MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-03 19:26:42+00:00
Actually I have written a sql query for that which you can run.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029#46875831

It's essentially comment karma (total up votes)/words ratio. I do think that I have a less karma ratio but that's probably because I write a lot of words which sometimes not even land a single +1 but I don't think that I would be a plain spammer. If you want I can try to find the highest ratios if that's what you like but I feel like that might have the issue where people with less words but with very high upvotes might have the likelihood of being spam/scam too when you think about it? Essentially, I feel like I can provide the query & then you can run it/modify it on the things that you might be interested to find.

Hope it helps!
by calmbonsai | 2026-02-03 19:26:44+00:00
This is only true for the "ticket purchase" not for the service itself.

Outside of ERs in exigent circumstances, any commercial enterprise in the U.S. retains the right to "refuse service" though the nuances of enumerated reasons backed by jurisprudence differ by industry and locale.

An airline can not refuse the "service purchase" unless the customer has been "banned" (technically a trespass statute), but they can refuse to "execute service" for a whole host of reasons including unforeseeable "Acts of God", logistics, or simply if the customer is intoxicated.
by neutronicus | 2026-02-03 19:26:49+00:00
Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy.

XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio.

As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happens instantly running under VS on Windows).

The Jump to Definition seems to have gotten flakier. Or maybe it's always been terrible relative to Visual Studio, IDK. But regardless a lot of times I'm just going by memory and Cmd+F on XCode - Jump to Definition and Cmd+Shift+o are just not getting there.

The Variables pane in the Debugger often just fails to actually ... display anything for any of the variables when stopped at a breakpoint. Sometimes it will appear after stepping a couple lines, sometimes it won't.

The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.

I am an emacs guy so it's not like I'm disposed to like Visual Studio. Visual Studio's quality has slipped a little too. But XCode feels straight-up amateurish in comparison to it. That said, at least Apple is actually exposing the capabilities of the IDE to their LLM integration offering. This is an improvement over the abortion that is Copilot integration in Visual Studio.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-03 19:26:55+00:00
Well, this is the hard part, but the idea is that if you're working with both untrusted inputs and private data/resources, then your agent is susceptible to the "lethal trifecta"[0], and you should be extremely limiting in its ability to have external network access. I would suggest starting with nothing beyond the single AI provider you're using, and only add additional domains if you are certain you trust them and can't do without them.

[0] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-03 19:27:00+00:00
It is a single page shit post.

He thought SETI listening to space radio waves was dumb, so made essentially a satirical paper saying we should look for heat instead, because "an advanced civilization would be using these Shells to capture all star energy, so we could only see the heat"

The "dyson sphere" was a made up and entirely unfounded claim, without justification.

He was throwing shade.
by nayuki | 2026-02-03 19:27:21+00:00
> They didn't abuse the definitions.

Yes they did. Kilo- means 1000 in SI/metric. The computer industry decided, "Gee that looks awfully close to 1024. Let's sneakily make it mean 1024 in our context and sell our RAM that way".

> It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes.

I'm not disputing that. I'm 100% on board with RAM being manufactured and operated in power-of-2 sizes. I have a problem with how these numbers are being marketed and communicated.

> SI units make no sense for computers.

Exactly! Therefore, use IEC 60027 prefixes like kibi-, because they are the ones that reflect the binary nature of computers. Only use SI if you genuinely respect SI definitions.
by ericmay | 2026-02-03 19:27:27+00:00
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
by ghaff | 2026-02-03 19:27:28+00:00
It's complicated. I live on a parcel of a very old property (early 1800s) that was subdivided shortly before I bought it. Without going into all the details, my neighbor who also lives on a parcel of the original land had a survey done and it turned out there were some significant incursions into other properties.

And we're not talking inches.

But, yeah, even inches (or any liens) can be an issue when it comes time to sell.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-03 19:27:29+00:00
Aren't you just waving a flag for less regulation by rushing to align yourself with this inarguable example of regulatory success? Rather than discussing the issue of what impact lead had, or how we might apply this longitudinal method to other other problems (making hair archives into a general environmental data resource), or develop longitudinal methods in general, You've chosen to issue a clarion calla gainst 'bad regulation'.

Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.

....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.
by catlikesshrimp | 2026-02-03 19:27:40+00:00
I hope we aren't too close to "territorial currencies" where each feudal lord was authorized (or not forbidden) to mint his own currency, which couldn't be carried over the next feud. Think awarded "miles" by your credit card, or tickets in a games center.

https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/41452/1/112....
by observationist | 2026-02-03 19:28:12+00:00
I mean, asking for $500 in gold every paycheck would be kinda cool, or getting gold coinage each pay cycle on a rolling basis, as many coins as your repeated $500 contributions buy.

It'd be friction against spending, a little bit of investing, in the case of gold, but friction against spending with crypto only makes sense if you don't lose a lot on moving it into a real bank account.
by riku_iki | 2026-02-03 19:28:30+00:00
> X.ai is controversial mainly because of Musk. But if you can look beyond that, it does actually have a bit of non trivial IP. Grok is not bad as a LLM.

the problem is that this market becomes commoditized, there are tons of not bad open weight LLMs available, and it is not clear if Grok IP is that not trivial. They even totally can run others LLMs under the hood, it is well known that they used Claude output at the beginning.
Show HN: Askfeather.ai – Professional Class AI Tax Assistant
by sokratisv | 2026-02-03 19:28:41+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re the team at Feather Labs, and we built Feather (https://askfeather.ai), an AI tax assistant designed to assist how professionals handle modern Tax research.

General LLMs are a liability for tax work because they lack a hierarchical understanding of the law. They often conflate IRC Title 26 with non-authoritative blog posts or outdated Treasury Regulations. We built Feather to move past "plausible" prose toward audit-defensible reasoning.

The Technical Challenge: Standard RAG often chokes on the tax code for a few specific reasons:

1. Hierarchical Fragmentation: Simple character-count chunking breaks the logical nesting of tax law; we implemented a strategy to preserve the relationship between code sections, sub-clauses, and court cases.

2. Temporal Decay: A vector search might pull a 2021 Revenue Ruling that was superseded in 2024; our indexing prioritizes versioning and the latest IRS guidance.

3. Contextual Overlap: The tax code is highly repetitive. We use multi-jurisdictional analysis to distinguish between federal and state-level nuances that appear semantically similar but are legally distinct.

The Build:

1. Audit-Ready Citations: Every answer is grounded in primary sources—IRC Title 26, Treasury Regs, and IRS guidance, providing verified references you can actually defend.

2. Context-Aware Intelligence: Beyond answering queries, the system flags related risks, exceptions, and filing deadlines that practitioners might overlook.

3. Compliance: We are SOC 2 compliant with a strict zero-training policy on sensitive client data.

We’re curious to hear from anyone else building RAG for "dense" domains where "close enough" results are not enough. We'll be in the comments to talk about our indexing strategy and how we handle complex document extraction.

Sokratis
by alamortsubite | 2026-02-03 19:29:09+00:00
It is true. The shelf life of those Tastykakes is three weeks. A Twinkie's is six. The shelf life of a Tastykake pie is seven days. They haven't changed much or at all since I was a kid.

Have you tried a Tastykake (and a Twinkie)? The difference is obvious if you can spare the calories.
by tedggh | 2026-02-03 19:29:11+00:00
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
by palmotea | 2026-02-03 19:29:22+00:00
> If the islanders are ever to band together and liberate themselves by seizing the magic stone, then they must first stop praising the owner for making them work, and they must stop plotting to destroy the magic stone that could liberate them from their toil.

Dude, your story proves nothing. It's a fantasy. It doesn't map to the society we live in, or any realistic social change. The islanders didn't do anything before the "magic stone" to change their situation ('cause that ain't the first stone, there have been dozens before it), and they're unlikely to do anything different afterwards.

Also, if you think about your story correctly: the "magic stone" doesn't liberate the islanders, it destroys their power to make change.
by loorke | 2026-02-03 19:29:32+00:00
> I'm a German citizen

Of course, who else would complain about this.

When my ex-wife just moved to Germany, she was extremely anxious about waste sorting. She spent an hour sorting trash according to video guides on YouTube. Regardless doing everything perfectly, some German neighbor snitched on her to her landlady. Then some other old neighbor was watching through her windows with binoculars (privacy my ass!). Germany is a terrible country, the sick man of Europe once again
by LinuxMC | 2026-02-03 19:29:56+00:00
Hello I am hosting an Website on an old school PC that my school gave me for free. The PC is running Ubuntu Server and Nginx. The Server is only rechable over IPv6 and the site is in german because I am german. Would it be a good idea if I make the site in english or I add an english version? The domain is linuxmc.tech . I just want to make the site a bit popular.
Show HN: Civie. Anonymous daily civic questions.
by gucduck | 2026-02-03 19:30:26+00:00
Civie is built around a simple bet: that making civic questions anonymous, quick, and recurring lowers the barrier to participation, even if the resulting data isn’t perfectly representative.

Each day, you answer 1–3 short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous, and results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those aggregates stick around and remain open for anyone to explore or analyze.

This is not scientific polling. Samples are self-selected, nuance gets flattened, and the results shouldn’t be treated as population-level truth. That’s an intentional trade. The goal isn’t methodological purity, but making participation easy and safe enough that more people are willing to show up at all.

What I’m trying to test: 1) Does anonymity actually lower friction for people who otherwise wouldn’t participate? 2) Does reducing effort change who participates, not just how often? 3) Can imperfect but longitudinal data still function as signals when viewed over time or alongside other datasets?

If this works, the aspiration is twofold. Primary: Reduce the psychological and practical cost of civic participation to near zero. Secondary: Build an open, cumulative dataset that researchers, journalists, educators, or other builders can apply data science to, with clear caveats about what it is and isn’t.

There’s intentionally no debate, feeds, or identity performance. The product is opinion capture and aggregation, not discourse (the internet has plenty of that already).

I’m early and actively looking for beta users who are willing to use it for a few weeks and help poke holes in it, especially around anonymity, abuse vectors, data quality, and interpretation.

Blunt feedback welcome. Gentle feedback also accepted.
by ambonvik | 2026-02-03 19:30:26+00:00
Each coroutine is running on its own stack. They are fixed size stacks, at least for now, so that could be a tender point, but I place some sentinel values at the end to try to capture it in an assert() instead of just letting it crash. I did not think it worth the effort and speed penalty to implement growing stacks yet. However, I do catch any coroutine function returns safely instead of letting them fall off the end of their stack.
by ATechGuy | 2026-02-03 19:30:36+00:00
In the last one year, we have seen several sandboxing wrappers around containers/VMs and they all target one use case AI agent code execution. Why? perhaps because devs are good at building (wrappers around VMs) and chase the AI hype. But how are these different and what value do they offer over VMs? Sounds like a tarpit idea, tbh.

Here's my list of code execution sandboxing agents launched in the last year alone: E2B, AIO Sandbox, Sandboxer, AgentSphere, Yolobox, Exe.dev, yolo-cage, SkillFS, ERA Jazzberry Computer, Vibekit, Daytona, Modal, Cognitora, YepCode, Run Compute, CLI Fence, Landrun, Sprites, pctx-sandbox, pctx Sandbox, Agent SDK, Lima-devbox, OpenServ, Browser Agent Playground, Flintlock Agent, Quickstart, Bouvet Sandbox, Arrakis, Cellmate (ceLLMate), AgentFence, Tasker, DenoSandbox, Capsule (WASM-based), Volant
by aanet | 2026-02-03 19:31:11+00:00
Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).

It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.

I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.

Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
by ZenDroid | 2026-02-03 19:31:27+00:00
Because it's developed by JetBrains (with Google contributions), a company whose main business is writing really good IDEs. Apple on contrary is a hardware company that happens to build software. If they had delegated the XCode development to JetBrains, we would have had a great IDE for macOS/iOS development too. AppCode was damn good with zero support from Apple side, and despite the fact that JetBrains always needed to catch-up with Apple's breaking changes.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-03 19:31:45+00:00
Between this and Canada being dropped as an investable country shortly after the recent US/Canada fracas, I'm starting to wonder about YC's current political affiliations. Also, if you want to put your tinfoil hat on, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell were publicly anti-Trump, and they both left months after the Trump admin took over, a very paranoid take is that the big shot VCs tied to YC made a push to "clean house" or "toe the line" and they were either gently pushed out or decided to leave because they didn't like the new vibes.
by marssaxman | 2026-02-03 19:32:10+00:00
For years now I have been regularly receiving unsolicited offers to buy 560 Bluefields Street SE, an undeveloped lot in Palm Bay, Florida. Whether the land is actually for sale, I have no idea; I've never been anywhere near the place, and cannot imagine why anyone would believe I owned land there. I wish I could somehow redirect the speculators who won't stop pestering me to scammers like the ones in this tale, so they could all go harass each other and leave me in peace.

I suspect that the speculators are scammers anyway: they never respond to my questions.
by taoji1994 | 2026-02-03 19:32:15+00:00
totally fair point — I actually agree with you. Privacy was one of my biggest concerns when building this.Right now, the trade-off I made was accessibility vs. local-only setup. Running the models locally still requires a fairly heavy setup (GPU, memory, model weights), which would block most non-technical users.
A local / self-hosted version is something I’ve seriously considered, especially for developers and privacy-sensitive users.
If there’s enough demand, that’s definitely a direction I’d like to explore.
Really appreciate you calling this out — it’s a very reasonable concern.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback — really appreciate it.If you’re curious, feel free to give ai-headshot-generator.art a try.I’ve also added a 50% off code: SRLEILCR as a small thank-you
by logicallee | 2026-02-03 19:32:18+00:00
What do you require local models to do? The State of Utopia[1] is currently busy porting a small model to run in a zero-trust environment - your web browser. It's finished the port in javascript and is going to wasm now for the CPU path. you can see it being livecoded by Claude right now[2] (this is day 2, day 1 it ported the C++ code to javascript successfully). We are curious to know what permissions you would like to grant such a model and how you would like it served to you. (For example, we consider that you wouldn't trust a Go build - especially if it's built by a nation state, regardless of our branding, practices, members or contributors.)

Please list what capabilities you would like our local model to have and how you would like to have it served to you.

[1] a sovereign digital nation built on a national framework rather than a for-profit or even non-profit framework, will be available at https://stateofutopia.com (you can see some of my recent posts or comments here on HN.)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/live/0psQ2l4-USo?si=RVt2PhGy_A4nYFPi
by reliefcrew | 2026-02-03 19:32:27+00:00
> what got you interested in having a mobile setup

Over time the need to quickly address administrative and operational issues while on the road converged with marathon coding sessions. So, I'd say it was organic and more "evolutionary" than "revolutionary". More often than not, I think advances tend to happen in that fashion.

Perhaps that's something to consider while you brainstorm. IOW, it may be good to compromise between a more grandiose vision and a mundane, but tangible delivery... then iterate.

Is this hedging bets a little? Sure, but I've grown into a somewhat risk averse developer so I like playing "small ball". Whether or not that's the best approach, I can't say.
by buzer | 2026-02-03 19:32:29+00:00
It's important to note that this is what European Commission has determined to be acceptable for them. One very important distinction here is, as far as I understand, that EC is not bound by ePrivacy Directive as directives bound member states and require them to include them on their national law. They do still try to be consistent with how the directive is applied in the member states though but since it can be varied they have more leeway compared to most other controllers.

The text on that website does state that some DPAs have found some first-party analytics acceptable, but that's not something that is confirmed by CJEU. And ePD does not have single-stop shop so you need to follow every DPAs directions if you are offering services to that DPA's country.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-03 19:32:30+00:00
Why should paying you entitle me to know your home address? Paying you entitles me to some amount of your labor. I don't see why there should be anything else to it.

In practical terms businesses are required to collect employee PII in order to comply with various regulations. But that's not "entitled" that's "government imposed for unrelated reasons". (Those unrelated reasons being illegal aliens and tax compliance.)

There's also an element of risk management with the employer wanting to run a background check. But there's no particular reason that can't be done via a mutually trusted third party, similar to escrow. In fact it often is done that way in the residential rental business - the applicant authorizes the check and pays the third party who then furnishes the report to the landlord.
by Ylpertnodi | 2026-02-03 19:32:40+00:00
The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile.
Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent.
Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone?
Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-03 19:32:45+00:00
Would you be interested to measure me? Because I do indeed have an almost certified HN problem (I contacted the moderators once and they said that I was posting quite a lot when I might be posting quite a lot of comments)

Not sure if I would be happy or sad if I would have a HN problem tho. LOL. so maybe let's just have it in mystery :)

Alright time to really sleep now..... (have said this for an hour but the comments here had me hooked on them haha commenting to many/ (almost all?) of them)

Good night!
by seneca | 2026-02-03 19:33:44+00:00
This is one of those topics where everyone is going to insert their personal bête noire as the cause. "Tech, the economy, culture, immigrants, loss of religion, corruption, polarization, capitalism, socialism!". I actually really like threads like this, since it's a good way to get a pulse on what the different discontentment topics are at any given time.