MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-07 10:53:57+00:00
Tangential:

Afaict mods are on our side, even if the data "suggest" otherwise.

This site (which I peruse everyday) claims that 3 AI articles were modded down today, but in actual fact the single nonAI article that was supposed to have been modded down was modded up.

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals?tab=rea...

One has to delve into the data before arriving at broad judgements :)
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-07 10:55:08+00:00
Why do you feel among all the cultures there, you know which one among them would will out. I see no point in being among my race if it's a communist or fascist country. The race has already failed me then. Hell give me aliens from mars and I'd gladly live among them if they are liberal democratic and capitalistic. To me these three principles are paramount, the identity of the agents executing them is irrelevant.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 10:56:06+00:00
Another habit I follow is to set the gateway of (a) computers I cannot trust, i.e., ones running corporate OS I cannot control, to (b) a computer that I believe I can control running UNIX-like OS that I compiled from source

I run tcpdump on (b)

(b) is the only computer with direct access to the internet

The only time I have seen a sentry.io DNS request is from (a)
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-02-07 10:56:42+00:00
> not reading

Respectfully, I think that is a mistake.

Yes, he frequently exhibits an ego the size of Jupiter. But he is very smart†, and he writes well, and this stuff that theyre doing is at least interesting. I don't know if its physics or metaphysics or something else entirely, and it may be just empty tail-chasing, but I reckon its at least worth paying some attention to.

† and he's also built a long-term business selling maths tooling, of all things, which I think is worth some respect
by pjmlp | 2026-02-07 10:57:49+00:00
Agreed, however AI adoption is finally putting pressure on CPython to have a JIT in the box, so there is that.

And on GPU side, the existing libraries provide DSL based JITs, thus for many scenarios the performance is not much different from C++.

Now NVidia is also on the game with the new tile based architecture, with first party support to write kernels in Python even.
by dehue | 2026-02-07 10:59:08+00:00
It's not just different videos, Tiktok is much better at recommending videos by very small creators and people with no followers. On Instagram or Facebook if you don't already have a large following you most likely wont get any views at all no matter how well your video matches the platform. YouTube often pushes big creators that already made it big while Tiktok allows me to discover new and niche ones.
by 9rx | 2026-02-07 10:59:52+00:00
> Like what fictional compilers when you run them on source code produce a program that may or may not run, may or may not produce desired result etc.?

Oh, you are talking about program determinism. Well, gcc and clang will produce programs that behave differently from compile to compile where __DATE__ or __TIME__ is used. And ick has the -mystery flag!

But we were talking about compiler determinism. Where for a stable input the compiler produces a stable output. A non-deterministic compiler does not necessarily equate to a non-deterministic program. The structure of the binary and the execution of the binary are different concerns.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 10:59:55+00:00
> Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

People are also non deterministic. When I delegate work to team of five or six mid level developers or God forbid outsourced developers, I’m going to have to check and review their work too.

It’s been over a decade that my vision/responsibility could be carried out by just my own two hands and be done on time within 40 hours a week - until LLMs
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-02-07 11:02:29+00:00
"Bright" ideas were and always will be a thing in copy protection mechanisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for a much newer example, albeit non-destructive. I vaguely remember some much more recent destructive examples, not sure if implemented or threatened, but I might be confusing things.

Edit: Found the incident I was thinking about using Gemini. A flight sim addon company FSLabs shipped malware with their installer. It didn't wipe data, it stole your Chrome password manager instead. https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/xa58qz/a_retrosp... is a reddit summary, https://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?%2Fannouncement%2... the company explaining/justifying what they did and why (TL;DR it was meant to be a targeted attack against some specific pirates).
by impossiblefork | 2026-02-07 11:02:31+00:00
In this case though, lies have effectively been made mandatory to gain entry to certain 'elite' institutions. That is ultimately from the head, since sensible leadership would put an end to this immediately, but it's from a head that came into place in what, the 80s, 90s? Maybe earlier?

In India it's purely score based. Top on the JIT (although I guess they have special things for scheduled castes or something), you get in. In Sweden the same. Top 1% on the högskoleprov and there's nothing you can't get in to. Maybe KTH has its own, more advanced maths test for entry, and I think you need to pass an interview for medicine at KI, but aside from that nothing you can't get into. At ETH they see whether you can pass a first year of courses.

But in the US it's a bunch of weirdness, and it's from Idpol. I don't know if you could avoid it-- India obviously doesn't want to avoid it completely, but another idea is to not have the arbitrary eliteness be a thing. I used to believe in something like it, believing that only certain Swedish universities were okay (and that's probably still true for education), and then a bunch of Germans who wanted to be professors got jobs at the ones I thought were shitty and started doing good research and suddenly you ended up with places like Örebro, which I had regarded as 'what even is this' producing real science. I think the Germans are right and that a distributed less status-based university system is sensible.
by mathfailure | 2026-02-07 11:03:32+00:00
I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally.

If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally.

And if I EVER need to call grep without my alias - I just prefix it with a backslash: \grep will search with case sensitivity and no color and will scan binaries.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 11:04:10+00:00
I use a different prefix character, e.g. "[", but I have been doing this for years

I started using a prefix because I like very short script names that are easy to type

I prefer giving scripts numbers instead of names

Something like "[number"

I use prefixes and suffixes to group related scripts together, e.g., scripts that run other scripts

I have an executable directory like ~/bin but it's not called bin. It contains 100s of short scripts
by stavros | 2026-02-07 11:04:31+00:00
Their incentive is to keep the browsers good enough to not lose market share. Other than that, the incentive is to either close the web down, or to make the experience as shitty as possible without leading users to switch away, so they can steer users towards the more closed-down native apps.

Unfortunately, companies have an incentive to put us into walled gardens, so the only company that actually cares about the web is the company whose only business model is selling a browser.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-07 11:05:33+00:00
I appreciate the idea, but the comma just looks horrible to me as part of a filename. I can imagine someone unfamiliar with the naming scheme to get confused.

I'd prefer to use underscore (when writing BASH scripts, I name all my local variables starting with underscore), but a simple two or three letter prefix would also work. I don't like the idea of a punctuation prefix as punctuation usually has a specific meaning somewhere and including it as the first character in a filename looks wrong. (e.g. Comma is typically used as a list separator and it's a bit of cognitive dissonance to see it not used in that context)
by cope123 | 2026-02-07 11:06:37+00:00
I’ve been thinking about how much hidden context photos carry today.

Beyond the image itself, many photos include GPS location, timestamps,
device info, and other metadata that isn’t visible unless you inspect the file.

It feels like a lot of people assume platforms handle this automatically,
but in practice photos are often shared via email, forums, support tickets,
docs, or cloud storage where metadata stays intact.

Curious how people here approach this:

– Do you treat photos as sensitive files by default?
– Have you seen real privacy or security issues caused by EXIF/GPS data?
– Do you rely on platforms to strip metadata, or do you handle it yourself?

Interested in perspectives from security, infra, OSINT, or anyone who’s
changed how they think about “harmless” images.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-07 11:07:52+00:00
Most people don’t want to admit that the author of the book wants you to take the book and movie at face value and thus the film/book are unironically right wing coded.

A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.

Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
by nairboon | 2026-02-07 11:08:34+00:00
I wonder if the people in 100 years will refer to the current time period (now) the same way as we sometimes do to about ~100 years ago.
As in did the scientist and curious minds in the last century really have this golden period to just wander around in all these greenfields, whereas nowadays the fields are not so green anymore. Or is this just a normal phenomena of any time period?
by psychoslave | 2026-02-07 11:08:39+00:00
Come on, everybody knows it's philosophers all the way down. It's even in the title: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_All_the_Way_Down

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

https://xefer.com/2011/05/wikipedia

https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2013/projects2013/cs2...
by lembergs | 2026-02-07 11:10:09+00:00
I built a dead-simple watermarking API because existing solutions
(Cloudinary, imgix) are overkill and expensive for developers who
just need to slap a logo on images.

- $0.01/image or $19/mo unlimited
- 50 free images to test
- 5-minute integration
- API-first, no dashboard bloat

Built in 7 hours. Looking for feedback from developers who've
struggled with this problem.

Try it: https://api-production-caa8.up.railway.app/docs
```

## Additional Context for Discussion

If the post gains traction, be prepared to discuss:

### Technical Details

- Built with Node.js, Express, Sharp for image processing
- Uses Cloudflare R2 for storage (S3-compatible, cheaper than S3)
- PostgreSQL for tracking usage and credits
- Stripe for payments
- Deployed on Railway.app

### Why This Exists

- Cloudinary charges $0.10-0.15 per image for watermarking
- imgix starts at $199/month for basic features
- Many developers just need simple batch watermarking
- Existing solutions require complex dashboards and setup

### Performance

- Watermarks 1,000 images in under 2 minutes
- Batch processing up to 100 images at once
- Returns ZIP files for batch downloads
- All processing happens server-side

### Pricing Comparison

- *Our API:* $0.01/image or $19/month for 2,500 images
- *Cloudinary:* $0.10-0.15/image (10-15x more expensive)
- *imgix:* $199/month minimum (10x more expensive for similar volume)

### Use Cases

- E-commerce sites watermarking product photos
- Photographers adding logos to portfolios
- Social media managers branding images
- Developers building apps that need image watermarking
by distances | 2026-02-07 11:11:32+00:00
Different folks are interested in different niches. I don't know this author either. I would know many names from other subfields, though.

I once went to a meetup where the host introduced the speaker with "he needs no introduction". Well to this day I've no idea who the speaker was. Familiarity really shouldn't be assumed beyond a very, very small handful of people.
by jjav | 2026-02-07 11:13:03+00:00
Very much this.

My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.

If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)

Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.

I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
by jstanley | 2026-02-07 11:14:23+00:00
Is this a parody? It seems obviously made-up but the other comments seem to be taking it at face value?

> Re-read it again and again until you get it.

OK, now I get it.

"This is my room. This isn't your room. I'm the most important person here. You should be honoured to be standing in the same room as me. But you're not here to help make decisions. I already made the decisions. Good luck"
by bstsb | 2026-02-07 11:15:11+00:00
side note, i absolutely love Infisical’s self-hosted offering. it’s really easy to get set up with and aside from a few minor problems with their Universal Auth, i had it working in production in just a few days. it’s made secret management a lot easier, especially across different environments!

i’m aware that there are limits on the free plan, but as a single user i haven’t hit any crazy restrictions
by vecti | 2026-02-07 11:16:27+00:00
Hi karhuton,

Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback.

Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and im working on releasing them shortly.

Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.

With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50

Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.
by virgilp | 2026-02-07 11:16:27+00:00
I'm wondering about that. I think with the advent of AI, we might see a new kind of successful software company - one that doesn't sell a single solution to many customers, but instead has the building blocks, prompts (agents skills etc) & processes to quickly build very custom solutions for each customer - using a new blend of engineers that are not exactly "customer support" nor traditional "sw eng", but more around the emerging "forward-deployed engineer" role.
Ask HN: How are researchers using AlphaFold in 2026?
by jocho12 | 2026-02-07 11:16:43+00:00
I've been paying somewhat high level attention to advancements in bio for the past few years (not an expert in biology by any means), so I would love to know how researchers are actually putting Alpha Fold to use. How much of an impact has it had on their work? From the outside, you hear that AlphaFold was really going to be a breakthrough for researchers and biology as a whole. Curious to know how folks are actually benefiting from it!
by HeavyStorm | 2026-02-07 11:17:04+00:00
Oh, thank you. I wasn't able to figure it out exactly - at first I thought OK, the girlfriend died, that's why this post... But with her _alive_...

Re read it, it sounds like he's the victim: He was haunted during vacation. He was the rock. He fell into fetal position. I mean, sure, he's _a_ victim, but until she dies, if she dies, this is about her. Curing her is again about him and his want for kids.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-02-07 11:17:30+00:00
Conflating types in binary operations hasn't been an issue for me since I started using TS in 2016. Even before that, it was just the result of domain modeling done badly, and I think software engineers got burned enough for using dynamic type systems at scale... but that's a discussion to be had 10 years ago. We all moved on from that, or at least I hope we did.

> Now we all should be looking towards fail-safe systems, formal verification and domain modeling.

We were looking forward to these things since the term distributed computing has been coined, haven't we? Building fail-safe systems has always been the goal since long-running processes were a thing.

Despite any "past riddles", the more expressive the type system the better the domain modeling experience, and I'd guess formal methods would benefit immensely from a good type system. Is there any formal language that is usable as general-purpose programming language I don't know of? I only ever see formal methods used for the verification of distributed algorithms or permission logic, on the theorem proving side of things, but I have yet to see a single application written only in something like Lean[0] or LiquidHaskell[1]...

[0]: https://lean-lang.org/

[1]: https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell/
by chrisjj | 2026-02-07 11:17:54+00:00
> LLMs are probabilistic and non-deterministic

This is a polite way of saying unreliable and untrustworthy.

The problem facing enterprise is best understood by viewing LLMs as any other unreliable program.

> We’ve found that treating LLMs as suggestion engines rather than decision makers changes the architecture completely.

Figures. Look at the disruption LLM "suggestions" are inflicting on scientific journals, court cases and open source projects wordwide.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-07 11:18:17+00:00
Suppose a future world where all the world, every country is thoroughly mixed up by today's racial standards. There is no "white" country, no "chinese" country, no "black" country. How do you think race wars would be organized, "Lets kill all the [racist slur] bastards of this country" wait what, there's no easy country to point to, already making race war quite difficult. Or do you like having race wars?
Again, I fail to see what exactly is the "loss" or "gain" of a race existing or not? What has it ever given us? It's like religion and nationalism, very little benefits and pure destruction and waste of human life in the balance of history.
by caeruleus | 2026-02-07 11:18:42+00:00
Prefixing commands solves the namespace problem and discoverability (at least partly). I use a slightly more sophisticated method, which helps me remember which custom utilities are available and how to use them: sd [1], a light wrapper written for zsh that, in addition to namespaces, provides autocompletion, custom help texts + some other QoL enhancements. Can definitely recommend if you're looking for something a bit more fancy.

[1] https://github.com/ianthehenry/sd
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 11:18:52+00:00
Rust is a good way to get bad C programmers to stop using C

But Rust evangelists cannot stop people from using any particular language

Assembly is the only language that matters. It's the
only language the computer "understands"

Everything other language is just an abstraction over it

When it comes to abstractions not everyone has the same preferences
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-07 11:19:17+00:00
zoos and aquariums serve a very vital purpose. most people only care about these animals because they can go SEE them alive. documentaries help but nothing beats getting a captive people into a room to see a wild animal and then bamboozling them with propaganda about how important it is to preserve these animals. Its the reason we have funding to keep these creatures alive in the wild at all.

if all zoos and aquariums were shut down, public concern about the environment would slowly drift to nothing within 2 generations.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 11:19:20+00:00
Mileage may vary! The basic problem for an English speaker is that some languages are more translated than others. There are far more people translating from Greek, Hebrew and Latin works, than from Tibetan or Ge'ez (an Ethiopian language).

I've heard about the Taoist canon recently, which is seemingly vast, and despite Chinese being a major language, and a substantial number of people knowing both Chinese and English... Only a fraction of the Taoist canon is available in English.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-07 11:20:15+00:00
Always found this term sounded like a half-backed one. I get that going full greek roots with nomology was a dead end due to prior art. But "regularology" was probably free, or even at the time "regulogy" or "regology" though by now they are attached to different notions.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/regula#Latin

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

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols4/ontologies/ro/properties/http%253...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/regology
by saberience | 2026-02-07 11:20:41+00:00
I actually have no idea why this is needed. I want my models to have access to full libraries/sdks/apis and this is when they become actually useful.

I also want my models to be able to write typescript, python, c# etc, or any language and run it.

Having the model have access to a completely minimal version of python just seems like a waste of time.
by harel | 2026-02-07 11:21:19+00:00
This reminds me of a "web site" (remember those) I used to visit a lot years ago, trying to understand Neural Networks and genetic algorithms:

http://www.ai-junkie.com/ann/evolved/nnt1.html

This is old. Perhaps late 90s or early 00. The top domain still uses Flash. But the same OCR example is used to teach the concept. For some reason, that site made it all click for me.
by jph | 2026-02-07 11:21:26+00:00
Clever hack! <3 I also do namespacing yet in a different way.

I create a home directory "x" for executables that I want to manage as files, and don't want on PATH or as alias.

To run foo: ~/x/foo

For example I have GNU date as ~/x/date so it's independent of the system BSD date.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-07 11:21:30+00:00
Yeah, I don't think the commentators here realize how fast Idaho has grown. There are some NIMBY attitudes here, but by and large we do just greenlight almost all development.

I'm from south central Idaho and it's really astonishing to see how much growth has happened in both poky and Burley. But basically all the cities I'm familiar with are also operating with roughly the same infrastructure they had when I was a kid, and that's the problem. Idaho isn't upgrading that infrastructure. Instead they keep finding inventive ways to keep cutting taxes and ignoring infrastructure.