MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mwapinska | 2026-02-03 04:28:19+00:00
Senior Python Backend Engineer | REMOTE | https://reef-technologies.com/

We’re looking for Python backend engineers to work on a trustless supercluster of performance-proofed GPU-enabled sandboxed docker container runners controlled by truly decentralized algorithms (not just PAXOS or RAFT).

Wow, that was a mouthful...

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Salary on a B2B contract:

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We're looking for someone with 5+ years of programming experience, including at least a year with Python (including opensource and significant personal projects).

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Contact: hiring@reef.pl
by tom_m | 2026-02-03 04:28:39+00:00
Tests are important. Writing good tests even moreso. However, you can't do either of you don't have good product requirements and communication.

Most software has "bugs" simply because people couldn't communicate how it should work.

I think most programmers are on top of actual runtime errors or compilation errors. It's straightforward on how to fix those. They are not on top of logic issues or unintended behavior because they aren't the product designer.

Programmers just cook the burger. If you order it well done, don't complain when it doesn't come out medium rare.
by tensor | 2026-02-03 04:28:59+00:00
First of all, the current government doesn't give a shit about the first amendment and is successfully putting a chilling effect on it through various means. Both through illegally using government funding as a hammer to require independent companies to curtail their speech, or by using regulation.

Second, history will look back and realize that without taking into account the volume of your voice, you don't really have free speech in a way that matters. If you the person next to you can use a megaphone that is so loud that no one hears you, you effectively have no speech. A great many democracies implicitly realize this and thus have election spending limits tied to the number of supporters. The US, through it's lobby system, and through party affiliated control of third party networks, does not.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-02-03 04:29:04+00:00
Studies have all come out clean on pacemakers and mmWave. No detectable interference in the hardware or on an EKG while in a mmWave scanner.

I could imagine other conditions potentially but pacemakers have been ruled a non issue for mmWave by academic studies (albeit I can understand still exercising caution despite that).
by root_axis | 2026-02-03 04:29:11+00:00
It's not a money grab, it's a tactic to encourage compliance. This isn't evidence of a change in security posture, you've always been able to travel without a Real ID. They've been pushing Real ID for more than a decade, 90% of people have one already anyway, the remaining stragglers simply don't care because there have never been any consequences.

Now TSA is offering an ultimatum. Pay $45 once to renew your ID or pay it every time you travel. For most people this is enough motivation to renew the ID and never think about it again.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-02-03 04:30:17+00:00
If Real ID is so good, why do we have CLEAR? Why can I not skip the line with RealID?

If we are forced RealID, why not just make all the TSA checkpoints like Global Entry (or in several countries with IDs), fully automate them, using Real ID. That would get rid of CLEAR, and a lot of TSA agents.
by tombert | 2026-02-03 04:30:55+00:00
Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!

I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.

I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.

So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

[1] https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween
by rishi_blockrand | 2026-02-03 04:31:25+00:00
Interesting choice using a Feistel cipher for format-preserving encryption here. It’s a solid step up from Hashids for preventing sequential ID discovery.

I’ve been looking into the 'Integrity Gap' in HMAC systems lately—specifically how to prove to an external auditor that the server secret (your masterKey) wasn't speculatively rotated or manipulated before a token was generated. In high-stakes environments like verifiable gaming or sensitive audit trails, the server holding the entropy is often a trust bottleneck.

Have you considered a model where the seed/key is anchored to a decentralized beacon like Drand? I've been experimenting with a 'Commit-Reveal' alternative where the final result is dependent on a future beacon round. It effectively removes the 'Last-Look' advantage from the server. Curious if you see a place for decentralized entropy in ID obfuscation for apps requiring a public audit trail
by varenc | 2026-02-03 04:31:39+00:00
pros and cons to this approach, like the CVE introduced in sudo 9.1.14 (June 2023) fixed in 1.9.17p1 (June 2025). https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-32463

But also sudo has A LOT of features that 95% of people don't use. Just checkout `man sudo` to get a sense for this. And it includes plugins like the popular visudo plugin. You can see from the release cadence that real improvements continue to be made. Though it is a bit more work to secure a moving target.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-03 04:32:21+00:00
There are not in fact millions of people who want to burn the world just to spite others. If you truly believe that then you have really failed to understand people around you, and should try to better empathize. As a rule, people do what they do because they believe it to be the right thing. They might be misguided in that belief, of course, but the idea of millions of people deciding on a cartoonishly evil course of action is not an accurate analysis of anything.
by rishi_blockrand | 2026-02-03 04:32:50+00:00
The non-escalating envelope approach in Firecracker is a great way to handle agent drift. I noticed you’re using HMAC approval tokens for gated ops—how are you handling the entropy source for those secrets?

One edge case in agent security is 'Entropy Exhaustion' or prediction if the microVM environment is compromised. I’ve been looking at anchoring HMAC generation to decentralized randomness beacons (like Drand) to ensure that even if an agent compromises the local environment, it can't predict or pre-mine the next set of 'valid' tokens because the entropy hasn't been released by the network yet.

Have you thought about moving the 'Root of Trust' for your HMAC tokens outside the local microVM entirely?The non-escalating envelope approach in Firecracker is a great way to handle agent drift. I noticed you’re using HMAC approval tokens for gated ops—how are you handling the entropy source for those secrets?

One edge case in agent security is 'Entropy Exhaustion' or prediction if the microVM environment is compromised. I’ve been looking at anchoring HMAC generation to decentralized randomness beacons (like Drand) to ensure that even if an agent compromises the local environment, it can't predict or pre-mine the next set of 'valid' tokens because the entropy hasn't been released by the network yet.

Have you thought about moving the 'Root of Trust' for your HMAC tokens outside the local microVM entirely?
by samplatt | 2026-02-03 04:32:59+00:00
Programming semantics is a large part of the equation, but it's a secondary part. Unity is just too damn EASY for spinning up a prototype and gluing other modules onto it. C# is a part of that but simple implementation is so much easier and powerful than other engines.

This goes out the window for polished end products but that's a different argument... but by then the ship has often already sailed and you're already using Unity.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-03 04:33:24+00:00
You're not considering some important multipliers. In space you're already getting a substantial immediate boost due to greater solar irradiance - no atmosphere or anything getting in the way of those juicy photons. You can also get 24 hour coverage in space. And finally they mention "deep space" - it's unclear what that means but solar irradiance increases on an inverse square law - get half way to the sun and you're getting another 4x boost in power. I'm sure there's other factors I'm not considering as well - space and solar just go quite well together.
by eldenring | 2026-02-03 04:33:43+00:00
> The panels suffer radiation damage they don't suffer on Earth.

I don't think this is true, Starlink satellites have an orbital lifetime of 5-7 years, and GPUs themselves are much more sensitive than solar panels for rad damage. I'd guess the limiting factor is GPU lifetime, so as long as your energy savings outpace the slightly faster gpu depreciation (maybe from 5 -> 3 years) plus cost of launch, it would be economical.

I've said this elsewhere, but based on my envelope math, the cost of launch is the main bottleneck and I think considerably more difficult to solve than any of the other negatives. Even shielding from radiation is a weight issue. Unfortunately all the comments here on HN are focused on the wrong, irrelevant issues like talking about convection in space.
by rishi_blockrand | 2026-02-03 04:33:48+00:00
Nice puzzle mechanics! I noticed you mentioned randomness is only used for the initial config. For 'Daily' style puzzles, there's always a segment of the player base that gets skeptical about whether the 'Daily Seed' was hand-picked to be harder or easier (the classic 'Wordle' suspicion).

A cool way to bypass that is to use a public, decentralized beacon (like Drand) as the seed for your generator. It effectively proves to players that you couldn't have rigged today's puzzle, because the entropy didn't exist until the beacon round fired. It's a low-lift way to add a 'Provably Fair' badge to a daily game without needing a complex backend.
by another_twist | 2026-02-03 04:34:28+00:00
I have found copilot to be very noisy to the point where I have had to turn it off and then uninstall on both IntelliJ and VSCode. I have found generating code via your favourite coding agent and then reviewing the output to be less taxing since the review burden is reduced. For agentic, you often have to review a bunch of code but its usually very close to the spec. Reviews are then easier.
by dang | 2026-02-03 04:36:16+00:00
I looked at the flags and they seem to be legit flags from legit users. My guess is that they thought this was below-the-radar drama that wasn't on topic for HN. (I could make a "people who flagged X also flagged" list a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771900 to support the point, but it's a time-consuming pain so I'd rather not!)

Edit: after looking at this more closely, I have a counterintuitive (to me at least) take: I think this is interesting enough to transcend the usual categories. That is, we'd normally downweight this kind of post off the frontpage - but in this case there are so many unusual variables that the usual rules don't apply.

I say this even though I have zero clue what's actually going on here, but we do have a nose for what the HN community might find intellectually interesting (we'd bloody well better after doing this job for so long), so let's override the flags and see what happens.

But without relitigating WWII please.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-02-03 04:37:09+00:00
Not Tomo’s developer, but my position on the 1 vs. 0 for list-like object indexing goes like…

1) using 0 as the index of the first element in a list-like object ISA holdover from C (most of the earlier languages used either 1 based or flexible base for indexing);

2) in C, 0 is the index due to the manner of C’s array indexing implementation;

3) if holding onto the C semantics (or syntax in some respects) is not an explicit goal of the language, then flexible indexing should be the default (declared at creation point for the list-like object);

4) in flexible default is not appealing to the language designer, and again, maintaining C semantics is not a goal, then 1 based should be the next reasonable default.

For me, when counting things (and most other native English speakers, if not most people in general), the first item counted is object 1. Therefore, 1 should be the index of the beginning of the list-like objects indexing.

I’m not sure how about 0 being ‘None’, but I might find it intuitive if thinking more about it.
by dnautics | 2026-02-03 04:37:11+00:00
i find claude does quite well with zig. this project is like > 95% claude, and it's an incredibly complicated codebase [0] (which is why i am not doing it by hand):

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

[0] generates a dynamically loaded library which does sketchy shit to access the binary representation of datastructures in the zig compiler, and then transpiles the IR to zig code which has to be rerun to do the analysis.
by Supermancho | 2026-02-03 04:37:34+00:00
> They need to talk about how the pr itself should change.

When PRs are spammed, it's impractical to discuss each submitted change. The existence of the PRs interferes with the ability of maintainers to continue making directed changes.

> We should be using ai to chunk changes into reviewable bytes and to align on semantics and contracts.

That statement is a convoluted version of the narcissist's entitlement. ie "other people should realize my vision".
by Sophira | 2026-02-03 04:37:55+00:00
There is nothing visible on your profile[0] other than a derogatory comment about HN in your bio.

If you're seeing something there, then I would advise you to look at it again when you're logged out so that you can see what others are seeing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=its_ubuntu2
by m64-64 | 2026-02-03 04:37:55+00:00
Hi, I built this.

I run my AI agents on isolated machines and didn't want to mount my filesystem or give them SSH keys. So I built a capability-based file access layer with scoped, time-bounded tokens and full auditing.

It’s written in Zig and uses Ed25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305.

Happy to answer questions or hear criticism.
by thegrim000 | 2026-02-03 04:38:28+00:00
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality

- "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon"

- "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels"

- "The condition of a station's underground storage tanks affects quality"

- "For the best engine performance and longevity, choosing Top Tier-certified gasoline is generally recommended."
by borland | 2026-02-03 04:38:52+00:00
It's a solved problem. The physics is simply such that it's really inefficient.

> ... we'd need a system 12.5 times bigger, i.e., roughly 531 square metres, or about 2.6 times the size of the relevant solar array. This is now going to be a very large satellite, dwarfing the ISS in area, all for the equivalent of three standard server racks on Earth.

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

The gist of it is that about 99% of cooling on earth works by cold air molecules (or water) bumping into hot ones, and transferring heat. There's no air in space, so you need a radiator 99x larger than you would down here. That adds up real fast.
by its_magic | 2026-02-03 04:39:41+00:00
Just to be clear, I did not write these patches, but have collected many like this via scouring the net. I think I did make the ATK one though.

If you'd like to be an alpha/beta/release tester of this system, hit me up via email please. I'll start with an initial closed alpha release here in a month or so, if there's interest.

Now for the donation drive: I have plenty of time and a stable situation to work on this system, but the one drawback is I have little funds--and unfortunately my workstation is getting pretty long in the tooth. (AMD FX. I'm getting Left Behind here.) The main thing holding me back is compile speed, especially doing work on Chromium and WebKit.

So I'm hoping to bump into an "angel investor" who either has some old Xeon (Broadwell or newer?) hardware laying around they would donate, something with lots of cores and memory, or who can make a cash donation for me to buy the gear I'm looking at on Ebay. $400-500 is enough for a nice 5x upgrade. (Amazing how cheap this stuff is.) A better video card would be nice too, if you're feeling generous. Mine is a GTX570. I'd love to have a GTX7xx or newer, or equivalent AMD. That's more of a want than a need however.

If anyone out there is in a position where they can help this project in some way, email me please! Thank you.
by FeistySkink | 2026-02-03 04:39:52+00:00
I like the idea. Right now it's only possible to require approval for actions for new contributors. But once they get a PR in, they're free to spam new PRs that can clog resource-expensive pipelines. Would be nice to have something like 5+ PRs merged and be a contributor for 1 month before a PR is auto created and actions are allowed to run.
by mlindner | 2026-02-03 04:39:57+00:00
Trying to make a point out of whether he did or didn't found Tesla kind if defeats the rest of your post. He paid over 90% of the first funding round and brought in key people like JB Straubel. When the company was basically an incorporation paper and no assets. Under most companies people would have argued for founder/co-founder status at that point. So yes he didn't "found" Tesla but for all intents and purposes he basically did.
by tom_m | 2026-02-03 04:40:52+00:00
I don't think so. I think reviewing (and learning) will be. I actually think that the motivation to become better will vanish. AI will produce applications as good as we have today, but will be incapable of delivering better because AI lacks the motivation.

In other words, the "cleverness" of AI will eventually be pinned. Therefore only a certain skill level will be required to debug the code. Debug and review. Which means innovation in the industry will slow to a crawl.

AI will never be able to get better either (once it plateaus) because nothing more clever will exist to train from.

Though it's a bit worse than that. AI is trained from lots of information and that means averages/medians. It can't discern good from bad. It doesn't understand what clever is. So it not only will plateau, but it will ultimately rest at a level that is below the best. It will be average and average right now is pretty bad.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-03 04:41:27+00:00
> You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

Lol, we used to do this with my (extremely nerdy) friends group in college when we 'inducted' new members! I never knew that it was from something, I just thought it was tradition. We had some great entries -- a circle of nines with no beginning and ending, a very good drawing of a wolf, many protest entries, somebody accidentally wrote 1^1^1^1^1^... before realizing their folly, etc. Great times.
by preston-kwei | 2026-02-03 04:43:13+00:00
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I really like that quote -- hopefully I start another company and think about distribution straight off the bat. Can I ask what the product was? Even just a general idea. And, how did you find the emails.

I've found myself procrastinating a lot when it comes to trying to acquire users. It's a lot more fun to build features than it is to do cold outreach. Yes, you found the site :).

1) Understandable, let me reply to the other 3 points to see if pricing makes sense after that.

2) We’re not trying to replace Calendly. Calendly is great for link-based 1:1 scheduling, but many execs still operate primarily over email and actively avoid sending links. Persona is an email delegation layer that handles inbound scheduling end-to-end: proactive follow-ups, coordinating across long threads, and dynamically rescheduling when higher-priority contacts come in. That distinction should definitely be clearer on the landing page.

3) Fair point that you’re not the audience. We’re focused on founders and execs who spend a meaningful amount of time coordinating meetings over email. For them, the pain isn’t finding a time once, it’s the constant back-and-forth, follow-ups, and reshuffling priorities. Not everyone can afford a human EA, and link-based scheduling tools can’t handle that level of personalization (talking to an investor is very different than a friend). Research we’ve seen shows execs still spend 6+ hours per week on scheduling.

4) That’s a good point, and we’re thinking along similar lines. Since Persona operates directly over email, there’s a natural distribution loop there, similar to Calendly links, and we plan to lean into that more deliberately. Would you be bothered if you were on our 23/mo plan and still had a banner there? Also, do you think there should be a free tier beyond the 14 day trial?

Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
by cyberax | 2026-02-03 04:43:32+00:00
> How do we determine that a specific instance of a filesystem mount is "remote", or even requires a "network"?

Like systemd authors do! Hard-code the list of them in the kernel, including support for fuse and sshfs. Everything else is pure blasphemy and should be avoided.

Me? I'd have an explicit setting in the mount unit file, with defaults inferred from the device type. I would also make sure to not just randomly add landmines, like systemd-update-done.service. It has an unusual dependency requirements, it runs before the network filesystems but after the local filesystems.

I bet you didn't know about it? It's a service that runs _once_ after a system update. So the effect is that your system _sometimes_ fails to boot.

> systemd has .mount units which are way more configurable than /etc/fstab lines

It's literally the inverse. As in, /etc/fstab has _more_ options than native mount units. No, I'm not joking.

Look at this man page: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... The options with "x-systemd." prefix are available for fstab.

Look for the string: "Note that this option can only be used in /etc/fstab, and will be ignored when part of the Options= setting in a unit file."
by dminik | 2026-02-03 04:44:11+00:00
Objecting to murder is still politics, no? In fact, US republicans and democrats can't seem to agree who is fine to murder.

Republicans say that abortions are murder, but often also that prisoner executions are fine. Democrats tend to be in favor of abortions, but not of the death penalty.

I'm not making a moral judgement here, but I do want to ask. Is it just politics you don't agree with that you don't want Andrew to express?