MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2026-02-03 23:31:16+00:00
To address all the questions you addressed to me.

> Isn’t that what the scanners are for?

Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words.

> To find large metallic objects?

The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within.

> Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that?

In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data.

> Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons?

In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment.

> If so, we should get rid of the scanners.

We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion.

I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.
by Willish42 | 2026-02-03 23:31:25+00:00
> cmd /c "whoami&&tasklist&&systeminfo&&netstat -ano" > a.txt

Naive question, but isn't this relatively safe information to expose for this level of attack? I guess the idea is to find systems vulnerable to 0-day exploits and similar based on this info? Still, that seems like a lot of effort just to get this data.
by standardUser | 2026-02-03 23:31:34+00:00
Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.

Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.
by ploxiln | 2026-02-03 23:31:58+00:00
In addition to the all the other stuff, including light spectrum differences, you can't just trust that a "37000 lumen" light (cheap from China ...) is such a thing. Some examples of "100,000 lumen" flashlights that ended providing more like 2000 to 3000 lumens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_0wxzClkg

It's possible, they exist, many such LEDs are probably manufactured in China ... but the legit ones are probably more expensive, and you may need a more recognizable brand to do some QA, and keep pressure on the factory to not slip quality or inputs.

Consider the cheap screwdriver included with the lamp in this story: unexpectedly, many were more faulty than the cheapest $4 screwdriver you'd find in any hardware store. The more stories you read about manufacturing stuff in China, the more you'll see very strange things. It's not about nationality or anything, it's an extreme kind of optimization. If you didn't catch it already, maybe you didn't really need what you thought you asked for ... they're just checking/optimizing
by simonw | 2026-02-03 23:32:31+00:00
The most important question is whether they make or lose money on each customer, independent of their fixed R&D costs.

If they make money on each customer they have a credible business - they could become profitable even with their existing R&D losses provided they can sign up enough new paying customers.

If they lose money on every customer - such that signing a $1m new enterprise account costs them $1.1m in server costs - then their entire "business" is a sham.

I currently believe that Anthropic make money on almost every customer, such that their business is legit.

I guess we'll have to wait for the IPO paperwork to find out if I'm right about that.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-03 23:32:36+00:00
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.

Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.

The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.

The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
by mmh0000 | 2026-02-03 23:32:44+00:00
He literally said he was gonna:

"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...

(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)

EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...
by renewiltord | 2026-02-03 23:32:56+00:00
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
by trhway | 2026-02-03 23:32:58+00:00
>The power radiated is T^4, but 70c is only about 17.1% warmer than 20c because you need to compare in kelvin.

17% in T^4 is almost 2x - plugging 293 (in Kelvin of course) in the calculator i get 417 W/m2 vs. 784W/m2 that i got earlier for the 343 (Kelvin for the 70 Celsius).

The ISS targets rejecting 70KW and has something like 140m2 of radiators. These radiators are attached to the ISS and use a lot of plumbing to carry the cooling liquid.

Where is GPUs and everything can be attached directly to the radiators and solar panels. So 70KW - 70 GPUs - can be placed right onto the 10m by 10m radiator panel. In front of those GPUs sitting on that radiator - a 15m by 20m solar panels assembly. Whole thing is less than 1 ton. Between $10K and $100K on Starship.
Show HN: AnsiColor, resilient ANSI color codes for your TUI
by gurgeous | 2026-02-03 23:33:01+00:00
Hi HN. AnsiColor constructs resilient ANSI color codes for your TUI, cli app or prompt. Colors that will work regardless of the user's terminal theme.

I built this after experiencing the hilarious illegibility of Codex CLI when running with Solarized Dark. If a zillion dollar company can't get it right, we need better tools.

It comes with these themes:

Andromeda
Ayu Dark/Light
Bearded Dark/Light
Catppuccin Frappe
Catppuccin Latte
Catppuccin Macchiato
Catppuccin Mocha
Dracula
GitHub Dark
Gruvbox
Monokai Dark/Light
Nord
One Dark/Light
Palenight
Panda
Solarized Dark/Light
Synthwave 84
Tailwind
Tokyo Night Dark/Light
by maxglute | 2026-02-03 23:33:08+00:00
TBH pretty retarded to eat up American spacerace 2.0 / rivalry / competition framing when space is like ~0.1% of GDP spend in both US/PRC. At least bump up to half a percent for a proper space race spending. Of course true purpose of framing is likely to keep US space spent at 0.1% instead of 0.01%.

> compete for the best spots

Nothing in outer space treaty that enables first come / first serve squatting. Second mover can always park next door. If anything OST allows joint scientific observation, which allows actors to build right next to each other.

The entire best spot narrative is US trying to bake in landgrab provisions via Artemis Accords (not international/customary law) for safety zones, i.e. landgrab by exclusion - if US build first, someone else can't because it might effect US safety. But reality is non signatories not obliged to honour Artemis. PRC's Artemis, i.e. International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) doesn't have safety zones baked into language yet, but they're going to want to push for some sort of deconfliction as matter of lawfare eventually.

But shit hits fan, and country absolutely need that moon base, everyone who can will be shanty-towning it up in Shackleton, where prime real estate (80-90% illumination windows) are like a few 300m strips. No one is going to settle for shit sloppy seconds because Artemis dictates 2km safety buffer. Exhaust plume from competitor landing next door damage your base? Your fault for not hardening it in first place, building paper mache bases and trying to exclude others under guise of safety is just not going to fly. With all the terrestrial geopolitical implications that entails.
by simianwords | 2026-02-03 23:33:23+00:00
OT but instead of quadratic attention can we not have n^10 or something crazier? I feel like we are limiting the intelligence just to save cost. But I can imagine that there might be some questions that may be worth paying higher cost for.

I feel like n^10 attention can capture patterns that lower complexity attention may not. So it seems arbitrary that we have n^2 attention.
by beloch | 2026-02-03 23:33:46+00:00
I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
by thatfunkymunki | 2026-02-03 23:33:52+00:00
it's not "just to get that data", it's to confirm level of access, check for potential other exploiters or security software, identify the machine you have access to, identify what the machine has network connectivity to, etc. The attacker then maintains the c2 channel and can then perform their actual objective with the help of the data they have obtained.
by codethief | 2026-02-03 23:33:57+00:00
> Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

As a European, I agree. Zooming out a little, though, this whole decoupling process of entire economies (which has been well underway for a while) is going to increase the probability of armed conflict as the repercussions of military engagement will be lower.
by taftster | 2026-02-03 23:34:14+00:00
I almost feel like this should just be the default action for all applications. I don't need them to escape out of a defined root. It's almost like your documents and application are effectively locked together. You have to give permissions for an app to extra data from outside of the sandbox.

Linux has this capability, of course. And it seems like MacOS prompts me a lot for "such and such application wants to access this or that". But I think it could be a lot more fine-grained, personally.
by fatbird | 2026-02-03 23:34:33+00:00
No, but they all knew he was a pedo/rapist, and were still friends with him and went to the island of a pedo/rapist, and introduced the pedo/rapist to their friends...

We don't know how many were pedo/rapists, but we know all of them liked to socialize with one and trade favours and spread his influence.
by insuranceguru | 2026-02-03 23:34:52+00:00
The fiduciary model is the only regulatory framework that actually scales. In insurance (my field), we see the difference daily: a captive agent works for the carrier while an independent broker often has a pseudo-fiduciary duty to the client.
If we applied that to data, your AI assistant would legally have to prioritize your privacy over the vendor's ad revenue. Right now, the incentives are completely inverted.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-03 23:34:57+00:00
Wow.

> Build a platform where anyone can create their AI twin for genuine matching.

Add a premium tier that deepfakes you into each opening's "AI"-researched ideal candidate.

And a super premium tier to deliver the exclusive best fake for each particular opening.

Once you get traction, offer recruiters a filter that removes the fakes for $$$, but instead deliver just improved fakery.

Let recruiters pay $$$$$ to have their competitors get only fakes.

But be quick, else be beaten to it by Cory Doctorow or Charlie Brooker :)
by alexanderlevin | 2026-02-03 23:34:57+00:00
We spent two years optimizing vehicle routing for a huge line-haul delivery network. We found that standard OR solvers (such as Google OR-Tools) struggled with the dynamic nature of the requests, while pure Reinforcement Learning agents would not converge.

We ended up building a Hybrid Architecture that splits the logic:

1. MARL Agents act as "Fleet Managers" that handle high-level strategy (when to dispatch, which cluster to serve).
2. Linear Programming acts as a "Bin Packer" to enforce strict physical constraints on the final route.

The article details the architecture, the specific reward shaping we used to encourage LTL (Less-Than-Truckload) consolidation, and how we normalized the observation space to achieve zero-shot generalization across different warehouse sizes.

Happy to answer questions about the stack or the specific failure/success cases we ran into.A
by echelon | 2026-02-03 23:35:13+00:00
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".

Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.

Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.

If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.

I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.

Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.

Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".

How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.

Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.

Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?

We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Show HN: Added a new puzzle mode to my game
by timenotwasted | 2026-02-03 23:35:17+00:00
Hi HN! I submitted my word game a few days ago and since that time I've added a new puzzle mode, tutorial, and a host of other QoL updates.

Not to worry I won't be spamming Show HN with updates but I did think the new puzzle mode would be worth an update. Would love any feedback if you have a few moments to try it out. Thanks!

Link: https://spellrush.com/
by simonw | 2026-02-03 23:35:44+00:00
Claude Code was released in February, it just had its 1 year birthday a few days ago.

OpenAI Codex CLI and Gemini CLI followed a few months afterwards

It took a little while for the right set of coding agent features to be developed and for the models to get good enough to use those features effectively.

I think this stuff went from interesting to useful around Sonnet 4, and from useful to "let it write most of my code" with the upgrades in November.
by its_magic | 2026-02-03 23:36:24+00:00
"Obsolete"? Apparently you aren't paying close attention.

See this GIANT argument with hundreds of comments? It seems some people believe that SysVinit is, in fact, not even close to obsolete.

If Gnome/KDE can't support the init system I choose to use, then I don't choose to use their garbage software anymore.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-03 23:36:40+00:00
> I am unsure all visible fans on modern jets on the spool couple directly to the turbine

They exist now [1][2]. The general term is geared turbofans.

If you want to mentally unfuck it a bit, the major variables are: combustion type (internal or turbine), gearing or not, ducting or not and bypass ratio. (Compression ratio and number of blades can come too.)

When one of these changes substantially, you get a change in engine type. When it changes a little bit, you get a blur.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_PW1000G

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Trent#UltraFan
by insuranceguru | 2026-02-03 23:37:22+00:00
That profit optimal caricature is what we call moral hazard in risk management. When a system is optimized purely for short-term extraction it offloads the long-term tail risk onto the consumer or society.
We see this with cheap IoT devices that have zero security updates the manufacturer saves $0.50 on a chip and the consumer eventually pays for it in identity theft or botnet attacks. It’s an externality that isn't priced in.
by defrost | 2026-02-03 23:37:49+00:00
None the less it was yourself that asserted the I in AI stood for intelligence when clearly the AI Acronym has alernative priors.

> I'm not really interested in a summary of The debauched lives of Bogans

That seems a bit judgemental there;

bogan - "an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status"

seems at odds with events often attended by millionaires and billionaires with multiple degrees and on the honour roles at snotty schools of high standing.
by genter | 2026-02-03 23:37:53+00:00
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.

In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
by jfengel | 2026-02-03 23:38:05+00:00
Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
by troad | 2026-02-03 23:38:13+00:00
MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions.

Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution of end user applications, then it will just end up entirely centralised in one of the big tech companies, as it already is on iOS and macOS by Apple.
by taftster | 2026-02-03 23:38:23+00:00
In the early days, updates quite often made systems less stable, by a demonstrable margin. My dad once turned off all updates on his Windows machine, with the ensuing peril that you can imagine.

Sadly, it feels like Microsoft updates lately have trended back towards being unreliable and even user hostile. It's messed up if you update and can't boot your machine afterwards, but here we are. People are going to turn off automatic updates again.
by andrepd | 2026-02-03 23:38:26+00:00
The UUID is unique per service. All it tells you is that two people are not the same person.

The "authentication service" is the national id. The tax man already knows your name, address, date of birth, financial possessions, income, family members, etc etc. There is no further information, apart from which website you logged on and when. This quite literally the standard of Signal [1]. And this is of course assuming the worst from the national id implementation; any sensible law would require the id provider to delete all information as soon as the login is complete.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-03 23:39:06+00:00
Right, and everyone else has the right to an opinion on it. The point seemingly being made above is Trump's swingeing cuts seem to be driven more by ideology than administrative efficiency. Xi's dismissal of his top general (which seems to be equivalent to sacking the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff) is perplexing due to the opacity, but it doesn't seem to be indicative of any bigger or broader trend.
by jleyank | 2026-02-03 23:39:11+00:00
What defines an owner, then? One who signs the application? Somebody with stock? If so, how much stock? Can they be promoted to owner after the application is granted?

Is it ok to have green card and/or work permit people on staff, or is that also a no-no? I can imagine they’d agree, since the administration’s goal is to not have non-citizens. Or, maybe, not have small business loans?
by s1artibartfast | 2026-02-03 23:39:39+00:00
I was thinking something along the lines of this:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ

However, my main point was to refute the idea of some mythical past where the government was massively more funded, and therefore more competent and capable.

This also ignores the effect of the growing pie over time, but that is somewhat a tangent.

If someone is referencing back to the 1930s tax rates, those total receipts were closer to 10% of GDP when things like the Hoover Dam and Interstate System were being built.

Today, the rates are closer to 30% and the GDP being taxed is 25-30 times larger, controlling for inflation.

To me, this suggests that the reason we can't perform infrastructure projects is not lack of funding
by array_key_first | 2026-02-03 23:40:04+00:00
I doubt it's likely at all. The thing that makes tobacco dangerous is high temperature combustion and nicotine. You get BOTH in natural tobacco.

The thousands of "chemicals" from cigarettes are not put in there. They come from combustion. Setting shit on fire makes chemicals turn into other chemicals, some of them very harmful. That's why many survivors of 9/11 later died from lung cancer.
by triceratops | 2026-02-03 23:40:14+00:00
Another important takeaway: the "we need to mine for batteries" argument against renewables is complete bunk and always has been. Because:

1. Battery recycling will eventually provide all the minerals we need for new batteries. This is already true for lead-acid car batteries. We just don't have enough old lithium batteries around for lithium battery recycling to be a big industry yet.

2. We burn fossil fuels, which means we constantly need to dig out more and more. Any amount of mining we will do for batteries and panels is a small fraction of what we do for oil and coal.