MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by constantius | 2026-02-05 15:52:03+00:00
It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.

As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.

That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.

It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.
by torginus | 2026-02-05 15:52:08+00:00
An I am pointing out the design has merit from a purely mechanical perspective, and is a very poor method for actually preventing third party repair.

BMW has done some despicable things as pointed out by a recent article, like welding in a pyrotechnic fuse that would kill the battery when the car detected a fault, and which could only be replaced by cutting the factory sealed battery case open, or installing 'theft protection' measurers, which could brick ECUs if an unlicensed repair shop would attempt repairs on the car (which have been known to trigger even when the dealership attempted to fix the issue using official tools)
by deaux | 2026-02-05 15:52:34+00:00
It's incredibly bad on this article. It stands out more because it's so wrong and the content itself could actually be interesting. Normally anything with this level of slop wouldn't even be worth reading if it wasn't slop. But let me help you see the light. I'm on mobile so forgive my lack of proper formatting.

--

Because it’s not just that agents can be dangerous once they’re installed. The ecosystem that distributes their capabilities and skill registries has already become an attack surface.

^ Okay, once can happen. At least he clearly rewrote the LLM output a little.

That means a malicious “skill” is not just an OpenClaw problem. It is a distribution mechanism that can travel across any agent ecosystem that supports the same standard.

^ Oh oh..

Markdown isn’t “content” in an agent ecosystem. Markdown is an installer.

^ Oh no.

The key point is that this was not “a suspicious link.” This was a complete execution chain disguised as setup instructions.

^ At this point my eyes start bleeding.

This is the type of malware that doesn’t just “infect your computer.” It raids everything valuable on that device

^ Please make it stop.

Skills need provenance. Execution needs mediation. Permissions need to be specific, revocable, and continuously enforced, not granted once and forgotten.

^ Here's what it taught me about B2B sales.

This wasn’t an isolated case. It was a campaign.

^ This isn't just any slop. It's ultraslop.

Not a one-off malicious upload.

A deliberate strategy: use “skills” as the distribution channel, and “prerequisites” as the social engineering wrapper.

^ Not your run-of-the-mill slop, but some of the worst slop.

--

I feel kind of sorry for making you see it, as it might deprive you of enjoying future slop. But you asked for it, and I'm happy to provide.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I imagine he'd give the same examples.

Personally, I couldn't care less if you use AI to help you write. I care about it not being the type of slurry that pre-AI was easily avoided by staying off of LinkedIn.
by Multicomp | 2026-02-05 15:53:14+00:00
thanks for the recommendation, I've put a hold on it for my library now.

This article reminds me of another book [1] called Holacracy where how a business is run is systematized according to other pre-defined principles. David Allen, a productivity trainer, used it at his own company for several years before eventually moving away from it because the ongoing overhead to keep its system up was too much.

I wonder if this system will end up like that as well. I love the idea, but I think humans operate at a squishier level than our computers do, there's a risk of 'massive bureaucratic dehumanization and inflexible processes' and the Iron Law of Organizations that make such efforts as that book and this article fraught with peril. Taylorism has its limits.

But hey, if this works, I'll be excited to see more businesses adopting better practices and less painful fumbling around trying to do practices in an organic or unplanned way.

[1] https://www.holacracy.org/blog/dac-ceo-reflects-on-holacracy...
by coryrc | 2026-02-05 15:53:35+00:00
Uh, no, we're having a generational crisis because wages are flat and rent cost has been growing for decades. That's quite reprehensible. Unfortunately, in our push for home ownership, we now have a majority of people being homeowners and opposed to lowering prices, and a few companies who can make a profit lobbying to ensure prices only go up.
by freejazz | 2026-02-05 15:53:35+00:00
>We often only get the thing for a limited time period after it is lost forever because copyright has prevented the thing from being archived.

That's not inherent to copyright, though copyright does grant the author the power to control distribution of its work. Nevertheless, it all eventually becomes public domain.

>A lot of things that are copyrighted would have also been created anyway, often by multiple people, because there is an actual need for them to exist or an inherent human drive to create them.

Such as?

> And with the ability to effortlessly copy works at effectively no cost we do (or would) have an ever increasing library of them which reduces the need to encourage even more creation than what would happen anyway, especially when the cost of that encouragement is not only excessive but ends up impeding many creative endeavors

That's a lot of words but nothing actual. Do you think you'd see David Lynch movies if there was no copyright? What do you think the world today would be like if there was no copyright? Some sort of magical world where authors create for free, without any regard for the finances required to do so? It's a bit ridiculous.
by kukkeliskuu | 2026-02-05 15:53:37+00:00
Anything can be used for the good or for the bad. Defining how the organization is structured and how it operates usually is usually not about how people really do their actual work -- unless there are safety etc. regulations that must be met. Many enterprises are in constant chaos, which stresses people out. Adding some structure to it helps to alleviate that stress. For example, if there is a good template to document something, you don't have to start from the scratch. Of course, you could also go all in automate all your "management", in order to avoid talking with your employees. I don't think that will end well.
by nritchie | 2026-02-05 15:53:45+00:00
I don't care about dated looks. I do find MS Office's pressure to use OneDrive frustrating and annoying. Honestly, older UIs for office suite products just feel more direct and responsive than the clever ribbon bars. Excel used to be svelte (25 years ago or more...) Now it feels bloated and clumsy. LibreOffice Calc (same parentage as Collabora Office) feels more like Excel used to feel. Similar complaints about Word.
by user34283 | 2026-02-05 15:54:05+00:00
I paid 150€ for a Mini PC with an Intel N100, 16 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 500 GB SSD.

While I have no intention to scale up low spec hardware like this, it at least seems to beat the Azure VMs we use at work with "4 CPUs", which corresponds to two physical cores on an AMD EPYC CPU.

And that super slow machine I understand costs more than $100 per month, and that's without charges for disk space slower than the SSD, or network traffic.

Renting at Azure seems to be a terrible decision, particularly for desktop use.
by DetroitThrow | 2026-02-05 15:54:28+00:00
The part where Claude specifically tipped them off felt helpful to include. Stating that you used Claude to do a first pass just sounds like "I opened Vscode with highlighting to do a first pass" and that doesn't sound so relevant.

I might be too used to using coding agents in various parts of my workflow, and others are still getting acquainted, or others find it still much different than just another standard debugging tool.

And fwiw it's probably not Claude's fault that emoji fonts load this slow, though. Wtf Safari?
by antonvs | 2026-02-05 15:54:34+00:00
> excluding being forced to disclose the contents of your mind for a second

This seems like a key point though. What's the legal distinction between compelling someone to unlock a phone using information in their mind, and compelling them to speak what's in their mind?

If I had incriminating info on my phone at one point, and I memorized it and then deleted it from the phone, now that information is legally protected from being accessed. So it just matters whether the information itself is in your mind, vs. the ability to access it?
by phil21 | 2026-02-05 15:54:35+00:00
Yep, absolutely. I’ve come up with the term “man on the mountain” for such positions.

It’s when one person is exceedingly talented at exactly one thing - but isn’t exactly a typical employee who is good or interested in doing much else other than keeping that one thing online and reliable.

Their job is to go live on their mountain for weeks or months at a time without so much as doing anything other than keeping their phone on and answering it within the first couple rings regardless of when called. If they are good at their job you likely don’t even need to call - they already know it’s broken before you do.

I’ve employed a few such folks over my career. They tend to be the “alternative” style candidate - exceptional people with exceptional flaws. They love the simple tradeoff.

That said of course this is ignoring bus factor and overly simplifying things. Typically this is one deep subject level matter expert who sits off on the side of a small team, so there is at least one “understudy” hanging around as well.

I still advocate for such positions when they make sense though. I would much rather in-house my own “insurance” vs overpay some giant company for each month only to find out the insurance didn’t exist when I needed to make a claim. It’s certainly more risk to my career - but I have very strong feelings that as a manager or executive my job is NOT to cover my own ass because it’s easier.
by ahmedoo | 2026-02-05 15:55:34+00:00
Using leaflet from Clojure is entirely JS interop calls. You can see an example in my other mapping project here (https://github.com/ahmed-machine/mapbh/blob/master/src/app/p...). I'll add that leaflet 2, while still in alpha, is much nicer to use from CLJS as it replaces all factory methods with constructor calls: (e.g. L.marker(latlng) -> new Marker(latlng)). I've been slowly moving my newer mapping projects over to the new version.

Your project sounds really cool, I'd love to read that code. The implementation in this project largely utilises Leaflet's GeoJSON layers (https://leafletjs.com/examples/geojson/) which does render out to SVGs (there's an optional canvas renderer, too). One of the trickier parts in this project was figuring out how to layer each band so that the isochrone bands closest to the point (i.e. 15 minutes from point) were painted on top of the bands further away (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/painters-algorithm-in-comp...). That and pre-computing the distances per NYC intersection across the tri-state area which required a lot of messing around with OpenTripPlanner configuration files, GTFS data, and parallelising the code to finish in a reasonable time span (few days).
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-05 15:56:40+00:00
Not at all. It literally is just an engineering problem. Space radiators exist for decades. You can build one big enough for any heat load, it's purely a matter of cost - there are no unknown problems there.

You can argue that the current costs are too high and you need new physics or new inventions to bring it down to something more reasonable, yes. But the basic science of radiating heat in space is known. There are proposals for alternative designs that might work better. The question is how much can you build them for and what's the resulting cost profile. Which is an engineering question.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-05 15:56:59+00:00
Original title "Proposing an NIH High-Leverage Trials (HILT) Program: Large-scale Research for Repurposing and Supplements" compressed to fit within title limits.

From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2026

> 7: Related: Proposing An NIH High-Leverage Trials Program. One of the biggest problems in US drug development is that nobody has any incentive to spend money studying anything that can’t be patented, so supplements, certain small molecules, and new uses for old drugs never get a chance at FDA approval. Nicholas Reville discusses the obvious solution - that the government fund these as a public good. But he adds a few new things I didn’t know - first, that many of these can be justified as cost-saving (ie since the government pays for lots of health care, if a new trial lets them replace an expensive branded drug with a cheap off-patent alternative, they can recoup the cost of the study). And second, that this has already happened - in 2008, the National Eye Institute did a study like this to prove that a $50 older drug worked just as well as a $2000 newer drug, and saved the government $40 billion (“for context, NIH’s entire annual budget is ~$50B”).
by fcjr | 2026-02-05 15:59:25+00:00
The RCade is a custom arcade cabinet at the Recurse Center that runs games made by the community. It has a real CRT running at 320x240, a custom graphics card, custom input controllers with spinners, and a deployment system where any Recurser can ship a game to it just by pushing to GitHub. There’s also a web player and local simulator so remote Recursers can play and build for it from anywhere.

There are now 44+ games on it. This is the story of how it came together.
by iainctduncan | 2026-02-05 15:59:31+00:00
OP: it was a two factor decision.

The first is that it seemed at the time that Scheme was going to be easier to work with, and that has proven true. It's a lot easier to do music theory hacking and integrate with Max using a lisp 1. Being able to seamlessly change whatever the first form is (function, hash-table, list, vector) with no change to the code has turned out to be really really nice in my work.

The second was that when I started I new little about Schemes and Lisps and it seemed when going through the docs like ECL at that time was going to be a bigger lift to get going.
by sofixa | 2026-02-05 15:59:38+00:00
> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts

Is that a bias or just reality?

Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations?

If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
by NickNaraghi | 2026-02-05 15:59:43+00:00
We tried this at Hats Protocol, I think you’ll find our approach very aligned! https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/organizational-graphs

We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it.

Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up and down the org. Our latest thinking on that is what we call a “Trust Zone” - more details here: https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/making-daos-work

You can ignore the “DAO” parts. Happy to answer any questions, I’m still very inspired by this line of inquiry.
by antonyh | 2026-02-05 16:00:22+00:00
I tried Boox (Note Air 3 Colour) but it wouldn't run the one 'android' app I needed - O'Reilly bookshelf. Returned it and got an iPad instead. Seemed ok but only half supports apps. I didn't have it long enough to suffer pen accuracy or general performance, but the colours were muddy.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-05 16:00:25+00:00
>Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or fostering genuine cultural attraction.

Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility. Its a debatable claim that there is a 'core currency' of soft power.

As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill. But I can attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger than any International Relations Realist practitioner would make.
by gabrielgio | 2026-02-05 16:00:44+00:00
Nice writing. I can't add much to the pile on Github Action as I, thankfully, was spared from it, but I can say that Buildkite is really good. I use daily, don't have complain and they actually have meaningfully useful UI upgrades. We use a lot from his ability to dynamically uploads steps, which works just as you would expect.

> And debugging? Buildkite doesn’t make CI debugging fun. Nothing does. Nothing can.

Sourcehut's ci/cd can. It is trivial do debug failing state there since you can ssh into the job's vm.
by detourdog | 2026-02-05 16:00:56+00:00
It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.

The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data.

There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.

Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck in as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
by whyleyc | 2026-02-05 16:01:04+00:00
Don't bother, I tried with a disposable email address and they make you subscribe to a mailing list before sending you the download link. When you do eventually get it, it's a 3 page puff marketing PDF.

I converted it to TXT and pulled out the only bit of interest here:

Collabora Office Collabora Office Classic
Fresh, modern UX Classic, established UX
Javascript & CSS UI to match Collabora Online VCL-based classic UI
Simpler settings / streamlined defaults Very extensive options, menus & dialogs
No Java Java used for some features/wizards/DB drivers
No built-in Base app Includes Base UI
Runs macros Full macro editor & advanced BASIC/Python/UNO
Modern web tech (Canvas, WebGL, CSS) Custom toolkit (VCL)
Fast to iterate (edit JS, fewer recompiles) Core/C++ changes typically require recompiles
Initial release – Enterprise Support is coming Long term Enterprise Supported
Quick Start Guides and video tutorials Extensive manuals & books
by naikrovek | 2026-02-05 16:01:05+00:00
Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have a system that is secure by default and be usable by normal people? Because I'm saying that's very possible and I'm starting to get angry that it hasn't happened.

Plan 9 did this and that kernel is 50k lines of code. and I can bind any part of any attached filesystem I want into a location that any running application has access to, so if any program only has access to a single folder of its own by default, I can still access files from other applications, but I have to opt into that by making those files available via mounting them into the folder of the application I want to be able to access them.

I am not saying that Plan9 is usable by normal people, but I am saying that it's possible to have a system which is secure, usable, not a phone, and easy to develop on (as everything a developer needs can be set up easily by that developer.)
by iainctduncan | 2026-02-05 16:01:11+00:00
Author here! Funny to see this arise now, I shared links to the project a number of times but never got much interest here. For what it's worth, I would (and should!) update that page, but the choice of s7 has worked out really well. I now also use it in a WASM context, which is great. The fact that I can easily use the same scheme implementation anywhere I can run ANSI C has proven to be a real advantage.

Happy to answer other questions.

For people interested, I will update that page today with thoughts five years on.

TLDR: still really happy with the choice!
"The appearance of XXX's name in the files does not imply wrongdoing"
by chrisjj | 2026-02-05 16:01:21+00:00
E.g. at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9ykjlyv50o

Anyone else uncomfortable with this new BBC boilerplate?

The reporter cannot know. Might be wrong. Possibly the appearence does.

Clearly his goal is to disclaim accusation.

But why not stick with e.g. "does not necessarily indicate wrongdoing"?.
by TheCoelacanth | 2026-02-05 16:01:47+00:00
There's still plenty of room to improve lighting.

If you want to light an indoor room to be as bright as the outdoors on a sunny day, you're going to need a lot of heavy, expensive equipment that produces a lot of waste heat (LEDs produce way less than incandescent, but still a significant amount). It's also not going to be a full continuous spectrum of light the way that sunlight is.
by torginus | 2026-02-05 16:01:57+00:00
We did some benchmarks and ECS was definitely quite a bit more expensive for a given capacity than just running docker on our own EC2 instances. It also bears pointing out that a lot of applications (either in-house or off-the-shelf) expect a persistent mutable config directory or sqlite database.

We used EFS to solve that issue, but it was very awkward, expensive and slow, its certainly not meant for that.
by landdate | 2026-02-05 16:02:15+00:00
also why do morons never quote things?

ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))

and this line is a mess easy fix if you aren't stupid.

ROTATION="$(seq -0.5 0.05 0.5 | shuf -n 1)"

dumb fucks
by belorn | 2026-02-05 16:02:18+00:00
> An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themselves

There has been a few news articles (and court cases) where this question has been raised and it is not strict true. Employee actions are only actions for which the employee has been given as an task as part of their employment and role. Actions outside of that is private actions. When this end up in court, the role description and employee contract becomes very important.

A clear case example is when a doctor is looking up data on a patient. Downloading patient records from people who they are not the doctor for can be criminal and not just a breech of hospital policy, especially if they sell or transfer the data.