MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2026-02-03 02:29:48+00:00
This, as others have noted is not a right to repair, it's a right to pollute.

There's a push for agricultural right to repair.[1] That falls under the Federal Trade Commission, not the Environmental Protection Administration. That's about parts and tool availability for the whole machine, not just the Diesel power train. This new announcement has zero effect on that.

Here are the controls of a modern John Deere combine.[2] Very little of that has anything to do with engine control. It's being able to fix that, and all the sensors and actuators connected to it, that's important. Diesels are rather reliable by now.

[1] https://nationalaglawcenter.org/ftc-files-suit-against-john-...

[2] https://www.deere.com.au/assets/images/region-4/products/har...
by throwup238 | 2026-02-03 02:29:55+00:00
> A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station.

The ISS is powered by eight Solar Array Wings. Each wing weighs about 1,050kg. The station also has two radiator wings with three radiator orbital replacement units weighing about 1,100kg each. That's about 15,000 kg total so if the ISS can power three racks, that's 5,000kg of payload per rack not including the rack or any other support structure, shielding, heat distribution like heat pipes, and so on.

Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload, that's 12 racks launched for about $100 million. That's basically tripling or quadrupling (at least) the cost of each rack, assuming that's the only extra cost and there's zero maintenance.
by bcraven | 2026-02-03 02:29:56+00:00
None of these are local news articles, in fact they are all from a different continent.

A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).

https://www.petrolprices.com/news/garage-sells-petrol-dilute...
by marcosdumay | 2026-02-03 02:29:56+00:00
> I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar.

With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.

But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
by abbyw2002 | 2026-02-03 02:30:04+00:00
Location: San Francisco

Remote: Open to it, but would prefer in person

Willing to relocate: Would like to stay in bay area

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ZyeaZl2ux5Y8ukoLzCcwyZqVl3...

email: cab8895@gmail.com

I’m a new graduate software engineer with strong internship experience building full-stack applications using React, TypeScript, Node.js, SQL, and AWS. I’ve shipped performance-sensitive, user-facing features, worked with APIs and databases, and contributed to production systems in healthcare and government environments. I bring a solid foundation in software engineering, clean code, and collaborative development, with experience taking features from idea through deployment.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-03 02:30:11+00:00
As I mentioned[0] a few months ago after the TSA announced the $45 "fee":

...The courts have repeatedly struck down limits on domestic travel over the
past couple hundred years.

In fact, the $45 "fee" is an acknowledgment that you aren't required to have
special documents to travel within the US. Otherwise, they just wouldn't let
you travel.

So instead, they're making more security theater and punishing you if you
don't comply with their demands...

And now the birds are coming home to roost. No real surprise there, IMHO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46128346
Show HN: One Ego, Any Model – A Chrome Extension for Portable AI Context
by haebom | 2026-02-03 02:30:16+00:00
Hi HN,

Models are getting better, but workflows are getting fragmented.
I don’t think the future is one dominant AI model — it’s multiple specialized ones.

Context Wallet is a small Chrome extension that treats user context as something you own,
not something trapped inside a single provider.

You create context cards (role, tone, project state) and switch them across AI chat pages.
Everything is local-first by default.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-03 02:30:44+00:00
It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.
by DoctorOW | 2026-02-03 02:30:50+00:00
I'm going to be honest, I always felt like the verbosity was the point of Go. Iirc the whole reason it was invented was to let codebases be as readable as they are writable even for less experienced developers. Why are there Error types when exceptions exist? To force you to acknowledge the possibility for errors. You can easily let your frameworks and libraries handle recovering from panics, but err is unavoidable. You have to, at the very least, put the _.
by 2Gkashmiri | 2026-02-03 02:31:26+00:00
In India, we have generic medicine paracetamol for 20 bucks while branded one is like 5-10 times that.

Sadly many people feel that because they are sick, they need to spend as much money as possible because that would give them best shot at getting healthly.

I once asked a guy "why don't you buy that cheap medicine. Its the same and will save you money" but they were like "naa. Its cheap. What would be inside it. I need to pay top money for best medicine"
by gaigalas | 2026-02-03 02:31:59+00:00
I'd say browsers are a pretty good way of delivering models that run locally.

Currently, this tech is a sleeper because consumer hardware is not there yet.

Extensions, even websites, could benefit a lot from offering small models on demand and powering client-side features with them.

That is very different from a browser that embeds AI access through an API, and totally acceptable.
by sanex | 2026-02-03 02:32:29+00:00
Location: Chicago, IL, USA

Willing to relocate: No

Role: Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead / Engineering Manager

Experience:
Engineering Manager and Senior Engineer with deep experience in high-throughput, external-facing APIs and distributed systems. I’ve led small teams (5–10 engineers), owned architecture for revenue-critical platforms, and stayed hands-on shipping production code.

Recent work includes language rewriting a revenue-generating API with zero downtime, resolving thread pool exhaustion under load, and improving observability and incident response using Prometheus and Grafana. Strong background in event-driven architecture.

Tech:
C#, .NET Core, Kotlin, Java, SQL
AWS (ECS, Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, RDS), PostgreSQL, Redis
Event-driven architectures (NServiceBus, Kafka-style patterns)
React / Next.js (pragmatic frontend work, not UI-heavy)
Prometheus, Grafana, CI/CD

What I’m looking for:
Senior level IC roles or EM roles that remain technically hands-on. Companies learning to scale, break down monoliths, product teams trying to ship quickly and technically sound.
Remote-first or hybrid preferred.

Resume: https://www.sanecki.me/resume

Email: ben dot sanecki at gmail.com
by jongjong | 2026-02-03 02:32:32+00:00
Geology is fascinating. When geologists describe effects over long periods of time, it's like they're describing liquids, not solid matter.

It's interesting to think about the fact that on a long enough timeline, all the matter that we consider to be solid actually behaves more like liquid; bobbing up and down like a rough ocean. The continents shifting apart like two opposing currents with the plagues sliding one above another like what happens when two great currents meet... All the solid objects we interact with are like liquids frozen in time and we're actually moving through time extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we are able to temporarily shape the 'liquids' before they eventually disintegrate and melt into a puddle; as also happens to us.

Thinking about the world in this way makes everything we do seem much more complex, but at the same time, more futile, than it initially appears.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-03 02:33:02+00:00
Popular in 2023 (834 points, 341 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772

Unpopular in 2022 (5 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33237452

2021 (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27278356
by prodigycorp | 2026-02-03 02:33:12+00:00
If you're using 5.2 high, with all due respect, this has to be a skill issue. If you're using 5.2 Codex high — use 5.2 high. gpt-5.2 is slow, yes (ok, keeping it real, it's excruciatingly slow). But it's not the moronic caricature you're saying it is.

If you need it to be up to date with your version of a framework, then ask it to use the context7 mcp server.

If you need it to specify the latest version, don't say "latest". That word would be interpreted differently by humans as well.

Claude is very well known to be good at one-shotting things. 1) But that's at the expense of strict instruction following adherence. 2) It won't take as much time to gather context in larger codebases.
by LeFantome | 2026-02-03 02:33:55+00:00
> Freedesktop wants to kill X11

There is a difference of opinion. Freedesktop wants to "stabilize" X11. That does mean that they do not want to evolve Xorg. However, it does not mean that you cannot keep using it or that they are going to take it away. In fact, it is still being maintained and will be for a long time.

You can interpret the rejecting of patches and banning of developers as political. However others see the rejection and banning as protecting the stablity that is the goal.

If your goal is for Xorg to evolve and not to stabalize (fair), you may prefer Xlibre as a project.

Phoenix looks pretty cool too.

KDE Plasma and GNOME are trying to kill X11. Or, at least, they do not want to maintain support for it in their projecs. And COSMIC did not bother to add support for X11 at all. That will probably be the trend on desktop Linux.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-03 02:34:35+00:00
> No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth.

In space or vacuum radiation is the best way to dissipate heat, since it's the only way.

I believe the reason the common person assumes thermal radiation is a very poor way of shedding heat is because of 2 factoids commonly known:

1. People think they know how a vacuum flask / dewar works.

2. People understand that in earthly conditions (inside a building, or under our atmosphere) thermal radiation is insignificant compared to conduction and convection.

But they don't take into account that:

1) Vacuum flasks / dewars use a vacuum for thermal insulation. Yes and they mirror the glass (emissivity nearer to ~0) precisely because thermal radiation would occur otherwise. They try their best to eliminate thermal radiation, a system optimized to eliminate thermal radiation is not a great example of how to effectively use thermal radiation to conduct heat. The thermal radiation panels would be optimized for emissivity 1, the opposite of whats inside the vacuum flask.

2) In a building or under an atmosphere a room temperature object is in fact shedding heat very quickly by thermal radiation, but so are the walls and other room temperature objects around you, they are reheating you with their thermal radiation. The net effect is small, in these earthly conditions, but in a satellite the temperature of the environment faced by the radiating surfaces is 4K, not a temperature similar to the object you are trying to keep cool.

People take the small net effect of thermal radiation in rooms etc, and the slow heat conduction through a vacuum flasks walls as representative for thermal radiation panels facing cold empty space, which is the mistake.
by tavavex | 2026-02-03 02:34:38+00:00
No they didn't. 200Gb/s is 25GB/s, so... They could run 1/36th of a single current-gen SXM5 socket. Not even any of the futuristic next-gen stuff. 25GB/s is less than the bandwidth of one X16 PCIe3 socket. And that's already assuming the best-case scenario, and in reality trying to sync up GPUs like that would likely have loads of other issues. But even just the sheer amount of inter-GPU bandwidth you need is quite extreme. And this isn't some point-to-point routing like Starlink trying to get data from A to B, this is maintaining a network of interconnected systems that need to communicate chaotically and with uneven demand.
by president_zippy | 2026-02-03 02:34:51+00:00
By that logic, there was no value added in updating the syntax from ANSI C to C99: no reason to add double-slash comments, no reason to allow function-local variables to be declared and initialized where you use them instead of the top of the function, and no reason to omit a return statement for the main() function.

From your reasoning, it also follows that using infix notation instead of Polish notation for arithmetic does absolutely nothing to lower the learning curve.
by ehasbrouck | 2026-02-03 02:35:06+00:00
FWIW, REAL-ID is not about U.S. citizenship: A passport issued by any country is considered "compliant" with the REAL-ID Act for air travel or any other purpose, regardless of the person's U.S. immigration status. Some politicians seem to have deluded themselves to think that requiring REAL-ID will stop "illegal aliens" from flying. But it won't. Many foreigners in the U.S. (regardless of U.S. immigration status) have an easier time getting REAL-ID (a passport from their country of citizenship) than some U.S. citizens.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-03 02:35:28+00:00
No, it is incredibly streamlined because it tailored specifically to achieve this modernization.

The paid program can do it because it can accept these files as an input, and then you can use the general toolset to work towards the same goal. But the program is clunky an convoluted as hell.

To give an example, imagine you had tens of thousands of pictures of people posing, and you needed to change everyone's eye color based on the shirt color they were wearing.

You can do this in Photoshop, but it's a tedious process and you don't need all $250/mo of Photoshop to do it.

Instead make a program that auto grabs the shirt color, auto zooms in on the pupils, shows a side window of where the object detection is registering, and tees up the human worker to quickly shade in the pupils.

Dramatically faster, dramatically cheaper, tuned exactly for the odd task you need to do.
by sleepybrett | 2026-02-03 02:35:29+00:00
Thinking a bit, ORBITAL ai makes little to no sense, nowhere to dump your heat, your gpus are going to be slag or only operate part of the time. But what if he put them on the moon? the lag time is what ~1.2s? That seems like an amount of time that a current AI query can take and still seem reasonable.

Not that I think it's anything but him allowing some investors to cash out when spacex goes public. Hell didn't he just shift 2billion from tesla to xai?

At the end of the day he will never see whatever bullshit he's peddling in the media about this sale his drug habit is going to kill him before then.
by drob518 | 2026-02-03 02:35:48+00:00
In a sense, this is just an exercise in (possibly lossy) compression. 64-bit unsigned into are not lossy. 64-bit floating point is lossy but has larger range; it’s only able to encode a small fraction of the numbers in its range (in the limit, the fraction that can be represented is zero since there are infinite real numbers in the range and FP only captures a few).
by defrost | 2026-02-03 02:36:45+00:00
The punchline being:

The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health.

The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,”
by bsnnkv | 2026-02-03 02:36:58+00:00
> any time someone says something is post-$thing it means what they are doing is in dialogue with and in response to $thing. “we were doing that before $thing” no, you can’t be in dialogue with something that hasn’t happened yet.

> this is like saying “what do you mean post-modernist architecture, architecture predates modernism”.

https://lobste.rs/s/kaftkn/i_started_identifying_corporate_d...
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-03 02:37:13+00:00
> How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?

I provided the calculation for the pyramidal shape: if the base of a pyramid were a square solar panel with side length L, then for a target temperature of 300K (a typical back of envelope substitute for "room temperature") the height of the pyramid would have to be about 3 times the side length of the square base. Quite reasonable.

> Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?

The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that whatever prevents us from putting GPU clusters in space, it's not the difficulty in shedding heat by thermal radiation that is supposedly stopping us.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-03 02:38:06+00:00
> Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.

I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
by e35zhang | 2026-02-03 02:38:25+00:00
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Remote: remote, hybrid, or 100% on-site.

Willing to relocate: Yes (Canadian Citizen, TN Visa ready for US roles)

Technologies: Python (AST instrumentation), C (C11, bare-metal), Golang, SQL (SQLite SAVEPOINTs), AI-native architecture (MCP, Tool-use orchestration), Distributed Systems Verification (Source-DPOR, LTL)

Résumé/CV: https://www.entingzhang.com/Enting_s_RESUME_system_eng_2026_... (Interactive Demos Available in https://www.entingzhang.com)

Email: e35zhang@uwaterloo.ca

Bio:

Network Software Engineer (P2 @ Ciena) specialized in formal concurrency verification and high-performance system observability. I focus on "Architecture Over Intelligence"—building reliable agentic workflows where correctness is enforced by the system design rather than probabilistic model outputs.

Key Projects & Impact:

Clotho: Built a deterministic interleaving orchestrator that uses AST-level hijacking to verify Python codebases. It prunes $O(N!)$ state spaces into $O(2^{C})$ Mazurkiewicz equivalence classes via Source-DPOR.

Project Oracle: Architected an AI-native diagnostic suite that slashed TTR for core FIB (Forwarding Information Base) issues from 4 hours to <3 seconds by establishing a C-state-to-JSON "lingua franca" for LLM reasoning.

Knowledge Recovery: Successfully decoded complex, undocumented legacy control planes into formal specifications to enable critical 6500-to-10.X system transitions.

LTL-Driven Testing: Built a permutation-based framework using Linear Temporal Logic to auto-generate 8,000+ high-fidelity tests, identifying regressions in minutes that previously stalled teams for weeks.

I am looking for a new Senior Backend or Systems Engineering role where I can apply rigorous formal methods to modern AI-native or high-concurrency financial/distributed infrastructures.
by StellarScience | 2026-02-03 02:39:39+00:00
Stellar Science | Hybrid (USA) Albuquerque NM, Washington DC (Tysons VA), Dayton OH | Full time, interns/co-ops | U.S. citizenship required | https://www.stellarscience.com

Company: We're a small scientific software development company that develops custom scientific and engineering analysis applications in domains including: space situational awareness (monitoring the locations, health and status of on-orbit satellites), image simulation, high power microwave systems, modeling and simulation, laser systems modeling, AI/ML including physics-informed neural networks (PINN), human body thermoregulation, computer vision and image processing, high performance computing (HPC), computer aided design (CAD), and more. All exciting applications and no CRUD. We emphasize high quality code and lightweight processes that free software engineers to be productive.

Experience: Except for interns, we currently require a Bachelors degree in physics, engineering, math, computer science, or a related field. Masters or PhD is a plus. (Roughly 25% of our staff have PhDs.)

Technologies: Lots of C++23, Qt 6.9, CMake, git, OpenGL, CUDA, Boost, Jenkins. Windows and Linux, msvc/gcc/clang/clangcl. AI/ML and analysis projects use Python and C++. Web projects use Java and Typescript/React.

Apply online: at https://www.stellarscience.com/careers/.
by ajxs | 2026-02-03 02:40:07+00:00
Location: Sydney, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Potentially

Technologies: Node.js/Typescript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, .NET, React(Next.js, Redux), C, Rust, Ada, and more...

Email: ajxs@panoptic.online

https://github.com/ajxs

https://ajxs.me
by elektronika | 2026-02-03 02:40:15+00:00
>Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built.

Look up "Nail Houses". The USA used eminent domain heavily in the same situation back when they were still building new infrastructure.

>Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object.

It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.