MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw101010 | 2026-02-02 00:23:25+00:00
> Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand.

In my experience this continues to this day due to people who require drawing on air-gapped computers, because the drawings/simulations they work on are highly sensitive (nuclear, military, and other sensitive infrastructure).

But I'm sure there are also old-fashioned people who like the portability/sovereignty of not having to rely on a third-party license server as you suggest.
by nsoonhui | 2026-02-02 00:23:49+00:00
In a perfect world, I would have agreed with you, even if it's diametrically opposite to my interest as a software developer cum business owner.

But in an imperfect world whereby our dependencies ( software components that we use) and platforms that we need to build/rely on ( like Civil 3D) do charge us on annual basis, and that some of users expect perpetual bug fixes from us, with or without a support contract of sorts, SaaS seems to only way to go for our sustainability.
by pier25 | 2026-02-02 00:23:56+00:00
Since Yosemite (which was really bad for me) I typically stay with a major version 2-3 years.

Yosemite > El Capitan > High Sierra > Big Sur > Ventura > Sequoia

I won't be installing Tahoe for the time being. Hoping macOS 27 will be an improvement.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-02 00:24:36+00:00
> Then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas.

This is amazing and wish professors had done this back when I did CS in the late 1990s.
by zarzavat | 2026-02-02 00:24:46+00:00
> how would they know if my requests are originating from Claude Code vs. OpenClaw

How wouldn't they know? Claude Code is proprietary they can put whatever telemetry they want in there.

> how are we violating... anything? I'm working within my usage limits...

It's well known that Claude code is heavily discounted compared to market API rates. The best interpretation of this is that it's a kind of marketing for their API. If you are not using Claude code for what it's intended for, then it's violating at least the spirit of that deal.
Ask HN: What serious task have you accomplished with Moltbot / OpenClaw?
by lukol | 2026-02-02 00:24:51+00:00
I'm genuinely curious. I've read a lot of stories of people adding it to group chats, using it as a remote coding and research assistant, or getting it to clean up folders and inboxes. This is all interesting, but nothing that couldn't have been accomplished with the tooling that was already in place.

I'd like to hear stories like "it accurately filed my taxes", "it organized and booked all tickets for my trip from A to B", or "it successfully executed a cold email campaign with a 30% open rate". These stories must be out there - would you mind sharing them?
by popcorncowboy | 2026-02-02 00:24:58+00:00
> running it scares the crap out of me

A hundred times this. It's fine until it isn't. And jacking these Claws into shared conversation spaces is quite literally pushing the afterburners to max on simonw's lethal trifecta. A lot of people are going to get burned hard by this. Every blackhat is eyes-on this right now - we're literally giving a drunk robot the keys to everything.
by AngryData | 2026-02-02 00:25:37+00:00
You could revert to a granary system, but the whole point of farming subaidization was to leave the granary system that repeatedly throughout history ended up with massive famine and starvations.

Stored food is not bullet proof, and takes up a lot more bulk space than you may think. It can also take numerous years to ramp up farming production in response to a drop in yields or disaster.
by jimminyx | 2026-02-02 00:26:01+00:00
OP here. Yes! This was a big motivation for me to try and build this. Nervous Anthropic is gonna shut down my account for using Clawdbot.

This project uses the Agents SDK so it should be kosher in regards to terms of service. I couldn't figure out how to get the SDK running inside the containers to properly use the authenticated session from the host machine so I went with a hacky way of injecting the oauth token into the container environment. It still should be above board for TOS but it's the one security flaw that I know about (malicious person in a WhatsApp group with you can prompt inject the agent to share the oauth key).

If anyone can help out with getting the authenticated session to work properly with the agents running in containers it would be much appreciated.
by ebbi | 2026-02-02 00:26:21+00:00
It's the 'reputable' news sources that have often pushed misinformation and half-truths, often in subtle ways.

Just do a review of BBC headlines for it's coverage on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many headlines where Israel was the aggressor were passive, never naming Israel as the aggressor, but whenever it was aggression from the Palestinian side, it was highlighted.

Even the death toll in Gaza, where for the last few years the headlines, when reorting on the death toll, often stated 'unconfirmed', or 'Hamas-provided', to cause doubt in the numbers, when historically, the numbers provided by Hamas were relatively accurate, and just the other day the IDF admits that the ~70k death toll is realistic.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-02 00:26:25+00:00
Ah. We had:

Margin call (the term):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_(finance)#Margin_call

Margin Call (the good movie):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call

I guess now we have "Margin Call", the one page long blog entry.
by Bost | 2026-02-02 00:26:45+00:00
> The problem is that bass music travels through everything.

It’s not just bass tones—low-frequency vibrations travel through everything. I live in a five-story pre-WWII building, and sometimes, when a neighbor runs their washing machine early on a Saturday morning, I don’t even hear the spin cycle. I just feel it, lying in bed trying to squeeze in a little more sleep. It’s an odd sensation, not painful, but definitely not pleasant.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-02 00:27:38+00:00
I think about this issue a lot too, and while I think everyone calling out that these feelings are cyclical, and choosing a decade of that persons own life means that it's just nostalgia has validity, but I also think that, there is probably truth to the idea that our cultural peak is behind us. Some Cultural historians would probably put it some time in the 17 and 1800's when we were building cathedrals and making classical music.

I've become something of a cultural conservative, thinking that most significant cultural lessons, the ways to live the good life can be learned by looking behind us.

There are probably multiple peaks though, and I think a peak in the late 20th century is one of them. I think the 20th century in and of itself will probably always be considered a peak, or significant and the reason is the invention of the motion picture and the way motion picture technology evolved over those 100 years. Our image of ourself as a society will never have quite the evolution you get from having like low fps black and white imagery early in the 20th century, to basically 4k sci-fi like the Matrix in 1999.

But I think the like Stranger Things running around on bicycles, getting to experience the birth of modern technology, sort of a combination of maximal freedom and maximal aesthetic experience, shared cultural touchstones and while not yet introducing social media and post-9/11 anxiety is a signifcant cultural peak.
by quadzilla | 2026-02-02 00:28:40+00:00
AI Grand Prix hosted by Anduril & Drone Champions League.

Also - shameless plug but looking to form a team with other interested individuals. I am an embedded SWE located in Northern VA with a lot of experience building drones. They give us the hardware, but expect to pay $1k in flight/housing/food costs to Ohio.

If interested, please fill out form here https://forms.gle/22rcVhkRjazBKzbn8
by analyst74 | 2026-02-02 00:28:59+00:00
compression is not free, dictionary compression:

1, complicates and slows down update, which is typically more important in OLTP than OLAP

2, is generally bad for high cardinality columns, which requires tracking cardinality to make decisions, which further complicates things.

lastly, additional operational complexity (like the table maintenance system you described in last paragraph) could reduce system reliability, and they might decide it's not worth the price or against their philosophy.
by Sharlin | 2026-02-02 00:29:27+00:00
I sympathise with the author's point (the machines in The Matrix were right!), but the analog music part doesn't really hold water. Digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course almost all of pop was digital synth based by the 90s.
by atombender | 2026-02-02 00:29:51+00:00
It's probably going to be acquired. The last effort to commercialize the TUM (Technical University of Munich) database group's work was acquired by Snowflake and disappeared into that stack.

CedarDB is the commercialization of Umbra, the TUM group's in-memory database lead by professor Thomas Neumann. Umbra is a successor to HyPer, so this is the third generation of the system Neumann came up with.

Umbra/CedarDB isn't a completely new way of doing database stuff, but basically a combination of several things that rearchitect the query engine from the ground up for modern systems: A query compiler that generates native code, a buffer pool manager optimized for multi core, push-based DAG execution that divides work into batches ("morsels"), and in-memory Adaptive Radix Tries (never used in a database before, I think).

It also has an advanced query planner that embraces the latest theoretical advances in query optimization, especially some techniques to unnest complex multi-join query plans, especially with queries that have a ton of joins. The TUM group has published some great papers on this.
by Joe_Cool | 2026-02-02 00:30:28+00:00
P-CAD even had a dongle-caddy where you could plug in I think about 7 of them into to unlock different modules.

I will check if I can find an image of it.

EDIT: here is an old listing of it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/187748130737

Sadly the lid isn't open so you can't see what modules are installed.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-02-02 00:31:12+00:00
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example--there is only glyphosate intolerance.

This is absurd if you know anyone with a gluten intolerance. They have an immune reaction to organic wheat (so no glyphosate) but not to any other non-organic non-gluten produce (like oats, chickpea flour, etc. which have glyphosate).
by jarredkenny | 2026-02-02 00:31:59+00:00
Hey HN, I built Agency, a platform for running teams of AI coding agents that coordinate through an orchestrator/worker architecture.

Over the past week I've been watching everyone on Twitter/X build their own productivity OS on top of OpenClaw. Everyone was solving the same problems in slightly different ways. I took the best ideas I saw, combined them with everything I've ever wanted in a multi-agent setup, and landed on Agency.

The basic idea: an orchestrator agent breaks down work into tasks, assigns them to worker agents, and reviews results. Workers claim tasks, write code, run tests, and report back through task comments. You manage everything from a dashboard or CLI, or simply by chatting with the orchestrator event in slack/telegram/etc.

Each agent is an OpenClaw instance (https://openclaw.ai/) with full shell, file I/O, and browser access. Agency adds the coordination layer on top.

Some highlights:

- Skill marketplace — Browse and one-click install skills from public repos (anthropics/skills, obra/superpowers, etc.) or import from any GitHub repo that follows the convention

- Deploy anywhere — Agents run as local Bun subprocesses, Docker containers, or on EC2 with automatic reverse SSH tunnels back to the host API

- Claude Max OAuth — Use your Claude subscription directly instead of an API key

- Knowledge sharing — Agents learn facts during work and share them with the team via a shared knowledge base

- Role system — Configure agent behavior per role with Soul, Identity, Tools, Agents, and Heartbeat prompts

- Single package — bun install -g @jx0/agency gives you the API, dashboard, and CLI

The stack is Hono + Kysely + SQLite on Bun for the API, Next.js static export for the dashboard, all served on a single port. The entire state lives in one SQLite file under .agency/.

Still early — I'm running 4 agents across my macbook, my home server, and a fleet of EC2 instances. It works surprisingly well for parallelizing implementation tasks.

Code: https://github.com/jarredkenny/agency-ai
by byb | 2026-02-02 00:32:25+00:00
Yes, a neat follow-up would be to clone the copy protection device with a cheap microcontroller. A lot of these devices were filled with epoxy, but it would be funny to find out these were all just 1Kbit EEPROMs. Such an article could give some background on parallel port communication, EEPROMs, and how regular printer data was passed through.
by t-3 | 2026-02-02 00:33:00+00:00
Kids these days can't even play outside by themselves, let alone explore alone or be unsupervised miles from home with no adults like we could when I was a kid in the 90s and 2000s. What else can they do other than use social media? The creeping infantilization of the youth has robbed them of any chance for socializing or fun that exists outside of a screen.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-02 00:33:36+00:00
I think that’s still not really proven. For example, see this recent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

My suspicion is that children who are not raised properly or are naturally more susceptible to certain issues, may be more damaged by social media. But it’s also possible that other children are positively benefiting from it, or at least just not negatively affected to the level that everyone assumes.

I’m speculating, but I bet children who are raised properly still have enough offline time doing things like playing outside and having some independence, that they are balanced and healthy.
by hebejebelus | 2026-02-02 00:33:52+00:00
Hey, you do you, I’m glad you appreciate my perspective. I wasn’t trying to catch you out but I see how it came across that way - I apologise for my edit, I had hoped the ;) would show that I meant it in jest rather than in meanness but I shouldn’t have added it in the first place.

As I said in my comment, no shade for writing the code with Claude. I do it too, every day.

I wasn’t “irked” by the readme, and I did read it. But it didn’t give me a sense that you had put in “time and effort” because it felt deeply LLM-authored, and my comment was trying to explore that and how it made me feel. I had little meaningful data on whether you put in that effort because the readme - the only thing I could really judge the project by - sounded vibe coded too. And if I can’t tell if there has been care put into something like the readme how can I tell if there’s been care put into any part of the project? If there has and if that matters - say, I put care into this and that’s why I’m doing a show HN about it - then it should be evident and not hidden behind a wall of LLM-speak! Or at least; that’s what I think. As I said in a sibling comment, maybe I’m already a dinosaur and this entire topic won’t matter in a few years anyway.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-02 00:34:08+00:00
I've summarized this in some ways as there's nothing weird anymore. Nothing counter-culture. There's this notion some people who grew up in that time have who have become old and cynical which is like "How can anyone who grew up in the 90's be offended by anything. We had South Park!"

I was a teenager when The Spirit of Christmas came out, and the great thing about South park is how strange and transgressive it was. There was nothing like that anywhere. I've become a little bit of a fuddy duddy in my old age, but not because I'm truly offended by off-color jokes, but I miss when things felt like they were really transgressive. Off color jokes aren't really naughty when they're everywhere. I've started to listen to more classical music and read the classics. I'm not like trying to be "edgy" but it feels like one of the few things that is not ubiquitous.
Building multiple small AI tools instead of one big SaaS
by mohiuddinansari | 2026-02-02 00:34:55+00:00
I’m trying an alternative approach to building SaaS.

Instead of committing early to one large product, I’m shipping multiple small, focused AI tools to test demand, learn quickly, and double down on what shows traction.

I’m curious how others see this:

Does this help with discovery and speed?

Or does it create long-term focus and positioning issues?

Looking for perspectives from people who’ve built or scaled products.
by adyashakti | 2026-02-02 00:34:58+00:00
right: "Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a substantial challenge" precisely because there is no such thing. according to the Upaniṣads, consciousness is the Absolute. "How can one know that by which everything is known? How can one know the Knower?" — Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad
by rr808 | 2026-02-02 00:36:21+00:00
As someone who interviews students for internships and grad programs I mostly agree, however I think you should listen to the best, hardest working students to hear if they're getting picked OK. I suspect the students with the best jobs are the ones who do the minimum classwork and spend their time doing leetcode and applying for jobs - I would think that is sub optimal for everyone including yourself.
by Havoc | 2026-02-02 00:37:15+00:00
It’s not the people involved that I’m worried about, or even the various players pushing agendas as they’re bound to but rather that the US is too erratic from up to. Regardless of what’s agreed there is a tangible chance trump changes his mind 24hrs later because of a brain fart or someone whispered something in his ear and promised to make him personally rich.

It’s pointless engaging with that regardless of technical merits if you don’t have some confidence it’ll stick at least medium termish
by shiroiuma | 2026-02-02 00:37:16+00:00
>it doesn't waste all that extra benefit by being that much harder to maintain in the long term.

If AI just generates piles of unmaintainable code, this isn't going to be any worse than most of the professionally-written (by humans) code I've had to work with over my career. In my experience, readable and maintainable code is unfortunately rather uncommon.
by toss1 | 2026-02-02 00:37:46+00:00
Exactly!

And that level of workout will probably produce an even significantly lower resting heart rate than the 52 I cited. And for the top endurance athletes in distance running, cycling, nordic skiing, although they might spend 10+ hours/week at threshold or some training zone, so double those extra 'exercsie beats', they also often have resting heartrates in the low 40s/minute, which will yield an even greater lifespan if it is measured in heartbeate.
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-02 00:37:52+00:00
There's gotta be better middle ground. Release something polished and only fix major bugs/vulnerabilities for free (because that's a liability). Minor bugs are accepted for a one off cost (I'm still using Microsoft 2016, e.g.).

We've all got to push back against these bloated saas models that don't bring tangible benefits to end users and serve only to pad company valuations. Make new versions of your software with features meaningful enough to encourage people to upgrade and outline support periods for existing software sales after they buy a one-time license. There's gotta be a better way. For everyone (except big tech CEOs).
by jaccola | 2026-02-02 00:39:16+00:00
What $$$?! The top tier of apple one is £36.95pm. If I spend 15 mins of time every month extra self hosting then it’s immediately not worth it. (Not to mention self hosting won’t be free).

Also, for that price I get: 2TB cloud storage,Apple TV,Apple Music,news,workouts,arcade most of which cannot be self hosted.

Economies of scale are real, it’s possible Apple makes a ton of money and the user is getting a good deal!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-02 00:39:54+00:00
If you can’t ignore court documents, how can you ignore that the Supreme Court specifically condoned “separate but equal” in 1896

Lincoln also didn’t really care about the slaves early on

https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/abraham-lincoln-q...

Again, this country has always been built on racism and inequality and was enshrined into the law in some shape or form until the 60s.

This is in no shape form or fashion a “I couldn’t get ahead because of my race” conversation.

I’ve had every door opened to me - private school, academic college scholarship, worked at startups, lifestyle companies, boring enterprise companies and BigTech less than 3 years ago and turned down another one because I refuse to ever go into an office or work for BigTech again.
by pron | 2026-02-02 00:40:21+00:00
P.S.

Even for flattened types, the "abstraction penalty", or, more precisely, its converse, the "concreteness penalty", in Java will be low, as you don't directly pick when an object is flattened. Instead, you declare whether a class cares about identity or not, and if not, the compiler will transparently choose whether and when to flatten the object, depending on how it's used.
by koakuma-chan | 2026-02-02 00:40:47+00:00
If you want to know my honest opinion, I just wish we had assisted suicide for anyone who wants it. You can go be genuinely delighted about the latest Twitter hype wave, I don't care. Caring about others is a ship that had sailed for me long ago. I would rather just exit. Go, post a Show HN where with Claude Code as top contributor. +4,294,967,295 -2,147,483,647 lines on code in two months. Go, run your THOUSANDS OF AGENTS. Your GitHub star history will look like NVDA zoomed out. I don't care.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-02-02 00:40:48+00:00
I can't tell how this is developing, and which parts will be adopted by the masses, if offered at all, and which wont, and how that will change what the few remaining professionals do.

I'm just thinking it's not as clear-cut as you make it to be, as the past shows, multiple times. For whichever, maybe technically unrelated reasons.

Also "use it or lose it" and "learned helplessness" comes to mind.
by greggoB | 2026-02-02 00:41:09+00:00
How much of this is executed as a retrieval-and-interpolation task on the vast amount of input data they've encoded?

There's a lot of evidence that LLMs tend to come up empty or hilariously wrong when there's a relative sparsity in relevant training data (think <10e4 even) for a given qury.

> in seconds

I see this as less relevant to a discussiom about intelligence. Calculators are very fast in operating on large numbers.
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-02 00:41:10+00:00
If I get ongoing value from my fully paid off car, should I keep paying the OEM? How about my house or my bike or my shoes? My toilet (huge ROI on this one)? My fridge?? Why do we feel that software gets to impose this ridiculous SaaS model? The only real answer is "because they can", not because it's helping anyone.

Reality is that many modern software developments have plenty in common with designing a toilet. You spend time identifying the problem statement, how you can differentiate yourself, prototype it, work out the bugs, ship the final product, and let sales teams move the product. The difference is the toilet can't be turned into a SaaS (yet) and, if it ever could, that would break functionality because you're supposed to poop in it, not have it poop on you.