MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-03 14:25:31+00:00
I want one of those t-shirts.

I was incredibly lucky to have been funded to write StarLisp code for the original CM-1 machine. CM-1 was a SIMD architecture, the later models were MIMD. Think of the physical layout being a 2D grid or processors with one edge being for I/O. That was a long time ago so I may have the details wrong.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-03 14:25:36+00:00
> You wouldnt expect the post office to open your physical letters and write routing instructions to the postmen for delivery

Digital communication is based on the postmen reading, transcribing and copying your letters. There is a reason why digital communication is treated differently then letters by the law and why the legally mandated secrecy for letters doesn't apply to emails.
by mrbigbob | 2026-02-03 14:25:47+00:00
This will go absolutely nowhere and personally am tired of hearing about some good bills that become nothing. The US will not even let the military have the right to repair. https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/us_military_right_to_.... The US is beholden to defense contractors and corporations. The government cares very little if at all about the quality of life of anyone
by coldpie | 2026-02-03 14:26:19+00:00
I have two or three that I inherited from my dad. I've never learned to use them because I haven't thought of something I'd use them for. The one thing I could think of is quickly doing fractional math while woodworking (what width will I have if I rip this 7.5" board into 4 pieces?) but in reality I just don't actually do that much math while woodworking.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-03 14:26:29+00:00
Now that's a properly dead skill, surely. I have my dad's one somewhere, and know roughly how it works, but I've not touched it this century.

I also have one of these: https://archive.org/details/spencersdecimalr0000unse ; I believe they were popular around the time of the UK converting to decimal currency, to save people having to do the transitional arithmetic. Had a bunch of other tables in. A physical LUT.

I wonder if there's anyone with abacus skills here. I hear that held out against calculators a lot longer, for shopkeeper uses.
by jcynix | 2026-02-03 14:26:38+00:00
"BITNET was a co-operative university computer network in the United States founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET

BITNET connected mainframes, had gateways to the Unix world and was still active in the 90s. And limited line lengths … some may remember SYSIN DD DATA … oh my goodness …

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=execution-systsi...
by betaporter | 2026-02-03 14:27:17+00:00
I do not use, and have never used, a slide rule. My grandfather was an aeronautical engineering / materials scientist for McDonnell Aircraft, and did a lot of foundational work on heat shields for early space flight (or so I am told). He was eventually named a McDonnell Douglas Fellow, back when there were fewer than 15 Fellows - the company, at the time, took out a full-page ad in Aerospace Magazine announcing it.

I have his slide rule, that he used for ages. It's a mystery in a box to me - I have not the foggiest clue how it is used - but I cherish it.
by damnitbuilds | 2026-02-03 14:27:35+00:00
One white guy out of six people, only visible after scrolling past 4 screens with people in.

Just the usual sexism and racism of modern advertising.

Who's building your space station, Vast ?
Who's going to go fly there on the first test flight, Vast ?
Who's going to be signing the budgets for commercial flights, Vast ?

Fuck woke, fuck DEI, fuck Vast.
by el_nahual | 2026-02-03 14:27:47+00:00
> I wonder why SpaceX investors aren’t revolting.

Because if SpaceX were valued like a normal company, they would lose their money.

SpaceX, as technologically awesome as it is, simply cannot be that big of a company because the market for space launches is relatively small.

SpaceX is targeting an IPO at a valuation 500x earnings. They need to jump on the "AI" / datacenter bandwagon to even hope to sell that kind of valuation.

The whole "datacenters in space" thing is an answer to the question "what could require 1000x the satellite launches that we have now?"

It has nothing to do with what makes sense economically for datacenters!
Show HN: Sandboxing untrusted code using WebAssembly
by mavdol04 | 2026-02-03 14:28:01+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built a runtime to isolate untrusted code using wasm sandboxes.

Basically, it protects your host system from problems that untrusted code can cause. We’ve had a great discussion about sandboxing in Python lately that elaborates a bit more on the problem [1]. In TypeScript, wasm integration is even more natural thanks to the close proximity between both ecosystems.

The core is built in Rust. On top of that, I use WASI 0.2 via wasmtime and the component model, along with custom SDKs that keep things as idiomatic as possible.

For example, in Python we have a simple decorator:

from capsule import task

@task(
name="analyze_data",
compute="MEDIUM",
ram="512mb",
allowed_files=["./authorized-folder/"],
timeout="30s",
max_retries=1
)
def analyze_data(dataset: list) -> dict:
"""Process data in an isolated, resource-controlled environment."""
# Your code runs safely in a Wasm sandbox
return {"processed": len(dataset), "status": "complete"}

And in TypeScript we have a wrapper:

import { task } from "@capsule-run/sdk"

export const analyze = task({
name: "analyzeData",
compute: "MEDIUM",
ram: "512mb",
allowedFiles: ["./authorized-folder/"],
timeout: 30000,
maxRetries: 1
}, (dataset: number[]) => {
return {processed: dataset.length, status: "complete"}
});

You can set CPU (with compute), memory, filesystem access, and retries to keep precise control over your tasks.

It's still quite early, but I'd love feedback. I’ll be around to answer questions.

GitHub: https://github.com/mavdol/capsule

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500510
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-03 14:28:17+00:00
It might be easier in China but that doesn't help Elon or Americans.

Solar powered datacenters on Earth don't make sense to me. The GPUs are so expensive you want to run them 24/7 and power cycling them stresses the components a lot so increases failure rate. Once it boots up you need to keep the datacenter powered, you can't shut it down at night. Maybe for CPU datacenters solar power can make sense sometimes, but not for AI at the moment.

Nuclear is super hard and expensive to build. It probably really is easier to put servers in space than build nuclear.
by noirscape | 2026-02-03 14:28:28+00:00
Wrote about present day reasons to dislike systemd a few days ago on HN, which encompasses most arguments of actual substance[0] (tldr: Unix philosophy, it homogenizes distros and it may be too heavy for some low-resource environments).

Historic reasons mostly come down to systemds developers being abrasive jerks to people. Systemd has some weird behavior choices that only really make sense from the perspective where every computer is a desktop; ie. it terminates all processes spawned by a user when logging out unless they were made in a specific way with systemd-run. This makes sense on a desktop - users log out, you want everything they did to be cleaned up. On a server it makes less sense, since you probably want a tmux/screen session to keep running when you sign out of your ssh session (either by choice as a monitoring tool, or alternatively because you have an unstable connection and need a persistent shell).

Every downstream distro got surprised by this change[1] and nowadays just ships a default configuration that turns it off, because upstream systemd developers weren't interested in hearing the complaints.

Most of these footguns have been ironed out over the years though.

There's also some really dumb arguments to dislike systemd, most of which just can be summarized as "people have an axe to grind with Lennart Poettering for some reason".

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46794562

[1]: It was always available, but suddenly turned on by default in an update.
by a4isms | 2026-02-03 14:28:31+00:00
I did a little nostalgia threat on Mastodon recently. The sixth picture is of the slide rule I took to High School in 1973.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/115979168665997624

Although slide rules are a "dead skill," Aviators typically learn to use something called an E6B Flight Computer, which works on the same principle as a round slide rule.

https://pilotinstitute.com/e6b-made-easy/

I have one in my flight bag and was required to demonstrate proficiency in its use. Of course we fly with connected digital devices these days, but having an analogue backup that operates even if the power fails is important.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-02-03 14:28:53+00:00
And what is the % over total car sold in the world during FY2024 ?

This is like saying "I am the largest land owner in the country" , big deal considering the enormous number at the denominator.

Also very convenient to just pick one model when brands like Toyota have 30+ and sell 11+ million cars per year every year
by edm0nd | 2026-02-03 14:29:09+00:00
Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda?

>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.

Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
by DannyBee | 2026-02-03 14:29:29+00:00
Calling this "properly" is a stretch at best.

I will say first that C libc does this - the functions are inline defined in header files, but this is mainly a pre-LTO artifact.

Otherwise it has no particular advantage other than disk space, it's the equivalent of just catting all your source files together and compiling that.
If you thikn it's better to do in the frontend, cool, you could make it so all the code gets seen by the frontend by fake compiling all the stuff, writing the original source to an object file special section, and then make the linker really call the frontend with all those special sections.

You can even do it without the linker if you want.

Now you have all the code in the frontend if that's what you want (I have no idea why you'd want this).

It has the disadvantage that it's the equivalent of this, without choice.

If you look far enough back, lots of C/C++ projects used to do this kind of thing when they needed performance in the days before LTO, or they just shoved the function definitions in header files, but stopped because it has a huge forced memory and compilation speed footprint.

Then we moved to precompiled headers to fix the latter, then LTO to fix the former and the latter.

Everything old is new again.

In the end, you are also much better off improving the ability to take lots of random object files with IR and make it optimize well than trying to ensure that all possible source code will be present to the frontend for a single compile. Lots of languages and compilers went down this path and it just doesn't work in practice for real users.

So doing stuff in the linker (and it's not really the linker, the linker is just calling the compiler with the code, whether that compiler is a library or a separate executable) is not a hack, it's the best compilation strategy you can realistically use, because the latter is essentially a dream land where nobody has third party libraries they link or subprojects that are libraries or multiple compilation processes and ....

Zig always seems to do this thing in blog posts and elsewhere where they add these remarks that often imply there is only one true way of doing it right and they are doing it.
It often comes off as immature and honestly a turnoff from wanting to use it for real.
by bijant | 2026-02-03 14:29:56+00:00
Knew a mechanical engineer at a place where I interned. Asked him about it and he joked that he didn't trust those transistors before explaining that it's just muscle memory to him and while a calculator would be faster he'd still earn the same per hour. Apparently I was the first to ask him in over a decade as everyone had moved on to do stuff in software and no one was pushing him to use a calculator anymore. Interns didn't inquire because they thought it must be some esoteric/religious practice. Last I heard he was still working there, management asked him to stay on past retirement age for his invaluable skillset. While its probably some other skill I just like to imagine the suits in a meeting where they decided to keep him on for this particular "skill" that no one else in the company had anymore.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-03 14:30:10+00:00
> Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.

There has been a sharp rise in comments that have all the signs of LLM generated output. Some times I’ll check their post history and see the same thing over and over again, at which point I’ll flag it. I don’t guess based on a single comment alone.

Most recently there was a guy obviously using ChatGPT to generate comments under topics with the usual signs (em dashes, unnecessary bullet point lists, “it’s not this, it’s that” construction on every line) who would finish the comments with a plug for his project.

LLM generated advertisement comments. The scariest part was how his comments were all getting upvoted so much.

Now all of the comments from that account are dead, but it went on for a long time without many people noticing
by throw0101a | 2026-02-03 14:30:11+00:00
> Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war.

[citation needed]

Because according to Bob Taylor, who initially got the funding for what became ARPANET:

> Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge.

> Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When* Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... § Prologue

> Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing.

> Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. […]

* Wizards § Chapter 1

The first four IMPs were UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. Then BBN, MIT, RAND, System Development Corp., and
Harvard. Next Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford, and by the end of 1970 Carnegie-Mellon University and Case Western Reserve University.

It was only "later in the 1970s" that command and control was considered more (Lukasik):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_go...

But the first two people who get the project going, Taylor and Herzfeld, were about the efficient use of expensive computer resources for research. Look at the firs >dozen sites and they were about linking researchers: the first DoD site wasn't connected until 3-4 years after things go going, and there was nothing classified about it. MILNET didn't occur until 1984:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation
by AdamN | 2026-02-03 14:30:14+00:00
Yeah that's why startups often pick iOS first, get product-market fit, and then do Android. The fallacy that abstractions tout is that Android and iOS are the same.

They are not.

A good iOS app is not 1:1 equivalent to what a good Android app would be for the same goal. Treating them as such just gives users a lowest common denominator product.
by robtherobber | 2026-02-03 14:30:26+00:00
You appear to have posted a bit of a loaded question here, apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comment. It is, of course, the public that should decide what communication is of public interest, at least in a democracy operating optimally.

I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced.

To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested.

That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms:

- one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms;

- the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability.

A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now).

Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-03 14:31:02+00:00
Most western countries also haven't had multiple attempted [0][1][2] and committed [3][4] mass casualty terror attacks nor a direct conventional conflict that for all intents and purposes was a war [5] in the past 2 years.

And airport security in Israel makes Indian airport security feel like a breeze and I found Turkish airport security to be similar to India's (I remember landing in IST a couple years ago post-COVID and how the news monitors all blared about the 3-6 Turkish soldiers who died in Turkish controlled Syria the day previously).

All three are in very tenuous neighborhoods where the risks of mass casualty terror attacks remains a very real possibility and no on-duty officer wants to be the one who's name comes up in an inquiry into a terror attack should they happen.

Also, from what I remember you are either a Chinese national or someone who has travelled significantly to China. Anyone with that profile falls under stricter scrutiny due to reciprocal treatment of Indian-nationals and Indian-origin people from Arunachal [6][7] and Ladakh [8] as well as the multiple recent India-China standoffs.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Delhi_car_explosion

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nowgam_explosion

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Bengaluru_cafe_bombing

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Reasi_attack

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Pahalgam_attack

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_co...

[6] - https://indianexpress.com/article/world/who-is-prema-thongdo...

[7] - https://idsa.in/publisher/comments/china-ups-the-ante-in-aru...

[8] - https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/why-china-is-e...
by cfiggers | 2026-02-03 14:31:10+00:00
In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

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.

Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
by mvr123456 | 2026-02-03 14:31:36+00:00
Since it's an old debate that a lot of smart people spent a lot of time thinking about, the best short / simple answer you'll see for it is "you might want to read some more about it". A few keywords here are qualia, perception, descartes and the evil deceiver, berkeley and immaterialism, kant and synthetic a-priori, the nature of the reality of mathematical objects and mathematical truth, etc. If you think it's easy, for sure you have not understood the question yet.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-03 14:31:58+00:00
It isn't just a Tesla thing, no matter how much you want to believe it.

According to reports, the following cars will be affected by the new regulation:

- Xiaomi SU7, various models from BYD, Geely, and SAIC

- Tesla models 3 and Y

- BMW iX3, Kia EV6, models from Hyundai, Nissan, Porsche, VW, and GM

China will ban fully hidden, electronic-only, or retractable door handles on electric vehicles (EVs) starting January 1, 2027. All car doors will be required to feature a functional, accessible mechanical release for safety.