MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andremarais | 2026-02-09 22:23:12+00:00
All valid concerns! Any business is unlikely to stand or fall based on its patents. Brand, quality of execution, and the team are all where the big part of the value lies.

You're also absolutely right that litigation is expensive, and most early-stage companies will never file a lawsuit. But patents actually create a lot of value for start-ups, and in practice, leverage can come from fundraising and acquisitions, competitive deterrence, and, hopefully, preventing someone else from filing a patent that blocks yours. Very few patents are actually enforced, but they do add value in other ways.

Re the clean-room / LLM reverse engineering point: patents don't protect code, they protect mechanisms. If someone clean-rooms a different implementation of the same underlying technique, the patent still covers it. That's actually the whole point of a patent vs. copyright.

Just executing well and hoping the best person wins is philosophically correct and justifiable. Unfortunately, though, sometimes it's not an even playing field. A big player with significant resources can quickly squash an early-stage start with fantastic ideas. I also say a big part of inventing is just identifying the problem. I've worked with a lot of startups that have really identified a gap in the market or a particular need and worked hard to develop a solution. Just to have a quick follow slipstream on all of that domain experience and hard work can be incredibly frustrating.

Maybe not the most satisfying response, but hopefully of some value. Thanks for commenting.
by tanvach | 2026-02-09 22:23:16+00:00
Related - we have an atomic Seiko wall clock expecting to have the time automatically adjusted by the WWVB LF atomic clock broadcast. Turns out, the signal is very weak where we now live. Manually setting the time on these atomic clocks is a HUGE pain (beware!).

Turns out it's possible to emulate the atomic clock signal quite easily with a Raspberry Pi, or in my case I put together Arduino code that can emulate atomic clock broadcasts from around the world using an ESP32 module using NTP servers: https://github.com/tanvach/clocksync

The history of these atomic clock broadcast signals and their differences in different countries is quite fascinating.
by dheera | 2026-02-09 22:23:28+00:00
> live on much less than this.

They do not actually live on less, they sacrifice their health or well-being in order to meet the constraint.

I would argue the calculator grossly underestimates necessities because most of these jobs are not doable in old age, so you need to account for saving $1 for each $1 you make, to support yourself while old. You also need an emergency fund, because in the US you get billed $1000 for the most random shit at the most random time.

I got billed $5000 randomly for an echodardiogram because insurance didn't pay for it despite them saying they would. At least I have $5K to spare, but considering that can happen, that needs to be considered a basic necessity.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-09 22:23:33+00:00
If you test it, yes.

Of course, you need some way of producing test loads similar to those found in production. One way would be to take a snapshot of production, tap incoming requests for a few weeks, log everything, then replay it at "as fast as we can" speed for testing; another way would be to just mirror production live, running the same operations in test as run in production.

Alternatively, you could take the "chaos monkey" approach (https://www.folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html), do away with all notions of realism, and just fuzz the heck out of your test system. I'd go with that, first, because it's easy, and tends to catch the more obvious bugs.
by paranoidrobot | 2026-02-09 22:24:27+00:00
Instagram did a similar thing for me back in 2016-ish.

A family member had been sharing some photos they were taking, but only on Instagram.

So I signed up an account, verified via email and phone number. I wasn't initially able to find the family member's account. A week later after I got the spelling of their username right, Instagram popped up "Your account has been suspended". They then sent me an email saying I needed to take a photo of myself holding government ID, and a piece of paper with a hand-written code they supplied, plus a close-up photo of said government ID. No way was I supplying all that just to be able to browse some photos.
by spankalee | 2026-02-09 22:24:51+00:00
I'm not a C programmer - having coded in high-level languages only for the past 20 years - but I've been doing a lot of WASM recently, and eagerly looking forward to the stack switching proposal so I don't have to implement an asincify-type transform for an async/await feature.

If it's true that a C program doesn't have control of the stack, what does that mean for supporting the stack switching in Wastrel? Can you not reify the stack and replace it with another from a suspended async function? Do you need some kind of userland stack for all stacks once you support WASM stack switching?
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-09 22:25:22+00:00
> why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio?

I've written some code to play back 8-bit samples (and indeed to wavetable, FM, and VA synthesis) on 8-bit Arduinos using the PWM to output 8-bit audio. That runs at 31373Hz which is a pretty crazy sample rate.

Why?

Because the chip is clocked at 16MHz, and if you program the PWM for no prescaler and "phase correct" PWM where it counts up and back down, so you get a widening pulse in the middle of a "burst", then it counts 510 "steps" of the counter. It's an 8-bit counter so it counts from 0 to 255, then the next step counts back down to 254, and so to 0 again, when the next step takes it to 1.

And 16000000/510 is 31372.55 ;-)
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-02-09 22:25:31+00:00
For the top two deciles you have 15 and 74 drinks/week:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://w...

If we take oz of hard liquor, which is set at 40% alcohol, we get:

74 * 52 * .4 / 128 [oz/gallon] = 12.025 gallons of pure alcohol in a year

And:

15 * 52 * .4 / 128 = 2.44 gallons of pure alcohol

I think the folks who are really going hard pump the average (mean) up a lot.
by keeda | 2026-02-09 22:25:42+00:00
I think there is another dynamic that this article hints at but does not call out explicitly: work becoming much more intense because AI is now doing most of the cognitively less intense -- maybe even relaxing -- "donkey work."

This means humans are now spending most of their time doing the much more intense problem-solving work, followed by the dopamine hit of seeing their work completed. The cognitive buffer of that lengthy, intermediate donkey work is gone.

I posted more about it in this comment yesterday on the thread about AI fatigue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038

People are now working at a much more intense cadence, which will inevitably lead to burnout unless work is managed to be more sustainable.
by rockskon | 2026-02-09 22:26:02+00:00
This is categorically unacceptable.

People's livelihoods and safety are threatened when there's people's personally identifying information associated with their Discord chats - even if linked by "anonymous" identifiers.

Imagine your photo ID next to the horniest thing you've stated next to some random asshole on the Internet.

Discord has no moral right to make such a dramatically consequential decision about the personal privacy of its users in jurisdictions where such age verification tech is not mandatory.
by Saline9515 | 2026-02-09 22:26:15+00:00
The problem is black-and-white thinking that ignores reality.

There are different kinds of wealthy people. Some built their wealth through talent and luck. Some inherited it. Some gained it through state cronyism and clientelism.

Some own scarce assets (like real estate). Others created new assets (e.g., startup founders).

You can dislike Elon Musk, but his owning a large stake in Tesla doesn’t make others poorer. That’s not true of a landlord who corners housing supply in a city.

Wealth taxes are essentially revenge taxes without a clear objective. France tried one for years. It was costly to administer, riddled with exemptions, encouraged avoidance instead of productivity, and sustained an industry of tax specialists. The revenue was largely recycled into clientelist spending, sometimes increasing the wealth of the same elites (e.g., via housing subsidies).

If the goal is to curb land hoarding, implement a land value tax. If it’s to reduce dynastic concentration, tax large single-heir inheritances more heavily and lower the rate when estates are widely divided. If it’s to reduce cronyism, cut state spending, simplify regulation, and strengthen competition.
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-09 22:26:28+00:00
While I recognize that, as a business who needs reach, they kind of need to be using these websites where everyone is, I really wonder how difficult it would be to mirror everything they post to some more open and accessible location (a self hosted webpage, anything). I can't blame them for using Instagram/Facebook/whatever, but I can blame them for using nothing but that site. It would almost certainly get very little traffic so it wouldn't need much bandwidth and costs should be low, and it would be a lot more consumer friendly.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-02-09 22:26:30+00:00
Been making a few different sideprojects:

1. https://app.evvl.ai - a privacy focused Eval tool that you can download and compare outputs from different AI models (bring your own key)

2. https://dnsisbeautiful.com - an extremely clean and fast DNS lookup tool to track propagation across the different networks.

3. https://finalfinalreallyfinaluntitleddocumentv3.com/ - this is a Mac only file renaming tool (you drag and drop "screenshot1.png" onto it and it renames it to "dns-results.png" for you via local AI models. Though in true side project fashion the site looks kind of borked at the moment.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-09 22:26:34+00:00
"Phone Swap Collective" ... You keep an extra smart phone... then just swap phones with people who commute to different areas of your city each day. Keep social media accounts that are effectively "bots" on the collective and post real BS multiple times a day via AI bot interactions.

Give a prepaid to homeless along with a month long bus pass... let 'em ride all over town.
by dmurray | 2026-02-09 22:26:54+00:00
The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.

Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]

So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.

If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and
government $38 billion.

That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.

For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.

A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.

[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-09 22:26:57+00:00
I guess Im glad people like you finally are starting to admit that you authoritarian rule with martial law where people just get shot in the street. That way we don't have to argue about how government is taking away your personal freedoms, because youd gladly give up the most important one.

I really wonder if people like you are rotten through and through, or is there a situation where "reality" hits hard enough for you to realize that "Oh shit, yea this is actually real and not just internet politics anymore". I guess well find out in a few years. Regardless, when shit hits the fan, just remember - you wanted this.
by astrange | 2026-02-09 22:27:43+00:00
> When you visually simulate things or e.g. simulate how food will taste in your mind as you add different seasonings, you are modeling (part of) the world.

Modeling something as an action is not "having a world model". A model is a consistently existing thing, but humans don't construct consistently existing models because it'd be a waste of time. You don't need to know what's in your trash in order to take the trash bags out.

> We know LLMs can't be doing visuospatial reasoning using imagery, because they only work with text tokens.

All frontier LLMs are multimodal to some degree. ChatGPT thinking uses it the most.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-09 22:27:49+00:00
Spain and Portugal were in pretty much the same boat not too long ago and they've started to reform of their own accord. The French will come around once the bond vigilantes start taking a serious look at that whole government deficit+debt situation and unsustainable retirement ages. Of course it will be painful and involve severe austerity measures, but that's what it takes.
by nullhole | 2026-02-09 22:28:01+00:00
> To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.

You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.

The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-09 22:28:05+00:00
I think, to add to the comment, the whole raison d'être of zero days is that an (exploitable) bug has been found that the producer of the software is not aware of/has not produced a patch for.

It's fine to say "Look this is bad, don't do" and "A patch was issued for this, you are responsible" but when some set of circumstances arises that has not been thought about before that cause a problem, then there's nothing that could have been done to stop it.

Note that the entire QA industry is explicitly geared to try and look at software being produced in a way that nobody else has thought to, in order to find if that software still behaves "correctly", and <some colour of hat> hackers are an extension of that - people looking at software in a way that developers and QA did not think of.. etc
by bawolff | 2026-02-09 22:28:06+00:00
That's not how this would work.

Based on previous history where people actually did call google's bluff to their regret, what happens is that google trusts all current certificates and just stops trusting new certs as they are issued.

Google has dragged PKI security into the 21st century kicking and screaming. Their reforms are the reason why PKI security is not a joke anymore. They are definitely not afraid to call CA companies bluff. They will win.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-09 22:28:19+00:00
For the average HKer - absolutely. Most of my HK native friends and colleagues who could immigrated to London, SG, NYC as a result.

For a business - it depends on how dependent they are on ExChina capital markets or customers.

If you were a company that was primarily and overwhelmingly operating within China, after the changes there was no incentive not to shift most of your operational and executive staff to Shanghai.

If you weren't one of those, then shifting to Singapore makes sense.

The issue for Singapore is Indian companies have started making the same decisions as those China First companies, so Singapore has lost it's comparative advantage within Asia, as Western FDI remains prominent but is increasingly either routed directly or (in India's case) through challengers like the UAE or London.
by stackskipton | 2026-02-09 22:28:21+00:00
Someone mentioned the boards but Pipelines/Actions are not 100% compliant.

My company uses Azure DevOps for a few things and any attempt to convert to GitHub was quickly abandoned after we spent 3 hours trying to get some Action working.

However, all usability quarks aside, I actually prefer these days since Microsoft doesn't really touch it and it just sits in corner doing what I need.
by pcurve | 2026-02-09 22:28:44+00:00
"Which is to say, do they know that touch interfaces are bad and do it anyway because it saves money? Or do they go through life thinking they're actually making a usable product?"

It's likely the former. Industrial designers are trained on ergonomics so they know the benefits of physical switches.

However, at least in the case of BMW / Mini, they're forced use touchscreens by their management primarily because:

1. Not only it saves money

2. It also enables subscription models for certain features like heated seats and steering wheel. No heated seats? Just remove the UI buttons.

Unless consumers push back (like VW customers did), they will continue to cut costs.
Ask HN: Would you hate if your desktop software had opt-in Microsoft Clarity?
by fallat | 2026-02-09 22:29:23+00:00
While I absolutely hate tracking as a user, as a business, I've come to see why these are so compelling. You can see exactly where people are losing their shit. You can act on it and make the application better without surveys.

How do you feel about this? Esp. if it's opt-in?
A Deep Dive into Nova – A Web Framework for Erlang on Beam
by taure | 2026-02-09 22:29:39+00:00
I’ve put together a blog focused on Nova, a web framework built on Erlang and the BEAM VM.

The goal was to create something practical and easy to follow — covering setup, routing, views, plugins, authentication, APIs, and WebSockets — with a focus on how Nova fits into the broader BEAM ecosystem.

Blog: https://taure.github.io/novablog/

Nova repo: https://github.com/novaframework/nova

If you're interested in building fault-tolerant web apps on BEAM (and not just using Phoenix/Elixir), you might find it useful.

Feedback, corrections, and suggestions are welcome.
by toephu2 | 2026-02-09 22:30:02+00:00
> Are you OK with being tracked everywhere you go in public so that some bad guys don't get away with their bad activities? Many people are.

If it helps catch 1/10 criminals? or even 1 more out of 100 criminals than would be otherwise caught?

I am. I have nothing to hide. Also, in public, anyone can record you on video without your permission anyway.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-09 22:30:05+00:00
I'm asking because I hate Matrix and actually want you to convince me: why should I accept the risk of migrating my friend group from Discord to Zulip, which has already "broken the seal" of restricting features behind a monthly fee even for self-hosted users, when I could migrate us to Matrix instead? Matrix seems like the much less risky option.

I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.
by dnautics | 2026-02-09 22:30:21+00:00
"LLMs cannot backtrack". This is exactly wrong. LLMs always see everything in the past. In this sense they are more efficient than turing machines, because (assuming sufficiently large context length) every token sees ALL previous tokens. So, in principle, an LLM could write a bunch of exploratory shit, and then add a "tombstone" "token" that can selectively devalue things within a certain timeframe -- aka just de exploratory thngs (as judged by RoPE time), and thus "backtrack".

I put "token" in quotes because this would obviously not necessarily be an explicit token, but it would have to be learned group of tokens, for example. But who knows, if the thinking models have some weird pseudo-xml delimiters for thinking, it's not crazy to think that an LLM could shove this information in say the closer tag.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-09 22:30:54+00:00
> Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money ...

Google's Gemini is SOTA and Google is valued at 4 trillion. Now it's ironic of course: Google became a 4 trillion thanks to ads. Which now allows Google to serve no ads in Gemini. It doesn't matter to Google that they're operating at a loss with Gemini: they can throw hundreds of billions at the problem over a few years, serving zero ads, while people make fun of the AI firms showing ads, like ChadGPT.

OpenAI is not just facing Anthropic and its "no ads" ad, it's also facing "we're a 4 trillion company and can run Gemini at a loss for decades" Google, "we pretend we'll put datacenters in space so that xAI can tap into the SpaceX warchest", openweight models which anybody can run on rented hardware for next to nothing compared to ChadGPT's price, etc.

It doesn't matter if others can survive without ads: all that matters is that they can survive long enough without ads so that OpenAI doesn't become another trillion dollar company.
by daveguy | 2026-02-09 22:31:12+00:00
Fyi, episode 3 is out as of ~3 hrs ago:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grgIhw1YbHw

Episode 2 link for others' reference:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rhjJjDWMQOw&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3...
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-09 22:31:39+00:00
(Reminder that TechDirt is also a lobbyist Copia Insitute who takes money from big tech clients.)

Section 230 is a terrible law because it exempts one class of business from any responsibility for their actions.

A global company which faces no penalties for allowing malicious and fraudulent content has no incentive to police itself, and its clients live outside the reach of the law. Ergo, they make money on crime and have no responsibility for it.

If we want to fix the Internet, step one is deleting 230 in its entirety, and step two is ensuring a tech platform cannot profit from illegal activity. That means if they sell a malicious ad, they at bare minimum, have to give up that revenue, and ideally, face a penalty for it if they aren't taking adequate measures to prevent abuse.

A true financial risk to tech platforms is the only way to incentivize good behavior.
by ImPleadThe5th | 2026-02-09 22:32:15+00:00
It really would be less bad though wouldn't it?

The more we resist turning this into a state-sided solution which provides a service to private companies with a YES/NO age verification, the more likely your data is going to be given to botton-of-the-barrel third party private companies.

I'm genuinely curious what the argument is against state-run privacy focused age verification is here. We already protect real life adult spaces with IDs. You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.

What makes these social media platforms special that they have entirely different rules?

I will say, if they came for small privately-hosted communities, I can understand the cause for alarm. But so far it appears to be limited to massive misinformation machines.
by incahoots | 2026-02-09 22:32:31+00:00
>Now that China has become more adversarial

I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.

One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...
by dmix | 2026-02-09 22:33:03+00:00
The UK/US haven't even spent widely on internet addiction education or built widescale programs like they did for drugs or even speech therapy. Jumping immediately to banning and gatekeeping everything on the internet is silly and naive. The world won't be a better place because we fear other kids parenting skills, it will be highly locked down and these ID checks/bans will hit every part of the internet.