MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 17:01:53+00:00
What would I learn that I don’t already know? The exact syntax and property of Terraform and boto3 for every single one of the 150+ services that AWS offers? How to modify a React based front end written by another developer even though I haven’t and have actively stayed away from front end development for well over a decade?

Will a company pay me more for knowing those details? Will I be more affectively able to architect and design solutions that a company will pay my employer to contract me to do and my company pays me in cash as much as Amazon paid me in cash + RSUs a couple of years ago?

They pay me decently not because I “codez real gud”. They pay me because I can go from empty AWS account, empty repo and ambiguous customer requirements to a working solution (after spending time talking to a customer) to a full well thought out architecture + code on time on budget and meets requirements
by flumpcakes | 2026-02-04 17:01:59+00:00
> For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.

LLMs are completely different to programming languages or even Photoshop.

You can't type a sentence and within 10 seconds get images of CSAM with Photoshop. LLMs are also built on trained material, unlike the traditional tools in Photoshop. There have been plenty CSAM found in the training data sets, but shock-horror apparently not enough information to know "where it came from". There's a non-zero chance that this CSAM Grok is vomiting out is based on "real" CSAM of people being abused.
by quesera | 2026-02-04 17:02:22+00:00
> Cultivating optimism is the first step

I agree with this, and I recognize it as the good intentions behind faith communities.

People are (statistically) terrible at creating optimism on a blank canvas. They need narratives and common points of understanding.

And then the other side of human nature gets to take its swing at the mass of optimistic people with a shared belief system. :)
by cdrnsf | 2026-02-04 17:02:31+00:00
They attempt to report as though they don't have a point of view on the issue in pursuit of objectivity, which leaves them to position themselves in the middle of two perspectives which may or may not be extreme but, by doing so, they make both position seem reasonable.

They can't or won't call out racism and extreme action by the Trump administration because they'd forfeit their right to that faux objectivity. Perhaps they'll report the facts, but their unwillingness to call something what it is makes that thing appear to be acceptable.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-04 17:02:44+00:00
Is Twitter not the one distributing it? You make a request to their servers, and in the comment section there is a link to an image (also hosted on Twitter’s server) containing illegal content.

If a student printed the pictures out and distributed them at school you’d have maybe 1000 violations. Twitter likely has hundreds of millions if not billions. So it makes sense to go after the most severe violator.
by mattmaroon | 2026-02-04 17:02:48+00:00
Right, but in the context of data centers, it’s all about baseload anyway, right? If data centers become a big driver of energy use, there will be a lot lower fluctuation between peak and trough demand.

I can imagine a future in which every data center has a little baby nuclear plant built right next to it. Watts per acre may become a significant measurement of density. Solar’s environmental impact is of course dramatically overstated by its opponents, but it won’t be when we scale it up and have to start slashing forests for it.
by amluto | 2026-02-04 17:02:49+00:00
I skimmed the paper, and I think I completely lost the plot.

Sections 2.1 through 2.4 talk about the decomposing the per-token-pair attention (key vector from the ith token with query vector from the jth token, where, in inference, the jth token is the one being sampled) into an approximation that is only mildly outrageously exponential in size compared to the original exponential-of-a-dot product. And they get something that's a polynomial (in the mathematical sense -- you're literally evaluating a polynomial) and has a size that's manageable at 4th order.

Okay, great, they took something simple and made it bigger and nastier but less transcendental without losing too much precision. (As far as I know, there is really nothing special about the exp in attention in the first place, so trying to approximate it well seems mostly useful insofar as it will keep existing models working.)

But the reason that attention is quadratic is that each token gets evaluated with respect to each other token. They haven't changed this at all. Section 2.5 seems like it's deferring this to an appendix. Section 2.6 gives the hidden state size per token, which, on first read, is strictly larger than the hidden state in normal attention (in normal attention it's d_v * d_k -- I'm not sure where their +1 comes from).

So what did the paper gain? Is there some detail that I missed or that the paper completely glossed over that explains why there is any gain of efficiency at all?

For what it's worth, the paper's overall claim is, in some sense, impossible. You can think of attention as being a sort of vector database, and this gets more accurate the sharper you make the exponential. If you replace softmax with actual max, a query locates the key that is the closest match to the query and returns the associated value. This operation is a plain linear search, it's possible (in principle anyway) to do lots of queries and recover the entire contents of the database, and I think that any paper claiming to do it faster than linear time should explain how it's compressing the data and where the loss is.

In language model terms, imagine an prompt like so:

1: [string 1]
2: [string 2]
3: [string 3]
...
n: [string n]

Tell me the string associated with the number k.

As long as there's enough precision and enough query/key space to fit some embedding of the number k that will match the right thing (and there is a lot of room in high-dimensional spaces), one might expect a transformer to be able to answer this question. But this obviously requires memory with size linear in the prompt length. If you try to get rid of that, you necessarily lose something. (This is not to say that nice attention scaling is impossible -- one could imagine schemes where it takes the model multiple tokens to answer the question, and the number of tokens needed could scale, say, logarithmically with prompt size. But you still need that linear memory.)
by raphaelmolly8 | 2026-02-04 17:02:55+00:00
The cross-binary documentation transfer via normalized function hashing is really compelling for anyone tracking software that updates frequently. I've dealt with similar pain points analyzing game clients that push patches weekly — manually re-annotating shifted addresses is brutal.

Curious about the hash collision rate in practice. The README mentions 154K+ entries from Diablo II patches. With that sample size, have you encountered meaningful false positives where structurally similar but semantically different functions matched? The Version Tracker comparison in the comments is fair — seems like combining this hash approach with additional heuristics (xref patterns, call graph structure) could reduce both false positives and negatives.

The headless Docker mode is a nice touch for CI integration. Being able to batch-analyze binaries and auto-propagate annotations without spinning up a GUI opens up some interesting automated diffing workflows.
by jkkramer | 2026-02-04 17:02:57+00:00
Just yesterday I noticed I was mentally EXHAUSTED after building out a feature with Claude Code.

I actually had to think really, really hard to keep up with the idiot savant as it cranked out code.

Correctness was extremely important for this feature. Claude would consistently make subtle mistakes, and I needed to catch them to keep things from going off the rails. I could have done it myself, but it would have taken MUCH longer.

I essentially compressed a week’s worth of work into a few hours, and my brain paid the price.

So yeah. You can use AI to replace your thinking, or you can use it to push yourself to your max potential.
by neom | 2026-02-04 17:03:00+00:00
If you smoke weed regularly I'm not sure any of the 5/10mg edibles are particularly useful outside of diabetes. Health Canada puts a 10mg limit on THC extract for edible ingestion and personally I find it weird, people are consuming insane amounts of sugar eating gummies to get stoned due to tolerances. If you happened to be in Canada, there are a few companies that have snuck fully decarboxylated thc into the resin syringes you can get as "resin for smoking", BOXHOT Disty Dabber and Ellevia RSO can both be consumed edible out of the box and are considerably better than any other edible on the market, careful tho, a little goes a long way.
by necovek | 2026-02-04 17:03:34+00:00
Thanks for confirmation, but anatomies of people, especially at the p5/p95 extremes, can be widely different: maybe I've got a very small head with a short forehead :)

So in a sense, I'd still like an option to mount it differently and more out of the way before splurging €1.2k + ~30% customs/VAT on something like this.

This even prompted me to check out comparable video fill lights on Aliexpress, and they also run around $1k (some at $500 with possibly a few gotchas about actual light output)
for comparable luminosity/wattage, so your price is actually not too shabby.
by mmooss | 2026-02-04 17:03:41+00:00
> Optimism is irrational

That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.

Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.

To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
by kllrnohj | 2026-02-04 17:03:49+00:00
We don't consider warehouses & stores to be a "slippery slope" away from toll roads, so no I really don't see any good faith slippery slope argument that connects enforcing the law against X to be the same as government censorship of ISPs.

I mean even just calling it censorship is already trying to shove a particular bias into the picture. Is it government censorship that you aren't allowed to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater? Yes. Is that also a useful feature of a functional society? Also yes. Was that a "slippery slope"? Nope. Turns out people can handle that nuance just fine.
by powersjcb | 2026-02-04 17:03:51+00:00
I had good success with this after tuning my triggers + main agent prompt.

I explicitly tell it about the skills and that it should load them when the context feels correct.

```prompt.md

Company Name codebase ...

# Skills

Use the company specific skills that look like `company-*`. Load them once per conversation if they seem relevant to what you are working on.

```

```SKILL.md

---

description: Company TypeScript libraries and conventions

trigger: Writing or reading TypeScript in Company services
---

# company-ts

```
by vidarh | 2026-02-04 17:03:59+00:00
The notion of a "mixed economy" is really orthogonal to Marx arguments over capitalism, though it is relevant to other socialist ideologues. To Marx, what mattered was the dominant "mode of production", and the result power dynamic resulting from that. The existence of public services doesn't change that. A socialist system with a free market remains socialist. A capitalist system with public services remain capitalist. Calling either "mixed" doesn't alter what the dominant mode of production is.

As for Marx "spiel about contradictions", all he did was take capitalists seriously on the notion that competition in a truly free market will tend to drive down margins once the market is fully exploited.

One can certainly disagree with his conclusions over the consequences of that - e.g. whether societies will succeed in continuing to mitigate the negative effects, or end up in crises, but the core theory of Marx on capitalism was that competition and markets works as advertised.
by rishabhjain1198 | 2026-02-04 17:04:00+00:00
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.

This statement is actually completely false.
The bottleneck is not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible on the planet. How much we're willing to pay for increasing that is currently very unclear, but it's far more than the current cost of building a terrestrial data center.

As Jensen Huang famously touted their performance per watt, saying "Our customers won't buy our competitor's chips even if they were free."
by AlexandrB | 2026-02-04 17:04:05+00:00
I think some people like this because it pushes libertarian "no need for environmental or regulatory review" buttons. There's a kernel of a valid argument there, but it seems overstated given that companies seem to have little trouble getting approval for big datacenter buildouts here on earth.

There's also the coolness factor, I guess.

But why does no one talk about launching RackSpace servers into space? I think the whole thing is tied to AI because of the hype, not because sending servers into space has any kind of material advantages.
by kotaKat | 2026-02-04 17:04:20+00:00
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.

Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
by opo | 2026-02-04 17:04:24+00:00
I don't think that is the consensus view of why Caesar was assassinated:

>...According to Suetonius, Caesar's assassination ultimately occurred primarily due to concerns that he wished to crown himself the king of Rome.[13] These concerns were exacerbated by the "three last straws" of 45 and 44 BC. In just a few months, Caesar had disrespected the Senate, removed People's Tribunes, and toyed with monarchy. By February, the conspiracy that caused his assassination was being born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar
by chasd00 | 2026-02-04 17:04:56+00:00
> Does Apple's implementation have any sanitization layer between retrieved content and what gets fed to the model?

It's been discussed a lot but fundamentally there isn't a way to solve this yet (and it may not be solvable period). I'm sure they've asked their model(s) to not do anything stupid through the system prompt. Remember, prepending and appending text to the user's request to an LLM is the all you can do. With an LLM it's only text string in then text string out. That's it.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-04 17:05:36+00:00
Kids grow. If it were me I'd just remove the mower deck, throw an extra muffler in its place (because without the deck the engine will be the next loudest thing and I don't wanna listen to it). Maybe lock out the top speeds depending upon age/yard topology.

Stuff goes straight to permanent memory at that age so by giving them a "real" tractor there's a lot of potential to learn good lifelong lessons prompt them to ask the kind of questions that result in good teaching.
by kaicianflone | 2026-02-04 17:05:44+00:00
Thanks. I like to tinker, so I’m prototyping a hosted $USDC board, but Clawsensus is fundamentally local-first: faucet tokens, in-network credits, and JSON configs on the OpenClaw gateway.

In the plugin docs is a config UI builder. Plugin is OSS, boards aren’t.
by toast0 | 2026-02-04 17:06:41+00:00
Yeah, but using 616 is problematic because it ruins the Barney is the antichrist bit [1], and we wouldn't want to associate NANPA area code 616 with both the beast and Grand Rapids, MI (historically, 616 covered more of western MI)

[1] https://www.christadelphianbooks.org/agora/bible_books/jff01...
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-04 17:06:45+00:00
Technical teams are great at solving technical problems. And will always see more technical problems to solve.

This article is about how you can put jailbreaking this device out of the reach of a skilled reverse engineer, and require a skilled reverse engineer with some fancier technology. Ironically so it could be cracked by the same guy in all likelihood.

....Why?

There is no upside. Only costs.

This is obvious to anyone who's common sense isn't blinded by a mind geared to solving technical issues.
by nemild | 2026-02-04 17:06:56+00:00
Beyond crypto teams, we're seeing increasing use cases for more teams to use stablecoins to pay. For example, both Gusto and Deel (YC teams) are using stablecoins to offer worldwide payouts.

Here's Gusto's CTO:
https://x.com/edawerd/status/2018785968669815011
by autoexec | 2026-02-04 17:07:11+00:00
> And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.

Because what happens in the ballot box is private, it should be possible to let prisoners vote without interference as long as poll workers are allowed inside to do their job, but it's not just people currently in prison you have to worry about. There are places where convicted felons can lose their right to vote even after they've served their time and laws like that have already been used to suppress votes.

> The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship

Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with. By strictly limiting who is allowed to vote and taking that right away from millions of Americans you'd be destroying the country, not saving it.
by mindslight | 2026-02-04 17:07:33+00:00
> any transfer of property in the county has to be recorded on a deed that is submitted to the county clerk and kept on file by them. Otherwise it hasn't happened.

No, the point is that this is actually not true. The transfer has happened as soon as the deed has been executed. There are many reasons you generally want to record the deed in a timely fashion, but doing so is not strictly necessary.
by propellerhat | 2026-02-04 17:07:51+00:00
Huge, important distinctions:

Manufacturing firearms is not unlawful in the State of New York, nor is it unlawful federally.

As far as I can tell, there is no federal or state law that compels any company to add features like the ones HP has added to their products. I have not spent a large amount of time researching. Just browsed a few articles like this one https://www.itestcash.com/blogs/news/your-guide-to-federal-c....
by mmooss | 2026-02-04 17:08:31+00:00
Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?

Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
by quesera | 2026-02-04 17:08:53+00:00
Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic.

Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling.

So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent.

Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
by jampekka | 2026-02-04 17:09:08+00:00
At least in Finland there's a specific law about journalistic source protection (lähdesuoja) explicitly saying journalists have the right to not reveal sources.

In serious crime cases in some circumstances a court may order a journalist to reveal sources. But it's extremely rare and journalists don't comply even if ordered.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4hdesuoja

Edit: the source protection has actually probably never been broken (due to a court order at least): https://yle.fi/a/3-8012415
by nemild | 2026-02-04 17:09:33+00:00
Answering this seriously.

Most goods today are denominated in fiat, so stablecoins are a better fit than gold.

And at this stage, stablecoins are great for easy money movement (rather than holding in crypto). I actually think most people won't even know that crypto rails have been used to move their money, with stablecoins like tcp/ip for money movement.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-04 17:09:42+00:00
Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.
by maples37 | 2026-02-04 17:09:54+00:00
Okay, though, for very small hobbyist payloads, though, wouldn't hydrogen balloons be feasible?

Some quick math tells me that you can lift approximately a kilogram of mass per cubic meter (at sea level, anyway). If your balloon's full weight is a half of a kilogram, you'd only need about a large beach ball filled with hydrogen to lift it. That seems like something that would be attainable for an outdoor DIY electrolysis setup.
by pmart123 | 2026-02-04 17:10:41+00:00
There's a lot of irony right now regarding the cost of these things too (although I know the cost curve will drop over time). I know developers that are burning $1,000/day on tokens for Claude Code or VC's using the $200/month ChatGPT pricing plan who are then talking about Vibe coding TurboTax away. TurboTax for most people is $50 to $100 a year. We are still a far way off even from a cost justification standpoint let alone a reliability standpoint of relying on a vibe coded solution for filing your taxes.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-04 17:11:02+00:00
Why would anyone not want cheap energy?

The only logic reason I can see is purely political --- to cater to the petro industry at the expense of consumers and manufacturers.

China is adding solar capacity at an astonishing rate --- because they realize that cheap energy offers a competitive advantage to their manufacturing.

It's time to wake up and smell the coffee --- America First is really leaving the USA behind the rest of the world.

https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...
by nemild | 2026-02-04 17:11:26+00:00
Agreed, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

To start, think that stablecoins are great for money movement, even if fiat is used on both sides. For example, Bridge (now part of Stripe) started with a stablecoin sandwich, where the stablecoin was just the money movement piece and both source and destination were fiat. That was cheaper and faster than the other ways to move money.
by commandlinefan | 2026-02-04 17:12:10+00:00
Pretty disturbing to me how many people _on here_ are cheering for this. I thought that at least here of all places, there might be some nuanced discussion on "ok, I see why people are emotional about this topic in particular, but it's worth stepping back and putting emotions aside for a minute to see if this is actually reasonable overall..." but besides your comment, I'm not seeing much of that.
by mmphosis | 2026-02-04 17:12:56+00:00
The Commdore 64 has 64 kibibytes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units

"the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes (65,536 bytes) of RAM"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64