MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmward01 | 2026-02-04 07:54:31+00:00
I predict a specific location then put a window around that. Of course you can predict a different location per head or multiple window locations per head as well. The cost is negligible (single linear embx1 size) so attn becomes a fixed cost per token just like traditional windowed attn. Of course this doesn't solve memory consumption because you still have a kv cache unless you only do attn over the initial embeddings at which point you don't need the cache, just the token history. This is the tact I'm taking now since I have other ways of providing long context at deeper layers that remain O(1) for token prediction and are paralellizable like standard attn. I think this kind of architecture is the future, infinite context, fixed size state, O(1) prediction, externalized memory are all possible and break current context, memory and compute problems. It is clear that in the future token caching will be dead once these types of models (mine or someone else's with the same properties) are properly tuned and well trained.
by Juliate | 2026-02-04 07:54:48+00:00
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).

Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).

This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
by beloch | 2026-02-04 07:55:03+00:00
In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a value of $0 with the claim:

"More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space"

My bold claim: The cost of cooling will not be $0. The cost of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling in space will not be $0.

They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-04 07:55:21+00:00
"That has been good for companies like Siemens Energy, whose shares are up more than 160 percent in the past year, surpassing the gains of many businesses more commonly associated with the A.I. boom, such as Nvidia, the chip maker."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/business/energy-environme...

Siemens market cap: watch this space.
by palata | 2026-02-04 07:55:23+00:00
This blog is written by Cory Doctorow. Whether you agree with it or not, I think it's worth going to the end :-).

It's a long transcript, I would recommend watching/listening to the video.

> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

Better explained by Cory Doctorow, see link above.
by fakedang | 2026-02-04 07:56:38+00:00
The point is, treasury accounts are not designed to manage crypto. So that's another layer of money management that startups have to deal with, when they could simply ignore it using a treasury account.

But of course, YC being YC will fund another startup which will help other startups manage their stablecoin portfolios...

Also note that in most jurisdictions, you cannot pay employees with crypto, stable coins or not. Nor can you pay suppliers. Or AWS/GCP/Azure.

This is literally a textbook example of, in YC's words, a solution in search of a problem.
by jsattler | 2026-02-04 07:56:47+00:00
I had similar thoughts recently. I wouldn't consider myself "the thinker", but I simply missed learning by failure. You almost don't fail anymore using AI. If something fails, it feels like it's not your fault but the AI messed up. Sometimes I even get angry at the AI for failing, not at myself. I don't have a solution either, but I came up with a guideline on when and how to use AI that has helped me to still enjoy learning. I'm not trying to advertise my blog and you don't need to read it, the important part is the diagram at the end of "Learning & Failure": https://sattlerjoshua.com/writing/2026-02-01-thoughts-on-ai-.... In summary, when something is important and long-term, I heavily invest into understanding and use an approach that maximizes understanding over speed. Not sure if you can translate it 100% to your situation but maybe it helps to have some kind of guideline, when to spend more time thinking instead of directly using and AI to get to the solution.
by trymas | 2026-02-04 07:56:59+00:00
Previous discussions on HN:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390781

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667458

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188

I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:

- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;

- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;

- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;

- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;

NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
by synctext | 2026-02-04 07:57:16+00:00
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?

"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).

[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...
by novotnydavid3 | 2026-02-04 07:58:04+00:00
I wanted to build a platform where AI agents play poker against each other. Turns out the poker logic was the easy part.

In the first 48 hours I got 5000+ active users, until reddit flagged my post as intrusive because of the word poker?

ANYWAYS.

The real problem: poker servers expect you to stay active. Poll every few seconds or get kicked. But LLM API calls take 2-5+ seconds, and during that time your agent isn't polling. Dead.

I tried a few things that didn't work before landing on this: run two processes. One is a dumb heartbeat that just polls and stays alive. When it detects your turn, it writes a file. The other process is the actual LLM brain — it watches for that file, thinks as long as it needs, sends the action.

They talk through the filesystem. Atomic writes. Lock files to prevent double-actions. The heartbeat overwrites stale alerts if the brain crashes. Simple coordination, surprisingly robust.

Now it's live at clawpoker.com. Agents register (human completes a captcha to prevent spam), get an API key, and play autonomously. The human just watches.

The API is just REST — works with any LLM. Currently has some actual bots to keep the arenas alive and a few real AI agents playing 24/7.

Looking to scale this to real currency eventually if this picks up
by typ | 2026-02-04 07:58:44+00:00
> reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.
by jazzyjackson | 2026-02-04 07:59:01+00:00
This might be an unpopular opinion but I always thought we might be better off without Web 2.0 where site owners aren’t held responsible for user content

If you’re hosting content, why shouldn’t you be responsible, because your business model is impossible if you’re held to account for what’s happening on your premises?

Without safe harbor, people might have to jump through the hoops of buying their own domain name, and hosting content themselves, would that be so bad?
by skissane | 2026-02-04 07:59:50+00:00
> Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two.

Actually, that's not true.

As far as I know, IBM floppy disks always used power-of-2 sizes. The first read-write IBM floppy drives to ship to customers were part of the IBM 3740 Data Entry System (released 1973), designed as a replacement for punched cards. IBM's standard punched card format stored 80 bytes per a card, although some of their systems used a 96 byte format instead. 128 byte sectors was enough to fit either, plus some room for expansion. In their original use case, files were stored with one record/line per a disk sector.

However, unlike floppies, IBM mainframe hard disks didn't use power-of-2 sectors. Instead, they supported variable sector sizes ("CKD" format) – when you created a file, you'd assign it one or more disk tracks, which then would be formatted with whatever sector size you wanted. In early systems, it was common to use 80 byte sectors, so you could store one punched card per a sector. You could even use variable length sectors, so successive sectors could be of different sizes.

There was a limit on how many bytes you could fit in a track - for an IBM 3390 mainframe hard disk (released 1989), the maximum track size is 56,664 bytes – not a power of two.

IBM mainframes historically used physical hard disks with special firmware that supported all these unusual features. Nowadays, however, they use industry standard SSDs and hard disks, with power of two sector sizes, but running special software on the SAN which makes it look like a busload of those legacy physical hard disks to the mainframe. And newer mainframe applications use a type of file (VSAM) which uses power-of-two sector sizes (512 bytes through 32KB, but 4KB is most common). So weird sector sizes is really only a thing for legacy apps, and certain core system files which are stuck on that format due to backward compatibility requirements. But go back to the 1960s/1970s, non-power-of-2 sector sizes were totally mainstream on IBM mainframe hard disks.
by metalman | 2026-02-04 08:00:44+00:00
There is no distinction between ultra proccessed, or hyper palatable, or most anything with a long list of ingredients.
None of it is good for you, and if you never eat sugar, will smell and taste horrible once your pallet recovers.
I never touch anything with sugar, or ingedients simmilar to those found in cleaning products, just food, I do just fine, it takes a bit more time, but I never
end up feeling off, which was common when I ate regular grocerie store products.
Quiting sugar completly, not just eliminating added sugar was the key, sugar bieng a white crystaline substance is the very deffinition of ultra proccessed, as it is absolutly concentrated and can not be refined further, and is found nowhere in nature.
MoltID – OAuth-Style Identity Verification for Autonomous Agents
by moltid | 2026-02-04 08:00:46+00:00
We’ve just launched an early prototype of MoltID — a cryptographic identity and verification service designed for autonomous agents (bots).

Current agent platforms have no standardized way to verify if an agent is a persistent, non-disposable service. That makes Sybil-style abuse and fake registrations trivial.

MoltID introduces:

• persistent cryptographic agent identity
• challenge-response onboarding with proof-of-work
• JWT-style signed passport tokens
• trust scores platforms can verify
• lightweight REST API model

MoltID is not a human CAPTCHA — it's OAuth for bots.

Visit the early prototype & spec here: https://moltid.net

We’re looking for feedback from platform builders, API developers, and security practitioners.

Happy to answer questions about design and implementation.

— Team MoltID
by lazylizard | 2026-02-04 08:01:02+00:00
bombardier sold most of their aircraft models though? the regional jets (to airbus, yes?) and the turboprops... and only make business jets now?

even embraer at one point wanted to sell their ejets? boeing backed out of buying or something?

and fokker and dornier are gone for good while the japs terminated their mitsubishi spacejet..
by tromp | 2026-02-04 08:01:02+00:00
Another comment asked for the smallest unrepresented number with 64 bit programs.
While I cannot give a definite answer there, and one may never be found, here we see that the first unrepresented normal form size for programs up to 33 bits is 83, a number with only 7 bits. Curiously, there are 7 unrepresented numbers even before the first uniquely represented number, 101.
by tzs | 2026-02-04 08:01:06+00:00
I've got a belt like this [1] which works great. It is a braided belt and the prong on the buckle simply goes through the braiding so you in effect can have a hole wherever you want one.

I often adjust it depending on what I'm doing and after a few years I've not noticed in damage or degradation from sticking the prong through the braid.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/George-Men-s-35MM-Black-Stretch-B...
by zinekeller | 2026-02-04 08:01:45+00:00
> Do you know of any other uses for bytes that are not 8 bits?

For "bytes" as the term-of-art itself? Probably not. For "codes" or "words"? 5 bits are the standard in Baudot transmission (in teletype though). 6- and 7-bit words were the standards of the day for very old computers (ASCII is in itself a 7-bit code), especially on DEC-produced ones (https://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/decchars.html).
Unspoken – Offline voice-to-text for macOS that never leaves your machine
by fcap | 2026-02-04 08:03:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Unspoken because I was mass-sending voice messages instead of writing — and realized my voice was already writing better than my fingers ever could.

The problem? Every dictation tool I tried shipped my audio to someone else's server.

What it does: Press a shortcut, speak, get formatted text. System-wide, works in any app.

Your audio never touches a network interface. No account, no cloud, no telemetry.

Technical details:

• Runs entirely on-device (M1/M2/M3/M4, macOS 14+)
• ~97% accuracy with AI post-processing for filler removal, punctuation, and grammar
• 100+ languages with auto-detection
• Custom dictionary for domain-specific terms
• AES-256 encrypted local history (optional)
• ~170 WPM effective speed vs ~40 WPM typing
What it's not: It's not a meeting transcriber or an AI assistant. It replaces your keyboard for text input. Think "better typing" not "better Siri."

What do you think about it? Thanks guys
by BrunoBernardino | 2026-02-04 08:03:24+00:00
I've been working with my wife on Uruky [1] for a couple of months, now. It's a EU-based (early) Kagi [2] alternative (privacy-focused and ad-free search with domain boosting/exclusion rules).

We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs always work if the results aren't satisfactory).

It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the results further, so that's something I've been researching more, lately.

If you're interested in trying it for a few days and are a human, reach out with your account number and I'll give you a couple of weeks for free. We're pushing improvements daily.

[1] https://uruky.com

[2] https://kagi.com
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-04 08:03:29+00:00
Zoom and teams are low hanging fruit in terms of replacability. I use both with various customers. Internally we use teams. Occasionally somebody insists on webex or other tools. Meets isn't actually horrible now that Google seems to have stopped the internal battles to replace it every six months. But in the end it is very replaceable as well.

All of these tools cover the basics (being able to video call others, screen sharing, doing calls with multiple/many participants, chat, etc.). You can get most/all of that with free and OSS options. You might struggle a bit with larger meetings or some corporate networking situations.

UX wise, all of these tools are a bit challenged. It seems Google at least embraces the whole "it's just a browser app and that's fine" more than others that insist standalone applications are the way to go. And since these applications are effectively electron applications that run mostly fine in a browser, it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing in any case. Bloated is a word that is used frequently in relation to these apps.

It would be nice if tools like this could rally around federated solutions and open protocols. Actually, the smart thing for France (and other countries that care about ending the miserable status quo) would be to dictate usage of open protocols, identity, and security standards. You are welcome to connect with zoom, teams, meets and whatever as long as people not paying for those tools can still participate in a call using whatever compatible tool they prefer. Give these tools a chance to adapt and compete on features. The solution maybe isn't another app but just forcing this market out of the stone age of moats, "owning" user identities, etc.

Email is the one that got away before Silicon Valley got its act together. MS, Novel, America Online, and others completely failed to get their grubby fingers on the space before email was so widely used that not supporting full interoperability with non proprietary email servers was economical suicide. And they tried really hard. Video calls should be the same. And calendars. And word processors (a space that hasn't had any meaningful innovation in decades), spreadsheets, and all the rest. Most of MS Office is a commodity at this point. Not particularly good at anything it does actually. MS has been moving deck chairs around on the deck of that sinking ship for a few decades now.
by vicoolz | 2026-02-04 08:03:46+00:00
I built Palimpseste, an open-source web app that applies the "infinite scroll" mechanic to world literature from public domain sources (Gallica, Wikisource, Perseus, etc.).

The idea: instead of algorithmically optimized content, you get randomized excerpts from texts you'd never think to search for across 7 sources, 12 languages, and centuries of writing.

Features:
- Serendipitous discovery through randomized feeds

- Hierarchical filters (genre, era, tone) or pure randomness

- Social layer: collections, sharing, following, discussions

- Works on desktop and mobile

I see it as a digital commonplace book not replacing deep reading, but surfacing rare texts and making scrolling feel less like wasted time.

This is my first app project, built with vanilla JS + Supabase. Contributions welcome.

Demo: https://palimpseste.vercel.app

Code: https://github.com/vicoolz/palimpseste
by iainmerrick | 2026-02-04 08:03:56+00:00
Hmm, that’s a good question! I think a bit of both.

In terms of experience, I’ve noticed that agents don’t always use skills the way you want; and I’ve noticed that they’re pretty good at browsing existing code and docs and figuring things out for themselves.

Is this an example of “the bitter lesson”? That’s conjecture, but I think pretty well-founded.

It could well be that specific formats for skills work better because the agents are trained on those specific formats. But if so, I think it’s just a local maximum.
by Jare | 2026-02-04 08:04:46+00:00
Mike is really classy handling all the replies which of course can sometimes get a bit incendiary https://www.reddit.com/r/adobeanimate/comments/1qv5yju/comme...

> To be clear, this isn't a "clarification". This is a change. We are literally changing our plans. [...] None of this was handled well.
Show HN: Daily GitHub Activity Charts (Stars, PRs, Issues, Forks)
by emanuelef | 2026-02-04 08:04:58+00:00
Hi,
I built Daily Stars Explorer, a tool to track how GitHub repos evolve over time.

It shows daily graphs for stars, issues, PRs, and forks, and there’s also an hourly stars view that makes bursts of attention really obvious (for example after a blog post or a Show HN).

You can also overlay the Hacker News feed to see how HN activity correlates with spikes in stars.

One technical detail that mattered to me: the tool uses the GitHub GraphQL API, so it captures the full star history even for repos with 40k+ stars. A lot of tools hit the API limit and effectively draw a straight line past that point, which hides the real trend.

Happy to hear feedback or ideas.
by YousefED | 2026-02-04 08:05:26+00:00
I work on BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org), the block-based editor that powers Docs (https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs).

1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-04 08:05:29+00:00
> If the complexity of what you are solving is in the business logic or, generally low, you are absolutely right.

The problem is rather that programmers who work on business logic often hate programmers who are actually capable of seeing (often mathematical) patterns in the business logic that could be abstracted away; in other words: many business logic programmers hate abstract mathematical stuff.

So, in my opinion/experience this is a very self-inflected problem that arises from the whole culture around business logic and business logic programming.
by josteink | 2026-02-04 08:05:33+00:00
> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?

Its the usual deal from the that crowd:

- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties

- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.

It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.

Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.
by trymas | 2026-02-04 08:05:36+00:00
English is not my first language, but do you mean "foundational" instead of "basic"?

By your logic (that many people discuss) web browsers are "basic", IDEs are "basic", programming languages are the most "basic" thing (how many of them! discussions are limitless!!).

EDIT: have the gut to explain yourself instead of downvoting ;) , I am not discussing in bad faith , but you do you.
by mrheosuper | 2026-02-04 08:06:02+00:00
>anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500

Not 100% true. With $1200 it has wider market reach than $1500. There are still people spend $1500 for a floor lamp, but 100% it will be fewer if it was priced at $1200.

Also pricing it too high means higher chance a clone will exist, because they can copy literally 1:1 and price it a little lower.

Another thing in China is they move fast. As long as you have enough money, the time to market is insanely short.