MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danparsonson | 2026-02-04 23:45:08+00:00
> Sure, but that's not enough.

You're right - a healthy dose of luck, 'right place, right time', is also needed. Plus the arrogance to assume that they deserve everything they want.

> You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)

Maybe you and I disagree on the definition of a genius; Ellison and Musk are of course smart, but there are very many smart people - that is also not sufficient, and 'genius' is not required. Elon Musk spends a lot of time arguing with random people on Twitter, and espouses some very dumb, and sometimes racist views. He's a good salesman (principally of himself), and possessed of huge self-confidence, but I don't see any evidence of genius. More like being born 3-0 up and convinced he'd scored a hat-trick, amplified by survivor bias; for every billionaire, there are thousands like them who just didn't get the right breaks.

Compare Elon and 'lawnmower' Larry to everyone's favourite genius, Einstein, and they're not even in the same league.
by mercutio2 | 2026-02-04 23:45:30+00:00
Yeah, the generosity of Anthropic is vastly less than OpenAI. Which is, itself, much less than Gemini (I've never paid Google a dime, I get hours of use out of gemini-cli every day). I run out of my weekly quota in 2-3 days, 5-hour quota in ~1 hour. And this is 1-2 tasks at a time, using Sonnet (Opus gets like 3 queries before I've used my quota).

Right now OpenAI is giving away fairly generous free credits to get people to try the macOS Codex client. And... it's quite good! Especially for free.

I've cancelled my Anthropic subscription...
by platevoltage | 2026-02-04 23:45:32+00:00
This looks really cool. I'm restoring an 80's SEGA candy cab with a CRT and have been trying to figure out the best way to most accurately utilize the 15khz display in it. I tried bit-banging from a Raspberry Pi's GPIO, but landed on using an AMD GPU with the capability outputting a usable signal. This also looks like something I want to toy around with.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-04 23:45:32+00:00
I think you meant commutative.

Attention also has some specific properties.

And sometimes results are just unexpected. Did you know that anything a Turing machine can do in t tome steps, a different Turing machine can do in O(sqrt(t log t)) memory cells? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44055347
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-04 23:45:54+00:00
Well yeah, you're using them as reference books. You wouldn't necessarily approach a textbook the same way, since the point there is to guide you through a series of lessons that gradually build on each other. Similarly for narrative works. Jumping into the middle of a nonlinear narrative entirely misses the intentional choices behind the structure, for example.

You can read how you want, of course. The consequence is sometimes simply that you close yourself off from other aspects of the medium. There aren't many aspects bigger than narrative structure, but that's your choice to make.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-04 23:46:02+00:00
You guys keep using services like Jira, Salesforce, Stripe, Datadog, etc. While those are definitely the biggest names, I don't think people are referring to those SaaS platforms as the ones they will replace or try to build an inhouse version of. It will be things like ETL pipeline services, data scraping services, maybe some internal analytics SaaS. The niche things that cost a lot because they’re in a sweet spot where only a few people need them, but no one used to have the resources to build them in-house. So, when the salesperson called and offered a perfect solution to their problem, they bought the service. Those are the ones that will be more targeted for in-house solutions.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-04 23:46:11+00:00
Are you an Apple fanboy?

I had to make a business decision for a fortune 20 company, and we did a test with Apple's M series on a 70B param model, and it was unusable.

There is a reason Nvidia is the highest valued company and Apple is not. We ended up picking a ~$12,000 computer with 2 A6000s.

I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of Apple user post-purchase remorse, or Apple astroturfing, but it was not usable. Sure I could get an answer to the prompt "1+1=" but it was unreasonable for anything beyond this.
by protocolture | 2026-02-04 23:46:19+00:00
> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.

I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.
by trhway | 2026-02-04 23:46:31+00:00
>Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.

Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
by iagooar | 2026-02-04 23:46:41+00:00
Polish has been written with Latin alphabet since the 13th century. And before it simply wasn't written.

Polish works with the Latin alphabet just fine.

"Do kraju tego, gdzie kruszynę chleba podnoszą z ziemi przez uszanowanie dla darów Nieba.... Tęskno mi, Panie..."

"Mimozami jesień się zaczyna, złotawa, krucha i miła. To ty, to ty jesteś ta dziewczyna, która do mnie na ulicę wychodziła."
by shimman | 2026-02-04 23:47:09+00:00
It's this one:

https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Cooking-No-Recipe-Recipes/...

Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.

I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.

Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)

Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.
by ps2026 | 2026-02-04 23:47:16+00:00
I see your point. My main goal with this was simplicity, not reductivism. I am not sure the average person wants to dive into the nuances of every poll just to participate (I do like it as an option though). I also don't want to exclude people because it is too complex or there are too many steps to contribute.

The binary choice can be polarizing. But it can also yield very interesting results. Since it is anonymous, you can vote exactly how you feel with zero repercussions. People might actually find they are not as alone as they think. It also might allow someone on one side to choose something on the other side they normally wouldn't in something more formal.

It is really hard to say at this point though as I don't have enough data to make real conclusions (and not sure I ever will with this type of anonymous voting). But I do find it interesting and there have been some pretty good discussions so far. People have been explaining their thoughts without any dissolution into personal attacks which is great.
by torginus | 2026-02-04 23:47:19+00:00
That made me remember that one time many years ago, when I had a friend who literally called me a wizard.. He was working as a shift manager at a call center, and one of his most difficult tasks he kept ranting about was scheduling employees, who were not the most consistent bunch, and had varied skillset, yet he had to meet very strict support availability requirements.

He kept ranting about what a b*tch of a problem that was, every time we went out drinking, and one day, something got into me, and thought there must be some software that can help with this.

Surely there was, and I set up a server with an online web UI where every employee could put in when they were able to work, and the software figured out how to assign timeslots to cover requirements.

I thought it was a nice exercise for me in learning to admininster a linux server, but when I showed it to my friend, he looked me in the eye and told me I a saved him a day of work every week, and called me a wizard :D

It occured to me, how naturally part of the programming profession is to make things in fixed amounts of time, that turn difficult and time consuming tasks a human needed to do into something that essentially just happens on its own.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-04 23:47:22+00:00
> Open models are trained more generically to work with "Any" tool. Closed models are specifically tuned with tools, that model provider wants them to work with (for example specific tools under claude code), and hence they perform better.

Some open models have specific training for defined tools (a notable example is OpenAI GPT-OSS and its "built in" tools for browser use and python execution (they are called built in tools, but they are really tool interfaces it is trained to use if made available.) And closed models are also trained to work with generic tools as well as their “built in” tools.
by iamleppert | 2026-02-04 23:47:25+00:00
Have you ever tried to contact their support?

The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.

Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.
by johanvts | 2026-02-04 23:47:56+00:00
I have, and as I have said to others the lightning network is not some magic that makes distributed PoW efficient, it just lets you conduct a bunch if transactions off chain and then record the end result. You could do that with fiat currency as well. BTC does one thing: lets users transact without possibility of double spending, without trusting any other users. Lightning network removes that last part, so you are just back to VISA/PayPal/Banks etc etc.
by Daishiman | 2026-02-04 23:48:05+00:00
Truly a massive disappointment.

So many intellectuals that appear to dedicate their lives to developing coherent and consistent models of how to think and how to act in this world, who nonetheless decided that conversing with a known child rapist is A-OK.

The only people I've seen who have come out ahead morally are Nassim Taleb and Norman Finkelstein.
WorkHourly tracking app for people who work with their hands
by bukhtin | 2026-02-04 23:48:17+00:00
I built an iOS app for service professionals - nannies, handymen, tutors, house cleaners, gardeners - people who juggle multiple clients with different rates and schedules.

WorkHourly tracks time per client, calculates earnings (including overtime), and generates PDF invoices. It works completely offline - no account, no server, everything stays on the phone.

https://WorkHourly.app
by janalsncm | 2026-02-04 23:48:21+00:00
Everything is a tradeoff, and different use cases require different tradeoffs:

Option A: this model

Option B: faster model, only 1 language

Option C: same size model, only 1 language but higher quality

My point is that option A isn’t always best.

And on the borrowed words bit, there’s no rule that we cannot add borrowed words into the vocab. But you don’t need the whole language. I know what deja voux means but I don’t speak French.
by codingdave | 2026-02-04 23:48:27+00:00
Re-indexing seem sub-optimal. I can't think of a use case where people care if the design changes. Even some content changes are not going to be interesting. Someone corrected a typo, updated punctuation, that kind of thing... such things are just noise if you are trying to react to content changes.

Your system needs to know not only what changed, but whether or not it matters. Splitting meaningful content from irrelevant noise is exceedingly important. If you know that, you do not need to re-index because you can diff only the meaningful content.

As far as the 100K URLs, each URL has between 200 and 1000 sub-pages beneath the top-level page. They all need to be periodically scanned for updates, while capturing that distinction of noise vs. meaningful change. I've actually got code that does the needed work - it is scaling it up to that level that I didn't want to take on.

I'm not sure what you mean by no browsers. My existing scraper uses headless browsers, in order to capture JavaScript-driven content and navigate through a SPA without having to re-load at every URL change. If you are not using even a headless browser, how are you getting dynamic content?
by pembrook | 2026-02-04 23:49:26+00:00
Definitely agree, this is the classic left/right contradiction that has always existed.

In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone braindead populist, it's a stalemate.

The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private actors represent a threat to populist power (this truth will be masked with religious claims of saving the poor and the environment however).

The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, generally for the same reason (central planners might kill the arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).

But central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything. Few Europeans would be okay with Brussels wielding this power, even though it would ultimately benefit them long term, imo.

What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-integration planners, but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.

I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.
by vel0city | 2026-02-04 23:50:06+00:00
> It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today

If you're just building solar panels and using batteries you don't need grid approval to build it and connect it to your own datacenter. The same is true if you're wanting to just use natural gas to a large extent, although you'll have more regulations regarding environmental emissions. But you'll get that when you're trying to get a million space launches approved as well.
by recursive | 2026-02-04 23:50:24+00:00
I don't know how to define sketchy. I believe you. I just don't know how to account for the difference in experience.

> In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant

I don't think I've ever seen anyone use a phone to pay at a restaurant. I think I generally see 95%+ pay with cards, the same way that "was" common. The rest is cash. Maybe I'm just not paying attention? I don't know.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-02-04 23:50:34+00:00
I have been using color eInk displays since Triton was still thing, and despite promises everywhere that each new generation of color display was miles better than the previous one, this has never been true, and when I compare my JetBook (eInk Triton and still running Windows CE!) with the Remarkable Paper Color, I sometimes think the colors _are actually more vivid on the JetBook_. (Not a very high bar). In comparisons with the PocketBook/Kaleido, Gallery definitely _loses_. The contrast also _still_ takes a huge hit in the Remarkable Paper compared to the 2, and TFA also points that, albeit it may have to do with the frontlight rather than Gallery (but who knows).

This is the level of improvement in eInk over 20 years.
by jujube3 | 2026-02-04 23:51:09+00:00
The strategies used to cool something in space are not going to work at all in the desert. The amount of solar power you'll get in the desert is orders of magnitude less, and intermittent. In the desert you will have to deal with rain, weather, and other parts of nature.

Elon has already built tons of data centers here on earth. He knows how to build them quickly. People even build them in tents these days.
by mingus88 | 2026-02-04 23:51:58+00:00
This has been endemic for a long time. I’ve always known folk who game the system, regardless of politics or demographics

The change I feel is that nobody even cares to be honorable any longer. There is no benefit, even culturally. As the article says, you’d have to be stupid not to do it. I’ve always tried to be honest idk

But laws don’t matter anymore. There is no shaming bad actors. It’s all blatantly out there and no consequences have been doled out so here we are.
by Flexz | 2026-02-04 23:52:55+00:00
Hi everyone
I’m building a small personal website that collects Minecraft content in one place.
It currently includes:

• Mods
• Resource Packs
• Modpacks
• Data Packs
• Server Plugins

The main idea is to keep things clean, simple, and safe — no misleading download buttons, clear version info, and basic install notes.
This is a personal project while I’m learning web development, so I’d really appreciate feedback or suggestions on what could be improved.

Thanks!
by archaeal | 2026-02-04 23:53:31+00:00
Hi HN! I'm a software engineer (25+ years) building this as a side project for my own family.

The idea came from a notebook we pass around at the dinner table - kids draw, parents write, grandma adds her own notes. It became the most valuable thing in our house.

Inklings takes that idea digital (but not really): family members send handwritten notes and drawings to each other, everything delivers once in the morning like mail (no infinite feed), and at the end of the month it all gets compiled and printed into a physical book.

The core constraints are intentional:

* Family circles only, no public anything

* Handwritten/drawn input only — no typing

* Morning delivery, not real-time

* No ads, no algorithms, no strangers

Stack: Next.js, Neon Postgres, Drizzle, Vercel. Running a waitlist with a referral bump system right now.

Would love feedback on the concept, the landing page, or the business model. Is "slow family social network that makes physical books" too niche, or is that the point?
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-04 23:53:33+00:00
- Electric motors were invented in 1827 and one of the first things the inventor did was a toy electric car in 1827. The first proper electric car was 1890, and they were popular as golf carts and milk floats through the 1900s. What they were lacking was good enough batteries. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle#History

- Reusable rockets have been a thing since the Space Shuttle in 1981, building on a 1969 plan for reusable space vehicles. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

- Autonomous cars: human chauffeurs and taxis (and trains) so we can be moved around without doing the driving, go back to the first cars. We haven't had the technology to build them (and arguably don't and won't have until we get near AGI).

- Data centers in space ... ???? Bueller? Bueller?

- Humanoid robots were seen in Fritz Lang's Metropolis film in 1927, they've always made sense. What doesn't make sense is lying about having built humanoid robots and then having to admit they were being remote controlled, cough Tesla.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
by iamleppert | 2026-02-04 23:53:45+00:00
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.

These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.

It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.
by Lanzaa | 2026-02-04 23:53:55+00:00
I think there are two key imperatives that lead to company "psychopathy".

The first imperative is a company must survive past its employees. A company is an explicit legal structure designed to survive past the initial people in the company. A company is _not_ the employees, it is what survives past the employees' employment.

The second imperative is the diffusion of responsibility. A company becomes the responsible party for actions taken, not individual employees. This is part of the reason we allow companies to survive past employees, because their obligations survive as well.

This leads to individual employees taking actions for the company against their own moral code for the good of the company.

See also The Corporation (2003 film) and Meditations On Moloch (2014)[0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
by subsection1h | 2026-02-04 23:54:25+00:00
> Never thought this would be something people actually take seriously

The author of the article has a bachelor's degree in economics[1], worked as a product manager (not a dev) and only started using GitHub[2] in 2025 when they were laid off[3].

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshoemaker000/

[2] https://github.com/benjaminshoemaker

[3] https://www.benshoemaker.us/about
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-04 23:55:28+00:00
Not the GP but the new Qwen-Coder-Next release feels like a step change, at 60 tokens per second on a single 96GB Blackwell. And that's at full 8-bit quantization and 256K context, which I wasn't sure was going to work at all.

It is probably enough to handle a lot of what people use the big-3 closed models for. Somewhat slower and somewhat dumber, granted, but still extraordinarily capable. It punches way above its weight class for an 80B model.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-02-04 23:55:39+00:00
The Paper Pro switched to AES like every other recent tablet out there instead of keeping the Wacom EMR, and it definitely takes a hit in almost every metric you can think of. Like accuracy, as TFA complains.

I frankly _cannot_ recommend the Paper Pro if you already have the 2. It is way too expensive for something that is almost a sidestep instead of an upgrade.