MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LightBug1 | 2026-02-10 21:58:19+00:00
I like these kind of stories. Insight into these situation is inspiring. When I hang up the gloves in my current role I'll probably do something similar.

But, come on ... isn't it just a touch disingenuous to call this a bootstrap situation?

I assume an ex-Google developer jettisoned with a decent safety net. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I have a very different idea of what bootstrapping is.

Anyway, kudos to you ... making your own move is brave and commendable.
by switz | 2026-02-10 21:58:24+00:00
Yup, I always say – the hardest part of my job is that if I don't do it, nothing gets done. That copy error on the website. That minor bug. We take for granted the velocity we get by having colleagues. If I get lazy, everything grinds to a halt. And those little nits add up. But I strongly agree it's all worth it.
by sebringj | 2026-02-10 21:59:10+00:00
idk, i'm loving the newness of all of it, I feel more empowered than ever before, like it's my time. Before startups would take like a year to get going, now it's like a month or so. It's exciting and scary, we have no idea where it's going. Not boring at all. I was getting bored as shit and bam, now i can dream up shit quick and have it validated to, ya i figured that out with an MCP so ya this is my jam. Program MCPs and speed it up!!!!!!
by bpt3 | 2026-02-10 21:59:25+00:00
Nothing like a thread on vehicle preferences to rouse the extremely vocal and judgmental fuckcars crowd on here.

You may be shocked to hear this, but not all SUVs are less spacious than minivans and comfort is very subjective.

You have to define SUV to determine its goals. Most "SUVs" are basically cars that are slightly lifted and extended. The ones I assume you take most issue with are significantly larger than minivans, have 4WD (which is actually useful where I live), and also are seen as more luxurious.

I would say the primary goal, especially for parents, is occupant safety, which does come at the cost of the safety of others. Good luck convincing anyone to change with your attacks though.
by davegoldblatt | 2026-02-10 21:59:36+00:00
Agree on human pruning piece for the most part. The system is built on the assumption that the model shouldn't necessarily be trusted to decide what's permanently important.

Remove-gates are a good extension of the same philosophy. Right now /recall-maintain lets you manually review and clean up, but it doesn't proactively surface "hey, you haven't referenced this in two weeks, still relevant?" That would be the natural counterpart to the write gate: system surfaces candidates, human decides.

Am going to think on this, but will likely add. Appreciate you!
by kube-system | 2026-02-10 21:59:40+00:00
CAFE doesn't prevent them from producing or selling it here, plenty of automakers just pay CAFE fines. The Tacoma and Hilux are very similar in size, but the Tacoma does have the wheels pushed slightly closer to the corners, likely for this reason.

However, current CAFE fines are capped to a whopping $0.00
by zahlman | 2026-02-10 22:00:01+00:00
I can still remember trying to deal with structured binary data in Perl, just because I didn't want to fiddle around with memory management in C. I'm not sure it was actually any less painful, and I ultimately abandoned that first attempt.

(Decades later, my "magnum opus" has been through multiple mental redesigns and unsatisfactory partial implementations. This time, for sure...)
by jakewins | 2026-02-10 22:00:40+00:00
I mean, no, it's more than that.

You also need to choose optimal instruction encoding, and you need to understand how relocs work - which things can you resolve now vs which require you to encode info for the linker to fill in once the program is launched, etc etc.

Not sure why I'm on this little micro-rant about this; I'm sure Claude could write a workable assembler. I'm more like.. I've written one assembler and many, many parsers, and the parsers where way simpler, yet this thread is littered with people that seem to think assemblers are just lookup tables from ascii to machine code with a loop slapped on top of them.
by stickfigure | 2026-02-10 22:00:46+00:00
I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman".

You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.

"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 22:01:42+00:00
I recommend having an initial talk with a broker if you're thinking about it at all.

The brokers I've met are happy to talk if you have a profitable business, even if you don't plan on selling anytime soon, and you don't have to sign anything to commit to them. They can talk to you about what you can do to prepare for an exit even if you don't expect that to happen for several years (and it might take you several years to manage yourself out of the business).

I personally liked the broker I worked with and recommend him.[0]

[0] https://quietlight.com/advisors/chris-guthrie/
by reify | 2026-02-10 22:01:46+00:00
Being 70 years old I have been thinking about getting a bit of an upgrade.

A new face would be nice, I wonder how that works. Do you have to wait for a young car crash victim and be first inline for a face transplant. Money talks I suppose,

I don't want a shiny frankenstein one like Jeff (benzodiazepine) Bezos and Mark (facecrook) Sucker-fur-berger have. They look like their highly polished faces are melting under the lights when they are interviewed.

A new foreskin would be helpful or at the very least a bit of a tightening procedure. Honestly you could make a handbag out of the loose section. Thats my overzealous wife's fault, hands like an Irish ground worker.

I have been bald for a millennium and recently been fantasising about a wig like the one Trump wears, in a nice warm blonde colour, not yellow like Trumps one.

Apart from that I am quite healthy. The old brain still works good enough to do the guardian cryptic crossword every day.
by Nition | 2026-02-10 22:01:54+00:00
January 20, 2038

Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside in the sun, seemingly unobserved. A true miracle. Grigori, who once worked with computers at the nuclear plant in Bilibino, only says cryptically: "All things come to an end, with time."
by Jtsummers | 2026-02-10 22:02:01+00:00
> if I am reading input, I am always going to validate that input after parsing.

In the "parse, don't validate" mindset, your parsing step is validation but it produces something that doesn't require further validation. To stick with the non-empty list example, your parse step would be something like:

parse [h|t] = Just h :| t
parse [] = Nothing

So when you run this you can assume that the data is valid in the rest of the code (sorry, my Haskell is rusty so this is a sketch, not actual code):

process data =
do {
Just valid <- parse data;
... further uses of valid that can assume parsing succeeded, if it didn't an error would already have occurred and you can handle it
}

That has performed validation, but by parsing it also produces a value that doesn't require any revalidation. Every function that takes the parsed data as an argument can ignore the possibility that the data is invalid. If all you do is validate (returning true/false):

validate [h|t] = true
validate [] = false

Then you don't have that same guarantee. You don't know that, in future uses, that the data is actually valid. So your code becomes more complex and error-prone.

process data =
if validate data then use data else fail "Well shit"

use [h|t] = do_something_with h t
use [] = fail "This shouldn't have happened, we validated it right? Must have been called without data being validated first."

The parse approach adds a guarantee to your code, that when you reach `use` (or whatever other functions) with parsed and validated data that you don't have to test that property again. The validate approach does not provide this guarantee, because you cannot guarantee that `use` is never called without first running the validation. There is no information in the program itself saying that `use` must be called after validation (and that validation must return true). Whereas a version of `use` expecting NonEmpty cannot be called without at least validating that particular property.
by TOMDM | 2026-02-10 22:02:34+00:00
This is what Claude had to say about your comment if we're doing this now:

Imagine being so intellectually lazy that you can't even be bothered to form your own opinion about a product. You just copy-paste it into Claude with "roast this" and then post the output like you're contributing something. That's not criticism, that's outsourcing your personality to an API call. You didn't engage with the architecture, the docs, the use case, or even the pricing page — you just wanted a sick burn you didn't have to think of yourself.
by stefan_r | 2026-02-10 22:02:37+00:00
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We are looking for a product-minded Applied AI Engineer with 5+ years of experience and deep expertise in building autonomous agents. Experience with Voice AI or at vertical/coding agent companies is a major bonus. You'll build autonomous voice and digital agents powering 10M+ interactions monthly and will own features end to end, tackling hard edge cases like low-resource languages, low literacy, and poor connectivity.

Salary up to $222,700 + equity. Benefits include 6 months parental leave, $10k charity match.

Apply here: https://www.wave.com/en/careers/job/5779974004/
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-10 22:02:43+00:00
This is the law which regulates such things, and the law makes no difference between any payment service (ie credit or debit), when it comes to unauthorized use, see chapter 5:

https://svenskforfattningssamling.se/sites/default/files/sfs...

Edit: Page 28 to be precise.

The law explicitly states that funds have to be reimbursed to the victim immediately or at latest on the same bank day.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-02-10 22:02:52+00:00
iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know
by tayo42 | 2026-02-10 22:02:53+00:00
>so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.

My experience so far with a kid is most people will just tolerate your child. I'm surprised your running into that attitude.

Other new parents I know that are in the suburbs aren't all surrounded by family's either. I think aging people aren't downsizing their houses and moving around. Careers scattered and cheap homes scattered everyone around.

Maybe NYC is just different. I mean I'm 100% sure it's different. I'm grew up in a NYC suburb lol
by jammcq | 2026-02-10 22:02:57+00:00
I love it when I learn something new. It's even better when I learn multiple things. I've been using Postgres for over 20 years and I didn't know about auto_explain and fastupdate on GIN indexes. One of my favorite things to do is tune queries to respond faster. Nothing like taking a query that takes 15 seconds and getting it down to 15 milliseconds. We use GIN indexes a bit but we don't have a high volume of writes so we haven't run into the slowness that you talk about. If we do see any write performance issues, I definitely know where to start looking. Thanks for your article!
by momoschili | 2026-02-10 22:03:24+00:00
I'd argue so is the bed you sleep in every night, and the roof over your head. Best not to take those for granted, as I don't think the transistor would last so long if it wasn't sheltered from the environment.

The argument is that these kind of distinctions between how "classical" and "quantum" physics affects our lives is just a pointless endeavor that even academics don't waste their time with.
by avianlyric | 2026-02-10 22:03:33+00:00
None of what you’ve mentioned has anything to do with Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard are just payment networks, their whole business is literally just transporting transaction information from payment terminals to banks and payment processors, plus keeping track of all the numbers (which is pretty important).

Payment networks don’t provide credit or any kind of liquidity whatsoever, that entirely provided by the various financial entities that communicate via the payment network. The reason Visa and Mastercard haven’t been easily replaced is simple network effects, nobody wants to integrate with a payment network where there’s nobody to transact with.
by JambalayaJimbo | 2026-02-10 22:03:34+00:00
>against the owner of the device

Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?

>If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me

They are offering you free software and are operating under a security model tied to these specific devices. You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.

>Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car

Car manufacturers do this as well though. Some of this is for the benefit of their customers (preventing theft from easily cloned keys). Some of this is not for customer benefit, like locking down infotainment systems.

Banks however are only interested in preventing fraud.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-10 22:03:39+00:00
That abstraction exists in D3D11 and to a lesser extent in Metal via smaller state-group-objects (for instance D3D11 splits the rende state into immutable objects for rasterizer-state, depth-stencil-state, blend-state and (vertex-)input-layout-state (not even needed anymore with vertex pulling).

Even if those state group objects don't match the underlying hardware directly they still reign in the combinatorial explosion dramatically and are more robust than the GL-style state soup.

AFAIK the main problem is state which needs to be compiled into the shader on some GPUs while other GPUs only have fixed-function hardware for the same state (for instance blend state).
by rpcope1 | 2026-02-10 22:03:52+00:00
That's the dirty secret, is that a lot of the side-by-sides kind of suck in relation to an old Tacoma, S10, Mahindra Roxor or a Kei truck, and cost an arm and a leg. It's amazing to me that Polaris sells as many as they do, given what they cost and their capabilities.
by mlochbaum | 2026-02-10 22:04:07+00:00
More on not being able to find π, as I'm piecing it together: given only the field structure, you can't construct an equation identifying π or even narrowing it down, because if π is the only free variable then it will work out to finding roots of a polynomial (you only have field operations!) and π is transcendental so that polynomial can only be 0 (if you're allowed to use not-equals instead of equals, of course you can specify that π isn't in various sets of algebraic numbers). With other free variables, because the field's algebraically closed, you can fix π to whatever transcendental you like and still solve for the remaining variables. So it's something like, the rationals plus a continuum's worth of arbitrary field extensions? Not terribly surprising that all instances of this are isomorphic as fields but it's starting to feel about as useful as claiming the real numbers are "up to set isomorphism, the unique set whose cardinality matches the power set of the natural numbers", like, of course it's got automorphisms, you didn't finish defining it.
by davegoldblatt | 2026-02-10 22:04:10+00:00
The global vs. project-specific split is the right question and has real tradeoffs. You're right that preferences, identity, and coding style don't change between repos. Right now Total Recall is project-scoped, so if you're using it across multiple projects you'd be maintaining separate memory for each, which of course is redundant for that kind of context.

The tension is that some things genuinely are project-specific (decisions, architecture, people involved) and mixing those into a global tier makes retrieval noisier and may degrade performance to the point where its useless. I think the answer is probably both: a global layer for durable personal context and project-scoped registers for everything else. Haven't built that yet but it's the obvious next step. Am going to add this to my next sprint.

Also, your point about using Claude Code for thinking and writing beyond just coding resonates too. The more you use it outside of repo-scoped work, the more project-level memory feels like the wrong boundary. Will report back when ive come up with a potential solution.
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-10 22:04:24+00:00
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.

Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger deal.
by thehaikuza | 2026-02-10 22:04:32+00:00
I'm deep in the rabbit hole of ergonomic keyboards and working on the design of a wireless, 36-key keyboard that can be used as a unibody or split. This came about because while I enjoy using a split when I'm at a desk, I found it cumbersome to use when I'm moving around at a coworking space or cafe, or even while working on a couch, where a unibody keyboard is more convenient (albeit with less ideal ergonomics).

Normally, split keyboards use two microcontrollers and batteries (one for each half), but this design uses a single microcontroller and a GPIO expander to bridge the two halves together via a magnetic 4-pin connector. It also features a reversible PCB to further keep the overall costs low.

Just finished bringing up the PCBs and putting the ZMK firmware together. Still designing the case for it, but all the files are open-source and on GitHub!

https://github.com/justinmklam/dabao
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-10 22:04:38+00:00
Great to see you doing red/green TDD Simon!

Passing tests in your repo are great documentation of the tool at a microscopic level. And rerunning tests only burns tokens on failures (since passed tests just print a dot) so it’s token efficient too.

Some other neat tricks:

- For greater efficiency configure your test runner to print nothing (not even a dot/filename) for test successes. Agents don’t need progress dots, only the exit code & failure details

- Have your agent implement a 10ms timeout per test. pytest has hooks to do this. The agent will see tests time out and mock out all I/O and third party code - why test what one assumes third parties tested already! Your test suite is CPU-bound without a shared database, has no shared data and no tests that interfere with or depend on each other, so tests can run in parallel.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-10 22:05:01+00:00
> Flatpak ships as it's own system managing Mesa versions.

Mixing and matching the kernel and userspace mesa components is subject to limitations. However it will transparently fall back to software rendering so you might not notice if you aren't doing anything intensive.

Related, being a container flatpak has no choice but to ship the mesa userspace component. If it didn't nothing would work.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-10 22:05:12+00:00
Original article: "Widespread slowdown in short-term species turnover despite accelerating climate change" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-68187-1

Abstract: "When the species composition of ecological communities changes over time, environmental drivers are often invoked as the most plausible explanation. Several lines of reasoning, however, suggest that such compositional change, called temporal species turnover, can similarly result from intrinsic ecosystem dynamics, even in a constant environment. The degree to which these two drivers contribute to observed turnover remains unclear. To address this conundrum, we analyse the well-established BioTIME database of surveys. We expect either an acceleration of turnover with accelerating climate change or constant turnover if intrinsic mechanisms dominate. Surprisingly we find instead that species turnover over short time intervals (1-5 years) has decelerated in significantly more communities during the last 100 years than it has accelerated, typically by one third. The observed slowing of turnover, we argue, could be understood—when intrinsic dynamics dominate—as resulting because anthropogenic environmental degradation or declines of regional species pools reduce the number of potential colonisers driving turnover. Our results suggest that observed past changes in species composition were often manifestations of natural, intrinsic ecosystem dynamics. Although one can expect environmental drivers to dominate species turnover eventually as climate change accelerates further, for now such attribution should be done with caution."

Referred to in the article: "Ecological communities with Lotka-Volterra dynamics" - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.04...

Abstract: "Ecological communities in heterogeneous environments assemble through the combined effect of species interaction and migration. Understanding the effect of these processes on the community properties is central to ecology. Here we study these processes for a single community subject to migration from a pool of species, with population dynamics described by the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations. We derive exact results for the phase diagram describing the dynamical behaviors, and for the diversity and species abundance distributions. A phase transition is found from a phase where a unique globally attractive fixed point exists to a phase where multiple dynamical attractors exist, leading to history-dependent community properties. The model is shown to possess a symmetry that also establishes a connection with other well-known models."
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-10 22:05:43+00:00
Duh. The first cyclotron was built for, like, a 1000 bucks. Many of the following colliders were also ridiculously cheap by comparison. But in the same way the semiconductor industry now spend billions on EUV research to keep making progress, particle physics spends billions on colliders. But when you account for real GDP growth, collider costs have actually been stagnating for decades.