MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by layer8 | 2026-02-20 00:37:18+00:00
What is it about the tests that make you not care about how it’s implemented versus other code? Just the fact that it isn’t interesting to you? I happen to like spec-testing code and find it an interesting design space. It is vital to review it thoroughly for correctness. But I also think that whether I find something interesting or not doesn’t have much bearing on whether code quality is important. Code quality can even be more important for uninteresting code, because due to the lack of interest I’ll have a lower attention span when reviewing it.
by selridge | 2026-02-20 00:37:27+00:00
Lmfao. The front page is littered with whining about the craft from people who can’t argue coherently why I should go back to getting yelled at by a linter.

It’s all “I can’t think anymore” or “software bad now” followed by a critique of the industry circa 2015.

Most of the people making cool stuff with LLMs are making it, not writing blog posts hoping to be a thought leader.
by HarryHirsch | 2026-02-20 00:37:38+00:00
They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic.

Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-20 00:37:55+00:00
> I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.

Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing.

> Is usage based billing the same as micropayments?

Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.
by tgrowazay | 2026-02-20 00:38:15+00:00
From wiki:

> Rebecca Beth Bauer-Kahan (née Bauer; born October 28, 1978) is an American attorney and politician who has served as a member of the California State Assembly from the 16th district since 2018. A member of the Democratic Party, her district extends from Lamorinda to the Tri-Valley region of the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been described as a women's rights advocate.
by danpalmer | 2026-02-20 00:38:37+00:00
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.

We know that micropayments can work because slot machines are a thing, but I don't think most people would say that's what entertainment should be.

Similarly, journalism can do better. Are people going to pay $0.20 to read "One thing financial advisors won't tell you, you'll retire 10 years earlier!", or are you going to pay $0.20 for "‘It feels like a worse version of Lotto’: what Australians told us about the great intergenerational wealth transfer" (a Guardian special report from today).

I know I'd rather pay to read the latter, but between clickbait and optimising revenue, the former is going to perform a lot better. Not to mention that the cost to produce slop content will be near zero, so they can charge less, where the cost to produce high quality content will be far higher and will therefore not be able to compete on price.

I'd much rather commit to paying $10 a month for news and then choose which articles get a share of that after reading. If I've already committed it costs me nothing to pay for an article, but by doing it after reading I can much more easily support good journalism. The problem with that is that it will probably trend towards just the news subs we have today.
by mbrumlow | 2026-02-20 00:39:03+00:00
This comment seems crazy to me.

Chinas political stance more closely resembles right-wing policies than left leaning ones.

All the xenophobic notions you are talking about china has in spades.

I am not saying China is not doing things right here will lead to your described outcome, what I am saying you conflation with western politics is completely out of this world, and is a excellent example of why the outcome you describe may be a reality for China.
Ask HN: Does treating Inflation as a "Quantization Snap" resolve slow-roll?
by aplowe | 2026-02-20 00:40:03+00:00
I've been developing a theoretical derivation that treats the early universe as a computational system hitting an entropy wall. By applying the Radix Economy Law (from computer science) to M-Theory/holographic stability, the math seems to yield the ~60 e-folds of Cosmic Inflation as a "Quantization Snap" down to Base-3 (Ternary).

I suspect there may be a flaw in the holographic stability bounds or the diffusion latency math, but I am seeking a rigorous critique from anyone familiar with Information Theory and scalar-field cosmology.

The full derivations and paper are at: https://entropic-limit.org

Is this a valid way to approach the trans-Planckian problem, or is there a fundamental breakdown in the radix economy application?
by selridge | 2026-02-20 00:40:26+00:00
Why do I care who made the thing showed to HN? If someone makes a tool that I like or a project that’s amazing, but they did so with a robot, who is harmed?

Like all we need to do is decouple “I made this” from “I can compose all parts in my mind”, which were never strongly coupled anyway. Is the thing that is being shown neat? Cool! Does it matter if it was a person or 20 people or a robot? I don’t think so, unless it’s special pleading for humans.
by calf | 2026-02-20 00:40:34+00:00
8 minutes into the video yet again a physicist who has no idea what a Turing machine is, he claims a Turing machine is like a laptop that cannot self replicate because its tape is symbolic and a von Neumann machine is more like a 3D printer since the memory grid corresponds to a space of atoms.

This is so insane. Every physicist and every other AI speaker needs to please take an actual class or two in 1) computability, and 2) complexity. As in actually read through Sipser or other equivalent textbook and do the homework problems and pass an exam.

To see public speakers openly abuse Alan Turing's own theories/arguments is so offensive and wrong. They would not do this in their own field be it physics or genetics.
by supern0va | 2026-02-20 00:40:46+00:00
>These companies all hired psychologists to help design systems that maximize dopamine release and introduce loops that drive compulsive behavior.

This seems like the important bit: these systems weren't designed just for enjoyment. They hired experts in habit formation.

I talked to a friend recently about this and she described it as feeling hollow. When she stayed up all night playing a game she really liked, she enjoyed herself and might have had regrets about giving up some sleep, but didn't necessarily regret the time spent. She found is nourishing in some way. Similarly to feeling compelled to keep reading a great book, or even eat an extra bit of something particularly great dessert.

But at the same time, she would describe staying up until 3-4am regularly scrolling TikTok and would just feel awful the next day. She didn't want to be up doing it, it wasn't actually really fun or enjoyable, but she just...did it anyway.

I'll also note that there are games that are designed for maximum addictiveness that probably also leave you feeling "hollow" in the way that TikTok does, too, so this isn't necessarily to say that games are universally different. But it's clear that there's a psychological mechanism that some companies use in their design that is intended to hijack, rather than just provide "fun" or entertainment.

I don't know what we do about that, or how/if it should be regulated in some way, but it's pretty clear that there is a real difference.
by lawrencechen | 2026-02-20 00:42:05+00:00
Excited that someone besides me wants this! I want to hear more about your warm container host, is that shared between multiple people, or just yourself?

Also want some feedback on how we should implement it. Could make it a CLI command that opens a new vertical tab/workspace:

cmux ssh <host>

Or maybe a configurable dropdown next to the plus button.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-20 00:42:28+00:00
From the article:

"Mark Zuckerberg told a jury on Wednesday that he overruled concerns about teen wellbeing from staff and 18 experts to lift a ban on Instagram beauty filters because he was concerned about "free expression"."

"Instagram temporarily suspended beauty filters - which digitally alter people's appearance - to conduct a review of the features in 2019. All of the 18 experts Meta hired concluded they presented a wellbeing issue."
by gndjdjcjjd | 2026-02-20 00:42:44+00:00
There's an insane idea that's taken root in the US that technical talent can only be found abroad, with near-total disregard for the domestic American talent pools currently languishing in neglect. While China did recently implement its K visa, they are largely taking the opposite approach of the United States by focusing primarily on developing domestic Chinese talent: Chinese universities and companies are almost exclusively populated with native Chinese people, and leading companies like Deepseek have explicitly stated that their strategy is to develop domestic Chinese talent rather than import it from abroad. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/Zeg...

[2] https://www.paraform.com/blog/deepseek-hiring-culture
by skeledrew | 2026-02-20 00:43:03+00:00
There was no third choice if they didn't explicitly state that there was.

> If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private".

If you invite people on your porch for a party, and someone finds that you left the house key under the mat and went off to restock, then it's hardly "private". It's perfectly fine for whomever feels like to take the party indoors without your permission. Pretty much what you're saying, reframed, but I seriously doubt you'd agree to random people entering parts of yours premises to which you didn't explicitly invite them.
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 00:44:03+00:00
America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.

The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-20 00:44:14+00:00
And what part time jobs offer health insurance?

While I can drag myself out of bed most of the time as long as I have my right hand that I can type with [1] and walk over to my office most of the time if I am not feeling well, that’s big an option for most people.

[1] about that whole pre-existing condition thing. I have cerebral palsy that mostly affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. Even though I hadn’t been to a hospital since 1995 at the time for foot surgery - my only CP complication, had been a part time fitness instructor and could easily run a sub 10 minute mile up to a 15K at the time in 2012 - I couldn’t get private insurance. Now at 51, I’m still a gym rat with no CP related complications.
by calmbonsai | 2026-02-20 00:44:39+00:00
This is the best post to HN in quite some time. Kudos to the detailed and structured break-down.

If the author had a Ko-Fi they would've just earned $50 USD from me.

I've been thinking of making the leap away from JIRA and I concur on RDS, Terraform for IAC, and FaaS whenever possible. Google support is non-existent and I only recommend GC for pure compute. I hear good things about Big Table, but I've never used in in production.

I disagree on Slack usage aside from the postmortem automation. Slack is just gonna' be messy no matter what policies are put in place.
by RadiusTech | 2026-02-20 00:44:55+00:00
IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary. Machines are likely going to be paying extreme small amounts between each other, so its highly questionable whether that state machine (a) needs to protect for fraud at .001 cents per tx and (b) whether a machine, acting on its own accord, spending .001 was contemplated during the construction of the bank secrecy act (which had the de minimis oversight of transactions at ~82k USD in 2026 values). Ensure no double spend, ensure that the machines can move value as needed, change the state. Ensure that the system scales as much as the volumes of transactions needed. And charge effectively free rates (we're at 10m tx/usd). Lots more to build here, but we're not far off. (and we're launching soon at radiustech.xyz). Come check us out.
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-20 00:44:58+00:00
I know people who don't like guns don't want to hear it, but guns are tools. You wouldn't ask a carpenter if the only tool he needed was one saw. You don't just need a saw, you need a hammer, a screwdriver, a drill. And you don't just need one saw, you need a few specialized saws, and many screwdrivers. Maybe one hammer is enough.
by recallingmemory | 2026-02-20 00:46:08+00:00
I would point to the conclusion of the study: "Red and processed meat consumption and its interaction with the gut microbiota are found to be major associated factors. The CRC-associated gut microbiota is made of pro-inflammatory or pro-carcinogenic bacteria and opportunistic pathogenic bacteria that enrich the tumor microenvironment by promoting disease progression."

I would also add that the World Health Organization after evaluating 800 studies classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen back in 2015, indicating a strong causal link to colorectal cancer, placing it in the same risk category as tobacco. [1]

While I linked to a single study in my original comment, I believe the results are more than a small signal.. enough for the WHO to come out and say processed meat does in fact have a causal link to CRC.

1: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/2015/11/03/report-s...
by Aurornis | 2026-02-20 00:46:08+00:00
> Never tapped a port, eh?

I have. I have a background in high speed communications.

Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?

If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-20 00:46:22+00:00
I'm reminded of how tedious it is when people debate how small something has to be before it can be called a microservice... Maybe the language needs to focus on something besides size.

If you pre-pay, you're creating a debt which is destroyed when service is rendered. If you post-pay you're creating a debt when service is rendered that is destroyed when you pay. In both cases the logic of when and how you pay is decoupled from the thing you're paying for. You've got to ask how far you'll let the two accountings drift (sync monthly is a common choice).

My feeling for "micropayments" is that they happen as part of the same protocol which is providing service. There's just one accounting. Settlement schedule is determined by the nature of the service. Maybe it's page views or packets or gulps, but whatever it is it's imposed by circumstance. They're... situated payments?

And the other style is... decoupled payments?
by munificent | 2026-02-20 00:46:30+00:00
Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.

But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.

I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.

Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.

And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feels is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
by josefritzishere | 2026-02-20 00:46:32+00:00
I was not around for 1.0; it sounds colorful. The HN guidance on curiosity, kindness, being thoughtful and substansive...all solid. The same guidelines describe "politics" as "off topic" but not prohibited. I had thought there may be specific subtopics which are actually prohibited. What I probably have been seeing is that clawdbot is more active on divisive topics, because of key words, and thus gets flagged.
by SloppyDrive | 2026-02-20 00:46:58+00:00
The point about militia is a short statement for why the right to bear arms is important, rather than trying to restrict or qualify the right.

The ability to form militias is so important, that everyone should have the right to bear arms, in order to enable this.

The idea is that it prevents the idea of a "special militia" having some selection criteria, so the government of the day cant make qualifying for its group a requirement to own guns.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-20 00:47:29+00:00
I would argue that wherever you're getting your news from is lying by omission and you have no idea what's actually happening out there.

Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance.

Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.

Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
by suhputt | 2026-02-20 00:47:53+00:00
the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA

now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
by Aurornis | 2026-02-20 00:47:55+00:00
> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume

No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-20 00:48:13+00:00
Update: Levi Strauss apparently does still offer bespoke jeans, under the "Lot No. 1" label. Pricing begins around $USD500, and the option is offered only in SF, NY, and London.

There is also a "Levi's Taylor Shop" option at somewhat more locations: <https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/features/tailor-shop>.
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-20 00:48:16+00:00
Not really. It only applies to machines whos "sole or primary" ability is to manufacture firearms.

I'm not sure even one such machine exists. Some companies market benchtop or small lathes as "gun lathes" but that is marketing fluff not a technical description. Any lathe can be used to make weapons. They have tons of round parts and parts with drilled holes. So does everything else that gets manufactured.

I am not aware of any machine tool company that manufactures lathes, mills, etc explicitly designed just for manufacturing firearms.

So in that sense the law you reference is typical of performative legislation. You have angry idiots pestering you to Do Something(TM). So you pass a do-nothing bill. You get to say you banned a thing that never existed. Meanwhile it doesn't hurt or bother anyone because it applies to no one. That's the best of both worlds! Do nothing while looking busy! Take action without actually hurting anyone.

Is it silly? Yes. But I'd rather they do stuff like that then actually try to regulate 3d printers.
by briHass | 2026-02-20 00:48:18+00:00
From a 'public health' perspective, it makes perfect sense to limit the frequency of screening procedures by age and other broad risk-factors, but that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics.

Most cancers are still very much lethal once they progress to a certain point, and the best treatment we know of is early detection. Many of the cancer screens are harmless or don't add significant risk of death, so it really comes down to money and medical resource availability (also solved with money.)

I don't see much difference in someone paying out-of-pocket for a full-body MRI/colonoscopy vs. them spending way above average on any other item that slightly reduces the risk of dying (how many smoke alarms and fire extinguishers does your home have?)
by bitcurious | 2026-02-20 00:48:36+00:00
>We know, we had the Nazis.

Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.
by accurrent | 2026-02-20 00:49:08+00:00
This assumes citizens actually putp a lions share of their money into more risky investmemt vehicles. For reference, this may not be the case with a large swathes of our older population. Bank rates, t bills and bonds here are generally lower than cpf. If you are a high income earner the contribution is capped and combined with low taxes this is not a bad thing.
by dwd | 2026-02-20 00:49:08+00:00
Chris Wild who ported the Lords of Midnight to the PC, and then later worked with Mike Singleton to create versions for Android/iOS that were unfortunately only published after Mike's passing away, put together this series of articles about the optimisations Singleton used to squeeze so much into the limited memory of the ZX Spectrum and C64.

If I remember correctly Chris ported from the Spectrum. The data structures are particularly interesting using tokens/lookup tables to compress the data as much as possible.

https://www.icemark.com/tower/index.html

Also some notes on Doomdark's Revenge where Singleton managed to create a bigger map and feature more characters.

https://www.icemark.com/gate/index.html