MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxglute | 2026-02-04 22:13:44+00:00
Preferential satrap treatment is for countries whose geopolitical alignment helps US... i.e. containing USSR, PRC. Iran/Shah muscle and Saudi money use to be US twin pillar strategy for MENA influence, including coldwar anticommunist containment. Israel is muscle now, and they sure as shit isn't going to share with Iran. Deputy sheriff position is zero-sum.

The current realpolitik geopolitical fate for Iran is to be suppressed and relegated, regional players don't want to redistribute power / influence to accommodate Iran. Bluntly Iran is too big allow to flourish, but not so big it cannot be suppressed. That's Iran's fate under current dynamics, no one wants to save Iran, they want to neutralize Iran, naive to pretend otherwise. Iran is no longer in the minority of potential strategic intervention successes, its in the bucket of dozens of countries US intervention fucked over because that's the strategic end goal is for these countries to remain weak. If Iran wants bigger lightcone, it needs to fight for one.
by apsurd | 2026-02-04 22:13:45+00:00
The accounting saas dores presumably uses doesn't "automate spreadsheets" as its core value prop.

related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
by re-thc | 2026-02-04 22:13:52+00:00
> Anyone overseeing work from multiple people has to?

That's not a black box though. Someone is still reading the code.

> At some point you have to let go and trust people‘s judgement

Where's the people in this case?

> People who do that (I‘m not one of them btw) must rely on higher level reports.

Does such a thing exist here? Just "done".
by VonTum | 2026-02-04 22:13:59+00:00
Oh hi Rachit, long time no see. I sadly didn't have time to submit something to LATTE this year as I've been spending all my time building infrastructure for SUS.

I think improving the safety of hardware design is a noble goal, and certainly there is much that can be improved over Verilog & VHDL's incredibly brittle baseline.

Though for dynamic latency safety, my intuition tells me the problem space is undecidable. Sure one could prove the correctness of various kinds of dynamic latency pipelines, and as research progresses you'll include more and more such constructs, but it'll always remain possible to construct a correct but unprovable dynamic pipeline.

Given that, shouldn't we take a leaf out of Rust's book, and instead give the user tools to build abstractions which internally contain unprovable but correct black magic, yet on their interface provide a safe, static latency count.

Take for instance SUS' SlowState. It abstracts over an internal state, and the user provides a pipeline to update this internal state. Now, if we were to update the state twice, before the change has had time to propagate through the pipeline, that would be an error. SlowState prevents you from doing so by statically measuring the length of the update pipeline, and only allowing updates once it has cleared.
Implementing SlowState requires some unsafe, but it can provide a safe interface upholding its requirement.
by osigurdson | 2026-02-04 22:14:01+00:00
It seems that current advantages would compound with AI. I.e., if I am making a SaaS for Popsicle stick makers today, why I am disadvantaged with AI vs a new competitor in the space? I guess the hypothesis is the Popsicle stick maker will vibe code all of the software that they need instead. For that, we need significantly better AI than we have today - perhaps something like a 1000X improvement. Basically, this is a world in which non-technical grandparents can vibe code anything that they want. This means, it understands what you want without you being able to articulate it well in the first place.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-04 22:14:13+00:00
I'm 2-3 years from now if coding AI continues to improve at this pace I reckon people will rewrite entire projects.

I can't imagine not reading the code I'm responsible for any more than I could imagine not looking out the windscreen in a self driving Tesla.

But if so many people are already there, and mostly highly skilled programmers imagine in 2 years time with people who've never programmed!
by comrade1234 | 2026-02-04 22:14:22+00:00
Out of curiosity I looked at my ios books app to see how many I read and it says I only read one book in 2025 and one book in 2026. This is completely wrong - I've read 4 books since Jan 1 and last year maybe 10 to 15 books (mostly trashy sci-fi and fantasy)

When I looked closer in the app it's because all of my books are 99% finished because I didn't click in every page until the end. Annoying.

I use my garmin connect app to track exercise, blood pressure, water consumption, etc. it would be cool to have something similar for the mind.
by kwindla | 2026-02-04 22:14:38+00:00
Yes, but also ... the analogy to assembly is pretty good. We're moving pretty quickly towards a world where we will almost never read the code.

You may read all the assembly that your compiler produces. (Which, awesome! Sounds like you have a fun job.) But I don't. I know how to read assembly and occasionally do it. But I do it rarely enough that I have to re-learn a bunch of stuff to solve the hairy bug or learn the interesting system-level thing that I'm trying to track down if I'm reading the output of the compiler. And mostly even when I have a bug down at the level where reading assembly might help, I'm using other tools at one or two removes to understand the code at that level.

I think it's pretty clear that "reading the code" is going to go the way of reading compiler output. And quite quickly. Even for critical production systems. LLMs are getting better at writing code very fast, and there's no obvious reason we'll hit a ceiling on that progress any time soon.

In a world where the LLMs are not just pretty good at writing some kinds of code, but very good at writing almost all kinds of code, it will be the same kind of waste of time to read source code as it is, today, to read assembly code.
by slg | 2026-02-04 22:15:01+00:00
>The entire premiss for this? To stop individuals from manufacturing firearms and firearm components WHICH IS A LAWFUL ACTIVITY!

Everything is a lawful activity until they make a law outlawing it. You're arguing against the idea of all new laws.

>Your motivations are transparent. You are using regurgitated anti-gun arguments.

I wasn't hiding anything. I think stricter gun regulations would be a net benefit for an American society that is way too obsessed with guns. The voters of New York generally agree with that idea. The last few months have also made it clear that all the years of 2nd Amendment advocates talking about us needing guns to fight tyranny have been lying about their motivations. So if we're demanding transparency, let's also be clear that there is no deeper ideology at play here beyond a love of guns.
by zqna | 2026-02-04 22:16:08+00:00
It's funny to think that all this discussion would not be happening if not for naive idealism embraced by software people fo decades, which enabled sharing everything they made after working hours for free and for everyone. That all it was hijacked by a handful of rich and not very altruistic people to enslave everyone comes as a big surprise. Who would have thought. I guess we arent that smart after all
by projectazorian | 2026-02-04 22:16:12+00:00
> At that point, you’re legitimately addicted

You can just stop. Really. Go take a long trip somewhere weed is illegal (eg. Japan) and throw out your stash on the way out the door. You will be fine, maybe a little irritable for a couple days, but the trip will distract you and it'll be indistinguishable from typical jet lag symptoms. There is no biological dependence, unlike with most legal drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, benzos...
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-04 22:16:17+00:00
Has bezos made any decisions for you lately? Money tends to be a pretty weak form of power.

What we are seeing is bezos trying to translate money into media power, which is real. But it doesn’t seem like his paper is that influential or that he is able to wield much control over the journalists who work there. The message they say is almost the same - likely because they operate within a tight group and culture that exists across outlets.

Your instinct is that media is actually powerful. Isn’t a few people operating the media scarier than a few people being able to consume a lot of goods and services?
by tyre | 2026-02-04 22:16:20+00:00
Right, it’s pretty silly. None of the past three Democrats have been particularly to the left.

Even a true centrist would have built a public option along with the Affordable Care Act. Obama didn’t even support gay marriage when running in 2008! Clinton’s NAFTA accelerated American manufacturing shifting outside of the country. The craziest thing Gore would have done is combat global warming.

America is at best center-right. Our last leftist president was LBJ.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-04 22:16:39+00:00
I don't view LLMs as a substitute for thinking; I view them as an aid to research and study, and as a translator from pseudocode to syntax. That is, instead of trawling through all the documentation myself and double-checking everything manually, an LLM can pop up a solution of some quality, and if that agrees with how my mental model assumes it should work, I'll accept it or improve on it. And if I know what I want to do but don't know some exact syntax, like has happened in Swift recently as I explore macOS development, an LLM can translate my implementation ideas into something that compiles.

More to the point of the article, though, LLM-enthusiasts do seem to view it as a substitute for thinking. They're not augmenting their application of knowledge with shortcuts and fast-paths; they're entirely trusting the LLM to engineer things on its own. LLMs are great at creating the impression that they are suitable for this; after all, they are trained on tons of perfectly reasonable engineering data, and start to show all the same signals that a naïve user would use to tell quality of engineering... just without the quality.
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-04 22:16:44+00:00
Yes, on the face of it, the plan is workable. Heat radiation scales linearly with area and exponentially (IIRC) with temperature.

It really is as simple as just adding kilometers of radiatiors. That is, if you ignore the incredible cost of transporting all that mass to orbit and assembly in space. Because there is quite simply no way to fold up kilometer-scale thermal arrays and launch in a single vehicle. There will be assembly required in space.

All in all, if you ignore all practical reality, yes, you can put a datacenter in space!

Once you engage a single brain cell, it becomes obvious that it is actually so impractical as to be literally impossible.
Show HN: BederSnake Revolution: Snake+Sokoban+Match3 puzzle with MLsolvable lvls
by avtomatron | 2026-02-04 22:17:03+00:00
I’m a solo dev. This is a playable web prototype.

BederSnake Revolution is a hybrid puzzle: Snake movement + Sokoban pushing + Match-3 clearing.

Tech twist: I built an ML-based level generator/solver that produces guaranteed solvable levels — both random and levels generated from an 8×8 pixel mask (tiny pixel-art patterns).

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSXjkGwlXI

Feedback I’d love: is the core loop fun in the first 60 seconds, and where does the difficulty curve feel unfair?
by samus | 2026-02-04 22:17:23+00:00
Our primate ancestors required tails so they could effectively move around on trees. A tree dweller without a functional tail is slower and has a harder time gathering food and escaping from predators. That's a very strong selection pressure that ends up maintaining the tail.

When the woods in eastern Africa changed into savannah, we shifted to two legs and adopted a persistence hunting strategy. The tail became useless, even a liability, and mutations that resulted in reduced tails were not selected against anymore.
by Xirdus | 2026-02-04 22:18:02+00:00
> I can’t imagine any other example where people voluntarily move for a black box approach.

I can think of a few. The last 78 pages of any 80-page business analysis report. The music tracks of those "12 hours of chill jazz music" YouTube videos. Political speeches written ahead of time. Basically - anywhere that a proper review is more work than the task itself, and the quality of output doesn't matter much.
by deafpolygon | 2026-02-04 22:18:10+00:00
i also have aphantasia. it’s interesting to say the least. as a side effect of aphantasia, i also experience sdam (severely deficient autobiographical memory) in which i don’t recall clear events in my life (i only know that certain things happen, but in general it’s all just a blur) and i have difficulty recognizing people in a crowd (even loved ones).
by comrade1234 | 2026-02-04 22:18:31+00:00
I used to think the same way as you about audiobooks but this year I had three weeks where I wasn't supposed to read a screen after eye surgery and so I tried some audiobooks. It took a few days but eventually I got to the point where it was indistinguishable from reading - where I could picture in my mind everything happening.

This is quite different from tv and film where you're just watching and not using your mind.
Show HN: WhookTown – Visualize your infrastructure as a 3D cyberpunk city
by fralix | 2026-02-04 22:18:47+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm excited to share WhookTown, a visualization tool that transforms your IT infrastructure into a living 3D city.
Instead of staring at dashboards full of charts and numbers, you watch over a neon-lit cyberpunk metropolis where each building represents a server or
service.

How it works:

- Your servers become buildings in a Tron-inspired cityscape
- Health status is shown visually: green neon = healthy, orange = warning, red = critical, grey = offline
- A spinning windmill's propeller speed reflects CPU load
- Data centers display real-time FFT visualizations
- Fire effects indicate critical failures you need to address

What makes it different:

Beyond the visual layer, there's a workflow engine that lets you create custom logic (e.g., "if database latency > 500ms AND cache miss
rate > 20%, set the building on fire").
You're not just watching pretty graphics – you're encoding domain knowledge into visual states.

The scene includes 23 building types with unique behaviors, Tron-style traffic (light cycles and data packets) and an adaptive audio system that shifts the soundtrack based on your infrastructure's mood.

Built with Go microservices, Redis Streams for messaging, PostgreSQL, and Three.js for the 3D rendering. WebSocket pushes real-time
updates to connected clients.

Pricing:

Free tier available (1 layout, 4 buildings). Paid plans start at $4/month for more capacity.

The idea came from spending too many hours staring at Grafana during on-call rotations.
I wanted something that would make observing infrastructure less soul-crushing and more... fun?

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

https://whook.town
by AngryData | 2026-02-04 22:19:17+00:00
I don't know if I would consider it especially difficult for them. It is obviously not convenient but when I had peacocks they would still fly way up in some tall pine trees to roost even with a full tail without too much trouble. That said these were domestic peacocks so they didn't have to fly very far at all for everything they ever wanted, wild peacocks might have to go farther.
by ytpete | 2026-02-04 22:19:45+00:00
Some highlights from the abstract:

- Analyzes fact-check requests on X (Grok and Perplexity)

- "exposure to LLM fact-checks meaningfully shifts belief accuracy" comparable to the degree observed in studies of professional fact-checking

- 54.5% of Grok ratings and 57.7% of Perplexity ratings agreed with human fact-checkers ("significantly lower than the inter-fact-checker agreement rate of 64.0%"). But "API-access versions of Grok had higher agreement with fact-checkers"

- "Responses to Grok fact-checks are polarized by partisanship when model identity is disclosed, whereas responses to Perplexity are not"

- "Users requesting fact-checks from Grok are much more likely to be Republican than Democratic, while the opposite is true for fact-check requests from Perplexity – indicating emerging polarization in attitudes toward specific AI models."

- "posts from Republican-leaning accounts are more likely to be rated as inaccurate by both LLMs"

- Grok and Perplexity "strongly disagree" (one rates a claim as true and the other as false) 13.6% of the time
by kace91 | 2026-02-04 22:20:01+00:00
>At some point you have to let go and trust people‘s judgement.

Indeed. People. With salaries, general intelligence, a stake in the matter and a negative outcome if they don’t take responsibility.

>Reading and understanding the whole output of 9 concurrently running agents is impossible.

I agree. It is also impossible for a person to drive two cars at once… so we don’t. Why is the starting point of the conversation that one should be able to use 9 concurring agents?

I get it, writing code no longer has a physical bottleneck. So the bottleneck becomes the next thing, which is our ability to review outputs. It’s already a giant advancement, why are we ignoring that second bottleneck and dropping quality assurance as well? Eventually someone has to put their signature on the thing being shippable.
by MrDunham | 2026-02-04 22:20:29+00:00
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).

It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.

That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.

The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.

* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
by aspectrr | 2026-02-04 22:20:37+00:00
Hey! Yes I updated the website with some more of my comments.
- RO mode would be a good idea
- Agreed on explaining destructive actions. The only (possibly) destructive action is creating the sanbox on the host, but that asks the user's permission if the host doesn't have enough resources. Right now it supports VMs with KVM. It will not let you create a sandbox if the host doesn't have enough ram or cpus.

- The kubernetes example is exactly what this is built for, giving AI access is dangerous but there is always a chance of it messing something. Thanks for the comment!
by davnicwil | 2026-02-04 22:20:47+00:00
I think the classic definition of the singularity though (per Kurzweil's book) is precisely when the curve actually doesn't look flat on human comprehensible timescales any more.

I.e. One day there are significant overnight changes. Then the very next day hourly changes, soon thereafter every minute, second, millisecond, etc.
by xrd | 2026-02-04 22:20:51+00:00
I love litestream. I've used it with pocketbase and it works. sqlite is a great building block for almost everything.

Does anyone know whether you could use this to stitch together a bunch of .db files (that share the same schema) in an ad-hoc way?

For example, if I decided I wanted to synchronize my friend's .db file, could I enable this using litestream? And, what if my friend wanted to sync two of his friends' .db files, but I'm only interested in his changes, not theirs? I assume this kind of fan out is not possible, but it would be fun if so.
by d_silin | 2026-02-04 22:20:55+00:00
Would never work in reality, you can't optimize algorithms beyond their computation complexity limits.

You can't multiply matrix x matrix (or vector x matrix) faster than O(N^2).

You can't iterate through array faster than O(N).

Search & sort are sub- or near-linear, yes - but any realistic numerical simulations are O(N^3) or worse. Computational chemistry algorithms can be as hard as O(N^7).

And that's all in P class, not even NP.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-04 22:20:57+00:00
Yawning is so baffling, I woke in the night to yawn yesterday. I was turning over in bed and suddenly found myself yawning enough to perk my sleepy awareness.

Distinctly remember being outraged.

Makes more sense I suppose if yawning isn't just signalling sleepiness to do it even while asleep!
by milkytron | 2026-02-04 22:21:12+00:00
I don't think there will be a post oil industry, at least not as long as we have roads and cars.

We don't really need as much oil for walking paths, trains, or bike trails, and potholes are a different problem with different solutions for those.

As long as we have cars as we know them, we'll have oil. Road construction require s oil, all of the plastics in cars require oil, trucks require oil, shipping vessels require oil, it's oil all the way down.

It would require a seismic shift in life as we know it to live in a post oil world. Our stockpiles are pretty low (maybe a month in the US).
Show HN: LayerClaw – Observability tool for PyTorch training
by prabhavsanga | 2026-02-04 22:21:42+00:00
Hi HN! I built LayerClaw (https://github.com/layerclaw/layerclaw), a local-first observability tool for PyTorch training.
The problem: When training neural networks, things go wrong silently. Your loss explodes at step 47,392. Your gradients vanish in layer 12. Your GPU memory spikes randomly. By the time you notice, you've wasted hours or days of compute.

I got tired of adding print statements, manually checking TensorBoard files, and tracking down training issues after the fact. Existing tools either require cloud accounts (W&B, Neptune) or are too heavyweight for quick experiments (MLflow, TensorBoard for gradient analysis).

What LayerClaw does:

- Automatically tracks gradients, metrics, and system resources during training - Stores everything locally (SQLite + Parquet, no cloud required) - Detects anomalies: gradient explosions, NaN/Inf values, loss spikes - Provides a CLI to compare runs: `tracer compare run1 run2 --metric loss` - Minimal overhead with async writes (~2-3%)

Quick example:

```python import tracer import torch

# Initialize (one line) tracer.init(project="my-project", track_gradients=True)

# Your normal training loop model = YourModel() tracer._state.tracer.attach_hooks(model)

for batch in dataloader: loss = train_step(model, batch) tracer.log({"loss": loss.item()}) tracer.step()

tracer.finish() ```

Then analyze: `tracer anomalies my-run --auto`

What makes it different:

1. Local-first: No sign-ups, no data leaving your machine, no vendor lock-in 2. Designed for debugging: Deep gradient tracking and anomaly detection built-in (not an afterthought) 3. Lightweight: Add 2 lines to your training loop, minimal overhead 4. Works with everything: Vanilla PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch Lightning

Current limitations (v0.1.0):

- CLI-only (web UI planned for v0.2) - Single-machine training (distributed support coming) - Early stage - would love feedback on what's most useful

Available now: - GitHub: https://github.com/layerclaw/layerclaw

I'm looking for contributors! I've created several "good first issues" for anyone interested in contributing. Areas where I need help: - Web UI for visualizations - Distributed training support - More framework integrations - Real-time monitoring dashboard

If you've struggled with ML training issues before, I'd love your input on what would be most valuable. PRs welcome, or just star the repo if you find it interesting!

What features would make this indispensable for your workflow?