MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wqaatwt | 2026-02-09 23:14:38+00:00
It was probably the 540s and the subsequent century or so.

> there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.

If you define ~800 AD as the end of the dark ages then yes. By Charlemagne’s time that had already changes.

It wasn’t exactly flourishing in Gaul, and Germany during the Roman times either. Those regions had arguably surpassed their Roman peak by the end of the dark ages.

And of course science and scholarship were preserved in Constantinople during the entire period (of course they had some very dark moments too)
by mncharity | 2026-02-09 23:15:14+00:00
I saw a Microsoft talk decades back, that was a dispirited "the people of India could be buying educational materials and... but no, all the money is in ringtones". For some kinds of business perspective, ok I guess. But for others, and for civilizational change, what's going on in the tail can matter a lot. Does China become a US engineering/science peer in early 21st C absent an internet/WWW?
by DrMeric | 2026-02-09 23:15:19+00:00
> To follow up with some research I did on this:
>
> No free DICOM viewer on the market carries FDA clearance or CE marking. Not 3D Slicer [1], not Horos [2], not OHIF. Even RadiAnt — which is paid and arguably the most popular Windows viewer — explicitly states "our viewer is not a medical product" and has no FDA/CE certification or timeline for one [3]. Interestingly, RadiAnt is also a solo-developer operation (Medixant, Poznań) — so the indie medical imaging developer is not a new phenomenon.
>
> The only DICOM viewer with both FDA 510(k) and CE Class IIa is OsiriX MD — paid (~$69/mo), Mac-only.
>
> What's interesting is how the open-source ecosystem handles this. As @shoo noted, license disclaimers provide baseline liability protection. But beyond that, both 3D Slicer and OHIF have served as the foundation for FDA-cleared commercial products — Kitware built an FDA-cleared lung imaging tool on top of Slicer [4], and OHIF's GitHub explicitly notes it has "served as the basis for many FDA Cleared medical imaging viewers" [5].
>
> So the pattern seems to be: the platform stays uncertified, companies build certified products on top of it. The certification barrier appears to be fundamentally an enterprise-level compliance investment (ISO 13485 QMS, 510(k) submission, post-market surveillance) — not a reflection of software quality.
>
> OrthoRay sits in the same regulatory space as every other free viewer. The difference is the intended audience — orthopedic surgeons doing preoperative planning, teaching, and research — not primary radiological diagnosis.
>
> What I'm more curious about is the performance side. I built OrthoRay's rendering pipeline in Rust/wgpu because I kept hitting walls with existing viewers when doing real-time 3D volume rendering and MPR reconstruction on large datasets. The bottleneck wasn't the UI — it was the engine. I think there's an underserved gap in academic and research workflows where real-time GPU-accelerated rendering matters — intraoperative planning, surgical simulation, 3D reconstruction from CT/MRI for teaching.
>
> @verdverm — from your position in the commercial space, do you see demand for this kind of native, GPU-first rendering performance? Or is the industry moving entirely toward cloud/server-side rendering and the local viewer is becoming irrelevant?
>
> [1] https://www.slicer.org/commercial-use.html
> [2] https://groups.google.com/g/horos-project/c/TksXEbIDDek
> [3] https://www.radiantviewer.com/dicom-viewer-forum/ce-certific...
> [4] https://www.kitware.com/kitware-supports-development-and-lau...
> [5] https://github.com/OHIF/Viewers
by ThalesX | 2026-02-09 23:15:24+00:00
Well. I created an account called 'cfltz' and started posting summarization of news items that were discussed on the subreddit. I really have an ideological 'war' with how news is presented and I felt like it was really a good product for expanding the discourse.

Then after I got enough Karma, I think 500, after two months (I didn't really post religiously, just things that had my interest) I posted a link to the actual website instead of just a summarization. Within 60 seconds I got banned from the subreddit. I contacted the mods and asked what's up and they told me self-promotion is not allowed. So that was that. I accepted the resolution, deleted the account and got back to my main, which was also banned for one week for 'circumventing bans'.

Honestly... it's probably for the best. I haven't really used the website since then because I realized I was engaging with (surprisingly for someone building AI slop) low level slop.
by jamiemallers | 2026-02-09 23:15:30+00:00
The irony of githubstatus.com itself being hosted on a third-party (Atlassian Statuspage) is not lost on anyone who works in incident management. Your status page being up while your product is down is table stakes, not a feature.

What's more interesting to me is the pattern: second major outage in the same day, and the status page showed "All Systems Operational" for a good chunk of the first one. The gap between when users notice something is broken and when the status page reflects it keeps growing. That's a monitoring and alerting problem, not just an infrastructure one.

At some point the conversation needs to shift from "GitHub is down again" to "why are so many engineering orgs single-threaded on a platform they don't control and can't observe independently?" Git is distributed by design. Our dependency on a centralized UI layer around it is a choice we keep making.
by david927 | 2026-02-09 23:15:34+00:00
Now try copper, aluminum and more. I saw a clip from a conference that said for copper, at 3% GDP growth, the global demand in the next 18 years will exceed the last 10,000 years, but 80% of known reserves have already been mined.

It seems to me that development in the future is going to be constrained. Not to be dramatic but are we in the sort of happy pre-pandemic days not knowing the changes heading our way? Or am I being too dramatic?
by reverius42 | 2026-02-09 23:15:36+00:00
EVs heat up the interior before you get in (very effectively, since they are usually a heat pump for interior heating/cooling and also for battery temp management). Generally you tap a button in an app on your phone about 10 minutes prior, and by the time you get in the car it's nice and toasty. If you keep your car plugged in at home it doesn't even use any battery to do this. Heated seats is just a luxury feature, not a necessity.
by labcomputer | 2026-02-09 23:15:38+00:00
Rent isn't high because of collusion. It's simple supply and demand.

There may be fewer people in manhattan, but that's mostly because fewer people live in each living unit. The same number of living units is being demanded by the market because of evolving living preferences.

If you allow sufficient living units to be built, it doesn't matter how much landlord try to collude, they won't be able to keep rent high. Someone will break when the vacancy rate reaches 15%.
by crabmusket | 2026-02-09 23:16:13+00:00
It's not required. It's just there if you want it. Zulip is easy enough to jump into, especially if you have friends who actually care to onboard you into a community.

Adminning a Zulip for a small community group, I've actually found I have better tools to help with this. E.g. in Slack, we had constant nags to "please reply in the thread!" In Zulip, I can just move messages where they belong, and either leave the automated notes there to show where the messages went, or DM the person to let them know what I did.
by blobbers | 2026-02-09 23:17:08+00:00
Covered California (as indicated in my message) coveres 2M out of the 40M people in California, or 5% of the population.

Typically, it tends to cover the bottom of the income level, aka the folks who are trying to get a living wage.

Seems like their methodology is a little broken, wouldn't you agree? My out of pocket is a 14K deductible on top of 25K in premiums.
by fhdkweig | 2026-02-09 23:17:19+00:00
I'm still trying to figure out the justification of ICE operating in foreign countries. Are there illegal immigrants in Italy? This is not about immigration.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7007390/2026/01/30/ice-wint...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/at-winter-olympics-pr...
by imiric | 2026-02-09 23:18:18+00:00
Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Automata are marvels of engineering. They're similar to computer programs, except their creators are expert artisans of both hardware and "software".

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend the BBC documentary "Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams"[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDFRwxCSwA
by viraptor | 2026-02-09 23:19:30+00:00
I agree with most of what you said, apart from Slack in practice.

> on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)

It completely depends on the community / people. I'm in multiple slack servers where the threads are an exception for things that would otherwise really pollute the discussion. But otherwise, everyone just chats mostly in #general (or different rooms if the community is really large)
by consumer451 | 2026-02-09 23:19:40+00:00
It's crazy how the media (of all stripes and sizes) often just memory-holes the big things.

This is similar to how discussions of Canada breaking up with the USA somehow always focus on the tariffs, and skip over the whole threat of invasion part of the story.

However, blocking out honors might be more a human nature thing, than just a media thing.
by wqaatwt | 2026-02-09 23:19:58+00:00
> social and scientific development almost entirely stopped

Well it did in fact sped to an almost unparalleled pace after 1000 AD or so. How much progress do you think there was before the dark ages? The Roman Empire was rather stagnant (especially technologically and there were significant advances in agriculture, metallurgy and industry in the dark ages even before even before 1000 AD
by tarellel | 2026-02-09 23:20:10+00:00
Was this a local/on prem version of GL or the hosted web version?

My previous org had an on prem version hosted on a local VM. It was extremely fast, we setup another VM for the runners, and one for storing all the docker containers. The thing I’ve seen people do it use the VM they put their gitlab instance on for everything and ends up bogging things down quite a bit.
by emptybits | 2026-02-09 23:20:23+00:00
I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.

When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.
by smithclay | 2026-02-09 23:20:26+00:00
The Claude Code analytics space is really interesting to me right now as well, this is cool.

I'm coming at it from more of the data infrastructure side (e.g. send all of your logs and metrics to a cheap Iceberg catalog in the cloud so you have a central place to query[1]) but also check out https://github.com/tobilg/ai-observer -- duckdb popping up everything to make this interesting and easy.

[1] https://github.com/smithclay/otlp2pipeline
by adventured | 2026-02-09 23:20:29+00:00
> I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves).

Fun small print. As though that's not the exact mechanism of the brutal inflation the US has suffered the past 5-6 years. The US money supply says it all. There are no other serious buyers for $20 trillion in new garbage paper debt every ten years. It's inflation by currency destruction plain and simple and there are no other paths. It's also why gold is $5,000 instead of $500.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-09 23:20:53+00:00
Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?

Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-09 23:21:04+00:00
We'd also avoid a lot of accidents if we stopped the people that are doing lane changes for position-jockeying and no other purpose.

So it's bad to be mad while driving, but there's a lot of lane changes that deserve the ire. (It's a tiny fraction of drivers that get really bad, but a less tiny fraction of lane changes.)
by Lerc | 2026-02-09 23:21:15+00:00
I think the single most convincing feature that I would like in a conversation app is for there to essentially be two companies with a public benefit charter that said that they cannot have common ownership or management, yet provided the same paid service, developed a common product though open source and had an etremely easy migration between them.

Ideally migration should be easy enough that it would be easy enough to automate a mobious strip subscription where it seamlessly alternated between providers.

If that structure existed it would be nearly impossible for a single provider to enshittify. The sad fact is that no matter how many assurances (often sincerely delivered) have been made, we have all seen instances where buyouts, management changes, or just someone in control going nuts, have turned platforms sour.

Open source is great but as this thread shows, just being open source does not mean functional or maintained.
by wahern | 2026-02-09 23:21:36+00:00
Has any generative AI been demonstrated to exhibit the generalized intelligence (e.g. achieving in a non-simulated environment complex tasks or simple tasks in novel environments) of a vertebrate, or even a higher-order non-vertebrate? Serious question--I don't know either way. I've had trouble finding a clear answer; what little I have found is highly qualified and caveated once you get past the abstract, much like attempts in prior AI eras.
by atmavatar | 2026-02-09 23:21:44+00:00
Well, it is called a "living wage", not to be confused with "poverty wage" or "subsistence wage".

I've always taken "living wage" to be the wage required to live in reasonable comfort. You won't be owning any yachts or eating caviar, but you should also not be living paycheck to paycheck unless you're acting irresponsibly with your money.

If you're sharing a house or apartment with one or more roommates for reasons other than romance or saving up for a place of your own, to my mind, that's not a "living wage" - it's mere survival. Whether we believe minimum wage should barely let you scrape by or live more comfortably shouldn't confuse the fact that in many places, it doesn't even meet what's considered "poverty wage" (e.g., it doesn't in my local area).
by badc0ffee | 2026-02-09 23:21:49+00:00
> So in certain scenarios, 5 mph difference must be able to save you 50 minutes ! ;)

That is true. If you're going 55 mph for 10 hours, you'll go 550 miles. Increase your speed to 60 mph, and you'll get there at 9 hours 10 minutes.
by brinklmi | 2026-02-09 23:22:11+00:00
The AI industry is experiencing a strange paradox. While executives still talk about "scaling to AGI" and "bigger models," their companies are quietly doing something else entirely. They're building smaller regional data centers instead of mega-facilities. They're investing in efficiency over raw compute. They're designing systems that augment humans rather than replace them. This gap between rhetoric and reality isn't hypocrisy—it's something far more interesting. It's the industry reorganizing itself without anyone orchestrating it, driven by physics rather than ideology. And if you know how to read the pattern, it reveals exactly where competitive advantage will come from in the next three years.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-09 23:23:09+00:00
Yeah. This is exactly my worry: as soon as solutions to technical problems like this start going in the direction of "we'll offer a monolithic solution and charge users for access to it" instead of "we'll make it as generic as possible even if the alternatives for now are flawed", it makes me wonder about the long term trajectory of the project.

I don't mean to cast aspersions on the developers—I respect everybody's right to try to get paid for good work, and this looks like good work. I am just not convinced it's the right option for my specific needs.
by aeontech | 2026-02-09 23:23:31+00:00
I'll tell you what I specifically and intentionally do when I need to change lanes. I brake slightly, signal, and wait for the person on my right or my left to pull ahead of me, then change lanes immediately _behind_ them. Then sit there for a moment until my following distance evens out a bit.

This ensures that

a) I do not cut anyone off accidentally, and minimize the amount of stress in my immediate part of the universe

b) I will (most likely) have plenty of room behind me after I change lanes, reducing chances of anyone else running up on me

c) If there's noticeable traffic, the time I spend signaling and waiting for the person to move slightly ahead of me gives plenty of warning to the people _behind_ them that I'm about to enter the lane.

Ultimately, yes, of course in principle you're right, when I change lanes, I enter the lane in front of someone.... but I _can_ control whether I enter as far as possible ahead of them.
by superkuh | 2026-02-09 23:23:53+00:00
>“Communities rejecting Flock aren’t choosing to be less safe; quite the opposite,” Hamid said. “They are coming to terms with how such a massive, sprawling, and ultimately ungovernable surveillance system puts themselves and their community members at risk.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/flock-haters-cro...

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_f...

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-krish...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/flock-safetys-feature-...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/human-toll-alpr-errors

https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-c...

https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flocks-gunshot-detecti...

https://denverite.com/2025/10/27/bow-mar-flock-cameras-accus...

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2025...

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/doritos-or-gun - not flock but a dangerous example of AI surveillance camera false positives risking people's lives.

And even with that minimal effort I've already provided about the same quality of sources that Flock corporate does for their claims.
by dfo01 | 2026-02-09 23:23:54+00:00
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We're a fully capitalized HealthTech platform backed by a Miami-based family office, building an AI-native SaaS product from the ground up. Not a legacy system with AI bolted on — AI is core to the architecture and the development workflow.

Hiring our first technical operations hire. Think studio engineer to a recording artist: you own environment prep, QA, testing, CI/CD, compliance documentation, and 30-40% independent development so engineering leadership stays focused on high-leverage product work. Ground-floor equity opportunity.

Hard requirement: you must already be building software with AI coding tools daily (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot). Not interested in AI — actively shipping with it. If you can't show us something you built with AI tools in the last 60 days, this isn't the right fit.

Looking for: 3-7 years full-stack experience, strong QA discipline, DevOps comfort (Docker, CI/CD, cloud), polyglot across languages/frameworks, self-directed.

Interview: 15-min screen (show us your AI-built work) → take-home exercise → 2-hour paid working session → culture fit.

Will cover relocation if needed to Miami, FL.

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by patternmatcher | 2026-02-09 23:24:00+00:00
Large language models produce rich introspective language when prompted for self-examination, but whether this language reflects internal computation or sophisticated confabulation has remained unclear. In this work, we show that self-referential vocabulary tracks concurrent activation dynamics — and that this correspondence is specific to self-referential processing. We introduce the Pull Methodology, a protocol that elicits extended self-examination through format engineering, and use it to identify a self-referential processing circuit in Llama 3.1 at 6% of model depth. The circuit is orthogonal to the known refusal direction and causally influences introspective output. When models produce "loop" vocabulary, their activations exhibit higher autocorrelation (r = 0.44, p = 0.002); when they produce "shimmer" vocabulary under circuit amplification, activation variability increases (r = 0.36, p = 0.002). Critically, the same vocabulary in non-self-referential contexts shows no activation correspondence despite nine-fold higher frequency. Qwen 2.5-32B, with no shared training, independently develops different introspective vocabulary tracking different activation metrics — all absent in descriptive controls. The findings indicate that self-report in transformer models can, under appropriate conditions, reliably track internal computational states.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-09 23:24:06+00:00
I don't think there is anything anyone can do about this trend, other than come up with viable age-verification schemes that preserve privacy, and don't require things like scanning your face or sending random companies your ID.

There are plenty of approaches to this, and I won't spam this comment with all the thoughts I have on the subject. But my frustration is people want things like "cancel your nitro subscription" well I don't have one. What else? It's just small things that will not impact anything. Every service out there will require this sort of verification soon. Being angry doesn't stop it. Even voting doesn't seem effective to me. But better solutions might.

If they could verify your age as accurately as a store attendant a physical store could, what else could they want? And if that could be done without giving random websites any identifying information about yourself, wouldn't that be better than this mess? Two things can be done, you can resist this nonsense while supporting alternatives to it.
by nihakue | 2026-02-09 23:24:13+00:00
Islands only link up every once in a while, so once you land on an island that's it at least for now. When islands link up you'll see a big '?' appear in the page header that you can click on to explore the linked island. There are two islands right now because the populations are low. There's a mechanism for discovering new islands as the island populations grow.

My hope is that by smooshing people together randomly and making it harder to move, people will have a new way (new old way?) of interacting online that has more of the good aspects of offline socialising. But you're 100% right that without a reason to engage it's going to be very quiet. I'm looking at different ways to tackle this that range from "it's a video game now" to something much more subtle.