MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by XorNot | 2026-02-04 12:43:27+00:00
There's also a bunch of countries pretty much begging companies to come and build solar arrays. If you rocked up in Australia and said "I'm building a zero-emission data center we'll power from PV" we'd pretty much fall over ourselves to let you do it. Plus you know, we have just a bonkers amount of land.

There is already a Tesla grid levelling battery in South Australia. If what you're really worried about is regulations making putting in the renewable energu expensive, then boy have I got a geopolitically stable, tectonically stable, first-world country where you can do it.
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:43:36+00:00
The cost breakdown here is wild - like $20 for something that can circumnavigate the globe? I remember when doing any kind of "near space" stuff required weather ballons that cost hundreds of dollars and you'd lose all your gear when it came down.

The WSPR tracking part is really clever too. Instead of needing your own ground stations or paying for satellite time, you just piggyback on the existing ham radio infrastructure thats already listening 24/7. The whole thing feels like peak hacker ethos - using existing systems in unintended ways.

Kinda want to try this now tbh. Anyone know if theres legal issues with launching these? I assume the altitude means you dont need FAA clearance like regular drones but not totally sure.
by topaz0 | 2026-02-04 12:43:53+00:00
1. The blog states that the relationship between economic growth and initial wealth doesn't show a trend that had been expected from theory. It uses per capita GDP and per capita GDP growth as proxies for wealth and growth. Its analysis does not control for any pet theories, because the theory claims to be general. (Indeed, it refers to literature that does control for other factors and explains why they are unsatisfying: because if the other factors are more important than the economic ones, then the theory isn't worth much)

2. OP, roughly, objects that GDP (and its growth rate) is sensitive to a fairly specific fact of the modern global economy, namely uneven financialization, and hints at an argument for why GDP would obscure the relevant trends in wealth and growth of wealth. They claim that the dynamics of various health proxies are better representative of economic status and growth than GDP is. They do not claim that these are not correlated. Effectively, their claim is that the portion of the variation of GDP that is not explained by its correlation with health outcomes is enough to obscure the relationship between economic status and growth.

3. You comment tersely that they are correlated, which was never denied in OP, and does not address in any way the relevance of the particular confounding factor that OP proposed. In followups try to rescue that correlation by controlling for your pet "extra factors" that (1) objected to for how they weaken the relevance of the economic theory, and that are irrelevant to the point that OP was trying to make.

To be clear, I have no strong evidence that financialization explains the way that GDP (and its derivative) differs from a linear function of other development metrics (and their derivatives), and if OP has evidence, they don't provide it in their brief HN comment. All I'm saying is, saying there's a correlation has very little bearing on OP's claim, and controlling for more irrelevant pet factors is not going to make it more relevant.
by Orygin | 2026-02-04 12:44:11+00:00
> but it seems we are almost at a golden age again with respect to good enough (if not popular) hardware.

I don't think we're in any golden age since the GPU shortages started, and now memory and disks are becoming super expensive too.

Hardware vendors have shown they don't have an interest in serving consumers and will sell out to hyperscalers the moment they show some green bills. I fear a day where you won't be able to purchase powerful (enough) machines and will be forced to subscribe to a commercial provider to get some compute to do your job.
by davidmurdoch | 2026-02-04 12:44:12+00:00
I'm wondering if everyone here saying they think harder with LLM agents have never reached "flow state" while programming. I just can't imagine using 100% of my mental focus state for hours with an agent. Sure, I think differently when my coding is primarily via agent, but I've never been totally enveloped by my thoughts while doing so.

For those who have found a "flow state" with LLM agents, what's that like?
Best Way to Host Next.js
by narrowapple | 2026-02-04 12:44:13+00:00
What do you recommend as best way to host a Next.js app, that needs auth, db and object storage? Vercel has a free tier but when you need pro it is 20$ per user, while for AWS Amplify you pay for what you use, but seems to support mainly NoSQL, of which I have no experience. What would you do?
by turtlesdown11 | 2026-02-04 12:44:27+00:00
>There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other.

This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications. Elon probably said "they could just run the machines faster! I'm brilliant".
by kimixa | 2026-02-04 12:44:59+00:00
Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same.

Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are doing today. And that's with direct cables - using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use and complexity for the communication in the first place.

Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric than in space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency, ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even things like communication network connectivity would be easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new trunk connections to every major hub.

There are advantages to being in space - normally around increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those benefits is nonsense.
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:44:59+00:00
This resonates alot with how I've been using Claude lately. The best sessions feel less like chatting with an AI and more like thinking out loud with someone who actually listens. The 'space to think' framing captures something I couldnt quite articulate before - its not about getting answers, its about having a patient collaborator while you work through problems. Wonder if this is closer to what pair programming was supposed to feel like.
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:45:04+00:00
I've had similar experiences with vibe coding small utilities. Theres something liberating about just describing what you want and iterating from there instead of getting bogged down in boilerplate. Though I do wonder if this approach will backfire when I need to debug these tools 6 months from now and have no idea whats actually going on under the hood. Have you had to go back and fix any of your vibe coded projects yet?
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:45:29+00:00
Finally a sensible refactoring guide that doesnt immediately jump to 'rewrite everything in a new framework'. The step-by-step approach here is exactly what real projects need. Though I'd add one thing - before touching anything, make sure you have some kind of test coverage even if its just smoke tests. Ive seen so many 'cleanups' that break things because nobody verified the behavior first.
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:45:41+00:00
Maintenance is such an underappreciated topic in tech. We celebrate launches but rarely talk about the unglamorous work of keeping things running. Theres a whole class of invisible labor that makes modern infrastructure possible - from the person updating ancient COBOL systems to the sysadmin patching servers at 3am. Would love to see more writing on this.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-04 12:45:48+00:00
Thanks. I paid attention but still didn't see how:

realistic images of a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct or realistic images of the sexual organs of a child, for primarily sexual purposes;

covers the example in question:

If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.

How about you?
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 12:47:09+00:00
> many articles would require 2 hours+ to confidently review as a professional

I think ML (and really all other fields) are the same. Skimming a paper never really leaves you certain of how rigorous it is.

I agree that a naive "just add voting" "review" mechanism would not suffice to replace journals. However there's no requirement that the review algorithm be so naive. Looked at differently, what is a journal except for a complicated algorithm for performing reviews?

> I am afraid the need for these publishers will still be there and they will just exist regardless, and it will still be preferred by academics.

Agreed. I doubt publishers are going away any time soon (if ever) regardless of how technically excellent any proposed replacement might be. I still think it's worthwhile to pursue alternatives though.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2026-02-04 12:47:17+00:00
This is another example of either stupid or malicious politicians thinking that it is possible to implement mandatory scanning on devices owned and operated by people and somehow get a meaningful true match rate without false positives. Of course this is not possible! But the negative consequences are immense.

It is exactly the same kind of stupid thinking driving ideas such as Chat Control in the EU. In the end, no child will be safer, but we will end up having a world where no-one has the right to control what software can run on their own hardware devices and where no-one has legal access to end-to-end encrypted communication.
Show HN: YourGPT Copilot SDK Open-source SDK for product-level intelligence
by Hannah203 | 2026-02-04 12:47:39+00:00
Over the past year, many SaaS products have added AI chatbots to answer questions and reduce support load. It helped initially, but most of these systems still live in a chat window with no awareness of what’s happening inside the application.
They don’t know the current page, selected data, user permissions, or workflow state. Users end up repeating context the product already has.
I recently came across an open-source Copilot SDK that approaches this differently by injecting live application state directly into the AI and letting it execute real frontend and backend functions instead of just responding with text.
What it does:
- Understands application state including current page, selected data, and user permissions
- Executes backend and frontend functions instead of only responding with text
- Delivers richer product experiences through generative UI such as tables, forms, and interactive buttons
- Understands user workflow and intent based on in-product context
- Maintains session context so interactions remain consistent
Example: Instead of the AI asking "What do you need help with?", it understands the user context is viewing failed transactions from last week and can immediately offer to retry them, export the data, or investigate patterns.
Technical details:
- Works with React, Next.js, Vite (Vue & Angular coming soon)
- LLM-agnostic (bring your own model)
- State injection via context providers
- Tool execution layer for safe function calling
- Full data ownership (everything runs in your infrastructure)

Docs + examples: https://copilot-sdk.yourgpt.ai

Happy to answer technical questions about implementation, or specific use cases.
by kypro | 2026-02-04 12:47:41+00:00
Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.

Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.

In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.
by GlobalChubby | 2026-02-04 12:47:46+00:00
Location: Washington, starting mid-March 2026, can start interviewing now
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Golang, Python, relational databases, AWS, GCP, ... (does anyone actually read these long lists?)
Email: sapien.reversing.entropy@gmail.com

I'm a software engineer with 10 YOE, though I was also an SRE at Google for a long time, so perhaps I have an understanding and appreciation of how to scale systems and infrastructure as well. Generally I like building interesting and reliable distributed systems. I'm looking to work with a smallish team of senior engineers trying to solve something interesting, or doing something generally good for society. These days I've been using Golang quite a bit, and I'm looking to work more in that language.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-04 12:48:00+00:00
At no point did I propose a massive block of solid aluminum. I describe the heated surface and I describe a radiating surface, so programmers understand the concept of the balance of energy flow and how to calculate rest temperature with Stefan Boltzmann law, if they want to explore the details they now have enough information to generalize, they can use RMAD and run actual calculations to optimize for different scenarios.

Radiation hardening:

While there is some state information on GPU, for ML applications the occasional bit flip isn't that critical, so Most of the GPU area can be used as efficiently as before and only the critical state information on GPU die or host CPU needs radiation hardening.

Scaling: the didactic unoptimized 30m x 30m x 90m pyramid would train a 405B model 17 days, it would have 23 TB RAM (so it can continue training larger and larger state of the art models at comparatively slower rates). Not sure what's ridiculous about it? At some point people piss on didactic examples because they want somebody to hold their hand and calculate everything for them?
by topaz0 | 2026-02-04 12:48:09+00:00
> The question is: does GDP correlate with things we care about?

No that is not the question. The questions are: a) would controlling for financialization be a better test of the economic theory, and b) are health metrics a good way of controlling for the portion of GDP that is explained by GDP.

Again, I don't know the answers, just that your cherry-picked pet factors are irrelevant to these questions.
by pxc | 2026-02-04 12:48:18+00:00
I think of Git hooks as a useful guiderail for myself that I share with others. They sometimes help me reduce the length of iteration cycles for workflows (which I generally don't like) where one typically commits before running/deploying (e.g., most of my team's Terraform repos).

> you can't force folks to run them

I think it's useful to be able to disable things like this when debugging or reconfiguring them. I sometimes disable the ones I've set up for myself, then reenable them later.

> Why not just call a shell script directly?

Because it's manual; I have to remember to do it each time. But there's no reason not to have a script you can invoke in other ways, if that's something you want.

> How would you use these with a CI/CD platform?

The thing that sets up your environment also installs the git hooks configuration, and/or you can have it invoke specific hooks via CLI.
by dguest | 2026-02-04 12:48:21+00:00
Also worth noting that if computing power scales with volume then surface area (and thus radiation) scales like p^2/3. In other words, for a fixed geometry, the required heat dissipation per unit area goes like p^1/3. This is why smaller things can just dissipate heat from their surface, whereas larger things require active cooling.

I'm not a space engineer but I'd imagine that smaller satellites can make due with a lot of passive cooling on the exterior of the housing, whereas a shopping-mall sized computer in space would will require a lot of extra plumbing.
by melvinroest | 2026-02-04 12:48:53+00:00
Ha! He mentions test coverage as well.

I found this guide through my interaction with an LLM. It feels a bit ironic but here we are. I got to it because I was refactoring React code with an LLM and the LLM was a bit wonky in its suggestions. So I asked it to find some expert guides and it found many things but this is the one it cited. I'm halfway through reading it, I'm learning a lot :)
by habinero | 2026-02-04 12:48:57+00:00
It's not as exciting as you think it is. "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths" is basically code for "it's, like, super black"

The limiting factor isn't the emissivity, it's that you're having to rely on radiation as your only cooling mechanism. It's super slow and inefficient and it limits how much heat you can dissipate.

Like the other person said, you can't do any better than blackbody radiation (emissivity=1).
by the_af | 2026-02-04 12:49:04+00:00
The article is interesting. I don't know how I feel about it, though I'm both a user of AI (no choice anymore in the current job environment) and vaguely alarmed by it; I'm in the camp of those who fear for the future of our profession, and I know the counterarguments but I'm not convinced.

A couple of thoughts.

First, I think the hardness of the problems most of us solve is overrated. There is a lot of friction, tuning things, configuring things right, reading logs, etc. But are the problems most of us are solving really that hard? I don't think so, except for those few doing groundbreaking work or sending rockets to space.

Second, even thinking about easier problems is good training for the mind. There's that analogy that the brain is a "muscle", and I think it's accurate. If we always take the easy way out for the easier problems, we don't exercise our brains, and then when harder problems come up what will we do?

(And please, no replies of the kind "when portable calculators were invented...").
by thephyber | 2026-02-04 12:49:16+00:00
I wouldn’t be so sure about Tesla stock. Tesla has only weathered 1 market downturn cycle and that was when it was a very different company. The company has thus far had access to plentiful capital since the Model S started being delivered.

Famous investors like to repeat the quote that “when the tide goes out, that’s when we find out who’s wearing no pants.” When Tesla actually weathers its first market downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
Show HN: howfar.nyc
by ahmedoo | 2026-02-04 12:49:27+00:00
Open standards illuminate different ways of understanding the world. After moving east, I was impressed with how quickly I could get to other major cities in the tri-state area and the breadth of places that people commuted into NYC from. I was also unimpressed with how often my bike was the fastest way to get to other places in Brooklyn. Particularly when apartment hunting, there seemed to be pockets of higher transit accessibility in certain areas that sometimes corresponded to higher rent prices. I needed a map and the past weeks' snow storm was an opportunity to make one.

I pulled some GTFS data and pre-computed transit travel times with Open Trip Planner for every intersection in NYC and some urban hubs in the tri-state area. The transit data includes MTA, CT Transit, Septa, and NJ Transit. The polygons are stored with PostGIS, and leaflet makes quick work of rendering them as GeoJSON layers. I have a few mapping projects on the same stack written in clojure/script so it was a natural extension.

Happy to answer any questions.

Note: Most transit agencies willingly provide their own GTFS data, but Amtrak's had to be FOIA'd so I used a third party cleaned up version of it.
Show HN: Unit Prefix Sanity Checker – Catches 10×/1000× errors in datasheets
by ClearSignal | 2026-02-04 12:49:27+00:00
I built a Chrome extension that flags suspicious unit prefix combinations in web pages. The kind of typos that cause engineers to order the wrong components or spend hours debugging.

Try it on these (install extension first):

Capacitor: 10 mF ceramic
MCU clock: 16000 kHz
Board width: 0.005 m
Battery: 3.7 mAh Li-ion
Download: 100 Mb storage
Surface finish: Ra = 1.6 mm

If the extension is working, you'll see inline highlights with explanations on hover.

It currently has 89 rules across electrical, mechanical, HVAC, data, chemical, optical, and angular units. Runs entirely locally, no data collection, no accounts, no backend.

The idea came from catching these errors in component datasheets and wondering how many I'd missed over the years.

Looking for feedback on what it misses, false positives, and unit conventions in fields I'm less familiar with. Looking to build it for Firefox next.
by rswail | 2026-02-04 12:49:49+00:00
Utility scale PV farms should be seen as literally harvesting solar power, not generating it, while still allowing other agriculture like sheep grazing to occur using the same fields.

You plant a PV panel and add its irrigation (power interconnect) and remote monitoring, then you harvest power for the next 25+ years.

Ethanol production excess is a specific US problem because of the misalignment of incentives and lobbying.
by panda-giddiness | 2026-02-04 12:50:44+00:00
> People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else

And yet criminals still commit crimes. Obviously jail is not the ultimate deterrent you think it is. Nobody commits crimes with the expectation that they'll get caught, and if you only "crucify some people", then most criminals are going to (rightfully) assume that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-04 12:51:37+00:00
12tet is a practical compromise between overtone approximation and playability.

Any fretted or keyed acoustic instrument with more than 12 notes/octave is extremely difficult and expensive to build and hard to tune and play.

The music is also hard to notate, because there are so many more possible pitch positions.

So 12 notes became a practical default for instrument builders. And from there, ET became a practical default for tuning to allow smooth-ish modulation through different keys. The errors in the tuning are the same for every key, so the tuning relationships stay the same while the key root changes.

That doesn't quite happen because overtone perception and beating effects aren't completely linear. But it avoids the obvious out-of-tune notes you get when playing in distant keys with non-ET tunings.