MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marojejian | 2026-02-01 00:00:11+00:00
Even since reading about Michael Levin's work, I've been sold that there is a lot going on in terms of bioelectricity outside of neurons. But I haven't seen that much progress. This is one interesting, albeit simple example.

>In this way, bioelectrical flow across cell membranes lets tissues test which cells are the least healthy and mark them for extrusion. “They’re always pushing against each other and bullying each other. And what they’re doing is probing each other for which one’s the weakest link,” Rosenblatt said. “It’s a community effect.”

This fits with my model of how high levels of cooperation succeed in biology. Even in a community as homogeneous as cells you have the risk of defectors (cancer), or just poor members. As such you need a process to continually test your community members.
by atombender | 2026-02-01 00:00:34+00:00
I've made a tiny SwiftUI app. It was really difficult to figure out the memory leaks. In fact, I have leaks that I still haven't been able to find. For some reason the heap is fine, but the app continues to allocate virtual memory.

I've thrown Claude and Gemini at the app to try to analyze the code, had them use vmmap and Instruments, asked them run all of the code in a loop to reproduce the leakage — and still it leaks, slowly, tens of megabytes per day.

I'm sure it's something simple starting me in the face. But the fact remains that Swift's sort-of-automatic-but-not-quite memory model still makes it much harder to reason about memory than Rust or even Go.
by bdash | 2026-02-01 00:00:56+00:00
SSVE instructions are executed by the SME engine, which trades latency for throughput. SSVE is really intended to support use of SME, rather than as a replacement for Advanced SIMD on the CPU core itself.

The Apple Silicon CPU Optimization Guide has a lot of great information on SME and SSVE, along with more general information on optimizing for Apple's CPUs

A few quotes from Apple's guide that are particularly relevant to SSVE, from "SSVE Vector Execution Unit Optimization":

> Broadly, this unit is designed to support long vector and matrix operations performed on
ZA storage _in the SME Processing Grid_.

> Recommendation: Use SSVE in a supporting role to enable high throughput SME grid computation.

> [Magnitude: High | Applicability: High] SSVE offers wide 64B vectors. While the ISA includes instructions that can operate on multi-vectors, the throughput is often only one 64B vector per cycle. Use SSVE to enable SME, which offers higher parallelism.

> Because of non-speculative execution, communication latencies, and in some cases long memory and computation latencies, SME engine instructions trail execution in the core by dozens to thousands of cycles. Any core compute instructions that consume data produced by the SME engine may have to wait an indeterminate (but long) amount of time for the data to arrive.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 00:01:07+00:00
When I've checked Wikipedia citations I've found so much brazen deception - citations that obviously don't support the claim - that I don't have confidence in Wikipedia.

> Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly.

Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too.

Also, I tend to add things to Wikipedia or other wikis when I come across something valuable rather than writing something and then trying to find a source (which also is problematic for other reasons). A good thing about crowd-sourcing is that you don't have to write the article all yourself or all at once; it can be very iterative and therefore efficient.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-02-01 00:01:27+00:00
I think for a new Ferrari there’s a fair chance it’s salaried individuals. There are quite a few folks who probably make enough to purchase a $400k-$800k car from their salaries. For ultra rare or special variants I think it’s unlikely as the percentage of someone’s net worth would likely be entirely consumed by the vehicle even at several million dollars a year. An example is an Enzo that sold this year for $17.6 million: https://www.thesupercarblog.com/ferrari-enzo-sells-for-a-rec...

FWIW—- that whole collection of cars, including the Enzo are 1 of 1 builds and it’s still shocking someone paid that much for a car with an absolutely heinous interior. I get it is unique, but it’s crazy someone paid that much for the privilege of owning the ugliest interior ever put in an Enzo. Reminds of the Ronald McDonald Viper from the mid 90s.
by bikelang | 2026-02-01 00:01:34+00:00
I love `—-dry-run` flags for CLI tooling I build. If you plan your applications around this kind of functionality upfront - then I find it doesn’t have to pollute your code too much. In a language like Go or Rust - I’ll use a option/builder design pattern and whatever I’m ultimately writing to (remote file system, database, pubsub, etc) will instead write to a logger. I find this incredibly helpful in local dev - but it’s also useful in production. Even with high test coverage - it can be a bit spooky to turn on a new, consequential feature. Especially one that mutates data. I like to use dry run and enable this in our production envs just to ensure that things meet the functional and performance qualities we expect before actually enabling. This has definitely saved our bacon before (so many edge cases with prod data and request traffic).
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-01 00:03:06+00:00
That worked well back when what we wanted more of were things that we all agreed upon were desirable. More food, more housing, more cars and tools and clothes.

Nowadays most of our efforts are in pursuit of contradictory goals. Creating an AI god, going to Mars, ethnic cleansing projects... these aren't things we unanimously want more of, they're one of two alternatives that some of us want to achieve and the others want to prevent. The logic of scarcity is a poor mediator for such things.

We don't have to dispense with scarcity entirely in order to stop using it as a proxy for decision making about outcomes that have nothing to do with scarcity.
by HippoBaro | 2026-02-01 00:03:30+00:00
> Rust invented the concept of ownership as a solution memory management issues without resorting to something slower like Garbage Collection or Reference Counting.

This is plain wrong, and it undermines the credibility of the author and the rest of the piece. Rust did not invent ownership in the abstract; it relies on plain RAII, a model that predates Rust by decades and was popularized by C++. What Rust adds is a compile-time borrow checker that enforces ownership and lifetime rules statically, not a fundamentally new memory-management paradigm.
by pron | 2026-02-01 00:03:34+00:00
I was surprised to see that Java was slower than C++, but the Java code is run with `-XX:+UseSerialGC`, which is the slowest GC, meant to be used only on very small systems, and to optimise for memory footprint more than performance. Also, there's no heap size, which means it's hard to know what exactly is being measured. Java allows trading off CPU for RAM and vice-versa. It would be meaningful if an appropriate GC were used (Parallel, for this batch job) and with different heap sizes. If the rules say the program should take less than 8GB of RAM, then it's best to configure the heap to 8GB (or a little lower). Also, System.gc() shouldn't be invoked.

Don't know if that would make a difference, but that's how I'd run it, because in Java, the heap/GC configuration is an important part of the program and how it's actually executed.

Of course, the most recent JDK version should be used (I guess the most recent compiler version for all languages).
by nlysses | 2026-02-01 00:03:59+00:00
Sure, I’ll polish the tutorial, each device on the top left is correlated to its rightful tools in real life, so some tool functions may be darkened preventing you from using it, unless you turn on the R&D mode or Frontier mode. Right now the tutorial is meant for the 1st 9steps but soon will be more! You’ll be the first to know! thanks for the feedback! Appreciate it! I’ll get to it asap!
Show HN: Small, anonymous app for teams to do retrospective sessions
by Cynddl | 2026-02-01 00:04:07+00:00
I built a small web app that allows to create retrospective boards with four columns: Glad (what went well), Wonder (questions), Sad (improvements), and Action (follow-ups). It's anonymous and collaborative: anyone with access to a session link can add, edit, vote, or delete cards.

I found that, apart from using hackpads or similar text-based tools, there weren't many solutions for quickly collaborate on such retrospective sessions without disclosing everyone's name. So I built this. It also works well with a mix of offline and online: first everyone can take time to add ideas and vote on them at their own pace, then everyone can meet in person to collectively decide on next steps.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-01 00:04:23+00:00
It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
by TomasBM | 2026-02-01 00:04:33+00:00
There is an obvious reason why LLM use should be discouraged in classwork focused on writing: the process that's needed for a brain to learn the skills can't be outsourced.

The Internet is different. Even with access to websites like Wikipedia, you had to write your own content. Plagiarism was easily detectable.

We shouldn't confuse "we don't have a solution at the moment" with "we should completely abandon no-LLM education". Like with social media, we can always change the direction of progress.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-01 00:05:40+00:00
This is really interesting. Julia is a beast compared to python.

Nowadays whenever I see benchmarks of different languages. I really compare it to benjdd.com/languages or benjdd.com/languages2

Ended up creating a visualization of this data if anybody's interested

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/data-processing-benchmar...

(Given credits to both sources in the description of this repo)

(Also fair disclosure but it was generated just out of curiosity of how this benchmark data might look if it was on benjdd's ui and I used LLM's for this use case for prototyping purposes. The result looks pretty simiar imo for visualization so full credits to benjdd's awesome visualization, I just wanted this to be in that to see for myself but ended up having it open source/on github pages)

I think benjdd's on hackernews too so hi ben! Your websites really cool!
Show HN: Skv – Repo‑local, deterministic dependency management for agent skills
by puszczyk | 2026-02-01 00:06:32+00:00
I had this problem recently, where I wanted to grab a Claude Code skill from a GitHub repo, and add it to a few projects of mine. Also to reuse it in Codex CLI.

In this brave new world code is cheap, so I've created it. Let me know what do you think.

skv vendors AI/agent skills directly into your repo, pins them by commit, and records a lockfile for reproducible sync/verify. Works with Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode, and Cursor; no registry or global cache required.
Show HN: Daigest – I built an AI to watch sources so I don't miss what matters
by sangkwun | 2026-02-01 00:07:49+00:00
Hi HN! I built Daigest.

Why I built this:
I first built an internal tool to monitor my Notion workspace.
I was worried about missing things happening at work.
Then I realized this problem is everywhere: Reddit threads I could've helped with (but found too late), competitor moves I noticed after everyone else.

Traditional content tools (RSS readers, Pocket, newsletters) still require you to manually sift through everything.
AI chatbots only answer when you ask.
I wanted something that watches proactively and tells me "here's what you need to act on."

How it works:
1. Connect your sources (YouTube, RSS, Reddit, X, websites)
2. Tell AI what to watch for ("flag competitor pricing changes", "alert me to security vulnerabilities in my stack")
3. AI monitors and maintains a self-updating document of what matters to you

Tech stack: Next.js, Supabase, Crawl4AI for content extraction.

Limitations:
- YouTube transcripts can be hit-or-miss for non-English content
- Scheduled updates only (no real-time push yet)

Try it at: https://daige.st

What signals would you want AI to watch for? Happy to answer questions!
by nielsbot | 2026-02-01 00:08:29+00:00
I don't think it's horrible, but I really do wish they would copy TypeScript here.

Let me do this:

const x: String | Int

Instead of

enum MyEnum {
case string(String)
case int(Int)
}

There's an existing proposal for this here:

https://forums.swift.org/t/re-proposal-type-only-unions/7270...
by hamasho | 2026-02-01 00:08:56+00:00
> The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true.

This really resonates with me.
If calculators returned even 99.9% correct answers, it would be impossible to reliably build even small buildings with them.
We are using AI for a lot of small tasks inside big systems, or even for designing the entire architecture, and we still need to validate the answers by ourselves, at least for the foreseeable future.
But outsourcing thinking reduces a lot of brain powers to do that, because it often requires understanding problems' detailed structure and internal thinking path.

In current situation, by vibing and YOLOing most problems, we are losing the very ability we still need and can't replace with AI or other tools.
by vitaelabitur | 2026-02-01 00:09:21+00:00
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time

If you only watch the story-driven scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, and skip the prolonged shots of the desert, you would miss out feeling the same vastness and heat Lawrence is feeling.

There is a limit to how much a film can make you think or feel. Films that reach the highest limits need "boring" voids in-between the primary scenes. These voids are not to ingest more, but to help digest what has been ingested in previous scenes, with subliminal scenes and silence that let the right thoughts and feelings grow.
by kkfx | 2026-02-01 00:09:49+00:00
Let's say if I had old-school BTC, mined personally or bought back in the day for very little fiat currency and today it's an enormously larger sum, I'd say it's time to not keep all my eggs in one basket and rebalance my portfolio.

For example, I'd say it's actually been time for a while now, ever since the crypto-tax wave start to hit, to convert into fiat currency and buy land, houses, assets that, IF the state doesn't collapse and they're chosen in reasonable areas, could still preserve significant value, allow you to flee to another country (houses purchased abroad) if necessary etc.

If someone had put 0.001% of their capital or even 0.01% into old-school BTC and today finds themselves with 50% of their capital in BTC, it's high time to give some thought to diversification.

Smart contracts will become the contracts of the future and NFTs will be digital identity is pretty obvious; we don't know WHO will be used by whom for these tasks, but it's clear that this is what they'll be because they're the most functional choice we have in the trend toward rules as code. The problem is that the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent, so it's a gamble, but also a logical diversification in its own right as well.

The only highly uncertain element is the miners' ability to withstand long periods of loss.
by daveguy | 2026-02-01 00:09:54+00:00
I didn't say AI as a software development doesn't have merit. I asked what production software was being produced from or predominantly with AI tools. I just see a lot more examples of "stop the slop" than I do of positive stories about AI being used to build something from scratch. I was hoping you had a concrete example in all of the hay. Are my expectations based on the hype too high?

That wasn't supposed to be an opportunity for you to get defensive, but an opportunity for you to show off awesome projects.
by benSaiyen | 2026-02-01 00:10:12+00:00
Too late. Outsourcing has already accomplished this.

No one is making cool shit for themselves. Everyone is held hostage ensuring Wall Street growth.

The "cross our fingers and hope for the best" position we find ourselves in politically is entirely due to labor capture.

The US benefited from a social network topology of small businesses. No single business being a lynch pin that would implode everything.

Now the economy is a handful of too big to fails eroding links between human nodes by capturing our agency.

I argued as hard as I could against shipping electronics manufacturing overseas so the next generation would learn real engineering skills. But 20 something me had no idea how far up the political tree the decision was made back then. I helped train a bunch of people's replacements before the telecom focused network hardware manufacturer I worked for then shut down.

American tech workers are now primarily cloud configurators and that's being automated away.

This is a decades long play on the part of aging leadership to ensure Americans feel their only choice is capitulate.

What are we going to do, start our own manufacturing business? Muricans are fish in a barrel.

And some pretty well connected people are hinting at similar sense of what's wrong: https://www.barchart.com/story/news/36862423/weve-done-our-c...
by sealeck | 2026-02-01 00:10:24+00:00
> Rust wasn’t designed for any specific platform

I suspect that Mozilla being the primary developer and sponsor for many years actually meant that compatibility with all major platforms was prioritised; Mozilla obviously care about stuff working on Windows, and run lots of builds on Windows + I imagine a number of Firefox developers (if not drive) at least own a Windows machine for testing Windows-specific stuff!

I call out Windows because I think generally software people go for Mac > Linux > Windows (although Mac > Linux may be slowly changing due to liquid glass).
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 00:10:36+00:00
A blanket dimsissal is a simple way to avoid dealing with complexity, here both in understanding the problem and forming solutions. Obviously not all newspapers are propaganda and at the same time not all can be trusted; not everything in the same newspaper or any other news source is of the same accuracy; nothing is completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy.

I think accepting that gets us to the starting line. Then we need to apply a lot of critical thought to sometimes difficult judgments.

IMHO quality newspapers do an excellent job - generally better than any other category of source on current affairs, but far from perfect. I remember a recent article for which they intervied over 100 people, got ahold of secret documents, read thousands of pages, consulted experts .... That's not a blog post or Twitter take, or even a HN comment :), but we still need to examine it critically to find the value and the flaws.
by written-beyond | 2026-02-01 00:10:45+00:00
You were confidently wrong for judging them to be confidently wrong

> While EMMA shows great promise, we recognize several of its challenges. EMMA's current limitations in processing long-term video sequences restricts its ability to reason about real-time driving scenarios — long-term memory would be crucial in enabling EMMA to anticipate and respond in complex evolving situations...

They're still in the process of researching it, noting in that post implies VLM are actively being used by those companies for anything in production.
by anematode | 2026-02-01 00:10:50+00:00
That makes a ton of sense and aligns with my observations. Thanks for the resource :)

If SSVE is slow, I was hoping that SME instructions could be used in a vector-like fashion (e.g. add two matrices with high throughput, or a Hadamard/element-wise product) but it seems most matrix accelerator ISAs don't have that.
by ethin | 2026-02-01 00:11:08+00:00
As someone who myself is legally blind, I am in no way justifying the use of AI like this. I was responding to the entire "let's all go back to actual paper-based tests/assignments" trope that was being trotted out on here. Sure, it (might) work, but it also disadvantages people like us, since most teachers can't read braille (at least, none of mine could).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-01 00:11:33+00:00
> Some images do overlap yes, but they are some of the most popular ones used and I wanted to demonstrate how they can be build as well. Half of them are only available through paid versions. I will be adding new images on regular basis, based on usage and impact.

This looks really good. Good luck for your project!

Also a quick question but when you mention Minimal being well.. Minimal? How much more minimal would it be compared to say alpine?

Also maybe I should stop saying so many times minimal in this comment haha!
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-01 00:11:48+00:00
Before crypto, don't forget the ProgrammableWeb and all the mashups that ensued, with programmableweb.com shutting down in 2023.

2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.progra...

Trustless Agents and the Agentic Economy is now in that cycle. Will it stick? Builders gotta build something.

2026: https://agentscan.info/

I am guessing this is sort of ProgrammableWeb 2.0.

Disintermediation is the common thread in all of this.

This whole thing about "Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app" surely that's going to irk people enough to create an alternative.

Will be interesting to see solutions arising for developers to monetize their open-source contributions. Pull Request = Push Demand so perhaps there should be a cost attached to that especially knowing that AI will eventually train on it.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-02-01 00:12:47+00:00
For the downvoters. See EO12333 2.4(b) & (c):

2.4 Collection Techniques...
These procedures shall not authorize:
...
(c) Physical surveillance of a United States
person in the United States by agencies
other than the FBI, except for:

(1) Physical surveillance of present or former
employees, present or former intelligence
agency contractors or their present or former
employees, or applicants for any such
employment or contracting; and

(2) Physical surveillance of a military person
employed by a nonintelligence element of a
military service.

This is written to look like it's constitutional but it's granting power through the wide-ranging exceptions. The upshot is it grants all agencies other than the FBI approval to surveil individuals covered by 2.4(c)1 & 2. The FBI gets a complete blank check on everyone. Covering "former employees" means this remains in effect until death for those affected.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu...
by Bender | 2026-02-01 00:12:48+00:00
Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

This has been the case since the e911 project in the 1990's and is mandatory. Prior to this I would reset the message waiting indicator on their phone continuously to see what cells and cell sectors they were moving through but that would basically just show what road or roads they may be on and what direction they are going very roughly. Assisting the FBI with tracking kidnappers or at least that is what they told me.

There are loads of other tags that can be set on someones phone. My favorites were priority override and caller-id blocking override. This was before SS7 spoofing was so prevalent.