Holocaust". The mother of all propaganda talking points.

> History will judge us for negotiating (and therefore, legitimizing) with the islamic regime that's occupied Iran for 47 years.

"Islamic". Take a bow. Nobody can doubt you've studied your zionist handbook. For extra credit, tell me how "israel" genociding palestinians isn't a genocide.

Another israeli slimeball trying to get us into another war.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-04 18:32:36+00:00
Like everyone else, I am very skeptical that it is somehow related, for several reasons.

- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?

- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.

- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.

- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!

- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-02-04 18:32:44+00:00
> Edit to add: Also, Israel was actually attacked, and civilians were raped, kidnapped, and murdered. Did any of the protestors in Iran kill, rape, or murder any of members of the regime who subsequently slaughtered them?

Just to be clear. You're arguing that if a country is attacked, it's ok to kill civilians that are unrelated to the attack? Or are you arguing that those 300,000 were somehow involved in the killing of the 3,000 Israelis that died in the Hamas attack?
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-04 18:32:53+00:00
Democracy is not "Whoever gets half + 1 vote is king"

Winning representatives are still supposed to represent the people who didn't vote for them in fact.

Democracy isn't about picking the "best" leader because that's not necessary. "The best" is almost never necessary, and you are much better off building a system that handles regularly not getting the best, because no system reliably picks the best, especially since "The best" is a criteria that cannot be rigorously defined.
by iagooar | 2026-02-04 18:32:56+00:00
In English it is pretty good. But talk to it in Polish, and suddenly it thinks you speak Russian? Ukranian? Belarus? I would understand if an American company launched this, but for a company being so proud about their European roots, I think it should have better support for major European languages.

I tried English + Polish:

> All right, I'm not really sure if transcribing this makes a lot of sense. Maybe not. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku, nie po ukrańsku.
by skydhash | 2026-02-04 18:32:57+00:00
Computers only care about the what, and have no use for the why. Humans care about the latter too and the programmer lives at the intersection of both. Taking a why and transforming it into a what is the coding process.

Software engineering is all about making sure the what actually solves the why, making the why visible enough in the what so that we can modify the latter if the former changes (it always does).

Current LLM are not about transforming a why into a what. It’s about transforming an underspecified what into some what that we hope fits the why. But as we all know from the 5 Why method, why’s are recursive structure, and most software engineer is about diving into the details of the why. The what are easy once that done because computers are simple mechanisms if you chose the correct level of abstraction for the project.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 18:33:14+00:00
According to Gallup, the record high support for increasing immigration was about 36%. Harris presided over an administration that saw a large increase in immigration. So believe didn’t find it credible when she said she wanted to control the border. And the position of wanting to increase immigration is more ideologically extreme than Trump’s position of wanting to shut down the border to illegal immigration just as a factual matter.

The latest Harvard-Harris poll, which isn’t good for Trump, still shows people want to deport all immigrants here illegally by a 52-48 margin: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/HHP... (page 24). I don’t think even Trump intends to actually do that. He would have to dramatically escalate what he’s doing now in order to achieve that outcome.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-04 18:33:36+00:00
> The NOVA definition is meant to classify ultra processed foods, correct?

Yes. It does so very badly.

> You seem to want the NOVA definition to classify between “healthy, non addictive foods” vs “hyper palatable foods”.

If by "you", you mean "a ton of people who are involved in health policy", yes.

> What these studies are doing is finding correlations between ultra processed foods and bad health.

It's flawed because (A) Nova is so ambiguous and useless that we can't actually assume that "it was categorized via Nova" is true (B) what they hone in on is not actually related to Nova, it's actually about palatability, which Nova has no framework for. Inclusion of Nova is strictly detrimental to the conversation.
by aspectrr | 2026-02-04 18:34:08+00:00
Hey HN,
My name is Collin and I'm working on fluid.sh (https://fluid.sh) the Claude Code for Infrastructure.

What does that mean?

Fluid is a terminal agent that do work on production infrastructure like VMs/K8s cluster/etc. by making sandbox clones of the infrastructure for AI agents to work on, allowing the agents to run commands, test connections, edit files, and then generate Infra-as-code like an Ansible Playbook to be applied on production.

Why not just use an LLM to generate IaC?

LLMs are great at generating Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, etc. but bad at guessing how production systems work. By giving access to a clone of the infrastructure, agents can explore, run commands, test things before writing the IaC, giving them better context and a place to test ideas and changes before deploying.

I got the idea after seeing how much Claude Code has helped me work on code, I thought "I wish there was something like that for infrastructure", and here we are.

Why not just provide tools, skills, MCP server to Claude Code?

Mainly safety. I didn't want CC to SSH into a prod machine from where it is running locally (real problem!). I wanted to lock down the tools it can run to be only on sandboxes while also giving it autonomy to create sandboxes and not have access to anything else.

Fluid gives access to a live output of commands run (it's pretty cool) and does this by ephemeral SSH Certificates. Fluid gives tools for creating IaC and requires human approval for creating sandboxes on hosts with low memory/CPU and for accessing the internet or installing packages.

I greatly appreciate any feedback or thoughts you have, and I hope you get the chance to try out Fluid!
by prabhavsanga | 2026-02-04 18:34:20+00:00
Hi HN! I built LayerClaw (https://github.com/layerclaw/layerclaw), a local-first observability tool for PyTorch training.

The problem: When training neural networks, things go wrong silently. Your loss explodes at step 47,392. Your gradients vanish in layer 12. Your GPU memory spikes randomly. By the time you notice, you've wasted hours or days of compute.

I got tired of adding print statements, manually checking TensorBoard files, and tracking down training issues after the fact. Existing tools either require cloud accounts (W&B, Neptune) or are too heavyweight for quick experiments (MLflow, TensorBoard for gradient analysis).

What LayerClaw does:

- Automatically tracks gradients, metrics, and system resources during training
- Stores everything locally (SQLite + Parquet, no cloud required)
- Detects anomalies: gradient explosions, NaN/Inf values, loss spikes
- Provides a CLI to compare runs: `tracer compare run1 run2 --metric loss`
- Minimal overhead with async writes (~2-3%)

Quick example:

```python
import tracer
import torch

# Initialize (one line)
tracer.init(project="my-project", track_gradients=True)

# Your normal training loop
model = YourModel()
tracer._state.tracer.attach_hooks(model)

for batch in dataloader:
loss = train_step(model, batch)
tracer.log({"loss": loss.item()})
tracer.step()

tracer.finish()
```

Then analyze: `tracer anomalies my-run --auto`

What makes it different:

1. Local-first: No sign-ups, no data leaving your machine, no vendor lock-in
2. Designed for debugging: Deep gradient tracking and anomaly detection built-in (not an afterthought)
3. Lightweight: Add 2 lines to your training loop, minimal overhead
4. Works with everything: Vanilla PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch Lightning

Current limitations (v0.1.0):

- CLI-only (web UI planned for v0.2)
- Single-machine training (distributed support coming)
- Early stage - would love feedback on what's most useful

Available now:
- GitHub: https://github.com/layerclaw/layerclaw

*I'm looking for contributors!* I've created several "good first issues" for anyone interested in contributing. Areas where I need help:
- Web UI for visualizations
- Distributed training support
- More framework integrations
- Real-time monitoring dashboard

If you've struggled with ML training issues before, I'd love your input on what would be most valuable. PRs welcome, or just star the repo if you find it interesting!

What features would make this indispensable for your workflow?
by encyclopedism | 2026-02-04 18:34:27+00:00
If I can 'speak' for the OP:

> I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off

I do not think this analogy is apt.

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do.

The article is lamenting the disappearing of something meaningful for the OP. One can feel sad for this alone. It is not an equation to balance: X is gone but Y is now available. The lament stands alone. As the OP indicates with his 'pragmatism' we now collectively have little choice about the use of AI. The flood waters do not ask they take everyone in their path.
by dartharva | 2026-02-04 18:34:42+00:00
That's a good question but preferably left unanswered, because trying to find the answer could easily lead to some very, very bad outcomes.

Sub-Saharan Africa is an example of what happens when you allow balkanization through arbitrarily-drawn territorial lines (and all territorial lines are always inherently arbitrary enough to not please everyone). Perpetual war, misery, stagnation.
Show HN: LIAM – email and calendar assistant that drafts replies and schedules
by sintem | 2026-02-04 18:34:55+00:00
Hi HN, yesterday I missed a meeting and spent most of the day sending ~35 emails. That kind of inbox + calendar admin has been draining my time for a long while, so I built LIAM to fix it.

It helps with:
- Drafting replies in your tone (honestly a bit scary how close it gets)
- Scheduling meetings and handling the back and forth
- Prioritising important threads and organising the inbox

Important: LIAM doesn’t send anything without approval.

I’d love feedback on what you’d actually trust an email agent to do, and which email workflows you’d automate first.

You are more than welcome to roast it.

Try it here: https://doitliam.com (connect Gmail + Calendar, about 1 min)