MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GJim | 2026-02-04 14:00:10+00:00
> there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU

No there isn't.

Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.

Governments are expected to research and discuss paths if legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!

Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
by digitalsushi | 2026-02-04 14:00:16+00:00
It's about as safe as trusting all the add-ons in your IDE, and all the packages your node app pulls from random package repos.

It's just the plausible blame that shifts.

If you read the script before you pipe it into your shell, it's safe.

And if that's not safe, then it's just as dangerous to trust that an unopened bottle of ketchup is safe.

Nothing is safe. Everything is a judgement. Being culpable is a professional service. Lucky people out-earn unlucky people. The world is a scary place.
by sigbottle | 2026-02-04 14:00:55+00:00
Yup, yup! There's so many different ways of thinking hard.

For me, thinking about an extremely technical TCS problem, for example, is my version of actively, tirelessly thinking hard. I'm logging a ton of observations, trying new ideas and hypotheses, using a mix of computer simulation and math to try and arrive at a concrete framing and answer.

On the other end of the specturm, I have philosophy. It's definitely a different type of hard. Most of my "Aha!" moments come from when I realize I've been strawmanning some argument, and not actually understanding what the person is saying. Why is the person saying this, relative to what, why is this a new observation, etc. Things are so amorphus and you can tweak the problem parameters in so many ways, and it's really tempting to either be too fluid and pretend you understand the thinker (because it's a subset of some conception you already have), or be too rigid and dissolve the thinker as a category error / meaningless. I've never felt the same feeling as I did when doing TCS research, but the feeling was definitely hard thinking nonetheless.

In terms of extremely nitty-gritty technical things, like linker bullshit and linux kernel programming, I'm much more familiar with, and these things are more about reading documentation (because the tool won't behave like you want it to) and iteration / testing (because... the tool won't behave like you want it to, so you need to make sure it behaves like you want it to!). This is also a type of thinking - I would call it hard as in the physiological response I have is similar to that of research in the very bad moments, but in terms of my lofty ideals, I don't want to call this hard.... it's very "accidental" complexity, but it's what I get paid to do :/

At work, you have a huge idea space to consider, both problem and solution framings, mixing in "bullshit" constraints like business ones. You also throw in the real-time aspect of it, so I can't just either armchair on a problem for a month (unlike Philosophy) or deep dive on a problem for a month (unlike research). I'm technically doing the third type of programming right now, but we'll see how long that lasts and I get put on a new project.

I'm not even sure if there's a clean demarcation between any of these. These are certainly better than brainrotting youtube though.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-04 14:01:07+00:00
"But why would you?"

Because the permitting process is much easier and there are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut you down.

I think this is the entire difference. Space is very, very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all but a few authorities that would hold power over you down on Earth.

No one will be able to complain that your data center is taking their water or making their electricity more expensive, for example.
by Keeeeeeeks | 2026-02-04 14:02:14+00:00
If I had to guess it’s because GDP growth in industrialized countries are driven by financialization facilitated by cheap power and energy, and the countries that are more financialized don’t exactly want the countries with precious minerals to be industrialized enough to be self sufficient.

That’s why a lot of global south countries with valuable materials (oil, data center building blocks, etc) are often chronically destabilized, but not so much so that it’s impossible to find someone to buy unrefined materials from.
Show HN: Two-week creative lab for developers building with real-time AI video
by cmuir | 2026-02-04 14:02:35+00:00
The Daydream team is kicking off a new cohort of the Daydream AI Video Program, a hands-on, two-week program for developers and creative technologists working with real-time AI video.

The program runs February 9–20. You'll get 1:1 support and access to cloud infrastructure, and you’ll get a chance to work alongside others building in this space. We'll give out more than $5K in prizes during the two weeks. It's free to participate. Applications close Feb 6.

Apply here: https://daydream.live/interactive-ai-video-program?utm_sourc...

Happy to answer questions about the program or the tech.
by tcgv | 2026-02-04 14:02:50+00:00
I get what he's pointing at: building teaches you things the spec can't, and iteration often reveals the real problem.

That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering. Software isn't only craft, it's also operations, risk, time, budget, compliance, incident response, and maintenance by people who weren't in the room for the "lump of clay" moment. Those constraints don't make the work less human; they just mean "authentic creation" isn't the goal by itself.

For me the takeaway is: pursue excellence, but treat learning as a means to reliability and outcomes. Tools (including LLMs) are fine with guardrails, clear constraints up front and rigorous review/testing after, so we ship systems we can reason about, operate, and evolve (not just artefacts that feel handcrafted).
by davidfekke | 2026-02-04 14:03:14+00:00
The countries of the EU need to ask themselves why these software unicorns are not starting in their countries. Why do so many European entrepeneurs come to the United States to start their businesses?

The EU has a tendency to regulate business before they ever get started. They might want to look at their regulatory structure so companies like Zoom start in the EU, and not in United States.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 14:03:31+00:00
For the most part it was great (IMO), and has some features I still miss in all other editors, like the automatic side-by-side toggling, using mouse gestures (on Apple's mouse) to go back / forward in history just like Safari, etc.

The most friction came from merging (e.g. when files were changed or project config was changed), due to xcode's insistence on having a project file listing all files etc. The other friction was in the annual update cycle of both xcode and the apps we built.

But the last time I tried xcode it was pretty bad; on paper the new UI coding approach is great, but in practice the live preview was so tempramental and crashed so often it was barely usable.
by jermaustin1 | 2026-02-04 14:03:34+00:00
> I'm a noob and am asking as wishful thinking.

Don't minimize your thoughts! Outside voices and naive questions sometimes provide novel insights that might be dismissed, but someone might listen.

I've not done this exactly, but I have setup "chains" that create a fresh context for tool calls so their call chains don't fill the main context. There is no reason why the Tool Calls couldn't be redirected to another LLM endpoint (local for instance). Especially with something like gpt-oss-20b, where I've found executing tools happens at a higher success than claude sonnet via openrouter.
by oblio | 2026-02-04 14:03:40+00:00
For people new to HN (Paul Graham - PG - is HN's founder):

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

Musk is running out of runway on his way to infinity dollars and since Tesla is slowly crumbling compared to its valuation, the ideas need to become crazier and crazier: humanoid robots tomorrow, self driving taxis tomorrow, reusable rockets going to Mars tomorrow, data centers in space tomorrow.

It would be fun to watch if Musk wouldn't funnel a lot of money that could be used for good, instead. Imagine how many diseases we could cure with all that money. Or feed and educate the poor. Or how much walkable and bikeable and ultimately liveable infrastructure we could build world wide. Or how fewer plastics we could use, ingest and discard if we could promote healthy and natural alternatives.

And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
by pvtmert | 2026-02-04 14:04:05+00:00
Interesting approach. I like Docker/Kubernetes way of secret mounts where you can limit user/group permissions too.

Meanwhile, I was an avid user of the echo secret | ssh consume approach, specifically for the kerberos authentication.

In my workflow, I saved the kerberos password to the macOS keychain, where kinit --use-keychain authenticated me seamlessly. However this wasn't the case for remote machines.

Therefore, I have implemented a quick script that is essentially

security find-generic-password -a "kerberos" -s "kerberos-password" -w | ssh user@host kinit user@REALM

Which served me really good for the last 4~years.
Show HN: Real-time STT and Translation for live using ElevenLabs and DeepL
by sapinfo | 2026-02-04 14:04:42+00:00
I volunteer as a tech director at a small Korean church. I’ve been providing live captions for elderly members using OBS, but recently needed to support English-speaking attendees too.

I initially tried implementing local STT with Whisper on my MacBook Pro M3, but the latency and accuracy—especially for Korean—didn't meet my expectations for a live environment.

A few days ago, I tried ElevenLabs Scribe v2 for real-time STT and combined it with DeepL for translation. The performance was impressive enough that I decided to build this web tool (elstt.co).

Key Features:

BYOK: Use your own ElevenLabs/DeepL API keys.

Sync: Encrypted key storage for seamless use across projector, PC, and mobile.

Status: It's being live-tested at my church. Not perfect yet, but I'm refining it every week.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the architecture or any feedback!
by 3squaredcircles | 2026-02-04 14:04:50+00:00
I've found that AI still makes me think. Yes I use it as my 10x, but I still have to plan what I am going to do, call it on its bull, and keep it on track. AI just saves me from the tedium of typing (and lets be real, mistyping). I can't specialize in 13 different languages, but I can bring good architecture, and good practices to bear.

It's a different type of thinking in my opinion, more "systems" thinking.
by vilhelm_s | 2026-02-04 14:05:11+00:00
I don't think it's that subtle: it would be enough to have a continuous integration tool that tries to compile the proofs that are checked into version control and raises an error if it fails.

The linked blog post says "Unfortunately, a student once submitted work containing this error; it was almost entirely incorrect and he had no idea." I guess the student probably was aware that not every proof had gone through, and that the that he saw like "99 out of 100 proofs succeeded" and assumed that meant that he had mostly completed the task, not realizing that a false theorem would be used to the give incorrect proofs for the rest of the file.
by elihu | 2026-02-04 14:05:12+00:00
The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are.

Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible.

If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.
by trashb | 2026-02-04 14:05:46+00:00
Yes pipes are exposed /proc/$pid/fd/$thePipeFd with user permissions [0].

Additionally command line parameters are always readable /proc/$YOUR_PROCESS_PID/cmdline [1]

There are workarounds but it's fragile. You may accept the risks and in that case it can work for you but I wouldn't recommend it for "general security". Seems it wouldn't be considered secure if everyone did it this way, therefore is it security through obscurity?

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156859/is-the-data-...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3830823/hiding-secret-fr...
by cogman10 | 2026-02-04 14:06:07+00:00
> has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so.

Optimization is literally how contractors working for the government got rich. Every hour they spent on research was directly billed to the government. Weight reduction being one of the most important and consistent points of research.

Heck, R&D is how some of the biggest government contractors make all their dough.

SpaceX is built on the billions in research NASA has invested over the decades. It looks like it's more innovative simply because the USG decided to nearly completely defund public spending in favor of spending money on private contractors like SpaceX. That's been happening since the 90s.
by jaynamburi | 2026-02-04 14:06:27+00:00
Consistency in AI generated apps usually comes down to treating prompts + outputs like real software artifacts. What’s worked for us: versioned system prompts, strict schemas (JSON + validators), golden test cases, and regression evals on every change. We snapshot representative inputs/outputs and diff them in CI the same way you’d test APIs. Also important: keep model upgrades behind feature flags and roll out gradually.

Real example: in one LLM-powered support tool, a minor prompt tweak changed tone and broke downstream parsers. We fixed it by adding contract tests (expected fields + phrasing constraints) and running batch replays before deploy. Think of LLMs as nondeterministic services you need observability, evals, and guardrails, not just “better prompts.”
by shadowgovt | 2026-02-04 14:06:35+00:00
Stefan-Boltzmann is about absolute, not relative temperature.

When one does the math on the operating temperatures of regular computing equipment that we use on Earth, how much heat it generates per watt, and how fast it would need to sink that heat to allow for continuous operation, one gets surface areas that are not impossible, but are pretty on the high end of anything we've ever built in space.

And then you have to deflect the incoming light from the Sun which will be adding to your temperature (numbers published by private space companies regarding the tolerances of payloads those companies are willing to carry note that those payloads have to be tolerant of temperatures exceeding 100° C, from solar radiation alone). That is doable, you could sunshield the sensitive equipment and possibly decrease some of your thermal input load by putting your craft out near L2 which hangs out in the penumbra of Earth. Still a daunting technical challenge when the alternative is just build it on the planet with the technology and methods we already have.
by sgarland | 2026-02-04 14:06:37+00:00
Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places, breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it’s a good thing.

They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance mismatch with my company’s desires, because if someone hands me a weird problem, I will happily spend all day or longer on that problem. Think, hypothesize, test, iterate. When I’m done, I write it up in great detail so others can learn. Generally, this is well-received by the engineer who handed the problem to me, but I suspect it’s mostly because I solved their problem, not because they enjoyed reading the accompanying document.
by stale-labs | 2026-02-04 14:06:41+00:00
The main practical win is that cmd args show up in `ps aux` for anyone on the system to see, whereas stdin keeps it off that list.

re: the /proc concerns - true, but if someones got same-user access to read your /proc/pid/fd, they can probably ptrace you or read process memory anyway. stdin is more about basic hygiene than stopping sophisticated attackers.

tbh for anything actually sensitive I've been leaning toward tmpfs files with strict perms, or using something like vault/age. stdin is a nice middle ground tho for quick scripts.
by recursivedoubts | 2026-02-04 14:06:52+00:00
AI slop, obviously.

The fundamental problem is not unlike what happened in the industrial revolution: we are suddenly much more productive as a society, how do we distribute that productivity?

A sane society would use a tool like the monetary supply to do so: money is a public good (it exists because we say it does) and thus should be managed for the public good. People should be able to work less while having a higher living standard, which is easily achievable given our almost comical productivity.

Because we've privatized money creation in the form of credit monopolies, this obvious mechanism isn't available, so it seems like we will end up with either short term crushing poverty followed by bloody revolution or the techno-feudalist utopia-for-the-few.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-04 14:07:12+00:00
You cannot escape national regulations like that, at least until a maritime-like situation develops, where rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are doing.

It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from that. As of now, big countries watch their space corporations very closely and won't let them do this.

Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape state and regional authorities this way. IIRC The Californian Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to comply with.

If you launch from international waters, these lower authority tiers do not apply.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-14/california...
Show HN: PostgreSQL extension for privacy – AI training and RAG monetization
by machine-squelch | 2026-02-04 14:07:23+00:00
Built a PostgreSQL extension with two use cases:

1. Privacy: Train LLMs without leaking customer names
Hash identities before training. Model learns patterns, not people.
Use case: Healthcare SaaS training on patient records (HIPAA safe)

2. RAG billing: Charge per-document retrieved instead of flat subscriptions
The "Spotify model" for knowledge bases
Use case: Legal databases charging $0.25/case vs $10k/year unlimited

Pure SQL. 30-second install. MIT license.

Looking for feedback from anyone building RAG systems or training AI on sensitive data.
by bluedino | 2026-02-04 14:07:46+00:00
> These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.

A lot of the polymer guns (1911, AR15) need to be reinforced with metal at certain places for any kind of reliablity. A Glock doesn't need to be, because the material was invented by the designer of the gun and the gun was intended to be a polymer frame from the start.
by m132 | 2026-02-04 14:07:58+00:00
LLMs haven't changed how hard it is to truly invent. What LLMs do instead is painfully rub it in that most problems already have their solutions.

There's no need to create another serialization format or a JavaScript framework. You now have more time to direct your focus onto those problems that haven't yet been solved, or at least haven't been solved well.

A question that might be hard to digest: was that "thinker" really a thinker, or a well-disguised re-inventor?
by yusukekaizen | 2026-02-04 14:08:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I spent my academic years at Tsinghua Univ (Beijing) experiencing "China Speed," and my professional years at Toyota Group (Japan) enforcing "Zero Defects."

I've noticed that many AI PoCs fail in the manufacturing sector because they try to apply Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" logic to the physical world where safety is non-negotiable.

I wrote this post to propose a framework distinguishing between "White Color AI" (Cognitive/Digital) and "Blue Color AI" (Physical/Safety-Critical), and how to bridge them using a semi-autonomous model.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on implementing LLMs in safety-critical environments. Thanks!
by crtasm | 2026-02-04 14:08:45+00:00
As it doesn't seem to be linked, here is Hofstadter Q-sequence https://oeis.org/A005185

I can't tell which of Chai Wah Wu's submissions the interviewer was referring to. https://oeis.org/search?q=Chai%20Wah%20Wu&fmt=short&sort=cre...
by blackoil | 2026-02-04 14:08:48+00:00
I just calculated the potential weight of solar cells in space. Can't say about cost. Idea is mot of the weight of panel is because of glass/plastic protection on top and frame, these are there to protect from rain, hail, wind and dust. In space the elements it will need protection from will be different. I could be completely off but have no claims on cost and feasibility of this.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-04 14:09:27+00:00
The approach of building for one specific user (your wife) rather than abstracting too early is underrated. You end up with something that actually fits the workflows instead of a generic tool that needs heavy configuration.

Elixir + Ash is an interesting choice for this domain. LiveView particularly shines for internal tools like this where you want the interactivity without managing a separate frontend build. Curious how the AI code generation worked with Ash specifically - the declarative nature seems like it could either help a lot (clear patterns) or confuse models that expect more explicit code.

The BOM with cost rollups is the feature that would have saved me hours in a previous project. Most small batch producers I know either overprice everything out of caution or underestimate costs because tracking ingredient pricing through recipes is tedious in spreadsheets.
Ask HN: Are ISPs "evil" and who runs the Internet?
by tavro | 2026-02-04 14:09:50+00:00
I came across this "Who Runs the Internet" graphic (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Who-Runs-the-Internet-graphic.png) when planning a blog post and it got me thinking about the role of internet service providers.

Obviously this is a highly simplified question. Internet governance is a complex topic, but from your experience and perspective, are ISPs "evil"? Who really has the power over the Internet?