MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hebejebelus | 2026-02-04 20:11:59+00:00
Clever solution. I think ops (like this) and observability will be pretty hot markets for a while soon. The code is quite cheap now, but actually running it and keeping it running still requires some amount of background. I've had a number of acquaintances ask me how they can get their vibe coded app available for others to use.

I really like this idea. I do a lot of kubernetes ops with workloads I'm unfamiliar with (and not directly responsible for) and often give claude read access in order to help me debug things, including with things like a grafana skill in order to access the same monitoring tools humans have. It's saved me dozens of hours in the last months - and my job is significantly less frustrating now.

Your method of creating ansible playbooks makes _tons_ of sense for this kind of work. I typically create documentation (with claude) for things after I've worked through them (with claude) but playbooks is a very, very clever move.

I would say something similar but as an auditable, controllable kubernetes operator would be pretty welcome.
by tgbugs | 2026-02-04 20:12:57+00:00
I wonder if there are existing data sources that could be used to implement an optimal pot hole patching priority lists at scale.

Identify pot hole locations. Combine with traffic metrics for those locations. Then use a combination of some pot hole nuisance metric (size, depth, location in lane, number of cars that could hit it per unit time based on traffic metrics), a cost to repair for a given repair type metric (should include traffic disruption cost estimates), then have an estimate for future degradation if it is not repaired and the cost of that applied at a few time points .... I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of various versions of the algorithm, but I wonder whether there are open data sources ....

A quick search suggests that most approaches are municipality based crowd sourcing efforts. A stream from the radars from various vehicles could provide something that was up-to-date enough to avoid false positives that had already been fixed .... Things like streetview and various aerial photography datasets probably update too slowly ... though I know of some potholes that have existed through multiple recaptures.

0. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10636488
1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2023.103335

I guess the days of citizens grabbing their shovels and going to fix the roads are becoming a thing of the past. Which is a shame because the total cost of asphalt needed to fix most potholes is less than the cost of a single tire repair.
by lukev | 2026-02-04 20:12:59+00:00
Chomsky's claim is that linguistics is actually a branch of cognitive science, that language is, by definition, "what the brain does" and that "meaning" in language is grounded in the brain, by what the speaker as a biological entity intends.

But this forces one into the position that whatever a LLM is doing is not real language, just an imitation of language.

If you take the fact that LLMs are emitting "real language" at face value, then you need to adopt a more structuralist view of language, in which "meaning" is part of the system of language itself and does not need to be grounded biologically.

I don't think holding a structuralist view of language precludes believing that humans have a biological facility for language, or even that language is shaped and ultimately a result of that biological facility. Its more an argument over what language IS -- a symbolic system, or an extension of the human brain.
by kakacik | 2026-02-04 20:13:02+00:00
> When I was an infant, I went to school one day

You most probably didn't attend school before you were 1 year old (infant definition), and if yes you certainly didn't remember that, and if so, as per public information she didn't abolish free milk under 7 years of age (or higher if there was medical reason). Heck she privately opposed that but was forced to do so by treasury (again public info).

Its a detail but sometimes shows that when we want to bash somebody we hate, every stick is good regardless of facts. Not defending her, not British national in any sense just an observer.
by advisedwang | 2026-02-04 20:14:08+00:00
> where is the line between marketing to them and a phishing attack?

The courts have an answer for this one: intent. How do courts know if your intent meets the definition of fraud or theft or whatever crime is relevant? They throw a bunch of evidence in front of a jury and ask them.

From the point of view of a marketer, that means you need be well behaved enough that it is crystal clear to any prosecutor that you are not trying to scam someone, or you risk prosecution and possible conviction. (Of course, many people choose to take that risk).

From the point of view of a victim, it's somewhat reassuring to know that it's a crime to get ripped off, but in practice law enforcement catches few criminals and even if they do restitution isn't guaranteed and can take a long time. You need actual security in your tools, not to rely on the law.
by epsters | 2026-02-04 20:14:29+00:00
Iranian official figures[1] put the final death toll at ~3111 for the entire duration of the protests (about a month). They have supposedly published names and identification numbers for about ~2900. So that gives a baseline at least.

Figures thrown around like 12k/20k/30k in 2 days - frankly beggar belief. Compare it to the recent (and ongoing) massacre of Gaza. which at its peak we were talking 1000-2000 deaths per day. The Israelis were dropping 2000-pound bombs and shelling non-stop until the entire strip into rubble. Reaching similar numbers against armed protestors without resorting to heavy weapons doesn't seem plausible. On top of it, 100s of thousands of injured (claimed along with the deaths). Again in 2 days. Even in a country of 90 million, can you imagine the utter pandemonium in every hospital. Mass graves. The blood and bodies at the squares. It would be visible from space. It would impossible to conceal. You have to go to Babi Yar in WW2 to get similar figures.

Beyond that its hard for me to tell. I dont trust any of this, given the interests and parties involved and the sources pushing these narratives . The legacy media is in full-blown propaganda offensive. The accounts and claims seem to come from a constellation of anti-regime NGOs, activists, Israeli lobbyists, neocons and intelligence agencies. Statements and actions of western and Israeli leaders make it abundantly clear this is an armed regime-change operation backed by numerous US, Israeli and western-backed proxy groups. US carrier strike groups have finally arrived in Gulf of Oman and suddenly the news stories pick up again. A month ago the same CSG was off the coast of Venezuela while the nobel prize was being awarded to an opponent of the Venezuelan government. Now that same nobel-laureate is meeting up with Reza Pahlavi and opponents of the Iranian government while Trump is sabre-rattling again. It all feels like deja-vu all over again. Netanyahu and the Israelis really want their Iran war and they need the Americans to carry it home for them.

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/02/01/763331/Iran-officia...
by derektank | 2026-02-04 20:14:39+00:00
Wikipedia is, of course very useful, but what it’s not good at is surfacing information I am unfamiliar with. Part of this problem is that Wikipedia editors are more similar to me, and more interested in similar things to me, than the average person writing text that appears online. Part of the problem is that the design of Wikipedia does not make it easy to stumble upon unexpected information; most links are to adjacent topics given they have to be relevant to the current article. But regardless, I’m much more likely to come across a novel concept when chatting with Claude, compared to browsing Wikipedia.
by cmiles8 | 2026-02-04 20:14:53+00:00
“Killing” is a bit strong, but is there a world where folks just vibe code solutions that they would have bought previously? Absolutely and and I think that world is here now.

I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher.

(Insert rant from dev teams about the code sucks, who will maintain it, etc). Yes all valid points, but things are changing regardless of if folks like it or not.
by maxglute | 2026-02-04 20:15:09+00:00
>Reserve currency issuer must run

This is PRC's fundamental disagreement. US reserve currency morphed into high liquid, high speculative instrument to fund unsustainable debt, hollowed out domestic industry (triffin)... but this is not by design. It's the result of emergency adaptations moving off gold, then people post rationalize the trinity musts (open capital, floating rates, independent central bank) is what makes reserve when it's unintended structural outcome from failed gold peg.

Now we see hints of end stage USD reserve behavior, debt snow balls and reserve controller will pull the our dollar, your problem card. This US doing current conniptions trying to either reduce USD strength or inflate away debt... costly instability. People forget, liquidity / storage only matters to sovereign buyers who needs reserve for utility... everyone else (now plurality) are private buyers who buy for returns. If we enter end of dollar cycle and USD reserve cost them money, then they go elsewhere

Elsewhere is what PRC wants to offer, HIGHLY CONTROLLED, BUT STABLE reserve pegged to PRC industrial chains, i.e. real economy instead of speculative financialization. This what recent yuan reserve talk is from (note it was old Xi speech republished in Qiushi), so the propose model isn't even in response to current USD conniptions but prediction on end life of US behavior when USD reserve goes from exorbitant privilege to just exorbitant.

It's precisely because logical outcome of current reserve "musts", i.e. triffin charity/global good that makes it ultimately a stupid arrangement where the system breaks when US/owner can't afford to maintain or develops bad habits (deficit spending). Hence, what PRC plans to offer in parallel: stable regulated reserves for "real economy" financial utility. Stable Yuan "bank" reserve can coexist with volatile USD "casino" reserve. Now of course this all heterodox theory, but we are seeing theory of USD reserve limits peaking it's head, and PRC not retarded enough to pickup triffin baton. IMO PRC fine with US dealing with triffin headache and IMO betting US will fuck global creditors when shit hits fan, i.e. they waiting for USD reserve to implode due to inherent contradictions, to show world precisely why yuan reserve not modelled to repeat same mistake.
by humannature1 | 2026-02-04 20:15:29+00:00
I wish this was true. Yet, I think we all have some skin in the game to why this article rings false.

When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.

For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.

We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.

I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-04 20:15:49+00:00
I think it's a combination of things... Gen-X was the start of the real decline in marriage rates, which tends to really affect people later in life in terms of fulfillment (related to having children), so now that we're well into middle-age, it's starting to show.

This combined with lower upward mobility in terms of average income, and higher debt to income ratios... combined with rapidly increased prices of essential goods, especially relative to income it's gotten hard.

I'm 51 now... in the past couple years, I've had to come to grips with some health issues I never considered (deteriorating vision) combined with a few periods of prolonged unemployment (only a bit of contract/project work)... with the medical bills what they are, I'm maxed out, I took a 40% pay cut for my current job, and literally every job I get contacted from recruiters for is largely well below my income the past few years, even below my current contract job.

I don't really have memory issues and have managed to stay current with the technology in my field... but it's been a consistent stress for several years now. Depression and anger tend to go hand in hand with this. I keep getting up and working though.
by mrdependable | 2026-02-04 20:15:51+00:00
I am a fairly cynical person. Anthropic could have made this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it in that context. They are saying this to try to get people angry about ads to drop OpenAI and move to Anthropic. For them, not having ads supports their current objective.

When you accept the amount of investments that these companies have, you don't get to guide your company based on principles. Can you imagine someone in a boardroom saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a ton of money, but it's wrong!" Don't forget, OpenAI had a lot of public goodwill in the beginning as well. Whatever principles Dario Amodei has as an individual, I'm sure he can show us with his personal fortune.

Parsing it is all about intention. If someone drops coffee on your computer, should you be angry? It depends on if they did it on purpose, or it was an accident. When a company posts a statement that ads are incongruous to their mission, what is their intention behind the message?
by exceptione | 2026-02-04 20:15:52+00:00
> which "just doesn't work"

Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully:

step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.

Done.
by mempko | 2026-02-04 20:16:19+00:00
You're right that $566B alone isn't a black swan. That FINRA figure only captures retail and small institutional margin at broker-dealers. It excludes prime brokerage (hedge funds), securities-based lending, and repo markets. Conservative estimates put total leveraged exposure at $10-15 trillion. The $566B is maybe 5% of the iceberg.

I see visible margin debt as both a canary and a proxy. It's a canary because retail cracks first (less sophisticated risk management, stricter regulatory margin). It's a proxy because when visible leverage contracts, it usually means hidden leverage is contracting too. They're exposed to the same assets. When FINRA margin debt starts falling, it's not just a warning, it's confirmation that system-wide deleveraging is already underway.

That's my 2c. Does that make sense?
by metalrain | 2026-02-04 20:16:45+00:00
I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service.

When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them.

AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S.

Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc.

Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.
by rick_dalton | 2026-02-04 20:16:49+00:00
The intention behind lockdown mode is protection for a select few groups of people such as journalists, that are at risk of having software like Pegasus used against them. It’s to reduce the attack surface. The average user wouldn’t want most of it as a default setting, for example: almost no message attachments allowed, no FaceTime calls from people you haven’t called and safari is kneecapped. Making this a default setting for most people is unrealistic and also probably won’t help their cybersecurity as they wouldn’t be targeted anyway.
by toast0 | 2026-02-04 20:17:28+00:00
> anyone who is underage -- do we let 10 year-olds fly alone? how do you assess age without ID?

Most children don't carry ID. And most ID for children doesn't even have a photograph. For travel that doesn't require a passport, you just have to deal with asking the child or their travel companions.

> baggage claim: if there is no link between ticket and person, what's to stop me from claiming anyone's luggage as my own?

I can't recall being challenged as to my identity for any luggage I've picked up from the carousel. This was as true in 1997, when it was the focus of a major motion picture [1], as it is today. Regardless, having possession of the matching luggage receipt for a tag should really be sufficient to pick up a bag.

> I admit my personal bias is that "taking a plane = passport" even when traveling domestically (I'm not a US citizen)

That's a reasonable personal bias, but presuming you're subject to mandatory alien registration and you're eighteen or older, you have a legal requirement to register and carry proof of registration. Citizens are not generally required to be registered with the federal government, or to carry proof of registration or other identity documents; although enough things require a social security number that the vast majority of citizens are registered and enumerated by SSA, and enumeration at birth is the default, but a very small number of citizens manage to be born without a birth certificate being issued.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Heads_in_a_Duffel_Bag
by dmix | 2026-02-04 20:17:29+00:00
The part about financials

> The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election
and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2013, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors.
by ge96 | 2026-02-04 20:17:30+00:00
Philosophical tangent

I also produce hardware projects and share them open source but unfortunately at a certain level of complexity people don't reproduce them. It's kind of sad but also I'm glad to be able to give back as I've had people help me learn to code in the past, sit down with me through video and yeah. Or people sharing knowledge in question answer forums.

There is the inspiration aspect too I've had some of my repos get forked/modded so that's something but yeah ultimately gotta do it for yourself. Getting published in tech websites is cool though, like I had a project get picked up by a Japanese website that was neat.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-04 20:17:41+00:00
This is exactly why some legal systems are intentionally not codified in language, i.e. the Qadi system. There are no laws, there are only mutually agreed upon judges who adjudicate between parties who bring a complaint. Every case is different and there are no set of rules that can cover every edge case. Programmers of all people should know this.
by Beijinger | 2026-02-04 20:18:21+00:00
I want one :-(

Other interesting Story about tractors:

"In the heartland of American agriculture, a quiet revolution is underway. Farmers, long frustrated by the high costs and restrictive repair policies of leading tractor manufacturers like John Deere, are increasingly turning to simpler, more affordable alternatives from an unlikely source: Belarus. These rugged, no-frills machines from Minsk Tractor Works (MTZ) are gaining traction not just for their price tag, but for their deliberate avoidance of the complex electronics and subscription models that have become the bane of modern farming."
by softfalcon | 2026-02-04 20:18:28+00:00
> My method was simply to think. To think hard and long... This method never failed me. I always felt that deep prolonged thinking was my superpower. I might not be as fast or naturally gifted as the top 1%, but given enough time, I was confident I could solve anything.

This mindset is a healthy and good one. It is built on training yourself, learning, and practicing a discipline of problem solving without giving up.

Persistence is something we build, not something we have. It must be maintained. Persistence is how most good in the world has been created.

Genius is worthless without the will to see things through.
by Dig1t | 2026-02-04 20:18:31+00:00
>I think the representatives pushing for this legislation is evidence

Why is that considered evidence? There are many cases of elected representatives doing things that do not align with the wishes of their constituents. There are also many cases of regulators regulating things that their constituents don't care about at all, but help a politician's career by building their reputation as one of "getting things done".

Actual evidence would be polling, citizen organizations, donations etc. None of which seem to exist for this issue.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2026-02-04 20:18:50+00:00
> I don't think we yet have a good understanding of how many deaths he will have caused as a result of DOGE so abruptly cutting off assistance to so many vulnerable people around the world

Nor how many deaths will be caused by his support for far right parties across Europe, when they start ethnic cleansings.
by Legend2440 | 2026-02-04 20:19:00+00:00
Several issues with this:

1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.

2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.

3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.

We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.
by raffael_de | 2026-02-04 20:19:04+00:00
But didn't all those people you list fail at the end of the day?

Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.

Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.

Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.

Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.

None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.

If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.