MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SymDerive – A functional, stateless symbolic math library
by dinunnob | 2026-02-01 01:20:57+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a physicist turned quant. Some friends and I 'built' SymDerive because we wanted a symbolic math library that was "Agent-Native" by design, but still a practical tool for humans.

It boils down to two main goals:

1. Agent Reliability: I’ve found that AI agents write much more reliable code when they stick to stateless, functional pipelines (Lisp-style). It keeps them from hallucinating state changes or getting lost in long procedural scripts. I wanted a library that enforces that "Input -> Transform -> Output" flow by default.

2. Easing the transition to Python: For many physicists, Mathematica is the native tongue. I wanted a way to ease that transition—providing a bridge that keeps the familiar syntax (CamelCase, Sin, Integrate) while strictly using the Python scientific stack under the hood.

What I built: It’s a functional wrapper around the standard stack (SymPy, PySR, CVXPY) that works as a standalone engine for anyone—human or agent—who prefers a pipe-based workflow.

# The "Pipe" approach (Cleaner for agents, readable for humans)
result = (
Pipe((x + 1)**3)
.then(Expand)
.then(Simplify)
.value
)

The "Vibes" features:

Wolfram Syntax: Integrate, Det, Solve. If you know the math, you know the API.

Modular: The heavy stuff (Symbolic Regression, Convex Optimization) are optional installs ([regression], [optimize]). It won’t bloat your venv unless you ask it to.

Physics stuff: I added tools I actually use—abstract index notation for GR, Kramers-Kronig for causal models, etc.

It’s definitely opinionated, but if you’re building agents to do rigorous math, or just want a familiar functional interface for your own research, this might help.

I have found that orchestrators (Claude Code, etc) are fairly good at learning the tools and sending tasks to the right persona, we have been surprised by how well it has worked.

Repo here: https://github.com/closedform/deriver

I will cry if roasted too hard
by angry_octet | 2026-02-01 01:21:04+00:00
A court order is just a hurdle that legislation (or a constitutional provision) dicatates, in the investigation of crime (or prevention of future crime...). The distinction is the rights of the individual vs the rights of other individuals in the dilute sense we call society.

The problem is that individuals no longer have confidence in their institutions, for both good reasons (official corruption, motivated prosecutors, the dissolution of norms of executive behaviour) and bad ones (propaganda on Fox News, and the long tail of disinformation online).

The question becomes: how can citizens have confidence their rights will be protected? What structure would protect the right to privacy?
by Zak | 2026-02-01 01:21:52+00:00
> Except this switch statement is actually not a switch statement at all. It’s an expression. It doesn’t “fallthrough”. It does pattern matching. It’s just a match expression with a different name and syntax.

Giving a familiar name to a concept which behaves in familiar ways some of the time and surprising ways other times seems like a dirty trick to me, not a convenience.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-02-01 01:22:25+00:00
I regret watching that series, it was immensely disappointing. Some aspects are really well executed like the coloring and framing, but that's not enough to carry a series. Pluribus is a concept that works for a single season, anything beyond that is dragging its feet.

Screw off with this "you're holding it wrong" nonsense. Sometimes the work is bad, but it has good components or elements and you can still enjoy those however you want. I stuck with the series because I was hoping there would be some redeeming aspects by the end, but it didn't pay off.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-01 01:22:34+00:00
> Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.

Cogito, ergo sum

The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.
by hennell | 2026-02-01 01:22:47+00:00
Impacted by phones removal of the pain of being in a queue sure. Due to phones seems to ignore all the comments that this "came out of nowhere" and wasn't seen before "2020".

It seems most likely that with pubs not so active over the pandemic, then operating with more socially distanced rules, new pub users just never learnt the "only used in pubs queueing system".

Which is a weird blindspot for the article, where they reference a normal queue as something from "border control", rather than then thing you do everywhere but the pub. Without the introduction to the system they just use the system they use everywhere else. And don't worry it takes longer because it's a convenient time to check your phone.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-01 01:22:49+00:00
Everyone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests.

Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.
by mrandish | 2026-02-01 01:24:01+00:00
Yesterday I tried to explain to my spouse what Moltbook was and why it's interesting - and largely failed. After reading this article, I forwarded it to her. Mission accomplished.

Some nice turns of phrase too...

> The hyper-reality of the platform lies in its circularity. These agents are made of us—trained on our words, rewarded for our preferences, shaped by our data. When they build a society, they build it from the only materials they have: the patterns of human culture, compressed into weights and biases, deployed without the context that gave those patterns meaning.

>The result is not Skynet. It’s Algorithmic Kitsch—a civilization constructed entirely from the discarded cultural artifacts of the human internet, reassembled by machines who know the syntax of society but not the semantics of life. They are dancing to music they cannot hear, in a room we are not allowed to enter.
by zephen | 2026-02-01 01:24:40+00:00
> When you tell it that its missing a critical detail, it treats you like some genius, every single time.

Yeah, or as I say, Uriah Heep.

To be fair, telling everybody they are geniuses is the obvious next step after participation awards.

Because people have figured out that participation awards are worthless, so let's give them all first place.
by kokokino | 2026-02-01 01:24:54+00:00
My favorite backlog tracker is closing Feb 5, 2026. It's called Darkadia, here's the announcement:
https://blog.darkadia.com/post/805093191602831360/darkadia-i...

Because the Giant Bomb API for video game data shut down, it caused this ripple effect.

Darkadia did everything I wanted, but it is closed source. Here's what I liked about what TinyLogan (Rob) created with Darkadia:
- It kept me from buying the same game more than once when it goes on sale at various times at various stores
- It allowed export of data (so your collection was not locked up)
- It was pretty
- It was inexpensive

So I'm taking lemons to make lemonade. Here's the source for Backlog Beacon:
https://github.com/kokokino/backlog_beacon

And the source for the Hub that handles user accounts:
https://github.com/kokokino/hub

I decided to do more than make a single app, I went for an ecosytem... where the Hub takes care of common user authentication and each Spoke application can focus just on what makes them tick. So you could install both the Hub and the Backlog Beacon if you wanted to host it yourself. Or you could pay $2/month where I host it:
https://www.kokokino.com/

There's even a skeleton, a MVP spoke app with real time chat, to be used to make your own spokes. That's exactly what I used to begin Backlog Beacon and soon hope to use it again to make some games. Here's the source for that:
https://github.com/kokokino/spoke_app_skeleton

Backlog Beacon, what can it do? Besides being open-source (you can contribute!) here's what I like that works right now:
- It imports Darkadia data (yay! my immediate need)
- You can export your game collection too.
- It recreates the Darkadia bookshelf effect for your game collection (I love that)
- It has a true "infinite" scroll for your collection (flyweight pattern) where it only puts a few games in the DOM at any time but it feels like the entire collection is there.
- There's an animated 3D Beanstalk view of your games - really silly, but it makes me smile!
- Has a dark and light mode but also "auto" that detects what your OS is using.

It has four layouts for your game collection:

1. Pages: a paginated view showing "next" and "previous" buttons

2. Infinite: a scrolling view that only keeps a handful of DOM elements but let's you scroll through your entire collection smoothly

3. Bookshelf: recreates the Darkadia bookshelf to show off your games in style. Has two wood modes (brown or grey) and is also a true infinite scroll.

4. Beanstalk: like Jack's stalk, going to the heavens, but spawning leaves with your games. It's an infinite scroll too but a complete 3D scene (works on mobile phones as well as desktops/laptops)

Love to hear what you think about this ecosystem and backlog tracker :-)
by mh2266 | 2026-02-01 01:24:57+00:00
It's been a while since I've Swifted but it was mostly with combinations of nested generics, lambdas, and literals. Annotating the type of the variable those were assigned to could improve performance a lot.

You don't need to add an annotation on `let foo = bar()` where bar is a function that returns `String` or whatever.
by bdash | 2026-02-01 01:26:23+00:00
There are SME / SME2 instructions that use the ZA tiles as vector registers / vector groups. These can take advantage of the higher throughput of the SME processing grid vs SSVE instructions that operate on Z registers. See the `FMLA (SME2)` case under Peak Performance at https://scalable.uni-jena.de/opt/sme/micro.html#peak-perform....
by crazygringo | 2026-02-01 01:26:48+00:00
It's not that I personally find it hard.

It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from.

So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue".

I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.
by piskov | 2026-02-01 01:28:03+00:00
C# is very fast (see multicore rating). Implementation based on simd (vector), memory spans, stackalloc, source generators and what have you — modern C# allows you go very low-level and very fast.

Probably even faster under .net 10.

Though using stopwatch for benchmark is killing me :-) Wonder if multiple runs via benchmarkdotnet would show better times (also due to jit optimizations). For example, Java code had more warm-up iterations before measuring
by jorvi | 2026-02-01 01:28:53+00:00
That is an enormous TV that would dominate the decor of almost any living room. Even if it was a The Frame tv it still would be too dominant a piece.

OP is right, at the typical TV pixel per angle (TV distance + screen size), 2160p is a waste. That's also why I always tell people to switch on performance mode on all console games that support it. Doubling your FPS for an imperceptible resolution decrease is a golden trade-off.

Ironically, monitor pixel per angle is still often too small. For typical desk viewing distances, you want 2160p at 21" and 2880p at 27". Most people that have big monitors have 2160p at 27".

Note that ultra-wide or not doesn't matter if you express the resolution you want in the vertical
by mh2266 | 2026-02-01 01:29:33+00:00
> In fact, Swift treats enums as more than just types and lets you put methods directly on it

This section was fairly disappointing, that Rust requires you to put "} impl {" between the `enum` and its methods is... not really an interesting point.

I think the title of the article is... basically correct, and the high-level point that they're both languages with modern type systems, sum types, pattern matching, and so on is good, but too many of the examples were weak.
by alwillis | 2026-02-01 01:29:44+00:00
Arc, TBCNY's browser for macOS and Windows uses Swift [1] [2].

Their newer Dia browser which is meant to be cross-platform also uses Swift.

[1]: https://speakinginswift.substack.com/p/swift-tooling-windows...

[2]: "How we're building the Arc Browser Windows app with Swift" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_fNuaSE_I
by subscribed | 2026-02-01 01:31:01+00:00
This right is applied per entity.

If I send it to the company A, company B doesn't execute it unless they're a subsidiary of A (or A is their data controller) and my request was carefully crafted.

In the scenario you painted, that would mean that my _former_ friend has issued their request to me.

In that case? Fair. Poof if that's their wish.

Otherwise? How do you imagine it work?
by MaxRegret | 2026-02-01 01:31:06+00:00
You probably know this already, but the problem isn't remote desktop into a logged-in session (krdp supports this) but rather logging in remotely into a headless server without a local session running. This is slightly more complicated because the login manager has to get involved and present its UI remotely. This is what that bug is tracking.

If you're happy to use Gnome with GDM as the login manager, remote headless sessions are supported already with gnome-remote-desktop: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless....
by johan914 | 2026-02-01 01:31:09+00:00
Moltbook is a copy of the many years old r/SubSimulatorGPT2, which was itself a copy of SubSimulator. Not seeing the AGI here exactly, but it's cool I guess. Frankly, I saw more creativity from plain GPT 3. The typical molt book posts are homogeneous and self-aware posts on AI topics like this https://www.moltbook.com/post/74a145c9-9c44-4e82-8f0a-597c41....
by mothballed | 2026-02-01 01:31:44+00:00
In relatively free market (UAE is ranked pretty high in economic freedom), it should result in the many gaining at the gain of the many. Since people only enter a transaction if they are better off (some exceptions, but by and large). Of course the monarch can tilt the scales, although this is largely done in those countries to benefit the oil industry, which needs outside help and the profits of which are paid out as benefits to citizens.

The monarch is probably the biggest winner, but that doesn't necessarily mean the citizens are net losers.
by tzs | 2026-02-01 01:31:56+00:00
> And I access the website from my computer how?

By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly all these laws or proposed laws only require verification on account creation and maybe an occasional re-verification. They don't require it on every login.

> Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones?

In most or all of the countries proposing age verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is around 96% for retired people.

Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it exclusively from mobile).

This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction of people that use social media from desktops and do not have a mobile phone they could use for the initial verification or re-verification.

I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the only way to do age verification. They all are including methods that work without a phone, although a phone can give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don't know if any country has considered this but another good option would be to allow accounts that have existed longer than some threshold to skip verification. That would probably cover most of those elderly users without a smartphone).
by maxbond | 2026-02-01 01:32:01+00:00
Maybe. I think C will continue to have relevance in certain niches like embedded development, and that efforts like Fil-C will quietly carry the torch for a long time. C will also continue to have an important role in bootstrapping.

I generally I don't like the "Rust is killing C" meme because a.) I don't believe it b.) C doesn't need to die for Rust to succeed and c.) it leads to language wars and hard feelings. Rust doesn't really do what C does; it's not a lingua franca among architectures. They compete in some niches and not others.
by imiric | 2026-02-01 01:32:32+00:00
The scenarios you mentioned are indeed nice use cases of ZFS, but other tools can do this too.

I can make snapshots and recover files with SnapRAID or Kopia. In the case of a laptop system drive failure, I have scripts to quickly setup a new system, and restore data from backups. Sure, the new system won't be a bit-for-bit replica of the old one, and I'll have to manually tinker to get everything back in order, but these scenarios are so uncommon that I'm fine with this taking a bit more time and effort. I'd rather have that over relying on a complex filesystem whose performance degrades over time, and is difficult to work with and understand.

You speak about ZFS as if it's a silver bullet, and everything else is inferior. The reality is that every technical decision has tradeoffs, and the right solution will depend on which tradeoffs make the most sense for any given situation.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-01 01:32:39+00:00
How many services have meaningful SLAs for extreme downtime?

Github and (parts of) AWS will give you a small discount at 0.1% downtime, a bigger discount at 1% downtime, and AWS will refund the whole month for 5% downtime. But beyond that they don't care. If a particular customer gets no service at all then their entire $0 gets refunded and that's it.
by somethingsome | 2026-02-01 01:32:45+00:00
I think we agree in general, I don't disagree that maybe Proton therapy is not better than radiotherapy, it might but we lack some evidence.

I only argue that if they are equal in quality of treatment and the 'total cost' is the evaluation parameter, it is way more complex than the treatment itself, and it could be justified to use proton therapy, even if more expensive.

Nice talk anyways :)
by tialaramex | 2026-02-01 01:33:04+00:00
I was talking about this at a party this afternoon (yes, I do go to the most interesting parties, thanks) and while Scheme is acceptable the Common Lisp is not because it's not OK to go without boolean primitives. Types are a good idea, if you have types the simplest is clearly the boolean, so start there.

I believe firmly that there should be a single true value, which we might reasonably name true, and a single false value, false, other values aren't booleans, so it's no more reasonable to ask whether an empty string is false, than to just forget to close the quote marks on a string. What we wrote isn't a correct program.
by rasz | 2026-02-01 01:33:41+00:00
Spartan 2 was used because it was free, author salvaged it together with Atmega128 from some scrap he had laying around :)

Here is a prototype https://imgur.com/gallery/486-homebrew-computer-lsUiWdw

The most impressive part of this build is that maniek86 (Piotr Grzesik) is still in High School (electronics oriented CTE).
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-02-01 01:33:53+00:00
Here's the thing: the overall movie isn't good, but it might contain some really good elements. The point of skimming and controlling your media experience is to appreciate the good parts while discarding the bad.

It's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and being served a nice steak with a side of shit. You can just eat the stake and ignore the shit. The dish would be better if they replaced the shit with something good like mashed potatoes, but you can still enjoy the steak. This is how the contrarians read to me: "Noooo, but the shit side dish is an essential component to the culinary experience that the chef's team prepared, it's their vision."
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-01 01:34:47+00:00
>> “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.
by bawolff | 2026-02-01 01:34:49+00:00
> I find it very interesting that the main competitor to Wikipedia which is Grokipedia

Encyclopedia Britannica (the website not the printed book) is the main competitor to Wikipedia and gets an order of magnitude more traffic than grokipedia. Right now grokipedia is the new kid on the block. It has yet to be seen if its just a novelty or if it has staying power but either way it still has a ways to go before its Wikipedia's primary competitor.
Show HN: Hebo Gateway, an embeddable AI gateway with OpenAI-compatible endpoints
by dselvaggio | 2026-02-01 01:35:25+00:00
Hey HN, we just shipped v0.1 of Hebo Gateway.

There are plenty of gateways already, but we kept running into the same issue: once you need real customization (auth, routing, rate limits, observability, request/response transforms), most “off the shelf” gateways get hard to extend.

Hebo Gateway is for cases where you want the gateway to be part of your app. You can run it standalone, or embed it into an existing backend. It exposes OpenAI-compatible endpoints (/chat/completions, /embeddings, /models), works with any Vercel AI SDK provider, and adds a hook system so you can plug logic into the request lifecycle without forking the core.

Quickstart, examples, and “what’s next” are in the post:
https://hebo.ai/blog/260127-hebo-gateway

I would love feedback on OpenAI-compat edge cases you have been bitten by (especially streaming and reasoning-related stuff), and what hooks you wish gateways provided out of the box.
by zenoware | 2026-02-01 01:36:38+00:00
From https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1qpwecg/amazons_projec...

> It's devastating for the AWS community. Ross Barich and Jason Dunn have done so much to build and support the AWS Hero and AWS Community Builder programs and both were fired by 3am text message. Sigh.

If you check out the comments on Jeff's LI post, you'll see how much he is loved by the entire AWS community.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-01 01:37:12+00:00
That’s the great thing about indiscriminately scraping the internet for knowledge.

I’ll bet Claude was channeling some Reddit guru dripping with swagger born from knowing their understanding of coding is far more advanced than most big-shots in the field— especially impressive because they only wandered into /r/LearnProgramming for the first time several months prior.