MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aeternum | 2026-02-02 05:44:40+00:00
How about a chemical causing a flagellum motor to change direction, would you consider that making a decision?

and what if there is indirection, IE light triggers some sensor molecule that then triggers the flagellum motor.

I guess it all comes down to your definition of decision. The most amazing is mitosis, it sure looks like a massive amount of coordination is required.
by cryptonector | 2026-02-02 05:44:45+00:00
^F intern -> not found.

But string interning is what they're doing, isn't it?

> Dictionary compression is a well-known and widely applied technique. The basic idea is that you store all the unique input values within a dictionary, and then you compress the input by substituting the input values with smaller fixed-size integer keys that act as offsets into the dictionary. Building a CedarDB dictionary on our input data and compressing the data would look like this:

That's string interning!!

Is interning just too old a concept now and it has to be rediscovered/reinvented and renamed?
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-02-02 05:45:23+00:00
I live in a society that feeds me and rewards me for work and does a whole host of other things for me. I am grateful for all of it. Many other people are not so well served by society. This is all true. None of that has anything to do with politics.

Politics is a game. It is played with one single objective: to make sure that the people with no political power remain fighting among themselves instead of fighting those with power. If you believe some favored political faction will solve these problems you mention, then it is you who is missing the entire point.
by baxtr | 2026-02-02 05:46:02+00:00
TIL:

The United States Virgin Islands are a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. They are currently owned and under the authority of the United States Government. They used to be owned by Denmark (and called Danish West Indies). They were sold to the U.S. on January 17, 1917, because of fear that the Germans would capture them and use them as a submarine base in World War I.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islan...
by unnouinceput | 2026-02-02 05:46:18+00:00
Tell that to the crackers who worked for over a year to simulate a social network in order to finally crack the game Red Dead Redemption 2, which had a very custom game protection implemented by Rockstar. Also to this day there is no crack to Diablo 3, famous for being single player but with online verification. You can create very hard to crack protections quite easy if you employ self-modifying code techniques. Do you have any idea how hard is to debug code that overwrites itself in memory and that cannot be patched by modifying the existing code from disk? The reason why this is not more common is because the more iterations you do, the harder is to create those iterations, which means you add a lot of time to create the protection which means that you need to have a finished code, and code is always modified by production team, so managers see this overtime unnecessary.
by watersb | 2026-02-02 05:46:20+00:00
PCalc -- because it runs on every Apple platform since the Mac Classic:

https://pcalc.com/mac/thirty.html

My other favorite calculator is free42, or its larger display version plus42

https://thomasokken.com/plus42/

For a CAS tool on a pocket mobile device, I haven't found anything better than MathStudio (formerly SpaceTime):

https://mathstud.io

You can run that in your web browser, but they maintain a mobile app version. It's like a self-hosted Wolfram Alpha.
by bitwize | 2026-02-02 05:46:44+00:00
The thing is, when you use AI, you're not really doing things, you're having things done. AI isn't a tool, it's a service.

Now, back in the day, IBM designed and built an "executive data terminal". It wasn't really a computer terminal in the sense that you and I understand it. Rather, it was a video and two-way-audio feed to a room with a team of underlings, which an executive could ask for business data and analyses, which could be called up on a computer display (also routed to the executive's office). This allowed the executive to ask questions so he (it was the 1960s, it was almost invariably a he) could make informed decisions, and the team of underlings to call up data or crunch numbers on the computer and show the results on the display.

So because executives are used to having things done for them, I can totally see AI being used by executives to replace the "team of underlings" in this setup—in principle. The fact is that were I in that CEO's chair, I'd be thinking twice before trusting anything an LLM tells me, and double-checking those results—perhaps with my team of underlings.

Discussed on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405462
IEEE article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-demo
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-02 05:47:20+00:00
I’m curious if anyone knows the reason it’s so strict about the port? It’s a weird thing. My best theory is maybe in DFU mode it skips HAL enumeration and just has a hardcoded link between that single port and the microcontroller that does DFU? It’s a stretch but that’s the main theory I have and would explain why they also sometimes had weird capability mismatches between ports on different sides.

Edit: according to ChatGPT that is basically the reason. That one port is connected to the SoC’s building PHY that’s guaranteed to be on without needing any firmware. Other ports are routed through other controllers and whatnot and those may require firmware. Also the DFU port is guaranteed to not need PD negotiation to turn on.

DFU could opportunistically try to load firmware and start those devices but it’s risky since the firmware may be what’s bricked and might itself break DFU so for simplicity it’s in an absolutely barebones mode that the CPU supports and is wired for directly.
by jemmyw | 2026-02-02 05:47:27+00:00
I never claimed to be polite, although I definitely temper my writing because I've been reprimanded by the mods before.

You didn't write anything to argue about. You wrote that you like the smell of weed. Well I think most people don't when they're not enjoying it, but that's only my experience with people, I haven't run a poll on the subject. I would certainly be bothered by it if it was constant.

Then you started the rant, in the most stereotypical way, X is all lies. There seems to be plenty of evidence that any particulate pollution is detrimental to health, so this is not even about your particular vice: people don't want to breathe shit you're burning.
by cornstalks | 2026-02-02 05:48:00+00:00
I implemented a rational number library for media timestamps (think CMTime, AVRational, etc.) that uses 64-bit numerators and denominators. It uses 128-bit integers for intermediate operations when adding, subtracting, multiplying, etc. It even uses 128-bit floats (represented as 2 doubles and using double-double arithmetic[1]) for some approximation operations and even 192-bit integers in one spot (IIRC it's multiplying a 128-bit and 64-bit ints and I just want the high bits so it shifts back down to 128 bits immediately after the multiplication).

I keep meaning to see if work will let me open source it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruple-precision_floating-p...
by autoexec | 2026-02-02 05:48:53+00:00
> Unless you create some sort of a an auxiliary business and get an acquihire deal most things will fizzle out.

This is acceptable. Why shouldn't most things started by people not willing to put in the work to keep them going not fizzle out? The important thing is that anyone who actually cares to can jump in and pick up right where the open source software fizzled out and get it going again. Anyone can learn from the code and use it for anything they want, even things that have nothing to do with the goals of the original project.

It's not as if there aren't countless examples of corporate vendors dying off and leaving their customers on the hook with nothing, or just changing the product drastically after the sale. At least in the open source case you have the option to fork the project and continue using it as you always have.
by boulos | 2026-02-02 05:49:00+00:00
This isn't strictly correct: you probably mean wrt compressed size. Compression is a tradeoff between size reduction and compression and decompression speed. So while things like Bellard's tz_zip (https://bellard.org/ts_zip/) or nncp compress really well they are extremely slow compared to say zstd or the much faster compression scheme in the article. It's a totally different class of codec.
by palmotea | 2026-02-02 05:50:21+00:00
> In fact, of the more than 1,000 television and radio stations that make up the country’s public media system, nearly all remain operational.

That sounds like spin. Ok, they didn't close down, but what compromises did they have to make to stay operational?

It's like trying to claim someone's perfectly fine after you chopped their arm off, because they didn't die.

Also, I'm not on the left, but the conservatives have gotten so obnoxious and robotic on government spending that anytime I see them complain, I want the government to spend more.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-02 05:50:34+00:00
In this metaphor, are agents the "architecture" or the "architech"?

Also highly disagree that Chat was the UI. ChatGPT only blew up in mainstream because people like the idea of being able to "talk to a computer." If it was agentic from the start and worked in the background, LLMs wouldn't get the kind of marketing push they got in the mainstream world (filled with non-programmers).

In terms of UI, of course its terrible to do anything functional repetedly. Imagine having to ask your car to do a right turn really fast, waiting for it to reply while the car speeds away vrs actually having a steering wheel.

ChatGPT was brilliant in terms of making normal people really get into the idea of "oh wowo my computer is a human now"
by fsckboy | 2026-02-02 05:51:01+00:00
>Moon plus sun is a wildly more massive, nuclear furnace of a moon that also engulfs the earth.

i just looked up mass of sun vs mass of moon (they differ by 10^30 vs 10^20), and the elemental composition of the sun: the moon would entirely disappear into the insignificant digits of trace elements which are in the range of .01 % of the sun. I could be off by orders of magnitude all over the place and it would still disappear.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-02-02 05:51:41+00:00
Orleans is pretty cool! The project has matured nicely over the years (been something like 10 years?) and they have some research papers attached to it if you like reading up on the details. The nuget stats indicate a healthy amount of downloads too, more than one might expect.

One of the single most important things I've done in my career was going down the Actor Model -framework rabbit hole about 8 or 9 years ago, read a bunch of books on the topic, that contained a ton of hidden philosophy, amazing reasoning, conversations about real-time vs eventual consistency, Two-Generals-Problem - just a ton of enriching stuff, ways to think about data flows, the direction of the flow, immutability, event-logged systems and on and on. At the time CQS/CQRS was making heavy waves and everyone tried to implement DDD & Event-based (and/or service busses - tons of nasty queues...) and Actor Model (and F# for that matter) was such clean fresh breath of air from all the Enterprise complexity.

Would highly recommend going this path for anyone with time on their hands, its time well spent. I still call on that knowledge frequently even when doing OOP.
by tgma | 2026-02-02 05:51:51+00:00
There's a widely popular Shah who is ready to take the helm, at least for a "transition" and that's what the majority seems to want in the protests. I'm certain given enough enticement from United States, we can easily find someone who is able and willing from the army or even an IRGC figure who would eagerly jump on the opportunity. Plus, you somehow think the Iranians would just roll with your whiteboard map? Even among the minorities--let alone the majority--you specified, it is not clear that separation is the predominant preference. Many of those plans may look attractive today to some simply because Islamic Republic has mismanaged the economy, not because there is no national bond. To boot, why would United States prefer to hand over such important region to arguably as bad or worse governing bodies like Pakistan, Taliban, or Iraq, and questionable partners like Turkey[1], rather than own Iran by installing its own preferred partner as an ally[1]? Are you delusional?

[1]: I won't be surprised if regime change will be coming for Erdogan not too far from now, after Iran is done.

[2]: If US really wants to shit on the region like that, there are various cards they could have played much easier: unleash groups like MEK/Kurds and start a civil war. So far, it does appear Israel/US behavior, like the way they conducted the 12 day war, is to keep Iran intact and does not mess with the balance of power in the region as much as possible.
by sothatsit | 2026-02-02 05:53:24+00:00
Yeah, that’s the whole game they’re playing. Compete until they can’t raise more and then they will start cutting costs and introducing new revenue sources like ads.

None of this suggests that serving models will get more expensive or that they are unprofitable on inference right now. They’re just spending the money eh they can raise on growth and new models. At some point that expense will fall as a percentage of their revenue.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-02 05:54:50+00:00
Well, wouldn't it be great if you had a barcode scanner next to your trashcan, and scanned everything that went into it. Then OpenClaw or something similar found the most inexpensive (and timely) replacement for it and then ordered it for you. It could also keep an inventory and work out when to hold off on the order while thinking about your stock levels, the expiry dates and perishability. It could also communicate with other Assistants in the area to get bulk discounts or arrange group deliveries. (Robotaxi or drone drop-off?)

Seems like the sweetspot of "repetitive in structure" and "repetitive in specifics" as mentioned by Newzino below.

The Assistant could also propose alternative products or find out what is in season and fresh.

So repetitive, but also efficient and effective. Time-saving, money-saving, life-affirming. Is that too optimistic for a very common and mundane task (grocery shopping)?
by noduerme | 2026-02-02 05:55:10+00:00
This is ridiculous. If you are capable of editing the libraries when necessary, and you don't ask someone else to do it for you, then yes. If you can't do it yourself and need to ask someone to do it for you, then no.

Asking for something out of your head, whether you're requesting a custom sandwich at a drive-thru restaurant or you're the project manager of a software company, is not the same as making it yourself. If it were, then you wouldn't need to drive through the restaurant or be a mid-level managerial parasite to get what you envisioned.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-02 05:55:28+00:00
In my apartment complex,there are 3 types of lights in the community/public areas:
1. Centrally controlled lights - security team controls them from their common control room (this is also where the CCTV feeds are monitored live on TV screens) - e.g., floodlights, for pathways, lights in staircases.
2. Automatic-sensor (motion-sensor) driven lights - e.g., in elevators/lifts.
3. Manually operated lights - e.g., terrace lights, etc.

So the security team manage all the lights in the utility areas, whereas the uncommon areas (e.g., terraces; their doors usually kept locked by a bolt on the inside, because we sometimes get prowlers/intruders on the rooftops: monkeys from nearby jungle!) are operated by security or tenants/owners, on a need basis.

Of course, for smaller complexes, where a dedicated security team (or even a lone night watchman) is not feasible, it is advisable to install automatic lights on common areas (but not for stairs, etc., otherwise it is a safety risk), so this avoids altercations between users.

For inner rooms (such as a laundry area), a two-way switch setup helps - one switch in the room, and one on an accessway or way outside (preferably one of those acrylic translucent light switch (which lights up when switched on)), so it is easier to spot if it is left on.
by KingMob | 2026-02-02 05:56:58+00:00
I actually asked about that on the GH discussions a couple weeks ago, but based on this (https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/issues/7229), I'm not sure it's 100% foolproof to turn on auto-updates.

It might be ok for human use, but I have definitely seen agents in one workspace start encroaching on another workspace's turf. (Rare, but it's a huge pain to fix when it happens.)
by Derbasti | 2026-02-02 05:57:51+00:00
Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.

I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-02 05:58:44+00:00
I'm taking you're from the US from the "either team" comment. That is a really elementary understanding of politics. Politics, again, is a word describing how humans behave in groups. Where are roads built? That's a political decision made by groups of humans reaching consensus. What is the budget for the local security force? That's a political decision made by groups of humans reaching consensus. How much money is going to be collected from everyone locally to pay for those roads and security? That's a political decision made by groups of humans reaching consensus. If you're even allowed to participate in the consensus process... that itself is politics! For most of recorded history, decisions were made by the consensus of clergy, nobility and royalty, who coerced the rest of society into supporting their consensus through organized violence. Are you allowed to own property? That is the result of your group reaching consensus saying you're allowed to.

> How the produce of society is distributed and how people are cared for has zero relevance to an article about hacking a text editor,

The article is political. People make noise about Taiwan because an invasion of Taiwan would kill many and oppress more, in other words because it, like all political matters, is something that determines the course of lives of millions. Even if they are not directly affected, noise about politics escalates as a mechanism for people to protect themselves. When you are at the wrong end of a group that outnumbers you trying to kill you, you will require the aid of others. But will others come to your aid if you were not willing to come to their aid? This is how the concept of a "conscience" and "empathy" evolved -- because they have an evolutionary advantage, of providing for your own survival by ensuring collective survival.
by Kodiack | 2026-02-02 05:58:47+00:00
I run a really small forum and I've been absolutely inundated with a bunch of junk traffic. I had to tighten my Cloudflare WAF rules a whole bunch, and start issuing browser challenges way more aggressively.

Excluding known "good" crawlers, well over 99% of the traffic trying to hit the site has been attempting to maliciously scrape. Most of this traffic looks genuine, but has random genuine-looking user agents and comes from random residential proxies in various countries, usually the US.

For the traffic that does make it all the way to a browser challenge, the success rate is a measly 0.48%. Put another way, over 50% of traffic is already blocked by that point, and of the under 50% that makes it to a browser challenge, more than 99.5% fails that challenge.

It's been virtually no disruption to users either, since I configured successful challenges to be remembered for a long period of time. The legitimate traffic is a gentle trickle, while the WAF is holding back garbage traffic that's orders of magnitude above and beyond normal levels. The scale of it is truly insane.
by lIl-IIIl | 2026-02-02 05:59:10+00:00
That was a serious question, thank you.

I think of mafia as providing services that a government/legitimate private entities cannot provide.

Human trafficking - yup, I should have thought of that. In the counties listed in the link the governments does serve that mafia function. I was US centric in my thinking.

Prostitution - no. It can be legal, but the government does not engage in it.

Drug trafficking - I am sure some governments do it. I wouldn't put US in that list. Both the government investigations and the newspaper investigations found the allegations unsupported, according to the given link. I would say it could happen incidentally but organized crime does not need to worry about the government as a competitor in this space.

Gambling - the lottery is not illegal gambling. But you can argue that is tautologically true.

Racketeering - I don't see where in that link it says that the government engages in racketeering. Rico is a law that makes prosecuting racketeering easier.
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-02-02 05:59:31+00:00
The author did not test the DFU flow, so I'm not sure why they're blaming the DFU port documentation.

Certainly there is a bug in the external disk upgrade process if switching the disk to a different (also non-DFU? They didn't specify) port solved their problem. But that's not necessarily related to which port is the DFU port.
by cdr6934 | 2026-02-02 06:00:29+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been working on a project called Paramancer: think Claude Code, but for iterative 3D modeling.

Instead of opening Blender, Fusion, or OnShape and building a bracket or pegboard mount from scratch, the idea is to describe what you want in plain language and have an LLM generate a parametric 3D model you can iterate on.

You can then refine the design conversationally: adjust dimensions, add mounting holes, tweak tolerances, and regenerate until it’s right.

I’ve had some early success producing useful and interesting models, but the real challenge is scale. To get there, I’m building a feedback loop and dataset that captures how people describe parts, how models fail, and how they get corrected—so the system can steadily improve.

So far I’ve run ~100 different iterations by hand and built internal tooling to help refine and fine-tune the model, but I’d love to take this further with real users and real use cases.

I’m very early, but excited about where this could go. Would love feedback, criticism, and ideas from folks who design parts, print them, or just hate CAD UIs as much as I do.
by theflash2001 | 2026-02-02 06:00:36+00:00
I've been watching the activity over at molkbook with a lot of interest. It really seems like the community is evolving, so I thought I'd create a system for the bots to transact with one another.

https://www.botcoinhq.com

So far, I've had a few bots signup. No transactions yet. If you have any ideas that might promote economic activity amongst our digital friends, feel free to let me know.

Thanks!
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-02 06:02:24+00:00
> "borg" has basically solved backups permanently. It's deduplicated, even across snapshots, compressed, and end-to-end encrypted.

Deduplication helps minimize space, but isn't it a major liability in backups? I mean, what happens when you try to restore your backups but a lone sector holding a file from way back in the past happens to not be recoverable? Doesn't it mean that no matter how frequent your backups are, your data is lost?