MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexeyBelov | 2026-02-07 11:54:26+00:00
I know that it's against the guidelines to make comparisons to Reddit, but this is exactly what I frequently see there. People complaining about 4 downvotes and telling everyone how they are being silenced for being truthful in the sea of lies, or whatever else.

Very, very often this is some form of lashing out and has no basis in any reality.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-02-07 11:55:30+00:00
Regarding architecture, I don't believe a satisfying "why" is in the cards.

Conceptually neural networks are quite simple. You can think of each neural net as a daisy chain of functions that can be efficiently tuned to fulfill some objective via backpropagation.

Their effectiveness (in the dimensions we care about) are more a consequence of the explosion of compute and data that occured in the 2010s.

In my view, every hyped architecture was what yielded the best accuracy given the compute resources available at the time. It's not a given that these architectures are the most optimal and we certainly don't always fully understand why they work. Most of the innovations in this space over the past 15 years have come from private companies that have lacked a strong research focus but are resource rich (endless compute and data capacity).
by vouwfietsman | 2026-02-07 11:56:22+00:00
I think the key is in the distributed nature, h3 is effectively a grid so can easily be distributed over nodes. A recursive system is much harder to handle that way. R-trees are great if you are OK with indexing all data on one node, which I think for a global system is a no-go.

This is all speculation, but intuitively your criticism makes sense.

Also, mapping 147k cities to countries should not take 16 workers and 1TB of memory, I think the example in the article is not a realistic workload.
by ajb | 2026-02-07 11:57:11+00:00
Some vocal techniques - like belting and the classical voices - require the actual development of musculature, both to hold a shape (for high pitches) and to be able to stabilise shapes. That's not going to happen overnight, so you have to spend sometime sounding horrible before you can do those well. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

However, that's not the techniques used in the majority of popular singing. You absolutely can sound drastically different very quickly. This is simply because most people don't use most of the degrees of freedom that the voice has. If you look at the Estill method reference material, which concentrates on how the vocal system features actually operate to produce different vocal effects, they identify around 14 degrees of freedom.Some discrete, but a lot of them continuous. It is very common for someone who thinks that they have a terrible voice to take a few lessons and find that they can sound much better. It's just that, as another commenter pointed out, you can't see inside your own mouth and throat. You can't see that you're always holding them in a certain way.

For example, some women habitually sound shrill, usually because they have had to develop a penetrating voice. This is often true of teachers, who have to be able to make themselves heard over a bunch of shrill children (and aren't able to use the option of a deep bass). This is a vocal technique (twang) but it can also become habitual,to the point where they don't think they can do anything else.
by pastage | 2026-02-07 11:58:09+00:00
MacOS is a better desktop in the sense that the desktop is locked down. GNOME trie to be the same as MacOS but being the default desktop for nerds and build for people who lives the Apple way makes it a bit schizofrenic.

As a Linux lifer I agree that the hard diamond surface of the Mac desktop has a solid feeling to it. The Linux way is harder and also more brittle. Windows and Linux are both better than MacOS even as a desktop as long as you do not look at the in the wrong way. The thing is I have only minor problems doing that on either Linux or Windows, but the walled garden of the Mac, Android and iOS is a joke.

So it is not a better Unix, it is a political stance that means hacking will forever die.
by abdibrokhim | 2026-02-07 11:59:13+00:00
ANORA — Your Intelligent Canvas for Scalable Workflows

We’re building AI tools for real creative work, not "AI slop." Anora brings every creative AI model — across text, image, and video — into one intuitive interface.

You can easily connect these models to explore creative ideas faster than ever before.

We allow you to codify your creative process into repeatable systems that faithfully execute your vision.

Ideate, iterate, scale — however you want.
by olalonde | 2026-02-07 11:59:20+00:00
1. Progress is unstoppable. Refusing to fund it won't make it disappear.

2. Most VCs are normal people that just want a bigger slice of pie, not necessarily a bigger share of the pie. The vast majority of them would probably rather live as a regular dude in modern times than an aristocrat in pre-revolution France. See the fixed pie fallacy.
by rramadass | 2026-02-07 11:59:55+00:00
Description of the above video;

In 2027, virtual assistants like Sarah seamlessly handle our daily tasks, making life appear effortless. But behind this technological marvel lies a hidden reality. This documentary unveils the untold story of the ghost workers who power our digital world, performing the tedious and often traumatic tasks that machines can't handle.

Meet the invisible workforce behind tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber. These underpaid and disposable workers label images, moderate content, and train AI systems, often earning less than minimum wage. Their work is essential yet remains in the shadows, unacknowledged by the companies that depend on them.

00:00 - Introduction: The Illusion of Effortless AI
02:15 - The Hidden Workforce: Who Are the Ghost Workers?
05:30 - Undercover: Life as a Content Moderator
09:45 - AI Training: The Tedious Tasks Behind Smart Machines
13:20 - The Psychological Toll: PTSD and Stress Among Moderators
17:00 - The Future of Work: What Lies Ahead for These Workers?
by boneitis | 2026-02-07 12:00:30+00:00
i just deleted a many-paragraph response that was getting long-winded(incoherent) and started over --

yes, i concur.

like many, i dislike the "i want to help save the world" generic posts, but i think most here are being quick to dismiss TFA.

to others (not the parent): just want to help place a human face onto this guy, who has (not known to me until now) not only published a bunch of works (whose titles i find very relevant to me as a sysadmin), but was the guy in front of the camera in the Shouting in the Datacenter clip[0] !!

things are difficult, but i hang on to hope. and undoubtedly, i have tons to learn from this guy.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
by gdad | 2026-02-07 12:00:46+00:00
I experienced this as well. The built-in memory features are a black-box. Can't see what's stored, can't control when it's recalled and takes random irrelevant examples from past conversations into unrelated conversations. Also, I am into using multiple models, so it was frustrating they can't talk to each other.

The .md file approach is cool but like you mentioned, it is an overhead and doesn't scale well.

I have been building something in this space (Maximem Vity [https://maximem.ai]) that tries to solve this more systematically: a cross-LLM, cross-app memory layer that sits in a secure cloud vault. The idea is you control what gets stored and you can summon specific pieces of it into any AI session, granularly. So instead of hoping GPT remembers that you prefer TypeScript and work at a fintech startup, you explicitly pull that context in wherever you need it.
by vitorsr | 2026-02-07 12:01:00+00:00
Nice although I think the ASCII comma feels wrong as part of a filename even if for purely aesthetic reasons.

If we want to stay within (lowercase) alphabetic Latin characters I think prefixing with the least common letters or bigrams that start a word (x, q, y, z, j) is best.

`y' for instance only autocompletes to `yes' and `ypdomainname' on my path.

Choosing a unique bigram is actually quite easy and a fun exercise.

And we can always use uppercase Latin letters since commands very rarely use never mind start with those.
by voxleone | 2026-02-07 12:02:46+00:00
I’m involved in the development of the Functional Universe (FU) framework [0], and I see some interesting intersections with Wolfram’s ruliology.

Both start from the idea that simple rules / functions can generate complex structure. Where FU adds a twist is by making a sharp distinction between possibility and history. In FU, we separate aggregation (the space of all admissible transitions - superpositions, virtual processes, rule applications) from composition (the irreversible commitment of one transition that actually enters history).

You can think of ruliology as exploring the space of possible rule evolutions, while FU focuses on how one path gets selected and becomes real, advancing proper time and building causal structure. Rules generate possibilities; commitment creates facts.

So they’re not the same thing, but I think they’re complementary: ruliology studies the landscape of rules, FU studies the boundary where possibility turns into irreversible history.

[0]https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/blob/main/doc...
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-07 12:02:49+00:00
> I think my subtle argument is that we've been writing for about 4,000 years, so something discovered in the last 50 years is relatively new.

Sure, but look at everything else: there's this beautifully smooth exponential curve that everybody is riding up into the stratosphere, but theoretical physicists seem to be staring up at the foundations from below.

To be fair, these are the hardest of hard problems: figuring out the substrate from the inside.

The only point I'm trying to make is that we've pushed things to the very edge of human cognitive capability. The mathematicians have figured out how to push past that with tooling. The physicists just need to find their own way to expand the boundaries with the new toys available.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-07 12:02:59+00:00
Elon and people like him are currently spending a similar amount of money on building AGI, how's it going, any reason to object?

Asthma and lung cancer from Elon's gas turbines, polluted water everywhere, high electricity prices everywhere, RAM and SSD price hikes, Micron and Nvidia completely stopped making equipment for consumers, disinformation is everywhere, the internet is full of slop.

Oh, seems like billionaire projects are actually bad for people and there's plenty of reason to object.
by graemep | 2026-02-07 12:03:11+00:00
One important bit of background to it is that people had been arguing (and it had been the accepted view) that the creation stories were just stories pretty much from the beginning. Augustine and Origen, for example.

I think the division your are referring to may be true of American evangelical churches, but its not true of Christianity globally. "Modernist" is not a good term for a view that has been around (and generally accepted) for most of two millennia.
by krapp | 2026-02-07 12:04:34+00:00
>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.

4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.
by wiredfool | 2026-02-07 12:04:50+00:00
Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.

Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.

To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.
by vladdoster | 2026-02-07 12:04:56+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by delichon | 2026-02-07 12:07:19+00:00
The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.

I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-07 12:10:12+00:00
This problem one doesn't have, if one pays attention to devops from the start, maybe keeping 1 or 2 capable devops people, who keep things lean. Problem is of course finding the capable ones with the right mindset to keep things as simple and lean as possible.

The result of suddenly needing to hire devops should be to get a convenient setup, but then do you really still need the whole devops team? And if you don't, then hiring them for limited time might come at a cost (hiring freelancers or consultants).
by timwis | 2026-02-07 12:10:42+00:00
Would this be any better than just pasting links to the appropriate documentation for the technology you want to use in your AGENTS.md file? I suppose it's better if it's a single giant text file so there are fewer agent iterations navigating links within the docs but then doc sites could just provide that, like https://docs.avohq.io/3.0/llm-support.html
by nullifidian | 2026-02-07 12:11:07+00:00
>installing many packages

The issue is HOW MANY. This simple utility is in the 100-200 range, Zed editor is in 2000+ range. C/C++ software you find in distros is not only stabilized by the unstable/testing queue, which language repos don't have and don't plan to have, but also has 5-10x less dependencies on average.
by jleyank | 2026-02-07 12:11:23+00:00
I think the goal is to keep Canadians working and thus the tax base. Being lashed to the us, at the moment, is a recipe for disaster. Being lashed to the three us carmakers, unfortunately, isn’t much better given their worldwide difficulties. There’s a base of workers who bend metal and this community can be applied to alternatives while they exist. Military hardware, commercial vehicles, things that float, etc.

HN is an ironic place to have these discussions, as it’s businesses are the reason 20th century things like bending metal are in decline.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-02-07 12:11:44+00:00
That's really helpful, actually, as you may be able to give me some other ideas for projects.

So, things you don't think I or my coursemates could do include writing a C compiler that builds a Linux kernel.

What else do you think we couldn't do? I ask because there are various projects I'll probably get to at some point.

Things on that list include (a) writing an OS microkernel and some of the other components of an OS. Don't know how far I'll take it, but certainly a working microkernel for one machine, if I have time I'll build most of the stack up to a window manager. (b) implementing an LLM training and inference stack. I don't know how close to the metal I'd go, I've done some low level CUDA a long time ago when it was very new and low-level, depends on time. I'll probably start the LLM stuff pretty soon as I'm keen to learn.

Are these also impossible? What other things would you add to the impossible list?
by james_r_h | 2026-02-07 12:11:50+00:00
When or if you review the files, please understand that I know that it reads like an AI wrote them. That is a specific intention of myself, as designed. This research study is designed to be used with myself as Patient 0. If I can prove that all of this is functional, the ultimate intent is to provide data as a research patient that this concept is a viable base for further research into incorporating the Thrive-Vet and similar programs are viable treatment research programs. My personal motivation is the potential lives that can be be fixed and that my success might provide motivation to others in my situation to seek success in their own lives, in their own ways.
by graemep | 2026-02-07 12:13:30+00:00
Not only that, but there are both non western Christian traditional (middle eastern, Ethiopian, Indian) and these are both accepted in the major churches (e.g. the Syro-Malabar rite within the Catholic church) and encouraged (its called inculturation).

> For example, among evangelicals there is this paranoia of anything that might be considered pagan.

Many Christians also see much of value in aspects of paganism. its pretty mainstream - for example CS Lewis argues that God can reveal himself to pagans too (there is quite a bit about this in The Pilgrims Regress).
by replooda | 2026-02-07 12:14:33+00:00
If product->quality_x, I'm okay with employee->?quality_x — but not with either employee->quality_x or employer->!quality_x. A better thing to remember is that people have themselves to feed. Of those 100k engineers, how many can say "no, you don't, Satya, ain't no besmirching my code with slop"?
by estearum | 2026-02-07 12:14:36+00:00
I agree with those ideals, but this is like saying that only nepo-babies are likely to be professional basket weavers.

I don't see that as a meaningful bifurcation of kings and lords. Some people can afford the 99.9999% probability risk of investing 15 - 20 years of ultra-intensive training and coming up with literally no career and no method of adding value to their community that's even remotely correlated to the level of investment in their training.

It is good if that is as few people as possible. And it is good if that person isn't literally starving afterwards (i.e. can just collect rent from their parents' accounts)
by _heimdall | 2026-02-07 12:14:59+00:00
There's no gain to be had there at all. Any optimizations that reduce resource usage per output will be gobbled up by just making more output.

OpenAI released an open source model only because they are capped on growth right now by the amount if hardware they have. Improve resource efficiency and you better believe they'll just crank up use of said resources until they capped again.
by tim333 | 2026-02-07 12:15:24+00:00
Yeah I was a bit ho hum, boring about the Epstein files before the releases but the stuff so far has proved so interesting that you can't help being curious about the ~3m pages remaining unreleased in spite of congress ordering it.

A lot of the stuck fingers in stuff is anonymous allegations sent in by unknown people so may be rubbish - time will tell maybe.

The Russian kompromat allegations sound plausible though.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-07 12:15:32+00:00
It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.

Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-07 12:15:54+00:00
You are correct. Although I drive a very common car/color, it is naïve to think that these systems aren't monitoring me as the grey sedan without visible license plate. I did remove the bumper stickers [0]

My local newspaper retracted a story this month about how the police were able to locate a certain colored vehicle within minutes. Perhaps it was too revealing for general consumption?

My "obstruction" is more (legal) protest? Better to just move to a de-flocked city/state..?

[•] https://xkcd.com/1105/ [License Plate Police]

[0] I consider this similar to how some property appraisal maps allow people to remove their names from searches (either through LLC or black-out), but you can still request beneficial owner information of specific parcels; just one/two additional layers of protection to throw off the scent (have to know what you're looking for, not just simple plate# lookup — although I'm sure there are aliases/forwarders in advanced CCTVai systems).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 12:16:23+00:00
I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”.

I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5). Took advantage of every opportunity to put myself in front of the customer virtually and physically.

Learned through osmosis how the senior consultants, engagement managers (project managers) and account managers operate.

Got Amazoned almost 4 years later and became a staff consultant at a 3rd party firm (equivalent to a senior at AWS or GCP) and while I lead “delivery” projects, I’m still learning how things work at the next higher level of the funnel - pre sales. The level of ambiguity is high by the time it gets to me. But at least sales has narrowed down what high level business outcomes the customer wants.

My thesis is the closer I get to both the revenue drivers and where people skills matter, the less ageism is a factor and experience is actually rewarded and the harder it is to be outsourced, commoditized or replaced with AI. I’ve been concerned about commoditization for over a decade and that definitely happened on the enterprise dev side