MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ativzzz | 2026-02-04 20:52:56+00:00
> I just don't understand how billionaires think.

What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.

Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"

A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.

But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
by LargeWu | 2026-02-04 20:53:11+00:00
Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.
by echelon | 2026-02-04 20:53:23+00:00
How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating?

These are real risks to these companies.

Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
by tetris11 | 2026-02-04 20:53:37+00:00
> If an animal is drowsy or bored, it will be less alert than when fully awake and less prepared to spring into action. "Contagious" yawning could be an instinctual signal between group members to stay alert.

> Anecdotal evidence suggests that yawning helps increase a person's alertness.

> Paratroopers have been noted to yawn during the moments before
they exit their aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawn
by hampus | 2026-02-04 20:53:41+00:00
If your email service supports Sieve scripts (for example, Fastmail or Proton Mail), you can use this filter [1] that I made. It's very aggressive and will block all emails that originate from Zendesk, so you'll need to disable it whenever you're actually expecting mail from Zendesk.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/hampuskraft/780c8fbcc4042689153533ef...
by buttstuff69420 | 2026-02-04 20:53:42+00:00
GPS data is so easily spoofed these days that I treat any image or video containing it to be de facto false. GPS data is just time signatures from at least 5 different satellites of a network of over 40+. Having specific satellite RAIM details embedded in EXIF would be an issue, but general GPS information in EXIF is no more self-snitching than the content of the photo and the social media platform you post it to. It's far easier to dox without GPS and any available EXIF location data should only be used as non-primary information to corroborate existing hypotheses, not generate new ones.
by zbentley | 2026-02-04 20:53:46+00:00
> Why?

Presumably to secure the company selling the device’s revenue stream.

There’s a big difference between “any 10yo with $5 for an SD card can download a one-click app and jailbreak our projector” and “you have to be fairly technical to jailbreak our projector”.

Also, the article is more about drawing parallels to the enterprise software security space (where the “Why?” is large-to-existentially-large financial and regulatory risk to an organization that gets hacked) than explaining why this specific projector should be more tamper-proof.
by mc32 | 2026-02-04 20:53:59+00:00
Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.
by jedberg | 2026-02-04 20:54:23+00:00
> while you're staring into the abyss before you go to bed

I feel like I'm doing it wrong (or maybe right?), but I don't have that time. I'm asleep a minute after I lay down. In fact it's been an issue because the kids sometimes want me to lay down with them to fall asleep, and then I fall asleep in their bed!
by somat | 2026-02-04 20:54:31+00:00
Arcan is a display server, in the category of X, wayland or rio

The focus of arcan is to make the final display target super flexible.

So X was designed to be network agnostic, the programmer could use the same protocol and depending on how the end user had it configured it could be displaying on the same machine as the program via local shared objects or on a remote machine via tcp. But X never was able to dynamically transition between the two, there was no way for X to move a window from one machine to another. This is a core goal of the arcan project. I think the thing that gets people confused is along the way there is also a lot of adjacent experimentation in really wild window managers and control scripts. That is, what crazy things can you do once you have this amazing window location flexibility.
by dripdry45 | 2026-02-04 20:54:38+00:00
‘Course where i grew up we had it ‘ard. Aye…
We’d get woken up 2 o’clock in the mornin’ after sleeping in a road crater filled with sulphuric acid, race down the street naked in the dead o’ winter to distract the hungry velociraptors while one of us used a dull butter knife to chop off a limb we’d throw into the road hole so the steamroller could come by, flatten it to patch the hole, then use the stump to tamp the edges into place.
And drivers these days keep complaining how tough it is to get a pothole fixed…
by mnewme | 2026-02-04 20:54:59+00:00
Educational nudity where the subject consented possible for teenagers over 16 in Germany (and the publication complied with the law) is not the same category as CSAM or non-consensual sexual imagery. In the former, misuse by a minority doesn’t automatically make the publication illegal. In the latter, the harm is intrinsic: a child cannot legally consent, and non-consensual sexual images are a direct rights violation.
by coppsilgold | 2026-02-04 20:55:02+00:00
I would not recommend that one trust a secure enclave with full disk encryption (FDE). This is what you are doing when your password/PIN/fingerprint can't contain sufficient entropy to derive a secure encryption key.

The problem with low entropy security measures arises due to the fact that this low entropy is used to instruct the secure enclave (TEE) to release/use the actual high entropy key. So the key (or its weakly encrypted version) must be stored physically (eg. as voltage levels) somewhere in the device.

It's a similar story when the device is locked, on most computers the RAM isn't even encrypted so a locked computer is no major obstacle to an adversary. On devices where RAM is encrypted the encryption key is also stored somewhere - if only while the device is powered on.
by mmooss | 2026-02-04 20:55:06+00:00
> There are actually universities who _claim_ to have great math (or physics or other science) program, but actually just teach it at "advanced high school" level.

What do you mean by that? And could you give an example?

It's hard to imagine any university teaching science majors at 'advanced high school' level, as I understand it. I could see a US community college or almost any university teaching intro courses that way. I can't iamgine what a 4th year chemistry major would be studying that fits the scope of 'advanced high school'.
by llmslave | 2026-02-04 20:55:26+00:00
how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins.

i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
by VLM | 2026-02-04 20:55:31+00:00
A lot of effort has gone to comment without reading the stats. I'll read the survey for you all:

https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...

Yes it includes audiobooks in "books".

physical books were around three times more popular than ebooks or audiobooks.

75% did not read anything to children (kind of surprising 25% of the population has access to pre-literate children)

15% don't read books they own, which is surprisingly high. A third borrowed their books from the library.

54% of the population inaccurately think they "own" an ebook as opposed to reality. 40% "a book you accessed for free online" Sure thats all project gutenberg LOL.

Mysteries and Crime are top of the charts. I have no idea if "computer books" count as 11% other non-fiction or academic or hobbies.

Only 51% have a library card. I know they are cracking down hard at my library, show up physically with proof of residence or it gets cancelled. Its harder to get a library card in my community than to vote, get a job, or register for school, your community may vary.

Most people go to the library less than once a month. This sounds about right.

Shockingly 20% of people never go to the library just to hang out. As a parent of older kids I do that a LOT, drop them off then go silently read or compute or whatever at the library. The attempt at turning libraries from book warehouses into makerspaces seems to not be working very well according to this survey.

People own a surprisingly small number of books. A "large full height bookcase" puts you in the elite. I'm kind of surprised at that.

Virtually no one hoards digital or audio books, I am apparently a far extreme outlier in that regard LOL. I'm easily five figures each. From, uh, totally legit sources.

Most people actually own about two dozen books and think most other people own about twice as many around fifty.

Since I was a little kid I always read a little before bedtime and it seems this is very popular.

Most people don't organize their books but think they have an easy time finding them (not unlike how people organize computer files...)

Surprisingly there is zero to very minimal demographic difference in every category among people who do not read, which I find very surprising and unlikely.
by pllbnk | 2026-02-04 20:55:34+00:00
I think the OP’s proposal is great but impossible to implement right away. Some steps have to be taken towards that direction though. First, eliminate borrowing using their stocks as collateral, thus avoiding capital gains tax. That would immediately reduce the number of new mega yachts.

But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
by hellojesus | 2026-02-04 20:55:35+00:00
The time is there; you just have to find the willpower :)

Take the TV time and trade it for reading a page or two before turning the TV on. I think it just requires some time to adapt to generating a second wave of energy. It won't be there most days.

The alternative is coffee. I did a two month stint of sleeping only 11pm-4a last year (had a single 1.5 yr kid at the time). It was tough and ultimately my body's mechanics started to fail, so I don't recommend that. Now that I have two under 3, I strive for more sleep and therefore only a chapter per week (or a section per week on math/science textbooks).
by im975 | 2026-02-04 20:55:45+00:00
Hey HN! We built an open-source Manus clone to showcase our SDK for running CLI agents in secure cloud sandboxes.

Manus Evolve: https://github.com/evolving-machines-lab/manus-evolve

Evolve SDK: https://github.com/evolving-machines-lab/evolve

What it does:

- Run Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code in isolated sandboxes

- 1000+ integrations (Gmail, GitHub, Slack, Notion) via Composio managed auth

- Parallel agent orchestration (map, filter, reduce patterns)

- Streaming + structured output

- Built-in agent traces observability

npm install @evolvingmachines/sdk # TypeScript
pip install evolve-sdk # Python

Early/experimental – contributions to both Evolve SDK and Manus Evolve are welcome!
by loourr | 2026-02-04 20:57:33+00:00
I think the thing I often see missed in these discussions is the cost and time burden imposed by regulation. It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today. Launching satellites while hard, solves this problem.

Even if it's more expensive, Spacex will be able to deploy hardware when no one else can because all the gas turbines and existing power plants have been exhausted and the lead time to build new ones is 5+ years out because of the bureaucratic overhead.
by logicallee | 2026-02-04 20:57:36+00:00
Google took down this video showcasing Claude Code's massive abilities[1] see my previous submission for a writeup on this.[2] Claude wiped the floor with Gemini, which only has Jules and agentic workflows via Gemini CLI / Google Antigravity, so Google took down the YouTube video after 3,000 views of the writeup by Claude users.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/mgFHMieDvo8
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862004
by echelon | 2026-02-04 20:57:42+00:00
Metrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data.

We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.

Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
by falloutx | 2026-02-04 20:57:58+00:00
> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sound ludicrous.

If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
by wonderingape | 2026-02-04 20:58:09+00:00
Location: Brazil (nomading in Europe soon)

Remote: Fully remote (hybrid only with visa sponsor for an Europe/Asia country)

Willing to relocate: yes, only Europe/Asia

Technologies: Golang | Python | Haskell |JavaScript | C | SQL | Coq | NixOS & Nix | Docker | Kubernetes/Nomad | Firecracker | AWS (Lambda, S3, DynamoDB)

Résumé/CV: https://gist.github.com/PedrobyJoao/c0f37794ee872fb7b587dda7...

Email: joaoexplorer235@gmail.com

check it out my github: https://github.com/PedrobyJoao

About me: hey, I'm preferable interested in projects that are interesting/fun by nature, I want to have fun writing correct and elegant software. Topics of interest: Decentralized systems (e.g.: blockchains), functional programming, AI, anything else that is interesting haha
by jatins | 2026-02-04 20:58:31+00:00
The question is whether social media is closer to candy or cocaine.

You are right that kids will chose anything other than homework but how do you explain adults spending 8 hours a day on short form platforms? Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people. Some gamers did tend to develop obsessive tendencies over gaming but now that seems much more widespread with social media
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 20:58:37+00:00
It’s pretty optimal if you have TSA PreCheck + digital ID.

I fly in and out of ATL - the busiest airport in the US and one of the busiest in the world - I walk up to the TSA line, look at the camera , scan my ticket.

Then I take my wallet and my phone out of my pocket and put in my book bag, let it go through the scanner I walk through the scanner and grab my bookbag

This is the same process we did flying back from Costa Rica and London last year with the addition of showing our passport.

Everyone acts like this process is so much different than any other country.

Except for not having my book bag on me, it’s the same process to get on the “Chunnel” from London to Paris
by einarvollset | 2026-02-04 20:58:50+00:00
Great content and perspective. I would say (and fair warning, this is obviously biased as I run one of the investment banks that specialize in B2B SaaS M&A between $2-20M ARR - Discretion Capital), this:

"Now should you hire a banker when there is no actionable inbound interest and you have no prior relationships? I would recommend no, as in such a case bankers would typically rely on their network of Corp Devs and present your company to a laundry list of potential companies that likely have nothing to do with your space or business or you have no interest working for."

..is not how a great banker that actually does deals in the revenue size and market you're in would act. I can see how a "too large" a bank where you're small fry, would do this, but eg in my space ($2-20M ARR), the key job of your banker is to reach out to whomever would pay the most for your business, not just their corp dev buddies they happen to have existing relationships with.

That's not easy - there are 1000+ repeat software buyers with various portfolios and all kinds of timing constraints, and that's even before considering true strategics (in my range, the buyer mix is 70% PE or PE owned, 20% strategics and 10% other).

Typically, for a proper process, you'd want to see 100-150 (well sourced and properly targeted) potential acquirers. If they're just sending you to a handful of corp devs then they're not taking your business seriously and you should get another banker.
by exceptione | 2026-02-04 20:59:20+00:00
Which means that this discussion should take place _right here_. That is also a role for moderation to play. It used to be worse though, the fascism is now too much in the face to push it aside, so some of the critical pieces of information are not immediately removed from front page. But HN has a problem with reality and responsibility, I had naively thought the public would be more intellectually honest. Reality will only get more uncomfortable, I think. Authoritarian dynamics will inevitable escalate, crushing dissent or competition, anything goes in this zero sum game. The business part has to think about its political part.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-02-04 20:59:22+00:00
Anthropic's move of disallowing opencode is quite offputting to me because there really isn't a way to interpret it as anything other than a walled-garden move that abuses their market position to deliberately lock in users.

Opencode ought to have similar usage patterns to Claude Code, being a very similar software (if anything Opencode would use fewer tokens as it doesn't have some fancy features from Claude Code like plan files and background agents). Any subscription usage pattern "abuses" that you can do with Opencode can also be done by running Claude Code automatically from the CLI. Therefore restricting Opencode wouldn't really save Anthropic money as it would just move problem users from automatically calling Opencode to automatically calling CC. The move seems to purely be one to restrict subscribers from using competing tools and enforce a vertically-integrated ecosystem.

In fact, their competitor OpenAI has already realized that Opencode is not really dissimilar from other coding agents, which is why they are comfortable officially supporting Opencode with their subscription in the first place. Since Codex is already open-source and people can hack it however they want, there's no real downside for OpenAI to support other coding agents (other than lock-in). The users enter through a different platform, use the service reasonably (spending a similar amount of tokens as they would with Codex), and OpenAI makes profit from these users as well as PR brownie points for supporting an open ecosystem.

In my mind being in control of the tools I use is a big feature when choosing an AI subscription and ecosystem to invest into. By restricting Opencode, Anthropic has managed to turn me off from their product offerings significantly, and they've managed to do so even though I was not even using Opencode. I don't care about losing access to a tool I'm not using, but I do care about what Anthropic signals with this move. Even if it isn't the intention to lock us in, they are certainly acting as if they do.

The thing is, I am usually a vote-with-my-wallet person who would support Anthropic for its values even if they fall behind significantly compared to competitors. Now, unless they reverse course on banning open-source AI tools, I will probably revert to simply choosing whichever AI company is ahead at any given point.

I don't know whether Anthropic knows that they are pissing off their most loyal fanbase of conscientious consumers a lot with these moves. Sure, we care about AI ethics and safety, but we also care about being treated well as consumers.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-04 20:59:23+00:00
What work is is always changing.

Mechanization of construction meant the end of shoveling shit and dirt. Road workers for example, are often found sitting in the air conditioned cubicles of machinery manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage.

Sure, sometimes they go outside witg the shovel and dig around fragile stuff - old pipes, or the odd archaeological find.

With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”.

What will the comfy air conditioned cabin look like in that analogy?

My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it also keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism for the first time, a lie. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date.

For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand to build my product and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
by raffael_de | 2026-02-04 20:59:28+00:00
You're probably right. But then he is wrong anyway. Almost all the famous founders of the most successful companies the US produced are or have been infamously mean. Sometimes they had more likeable co-fouders like Paul Allen or Wozniak, but his little opinion piece falls flat nonetheless. He is contradicting himself in his own self-righteous thought bubble. I just chose not to participate.
by deafpolygon | 2026-02-04 20:59:38+00:00
I really want to applaud Anthropic; I remain cautiously optimistic, but I’m not certain how long they will maintain this posture. I will say that the recent announcement from OpenAI has put me off from ChatGPT — I use Gemini occasionally, because it’s the devil I know. OpenAI has gone back and forth on their positions so many times in a way that feels truly hostile to their users.

Plus, I’m not a huge fan of Sam Altman.