MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cxr | 2026-02-04 20:03:40+00:00
It's truly perverse that, at the same time that desktop systems are trying to lock down what trusted, conventional native apps can and cannot do and/or access, you have the Chrome team pushing out proposals to expand what browsers allow websites to do to the user's file system, like silently/arbitrarily reading and writing to the user's disk—gated only behind a "Are you sure you want to allow this? Y/N"-style dialog that, for extremely good reasons, anyone with any sense about design and interaction has strongly opposed for the last 20+ years.
by mrDmrTmrJ | 2026-02-04 20:04:01+00:00
Awesome article. Please read the entire thing. Gary takes a well-deserved shot at the US false use of "third‑worldification" as a stand in for "our own low-trust society".

This crap will only stop when there is:
1. A ton of new housing for all people.
2. Treat everyone the same. Same amount of test time etc.

Otherwise, our society is just a race to see who can claim the most special 'privilege' via some form of 'issue' or 'need'.

It would be great to see detailed demographic breakdowns of exactly who's making these heavy special-privilege claims, as the details may surprise a variety of commentators on this forum. Though I don't think Gary has access to that data.
by dcrazy | 2026-02-04 20:04:08+00:00
That’s not what’s being discussed. In other countries that operate under what’s called the Torrens title system, the government maintains an authoritative central land registry. If you wind up in a legal dispute about ownership of a piece of land, the judge looks at the government books and is bound by what they say (with minimal exceptions).

We cannot have such a national registry in the United States. We could have 50 independent ones, but the few states that tried it have given up and reverted.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-04 20:04:27+00:00
> That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game.

In HCOLs places, parking garages, usually basements, are the solution to this problem. If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods...well, SFHs aren't going to solve the housing problem anyway that you look at it, so...

> We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.

You are also right. You just need to add your budget of the garage into your housing projects costs, or not, since people of the option to buy condos in buildings that do not mandate you also buy a parking spot (which can pay for the underground garage construction).

> Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market?

OMG, yes, if you mean major cities in China. How the heck would you even build enough underground garage space to even think about doing that? The US is nice because our cities are small and not very dense, so we aren't talking about adding parking for every unit in a 40 story...heck, the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.

> This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.

More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess. No, I disagree, but you should really visit Tokyo.
by ghostly_s | 2026-02-04 20:05:02+00:00
Oh my goodness. Reading up on it a bit more:

Ox Security, a "vibe-coding security platform," highlighted these vulnerabilites to its creator, Peter Steinberg. The response wasn't exactly reassuring.

“This is a tech preview. A hobby. If you wanna help, send a PR. Once it’s production ready or commercial, happy to look into vulnerabilities.”[1]

In light of this I'm inclined to conclude- yeah, they're just lying about the privacy stuff.

1. https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/
by guessmyname | 2026-02-04 20:05:11+00:00
The tool works by querying your contacts’ names against https://analytics.dugganusa.com/api/v1/search?q={NAME}&index...

I’d hope anyone using this tool understands that names aren’t unique. So if your mother’s or father’s name shows up in that API, it only means someone else out there has the same name. People who are into conspiracy theories tend to love software like this because it helps them force a preexisting narrative to fit their conclusions.

Search for “John Smith” → https://analytics.dugganusa.com/api/v1/search?q=John+Smith&i...

Now search for “LoremIpsumDolor” (no spaces) → https://analytics.dugganusa.com/api/v1/search?q=LoremIpsumDo...

And, amusingly, “••• •••” (the author’s name) appears 164 times → https://analytics.dugganusa.com/api/v1/search?q=Christopher+...

edit: I removed the author’s name from this post, because the search results don’t really prove anything. Their first name is extremely common in the United States and returns 166 matches on its own, and their last name returns around 1,000. That’s exactly the point here: this API is doing basic name lookups, not confirming identities. Without additional identifiers (like location, email, phone number, or some kind of unique ID), these hits are essentially just name collisions and shouldn’t be treated as meaningful evidence.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-04 20:05:27+00:00
I could make the point that pollution by vehicles is also about basic courtesy and reasonable behaviour in shared public spaces, but it has become so normalised that I don't think you'll be convinced.

However, I do agree that people should be more wary around children and not subject them to second-hand smoke. The problem is that cannabis has such a strong smell that the smell is noticeable even when the amount of smoke exposure is likely not measurable.
by ehsanu1 | 2026-02-04 20:06:10+00:00
To spell it out for myself and others: approaching equivalent calculations for each individual attention block means we also approach equivalent performance for the combination of them. And with an error bar approaching floating point accuracy, the performance should be practically identical to regular attention. Elementwise errors of this magnitude can't lead to any noteworthy changes in the overall result, especially given how robust LLM networks seem to be to small deviations.
by jart | 2026-02-04 20:06:19+00:00
This was posted on OccupyWallSt.com. The OccupyWallSt.org website is still exactly as it was in its full 2011 looking glory. I've been dragging my heels on renewing the SSL certificate however everything's still there. It's even been cataloged and archived by the Library of Congress for posterity. So the dignity of the movement has been secured and is continuing to be respected. Your voices are now a permanent artifact in America's historical record.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-04 20:06:20+00:00
> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.

It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
by tromp | 2026-02-04 20:06:21+00:00
> If you don’t want people to rewrite history, you have to be wasting tons and tons of resources 24/7, 365. And that’s why Bitcoin burns as much power as a significant country.

No, Bitcoin burns that much power because it has become the top speculative asset.

But it only became that after maybe 8 years. Before that it actually functioned more like a currency (amongst other things, for buying illicit goods online).

And what makes Bitcoin ideal for speculation is its capped emission where every 4 years the amount emitted is halved, encouraging FOMO.

I agree most cryptocurrency should die in a fire, including all the ones made to enrich their creators, which is the vast majority of them.

The few that do not allow their creators any financial gain, and those that strongly discourage speculation by having the same amount emitted every year, do not need to die.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-04 20:06:26+00:00
It's a partial renaming but it's not revisionism.

> You no longer know whether a fellow engineer is using powers of 1000 or powers of 1024 when using kilobyte, megabyte or gigabyte

You never knew this, that's the point. You didn't know it in e.g. 1990, before KiB was introduced in 1998. People didn't only start using powers of 10 once KiB was formally introduced. They'd always used them, but conventions around powers of 10 vs 2 depended greatly on the computing context, and were frequently confusing.

There isn't more confusion now. Fortunately, places that explicitly state KiB result in less confusion because, at least in that case, you know for sure what it is.

Unfortunately, a lot of people won't get on board with it, so the confusion persists.

And frankly, I don't care what you call it when you're speaking, as long as you just use the right label in software and in tech specs.
by tpurves | 2026-02-04 20:06:47+00:00
Closest thing to a usecase I can think of are all military in nature. There's an argument that AI in space only begins to make any sense if the data source you are processing is also originating in space, and you need (for reasons) to run models on it in space before downlinking the results.

Maybe there's a very latency sensitive need to send realtime targeting information to a tomahawk missile in flight? But it's also too bandwidth, compute or cost intensive to send a firehose of raw spy-satellite data to a disposable one-way attack munition?

The data centers in space are actually for the spy satellites to use. That's all I got for practical applications.
by Jayakumark | 2026-02-04 20:06:51+00:00
Since you asked for it, here is my steelman argument :
Everything can cause harm - it depends on who is holding it , how determined are they , how easy is it and what are the consequences. Open source will make this super easy and cheap.
1. We are already seeing AI Slop everywhere Social media Content, Fake Impersonation - if the revenue from whats made is larger than cost of making it , this is bound to happen, Open models can be run locally with no control, mostly it can be fine tuned to cause damage - where as closed source is hard as vendors might block it.
2. Less skilled person can exploit or create harmful code - who otherwise could not have.
3. Remove Guards from a open model and jailbreak, which can't be observed anymore (like a unknown zero day attack) since it may be running private.
4. Almost anything digital can be Faked/Manipulated from Original/Overwhelmed with false narratives so they can rank better over real in search.
by wtetzner | 2026-02-04 20:07:04+00:00
Yeah, it's why I don't like trying to write up a comprehensive design before coding in the first place. You don't know what you've gotten wrong until the rubber meets the road. I try to get a prototype/v1 of whatever I'm working on going as soon as possible, so I can root out those problems as early as possible. And of course, that's on top of the "you don't really know what you're building until you start building it" problem.
by dmix | 2026-02-04 20:07:08+00:00
They rolled out full driverless in Austin in November 2025 and there's a website that reverse engineered the mobile app API to track the active cars. It found 90 active in Austin with more declared total by Tesla and 150 active in SF (SF ones have a safety driver for now). Likewise they found around 300 active in SF for Waymo with around 1000 cars declared total by Waymo itself.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-04 20:07:14+00:00
> Who opposes switching back to phonics? Oddly the teacher's unions. Guess who is the biggest contributor to the Dems? Weirdly it makes sense when you frame it this way.

I think you phrased that incorrectly, hopefully not intentionally in bad faith. What you mean is that something like 94% of teacher's unions political contributions go to democratic politicians. It is certainly untrue that the biggest contributions to democrats come from teachers, and it is trivial to find that out.

I am also skeptical that phonics is why teachers prefer democrats. It probably has a much stronger association with how villainized educators are by republicans.
by Legend2440 | 2026-02-04 20:07:34+00:00
I'm tired of these gloomy takes. Everyone only ever focuses on the negatives.

Automation being the end of work would be an unambiguously good thing. Machines can be far more productive than humans ever can, and it would free us up to do whatever we want. We might have to rework the social and economic order a little bit, but we probably needed to do that anyway.
by jdmichal | 2026-02-04 20:07:44+00:00
Something seems broken with the Tampa, FL map. I get an unauthorized page:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/map/YK41FR

And this shows no volumes available:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/tampa-fl/#/center/-84.77...

Same thing for Key West, FL.
by shadowgovt | 2026-02-04 20:07:45+00:00
If by "the movement," you mean Occupy Wall St., one of the things about it as an organization is that it didn't have a mechanism to exclude people really, if I understand correctly. So there was a pretty broad slice of political philosophies united around the common idea "The system that rewards risk-takers for taking risks with other people's money while consolidating the consequences on those who did not consent to the risks is fundamentally flawed."
by rtkwe | 2026-02-04 20:08:07+00:00
I'd be wary of trying this as it reeks of "one neat trick" thinking applied to law based on a small technicality where law is often subject to the spirit instead of strictly hewing to the most favorable interpretation the exact wording for the citizen. The warrant can just state you're required to unlock the system not simply "make your fingers available".

It's fun to try to find places where the rules seem to leave holes but it's important to remember the courts don't have to hew precisely to how you read the law. I see that a lot on tech centric boards where the law is treated like it's strictly, precisely, and impartially interpreted down to the exact words (though often not using the legal meaning of words which have decades of caselaw and interpretation informing their legal meaning).
by antonvs | 2026-02-04 20:08:12+00:00
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.

Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?

It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".
by unyttigfjelltol | 2026-02-04 20:08:59+00:00
He’s saying growth mindsets “win” and zero-sum players, the mean ones, stagnate. This is true as a system— who wants to invest with someone intent on gouging you— and it’s true as a function of effort— if you spend your time on petty tricks and tactics, you will, in the long run, “grow” very little.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-04 20:09:10+00:00
They are unique but they will cease to exist if everyone stops mining and doesn't keep a backup. They are just charges on a storage medium. You cannot use them for anything but to either keep in a wallet or move around. The transactions might be immutable but they are not persistent if not constantly tended to. Gold will stay gold for a long time without intervention.

Most normal currencies are the same as bitcoin/crypto in that they are mostly digital but at least they have some mostly agreed upon value within their system. They don't need to be converted to another currency to find out which goods I can exchange for them.
by dev_l1x_be | 2026-02-04 20:09:23+00:00
The ISS comparison is a bit of a category mismatch. The EATCS is complex because it’s a life-support system that must keep humans at exactly 22C (295K) while managing ammonia loops in a manned environment.

Computers aren't humans. High-performance silicon can comfortably operate at a junction temperature of 80C to 90C (approx. 360K). Because of that T^4 relationship, a radiator at 85C rejects nearly double the heat per square meter than a radiator at 20C, unless I miss something.

So this makes it a bit more nuanced.
by LegionMammal978 | 2026-02-04 20:09:29+00:00
At least in Isabelle/ML, it seems like in practice there are also untrusted "oracles" that a proof can invoke to generate "thm" objects [0], and it's not entirely trivial to automatically ensure that only trusted sources are used in a project [1], unless I am misunderstanding the linked thread.

Of course there's no free lunch, as you say, in making sure that high-level proofs are lowered into the trusted part correctly, but it's certainly a piece that should ideally be as simple as possible.

[0] https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/arc/cl-isabelle-users/2025-02/...

[1] https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/arc/cl-isabelle-users/2025-02/...
by aftbit | 2026-02-04 20:10:01+00:00
Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too, where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible because they were developed early on for communications, then obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the real world.

But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.
by trlha | 2026-02-04 20:10:02+00:00
They don't really. You have to hide the meanness on occasion to get ahead, sure.

I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?

Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.

Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,
by tshadley | 2026-02-04 20:10:20+00:00
> LLMs cannot offer that promise by design, so it remains your job to find and fix any deviations from the abstraction you intended.

LLMs are clumsy interns now, very leaky. But we know human experts can be leak-proof. Why can't LLMs get there, too, better at coding, understanding your intentions, reviewing automatically for deviations, etc.?

Thought experiment: could you work well with a team of human experts just below your level? Then you should be able to work well with future LLMs.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-04 20:10:25+00:00
I used not to capitalize "I" in my own writing, because it seemed a bit silly to do that, even though making it more distinct visually seems okay now, some years later.

At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like formal letters and such. Odd.
by zippyman55 | 2026-02-04 20:10:33+00:00
I loved when we would have an HPC server crash and we would analyze the issue and the vendor would respond, "probably a neutrino strike". I can't imagine this being more complex, given all the constraints of being in an orbit. The hardware depreciation, and the need to eliminate charge buildup and excess heat. Placing servers in the Arctic seems a better solution, at least the cooling issue is resolved.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-02-04 20:10:39+00:00
Universalist meaning they allow and want outsiders to become Christian and accept them as part of the in group once they convert.

Crusades and inquisition are perfectly compatible with that.

I’m an atheist by the way, I know once you express some position everyone tends to assume you have whatever standard package includes that position. I also don’t think this universalism has been a good thing long term. It united Europeans too quickly and destroyed their various separate identities while replacing it with something that is essentially a blender (in the sharp blades destroying things connotation, not the delicious fruit smoothie creation connotation).
by ck2 | 2026-02-04 20:10:44+00:00
The pile of 10,000+ bodies pretty much deems otherwise?

mothers went out with their children knowing their children would be murdered

to get bodies back from the morgue the regime makes the families pay for the bullets used to kill them

US telling protestors they would be covered and then doing nothing was beyond cruel

Imagine if North Korea had internet access (or even just electricity)
by dev_l1x_be | 2026-02-04 20:11:18+00:00
You’re correct that Stefan-Boltzmann uses absolute temperature (K), but that only reinforces the advantage of moving the "hot side" of the gradient up. If you increase your radiator temp from 300K (standard Earth ambient) to 360K (hot silicon), your radiative efficiency doesn't just go up by 20%—it nearly doubles.

The Solar Load is Directional: Unlike a terrestrial atmosphere where heat is omnidirectional, space allows for "shadow engineering." A simple multi-layer insulation (MLI) sunshield can reduce solar flux by orders of magnitude. We do this for the James Webb Space Telescope to keep instruments at 7K while the sun-facing side is at 380K. For a data center, you don't need 7K; you just need to keep the "dark side" radiators in the shade.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-04 20:11:37+00:00
An asphalt roofing shingle company just closed in Minneapolis due to the city's new CO2 tax. The local environmental group held a little press conference crowing about it.

Mind you, this won't change the demand for asphalt shingles, they'll just be shipped from further, generating more C02 on the whole.

The only other current alternatives are all non-renewable as well- mined clay, slate, or metal. For residential roofs, I'm hoping metal continues to come down in price, as they tend to last longer and can be made to look quite good. For commercial / flat roofed buildings, there still needs to be some very thick rubberized underlayment below gravel or whatever to prevent standing water from getting in. The same is true for sod roofs in hobbit style earth homes.

So, yeah, there's still people in power who expect that all petroleum based products are equally evil and must be punished.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-04 20:11:38+00:00
Came here to say this. Nobody is saying "I want to work forever", we're saying "can we not replace work while our entire global civilization is predicated on working to survive?"

JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.