MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zdragnar | 2026-02-05 11:33:30+00:00
That's nice, but my response was to demonstrate that there are in fact people who think there's post petroleum industry, or at least desire it, not that none are foolish enough to stick around.

The original tax passed by the council, and overriding the mayor's veto was 90 times the current one at $452 a ton versus the current $5. The only reason for the drop was that the original couldn't possibly survive a challenge in court.

The environmental group celebrating the GAF closure is also real, and would likely celebrate Owens closing too.
by aforwardslash | 2026-02-05 11:34:41+00:00
But they should; cloud wont magically make the architecture scale. A competent CTO should know the limits of the platform, its called "load testing" or "stress testing"; scalability is independent of the provider. Cloud gives you a nicer interface to add resources, granted; but that"s it.

As a hear-say anecdote, thats why some startups have db servers with hundreds of gb of ram and dozens of cpus to run a workload that could be served from a 5 year old laptop.
by ThatPlayer | 2026-02-05 11:35:28+00:00
The Linux drivers for PS4/PS5 controllers actually do map the touchpad as a mouse by default. With clicking it mapped to mouse button left. Might have to manually load the drivers if the controller's USB vendor and product ID don't match Sony's.

For anything more complicated (or Windows), you'll probably need a remapper like Steam or sc-controller running.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-05 11:35:41+00:00
You can, but the results will be messy and sub-optimal compared to industrially produced cores.

I've done it for an inductor for which there wasn't a ready made core. It left me with something that sort-of worked but the grade was much lower than even the poorest commercial grade. To improve on that I would have had to invest a lot of money.

Here is an overview of the steps in commercial ferrite core production:

https://www.powerelectronicstalks.com/2018/11/ferrite-core-m...
by Ms-J | 2026-02-05 11:35:44+00:00
Stylometry works. I've seen it used it cases where the individual was identified from a group.

One thing that is telling about the Epstein case study is how long it has stayed in public view. Pizzagate, which involved more powerful people, was shut down faster than I've ever seen for anything else. I still remember and have archived the more extreme content it's sick.
by deaux | 2026-02-05 11:36:10+00:00
You're blaming the public for not caring about 200 irrelevant bankers going to jail for mostly other reasons (e.g. TARP fraud), when there's no reason for them to. There might as well have 0 bankers gone to jail. Getting pedantic about your definition of "bankers going to jail" being technically correct and the public's definition of "banker going to jail" being too specific, completely misses the point and serves nothing but to make you feel good. You well know what the public means, and that they're right about it.

This comment puts it well. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898199
by dist-epoch | 2026-02-05 11:38:19+00:00
Wirth was complaining about the bloated text editors of the time which used unfathomable amounts of memory - 4 MB.

Today the same argument is rehashed - it's outrageous that VS Code uses 1 GB of RAM, when Sublime Text works perfectly in a tiny 128 MB.

But notice that the tiny/optimized/good-behaviour of today, 128 MB, is 30 times larger than the outrageous decadent amount from Wirth's time.

If you told Wirth "hold my bear", my text-editor needs 128 MB he would just not comprehend such a concept, it would seem like you have no idea what numbers mean in programming.

I can't wait for the day when programmers 20 years from now will talk about the amazingly optimized editors of today - VS Code, which lived in a tiny 1 GB of RAM.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-05 11:38:42+00:00
There's no question that AI also part of the dynamic. Again it appears to be growing the economy on paper but that's just because the things it costs weren't and aren't measured.

Microsoft makes money on AI. If course every single one of their products now makes you want to tear your hair out by the roots while screaming, but there's no metric for Windows being unusable or for the massive wave of AI-assisted cheating sapping value from education and science...
by vidarh | 2026-02-05 11:38:47+00:00
Your product managers most likely are not reading your code. Your CEO is not. The vast majority of your company is unlikely to ever look at a line of code.

If the process becomes reliable enough, then there is no reason. For now, that still requires developers to pay attention for important projects, but there are also a lot of AI written tools I rely on day to day that I don't, because the opportunity cost of spending time reading them is lower than the cost of accepting the risk that they do something wrong.

There are also a whole lot of tools I do read thoroughly, because the risk profile is different.

But that category is getting smaller day by day, not just with model improvements, but with improved harnesses.
by bonesss | 2026-02-05 11:40:48+00:00
Not to mention data retention and upgrade management.

When an update script jacks up the guaranteed-to-be-robust vibed data setup in this first of a kind, one of a kind, singular installation… what then?

The pros have separate dev, test, QA, and prod environments. Immutable servers, NixOs, containers, git, and rollback options in orchestration frameworks. Why? Because uh-oh, oh-shit, say-what, no-you’re-kidding, oh-fuck, and oops are omnipresent.

MS Access was a great product with some scalability ceilings that took engineering to work past. MS Access solutions growing too big then imploding was a real concern that bit many departments. MS access was not dumping 15,000 LoC onto the laps of these non-developers and telling them they are hybrid spirit code warriors with next level hacking skills.

Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, SharePoint… there are legitimately better options out there for tiny-assed self-serving CRUD apps and cheap developer ecosystems. They’re not quite as fun, tho, and they don’t gas people up as well.
by eru | 2026-02-05 11:41:05+00:00
> 4 - Buy and colocate the hardware yourself – Certainly the cheapest option if you have the skills, scale, cap-ex, and if you plan to run the servers for at least 3-5 years.

Is it still the cheapest after you take into account that skills, scale, cap-ex and long term lock-in also have opportunity costs?
by stopbulying | 2026-02-05 11:41:37+00:00
The Power of Nightmares | Part 1: Baby It's Cold Outside | Adam Curtis F... https://youtube.com/watch?v=jxBbw13Y3Gc?t=32m54s :

> I don't believe anything in Team B was really true

> [...]

> Casey was convinced that there was a single, organized network of evil in the world, [...]
He found the proof he was looking for in a book called The Terror Network

The Power of Nightmares | Part 2 : The Phantom Victory | Adam Curtis Ful... https://youtube.com/watch?v=KolgBqJ95ug?t=6m16s re: Casey, Reagan, Bush, Wolfowitz and why we've spent trillions saving the world from such dastardly evil since Carter's record-setting low EJK term (which was affected by oil price shock)

The Power of Nightmares:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
Show HN: Vilberta: speech to speech/text chatbot
by graphitout | 2026-02-05 11:42:18+00:00
Vilberta is a speech-to-speech/text chatbot using a pipeline that combines voice acivity detector (VAD), speech recognition (ASR), a large language model (LLM), tool calling (via MCP) and text-to-speech (TTS). This is a standard pipeline. Initially, I was going for a more noval approach where a multi-modal LLM handled both speech recognition and LLM. But I found that the multimodal LLM struggled with certain capabilities like tool calling. So I ended up with VAD+ASR+LLM+TTS where I can configure model for each.

No echo cancellation, so you will need a headset.

"Not everything needs to be spoken" - this is the idea I wanted to capture with this project. It generates text for TTS (usually short) and displays relevant information on the screen (longer sections).

Few things I learned on the journey:

- collecting jargons from previous chats to the llm based asr system greatly improves its ability to handle jargons during transcription

- openrouter is awesome!

- end to end speech to speech systems aren't all that great once tool calling is involved. for any serious use case, tool calling will be involved. so it has to go through speech -> text, text processing, text -> speech anyhow.

- once you are serious about a project, Claude code will consume the weekly quota rather quickly. I neded up with opencode + kimi 2.5. 90% of the code is done by chatbots

Usable, tested vibe coded PRs are welcome!
Show HN: I built a lightweight CRM that runs in the browser
by misterpmacd | 2026-02-05 11:42:38+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been paying $50–$100/month for CRMs for a while, and over time I realized what I actually relied on day-to-day was embarrassingly simple: a clean pipeline view, basic contacts, and tasks. I liked tools like Pipedrive because the UI stayed out of the way, but the pricing never made sense for a single-seat, solo use case.

So I built Lifetime CRM. It’s a lightweight, keyboard-first CRM that runs locally in your browser. It focuses on pipelines, contacts, and follow-ups, stores all data on your machine (IndexedDB), works offline, and skips team features, automations, and dashboards I never used. I also added a “catch-up” mode inspired by Slack’s iOS catch-up view, to quickly review what’s changed since your last session without digging through everything. There’s a 7-day free trial (card required), and after that it’s a one-time purchase. No subscriptions.

For those who’ve tried multiple CRMs, I’m curious which features you actually come back to most in day-to-day use, and how you think about the tradeoff between a simple, owned tool versus a full-featured cloud CRM. Happy to answer questions or dig into technical details.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-05 11:42:56+00:00
> All of those big tech companies have willingly given in to Trump and his band of goons and are cooperating at a scale that dwarfs anything the Germans could have ever wished for.

This is dangerously ahistorical and an offensive trivialization of the scale of human suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime. Fascism as practiced by the NSDAP involved the total integration of the state, the legal system, industry, media, and civil society into a single coercive apparatus in service of a genocidal war. German corporations were not “cooperating”; they were subordinated, aligned, and legally compelled within a one-party totalitarian state.

Yes, we substantially disagree on a contentious policy question. That does not change historical fact, nor does it make claims like “dwarfs anything the Germans could have wished for” anything other than profound historical illiteracy.
by haritha-j | 2026-02-05 11:43:01+00:00
I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit.

The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.
by hasheddan | 2026-02-05 11:43:13+00:00
Author here -- thanks for the comments and feedback! I typically use the solder stripping technique as well when actually incorporating the inductor into a circuit. Interesting you should mention variable capacitors as I just went through the process of sourcing 5 of them (will be discussed in a future post) from Amazon, and not only were they expensive, but they also took significantly longer to ship than was originally estimated.

I am somewhat surprised that the small loops would pick up a meaningful amount of noise, though I suppose meaningful always depends on the use case and tolerances. Do you have any references for how significantly this can impact inductor performance? Or is the primary concern just the rubbing and potential shorts?

Despite ferrite core inductors and loopstick antennas being old, fairly well understood technology, I have found there to be very little in the way of hands-on experiments with tangible results available. I'm hoping to continue testing various techniques and posting about them -- you've already provided some great variations for me to test out!
by zihotki | 2026-02-05 11:43:15+00:00
It baffles me that the 8K is discussed without taking the screen size into consideration. 8K in 77 inch TV is not that much different from 4k in 50 inch TV if you focus on PPI. Such big TVs also require certain distance to be able to watch them. Good luck finding an apartment or house in EU where you can fit 77 inch tv to comfortably watch it.
by whywhywhywhy | 2026-02-05 11:44:13+00:00
Discontinuing is fine, the egregious part is not open sourcing it. Huge swathes of internet culture in terms of both story telling, animation and games is locked up in this system they have no interest in.

Either it has value and shouldn't be open sourced in which case why not keep developing it.

If it has no value whats the excuse not open source it as a sign of good will for artists and developers to invest time in your ecosystem, otherwise the message is "If you build with our apps and systems you will be locked out of your work forever when its an inconvenience for us, even if you're paying us hundreds a year"
by asim | 2026-02-05 11:44:17+00:00
We need a language and a transpiler. Honestly the LLM has many uses. Agents have many uses. And we are narrowing down how to make them deterministic and predictable for programming machines and software. But that also means we need something beyond natural language for the actual implementation. Yes we've moved a level up, but engineers are not product managers, so as much as we can define the scope and outline a project like a 2 week sprint using scrum or kanban, the reality is deterministic input for deterministic output is still the way to go. Just as compilers and higher level languages opened the doors to the next phase, the LLM manages this translation and compilation, but it's missing a sort of intermediary language, a format that's going to be much better processed and compiled directly down to machine code. We're talking about LLVM. Why are asking LLMs to write Go code or Python, when we could much better translate an intermediary language to something far more efficient and performant. So I think there's still work to be done.
by brimtown | 2026-02-05 11:46:19+00:00
This is wonderful. Consider decoupling the core from Emacs, or packaging in a way that doesn’t require it as heavily.

I’ve been doing my own exploration of terminal ASCII games via Dwarf Fortress instead of SimCity. I’ve learned that letting a coding agent play is an interesting way to get feedback as well :)

https://github.com/brimtown/claude-fortress
by krapp | 2026-02-05 11:46:39+00:00
Democrats are complicit as well. Don't let them off the hook by making the mistake of thinking they're simply weak.

Democrats engaged in the same cover-up and lies and sexual abuse as the Republicans wrt Epstein. Democrats supported ICE and the murder of immigrants and citizens. Democrats supported American imperialism, oligarchy and genocide.

The parties aren't the same. Would we have the same open chaos, violence and instability under a Harris regime? Probably not. Would they have released any of the Epstein files on their own? Also probably not. Voting for the lesser (or more restrained) evil is valid when no good option exists but make no mistake the Democrats are not really a principled opposition party. It's mostly kayfabe.
by in12parsecs | 2026-02-05 11:46:45+00:00
I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.

I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.

My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.

I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.

I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)

If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.

We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
by Ms-J | 2026-02-05 11:48:28+00:00
ICE will need to hit up Israel for that data.

Israeli companies are constantly working on spyware and advertising technologies.

Take a look at abominations such as the product Sherlock produced by Insanet:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/

https://cyberjustice.blog/2024/01/22/sherlock-the-terrifying...

There are loads of others.
by helloplanets | 2026-02-05 11:48:53+00:00
> Let's say your organization wants to add "dark mode" to your site. How does that happen? A site-wide feature usually requires several people to hash out the concerns and explore costs vs. benefits. Does the UI theming support dark mode already? Where will users go to toggle dark mode? What should the default be? If we change the background color we will need to swap the font colors. What about borders and dividers? What about images? What about the company blog, and the FAQ area, which look integrated but run on a different frontend? What about that third-party widget with a static white background?

Only one or two of those questions are actually related to programming. (Even though most developers wear multiple hats.) If an organization has the resources to have a six person meeting for adding dark mode, I'd sure hope at least one of them is a designer and knowledgeable on UX. Because most of those questions are ones that they should bring up and have an answer for.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-05 11:49:15+00:00
> 2008 was caused, in part, by the governments deciding many "banks" were "too big to fail".

Perhaps worth noting that Ben Bernanke, who was the chair of the Fed at the time, was/is one of the most top experts on Great Depression (it's the work he later won the Nobel Prize for). So as bad as the GFC was, Bernanke thought it could get really bad and pushed for measures that he probably thought would prevent another 1930s scenario.
by Ms-J | 2026-02-05 11:51:08+00:00
Here is another example of ICE directly working with Israeli Spyware companies.

"What Is ICE Doing With This Israeli Spyware Firm?"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/software/what-is-ice-do...

The abuse to us normal people has to stop before we really organize and fix things.
by jpfromlondon | 2026-02-05 11:52:16+00:00
In my career I've deployed close to 100 different saas products at enterprise level and can tell you that most of the current crop are slapped-together half-finished dross with a huge sales and marketing team.

In the time it takes to deploy semi-bespoke saas, or while waiting for the current licence term to expire it would be very easy to develop a more suitable and much cheaper product in-house, this was true before AI tools and doubly so now.
by compsciphd | 2026-02-05 11:52:34+00:00
I'd think 85" even at 8k wouldn't be that great for a productivity monitor.

it seems conventional wisdom (for good or bad) would say 32" at 1440p isn't that great for productivity and one wants a full 4k monitor at that size for productivity use, and 8k at 85" would be about the same pixel density of 1440p at 32"
by NekkoDroid | 2026-02-05 11:52:41+00:00
> To be honest I don't know why it's such an issue on Linux. Mac and Windows don't have this issue at all. Windows presumably because it doesn't over-commit memory

To be fair, my Windows system grinds to a halt (not really, but it becomes very noticably less responsive in basically anything) when JetBrains is installing an update (mind you I only have SSDs with all JetBrains stuff being on an NVMe). I don't know what JetBrains is doing, but it consistently makes itself noticable when it is updating.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-02-05 11:53:04+00:00
No, im not implying that all refugees are terrorists. Just pointing out the obvious outcome of terror: people flee to savety.

There are still terror orgs seeking to destabilize the region, like israel or ISIS. Besides the destruction, thats at least one reason why you wouldnt want to go back.

But why can they stay? Maybe a familiy -- a life -- is a reason to stay too. Why is "why dont they go back" your initial reaction? Why do i have to remind you about that human element of migration? Are you implying all refugees are terrorists? Or are you a racist?

Id really would like to see your mind rn. How it tries to spin the convo to "but they are illegal aliens". Such a pitty that even you cant see it.
by kimixa | 2026-02-05 11:54:01+00:00
Indeed, that seems unnecessarily complex for what is actually needed. I don't understand why the great grandparent comment seems to suggest it's an "unsolved" problem - as if grid-scale solar buildouts don't already have examples of things like motorized brushes on rails for exactly this already.

And it's always a numbers game - sure they're not /perfect/, but a few % efficiency loss is fine when it's competing against strapping every kilo of weight to tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen and firing it into space. How much "extra" headroom to buffer those losses would that equivalent cost pay for?

And solar panels in space degrade over time too - between 1-5% per year depending on coatings/protections.
by thinkharderdev | 2026-02-05 11:54:10+00:00
> Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup

I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.