MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2026-02-01 18:37:16+00:00
From what was their victim software derived? How much time did it take to write the letter?

Is this the one with Noah Wylie?

XEROX Alto (PARC ), 86DOS, CPM DOS, BASIC,

Xerox Alto (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

The Altair 8800 has an Intel 8080 CPU:

Altair 8800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Intel 8080 -> Intel 8088

CP/M (1974) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

DOS > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS#History

86-DOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS :

> 86-DOS shared a few of its commands with other operating systems such as OS/8 and CP/M, which made it easy to port programs from the latter. Its application programming interface was very similar to that of CP/M. The system was licensed and then purchased by Microsoft and developed further as MS-DOS and PC DOS. [2]

BASIC > History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_interpreter#History

HP had BASIC on mainframes in the 1960s.

This paper (ScholarlyArticle) was published in 1974:

"A BASIC Language Interpreter for the Intel 8008 Microprocessor". ACM. (1974) from UIUC: University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana .. archive.org: https://archive.org/details/basiclanguageint658weav/page/n8/... .. scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=A+B...

"What Bill Gates’ first commercial code (Altair BASIC) looks like under the hood" https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-altair-basic/index.html ..
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1o9wk8x/what_b... :

Monte Davidoff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff :

> Davidoff was assigned the task of writing floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC over the summer, when the three of them lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where their company was then headquartered.[1] Gates, Allen, and Davidoff managed to write the software without ever seeing the Altair 8800 thanks to a simulator

BASIC > History > Microcomputer era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_interpreter :

> In January 1975, the Altair 8800 was announced and sparked the microcomputer revolution. One of the first microcomputer versions of BASIC was co-written by Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft. This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, [7] showcasing BASIC as the primary language for early microcomputers.

> In March 1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club and began formulating the design of his own computer. Club members were excited by Altair BASIC. [8] Wozniak concluded that his machine would have to have a BASIC of its own. At the time he was working at Hewlett Packard and used their TS-BASIC minicomputer dialect as the basis for his own version. Integer BASIC was released on cassette for the Apple I, and was supplied in ROM when the Apple II shipped in the summer of 1977. [9]

..Re: FreeBASIC, Q64, EDIT.COM and its new rust clone; where it's at today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018152
by bigyabai | 2026-02-01 18:37:55+00:00
Run 12 quarters, for all I care. Service revenue accounts for more than 50% of Apple's YoY revenue growth: https://www.statista.com/chart/14629/apple-services-revenue/

Hardware sales aren't picking up the slack, and advertisement revenue is also following a growth trend. Apple's stock would indeed be cooked if they went balls-out against the government that guarantees them access to cheap hardware and software that has been declared illegally anti competitive by foreign sovereigns. Apple needs this.
by Ldorigo | 2026-02-01 18:38:19+00:00
Thanks a lot for the feedback, this is what wanted to hear. After working on something for too long the UX becomes so obvious that it's hard to imagine it from the perspective of someone seeing it for the first time. I'll work on the onboarding. And try to find some history subreddits where I can share this. Thanks for the encouragement!
by alephnerd | 2026-02-01 18:38:29+00:00
This was a Biden era project that has had continued support from Trump aligned NatSec personnel. Most people associated with this remain in the DoD/DoW and/or are American nationals.

For those of us in the NatSec space, our interests are largely aligned. This is why you see people like Doshi, Mastro, Colby, and others pushing for similar policies despite working under different admins.

The Chinese government has been running an ongoing disinfo campaign against Western attempts at building an ExChina REE supply chain for years [0].

Finally, China de facto blocked REE exports to all Western and Western aligned nations in 2025 - not just the US - with the EU [1], Japan [2], and India [3] facing severe export controls as a result.

[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...

[2] - https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/zwgk/zcfb/art/2026/art_8990fedae8f...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...
by netsharc | 2026-02-01 18:39:07+00:00
For their votes, of course.

Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!"..

Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..
by teekert | 2026-02-01 18:39:10+00:00
I for one am getting pretty sick of it. FOSS is by nature apolitical, pre-competitive and for me has always been an intellectual exercise. This is the only way it can power Chinese clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP, and the many EU sovereign systems we're going to see. To me it's a place to find kind people who are enthusiastic about tech, like me.

Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh.

(as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
by GreenDolphinSys | 2026-02-01 18:39:10+00:00
The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical. We're just accustomed to it now, so it's not "political", in other words, it's not "controversial". Perhaps F/OSS is -more- political than other spaces because we organize around projects? Here, and on Reddit, we see the fallout of drama all the time in various F/OSS communities over disagreeing over policies. That's... politics.

Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.

"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.

Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
by sebastiennight | 2026-02-01 18:39:17+00:00
> Educators often describe reading as a predictor of long-term success, both academically and professionally. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey

This article is not off to a great start when right away it

- mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't)

- conflates academic and professional success with becoming a billionaire which is an outlier outcome

- links to a Yahoo News article (reporting the same story as the OP) when claiming to refer to a Fortune Magazine article (not linked; but I found it and the OP sems copypasted from it) as their source for a JP Morgan survey.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 18:39:27+00:00
I use ZFS on my system also, in a couple mirrors. I don't use any of the advanced features at all--just treat it like a big, reliable volume. I agree with your analysis. ext4 is all well and good until a power interruption or hard disk fault silently introduces some corruption in the middle of a file you were downloading, or zeroes one out, etc. That type of thing just doesn't happen with ZFS. My data has never felt safer since putting it in the loving embrace of ZFS.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-01 18:41:39+00:00
Modern Western countries mostly drifted towards a mix of capitalism and social democracy.

"modern first-world capitalism often outsources the human cost of it's milieu to the third world"

This is a bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

If you don't do any business with poorer countries, you can be called a heartless isolationist who does not want to share any wealth and only hoards his money himself.

If you do business with poorer countries, but let them determine their own internal standards, you will be accused of outsourcing unpleasant features of capitalism out of your sight.

If you do business with poorer countries and simultaneously demand that they respect your standards in ecology, human rights etc., you will be accused of ideological imperialism and making impossible demands that a poorer country cannot realistically meet.

Pick your poison.
by scott_w | 2026-02-01 18:41:49+00:00
I had a similar (but not as good) thought which was to separate out the action from the planning in code then inject the action system. So —-dry-run would pass the ConsoleOutput() action interface but without it passes a LiveExecutor() (I’m sure there’s a better name).

Assuming our system is complex enough. I guess it sits between if dry_run and execute(plan()) in its complexity.
by Retric | 2026-02-01 18:41:58+00:00
Subsidies as a concept includes spending 1% as much on subsidies. Subsidies as they exist now however are a specific system that’s incredibly wasteful.

Producing dramatically less food and ending obesity are linked. If the average American eats 20% less obesity would still be an issue, but that’s a vast amount of farmland we just don’t need.

The current system isn’t designed to accommodate increased agricultural production, lowering food demands, or due to decreasing fertility the slow decline in global population. Instead the goal is almost completely to get votes from farmers.
by pouyathe | 2026-02-01 18:42:38+00:00
"Update: Wow, this got a second life! Seeing a spike in GitHub clones (328+ in 2 days). If anyone's trying G, I'd love to hear:

What's your use case?

What's the biggest hurdle you faced?

What feature would make G actually useful for you?

Thanks for checking it out! — A 17yo student building this."
by jfreds | 2026-02-01 18:42:40+00:00
The crux is in the “and it gets implemented” part. Teams have a limited bandwidth, so what gets implemented absolutely is a zero sum game, that’s why backlog prioritization exists. In order for your idea to get implemented, you have to advocate for it, and convince others to do the same.
Writing great code and delivering useful side-projects can make you a 2-5x engineer. If you want to be a 10x engineer, you have to scale your impact beyond what you can do alone

Edit: maybe your great idea is actually something that you can implement on your own, such as a test suite or a tool. You still need to change other peoples behavior. You need to convince people to try it.
by sorenjan | 2026-02-01 18:42:41+00:00
This is not true, 5G has multiple positioning improvements that are not related to higher frequencies. 5G has something called LMF (Location Management Function) that handles positioning of user clients through multiple means, like round trip time, angle of arrival, and dedicated 5G positioning reference signals.

You can read more about 5G positioning here:

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/12/5g-positioning--wha...

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2024/11/5g-advanced-positio...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.03361

https://research.chalmers.se/publication/542739/file/542739_...
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-01 18:43:30+00:00
There is so much confusion on this topic. Please don't spread more of it; the answers are just a quick google away. To spell it out:

1) AI companies make money on the tokens they sell through their APIs. At my company we run Claude Code by buying Claude Sonnet and Opus tokens from AWS Bedrock. AWS and Anthropic make money on those tokens. The unit economics are very good here; estimates are that Anthropic and OpenAI have a gross margin of 40% on selling tokens.

2) Claude Code subscriptions are probably subsidized somewhat on a per token basis, for strategic reasons (Anthropic wants to capture the market). Although even this is complicated, as the usage distribution is such that Anthropic is making money on some subscribers and then subsidizing the ultra-heavy-usage vibe coders who max out their subscriptions. If they lowered the cap, most people with subscriptions would still not max out and they could start making money, but they'd probably upset a lot of the loudest ultra-heavy-usage influencer-types.

3) The biggest cost AI companies have is training new models. That is the reason AI companies are not net profitable. But that's a completely separate set of questions from what inference costs, which is what matters here.
by the_snooze | 2026-02-01 18:44:11+00:00
College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social capital that shields you from ChatGPT.

College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-01 18:44:22+00:00
I suspect they were developed (maybe AI-written) by a human, but the same human.

There's little variety in the way the stories are told.

I suspect that it will be tough to get folks to add to it, but it's not a bad idea.

One site I regularly visit, is Not Always Right[0]. I suspect that many of the stories are apocryphal, but it is entertaining.

I really miss the US Navy Safety Photo of the Day. That was a riot.

[0] https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-01 18:44:48+00:00
> "Hejlsberg: First of all, C# is not a Java clone. ... we looked at lots of languages, we looked at Java"

- https://web.archive.org/web/20100109195800/http://windowsdev...

You can just state the author of the language is lying and you somehow know better. You don't even justify why "they don't want to acknoweldge it" - even with Hejlsberg there acknowledging taking ideas from Java - or explain why C# had those differences mentioned in the rest of that interview, or why Microsoft separately wrote their own Java implementation like Visual J++ if C# was just "their Java".
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-01 18:45:22+00:00
I don't think model competition is necessarily the fix to this issue. We're not even sure if the setup as it exists today will be the norm. It could be that other entities license out the models for their own projects which then become the primary contact point for users and LLMs. They are obviously going to want to fine-tune the models to their use-case and this could result in intentional commercial or ideological biases.

And commercial biases wouldn't necessarily be affected by competition in the way that you're describing.
For example, if it becomes profitable for one of these companies to offer to insert links to buy ingredients at WalMart (or wherever) for the goulash recipe you asked for that's going to become the thing that companies go after.

And all of this assumes that these biases will be obvious rather than subtle.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-01 18:46:17+00:00
> you simply can't run the business without a minimum price or equivalent ongoing subsidy.

This is the question - what form of subsidy to use? You seem to imply they're all the same but that isn't true. For example, farming is subsidized in the US without mandating minimum prices - there seem to be good reasons for that but why are minerals so much different as to warrant a different approach which is significantly more disruptive to competition and thus to marketing forces?

> The US is the largest consumer and could be a major supplier of these minerals. Their position on this issue is relevant regardless of trust.

That statement is irrelevant to the quote it replied to. The issue was trust regarding agreement-breaking tariff and other trade policies which turn any agreement into a one-sided tool for achieving market domination - that is, when one side conforms to agreements and the other doesn't, that other side is effectively dictating its conditions to the rest. This should be quite obvious but what do I know.
by messh | 2026-02-01 18:47:07+00:00
Right idea but the reason people don't do this in practice is friction. Setting up a throwaway VM for every agent session is annoying enough that everyone just runs YOLO on their host.

I built shellbox (https://shellbox.dev) to make this trivial -- Firecracker microVMs managed entirely over SSH. Create a box, point your agent at it, let it run wild. You can duplicate a box before a risky operation (instant, copy-on-write) and delete it after.

Billing stops when the SSH session disconnects.

No SDK, no container config, just ssh. Any agent that can run shell commands works out of the box.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-01 18:47:10+00:00
> what form of subsidy to use

Most countries are adopting a Production Linked Incentive model for REEs which Vietnam [1] and India [0] are using to build our capacity, as both face active military disputes against China, and have been supported by Japanese [2] and Korean [3] processing tech transfers and JVs.

Western countries like Australia and the US are adopting similar strategies, which is the point of the summit mentioned.

> The issue was trust regarding agreement-breaking tariff and other trade policies which turn any agreement into a one-sided tool for achieving market domination

The issue is China has already [4] done [5] this [6] for over a decade [7].

As such, most countries (especially Asian countries where the majority of the electronic supply chain exist) are fine working with the US because China is an existential threat that wishes to invade them.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/india-...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/vietnam-aims-rai...

[2] - https://trei.co.in/

[3] - https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-08-20/busines...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...

[5] - https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/zwgk/zcfb/art/2026/art_8990fedae8f...

[6] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...

[7] - https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/senkaku_crisis.pdf
by Redoubts | 2026-02-01 18:48:17+00:00
> - The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).

sad, I was doing server side around v4/5 and this was the biggest issue at the time for me (lots of stuff was not implemented and you only found out at runtime). that this is still a problem is very disappointing...
by TZubiri | 2026-02-01 18:49:16+00:00
The way OverlayFS works is that there's a base directory. And then there's an overlay directory that only contains the changes. Docker is based on OverlayFS.

There's two main ways overlays are used, first at build time, each line/command generates a new overlay based on the previous base, so when you do something like

FROM debian
RUN apt-get update

it creates a base from the debian image , and then creates an overlay that only contains the changes introduced by apt-get update.

If you use docker inspect or docker show on the image you get a json showing exactly where the overlay directories are, you just need to navigate the overlay directory.

Second: on runtime. [Assuming you are not using volumes, (and if you use volumes, just make sure the volume starts out as empty, instead of sharing your host files)] OverlayFS is used for the runtime file changes as well, the last image is used as a base, and every files changed during runtime are added to the runtime overlay. That filesystem won't be deleted, if you only stop the docker container, the runtime files will still be present, and you can reach them by docker inspecting the running docker processes/instances, and then navigating the overlay fs as you would any directory.

You can also just use overlayfs, as far as I recall, you just use mount and unmount while specifying the OverlayFS driver and special parameters like base and overlay. Conjugating a chain of overlays is a bit more complex, but it's the same interface.
Show HN: WikiReplay – a time‑lapse diff viewer for Wikipedia
by blurayfin | 2026-02-01 18:49:33+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built WikiReplay on this lovely weekend, a small, fun project for replaying the full revision history of Wikipedia articles as a timeline.

You can search any article, hit play, and watch diffs unfold over time with controls for speed and filters.

Try it: https://wikireplay.com/
Repo: https://github.com/sensahin/WikiReplay

I made this because I wanted a more visual, “time‑lapse” way to explore edits. Just for fun.

I’d love feedback on the UX and what features would make this more useful (or less noisy).

Happy to answer questions.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-01 18:50:22+00:00
I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
by rpastuszak | 2026-02-01 18:52:02+00:00
Haha, excellent timing:

I opened HN just now because:

1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because

2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because

3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).

And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.

I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!

* (sunk cost fallacy)