MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taoji1994 | 2026-02-04 04:59:24+00:00
Appreciate the feedback — I’m mostly sharing a different angle, not disagreeing.

Many people can absolutely get a great headshot with a smartphone, and $300 is definitely on the high end, not the norm. I mentioned it mainly as an example of what I personally ran into, rather than a claim about average cost.

For me, the bigger motivation was avoiding the logistics and friction — lighting, backgrounds, retakes, and decision fatigue — especially when all I needed was one usable result.

That’s also why this is intentionally narrow in scope: predefined styles and outputs instead of open-ended prompting. For things like ID photos or short self-introduction videos, I’ve found some users prefer picking from a fixed set (e.g. Korean-style ID photos, US campus-style portraits) rather than starting from a blank prompt.

It’s not meant to replace ChatGPT, but to serve people who want a very specific outcome with minimal effort.
by adastra22 | 2026-02-04 04:59:26+00:00
> micro droplet technology

Intentionally causing Kessler Syndrome?

> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.
by skissane | 2026-02-04 04:59:28+00:00
> In many US jurisdictions, the county clerk is not responsible for checking to see if the person recording the transfer deed has the legal right to do so; that's up to other parties involved. But under the Torrens system you describe, it seems like the government land registry would have to do such a check in order to make the guarantee it makes. But how can it? It doesn't control or have access to things like wills in other jurisdictions that determine who has the legal right to take title to a property.

Commonly what happens-in legally complex situations, they’ll refuse to register the change in ownership; and then you have to challenge their refusal in the local jurisdiction’s courts-which are much better equipped to deal with complex legal issues, especially those involving interactions with foreign jurisdictions than the lands title registry is-and if you convince the court, they’ll order the registry to register the title change.

For deceased estates, they want to see an order from probate court telling them what to do before they do anything (if there is a will which nobody disputes, such an order is basically a formality). They don’t accept overseas court decisions; you need to apply to a local court asking for an order for the execution of the foreign judgement, and if the local court grants it, then the land registry will action it.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-04 05:00:08+00:00
skills are "just instructions in English" in any old format (as opposed to McPs, which have a lot more weirdness behind them).

A skill is essentially just a markdown file, containing whatever instructions you want, possibly linking to other markdown files and/or scripts to avoid context pollution.

What skills give you is autodiscovery. You need to somehow tell the agent that documentation exists and when it should be looked at, and that's exactly what the skills standard does. It's a standardized format for documentation that harnesses can automatically detect and inform agents about, without them having to do many useless calls on every single turn to see if there are any skills present.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-02-04 05:00:10+00:00
> you just need to host public tarballs of your source code.

Except now I can do it all on one place.

> public repo = public/open PRs, because that's how a vcs works.

No it’s not. A PR is not a feature of git the vcs, it’s a feature of GitHub the website.

> other have the right to make community corrections

No, others have the ability. They are not an unalienable right to do so. Likewise they don’t have a right on my GitHub repo.

You keep falling back to “because they can, they have a right to”, which I think is obviously incorrect.

And I disagree that this is similar to notes on Twitter. It is comments on YouTube or replies on Twitter; they are by and large used by people to add their opinion on the topic.
by Murskautuminen | 2026-02-04 05:00:57+00:00
I think for smaller software papers or ML learning on arxiv this might work. For larger papers on biomedical or hard-tech, I think it is much less likely. I struggle to keep up with BioRxiv.org as a medical professional, many articles would require 2 hours+ to confidently review as a professional and I would never trust a "public" review algorithm to necessarily do a great job. Larger, technically impressive multi-disciplinary papers with 20+ authors are basically impossible to review alone, you would like a few experts on the main methods to review it together in harmony.
by ericmay | 2026-02-04 05:01:27+00:00
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.

Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
by autoexec | 2026-02-04 05:01:56+00:00
> Why does that involve a home address?

Although it could, home addresses were just one example of personal data that Justin Sherman seems to want to have redacted in public records. Good luck getting anything useful out of an investigation without them. Imagine submitting a public records request and having all the information about the government workers involved redacted. A list of phone calls being made and received, but all the numbers blacked out. A bunch of emails with all the email and IP addresses scrubbed.

We've already got armed government employees wearing masks to hide their identity as they murder people in the streets, we don't need more laws limiting the ability of the public to know who government workers are or preventing them from being investigated. If someone doesn't want people to easily be able to look up basic information about them like their name, address, salary, position, hire date, etc. the solution is to stop accepting taxpayer money and work for the private sector. Civil servants should expect members of the public will have the ability to see those types of things.
by rohitshenoy | 2026-02-04 05:02:00+00:00
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Our engineering culture emphasizes speed, ownership, and autonomy. We are building at the forefront of scraping and AI and would love to meet if this sounds interesting to you.

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by arjie | 2026-02-04 05:02:04+00:00
This is great. I found out about Clickhouse's Play interface[0] through this. I added the top 100 to a personal transient blacklist so that I can first view comments without them. I wonder if I should do it with the whole top 1000.

One thing HN used to have was a karma/comment score on your profile. I'm currently at 3.68.

Of course that includes stories as well but I have a small fraction of karma from there. Cool!

0: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIDU3OTYvQ...
by buchanae | 2026-02-04 05:02:26+00:00
Hm, leveraging CloudKit is smart. I am fully assimilated into the Apple world.

I'm a little wary of something watching my clipboard, honestly. A lot of passwords and sensitive information goes through there.

Drag-and-drop into a menu bar icon is super clever though.

Well done. It might be a little more than I need, but I'm cheering you on nonetheless.
by lukeinator42 | 2026-02-04 05:02:50+00:00
This is an interesting article from a couple of days ago about tracking diy balloons long distance: https://spectrum.ieee.org/explore-stratosphere-diy-pico-ball.... Given the tracker can be built for $14 it might be worth it to test a version with just the custom hydrogen enclosure and tracker and see how far it gets.
by dmitrygr | 2026-02-04 05:03:54+00:00
>When people complain about protesters getting in the way and being noisy and generally being inconvenient, they are bemoaning effective protest. That's a constitutional right.

Since you did not exclude it, i will assume that by "being inconvenient" you mean all sorts of things done nowadays as parts of protests, like blocking roads and such... Thing is, it is not nearly as clear cut as you might think.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There has not yet been a SCOTUS test on whether impeding others' free movement is considered peaceably assembling. I expect we'll see such a test soon. You indeed do have a right to petition government, and assemble peaceably, it is not clear that you have a right to inconvenience unrelated persons whose only fault is living in the same town and trying to get to school to pick up their kids while you block a road.

Inconveniencing unrelated persons is not nearly as clearly legal as you seem to claim it to be.
by adastra22 | 2026-02-04 05:04:06+00:00
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
by nberkman | 2026-02-04 05:05:15+00:00
I get the concerns, but there's a flip side nobody's talking about: what about experienced developers who had years of ideas bottled up and never had the bandwidth?

I used to think open source was something I'd focus on when I retired. Instead I'm doing it now. I built Clippy (https://github.com/neilberkman/clippy) from scratch, a much better bcopy, that fixes a real gap in pbcopy, and it hit 200 stars and Homebrew core in seven months. Neither of these would exist without AI assisted development. My DocuSign Elixir SDK sat basically unchanged from 2021 to 2025, other than a few external contributions. I knew it needed a full migration of the OpenAI code gen layer, LiveBook examples and a million other tweaks. With coding agents I implemented everything useful I could imagine.

Am I the only one? There must be other devs out there resurrecting stale projects or shipping tools they never had time for.
by rc-1140 | 2026-02-04 05:05:18+00:00
I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they consider close to that level of perfection, that's when they say they're done.

While this may be an unfair generalization, and apologies to those who don't feel this way, but I believe STEM types like the OP are used to problem solving that's linear in the sense that the problem only exists in its field as something to be solved, and once they figure it out, they're done. The OP even described his mentality as that of a "Thinker" where he received a problem during his schooling, mulled over it for a long time, and eventually came to the answer. That's it, next problem to crack. Their whole lives revolve around this process and most have never considered anything outside it.

Even now, despite my own healthy skepticism of and distaste for AI, I am forced to respect that AI can do some things very fast. People like the OP, used to chiseling away at a problem for days, weeks, months, etc., now have that throughput time slashed. They're used to the notion of thinking long and hard about a very specific problem and finally having some output; now, code modules that are "good enough" can be cooked up in a few minutes, and if the module works the problem is solved and they need to find the next problem.

I think this is more common than most people want to admit, going back to grumblings of "gluing libraries together" being unsatisfying. The only suggestion I have for the OP is to expand what you think about. There are other comments in this thread supporting it but I think a sea change that AI is starting to bring for software folks is that we get to put more time towards enhancing module design, user experience, resolving tech debt, and so on. People being the ones writing code is still very important.

I think there's more to talk about where I do share the OP's yearning and fears (i.e., people who weren't voracious readers or English/literary majors being oneshot by the devil that is AI summaries, AI-assisted reading, etc.) but that's another story for another time.
by ratorx | 2026-02-04 05:05:52+00:00
I think it depends on the scope and level of solution I accept as “good”. I agree that often the thinking for the “next step” is too easy architecturally. But I still enjoy thinking about the global optimum or a “perfect system”, even it’s not immediately feasible, and can spend large amounts of time on this.

And then also there’s all the non-systems stuff - what is actually feasible, what’s most valuable etc. Less “fun”, but still lots of potential for thinking.

I guess my main point is there is still lots to think about even post-LLM, but the real challenge is making it as “fun” or as easily useful as it was pre-LLM.

I think local code architecture was a very easy domain for “optimality” that is actually tractable and the joy that comes with it, and LLMs are harmful to that, but I don’t think there’s nothing to replace it with.
by pclmulqdq | 2026-02-04 05:06:47+00:00
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.

In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).

Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.

All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.

This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.
by jewelryde | 2026-02-04 05:06:50+00:00
AI Headshot Generator is a web‑based SaaS built with a modern frontend framework, cloud hosting, and an AI image generation pipeline for face training and headshot rendering. It is designed for individuals, freelancers, and small teams who want consistent, professional headshots without booking studio sessions. There are several other AI headshot tools in the space, but this project focuses on a straightforward workflow, business‑ready styles, and making it easy for non‑technical users to get reliable results in just a few minutes.
by bhawks | 2026-02-04 05:07:29+00:00
The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 05:07:34+00:00
> Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB.

That doesn't conform to SI. It should be written as kB mB gB. Ambiguity will only arise when speaking.

> Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10.

Mass storage (kB) has its own context at this point, distinct from networking (kb/s) and general computing (KB).

> When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, ...

You aren't speaking but are rather working in writing. kb, kB, Kb, and KB refer to four different unit bit counts and there is absolutely zero ambiguity. The only question that might arise (depending on who you ask) is how to properly verbalize them.
by hn_acker | 2026-02-04 05:07:50+00:00
I think that the dilution of "terrorism" will not be very significant in the long term. I think of "terrorism" as describing certain actions that are almost "universally" bad, as with the more-easily-defined "murder". To whatever extent "terrorism" becomes diluted, people will want a less-diluted word (such as a new word) to describe most of the same actions or will continue using "terrorism" as they currently do toward a restricted target audience. If I strongly trust a certain speaker on issues that have been brought widespread attention by or have been highlighted by protests, violence, or terrorism, that particular speaker's usage of the word "terrorism" might not become very diluted if at all for me.
by keyle | 2026-02-04 05:07:50+00:00
I don't get it.

I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.

If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same.

But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!"

Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving!

We went from auto completing keywords, to auto completing symbols, to auto completing statements, to auto completing paragraphs, to auto completing entire features.

Because it happened so fast, people feel the need to rename programming every week. We either vibe coders now, or agentic coders or ... or just programmers hey. You know why? I write in C, I get machine code, I didn't write the machine code! It was all an abstraction!

Oh but it's not the same you say, it changes every time you ask. Yes, for now, it's still wonky and janky in places. It's just a stepping stone.

Just chill, it's programming. The tools just got even better.

You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.

We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.
by chii | 2026-02-04 05:07:58+00:00
> But history is littered with self-obsessed autocrats ruining a good thing.

i actually dont believe that china is heading towards autocratic rule. At least, the trajectory isn't indicative of such tbh. It's dictatorial - ala, the party's needs supersedes the needs of the population, but it doesn't make it autocratic imho.

On the other hand, the behaviour of trump and his goons, have shown more signs of autocratic behaviour than any in recent history in american gov't.
Show HN: A T-Spline Library
by dschroer | 2026-02-04 05:08:01+00:00
I have been interested in CAD and heard a lot of talk about BREP vs T-Splines. Especially after the patent expired in 2024. However I could not find good libraries or resources on it.

So I have started to build my own library with the data structure and algorithms for it. Still early days and full of bugs but it is starting to show its shape.
by helloplanets | 2026-02-04 05:08:36+00:00
And when programming with agentic tools, you need to actively push for the idea to not regress to the most obvious/average version. The amount of effort you need to expend on pushing the idea that deviates from the 'norm' (because it's novel), is actually comparable to the effort it takes to type something out by hand. Just two completely different types of effort.

There's an upside to this sort of effort too, though. You actually need to make it crystal clear what your idea is and what it is not, because of the continuous pushback from the agentic programming tool. The moment you stop pushing back, is the moment the LLM rolls over your project and more than likely destroys what was unique about your thing in the first place.
by Sparyjerry | 2026-02-04 05:09:04+00:00
Some claim launch costs are only at 2-4x the cost but they only have a few launches or are small rockets. On a per/kg basis at best the closest competitor in the US is ULA which claims about 3x the cost but only had 1 single launch in 2025, total payload launched was about 1/50th of Spacex's total payload launched. New Glenn has had zero commercial launches. SpaceX launched 5x the mass to orbit of all other US companies -combined-, easily 20x the cadence of any other company.
by buchanae | 2026-02-04 05:09:38+00:00
I haven't written about it much yet, but atlas9.dev has an infrastructure component to it. I actually spent most of today researching and experimenting with infrastructure and I plan to write about it soon.

atlas9 is about setting up a foundation/framework for building and deploying apps that takes care of more of the common issues. Infrastructure (build, deploy, monitor, config, secrets, etc etc) is a big part of that. I've been focused on the application code lately, but I suspect infrastructure is where the meat of the problem lies.