MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxglute | 2026-02-04 06:30:53+00:00
The good news is PRC, like western capitalist pigs are willing to sell the rope that hangs them. It's never been more affordable and accessible to build up nascent manufacturing. PRC now one stop shop for bootstrapping development from cheap energy to infra to capital goods at involution prices vs PRC developed by paying premium on western capita goods. PRC, also like western capitalist pigs assume their dominance is so entrenched that others are unlikely to catchup, at least not in relevant time frame.

The bad news is unlike western capitalist pigs that drank own koolaid, PRC might be right. Ultimately PRC manufacturing has to also be calibrated to price in bottom 40% of domestic pop whom are relegated to low income, ~2000 USD per year, i.e. they will structurally hold on to low/medium end manufacturing competitiveness even as they move up the value chain. Realistically PRC won't be vacating those low end until 2050s when that cohort starts dying. Or potentially never with automation.

In the meantime, as long as global south slowly trend towards low-middle income, i.e. ~5000 usd customers, that's still growing 3billion+ people into market / S-curve territory for consumer goods from phones to air conditioners to low end nevs. TLDR PRC is giving all the tools for poor countries to catchup, betting they won't. Maybe that's hubris, but there's a reason PRC isn't actually trying to export it's political/development model, because bluntly they don't think others can replicate it, least of all due to PRC agglomeration scale alone. Maybe India.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-04 06:30:57+00:00
>> Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference.

> You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

> Guess what, they got over it.

You conveniently omitted my next sentence, which contradicts your position and reads thusly:

Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the
same concerns quoted ...

> You will too.

This statement is assumptive and gratuitous.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-04 06:31:00+00:00
This makes so much sense, especially with the rise of crypto Payment Cards, although I like the idea of keeping things crypto-native (eventually!)

Next step will be to allow founders to capital raise on the blockchain but do it in a way where they don't dilute control even if they do dilute ownership. That could be achieved by having a large number of token buyers to prevent third-party ownership concentration. But could they merge into a voting block?

Surely this has been done before? Is there any way to make newly issued tokens equivalent to conventional equity so no rug-pulls?
Are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations currently being used to this effect?

Imagine distributing a firm's revenues directly to shareholders in real-time. Everything stays on the blockchain. That's crazy!
by zwaps | 2026-02-04 06:31:59+00:00
Apple is terrible. I have to install xcode for whatever reason but do not want to use it.

Yet every week it assigns itself as default program for all sorts of files, from markdown to python modules.

So clicking on pretty much anything opens this.

Apple is just very bad at user interface. Whoever said Mac as better than Linux or even Windows is insane.

I hate it.
by kijin | 2026-02-04 06:32:34+00:00
Malware can't modify files in System32, but it can drop extra files in there no problem. The only way to find and clean them up is a clean install.

In Linux, one could write a script that reinstalls all packages, cleans up anything that doesn't belong to an installed package, and asks you about files it's not sure about. It's easy to modify a Linux system, but just as easy to restore it to a known state.
by al_borland | 2026-02-04 06:32:44+00:00
Most of the tech debt I deal with comes from projects that are declared a success by management before they are actually done, and no one is officially responsible for maintaining it. The teams are told to move on to something new, the old thing never gets fully finished and dies a long slow death, because no one wants to officially say that it was a waste of time and should be shut down.

Do this repeatedly and it really starts to add up. At times we are running 3-4 platforms for the same thing. Two are legacy with one or two critical things still running on them with no support. One is “production”, but no one is actually paying much attention to it. And one is in development or pilot… it’s all anyone can talk about, but it doesn’t actually work. While that in-house developed pilot is going on, we’ll also be told to do a POC with a tool from some outside vendors.

AI won’t solve political and bureaucratic problems. If anything, it will make it worse, as turnover to new products is expected faster.

To get rid of technical debt, an organization needs to focus. Which means saying “no” to most things, instead of trying to do it all.
by chadcmulligan | 2026-02-04 06:33:12+00:00
That is a very good analogy - sliced shop bread is tasteless and not that good for you compared to sourdough. Likewise awful store bought tomatoes taste like nothing compared to heirloom tomatoes and arguably have different nutritional content.

Shop bread and tomatoes though can be manufactured without any thought of who makes them, though they can be reliably manufactured without someone guiding an LLM which is perhaps where the analogy falls down, and we always want them to be the same, but software is different in every form.
by jasonkester | 2026-02-04 06:34:06+00:00
That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China.

They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.

They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.
by bsimpson | 2026-02-04 06:34:57+00:00
I would suspect flashing your firmware to the globally standard one would become commonplace if printers sold in NY came with a nerfed version.

On principle, yes, but also for maintenance. The nerfed firmware that's only required in a few jurisdictions is almost assuredly going to fall out-of-sync with mainline features.

"The rule saying you can't print the thing that you either weren't going to print, or you weren't going to let the rule tell you not to print, wants you to run old/broken software." No matter which side of that you fall on, you're upgrading the software.
by monch1962 | 2026-02-04 06:35:25+00:00
As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing.

As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.

You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.

Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.

Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.

I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.
by Curiositry | 2026-02-04 06:35:31+00:00
I haven’t actually tried step three yet, but:

1. Kobo ereaders are dirt cheap at thrift stores (and run Linux)

2. KOreader is simple to install (I have done this)

3. KOReader has a text editor + terminal built in, and has a setting to switch to USB-OTG mode, which should allow you to plug in a USB-C hub, and a mechanical keyboard.

Boom! Internet connected e-ink writing tablet with excellent battery life, and the best keyboard you have, for ~$5-100.
by guessmyname | 2026-02-04 06:35:55+00:00
I call it “The Broke College Student Syndrome.”

Most of us did stuff like this when we were younger.

For starters, we were broke. I mean, we didn’t have enough extra cash to pay for something we knew we could probably get for free. Back then, having a credit card in college was basically a “rich kid” thing. The money we had was whatever was in our pockets, maybe stashed under a pillow, or saved in a piggy bank. These days, kids are more “modern,” so the idea of not having a card paid for by mom or dad, or at least some extra cash, sounds ridiculous. But that’s how it was for a lot of us.

So I’d constantly look for ways around paying, because I genuinely couldn’t afford it. Think learning C just to write a keygen.exe and bypass license checks, doing in-memory hex edits to tweak games and give myself more virtual coins, or forking Tor to get single-hop proxy connections.

Good ol’times.
by ggm | 2026-02-04 06:38:11+00:00
I very much hope this doesn't descend into licence wars but I would think all of the BSD, MIT, ISC, hold-harmless, RAND and GNU licences qualified. If that's true and it was understood the public/commons got an outcome, I'd be in favour.

If the code is under restrictive clauses, or gets tokenistic input and the quotient of time and money is spent doing something else, then I think this is a licence to cheapen out contracting rates for-profit.

How does an auditor know?
by lkey | 2026-02-04 06:39:05+00:00
What stole the joy you must have felt, fleetingly, as a child that beheld the world with fresh eyes, full of wonder?

Did you imagine yourself then, as your are now, hunched over a glowing rectangle. Demanding imperiously that the world share your contempt for the sublime.
Share your jaundiced view of those that pour the whole of themselves into the act of creation, so that everyone might once again be graced with wonder anew.

I hope you can find a work of art that breaks you free of your resentment.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-02-04 06:40:11+00:00
What's unclear to me from the blog post is whether this is a problem for the property owner, or only for the buyers/attorneys/relators/insurances involved on the other side of the scam?

It seems like in most cases the scammer pockets the earnest money deposit and that's it, in some cases, the buyer thinks they actually bought the property but they haven't actually (how does that work in terms of the deed?)

Seems like the worst case outcome for vacant land is "free house"?

Edit: based on the comments, the problem for the property owner is the headache and cost associated with cleaning the mess up. You don't lose the property but a fraudulent title change (?) can actually end up in the registry, which can be cleaned up but is a major PITA.
by FranklinJabar | 2026-02-04 06:40:14+00:00
Typically in capitalism, if there is any profit, the race is towards zero profit. The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly (or duopoly, or some other stable arrangement). I assume the latter is the goal, but that means burning through like 50%+ of american gdp growth just to be undercut by china.

Imo I would be extremely angry if I owned any spacex equity. At least nvidia might be selling to china in the short term... what's the upside for spacex?
by yanhangyhy | 2026-02-04 06:41:22+00:00
> Taiwan All the Taiwanese workers at the table (about 3 or 4) said that the moon landing was a hoax.

People from small countries usually have only a single viewpoint and are deeply influenced by propaganda. They have almost no independent thought.

> I wonder what the average person in China thinks of the Apollo moon landings

we believe in science. most people believe it's true. it's just a shame how USA become today. we saw both ourselves and America some Rome kind of Empire. we like it before, we just feel sorry it will collapse and cannot even do something it did beofre.

also something related to USSR: We also believe that the Soviet Union achieved accomplishments in space exploration no less significant than those of the United States; it is just that Western propaganda has deliberately downplayed them.
by k310 | 2026-02-04 06:42:29+00:00
It's up now. 10:36 pm Pacific time.

However, the front page is different. It goes to the Wayback Machine and a horizontally scrolling "bug" or Times Square display of various pages.

The last thing I need is ornament. Go figure. Any down time might have been for a transition to this new front page.

Like "innovations" from Apple. Stuff I never asked for, will never use and which seem ornamental more than practical, or at the least, disruptive. I still have problems explaining settings on a mac since they were entirely reorganized to confound my phone help efforts. But I'm dropping the company in any future purchases and consulting due to its overt support of the despot.
by ggm | 2026-02-04 06:42:41+00:00
whats the impact of epigenetics on this, given we're looking at a cohort of Boomers whose parents in many cases underwent extreme dietary restriction across the years of puberty or close?

the post ww2 children are the ones I'm talking about: their parents have in large part had cataclysm events in their fertile windows. my parents were 192x babies and their parents in turn were 1890/1900 window, and so dodged a lot of things because of a peace bonus. But my parents began a family in the 1950s after stress, and since neither fought nor were in the ETO or Asia, I suspect impact on me is minor but for dutch, or german, or french, or polish or chinese ...
by TMWNN | 2026-02-04 06:42:46+00:00
>Sub-saharan africa has slowly lost ground since 1950.

I learned this some years ago. I'd heard the same thing as everyone else, about how Africa was booming and would surely approach developed-world standards Real Soon Now. Nope! <https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/9valp9/gdp_...>
by 6mirrors | 2026-02-04 06:42:47+00:00
The sampling rate we use to take input information is fixed. And we always find a way to work with the sampled information, no matter if the information density is high or low.

We can play a peaceful game and a intense one.

Now, when we think, we can always find a right level of abstract to think on. Decades ago a programmer thought with machine codes, now we think with high level concepts, maybe towards philosophy.

A good outcome always requires hard thinking. We can and we WILL think hard at a appropriate level.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-04 06:43:16+00:00
I could maybe see this argument if we were talking about raiding Stable Diffusion or Facebook or some other provider of local models. But the content at issue was generated not just by Twitter's AI model, but on their servers, integrated directly into their UI and hosted publicly on their platform. That makes them much more clearly culpable -- they're not just enabling this shit, they're creating it themselves on demand (and posting it directly to victims' public profiles).
by urutom | 2026-02-04 06:43:21+00:00
One thing this discussion made me realize is that "thinking hard" might not be a single mode of thinking.

In grad school, I had what I'd call the classic version. I stayed up all night mentally working on a topology question about turning a 2-torus inside out. I already knew you can't flip a torus inside out in ordinary R^3 without self-intersection. So I kept moving and stretching the torus and the surrounding space in my head, trying to understand where the obstruction actually lived.

Sometime around sunrise, it clicked that if you allow the move to go through infinity(so effectively S^3), the inside/outside distinction I was relying on just collapses, and the obstruction I was visualizing dissolves. Birds were chirping, I hadn't slept, and nothing useful came out of it, but my internal model of space felt permanently upgraded. That's clearly "thinking hard" in the sense.

But there's another mode I've experienced that feels related but different. With a tough Code Golf problem, I might carry it around for a week. I'm not actively grinding on it the whole time, but the problem stays loaded in the background. Then suddenly, in the shower or on a walk, a compression trick or a different representation just clicks.

That doesn't feel "hard" moment to moment. It's more like keeping a problem resident in memory long enough for the right structure to surface.

One is concentrated and exhausting, the other is diffuse and slow-burning. They're different phenomenologically, but both feel like forms of deep engagement that are easy to crowd out.
by anavat | 2026-02-04 06:43:26+00:00
It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert on a helicopter in few hours.

And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.
Show HN: I'm 16 and built EU AI Act compliance software
by chaitanya_sci | 2026-02-04 06:43:42+00:00
Hey HN – I'm Chaitanya, a 16-year-old student. I built AuditDraft after reading through the EU AI Act and realizing most companies have no idea how to comply.
The regulation is 400 pages. High-risk AI systems need technical documentation covering 12 different requirements. Fines go up to €35M. Enforcement has already started for some provisions, and the big deadline (August 2026) is coming fast.
AuditDraft helps you:

Classify your AI system's risk level (8 questions based on Article 6)
Generate Annex IV compliant model cards and documentation
Track compliance across all 35 high-risk requirements

Built with Passion.
by int_19h | 2026-02-04 06:44:06+00:00
There is, in fact, a good question wrt how much of NFA is actually constitutional. A funny thing about this is that ATF has dropped cases on several occasions where the defendant tried this angle, presumably because they didn't want something contrary to their current regulations as written to be overturned in court, and because they had plenty of other charges to throw at those guys anyway.
by aboardRat4 | 2026-02-04 06:44:10+00:00
>It’s like going into a Spanish government building to get your Belgian passport replaced.

The police are not expected to replace the ID. They are expected to give you a proof that you have indeed lost one. In fact Russian embassy won't give you a "returnee permit" unless you go to a Spanish police station and declare your loss of a document.

Even foreign police cannot be expected to just generate documents on a whim.

In the US states don't have embassies, but surely a police station in New York can ask the registration office in California to send them your picture by WhatsApp and have at least a vague kind of proof that you are who you claim to be.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-04 06:44:38+00:00
Anyone who believes something like this you can be 100% sure doesn't know how to cook even the most basic of staple foods. Cooking your own food is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper and, with a few cheap spices and seasonings, almost always tastier. The only valid argument is prep time here, and that too even only applies to certain kinds of foods.
by gf000 | 2026-02-04 06:44:41+00:00
Hate speech laws exist in most of Europe and they are not abused at all. And it's not like media wouldn't already have a bunch of laws applied to it, even in the US - e.g. libel and the like. Surely you can slippery slope with that as well, right?

And the free market only works if there is a well-defined market with proper laws that are upheld. Otherwise it's a running competition where Meta/X just shoot every other competitor at the start and drive to the goal with a car. This has been known by Adam Smith already - you can't be a "free market person" while being happy with these giga-corporations trampling on laws left and right.
by nayuki | 2026-02-04 06:45:40+00:00
> no one is going to confuse mB for millibytes because what would that even mean?

Data compression. For example, look at http://prize.hutter1.net/ , heading "Contestants and Winners for enwik8". On 23.May'09, Alex's program achieved 1.278 bits per character. On 4.Nov'17, Alex achieved 1.225 bits per character. That is an improvement of 0.053 b/char, or 53 millibits per character. Similarly, we can talk about how many millibits per pixel JPEG-XL is better than classic JPEG for the same perceptual visual quality. (I'm using bits as the example, but you can use bytes and reach the same conclusion.)

Just because you don't see a use for mB doesn't mean it's open for use as a synonym of MB. Lowercase m means milli-, as already demonstrated in countless frequently used units - millilitre, millimetre, milliwatt, milliampere, and so on.

In case you're wondering, mHz is not a theoretical concept either. If you're generating a tone at say 440 Hz, you can talk about the frequency stability in millihertz of deviation.
by foxglacier | 2026-02-04 06:46:35+00:00
It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for a decade because it's dominated by other costs.

Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.

So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
by ghuun | 2026-02-04 06:46:56+00:00
If you actually have a problem worth thinking deeply about, AI usually can’t help with it. For example, AI can’t help you make performant stencil buffers on a Nokia Ngage for fun. It just doesn’t have that in it. Plenty of such problems abound, especially in domains involving some or the other extreme (like high throughput traffic). Just the other day someone posted a vibe coded Wikipedia project that took ages to load (despite being “just” 66MB) and insisted it was the best it was possible to do, whereas Google can load the entire planet (perceptually) in a fraction of a second.