MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarecrowbob | 2026-02-05 18:08:18+00:00
As somebody who'd rather fight the fascists now, I don't think it's super likely.

Enjoy some wild speculation, if that's your jam:

My bet is that DJT will kick off from a stroke in the next 2 years, the GOP will get beat, and things will "go back to normal". But the Dems will elect some jerk like Newsome and not do the important work of imposing consequences, so this fascist power will return after two presidential terms of delicious brunch (which will fail to make progress on the environment, mass incarceration, immigration, student loan debt, housing, the economy, or anything, really).

AI and small drones will be -even- better at that point, along with an ever tighter network of flock cameras.

The propaganda will be even more solid and the aging/retired gen-xers whose grand kids won't talk to them will largely be interacting with AI-based pals who are making the same kind of pronouncements that Nome and Vance are currently making but in the voice of their first girlfriend from 1987.

Personally, I'd rather see some very extreme change now instead of fighting that fight in 15 years (or, rather, supporting the 30 year olds fighting, because I will be pretty old then).

It's not a very realistic picture of the future though; it could be the case that all this comes to a head soon. It could be the case that soon folks have some real come-to-jeebus moment about Epstein-types and capitalism (hey, it's not Capitalism, it's just croney internationalist capitalism that is the problem bro, we can just implement this anarcho-Reaganist platform, these aren't limitations on capitalists, just "normal Christian Democrat" reforms).

It might be the case that the real limits of 3-5K soldiers operating against an armed and organized city of 100k midwesterners makes it obvious what the outcomes will be if they don't stop pushing their hands.

For instance, when they start busting, say, signal chat groups of suburban soccer moms that have taken up sniping tires and cutting the power to facilities, folks might no longer have the stomach for the kinds of applications of power necessary to prevent the actions of "the people" who have their hands on all the little levers.

It could be the case that the global ecosystem really is as bad as it appears and giant storms break all the just-in-time delivery systems in the so-called advanced but fault-intolerant countries about the same time Ebola Plus (tm) hits, and we all go back to living in the beautiful caves in the pinion forests of my back yard (that's my preferred outcome even though it'll probably kill me).

Hell monkeys could fly out of my butt (that would probably kill me too, but I die in most scenarios I can imagine).

To answer your question, all things equal if you're gonna flee, flee. I'm not, but that's because I don't think there is anywhere to go.
by jfengel | 2026-02-05 18:08:25+00:00
Notably, they're allowing it because they think it's based on political bias. If it had been on the basis of racial bias, they'd have forbidden it.

Texas and California now both have nakedly and explicitly partisan gerrymandering. The court has rejected attempts to use Due Process or Equal Protection or other clauses based on the idea that you're losing a chance at a voice in Congress. There's no law preventing that -- except for a narrow set of protected categories.

I'd like to see somebody run for Congress on a bill to make that explicit. I don't know the best way to phrase it -- perhaps just making political party a protected class?
by majormajor | 2026-02-05 18:08:31+00:00
In addition to those sorts of non-first-hardware-purchase costs, the person writing the check needs to think long and hard about how bad an outage would be, and how much money it makes sense to budget simply to "avoiding outages." And the more important it is not to have any downtime, the more it's gonna cost to build up some sort of substitute for cross-datacenter cloud functionality. (You are also likely not going to be as good at either managing and configuring those networks, or hiring people to do so, as AWS, either.)
by swed420 | 2026-02-05 18:08:55+00:00
> this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.

Seems like it's to manufacture consent for a narrow overton window of capital interests, which is nothing new to this administration in particular. It keeps up the illusion of democracy by looking like changes are happening all the time as a result of voting, but really it's a race to the bottom except for the uber wealthy.

Since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.

We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.

The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki...

Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
by jaredklewis | 2026-02-05 18:09:08+00:00
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.

But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.

Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.

Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision almost always the bottleneck. Money usually just results in more “features” being shoved in.
by cheema33 | 2026-02-05 18:09:21+00:00
> Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it.

Same here. But, I assume you have managed PostgreSQL in the past. I have. There are a large number of people software devs who have not. For them, it is not a low complexity task. And I can understand that.

I am a software dev for our small org and I run the servers and services we need. I use ansible and terraform to automate as much as I can. And recently I have added LLMs to the mix. If something goes wrong, I ask Claude to use the ansible and terraform skills that I created for it, to find out what is going on. It is surprisingly good at this. Similarly I use LLMs to create new services or change configuration on existing ones. I review the changes before they are applied, but this process greatly simplifies service management.
by em-bee | 2026-02-05 18:09:47+00:00
grep with equivalent performance? i highly doubt that. my mailbox has 2.6M emails: running grep through millions of files if you use maildir or a similar format takes forever. likewise running grep on a 7.6GB large mbox file takes more than a minute.

on the other hand in supmua (which inspired notmuch) the same search takes seconds.
by dirkc | 2026-02-05 18:09:50+00:00
I reckon a lot of re-writes tend to take "them 5x as long as they had hoped" and "isn't even any easier than the old code" exactly because writing the code wasn't the problem in the first place.

It's business logic, edge cases and other small necessary details that accumulated over time which make the code 'messy'. Once you've integrated all those in the new system, it likely looks equally messy. And discovering and implementing all those extra requirements is probably what took you the longest.

Not to say this applies to all re-writes or that AI tools can't help the process
by mattddowney | 2026-02-05 18:10:29+00:00
From Alphabet 2025 Q4 Earnings call:
"As we scale, we’re getting dramatically more efficient. We were able to lower Gemini serving unit costs by 78% over 2025 through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements."
https://abc.xyz/investor/events/event-details/2026/2025-Q4-E...
by simonw | 2026-02-05 18:10:37+00:00
Here's a kākāpō riding a bicycle instead: https://gist.github.com/simonw/19574e1c6c61fc2456ee413a24528...

I don't think it quite captures their majesty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%81k%C4%81p%C5%8D
by lstodd | 2026-02-05 18:10:47+00:00
There are power meters like KWS-303L that will tell you how much manufacturers lie with their numbers.

For example my ancient tplink TL-WR842N router eats 15W standby or no, while my main box, fans, backlight, gpu, hdds and stuff -- about 80W idle.

Looking at Synology site the only power I see there is the psu rating, which is 90W for DS425. So you can expect real power consumption of about 30-40W. Which is typical for just about any NUC or a budget ATX motherboard with a low-tier AMD-something + a bunch of HDDs.
by uyzstvqs | 2026-02-05 18:11:16+00:00
It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?

As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.
by alexhans | 2026-02-05 18:11:37+00:00
> Has anyone tried this yet? If not, why not?

Yes (in a minimalistic TDD like way?). [1]

I agree that the company as code can be tested without too much risk if you think about as "model your world drawing a circle around what you own".

You can be your own auditor constantly so that you pre-answer questions you would ask in an audit.

I would advise against the always tempting "we are the everything platform" because that rafely scales and makes you a bottleneck. You won't be able to keep up. It's easier to model the tribal knowledge of your own world knowing where the frontiers are and that can even be a forcing function to simplify and reduce externalities.

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/automate-audit...

Edit: make sure whoever works on it is pain point driven and solves things for themselves and then you will build just enough. A world that is more programmatic and can tolerate fuzzy translations (MCPs/LLMs) and where you can test (evals) the level of quality you need can make this cost effective.
by cootsnuck | 2026-02-05 18:11:57+00:00
I have not see any reporting or evidence at all that Anthropic or OpenAI is able to make money on inference yet.

> Turns out there was a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of inference optimization that hadn't been plucked yet.

That does not mean the frontier labs are pricing their APIs to cover their costs yet.

It can both be true that it has gotten cheaper for them to provide inference and that they still are subsidizing inference costs.

In fact, I'd argue that's way more likely given that has been precisely the goto strategy for highly-competitive startups for awhile now. Price low to pump adoption and dominate the market, worry about raising prices for financial sustainability later, burn through investor money until then.

What no one outside of these frontier labs knows right now is how big the gap is between current pricing and eventual pricing.
Show HN: Why it's hard to know which deployment caused a production incident
by veinar_gh | 2026-02-05 18:12:05+00:00
We’re a team of two building Valiant after too many incidents where “something changed” but nobody could tell what actually caused production issues.

Valiant correlates intent (Git commits, CI/CD signals) with actual execution (Kubernetes rollouts) and links them to Prometheus metrics, so you can see the real impact of each change - not just what was deployed.

It’s open-source, still under active development, and very much a work in progress. Feedback, ideas, or contributors are welcome.

No website yet — just the GitHub repo ;)
by Attrecomet | 2026-02-05 18:12:28+00:00
This could not be a more picture perfect example of a Wirth-suboptimal engeneering decision as per the article if it were designed for that. The amount of slowdown to run to the emails, wait for reception, open, copy, paste instead of using the sensible flow of password manager integration is huge. But people will use wasteful processes if they just don't need to change them, so what are you gonna do?
by granzymes | 2026-02-05 18:12:39+00:00
I think Anthropic rushed out the release before 10am this morning to avoid having to put in comparisons to GPT-5.3-codex!

The new Opus 4.6 scores 65.4 on Terminal-Bench 2.0, up from 64.7 from GPT-5.2-codex.

GPT-5.3-codex scores 77.3.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-05 18:12:40+00:00
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).

What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
by defrim | 2026-02-05 18:12:59+00:00
As a devout supporter of Ukraine, I'm not sure it's fair to denounce the FOSS version of the app just because it was built by developers that reside in Russia. We all know that the company outwardly stating "we are against the invasion of Ukraine" wouldn't end well for them, and as long as you're not paying for it, I don't see a huge difference using this vs. your average American software (in which the developers also reside in a country with questionable government leadership). Enlighten me if I'm wrong though
by saghm | 2026-02-05 18:13:12+00:00
The problem I have with that logic is that it still doesn't really give any sensible reason for why the stock should have any economic value at all. If the point is that the company will pay for it at some point, it makes more sense for it to be a loan rather than a unit of stock. I stand by my claim that selling a non-physical item that does nothing other than hopefully get bought again later for more than you sold it for is indistinguishable from a scam.
by Perz1val | 2026-02-05 18:13:12+00:00
Afaik, (extremely simplifying) refineries split crude oil into fractions; we burn lighter hydrocarbons as fuel, make plastics out of the middle/heavy parts and what's left in the pot are some heavy, dirty remains that we figured make good roads instead of being thrown out.

We've already hit the point that electric cars are cheaper to operate, yet photovoltaic prices keep falling. Even equipment like electric excavators is now a thing. Batteries keep improving. It'll compound to smaller and smaller fuel, thus oil needs, so there will be less refining, thus less asphalt.

The assumption wasn't that that there will be no oil extraction, it was that there might be a future without tons of almost free road material. But I have zero expertise in oil macroeconomics, the question might've been stupid, I don't know that, haha
by msowin1 | 2026-02-05 18:13:24+00:00
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Instinct is building AI-forward SaaS products that serve the veterinary world. We are growing our talented Engineering team and looking for people who thrive with autonomy and want to solve hard problems.

Stack: Elixir, React, AWS, GraphQL

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by epsilonic | 2026-02-05 18:13:24+00:00
We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
by nkrisc | 2026-02-05 18:14:12+00:00
I too got tired of paying so much for TV so I canceled and just stopped watching it.

I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.

People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?

NFL games aren’t water or food.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-05 18:14:22+00:00
A ton of GPU kernels are hugely inefficient. Not saying the numbers are realistic, but look at the 100s of times of gain in the Anthropic performance takehome exam that floated around on here.

And if you've worked with pytorch models a lot, having custom fused kernels can be huge. For instance, look at the kind of gains to be had when FlashAttention came out.

This isn't just quantization, it's actually just better optimization.

Even when it comes to quantization, Blackwell has far better quantization primitives and new floating point types that support row or layer-wise scaling that can quantize with far less quality reduction.

There is also a ton of work in the past year on sub-quadratic attention for new models that gets rid of a huge bottleneck, but like quantization can be a tradeoff, and a lot of progress has been made there on moving the Pareto frontier as well.

It's almost like when you're spending hundreds of billions on capex for GPUs, you can afford to hire engineers to make them perform better without just nerfing the models with more quantization.
by gnerd00 | 2026-02-05 18:14:47+00:00
some people discuss these dynamics as sheep versus goats. Social stability was more precious due to scarcity, while goat behavior included 40 armed men killing their rivals with swords (and better if the rivals do not have their own swords). Many, many parallels exist in mammals that live in groups. You might be surprised at the details of how some mammals actually behave in real life!
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-05 18:14:53+00:00
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).

He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).

Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).

People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.

I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-05 18:15:02+00:00
This benchmark inspired me to have codex/claude build a DnD battlemap tool with svg's.

They got surprisingly far, but i did need to iterate a few times to have it build tools that would check for things like; dont put walls on roads or water.

What I think might be the next obstacle is self-knowledge. The new agents seem to have picked up ever more vocabulary about their context and compaction, etc.

As a next benchmark you could try having 1 agent and tell it to use a coding agent (via tmux) to build you a pelican.
by Arathorn | 2026-02-05 18:15:15+00:00
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).

That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.

Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
by typpo | 2026-02-05 18:15:17+00:00
Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes.

My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree.

Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/
by krapp | 2026-02-05 18:15:18+00:00
I've seen this exact argument made numerous times in defense of some heinous people, or generally against "cancel culture" within tech, in favor of what they consider the political neutrality of "pure meritocracy."

If Jeffrey Epstein were a startup founder or if he had written a really important compiler or something that linked him to tech more directly, more people here would be defending him.
Show HN: VoxPaste – Fast voice-to-text CLI for dictating to Claude/Cursor
by brockmeier | 2026-02-05 18:15:37+00:00
Built this because typing long prompts to Claude Code got tedious. VoxPaste records audio and transcribes via your choice of provider—Mistral, Groq, OpenAI, or Deepgram—then copies directly to clipboard.

Unlike single-provider tools, you can pick the fastest option for your needs. Mistral and Groq deliver fastest. Bind it to a hotkey and invoke from anywhere.

Audio goes directly to your chosen provider.

https://github.com/felixbrock/voxpaste
by ayhanfuat | 2026-02-05 18:16:03+00:00
> For Opus 4.6, the 1M context window is available for API and Claude Code pay-as-you-go users. Pro, Max, Teams, and Enterprise subscription users do not have access to Opus 4.6 1M context at launch.

I didn't see any notes but I guess this is also true for "max" effort level (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config#adjust-effort-l...)? I only see low, medium and high.