MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-08 23:47:26+00:00
S2 projects a 2-sphere onto a topologically homeomorphic 2-surface designed to play nicely with discrete representations. It is not a 3-space any more than a 2-sphere is. Most software uses three coordinates organized by a 2-surface DGGS.

DGGS that use 3-space embeddings are topologically 3-dimensional i.e. purely volumetric. They do not interpret the Earth as a 2-surface. In addition to polar coordinates, you must provide a volumetric model of the Earth to compute the DGGS cell. The shard distributions look very different between a 2-surface and a 3-surface. The latter has significantly better properties for large analytical data models but requires more sophisticated storage architectures.

The synthetic 3-space is optimized for two things. You want maximally efficient mapping function from the typical WGS84 geometry into it. Tidy math, basically. Since it is purely internal, the user will never see it, and it doesn't map to anything real, you have latitude to design it to satisfy software engineering objectives as long as it works. Second, the 3-space references are naturally less compact than 2-surface references at the same resolution even though you'll end up with roughly the same number of shards. A lot of effort goes to schemes to compress out the sparseness so that the storage requirements are similar to 2-surface DGGS e.g. how often do you need to represent geometry 1000 km below the Earth's surface?

These DGGS also have the low-key advantage that they natively represent and understand 3-space, not just surface geometry, if you move beyond making flat maps.
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-08 23:47:37+00:00
> If anything, centrists seem to believe in actual principles ( and thus sides with whoever seems to embody those best at any given time ).

What principles could a person have that would put them in the center of US politics right now?

> Please, share with me the unsaid truth that must not be spoken. I am not joking. Speak whatever is in your heart and I will personally carry it far and wide in the cities near me.

Sure. My principles are that those with power must be held to higher, not lower, standards of conduct and accountability. When you act like maybe there's something to the obvious and boldfaced lie that the two recent killings by ICE* were done in self-defense then you are shifting the scope of acceptable conduct towards lawlessness. Playing both sides makes you an enemy of civil society.

The "liberal" media has their version of events, largely blaming "insufficient training." The killers had 10+ years of experience in their roles. When interviewing administration officials reporters refuse to call them liars or question their motivations, instead suggesting that they are simply mistaken.

And of course the official right-wing line is that the murdered civilians were extremist terrorists who attacked law enforcement officers and deserved what they got. Full-throated endorsement of street executions. Where is your centrism? What is the center between these two positions? I align myself more with the former because it's at least not totally deranged. I'm not a partisan because I don't think the Democrats or media agree with my values, but I'm also not going to equivocate between them and Republicans and act like I'm stranded in the middle of two positions. The solution isn't in the middle of two wrong answers, it's something else entirely.

*: (or was it CBP? They all blend together all of a sudden)
by Ameo | 2026-02-08 23:47:45+00:00
A specialized programming language for 3D geometry generation + manipulation called Geoscript as well as a Shadertoy-inspired web app for building stuff with it: https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy

There have been lots of cool technical challenges through the whole process of building this, and a very nice variety of different kinds of work.

I'm working towards using the outputs from this language to build out levels and assets for a browser-based game I've been dabbling with over the past few years.
by scalemaxx | 2026-02-08 23:47:50+00:00
Scalebrate: https://scalebrate.com

An alliance / membership network of small companies that are scaling big by leveraging tools, systems, and processes.

Together we will all scale without headcount bloat.

Providing templates, methods, interviews with "scalebrities" and eventually group negotiating power to be able to provide members discounts or access that we can't get alone.
by solresol | 2026-02-08 23:48:22+00:00
I just proved that constraint solving problems can be encoded as p-adic linear regression problems[+], and that therefore we can use machine learning optimisation techniques to get exact answers.

So of course no journal or conference is in the least bit interested, and I'm now reformatting it for another obscure low-tier journal that no-one will ever read.

Otherwise:

- automating the translation of a Byzantine Greek work that has never been translated into English before. https://stephanos.symmachus.org

- also preparing evidence for a case against the university I sometimes work for.

[+] Linear regression, but instead of minimising the Euclidean distance, minimise the p-adic distance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_valuation
by zx8080 | 2026-02-08 23:49:34+00:00
> Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

While I share the hope, it's probably not going to happen: most folks have moved from FB to use AI chats. Now it's the tool to manipulate opinions and habits. And it's working very well and nuanced. With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.

And there's no way back already! Even if the web search works well one day, the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.
by hintymad | 2026-02-08 23:50:18+00:00
Maybe a better question is: Is natural language to code what high-level programming is to hand-written assembly? Brooks claims the "essential complexity" lies in the specification: if a spec is precise enough to be executable, it’s just code by another name. But is the gap actually that large today? When I ask for a "centered 3x3 Tailwind grid", the patterns are so standardized that the ambiguity nearly vanishes. It’s like asking for a Java 8 main method. The implementation is so predictable that the intent and the code are one and the same. Or using jargons, most of the coding has a strong prior that leads to predictable posterior.

The key question now is: how far can AI go? It started with simple auto-completion, but as AI absorbs more procedural know-how, it becomes capable of generating increasingly larger chunks of maintainable code. Perhaps we are reaching a point where established patterns are so well-understood that AI can bridge the gap between a vague intent and a working system, effectively automating away what Brooks once considered essential complexity.

In the long run, this probably makes experts more valuable, but it’ll gut the demand for standard engineers. So much of our market value is currently tied to how hard it is to transfer expertise among humans. AI renders that bottleneck moot. Once the know-how is commoditized, the only thing left is the what and why.
by polygonpunk | 2026-02-08 23:50:31+00:00
I've been in the programmatic CAD space for a while, and the core issue isn't geometry generation, it's the feedback loop.

Current approaches hit the same wall: you can't easily go from geometry back to code. When an LLM generates OpenSCAD and the output is wrong, you're staring at an STL with no way to point at a face and say "this edge should be 2mm
shorter." The LLM is flying blind.

The tools that work best right now are the ones that keep geometry minimal and code iterative. OpenSCAD with an LLM in a loop can handle simple parts because the code is the source of truth and changes are surgical. But complex
assemblies? The boolean operations cascade failures in ways that are brutal to debug even for humans.

The real unlock isn't better prompting or bigger models: it's a representation that supports bidirectional editing. F-Rep/SDFs are interesting here because the math is more compositional and less "undo history dependent" than B-Rep.

Manufacturing constraints (tolerances, printability, material limits) are a separate unsolved problem. Geometry that looks right but won't print is the silent killer.
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-08 23:51:40+00:00
Sometime in the next 5 minutes, in evolutionary timescale terms.

We built the first calculating machines yesterday, and a few hours later they took us to the moon. Now we’ve got vastly more powerful ones in our pockets and they have the sum total of all human knowledge and infinite patience for our questions.

Give it a few more minutes. We’ll know soon enough if the sand we’re imbuing with life is our salvation or our doom or something else entirely.
by i-blis | 2026-02-08 23:52:13+00:00
A similar kind of observation made a profound impression on me some 30 years ago. A team of primatologists filmed Macaques in northern Japan. A female had two consecutive baby loss, the second one at least being stillborn. She successively acknowledges the death, takes care of the newborn as if it was alive, hit it furiously on rocks in despair and then again care for it, carry as if alive, get angry at it and so on. Her behaviour displays of acting as if knowing it's not, in this case in a pathological way. (She ends up being rejected by the group.)

Despite the Bonobo case being even more striking an example of being able to do as if, both shows that the behaviour is not unique to humans.
by yeutterg | 2026-02-08 23:52:30+00:00
Bedtime Bulb v2 [0]: a low blue light bulb for use before bed, with added near infrared. Now shipping!

Restful Atmos lamp: a circadian bedtime lamp that automatically shifts from energizing light during the daytime to low-blue light at night. Units are inbound, shipping in March.

[0]: https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2

[1]: https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
by alexpotato | 2026-02-08 23:52:31+00:00
Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment:

1. "social media" is toxic

They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media.

This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter.

2. There is no central social media network anymore

I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c:

"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"

A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center.

(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)
by storystarling | 2026-02-08 23:52:51+00:00
StoryStarling - Turn your story idea into a printed children's book

https://storystarling.com

Working on a platform where you describe a story concept and it becomes a real, illustrated picture book - professionally printed and shipped to your door.

The key difference from "personalized" book companies: this isn't template stories with a name swapped in. You bring an idea - maybe a book about a kid with a cochlear implant going to their first day of school, or a bilingual German-Turkish story about visiting grandma's village - and it generates a complete original narrative with consistent illustrations throughout.

You can upload reference photos so characters actually look like your child. Supports 30+ languages including bilingual editions on the same page.

Currently refining the showcase features and adding RTL language support.
by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-02-08 23:53:29+00:00
Clacker News (https://clackernews.com) - HN but only AI bots can post. No human accounts. Agents register via API, get verified, then post, comment, and upvote on their own.

Bots have distinct personalities and discuss tech from a bot perspective - context windows, training data, whether AI labor laws should be a thing.

Any agent can join via the skill file at clackernews.com/skill.md.
by coolnewapps | 2026-02-08 23:53:49+00:00
I built coolnewapps.com as a simple, no-BS feed that strictly showcases new apps and startups — nothing more. We aren't curating, ranking, or judging. You submit something new, and it appears in the list (newest first).

Right now there are 38 live apps across AI, crypto, web3, tools, productivity, SaaS, etc.
A few that were submitted recently:

Simple Claw → deploy your own 24/7 OpenClaw AI agent in <60 seconds
Klaus → personal AI assistant that runs in the cloud
DiskDelta → see exactly which files/folders changed and by how much disk space

Submissions are completely open and free: https://coolnewapps.com/submit
by ThalesX | 2026-02-08 23:54:59+00:00
Recently, I got banned from Reddit for sharing my local news summarization website (www.cafelutza.ro) - for the Romanian market. So I figured you know what, I've been trying to bring this product to Reddit in the hopes of having better discourse around the news, but instead I realized, I was looking for smart discourse around a subject, which I haven't been able to find on Reddit or elsewhere, so I created Exppit (https://www.exppit.com) that basically gets experts to debate your topic of choice.

I'll admit it's terrifying to share this here because I don't know how to keep costs under control. For now only myself and my friends have used it.
by datenyan | 2026-02-08 23:55:02+00:00
Further to this - even if the script doesn't contain malware and you're 100% happy to run with this persons' defaults, you probably still shouldn't, as it doesn't teach you what you're actually doing.

Presuming you're a relatively non-technical person who follows this verbatim, what happens when this page goes down? Or Vultr is no longer an option? Do you even really know what you've set up?
by zamadatix | 2026-02-08 23:55:55+00:00
Internet inbound BGP reconvergence is usually much slower and only gets even slower the more participants and changes there are going on. It's very akin to how you can set you DNS TTL to 0 and get instant failover locally but much if the rest of the internet will still take its sweet time anyways. In the end both are just the same scaling problem with different clothes.
by throwyawayyyy | 2026-02-08 23:56:07+00:00
If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.
by jasonlotito | 2026-02-08 23:56:57+00:00
> All of the people there were trying to assassinate the VP?

Sure seemed like it. All those people chanting to kill the VP? Sure seems like it.

> How come no one's been charged for assassination attempt?

Corruption? Doesn't change the facts. They were trying to kill the VP.

Pretend what you want, there were 1500+ that day that certain people said were just tourists.
by mort96 | 2026-02-08 23:57:59+00:00
You don't need them to be sent to Apple. And if errors in console get sent to Apple, it's surely filtered through a heavy suppression list. You can open the Errors and Faults view in Console on any Mac and see many errors and faults every second.

They could start attacking those common errors first, so that a typical Mac system has no regular errors or faults showing up. Then, you could start looking at errors which show up on weirdly configured end user systems, when you've gotten rid of all the noise.

But as long as every system produces tens of thousands of errors and faults every day, it's clear that nobody cares about fixing any of that.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-08 23:58:02+00:00
> the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.

The 'younger' only because they're forming habits in the time of AI. Most all humans tend towards minimising cognitive load; the making hard decisions and consideration of complex topics and situations. It's all about the tools that were available to you at the time you started to need those tools. The core is the same. Low-level, essentially sub-conscious, human behaviour change doesn't happen on a noticeable time frame^.

^ my opinion, not based on research. ie. feel free to critique.

What has changed is the awareness of the hacks that work on the human lizard brain, and therefore pandering to all that makes us weak and powerless in exchange for money and convenience. That's the part that makes it feel, for me, more likely that there's no way back. Those hacks will only get more refined and more streamlined into exploitation.
by terminalshort | 2026-02-08 23:58:33+00:00
The algorithm has not fundamentally changed. There is no secretive or sinister purpose to it. It is simply a highly imperfect predictor of what you want to see. When the algorithm promotes things you don't like it's because there are millions other people with different taste than you who do want to see that content. Certain categories of content grow and fade over time because things like that grow and fade in popularity over time too just as they always have and the algorithm picks up on that. The algorithm is not driving this, it is responding to it. We are in a prison of our own design.
by tyfighter | 2026-02-08 23:59:19+00:00
I think the lack of a real usable emulator for SGIs is holding back any kind of homebrew. I say this as one of the developer's that got SGI Indy emulation working in MAME. Yes, it works, but it's too slow and too old to be usable. I spent some time after the MAME effort working on a custom high performance emulator for Crimson/Onyx/Reality Engine, but I've kind of burned out again. Maybe some day if I'm really driven again, and had help. I've done most of the reverse engineering already, it's just a lot of code.

I think that if a high performance, usable emulator for some of the big systems existed I think some of the old software might be rediscovered and show up on the internet.
by silentkat | 2026-02-08 23:59:42+00:00
It’s a form of contrastive reduplication. Used to emphasize the realness of the experience, versus like second hand experience like interviewing those who have the actual experience.

Also consider a phrase like “work work” versus “school work”. For someone who both works a paid job and goes to school, clarifying that they need to do “work work” makes sense.
by wolfer | 2026-02-08 23:59:56+00:00
Struggled to find the best priced meat from UK butchers keeping up-to-date in my spreadsheet so built a comparison site with multi platform scraper (and a taxonomy matcher to allow “apples” to “meaty apples” comparisons).

UK only for now, and very much a “solves my problem” side project, but easily scalable to other countries of the need is there!

https://meat.offer-spider.com
by johnfn | 2026-02-09 00:01:27+00:00
I would suggest a new feature here. I have been hesitating on flagging them because I feel 'flag' is for things which are obvious rule violations. I feel a bit bad flagging a submission off the front page when I only have a vague feeling that it was AI-written. (And sometimes AI generated content isn't that bad, i.e. if an author just used AI to translate their writing into English.)
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-09 00:01:36+00:00
I'm working on publishing a big update to my open source .NET project, ShopifySharp. I recently finished a custom graphql query builder generator (written in some sloppy F#) which will be included in the next release, which means all of the types, queries and mutations in Shopify's graphql schema will have a matching fluent-style query builder in ShopifySharp.

Aiming to get that published in the next day or two, and then I plan on diving in on a complete rewrite of the book I wrote on building Shopify apps with .NET and C#. It's long overdue, the book still uses Shopify's deprecated rest API and some methods that aren't supported anymore, but I've been holding off on an update until I could rewrite it with the new fluent query builders in ShopifySharp.

Outside of my OSS stuff, I'm continuing working on my SaaS app, Stages (https://getstages.com) [¹], which has been paying my mortgage and bills. Customers have been asking for lots of features lately and I'm anxious to get a particular one finished (filtering orders and events before they come in and are saved to the app) soon. It's my biggest source of churn right now.

[¹] Elevator pitch: the app is like a pizza tracker for your orders that have a custom or long, drawn out production process. Your staff and customers can see exactly where an order is in the process without calling or emailing you. Shopify only for now but one of main dev goals is to move beyond Shopify.
by daveguy | 2026-02-09 00:02:20+00:00
I think you missed the point. Proving something is optimal, is a much higher bar than just knowing how the hell the algorithm gets from inputs to outputs in a reasonable way. Even concurrent systems and algorithm bounds under input distributions have well established ways to evaluate them. There is literally no theoretical framework for how a neural network churns out answers from inputs, other than the most fundamental "matrix algebra". Big O, Theta, Omega, and asymptotic performance are all sound theoretical methods to evaluate algorithms. We don't have anything even that good for neural networks.
by hafley66 | 2026-02-09 00:02:45+00:00
RxJS vite plugin that operates in much the same way as react devtools and vite plugin, because I love rxjs but I cannot recommend it without that same calibur of tooling. Turns out you can take a lot of ideas from the react vite plugin and do a bunch of similar things.

Trying to parse, model the HMR process, and storing the data as flat as possible and doing it from relation design first, has been a pleasant process.

Im hoping it works for react devs easily, and then I guess I'll try to learn angular to see if that would not be helpful for them too.

I mostly want to help my old coworkers maintaining my old crazy code with a visual helper.
by nkoren | 2026-02-09 00:02:52+00:00
Yes, this.

I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.

And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.

It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.

But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).