MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmclnx | 2026-02-05 03:57:24+00:00
I am not talking about rich, but exploation.

The US kind of exploits Korea, Taiwan for cheap labor.and goods. Pakistan was on/off a US ally, same for Egypt. Both at different times were aligned with USSR/Russia, bouncing between the US and Russia over the decades. Plus they are used by the US as a balance against other countries in the mid-east
by mc32 | 2026-02-05 03:57:25+00:00
Money and sycophancy also corrupt behavior. Another measure of character, is the response to being broke.

In any case Bill Cosby on TV was a good role model -in life, out of the public eye, he was a bad dude who drugged and SA'd victims. The public has little chance to "know" him. One might hear rumors but one needs factual info to make judgements.
by hn_go_brrrrr | 2026-02-05 03:58:24+00:00
Not really? If the people want to get through the locked doors throughout the office, they'll need someone to let them through the doors. At least where I work, the receptionists don't have that access. They need to call people who do have universal door access to let them in. Unless the cops just want to battering-ram their way through all the doors for the fun of it...

Also, a raid without a warrant is not a raid. It's a friendly visit to someone's office.
by mikebuilds | 2026-02-05 04:00:02+00:00
Hi HN, I was tired of manually typing my wife's shift roster (D/N codes) into Google Cal. I tried traditional OCR but it failed on grid structures. I built this using Gemini 2.5 to visually parse the layout. It runs on Next.js. No signup required to try. Roast my code/UI.
by wtallis | 2026-02-05 04:00:33+00:00
It's very common for both NVMe and SATA drives that they'll be locked/frozen during boot and thus will not honor a secure erase command until the drive has been power-cycled, which can usually be accomplished with the system-level sleep/wake cycle. I'm not sure what useful purpose this is meant to serve other than possibly making it hard for malware to instantly and irretrievably wipe your storage.
by Tracy978 | 2026-02-05 04:00:33+00:00
Great baseline. My quick rules:

For bigger installs, I usually prefer 12V or 24V distribution with local buck converters so bus current stays lower and wiring is easier to keep stable.

If the controller cannot sit near the first pixel, differential data over twisted pair (RS 485 style) is the most reliable fix.

Biggest “never again”: cheap connectors and skinny grounds. A weak connector or shared ground return turns into voltage drop and data glitches over time.

Reference on WS2812 vs WS2813 vs WS2815 differences:
https://ledsuntech.com/ws2812-vs-ws2813-vs-ws2815/
by lumirth | 2026-02-05 04:01:03+00:00
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.

For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.

Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).

This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
Show HN: Tiny PWA to encrypt files using Passkeys
by dansjots | 2026-02-05 04:01:34+00:00
Filippo Valsorda's Typage[0] is amazing, but I was a little annoyed that there wasn't a ready-made demo repo I can immdiately clone and serve from localhost.

So I made this, which admittedly is so simple that someone could've easily vibe-coded a more complex version in five minutes, but it's left intentionally bare-bones as a blank-slate intended for people to clone[1] and re-host.

[0] https://github.com/FiloSottile/typage

[1] https://github.com/filokey/filokey.github.io
by InitialLastName | 2026-02-05 04:03:01+00:00
> Gaming HW is going to suck for many years.

Not just gaming hardware, everything where the electronics are a predominant part of the unit cost (read: all gadgets) is going to be seeing a big crunch in the next ~2 years (optimistically).

Approximately 100% of RAM manufacturing capacity on Earth has been reallocated to feed the slop machines; anything consumers get is effectively a production cast-off.
by Retric | 2026-02-05 04:03:11+00:00
I’m saying the same thing she is, that soiling isn’t as severe in the desert not that it doesn’t exist.

The article itself said the maximum was 50% and it was significantly less of a problem in the desert. Even 50% still beats space by miles, that only increases per kWh cost by ~2c the need for batteries is still far more expensive.

So sure I could bring up other sources but I don’t want to get into a debate about the relative validity of sources etc because it just isn’t needed when the comparison point is solar on satellites.
by notyourwork | 2026-02-05 04:04:04+00:00
I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.

It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.

That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
by rr808 | 2026-02-05 04:04:06+00:00
I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-02-05 04:04:10+00:00
> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.

Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."

And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.
by davydm | 2026-02-05 04:04:10+00:00
For sure! Whilst most of the people around me seem to enjoy putting up with bad outcomes for the tradeoff of a few good ones (using ai codegen), I'll only use it to remind me of something ("please provide an example of doing X with Y") or for documentation lookups. With both, I have to double-check anyway.

I don't have any real desire to "have my productivity lifted" by ai codegen. I'd rather write my own code than debug someone else's. I like using the tdd cycle to let a design emerge. I care about the details in my code. I aim for maintainability over speed.
by Legin82 | 2026-02-05 04:04:35+00:00
With all the OpenClaw hype this week (Forbes, CNET, IBM, the name changes), I figured people might want a real user report instead of more hot takes. I've been running it for 7 days on a Mac Mini M4 managing two actual businesses.

Setup: Mac Mini M4 16GB from Costco (~$640 after CA tax), running 24/7. Claude Opus 4.5 via Claude Max. Connected to file system, terminal, web browser, messaging, project management, CRM, and GitHub CLI. Use case: autonomous AI employee ("Nigel") for a SaaS product and an AV rental business. Cron-based check-ins, reads/writes its own memory files, runs overnight work shifts while I sleep.

What Actually Works:

Overnight autonomous work is the killer feature. Directive before bed, wake up to structured deliverables in organized directories. Research reports, competitor analysis, lead lists, content drafts - all genuinely usable, not demos.

API integrations. It figured out OAuth flows, diagnosed auth issues, and connected to 4 new services autonomously in one session. This is where it starts feeling like a real employee.

The stuff you'd never get to. It found an SMS chatbot that had been broken for 10 months (legacy app version issue in my automation platform). Diagnosed the root cause, upgraded the components, rewrote the bot prompt through 6 iterations by analyzing real customer conversations. I never would have gotten around to that.

Memory actually works. Daily markdown logs + curated long-term memory + semantic search via embeddings. It remembers multi-day project context, references past decisions, and builds on previous work. Not perfect, but way beyond starting fresh every conversation.

What Doesn't Work:

It hallucinated about itself. When writing marketing copy, it invented $150 in freelancing revenue that never happened and got the hardware price breakdown wrong. An AI making up facts about itself is ironic and would've been embarrassing on a public forum. Everything needs review.

Browser automation is brittle. Rich text editors, complex multi-step UIs - still breaks often enough that you can't fully trust it.

Too agreeable. Without explicit "push back on bad ideas" rules in its personality config, it just says yes to everything. Useless when you need honest feedback. Had to build that behavior in manually.

The Numbers (Honest): Revenue generated: $0. Setup time: ~3 hours initial, then ongoing tweaks. Overnight deliverables: 8 major reports/analyses in one night. APIs connected autonomously: 4. Bug fixes filed: 8 (in a PR I still need to review). The SMS bot fix alone would've taken me a full day I didn't have.

Would I Recommend It? If you're a solo founder running actual businesses and willing to invest setup time: yes. The overnight autonomous work alone justifies the Mac Mini cost. But set expectations right - it's a very capable junior employee, not a senior one. You still need to review everything, catch hallucinations, and handle anything requiring judgment.

If you just want a chatbot: this is massive overkill. Use the API directly.

Happy to answer questions about the setup, what worked, what didn't, or anything else.
by DiscourseFan | 2026-02-05 04:07:47+00:00
I think the Tea Party is only tenuously connected to Trump. A lot of his policies involve a lot of government spending and federal overreach, and his policies are often opposed by the Freedom caucus. Historically, anyway, right wing populism tends to follow the collapse of the radical left and becomes a dark mirror of those very same movements, attempting to absorb their energies (Steve Bannon’s Leninism, Trump’s workerism). The tea party was, conversely, the last cry of reaganism and the dream of mixing traditional life with libertarian economics, which was flawed from the start as it was that very same deregulation which led to our contemporary technologically inflected society where all social norms are broken for the sake of profit. So the tea party was not the legitimate bearer of world history.
by protocolture | 2026-02-05 04:08:33+00:00
Used to do recycling. Before secure erase was widespread there used to be cheapish 16 and 32GB SSDs for embedded devices, but a few of them made it into the thin/zero client space and a few white labelled low end pc's. they were actually twice the size. Basically 2 16s in a single 16 chassis. And what you would get is that the 2 drives were sort of in sync, I think it was a failover mechanism to deal with shitty drive quality. If drive A failed it would just connect to drive B instead and the user might not know about the failure. But the second drive would not wipe necessarily depending on how you wiped the first one. A few people retrieved data from the second disk under lab conditions, after wiping the first, so we had a report come through that we couldnt certify these disks as erased until they demonstrated compliance with secure erase. So we shredded probably a few thousand of them.

I heard of similar issues with early nvme drives.
by gpm | 2026-02-05 04:08:56+00:00
If Russia had the means to invade Canada and hold territory they might try it. They don't. It's not even within the realm of possibility. It's absurdist fantasy to imagine otherwise. Their military is simply far too weak and the geography too poor.

They could probably land some troops in the middle of nowhere by taking advantage of how slow politicians are to react to incursions. Only to have the troops die from bombs and accomplish nothing but scaring some polar bears.

A beachhead in the arctic is utterly worthless as a starting point for moving south - the logistics simply make it impossible (the north is really big and really empty and has lots of really shitty terrain to cross). Even if you suppose somehow Russia is in principle capable of the logistics, Canada isn't reachable from Russia by the arctic sea except through Denmark or the US - they'd need to be co-belligerents or conquered first (narrow exception of submarines and airplanes of course, but not in large enough quantity to matter). They have no means to "control all of Canada" even if the Canadian military, and the allied militaries with treaties guaranteeing mutual defence, somehow magically ceased to exist.

Meanwhile we've seen from Ukraine that they lack effective air defence against planes far more outdated than what Canada already has... and our military isn't going to magically cease existing. Whatever beachhead they could establish, it wouldn't last long.

All this to say that Russia simply isn't a threat to Canada. The only exception to this is that they have enough nuclear bombs to say "fuck the world" and cause nuclear winter or something similarly stupid - but there's nothing militarily we could ever do to prevent that.

I agree that the US is acting consistent with being a Russian puppet - but the conclusion from that is that the US might invade to the benefit of Russia - not that Russia itself is somehow going to magic up an army capable of an invasion directly across the centre of the arctic ocean.
by iancmceachern | 2026-02-05 04:11:13+00:00
I think that’s a fair point, and it highlights part of the tension here. Total receipts as a share of GDP may be relatively stable, but the structure of taxation and where the burden falls has changed over time.

My point wasn’t that government lacked revenue in aggregate, but that many of the periods people point to as examples of large national projects coincided with higher marginal tax rates on top earners.

The interesting question isn’t just how much is collected, but how the burden is distributed and what tradeoffs people are willing to accept going forward.
by theragra | 2026-02-05 04:11:27+00:00
Countries in exUSSR are quite for a long time used similar stuff. But here, people are poorer and "tech" smarter (blame good STEM ed), so they quite often install software themselves. This software pirates free floating or torrented movies, but for tv, you usually can find pirate service that charges 1 to 5 bucks a month for thousands of channels from all over the world, mostly in Russian.

Since the Ukrainian war, new twist emerged. Authorities in Baltics did not care that much about piracy. But they do care about Russian state propaganda, which is absolutely widespread in Russian speaking households. In this case, they quickly put people in prison for helping to install and subscribe to Russian tv channels, which are banned in Baltics.

Sad thing is, many of us are victims of this situation, because parents might be zombified and ask for Russian TV, while children have nausea and hate thinking about it. Still, to avoid our parents be put in prison trying to do it themselves or be scammed, we have to do it ourselves.

I don't see solution to this.

P. S. Ironically, a lot of Ukrainians use the same services to watch content in their native Russian. Many of them are brainwashed so much they watch Russian state channels living under bombings.
by t23414321 | 2026-02-05 04:11:34+00:00
That's mostly copycats of Ben Heck approach from 2012 - some technical improvements, but like without understanding, further thinking about function - or imagination why someone needed it first, then what would be next. So all seems stuck for me, and not much than a bit a closer since then to what (and in which way) I want, starting from smoothly increasing the repeat rate with pressure for cursor keys or scrolling - not having to macro simulate it with few levels only.

(XBOX Controller Mods: Analog WASD Gaming Keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEwDImE0DU4 2012)
by nvch | 2026-02-05 04:11:40+00:00
As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.

There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.

On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
by iancmceachern | 2026-02-05 04:11:40+00:00
Agreed that effective tax rates were much lower than the headline marginal rates because of deductions and avoidance strategies. My point was more about the policy environment and incentives of those periods, not that people literally paid 90% of their income in tax.

The broader conversation I’m interested in is how we realistically fund large public efforts today and what mix of taxation or spending people think is fair and sustainable.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-05 04:11:50+00:00
> I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.

If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.
by jhallenworld | 2026-02-05 04:13:09+00:00
It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.

So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
by tombert | 2026-02-05 04:13:49+00:00
I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now.

I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-02-05 04:13:56+00:00
Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline.

Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.

https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733
by Retric | 2026-02-05 04:14:59+00:00
> the Court tends to say things that didn’t exist are covered by constitutional rights.

Sure but drivers licenses exist when no similar requirements existed for horse drawn buggies because the clear increase in relative danger to the public. When comparing newspapers with radio, the limited spectrum on radio was accepted as justification for more restricted speech etc.

Really citing when the court ruled one way vs another is less important than recognizing which kinds of arguments tend to resonate with the court as in the end specific cases are arbitrary decisions influenced by the specifics of the case.
by flexagoon | 2026-02-05 04:16:22+00:00
Exactly. See also this sentence:

> Look at who’s about to get angry about OpenClaw-style automation: LinkedIn, Facebook, anyone with a walled garden and a careful API strategy.

Browser automation tools have existed for a very long time. Openclaw is not much different in this regard than asking an LLM to generate you a playwright script. Yes, it makes it easier to automate arbitrary tasks, but it's not like it's some sort of breakthrough that completely destroys walled gardens.
by energy123 | 2026-02-05 04:17:02+00:00
It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.
by benatkin | 2026-02-05 04:17:06+00:00
That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age.

I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
by exodust | 2026-02-05 04:17:10+00:00
In other words: "I know a thing, but I won't say what. I condemn you for not knowing the thing."

Grok is censored, there's no question. Try it yourself. It can't even handle analysing a 19th century woodcut engraving containing topless mythical beings[1]. Grok refused because Grok has guardrails.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wood_of_the_Self-Murderers...
by eszed | 2026-02-05 04:17:15+00:00
That's a fair point, but in the interests of a concise story I left out a couple of details: there were three different names associated with my SSN; all of the jobs were agricultural; there weren't any bank account, housing, or other identity-markers associated with my number. (I don't know how much of that I would have been able to figure out on my own, or even if my buddy should have told me that much, but it's nice to have friends in useful places.) I'm pretty sure about what happened.

Sidenote: I don't bear any ill will towards whoever used my SSN. It's not like I was targeted, or even that any harm to me was intended. This was a "hack" of a dysfunctional immigration and employment system, in a way that's totally obvious and easy to anticipate. My ire is reserved for those in positions of responsibility who maintain a regime that is manifestly not fit for purpose.