MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marxisttemp | 2026-02-03 01:29:59+00:00
I care. I refuse to use Electron slop unless it is literally the only option available (usually due to some proprietary locked-in platform eg Discord). I will happily pay significant sums of money for well-made native apps that often have fewer features than the Electron versions, simply for the pleasure of using tools that integrate seamlessly with my operating system. Not all of us have given up on software quality.
by hinkley | 2026-02-03 01:30:14+00:00
There's a few months every year when I'm feeling brave or crazy. We could take turns.

The thing is that most supply chain attacks are going to hit you when you are least prepared to deal with them, because that's exactly how they get you. When you're distracted.

Upgrades are deep work, but the commands to start them feel like shallow work.
by robocat | 2026-02-03 01:30:18+00:00
It achieves cleaner air, which I personally like, and which is especially great for anyone with lung problems like asthmatics.

I suspect part of the rule tightening is to slowly squeeze to get rid of fires altogether (the outcome with the cleanest air).

> what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?

You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive). I don't know what the penalties are for illegal woodburners/fireplaces. My personal experience is that it isn't enforced. I'd guess penalties can be avoided unless you're a repeat offender with a complaining neighbour.

Note that outdoor braziers are legal AFAIK. Although Outdoor fires have some restrictions - especially if very dry and high fire risk.

Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.

Here's some historical data that shows very significant improvement over 25 years: https://www.ecan.govt.nz/your-region/your-environment/air-qu...

The smog was horrific before 2000 when those statistics start. Apparently low air quality was implicated in many deaths per year here.
Show HN: I built a 50 site sampler from CommonCrawl refreshing every 30 minutes
by whothatcodeguy | 2026-02-03 01:30:21+00:00
I tossed this together this afternoon mostly just to validate a premise: the internet has become so heavily consolidated into a few key discovery surfaces for the common user, and I miss when you could really just get lost in it. Is there a way we can unearth pieces of it we would never actually see under normal circumstances? Wouldn't it be so cool if you could just explore the internet like you're walking through random doors in a long, eternal 6TB hallway?

So, I made RandomCrawl. It's a super minimal website that does nothing more than run a Node script every 30 minutes, pick a random path down the file structure of the Common Crawl dataset, minor filtering for secure .com websites for good measure, and takes a random sample of 50 websites from the chunk.

There has been a ton of noise, but it has been surprisingly fun. I feel like an internet archaeologist. For every 5 random sass websites, you get like some random tourism site for a town you've never heard of, or an ancient blogspot from the early 2000s.

Here are a couple of great finds so far:
https://ahapoetry.com/
https://alexunu.blogspot.com/2007/
https://www.brtpeinture.com/

I'm not sure I'll do much more with the website since it was an experiment, but you can bet I'll be digging around this dataset some more. It reminded me there is still a lot of expression out there on the internet, and its amazing some of these sites are even still live. It's way more fun to explore than to mindlessly scroll one of our five favorite websites.

disclaimer: im not filtering out nsfw so keep that in mind
by iknowstuff | 2026-02-03 01:32:10+00:00
I appreciate you engaging, but I'm not sure power how would be the limiting factor. Assuming an average of 1kW of compute needed per robot (for reference, Tesla's AI4 is ~200W, rumors say 800W for AI5, nvidia B200 is ~1kW), that's nothing compared to the amount of energy we use for locomotion (a car eats like 20kW at 60mph).
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-03 01:33:46+00:00
> The middle 4 are all fairly common words.

That's not really the concept. People know what an orca is.

But if you see a crossword clue that says "black and white animal", you know that the answer is ORCA without even needing to look at the number of letters in the answer. (Could it be "skunk"? Could it be "panda"? No, those are stupid questions.) Same thing if the clue is "marine predator". (Could that be "shark"? No.) The words I listed are incredibly likely to appear in crossword puzzles. That's what's weird about them.
by slg | 2026-02-03 01:33:58+00:00
SolarCity and Tesla made more surface level sense just being in the same general vicinity since they're both fundamentally green energy companies. That made it easy to spin questions about the financials with some CEO-speak about synergy.

However, the way Musk has become less subtle with this tells a story. He got away with these shady financial dealings multiple times so he's now becoming even more brazen and transparent with this behavior. We have gotten to the point in which the spin needed to justify his moves is the physics-defying viability of datacenters in space.

The distortion field will keep growing as long as he keeps getting away with it.
by myko | 2026-02-03 01:34:19+00:00
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.

The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.

DC-X test flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4

It's awesome that Falcon 9 exists and it is great technology but this guy really isn't the one anyone should want in charge of it.
by tlb | 2026-02-03 01:34:44+00:00
The energy to build the system comes from the partial assembled system, plus some initial bootstrap energy. It grows exponentially. We seem to have enough today to build small factories in orbit.

The manufacturing scale comes from designing factory factories. They aren't that far in the future. Most factory machinery is made in factories which could be entirely automated, so you just need some robots to install machines into factories.
by cranberryturkey | 2026-02-03 01:34:53+00:00
The real question is whether this sets a precedent for how browsers should handle feature creep in general. Browsers have quietly accumulated telemetry, sponsored content, pocket integrations, VPN upsells — AI is just the latest.

What I like about Mozilla's approach here is the single toggle for all current and future AI. That's a genuine concession to user agency rather than the usual whack-a-mole of about:config flags. If every new feature category got this treatment (a clear, discoverable off switch), browsers would be in a much better place trust-wise.

The deeper issue is that Mozilla needs revenue diversification beyond the Google search deal, and AI features are their bet on that. So the incentive to make the toggle hard to find or slowly degrade the non-AI experience will always be there. I'd love to see them prove that wrong.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-03 01:35:11+00:00
It's an interesting take. But as I keep pointing out in other comments, one example doesn't make for an argument against the trend.

If it did then this example would be all I need to make my point. Is it?

House of Representatives vote on civil rights act: Approximately 63% of Democrats (153 yes out of 244 total Democrat votes cast) and 80% of Republicans (136 yes out of 171 total Republican votes cast).

Senate: Approximately 69% of Democrats (46 yes out of 67 total Democrat votes cast) and 82% of Republicans (27 yes out of 33 total Republican votes cast).

Here again it appears that Republicans as a larger majority remained true to the traditional Republican push for equality (not equity).
by Fogest | 2026-02-03 01:35:23+00:00
I mean, even if he isn't directly making a lot of the decisions in these companies that are doing well, it doesn't mean he doesn't play a big role in that still. He still had to pick a lot of these leaders, pay them well, keep them satisfied enough to stay there, and also give them the proper freedom to lead these companies. There are many people out there who could also manage to make these companies fail instead of grow.

I feel that a lot of people simply don't like Elon because of political reasons which are often also based on misinformed opinions. It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.

Now I think ultimately any ultra wealthy person is going to have some flaws that people can find and latch onto in order to hate someone.
by ee64a4a | 2026-02-03 01:36:08+00:00
The Robber Barons weren't in the 1920s; that refers to industrial age monopolists (e.g. rail/oil), and culminated in the Sherman Antitrust (i.e. 1800s).

Broadly, your point is still valid, though. Just a mild inaccuracy between the Gilded Age and the roaring 20s.
Latex-wc: word count and word frequency for LaTeX projects
by sethbarrettAU | 2026-02-03 01:36:35+00:00
I was revising my proposal defense and kept feeling like I was repeating the same term. In a typical LaTeX project split across many .tex files, it’s awkward to get a quick, clean word-frequency view without gluing everything together or counting LaTeX commands/math as “words”.

So I built latex-wc, a small Python CLI that:

- extracts tokens from LaTeX while ignoring common LaTeX “noise” (commands, comments, math, refs/cites, etc.)

- can take a single .tex file or a directory and recursively scan all *.tex files

- prints a combined report once (total words, unique words, top-N frequencies)

Fastest way to try it is `uvx latex-wc [path]` (file or directory). Feedback welcome, especially on edge cases where you think the heuristic filters are too aggressive or not aggressive enough.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-02-03 01:36:53+00:00
> It argues that rapid and decisive shifts in the propensity and capacity to kill powered capitalism, imperialism, and climate change

Shocker - Jacobin leaves communism & collectivism out of it's list of history's great killers. Mao & Stalin can leave 10s of millions in their wake, but Jacobin will find a way to blame markets. Very unserious people.
by mr_toad | 2026-02-03 01:37:09+00:00
> We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally.

Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but as of right now humanity seems to have an insatiable demand for power.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-03 01:37:23+00:00
Lots of society is like this. For example, red lights. I run them all the time and nothing happens. You just have to pay attention. It's why the police won't ticket you in SF. It doesn't matter. If anyone else complains you just yell "Am I being detained" a few times and then hit the accelerator. Teslas are fast. They can't catch you.
by semiinfinitely | 2026-02-03 01:38:22+00:00
an LLM can be used to losslessly compress a string to a size equal to the number of bits of entropy of next token prediction loss over the string, by encoding the extra bits of entropy with arithmetic encoding. its sota compression for the distribution of string found on the internet

an insightful video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO4TPJkeaaU
by xenodium | 2026-02-03 01:38:32+00:00
> It's still not crystal clear to me architecturally is going on

[ Emacs ] <-- JSONRPC (stdin/stdout) -> [ Agent subprocess (headless) ]

> I'd love to know how that is wired to the agents; is that input sent over ACP?

Yes. All traffic goes over ACP between Emacs and the agent. You can inspect the traffic using agent-shell itself.

https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell?tab=readme-ov-file#h...

> Is that just sending to the shell?

The compose buffer is an UX abstraction on top of the agent shell buffer which is a native Emacs buffer, but ultimately all traffic is sent over ACP.

agent-shell's links to blog posts may be of interest https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell?tab=readme-ov-file#n...
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-03 01:38:49+00:00
I thought this was already revised? Jensen Huang said they’ll be investing more than ever:

> Nvidia is likely set to make its “largest ever investment” in ChatGPT firm OpenAI, despite reports that the deal may be under threat in recent weeks. The chip giant’s CEO, Jensen Huang, didn’t say exactly how big the investment would be, but said it would be “nothing like” the $100 billion figure mentioned in the September partnership agreement.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-ceo-well-make-our-largest-...
by cvhc | 2026-02-03 01:39:19+00:00
I've been paying for the pro version for a while. It's templating is really powerful and easy to use. For my vocab deck, I set up a input field (e.g., word) and a bunch of derived fields (dict definition, AI-generated example, TTS audio). To add a new card, I just input the word and other fields will be automatically populated.

Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.
by Fogest | 2026-02-03 01:39:34+00:00
This could just be a gamble they hope pays off. Or maybe there is some kind of other bigger picture strategy at play here that goes beyond just the AI from space idea. I try to stay optimistic about innovations in tech and I like to see companies willing to try new things instead of just staying stagnant.

For example, I think the car market had become pretty stagnant with traditional car makers, and most electric cars they attempted to make sucked. Tesla making good desirable electric cars really pushed EV's into becoming more popular and having a better charging network. I think it would have taken much longer for EV's to start growing in popularity if someone wasn't willing to take a risk.

Are they going to be too early to the market for this kind of tech? Maybe. Is it going to end up being a waste of money? Yeah it totally could be. But at the end of the day I do like to see some risks being taken like this and it sucks seeing constant negativity whenever companies try something new.
by defrost | 2026-02-03 01:39:46+00:00
:-)

Look, I'm Australian, I enjoy a bit of banter. I stripped the personal info from my comment above; I was happy to share with you, reluctant to leave it as was.

I was a frequent Toronto visitor, for the TSX, back when we ran a minerals intelligence service before passing that onto Standard&Poor.

You're on the list, however my movements are constrained for now, my father's a feriously active nonagenarian which is keeping me with one foot nailed to the ground here for now.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-03 01:40:15+00:00
> I don't know what rsync does on top of that (pipelining could mean many different things), but my empirical experience is that copying 1 1 TB file is far faster than copying 1 billion 1k files (both sum to ~1 TB), and that load balancing/partitioning/parallelizing the tool when copying large numbers of small files leads to significant speedups, likely because the per-file overhead is hidden by the parallelism (in addition to dealing with individual copies stalling due to TCP or whatever else).

That's because of fast paths:

- For a large file, assuming the disk isn't fragmented to hell and beyond, there isn't much to do for rsync / the kernel: the source reads data and copies it to the network socket, the receiver copies data from the incoming network socket to the disk, the kernel just dumps it in sequence directly to the disk, that's it.

- The slightly less performant path is on a fragmented disk. Source and network still doesn't have much to do, but the kernel has a bit more work every now and then to find a contiguous block on the disk to write the data to. For spinning rust HDDs, the disk also has to do some seeking.

- Many small files? Now that's more nasty. First, the source side has to do a lot of stat(2) calls to get basic attributes of the file. For HDDs, that seeking can incur a sometimes significant latency penalty as well. Then, this information needs to be transferred to the destination, the destination has to do the same stat call again, and then the source needs to transfer the data, involving more seeking, and the destination has to write it.

- The utter worst case is when the files are plenty and small, but large enough to not fit into an inode as inline data [1]. That means two writes and thus seeks per small file. Utterly disastrous for performance.

And that's before stepping into stuff such as systems disabling write caches, soft-RAID (or the impact of RAID in general), journaling filesystems, filesystems with additional metadata...

[1] https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/ext4.wiki.kernel.org/inde...
by elihu | 2026-02-03 01:40:56+00:00
Do they need to be maintained? If one compute node breaks, you just turn it off and don't worry about it. You just assume you'll have some amount of unrecoverable errors and build that into the cost/benefit analysis. As long as failures are in line with projections, it's baked in as a cost of doing business.

The idea itself may be sound, though that's unrelated to the question of whether Elon Musk can be relied on to be honest with investors about what their real failure projections and cost estimates are and whether it actually makes financial sense to do this now or in the near future.
by yalogin | 2026-02-03 01:41:05+00:00
Musk’s schtick lately has always been to find a challenging problem, point everyone to it and say “ I will solve it by September “, have the stock shoot up and make money. His first dis that with self driving, then twitter, then xAi, and now robots and data center in space. These last two will last him a decade as these are both challenging problems to solve over night.
by kens | 2026-02-03 01:41:12+00:00
I was shocked to learn recently how China is crushing it in renewables and electric cars. BYD sold 600,000 more electric cars than Tesla in 2025, becoming the world's largest EV brand. Tesla's sales have been declining since 2023, while BYD sales are rapidly growing, so the gap is likely to get even larger in 2026. This is an important trend, regardless of how one feels about Musk.

Sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee8001
https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
by ericd | 2026-02-03 01:41:20+00:00
Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar install, everything else was pretty straightforward. Also, running a pretty sizable array at our house, the seasonal variation is huge, and seasonal battery storage isn’t really a thing.

Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
by nayroclade | 2026-02-03 01:41:58+00:00
If AI can code, why do you think it cannot handle building, testing, debugging, securing, monitoring, supporting, incident handling, and so on?

Consider incident handling. What if your AI sets up monitoring that detects errors or outages, wakes up an agent, gives it the problem context, then sets it to work so it can debug the issue, produce a fix, then deploy it? You now have an end-to-end system that works 24/7. Many issues will probably be resolved before you've even noticed them.

If your response is, AIs won't ever be smart or capable enough to do this as well as humans, how has that same prediction worked out for coding?

The next generation of AI "coding" tools will essentially be SaaS companies in a box. Agents will code the app, but they'll also test it, debug it, support it, etc. And this will happen in months, not years.
by carefulfungi | 2026-02-03 01:42:13+00:00
Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means.

> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-03 01:42:50+00:00
The US is a monument to both corruption and incompetency. It's also a monument to freedom.

China is the opposite. Less corruption because they're all executed under Xi now. Less incompetency because, I don't why. Less freedom for stuff like protesting or talking shit about the government online.

Personally I prefer competency and less corruption over freedoms I have never excercised in my lifetime. Actually I've talked plenty of shit about the government but I don't mind losing this freedom.
by Fogest | 2026-02-03 01:42:51+00:00
Well if they plan to put a crap ton of new satellites in the air specifically for running xAI on it, I think there is a decent chance that it isn't purely financial shenanigans. Obviously the finances are probably a big part of such a decision, but companies also do these kinds of things all the time. I don't see why this is considered "shenanigans" or how the quote would relate to what is happening.
by highfrequency | 2026-02-03 01:43:28+00:00
> Of course, ai will continue to improve. But it is also likely to get more expensive…Microsoft’s share price took a beating last week as investors winced at its enormous spending on the data centres underpinning the technology. Eventually these companies will need to demonstrate a return on all that investment, which is bound to mean higher prices.

That’s not how it works, and I’m surprised this fallacy made it into the Economist.

Commodity producers don’t get to choose the price they charge by wishful thinking and aspirational margins on their sunk costs. Variable cost determines price. If all the cloud companies spend trillions on GPUs, GPU rental price (and model inference cost) will continue going down.

Indeed, cheaper and cheaper AI for the same level of performance has been even more consistent empirically than improvement in frontier model performance.
by tombert | 2026-02-03 01:44:14+00:00
> The private sector is far better when it comes to money.

I've heard this a lot, but I've worked for BigCos and it seems like all they do is spend money, often superfluously. I've seen BigCos spend large quantities money on support contracts every year that haven't been used in more than a decade, or sending people on business trips across the country so they can dial into a meeting, or buying loads of equipment that sits dormant in warehouses for years and then is eventually sold off for pennies on the dollar.

I'm not convinced that they're better than the government with money allocation, I think they're just better at telling people they are.
by Rzor | 2026-02-03 01:44:52+00:00
>In an interview with Robert Wright in 2003, Dyson referred to his paper on the search for Dyson spheres as "a little joke" and commented that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious" [...]

To be fair, he later added this:

>in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial".[13] In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one.

Sources are in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere