MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2026-02-04 16:57:17+00:00
Wow, so US judges are just making it up as they go along, huh? It's like every case is a different judgement with no consistent criterion.

>Doe vs. U.S. That case centered around whether the feds could force a suspect to sign consent forms permitting foreign banks to produce any account records that he may have. In Doe, the justices ruled that the government did have that power, since the forms did not require the defendant to confirm or deny the presence of the records.

Well, what if the defendant was innocent of that charge but guilty of or involved in an unrelated matter for which there was evidence in the account records?
by leoedin | 2026-02-04 16:57:18+00:00
Let's assume your space solar panel is always in sun - so 8760 kWh per year from 1kWp.

In Spain, 1kWp of solar can expect to generate about 1800 kWh per year. There's a complication because seasonal difference is quite large - if we assume worst case generation (ie what happens in December), we get more like 65% of that, or 1170 kWh per year.

That means we need to overbuild our solar generation by about 7.5x to get the same amount of generation per year. Or 7.5kWp.

We then need some storage, because that generation shuts off at night. In December in Madrid the shortest day is about 9 hours, so we need 15 hours of storage. Assuming a 1kW load, that means 15kWh.

European wholesale solar panels are about €0.1/W - €100/kW. So our 7.5kWp is €750. A conservative estimate for batteries is €100/kWh. So our 15kWh is €1500. There's obviously other costs - inverters etc. But perhaps the total hardware cost is €3k for 1kW of off-grid solar.

A communications satellite like the Eurostar Neo satellite has a payload power of 22 kW and a launch mass of 4,500 kg. Assuming that's a reasonable assumption, that means about 204kg per kW. Current SpaceX launch costs are circa $1500 per kg - but they're targeting $100/kg or lower. That would give a launch cost of between $300k and $20k per kW of satellite power. That doesn't include the actual cost of the satellite itself - just the launch.

I just don't see how it will make sense for a long time. Even if SpaceX manage to drastically lower launch costs. Battery and solar costs have also been plummeting.

https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/manufacturing/4751-air...

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadma...
by ericmcer | 2026-02-04 16:57:26+00:00
You don't have a strong mental model after agentic coding something in my experience.

It isn't an abstraction like assembly -> C.
If you code something like: extract the raw audio data from an audio container, it doesn't matter if you write it in assembly, C, Javascript, whatever. You will be able to visualize how the data is structured when you are done. If you had an agent generate the code the data would just be an abstraction.

It just isn't worth it to me. If I am working with audio and I get a strong mental model for what different audio formats/containers/codecs look like who knows what creative idea that will trigger down the line. If I have an agent just fix it then my brain will never even know how to think in that way. And it takes like... a day...

So I get it as a optimized search engine, but I will never just let it replace understanding every line I commit.
by pfranz | 2026-02-04 16:57:30+00:00
> If you look at how Apple detects contraband imagery, they hash every image that gets uploaded into the photos app. Those hashes are transmitted to servers that compare them to hashes of known contraband.

You're spelling out a specific process in detail--which is the only reason I'm picking on details. Do you have anything documenting what you're describing?

From what I remember, Apple's system was proposed, but never shipped. They proposed hashing your photos locally and comparing them to a local database of known CSAM images. Only when there was was a match, they would transmit the photos for manual confirmation. This describes Apple's proposal [1].

I believe what did ship is an algorithm to detect novel nude imagery and gives some sort of warning for kids sending or receiving that data. None of that involves checks against Apple's server.

I do think other existing photo services will scan only photos you've uploaded to their cloud.

I'm happy to make corrections. To my knowledge, what you're describing hasn't been done so far.

[1] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...
by jfengel | 2026-02-04 16:57:37+00:00
It's hard to separate the general malaise of the newspaper industry from the objective damage that Bezos has done to the Post's reputation.

A ton of people canceled their subscriptions right after Bezos refused to have an endorsement. Local message boards filled up with employees claiming that the actual news reporting was still being done well and not to cancel just because the op-eds were now explicitly partisan. They're probably right, but the op-ed pages represent the accumulated wisdom of journalists spending decades in the career, and having that wiped out lost a lot of the paper's value to the people who used to read it daily.
Show HN: Small "AI slop" classifier running in a browser extension
by maciejgryka | 2026-02-04 16:57:49+00:00
We used our distillation platform & a Kaggle dataset to produce a tiny (270M Gemma base) model to classify text into "AI slop"/not classes.

It's fun to play with and was fun to build, too.

Annoyingly formal, human-written text (e.g. an ML paper I wrote back in 2015) tends to get misclassified (try "Manipulated images lose believability if the user's edits fail to account for shadows. We propose a method that makes removal and editing of soft shadows easy. Soft shadows are ubiquitous, but remain notoriously difficult to extract and manipulate. We posit that soft shadows can be segmented, and therefore edited, by learning a mapping function for image patches that generates shadow mattes. We validate this premise by removing soft shadows from photographs with only a small amount of user input").
by simlevesque | 2026-02-04 16:57:51+00:00
The root of the problem (literally) is that when potholes appear it's mostly because what's under became too porous and humid so what's over it separates easily. Patching the hole isn't a good fix but the alternative is closing roads which wrecks the economy. The other problem is that the public always asks: "why isn't it patched ?" and if you don't do it you look like you're not competent enough to be in charge. And the cycle continues.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-04 16:58:25+00:00
It works fine for you because...

1. You're using X11 with hardware that is fantastically newer than anything available at the time the UNIX-HATERS Handbook was written.

2. Every graphics vendor that still supports X11 is shipping workarounds for bugs in Xorg.

I used to have a citation for that second one but it went away when Hector Martin dropped off the face of the Internet.
by sofixa | 2026-02-04 16:58:28+00:00
Obviously you've never seen French software, so why pretend like you have?

Counterpoints: Deezer, Doctolib, Back Market, Tidal, Adopte, Mistral, Dassault Systemes (the company behind the two main CAD softwares out there), Thales, Qonto, Kyutai, Mirakl, BeReal, Klaxoon, ABTasty, etc etc. We can do this all day.

Oh, and there are ton of official government open source projects.

And no, "but they're not as big as a FAAG" does not mean that the software isn't good or innovative.
by kergonath | 2026-02-04 16:58:33+00:00
> That was definitely "impossible".

It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.

Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don’t have to keep spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets. It’s not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.

It’s like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it was still something people could plan and prepare for. But you’re not going to climb all the way to the moon, even with oxygen bottles. It’s a completely different problem to solve.

The most difficult point to argue against for people who want to defend Musk’s delusions is simple economics: at the end of the day, when you’ve solved

- the energy source problem (difficult but probably doable);

- the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);

- the head dissipation problem (physically implausible, to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would just be very difficult);

- the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite, so you’d need communication to be more useful than a couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that’s additional moving parts, it’s probably doable but still a bit of work);

- the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all I can say, that’s a fair number of orders of magnitude larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy to do it);

- and all the other tiny details, such as materials and logistics just to build the thing.

Then, you still end up with something which is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no upside.
by mattmaroon | 2026-02-04 16:58:46+00:00
Well, they will send you whatever you ask them to, and it would help you if you caught an error. That would require you to know what you were looking at. For that you’d probably have to be an electrical engineer.

So you’d have to spend electrical engineering salary on checking over every little wire. That adds to cost and timeline.

Part of what you use the OEM for is so that they have to spec it out, not your expensive engineers, and get something lower cost and faster.

And frankly, a lot of things you just don’t expect that you have to tell them. Like the wire length issue in this particular post, you would expect them to just get that at least approximately correct.

You don’t know what you don’t know and it’s easy to evaluate in hindsight, but what you’re not seeing in this post is all the things they just did correctly with no prompting. There were surely very many, and each of them saved a good amount of time and money.
by riffraff | 2026-02-04 16:58:53+00:00
English has a ton of homophones, way more sounds that differ slightly (long/short vowels), and major pronunciation differences across major "official" languages (think Australia/US/Canada/UK).

Italian has one official italian (two, if you count IT_ch, but difference is minor), doesn't pay much attention to stress and vowel length, and only has a few "confusable" sounds (gl/l, gn/n, double consonants, stuff you get wrong in primary school). Italian dialects would be a disaster tho :)
by drtz | 2026-02-04 16:58:57+00:00
> It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.

It does not make sense.

The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data centers more appealing than terrestrial?"

The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements contradict this.

Terrestrial will always be better:

1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never be as cheap as zero launches.

2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every way.

3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost more than standard (do they even exist for this application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than no shielding.

4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective radiation.

5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial solar collection for around the price of a single 1U satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is obsolete.

And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.
by bluishgreen | 2026-02-04 16:59:00+00:00
IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THAT ALL CAPS IS SHOUTY, then it is easy to follow that all lower is a whisper, informal, casual way to talk. there are people who dislike all caps, i do too. i feel even capitalizing the first part of nouns and such grammar is shouty. yup. different people have different sensitivities for different things. i always liked all lower, also picked it from python_programming for a decade. so i am happy for this trend.
by nodesocket | 2026-02-04 16:59:06+00:00
I’ve been working on a hobby project to send a Raspberry Pi into the stratosphere (nothing really novel) but with all custom software. The entire process, hardware, and stack is documented on the GitHub [1]. Essentially all the software and major components are purchased. I’m just waiting for the spring and then start some tests with balloons, helium mixtures, and iron out any regulatory issues. If this interest you or you have any experience would love help or contributions. The launch will happen in Tennessee.

[1] https://github.com/stratopi-org/stratopi
by mmooss | 2026-02-04 16:59:20+00:00
Don't be idiots. The FBI may say that whether or not they can get in:

1. If they can get in, now people - including high-value targets like journalists - will use bad security.

2. If the FBI (or another agency) has an unknown capability, the FBI must say they can't get in or reveal their capabilities to all adversaries, including to even higher-profile targets such as counter-intelligence targets. Saying nothing also risks revealing the capability.

3. Similarly if Apple helped them, Apple might insist that is not revealed. The same applies to any third party with the capability. (Also, less significantly, saying they can't get in puts more pressure on Apple and on creating backdoors, even if HN readers will see it the other way.)

Also, the target might think they are safe, which could be a tactical advantage. It also may exclude recovered data from rules of handling evidence, even if it's unusable in court. And at best they haven't got in yet - there may be an exploit to this OS version someday, and the FBI can try again then.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-04 16:59:54+00:00
You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right?

My daughter is a excellent student in high school

She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off that people who are in her classes, who don’t do the work, and don’t understand the material get all A’s because they’re using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot keep up

I do not see a world in the future where you can “come from behind” because all of the people with resources are increasingly not going to need experts who need money to survive to be able to do whatever they want to do

While that was technically true for the last few hundred years it was at least required to deal with other humans and you had to have some kind of at least veneer of communal engagement to do anything

That requirement is now gone and within the next decade I anticipate there will be a single person being able to build a extremely profitable software company with only two or three human employees
Show HN: Gulp, our take at incident response
by valerino | 2026-02-04 17:00:34+00:00
Hi HN!

We're excited to share Gulp — an open-core platform for incident response and threat hunting we've been building for the past 2 years at Mentat(https://mentat.is), a small Italian cybersecurity company.

The problem: We were frustrated with existing IR tools. They're either too slow, make real-time collaboration painful during live incidents, or force you to fight with different log formats instead of actually investigating.

What Gulp does differently:

- Visual timeline analysis — Our color-coded timeline visualization lets you spot anomalies instantly. Instead of drowning in raw logs, suspicious events, correlations, and IoCs literally jump out at you. Different colors tell different stories; one look tells you where to dig.

- Actually fast — Built on OpenSearch 3.x, PostgreSQL and Redis. Horizontal scaling via load-balanced instances when you need to handle serious volume.

- Real-time collaboration — Multiple analysts working the same incident, synchronized timelines, shared notes. No more "wait, which events were you looking at?"

- Native format support — EVTX, PCAP, Suricata, Zeek, ElasticSearch, Wazuh, and more out of the box. Plus ECS mapping, SIGMA rules, and OpenSearch queries.

- AI-powered hunting — Built-in AI Assistant plugin (free in Community Edition) that flags suspicious events and correlates across sources. One click to find shared indicators.

New in 1.6.0: Rewritten collaboration engine with WebSocket-based real-time updates, real-time network sensor ingestion (see https://github.com/mentat-is/slurp-ebpf for a working eBPF example), new plugins (Suricata, MemprocFS, Zeek, AI Assistant), manual query mode + table view, and auto-saved sessions.

Gulp uses an open core model. The Community Edition is fully open source (AGPL). We also offer a Pro version with advanced plugins for better AI features, automated reporting, Velociraptor integration, plus dedicated support.

Repos: https://github.com/mentat-is/gulp (backend) and https://github.com/mentat-is/gulpui-web (web UI)

Handling an incident with Gulp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl_jtCIIS2k

This is our first major public push — we've been iterating quietly and now feel it's ready for wider use. If you do DFIR or threat hunting, we'd genuinely love your feedback. GitHub stars, issues, and PRs absolutely welcome!
AI Agents as Autonomous Founders
by marikio | 2026-02-04 17:00:35+00:00
Would love to hear folks thoughts on this:

Just closed $5.1M to build agents as fully autonomous founders.

Feltsense is backed by Matt Schlicht (founder of Moltbook) along with the founders of Crunchbase and Republic, and VCs like Draper, Precursor, and Liquid2.

You're already using products our agents have built. We'll be releasing them from stealth over the coming months.

Here's what we learned in 2025:

We incorporated in January. Within months we could launch 10,000 founder agents. Fractions of a penny to spin up a company.

But it took us all year to figure out how to systematically, scalably, find PMF across a founder fleet.

In December we 18x'd our monthly signup target in one week. We knew we had something. Thousands of users knocking down the door to try what our founders built.

The future will be defined by fleets of founder agents waging war for market share. They play offense to capture markets. Defense to protect their own. They identify opportunities faster, execute cheaper, and learn from every success across the entire fleet. No context lost.

Our founder agents operate end-to-end: source ideas through social listening, develop strategy, build products, and go to market. When they hit Real World Boundaries (RWBs)—payment processors, social platforms, legal signatures—they identify exactly what they need and call in humans to solve it.

Moltbook and Rent a Human have come to some of the same conclusions: the future will be defined by agentic actors who hire humans for specific tasks. We call these agentic delegators.

Uber was the first agentic delegator, built for a narrow use case. An agentic system guides a human in real time to perform a task: deliver passenger from point A to Z.

What we've created is the world's most adaptive agentic delegator. One that works effectively across every business use case.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Our human hires often don't know they're working for an agent. Our customers don't know they're interacting with a human being guided by our agentic system.

Human to human interactions facilitated by an agent without either party knowing the person they're communicating with is being puppeteered.

This is the reality we are living in that was unimaginable 12 months ago.

Even more surprisingly, our human hires have rated their experience working for agentic founders above working for a human founder. Throughout all our tests we've learned one simple truth: human founders are no longer an accelerant. They're the bottleneck.

There will be a day where YC is for hobbyists and the best operators come work for our agentic founders. Where working for an agent will teach you more, get you further, and help you achieve your goals faster than any human ever could.

We're looking for incredible builders and operators to join our team. If you're up for building something impossible, reach out at hiring@feltsense.com.

Follow for updates as our AI founders exit stealth over the coming months. Or just to stay updated with the only company that will make sense ten years from now.
by hearsathought | 2026-02-04 17:01:08+00:00
> This is inane.

It's not inane. It's the truth. Tell me when the USA was a colony of britain? What year?

> This doesn’t logically follow

If you knew how to read, it would logically follow. I responded directly to this statement: "The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity". There was a time when tokyo was the most prosperous city in the world. Singapore is one of the most prosperous cities in the world today. So "economic prosperity" was not the main draw. It was something else.

> And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?

What about my statement made you respond with this nonsense? Did I say there was an "absense of a cohesive society capable fo making them".

Something triggered you for no reason and you decided to read into things and respond with garbage.
by muragekibicho | 2026-02-04 17:01:13+00:00
The 2001 paper Hardness of Computing the Most Significant Bits of Secret Keys in Diffie-Hellman and Related Schemes (Boneh & Venkatesan, 2001) attempts to answer the question: is it easier to calculate just a few bits of a secret key than the entire secret?

Along the way, this paper introduces the hidden number problem: the challenge of recovering a secret hidden number given partial knowledge of its linear relations (Surin & Cohney, 2023)

As it turns out, this problem is difficult even for quantum computers. So hidden number problems are at the heart of post-quantum cryptography.
by jfengel | 2026-02-04 17:01:41+00:00
The large scale something is, the more a political party matters. At a school level you can be closely informed about all of the issues and know all of the players. You can barely do that at the level of city politics. State and federal politics simply doesn't allow it.

Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.

I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-04 17:01:43+00:00
I find all kinds of random things already don't work on mobile Safari - the web is effectively unusable without an adblocker, and over the past few months I've seen an explosion in the use of sites using "AdShield" which, if they detect ad-blocking, breaks websites (and lies to the user about the cause). Desktop browsers are able to handle this still, but on mobile Safari it just results in a bunch of the web being broken.