MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deathanatos | 2026-02-02 04:21:49+00:00
Science has absolutely engaged in the politics du jour, including in major world wars. See, for example, the Szilárd petition[1]. (If you need a post-WWII example, those same scientists continued petitioning after the war on the dangers of nukes, too.)

Further, political banners in software have absolute helped, and have changed political outcomes. As an example of that, SOPA, and later PIPA, were defeated by websites such as Wikipedia (which are software) putting banners aimed at informing the public of those bills.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition
by lazide | 2026-02-02 04:21:58+00:00
As long as no one expects updates and ongoing support beyond some pre-agreed time.

The issue is a mismatch of incentives - customers wanting things for free - even if they aren’t actually customers. Vs businesses need/want for ongoing revenue (ideally for free too!).

Both sides are never going to be perfectly happy, but there are reasonable compromises. There are also extractive abusive psychos, of course.
by hinkley | 2026-02-02 04:23:11+00:00
This reminds me of college, when some of my professors were still sorting out their curriculum and would give us homework assignments with bugs in it.

I complained many times that they were enabling my innate procrastination by proving over and over again that starting the homework early meant you would get screwed. Every time I'd wait until the people in the forum started sounding optimistic before even looking at the problem statement.

I still think I'd like to have a web of trust system where I let my friends try out software updates first before I do, and my relatives let me try them out before they do.
by CzaxTanmay | 2026-02-02 04:24:07+00:00
People have been comparing it to Strudel, so I wanted to clearly explain the difference.

ÆTHRA vs Strudel (in short):

ÆTHRA is output-oriented: you write a script → run it → get a WAV file.

Strudel is performance-oriented: it’s browser-based live coding focused on real-time pattern manipulation.

Key differences:

Export

ÆTHRA has built-in WAV export (one click).

Strudel doesn’t natively export audio files; users usually record output manually.

Execution model

ÆTHRA renders audio offline (deterministic, no glitches).

Strudel runs in real time via the Web Audio API.

Use cases

ÆTHRA: game music, background scores, generative assets, scripting music like code.

Strudel: live coding, experimentation, performance.

Environment

ÆTHRA runs locally (currently Windows).

Strudel runs entirely in the browser.

Both tools are free, and they’re not trying to solve the same problem.
ÆTHRA is meant to feel closer to a music compiler, while Strudel feels closer to a live instrument.

ÆTHRA is early (v0.8), but it already supports tempo, ADSR, chords, scales, loops, echo/reverb, live preview, and WAV export. I will update AETHRA soon and make it very powerful to reach v1.0
by shiroiuma | 2026-02-02 04:24:35+00:00
>Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales?

Veblen goods aren't like this. If they were, everything would be priced at infinity. Veblen goods have to take into account the amount of spending money their target customers have, and how much they're willing to spend. Apple products are priced this way. They're not targeted just at people who can afford Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows, they're targeted at regular people who are willing to spend too much money on a phone when they can get an equivalent Android phone for half the price. Those people have limited money, but they're willing to overpay.

>You are claiming that if the price of the iPhone went down, apple would sell fewer phones?

Quite likely, yes. If they adopted razor-thin profit margins on iPhones, their phones would be seen as "cheap" and wouldn't have the cachet they have now. More people would start looking at alternatives, and start buying Samsung Galaxies and other flagship Android phones.
by wraptile | 2026-02-02 04:24:45+00:00
> Humans are not meant to

not meant to? by whom?

We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do?

There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only acceptable and reasonable expression of what humans are "meant to" do.

This makes me angry because fundamentally this is an attack on average person's intelligence and capabilities. We are not beasts that need to be hearded by some illuminated masters who deem what is and what isn't human nature.
by rvz | 2026-02-02 04:25:21+00:00
Look carefully at the 'why' in the person / influencer and you almost answered your own question.

> I don't know if the investments in AI are worth it but am I blind for not seeing any hope for AGI any time soon.

> People making random claims about AGI soon is really weakening my confidence in AI in general.

The "people" that are screaming the loudest and making claims about AGI are the ones that have already invested lots of money into hundreds of so-called AI companies and then create false promises about AGI timelines.

Deepmind was the one that took AGI seriously first which it actually meant something until it became meaningless, when every single AI company after OpenAI raised billions in funding rounds over it.

No one can agree as to what "AGI" really means, It varies depending who you ask. But if you look at the actions made by these companies invested in AI, you can figure out what the true definition converges to, with some hints [0].

But it is completely different to what you think it is, and what they say it is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668248
by weinzierl | 2026-02-02 04:25:36+00:00
These dongles used to be ubiquitous and they broke all the time.

As a young intern, I arrived early one morning to find the PCB layout software (PADS PowerPCB) on our "design PC" wasn’t working. (I use quotes because it was just the beefiest machine we had, naturally our boss’s PC, which he kindly shared)

Obviously the dongle. I tried unplugging and replugging it, with and without the printer daisy-chained. Nothing.

So I begrudgingly asked my colleague who’d just arrived. He looked at the dongle, looked at me, looked at the dongle again, and started laughing.

Turns out our Boss had stayed late the previous night processing customer complaints. One customer had sent back a "broken" dongle for the product we were selling. Boss tested it on his PC, found it worked fine, and mailed it back on his way home.

Except he didn’t send our dongle back. He had sent my PowerPCB dongle. More fun was had when the rest of the team and finally our boss arrived. Luckily he took it with good humor.
by nophunphil | 2026-02-02 04:27:00+00:00
I would have been interested in debating the content of your reply if your account had not been created 1 hour ago.

So what about protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems objectionable to you?

> it is fair to say that Notepad++’s freedom to protest would depend on who and what they are protesting.

What? In the US, UK, and Australia, the right to protest (i.e. of speech) does not depend on what’s being protested in the way you’re implying.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 04:27:09+00:00
> it's entirely illegal here

A mafia figure pointing a gun in a man's face and demanding he act a certain way or else does not negate that man's natural right to partake of any plant he pleases, or enjoy any of his other natural rights as a free human.

This plant is illegal everywhere, and has been for a hundred years. All mafia who are in control of any and all territories everywhere oppose the plant. If it were up to these people and their allies, they would eliminate it entirely from the earth, driving it to extinction and murdering, imprisoning, or enslaving every last one of its users.

Yet in spite of the great risks and dangers, and all of the suffering and hardship and persecution that comes along with it, people have kept and guarded this sacred herb for tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands. What does that tell you?
by Fogest | 2026-02-02 04:27:39+00:00
I think this is a good example you provide about the store clerk at the grocery store, and I think you can expand this even further. Sometimes when I go to a store and am checking out they will ask me to donate to some random charity. Whether or not I care about the cause they are asking for money for doesn't matter at all in that moment. It annoys me and I don't want it to be asked in that interactions as that's not what I'm there for and not what I care to be put on the spot to think about.

I view these kinds of weird virtue signaling political statements on things like software to be the same. They do absolutely nothing and are just visual noise for nothing. Actually, this is a good example of where it can go wrong as it likely made the software the target of Chinese state-sponsored actors. So not only does it serve no useful purpose, it also can make you a target and piss people off.
by mrbluecoat | 2026-02-02 04:27:43+00:00
Is this satire?

> All other 25 GbE adapter solutions I’ve found so far ... have a spinning fan. ... the biggest downside of the PX adapter is that it gets really hot, like not touchable hot. Sometimes, either the network connection silently disappeared or (sadly) my Mac crashed with a kernel panic in the network driver. ... Other than that, the PX seems to do the job
by Dracophoenix | 2026-02-02 04:27:45+00:00
> Despite its history, it’s still a valid example of an exception to the First Amendment under current law.

It's not. The current standard, set by Brandenburg v. Ohio, forbids speech which advocates imminent lawless action. It is a standard much broader than the Schenk case's threshold of clear and present danger.

> The problem is that most people who cite it are using it as an analogy for something else that isn’t.

Even the man who composed the the phrase did this. Schenk's "fire in a theater" aphorism was Oliver Wendell Holmes's attempt to persuasively discredit a group of Yiddish speaking anti-war pamphleteers in his non-binding legal commentary. The comparison is not a legal analysis nor is it itself a ruling on the merits of the case.
by xethos | 2026-02-02 04:28:29+00:00
This cuts both ways - ADP requires changing some settings on-device, and (in some cases I've heard) calling Apple to disable. So it is baked in, but it's hardly easy to enable and disable

GrapheneOS (which, FWIW, I do trust at least as much as ADP) has a web-installer IIRC, making it similarly easy to enable, but a little harder to disable for normal users. Moreover, it's not built-in to the Pixel. It's entirely third-party, and did not ship on mass-market hardware

Being an option on the default OS, with OEM support, can make all the difference sometimes
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-02 04:28:46+00:00
These were the states that supported some form of stare sponsored segregation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_...

And saying that the “Supreme Court didn’t always rule the way you like” is minimizing an entire race of people - including my still living parents having to grow up in schools that were underfunded but supposedly “separate but equal”, people getting hung if you looked at a White woman the wrong way and didn’t “know your place” or even marrying outside of your race was illegal until 1969. Not to mention colleges that ny parents weren’t allowed to go to, having to drink from “colored water fountains” - again the US Supreme Court said this was legal

So if you ignore half of the country that had segregation and the US Supreme Court that condoned it, everything is fine?
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-02 04:28:54+00:00
I agree the voters and party are a problem, but disagree that we shouldn’t do more. We need better checks and balances on an administration that willfully and casually violates constitutional rights all the time. Not to mention the constant corruption and grifting that enriches the Trump family. We should have a system that can protect against this even when the majority makes a bad voting decision.
by up-n-atom | 2026-02-02 04:29:08+00:00
Where did u get this notion from? you must not be old enough to know how subscription services play out. Ask your parents about their internet or mobile billings. Or the very least check Azures, AWS, Netflix historical pricing.

Heck we were spoiled by “memory is cheap” but here we are today wasting it at every expense and prices keep skyrocketing (ps they ain’t coming down). If you can’t see the shift to forceful subscriptions via technologies guised as “security” ie. secure boot and the monopolistic distribution (Apple, Google, Amazon) or the OEM, you’re running with blinders. Computings future as it’s heading will be closed ecosystems that are subscription serviced, mobile only. They’ll nickel and dime users for every nuanced freedom of expression they can.

Is it crazy to correlate the price of memory to our ability to localize LLM?
by sothatsit | 2026-02-02 04:29:10+00:00
Dario Amodei has said that their models actually have a good return, even when accounting for training costs [0]. They lose money because of R&D, training the next bigger models, and I assume also investment in other areas like data centers.

Sam Altman has made similar statements, and Chinese companies also often serve their models very cheaply. All of this makes me believe them when they say they are profitable on API usage. Usage on the plans is a bit more unknown.

[0] https://youtu.be/GcqQ1ebBqkc?si=Vs2R4taIhj3uwIyj&t=1088
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-02 04:29:26+00:00
Tin-free take on JFK assassination:

Years later, that was reflected in the failure of New Englishmen to sync with the rest of the country

(But the success of old-English women in syncing with...

https://youtube.com/shorts/4H-bmxbi_JM

https://youtu.be/5MLuDpfTLBE

?)
by anon291 | 2026-02-02 04:29:48+00:00
The last century was characterized by two mega wars that killed tens of millions and social changes / revolutions that killed tens of millions as well. This century is off to an AMAZING start. Perhaps unprecedentedly good in world history.

And of course before this century, resource scarcity, lack of modern medicine, etc meant a grueling life of farmwork, living in a hovel, and being sent off to random wars. Now people complain because they can't get a 1500 sq ft home and garden. Come on guys be real.

Not to mention brutal state violence being commonplace , punishments being swift yet often unjust, etc. of course even previous conflicts used to show a brazen disregard for life. Thirty years, 100 years of war, etc
by fzeroracer | 2026-02-02 04:29:57+00:00
> The proper method to administrate social benefits is via charity. In this way, there is no deadweight loss through unnecessary taxes.

We've tried this for years, it doesn't work at scale. And the end result is that you and I are still taxed, just more expensively and differently. We pay more for cops, prisons, healthcare etc because we're unwilling to solve it at scale.
Show HN: Jetcaller – Make international calls directly from the browser
by sankar_builds | 2026-02-02 04:30:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Jetcaller (https://jetcaller.com
), a simple web app for making international calls directly from the browser — no installs or SIM.

Built it after getting tired of clunky international calling setups while working remotely. I intentionally kept it minimal and shipped early instead of overbuilding.

It’s live and very early. Would love feedback on usefulness, or anything that feels unnecessary.

Happy to answer questions.
— Sankar
by khedoros1 | 2026-02-02 04:30:25+00:00
> ANYWAY, people have lost the ability to write in cursive, or even write in print neatly.

By 2nd grade, I had good, clean print handwriting. Third grade is when they started teaching (and requiring us to use) D'Nealian cursive. My cursive never has been attractive, but its influence crapped up my print too. I do my best to slow down just a bit if I think someone else will have to read it.

> a) Memorize Times Tables.

My kid was taught the tables last year. They went up to 12x12. They also did a bunch of multiplying numbers specifically by 2, but I'm not sure exactly how high. Maybe 2^15, or so?
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-02 04:32:00+00:00
it's not speculation, they specifically tell people that they're using facial recognition. They threaten protestors that they're entering them into a domestic terrorist database using facial recognition. They're arresting people and detaining them for long periods of time without due process, even while having proof of citizenship (real id, passports) on them, because of a facial recognition hit.
by Lammy | 2026-02-02 04:32:35+00:00
Sorry for assuming you'd be able to extrapolate from one example. It could be at any level of the funnel from your local machine to the wider Internet. Closer to home: this sort of fingerprinting could defeat things like MAC randomization in a PSK-authed business/university setting if those IT departments had some reason to want to track you.

I once worked at a company where the Security team were very proud of this and all the other tricks they used to catch leakers by figuring out who was on campus, where, at what time, usually via fingerprinting personal devices carried alongside corporate devices.
by ginkida | 2026-02-02 04:32:37+00:00
I built Gokin after hitting Claude Code's usage limits and realizing I didn't want to trust third-party CLIs (especially from Chinese AI companies) with direct access to my codebase. It's a Go-based CLI assistant designed to handle the heavy lifting of initial development while keeping sensitive code local.

Key differentiators:
• Cost: GLM-4 backend runs ~$3/month vs Claude Code's ~$100/month. Gemini Flash has a generous free tier.
• Security-first: All code stays local. Automatic secret redaction, sandboxed bash execution, and no telemetry.
• Hybrid workflow: Use Gokin for scaffolding/bulk operations → Claude Code for polish/architectural refinement.
• Rich tooling: Semantic code search (embeddings), multi-agent planning (Beam/MCTS/A*), MCP server integration, Git workflow, and undo/redo for file operations.
• Provider-agnostic: Works with Gemini 3 Flash/Pro (free tier) or GLM-4.7 (~$3/mo).

Tradeoffs: Chinese models (GLM) still lag behind frontier models for complex reasoning—but for scaffolding, refactoring, and repetitive tasks, they're surprisingly capable. Gemini Flash closes much of the gap with a free tier.
Built entirely in Go with a TUI (Bubble Tea). MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/ginkida/gokin

Docs include honest cost comparisons and security rationale.

Would love feedback from fellow developers who've wrestled with AI assistant costs or security concerns.
by vineyardmike | 2026-02-02 04:33:06+00:00
> it's impossible to tell who is normal in these stories

The answer is that everyone thinks they’re the normal one. And everyone generally is normal.

I’ve objectively been a bad neighbor in the past. Early 20s me loved loud music. But late 20s me learned how to be considerate of the music volume.

I’ve also had crazy neighbors. One neighbor of mine complained constantly, immediately after moving in, that the communal laundry area light was left on, and I kept promising to try and do better. Of course, I made plenty of mistakes and often forgot to turn the light off when leaving with a full basket. One day he just took the (low powered LED) bulb away like they were his! Was I the poor neighbor wasting electricity? Was he the psychopath who thought he could forcibly control the entire apartment buildings access to light? It’s all in the story telling.
by nickorlow | 2026-02-02 04:33:44+00:00
I believe in privacy but generally people are fine with rec algorithms running on a server if it's transparent enough/self hostable. Mastodon/DuckDuckGo/HN/etc all don't need to download a huge blob locally. (If you do want it to run locally, hosting the blob on a CDN or packaging this as an app and letting someone else host it would probably improve the experience a lot)
by ekelsen | 2026-02-02 04:34:28+00:00
Can you show me where in the ieee spec this is guaranteed?

My understanding is the exact opposite - that it allows implementations to return any NaN value at all. It need not be any that were inputs.

It may be that JavaScript relies on it and that has become more binding than the actual spec, but I don't think the spec actually guarantees this.

Edit: actually it turns out nan-boxing does not involve arithmetic, which is why it works. I think my original point stands, if you are doing something that relies on how bit values of NaNs are propagated during arithmetic, you are on shaky ground.
by CULPRITCHAOS | 2026-02-02 04:35:16+00:00
Founder here. VOR isn’t claiming LLMs don’t hallucinate — it enforces that ungrounded answers never leave the runtime. The model proposes, deterministic gates decide (answer / abstain / conflict), with replayable audits. This is a public demo meant to be challenged; I’m especially interested in failure cases, adversarial packs, or places this would break in real stacks.
by userbinator | 2026-02-02 04:35:17+00:00
For some reason, Reko was not able to decompile this code into a C representation

That's likely because it's one of those (of which many existed) which attempt to dumbly pattern-match against what a typical C compiler of the time (with equally dumb and extremely inefficient code generation) would do, but that routine clearly looks like handwritten Asm. I've never seen a C compiler from that era generate a LOOP instruction, for example, and of course "cli" nor the I/O instructions are not expressable except perhaps as intrinsics. Ghidra might be a bit better at this, as it's a generalised decompiler.

In fact, when the compiler (RPGC.EXE) compiles some RPG source code, it seems to copy the parallel port routine from itself into the compiled program.

This reminds me of the classic Ken Thompson attack.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2026-02-02 04:35:52+00:00
I think that the stereotype of Americans lacking nuance around political issue is valid. Obviously, like all stereotypes, it’s not 100% true but Americans seem to feel obliged to pick one side of an issue, most of the time aligned with the worth of their choice, and then to view everything that’s happening through that lens.

Try to point out to a democrat that Trump is doing something right or to a Trump voter that Biden did something right. Most of them can’t accept that. The “other” side has to all bad. I don’t see this to such an extreme in other countries I know like Germany or Spain.
by bsder | 2026-02-02 04:36:06+00:00
How on earth can you say that with a straight face?

> Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.

> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.

Ref: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

This is an official filing--facts, not a news report. A judge placed his job on the line and said these things in a written, filed, official ruling.

The problem isn't judicial rulings; the problems are petulant bullies who simply ignore the rulings; and completely subservient sycophants who only can say "As you wish, master."