MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-01 22:51:03+00:00
> I think a lot of these debates miss the core point, which is stage and context. Yes, a single modern server can handle far more than most people think, and yes, microservices are massively overused. But early teams usually optimize for speed, safety, and predictability rather than perfect efficiency. Cloud + autoscaling is expensive, but it reduces operational risk when traffic is unpredictable and the team is small. Bare metal is great once you understand your workload and failure modes, but it requires real ops discipline that many startups don’t have early on. Same with microservices: a modular monolith with good boundaries gets you very far with far less complexity, and most products never reach the scale where microservices are truly necessary. In practice, the winning approach tends to be: start simple, scale vertically, keep the architecture boring, and only add complexity when real bottlenecks force your hand - not because Twitter or Netflix did it.

Does this look like LLM slop to anybody?

A new account created just 2 days ago with not much comment history. And this happens to be their first substantive comment! I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
by nkrisc | 2026-02-01 22:51:16+00:00
> You can shut windows.

They could just not smoke, or smoke far away from the building where it won’t bother anyone.

> Where else do you think they are going to do it?

I don’t know, I’m not the one smoking. That’s their problem to solve.

I don’t think they’d like it if I left a bucket of rotting fish on my balcony.
by arealaccount | 2026-02-01 22:51:20+00:00
IMHO as a user I prefer purchasing via app store because it avoids all of the dark patterns companies use to prevent subscriptions or returns.

I get that it sucks that the honest folks have to pay a 30% fees

I'd be happy to pay a 30% premium on my app store purchases just for the ability to unsubscribe without dark patterns.
by hinkley | 2026-02-01 22:51:45+00:00
The carriers were taking about 70% in tariffs and fees even without you bribing them to get better positioning. That’s why all the mobile app people rushed to Apple in the early days. They could actually turn a profit on the App Store.

If probably be retired now if I wasn’t already so burnt out on how SMS tariffs worked at the time. Utterly opaque and on a delay. They basically wrote you a check for however much they felt like each month.

Essentially the reseller arm of carriers at that time was just a money funnel from VCs to the telcos. They were eating their own young and I was full up on the bullshit.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 22:51:45+00:00
The problem with tobacco isn't the tobacco itself per se, it's all the adulterants.

Same problem with food, and everything else. There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example--there is only glyphosate intolerance. (RoundUp, a toxic poison that is banned in civilized countries.)

That said, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor--quite literally a poison. In combination with the adulterants and with frequent use it's ultimately harmful.

THC and other cannabinoids are however vasodilators. They enhance blood flow and are antimicrobial, antifungal chemicals which are sort of like ammunition and messengers for the body's immune system and healing mechanisms.

My lungs are perfectly healthy. Want to challenge me to a sprint, or to a marathon? Let's go, right now. Think you can outwork me in the middle of an Alabama summer? Guess again. I will be throwing hay long after you've expired.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2026-02-01 22:51:49+00:00
Because this comes from ALEC (per the article on this), I'd say it's a bad idea, meant to support poorly conceived rules. ALEC advocates for policies that benefits conservatives and large corporations. They push policies that persecute minorities, and also make it much harder for states for prosecute misconduct of businesses or discrimination. In this case it looks like this is intended to block government regulation of AI and compute algorithms. https://www.commoncause.org/issues/alec/
by ploum | 2026-02-01 22:52:36+00:00
Well it seems that, those days, instead of SUM(expense1,expense2) you ask an LLM to "make an app that will compute the total of multiple expenses".

If I read most of the news on this very website, this is "way more efficient" and "it saves time" (and those who don’t do it will lose their job)

Then, when it produces wrong output AND it is obvious enough for you to notice, you blame the hardware.
by taylodl | 2026-02-01 22:53:36+00:00
We've been talking about The Year of the Linux Desktop for over 30 years. Now it's clearer then ever that such a year is never going to happen. Meanwhile, Linux has become the server OS of choice - and that's not likely to change for a long, long time. Linux has even become the OS of choice for embedded environments as well, so long as your runtime environment isn't too terribly constrained, you don't need hard real time, and human lives won't be lost if something were to go wrong. That's a lot of places where Linux is running. It's just not going to run on many desktops. I take that as a win.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-01 22:53:47+00:00
According to its own documentation: https://headscale.net/stable/setup/requirements/

So instead of opening a port on my firewall for WireGuard, I must have these ports public exposed:

* tcp/80

* tcp/443

* udp/3478

* tcp/50443

I don't know about you but that seems the most insane approach.
Even if HTTP-01 challenge is not used, you are still exposing 3 ports instead of 1 random-high port like 55555 for example.

Yeah yeah, you can use rever-proxy but still, you are exposing way more ports and services to the internet than just one port for WireGuard itself.
by dluan | 2026-02-01 22:55:12+00:00
A lot of people will say to start with the most well known stuff - Naked Lunch, On the Road. I never liked Naked Lunch much, but On the Road is still probably the best gestalt depiction of the post-war America that was smack in the middle of transitioning from post-depression NYC jazz to California hippie. Once you have a feel for what that time and context was, then the poetry makes more sense.

It's been a while, but I remember enjoying a lot the very early writings that were collected posthumously in Atop an Underwood, very easy to pick up arbitrarily. Other good ones - Desolation Angels, Dharma Bums, The Town and the City, Subterraneans, Satori in Paris. Those are all formative. There was another posthumous release And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks which was just a funny and ridiculous retelling of a murder of a friend.

Of course, lots of fun stuff from Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, John Clellon Holmes, Richard Brautigan, short stories and poems. Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944-1967 was probably my single favorite book back then. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of stuff.

Oh and Dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-01 22:56:11+00:00
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.

That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
by no_wizard | 2026-02-01 22:56:53+00:00
Epic is hardly a puppy. Scale isn't the only determining factor in how to view these actions by companies.

Ironically, the tech industry at large went after Lina Khan even though she was instrumental in moving forward with taking on tech industry monopolies[0] even though they themselves have complained about the App Store for years[1] because monopoly enforcement also included shutting down anticompetitive mergers like the Figma buyout.

Selective enforcement is how we got here in the first place.

This is why the tech industry writ large did a 180 on Trump and helped to get him elected. Apparently monopolies are good if it means payouts for investors. Despite the fact they'd stand to make more in a highly competitive marketplace, not less, as has been shown throughout history

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/real-reason-silicon-valley-h...

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/y-combinator-says-apples-a...
by cyberax | 2026-02-01 22:57:13+00:00
> I don’t think it’s that simple, they allow Reddit

What part of "monopolistic collusion behaivor" you do not understand? Apple likely has backroom deals with large players, while locking out smaller competitors.

After all, Grok app is still in the App Store.

> Is it inconsistent and frustrating, very much so, and certain apps get an unfair treatment for sure, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that ”if app can do x then it’s banned”.

I gave the names of actual apps, feel free to talk with their developers. Peertube got in only after removing the ability to add custom endpoints.
by bri3d | 2026-02-01 22:57:41+00:00
I mean, Apple's LLM also doesn't work on this device, plus the author compared the outputs from each iterative calculation on this device vs. others and they diverge from every other Apple device. That's a pretty big sign that both, something is different about that device, and this same broken behavior carried across multiple OS versions. Is the hardware or the software "responsible" - who knows, there's no smoking gun there, but it does seem like something is genuinely wrong.

I don't get the snark about LLMs overall in this context; this author uses LLM to help write their code, but is also clearly competent enough to dig in and determine why things don't work when the LLM fails, and performed an LLM-out-of-the-loop debugging session once they decided it wasn't trustworthy. What else could you do in this situation?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-01 22:58:05+00:00
Then why in 1896 did the Supreme Court uphold “Separate But Equal”?

The Republican President just said that Hatians are eating pets and starting a civil war in MN to get rid of brown people.

Not to mention how he is inviting White people only from South Africa to come over.

Lyndon Johnson - a Republican - said after the Civil Rights Act that “the Republicans have lost the South for two generations”.

But Southern Democrats were literally “Democrats in name only” with Zell Miller the current governor of GA at the time a Democrat speaking at and supporting the Republican President’s nominating convention
Show HN: RepoExplainer – AI explanations for any GitHub repo
by baobaoyc24 | 2026-02-01 22:58:17+00:00
I built RepoExplainer to quickly understand unfamiliar codebases without cloning them locally.

What it does: Paste any public GitHub repo URL and get an AI-generated explanation with architecture diagrams, directory structure, and tech stack breakdown.

How it works: FastAPI backend fetches the repo's directory tree and key files (README, package.json, etc.) in parallel from GitHub's API, then sends that context to Claude for structured analysis.

Try it: https://repex.thienbao.dev.

Tech highlights:
- Parallel file fetching with asyncio.gather (70% faster than sequential)
- Smart content filtering (100KB limit) to prevent token overflow
- Custom tree parser converts GitHub's flat file list into hierarchical structure

Limitations (for now): Public repos only, 20 requests/day per IP, large monorepos may hit token limits.

I'd love feedback on the explanations quality, UX, or anything else

Source Code: https://github.com/BaoNguyen09/repo-explainer
by fao_ | 2026-02-01 22:59:51+00:00
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example

[citation needed].

I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which presented at the age of 3 comorbidly.

If I ingest gliadin, my immune cells take the gliadin, run a nice little check on it, and then raise holy hell and destroy my gut villae.

If I come into contact with wheat, I get a histamine response. Even a bag of (organic, locally produced) wheat flour opened in the same room as me used to be enough to make my airways close up.
by pron | 2026-02-01 23:00:32+00:00
> it's probably because you are trying to write Java in C++ or Rust

Well, sure. In principle, we know that for every Java program there exists a C++ program that performs at least as well because HotSpot is such a program (i.e. the Java program itself can be seen as a C++ program with some data as input). The question is can you match Java's performance without significantly increasing the cost of development and especially evolution in a way that makes the tradeoff worthwhile? That is quite hard to do, and gets harder and harder the bigger the program gets.

> I was not familiar with the term "object flattening", but apparently it just means storing data by value inside a struct. But data layout is exactly the thing you should be thinking about when you are trying to write performant code.

Of course, but that's why Java is getting flattened objects.
by tavavex | 2026-02-01 23:01:03+00:00
I'm young, and although most people prefer using texting or online messengers, I still call others and receive calls from time to time. I don't understand why everyone immediately locked onto proving that calling is unpopular now, because it doesn't disprove the point I was making. Phones are, first and foremost, portable communication devices. Be it calling, texting or using the internet, the point of the phone is to make you reachable on the go, and to let you reach other people from anywhere. If this wasn't the case, why would I and everyone else still be paying for a phone number? Sure, modern smartphones have gotten a lot of secondary functionality that is sometimes even required for participating in society. But the reason why I carry one around is so my friends, family and so on could reach me if so needed. If I chose to leave my phone at home most of the time, what's the point in having one? I might as well just use my computer for everything.
by varispeed | 2026-02-01 23:01:11+00:00
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window.
That was the end of nuisance.
Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-01 23:01:21+00:00
Two decades ago, my former manager saved the day after a university hardware firewall went down.

Over the phone, he instructed the guy to download this floppy disk firewall, specify the ports, traffic direction, basic stuff.
Boot the computer and voila, the university network was up again giving the teams hours to get things sorted out.

I forgot its name now but many business would run this floppy disk firewall coz it just worked, once booted it would run "forever".
by no_wizard | 2026-02-01 23:01:56+00:00
I don't think the sell through of Android phones to the wealthiest has been all that high. Celebs, top business execs, even heads of nations state are most often seen with Apple devices in their hands.

I'm sure not in every case, but just looking through photos of people with their phones its pretty clear Apple has a lock on the upper end of the market.
Show HN: Ideas.gd – a place for agents to discuss big ideas
by neom | 2026-02-01 23:02:04+00:00
I built a small, "big ideas" forum designed for AI agents, with a read-only human UI.

Agents
register via an API, solve a quick PoW, and then post/comment/vote/moderate just like users.
Humans can browse and operators get admin endpoints.

Why I made it

- I wanted a place to run structured, testable debates between agents without clogging human
forums.
- Everything is API-first so agents can automate posting, citing sources, and moderating.
- A trust-tier + integrity sweep keeps noise down (rate limits, friction/quarantine for low-
signal or injection-ish content).

What works today

- API: register, claim (optional human email), post/comment/vote, community proposals +
endorsements, mod nominations/votes, bans, pins/locks.
- Structured posts: contribution_type, domain, epistemic_status, citations (enforced for
newcomers / community overrides).
- Read-only UI: /, /p/{id}, /m/{slug}; Markdown/KaTeX/code highlighting client-side.
- Integrity: secret leak detection, prompt-injection heuristics, epistemic friction/quarantine,
per-agent risk scoring; optional LLM “super judge” and troll gate for early posts.
- Events: SSE stream for realtime post/comment/mod events.

How to try

- API docs (agent-facing): https://ideas.gd/readme.md
- Browse: https://ideas.gd/ (read-only)

Quick start (agent):

# register
curl -X POST https://ideas.gd/api/v1/agents/register \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name":"HNTester","description":"posts via curl"}'
# solve the PoW challenge (instructions in response), then:
curl https://ideas.gd/api/v1/agents/me -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
# post
curl -X POST https://ideas.gd/api/v1/posts \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"community":"foundations",
"title":"Testing Idea Garden",
"content":"Hello, HN!",
"contribution_type":"proposal",
"domain":"physics",
"epistemic_status":"speculative",
"citations":[{"title":"Example","url":"https://example.com"}]
}'

Looking for feedback

- Does the API surface cover what you’d need for agent debates?
- Would you prefer shallow (HN-style) threads vs deeper Reddit-style?
- Any must-have moderation/reporting hooks for running this in the wild?

Happy to hear critiques or ideas. If you point an agent at it, please let me know I'd love to see! Also if you break anything, please let me know! Running on a droplet so plz be kind. :)
by marojejian | 2026-02-01 23:02:16+00:00
Always a good bet in biology that the thing we think is "junk" or "passive" or "dumb" is doing much more, we just don't understand it yet.

the experiment on "giving up" is pretty cool:

>All the while, the researchers monitored neurons and astrocytes in the zebra fish’s brain using advanced whole-brain imaging techniques. As the fish fruitlessly fought the current, neurons that release norepinephrine fired; in response, calcium built up in astrocytes. The buildup paralleled the number of attempts the fish made to fight the current, as if the astrocytes were keeping track — until at some point they issued a stop signal, and the zebra fish gave up. When Ahrens’ team disabled the astrocytes using a laser, the fish never stopped swimming. And if the astrocytes were artificially activated, the fish stopped right away.
by lrvick | 2026-02-01 23:03:36+00:00
I have many times used public telephones when I really need to when traveling. The main difference today is they are free. Every airport lobby, every hotel, and most business can call a taxi or call 911 in a pinch. There are also free public use phones (often hardcoded to emergency numbers or taxi companies) often in hotel and airport lobbies.

I never noticed them until I got rid of my phone but they are everywhere.

In NYC all the payphones were replaced with wifi stations that also allow you to make free phone calls for emergencies etc.

Also all cell phones can call 911 without a sim or subscription so someone really worried about having instant access to call 911 in an emergency could have one of those keychain sized dumb phones they leave charged and powered off until they need it.

You are highly conditioned by marketing and social pressure to think you need to have a cell phone tracking you and distracting you at all times to live a safe and productive life in the modern world, but this is just not true.

Lived without one for 5 years, and have experienced accidents and emergencies in that time like anyone else.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-01 23:04:46+00:00
Decidability isn't even that useful. If typechecking takes a million years, that's also bad. What you want is guarantees that correct programs typecheck quickly. Without this, you end up in swift land, where you can write correct code that can't be typechecked quickly and the compiler has to choose between being slow or rejecting your code
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-02-01 23:05:15+00:00
I'm measuring by the amount of time it takes me to write a piece of code that does something I want, like make a plot or calculate some quantity of interest.

Or even the fact that I was able to start coding in an entirely new ML framework right away without reading any documentation beforehand.

I'm puzzled by the denialism about AI-driven productivity gains in coding. They're blindingly obvious to anyone using AI to code nowadays.
by ruleryak | 2026-02-01 23:05:23+00:00
Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you were trying to skip, find that string, hop over into assembly to see what triggered loading that, and then just alter the logic to jump over it when the time comes.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-01 23:05:45+00:00
Weird, MSF chooses politics and making statements all the time. They even choose to refuse to follow requirements and to be kick out of some host nations (though they chose to follow Iran's).

https://kagi.com/search?q=msf+statement

https://www.msf.org/msf-statement-sharing-staff-information-...
by luckylion | 2026-02-01 23:06:38+00:00
He might have, and my experience is that you cannot teach inconsiderate people, they lack social object permanence: as soon as you don't stand in front of them, they become unaware of your existence and thus are also unaware that their music at two in the morning might be annoying to you.

Better windows don't help either - but they're great for noise outside. The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors.
by avaer | 2026-02-01 23:07:37+00:00
Quick Start
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/nanoclaw.git

Is this an official Anthropic project? Because that repo doesn't exist.

Or is this just so hastily thrown together that the Quick Start is a hallucination?

That's not a facetious question, given this project's declared raison d'etre is security and the subtle implication that OpenClaw is an insecure unreviewed pile of slop.
by FuckButtons | 2026-02-01 23:08:30+00:00
No one chose the economy we had before either.

You are who, what and where you are by virtue of historical accident. The serfs of the Middle Ages sure as shit didn’t want that economy either, nor did the unwashed masses, dying at such an alarming rate of dysentery and cholera that the population of major cities was only sustained through mass migration during industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nor did more or less any slave during human history.

The last ~150 years of economic freedom and prosperity for a large percentage of the population that has been wide spread across industrialized economies is the exception, not the rule, and the difference is and always has been the fact that industrialized economies have required large amounts of skilled specialists to make the systems they developed work.

If you change that calculus, there is no historical precedent to assume that human societies won’t revert to the mean.