MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by belviewreview | 2026-02-05 01:54:18+00:00
I see what you are saying, but not publishing the materials is not going to solve the problem. That's because the people who are attacking the professors will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.

Remember, the attackers are not a few oddballs. The are members of a vast MAGA movement that has enough member to elect the present president and that encourages this sort of behavior. And they have tons of money behind them.
by teecha | 2026-02-05 01:54:41+00:00
I find so many of these comments and debates fascinating as a lay person. I'm more tech savy than mostI meet, built my own PCs, know my way around some more 'advanced' things like terminal a bit and have a deeper understanding of computer systems, software, etc. than most people I know. It has always been more of a hobby for me. People look at me as the 'tech' guy even though I'm actually not.

Something I know very little about is coding. I know there are different languages with pros and cons to each. I know some work across operating systems while others don't but other than that I don't know too much.

For the first time I just started working on my own app in Codex and it feels absolutely amazing and magical. I've not seen the code, would have basically no idea how to read it, but i'm working on a niche application for my job that it is custom tailored to my needs and if it works I'll be thrilled. Even better is that the process of building is just feels so special and awesome.

This really does feel like it is on the precipice of something entirely different. I think back to computers before a GUI interface. I think back to even just computers before mobile touch interfaces. I am sure there are plenty of people who thought some of these things wouldn't work for different reasons but I think that is the wrong idea. The focus should be on who this will work for and why and there, I think, there are a ton of possibilities.

For reference, I'm a middle school Assistant Principal working on an app to help me with student scheduling.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 01:55:30+00:00
OpenClaw is a very fun project, but it would be considered a dumpster fire if any mainstream company tried to sell it. Every grassroots project gets evaluated on a completely different scale than commercial products. Trying to compare an experimental community project to a hypothetical commercial offering doesn't work.

> They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it.

I sincerely doubt that. If Apple charged $500 for a feature it would have to be completely bulletproof. Every little failure and bad output would be harshly criticized against the $500 price tag. Apple's high prices are already a point of criticism, so adding $500 would be highly debated everywhere.
by NotNerdz | 2026-02-05 01:55:42+00:00
You describe what you want in plain English and it builds the entire thing at once. Frontend, backend, file structure, configs, even the small details people usually forget. No step by step babysitting, no half finished outputs, no jumping between tools. It’s meant for when you want to go from idea to something real as fast as possible, whether that’s a landing page, a full app, or a complex repo you actually plan to ship.
It’s not perfect and it’s not magic, but it’s brutally efficient when you know what you’re aiming for. One prompt, one build, and you’re already editing something that exists instead of imagining it.
by bitwize | 2026-02-05 01:56:23+00:00
Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-02-05 01:56:25+00:00
Uhm. I actually sorta do. With an older version of this: https://www.storz-bickel.com/en/volcanoclassic :-)

That aside, where I live my nearest neighbors are about half a mile away, and behind me is nothing but my forest as far as I can see(which isn't that much, because mountain ridges, but still ;-> ), and behind that national forest. When I descend into more densely populated areas, I'm not trailing clouds of purple haze behind me. Be it for reasons of preferred soberness while doing business, shopping, not driving under the influence, whatever.

At the same time I'm feeling undisturbed by most of the stuff, except sometimes for matters of taste. Thinking something like "Ugh! I'd never smoke that crap."

I'm sure there are places where you'd be less disturbed by stuff like that.

Maybe Park City, UT?
by EarlKing | 2026-02-05 01:57:23+00:00
Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-05 01:57:29+00:00
Mac minis, but they’re only flying off the shelves for the same reason that folks are forced to use iPhones if they want to date: fear of the dreaded green bubble.

(Yes android users are discriminated against in the dating market, tons of op eds are written about this, just google it before you knee jerk downvote the truth)
by Nevermark | 2026-02-05 01:58:44+00:00
Agree with your characterization.

The conversation was about harnessing energy, from heat.

Heat pumps take energy to move energy. But you can't power the heat pump from the heat it is already pushing against the heat gradient.

Waste heat can be used, if there is a difference in heat to work across, but not if there isn't. A datacenter in Antarctica could recover energy from waste heat, against the freezing outdoor temperatures.

In orbital systems, the problem is getting rid of heat, so there isn't some cold place to use to create a heat gradient and harvest energy. Space is cold, but particles are so diffuse they have little heat energy capacity, so essentially a heat insulator, and not useful to create a gradient. Thus the use of radiators.
How VPN-free remote access works
by brintha | 2026-02-05 01:58:48+00:00
VPNs have been the default answer to remote access for a long time, and they solve a real problem: network reachability.

But in practice, especially for small teams, VPNs often introduce fragility. Connections drop, routing breaks, onboarding is awkward, and access is tied more to network location than to identity.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to understand how “VPN-free” remote access models actually work under the hood — not from a marketing perspective, but mechanically. Most of them flip the connection model: instead of a laptop reaching into a private network, a small agent on the server establishes an outbound connection to a control plane, and access is brokered through that.

Nothing listens publicly on the server. No inbound ports are opened. Authentication and authorization happen before each session, rather than granting broad network access.

I wrote a longer explanation here, focusing on how this model works, where it helps, and where VPNs still make sense:

https://www.lynxtrac.com/how-vpn-free-remote-access-works

Curious to hear from others:

Have you used VPN-free access models in production?

Where did they simplify things?

Where did they break expectations?
by b1temy | 2026-02-05 01:58:54+00:00
> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it

I don't pretend to know the future (nor do I believe anyone else who claims to be able to), but I think the opposite has a good chance of happening too, and hype would die down over "AI" and the bubble bursts, and the current overvaluation (imo at least. I still think it is useful as a tool, but overhyped by many who don't understand it.) will be corrected by the market; and people will look back and see it as the moment that Apple dodged a bullet. (Or more realistically, won't think about it at all).

I know you can't directly compare different situations, but I wonder if comparisons can be made with dot-com bubble. There was such hype some 20-30 years ago, with claims of just being a year or two away from, "being able to watch TV over the internet" or "do your shopping on the web" or "have real-time video calls online", which did eventually come true, but only much, much, later, after a crash from inflated expectations and a slower steady growth.*

* Not that I think some claims about "AI" will ever come true though, especially the more outlandish ones such as full-length movies made by a prompt of the same quality made by a Hollywood director.

I don't know what a potential "breaking point" would be for "AI". Perhaps a major security breach, even _worse_ prices for computer hardware than it is now, politics, a major international incident, environmental impact being made more apparent, companies starting to more aggressively monetize their "AI", consumers realising the limits of "AI", I have no idea. And perhaps I'm just wrong, and this is the age we live in now for the foreseeable future. After all, more than one of the things I have listed have already happened, and nothing happened.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-05 01:59:02+00:00
Only indirectly related, but it's mildly amusing to see UART backpressure addressed when most serial ports these days are wired up without CTS/RTS, and no XON/XOFF either.

(I break out CTS&RTS whenever I can, & so should everybody else. You don't have to use it. Just route it to wherever the serial ports goes.)
by like_any_other | 2026-02-05 01:59:35+00:00
What a sleazy way to try and obfuscate lying by omission. Why are you suddenly so confused? "What history course would you expect to see this in?" What kind of question is that? A history course on native Americans - you can't seriously be saying that you can't imagine any kind of college course teaching it, can you?

> Courses don't tend to contain "by-the-ways" for things outside of the course material.

Was it not clear that I was complaining about the composition of those course materials?

> Should it be against the rules to have a course specifically on the african slave trade?

No. But when your college is silent on every atrocity committed by anyone other than whites, people will correctly see it as trafficking in propaganda, not truth. Nobody is convinced by your implications that it's all just a big coincidence that there are no courses specifically on Aztec imperialism, or Dahomey slave trading, or problematizing the cultural revolution.
by fdr | 2026-02-05 02:01:42+00:00
depends if they stick to accepting money for services, e.g. productivity tools. Half the revenue of OpenAI[1], 1/28th the infrastructure infrastructure plan (1.4 Trillion / 50 billion), marketing like this: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think

If they stick to Google Workspace / Office 365 world, it'd be weird to have ads.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/12/anthropic-ai-data-centers-te...
by dangus | 2026-02-05 02:02:20+00:00
A very tired “red versus blue” take here.

There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.

One side isn’t better than the other, it’s really just that they copy each other doing various things at a different pace or arrive at that point in different ways.

Some examples:

- Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g. ability to grant limited photo library access to apps

- Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags

- Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years ahead of StrongBox)

- system-wide screen recording
by nine_k | 2026-02-05 02:02:30+00:00
Integer multiplication x * y can be trivially done in O(k): k = log₂(min(x, y)). This is because we can do addition in constant time, adding all bits in parallel.

By combining many more adding units, we can do (fixed-size) multiplication in constant time, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadda_multiplier
by ghshephard | 2026-02-05 02:02:49+00:00
$30k/year? For 100 Employees. So - $25/seat?

I can't imagine it would ever be worth, under any scenario, trying to write/build/support any $25/seat SaaS software for any company I've worked at in 25+ years.

Another thing to keep in mind - very little of the cost of a SaaS license is the time it takes to build the software. Security, Support, Maintenance, Administration, backups/restores, testing/auditing said backups/restores, etc, etc.. and then x-training new SREs on how to support/manage this software, ...

Even as someone who spend 10+ hours a day churning out endless LLM applications, products, architectures from my myriad of Cursor/Codex/CC interfaces and agents - I'm dubious that LLMs will ever eat into SaaS revenue.

I'm sure (lots of) people will try - and then 1-2 years in someone will look at the pain, and just pull the ripcord.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-05 02:03:18+00:00
Not my downvote, good chart actually.

It is worse of a downer when there is a complete failure to make further sense like that, but I'll try to do something.

Of course one chart does not an expert make, I don't understand half of it but at least I worked with 3.5 floppies since they first came out.

3.5 floppies are "soft sectored" media and usually the drives were capable of handling non-standard arrangements too. What made non-standard numbers of sectors uncommon was it would require software most people were not using. DOS and Windows simply prepared virgin magnetic media with 2880 sectors, or reformatted them that way and that was about it.

PC's were already popular when 3.5 size came out, and most of the time they were not virgin magnetic media, they were purchased pre-formatted with 2880 sectors (of 512 bytes per sector) already on the entire floppy, of which fewer sectors were available for user data because a number of sectors are used up by the FAT filesystem overhead.

On the chart you see the 1440kb designation since each sector is considered 1/2 "kilobyte".

512 bytes is pretty close to half a kilobyte ain't it?

(The oddball 1680kb and 1720kb were slightly higher-density sectors, with more of them squeezed into the same size media, most people couldn't easily copy them without using an alternative to DOS or Windows. Sometimes used for games or installation media.)

With Windows when partitioning your drive if you want a 64 GB volume you would likely choose 64000 MB in either the GUI or Diskpart. Each of these GB is exactly 2880000 sectors for some reason ;)

But that's the size of the whole physical partition whether it contains only zeros or a file system. Then when you format it the NTFS filesystem has its own overhead.
by TheJoeMan | 2026-02-05 02:03:58+00:00
"After this article was published, several Pinterest employees contacted CNBC and disputed the company’s characterization of the incident.

Pinterest fired the engineers after they posted instructions showing how to prompt the company’s staff directory to show who was laid off, the employees said. The employees said Pinterest’s claim that the engineers created custom software was inaccurate, and said the directory tool is accessible to anyone in the company."

So just like using inspect element is hacking, querying open staff directories is creating obstructionist tools, got it.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-05 02:04:21+00:00
My 6502 Apple ][ FORTH based on FIG FORTH had a "Character Literal" CLIT, that saved one byte compared LIT.

With a quick google I was able to find CLIT:

https://github.com/wa1tnr/figforth-local/blob/main/fig6502.t...

; CLIT pushes the next inline byte to data stack
;
L35: .BYTE $84,"CLI",$D4
.WORD L22 ; Link to LIT
CLIT: .WORD *+2
LDA (IP),Y
PHA
TYA
BEQ L31 ; a forced branch into LIT

I was also able to find COLON, which is threaded code instead of assembly:

https://github.com/wa1tnr/figforth-local/blob/main/fig6502.t...

L823: .BYTE $C1,$BA
.WORD L813 ; link to C!
COLON: .WORD DOCOL
.WORD QEXEC
.WORD SCSP
.WORD CURR
.WORD AT
.WORD CON
.WORD STORE
.WORD CREAT
.WORD RBRAC
.WORD PSCOD
by bhu1st | 2026-02-05 02:04:42+00:00
I have been working on a minimalist and calm work/task tracking app called Dodolr (doo-doo-lr) which supports tasks (dodos), notes and follow-up since last few months. I deliberately didn't build notification or reminders and leave it to the user to be fully accountable for completing their work (moving tasks to terminal stages). I'm building it for 3 local customers. Would be happy to give Early Access to any solo founder and power user who prefer non intrusive tools to keep a tab at their work. The app works well form small 1-3 person team very well.

The landing page is at:
https://www.dodolr.com

Please submit the Early Access form if you want an access. Happy to answer questions here as well.
Show HN: A Data Interchange Format
by JohnMatthias | 2026-02-05 02:05:08+00:00
I have designed a Data Interchange Format to replace JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, Protocol Buffers, SQL and HTTP. This was achieved by splitting the design between a Dynamically Typed Syntax and a Statically Typed Syntax. The Dynamically Typed Syntax is for Configuration, Dynamic Data Storage and Low-Performance Network Communication (HTTP). The Statically Typed Syntax is for Inter-Process Communication, Remote Procedure Calls, Static Data Storage and High-Performance Network Communication with Binary Serialization (Protobuf). The Syntax of the design introduces Delimiters, Scoping, Optional Schemas and Optional Static Typing. Data Interchange Formats are critical and the ones that we have been using are poorly designed because they fail to understand Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Rob Pikes principles at Bell Labs, in cooperation with Niklaus Wirth. A header file for Definition, a Source File for Implementation, or Wirth's Module Systems in Modula. My Data Interchange Format embraces the C-Style Syntax, Delimiters, Scopes and C-Style Header Files, while allowing extensions if Modules, Functions and Control Flow are needed. No ambiguous Indentation-Based Parsing from YAML or TOML. It has Proper Data Structures instead of Object Literals from JSON, YAML, TOML and XML. A Better Type System than Protocol Buffers and SQL. It is easier to implement than HTTP because a Message is a Data Structure with Initialized Fields. This prevents the usage of Domain Specific Language. Allowing teams to require either a Configuration File or a Library for a General Purpose Programming Language, no more "JSON with If Statements".
by thinking_cactus | 2026-02-05 02:05:51+00:00
I get why it is romantic (like the "next thing" after other human discoveries), but I don't think "exploring the universe" is that philosophically interesting?

Think about the case you had

(1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet)

(2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly

Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it.

I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth).

Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself.

Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P)

I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 02:07:07+00:00
> The best open models such as Kimi 2.5 are about as smart today as the big proprietary models were one year ago

Kimi K2.5 is a trillion parameter model. You can't run it locally on anything other than extremely well equipped hardware. Even heavily quantized you'd still need 512GB of unified memory, and the quantization would impact the performance.

Also the proprietary models a year ago were not that good for anything beyond basic tasks.
by rationalist | 2026-02-05 02:08:10+00:00
Considering I get spam from large U.S. companies because they believed someone else when they used my email to sign up for something, I am inclined to agree with you. No matter how many times I click "mark as spam" in Gmail, it always gets delivered to my inbox.

Credit Karma is the biggest offender off the top of my head. For a company in the consumer datamining business, they sure aren't doing a good job.
by maxglute | 2026-02-05 02:08:17+00:00
Gripens with external tanks outrange F35 with external tanks flying dirty, and since 4th gen, stealth hardly matters. Spaced based ISR is proliferating, in 10 years F35s will be picked up through SAR from space if not already... well depending on adversary. PRC and US, stealth broadly not meaningful. IMO RU hardly relevant.

And to be blunt, RU/PRC is MORE aligned with Canadian position on Northwest Passage sovereignty. Which really only leaves US... i.e. the only actual on paper threat to NWP is US, which makes F35s terminally stupid acquisition for CAN arctic. But broad IMO is Canada simply doesn't need a strong air game because it won't survive vs adversaries operating in the north anyway. Geopolitically, Canada needs F35 to NORDAD dues/ransom more than it needs F35 for tactical/operational needs. Cue CAN buys f35, find them ruinously expensive to operate, and US will end simply "patrolling" Canadian airspace anyways.
by keyle | 2026-02-05 02:08:45+00:00
people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware

That makes little sense. Buying mac mini would imply for the fused v-ram with the gpu capabilities, but then they're saying Claude/GPT-4 which don't have any gpu requirements.

Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
by pcurve | 2026-02-05 02:09:03+00:00
Agree on the valuations. Most have come down and many have overcorrected imho.

As expensive as some of these software seem in terms of cost per seat, most of the subscription contract rarely exceed a few hundred thousand / year if even $1mm, which is drop in a bucket for many companies. (vs running on-prem servers, having staff to support them)

You'd think Atlassian would be printing money given everybody under the sun is using them, but they only make $5B in annual revenue.

I've worked at fortune 50 companies for a while and custom enterprise software is still alive and well for things that are too business specific to buy off the product for. But they're not going to be in a rush to create their own Workday, Salesforce, Jira, Figma, SAP, etc.
by atonse | 2026-02-05 02:09:12+00:00
My point is that isn’t there a difference between “we had to endorse Trump because Bezos made us do it” and “we were forced to not take a side”

My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?

Why are newspapers picking sides at all?