MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chaboud | 2026-02-03 04:44:26+00:00
I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would inevitably chuckle and say something like "So what are the odds of being 'randomly' selected 27 times in a row?"

I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.
by jimrandomh | 2026-02-03 04:44:37+00:00
No, it isn't the advertised capacity, because counterfeiting scams require a large ratio between the value of the part claimed and the part provided, and you can't get 2TB of flash memory chips cheaply no matter how slow you're willing to accept. When counterfeit storage devices like this are disassembled, usually they're found to have a small microSD card in them.
by Rzor | 2026-02-03 04:44:48+00:00
The entire thing is a play. Musk should be a science fiction writer. He has that uncanny ability to create a statement that compresses 100+ years of industrial evolution into a few sentences.

>Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.

I love how he goes from "the raw material is there" to "we will build high-tech supply chain to process them", just like that, magically.

https://i.imgur.com/wLJ60Vj.jpeg [I think you should be more explicit here in step two]

Also, https://xkcd.com/1724/

Edit: Formatting
by sebazzz | 2026-02-03 04:45:00+00:00
It is just a button. Default it starts the Copilot app which is really the Office app that already existed but now with the copilot tab preselected. Also that Copilot runs in the cloud and doesn't use your NPU.

The only thing until now I've found using the NPU are the built in blur, auto frame and eye focus modes for the webcam.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-03 04:45:45+00:00
> We have watched every good tech invention for the last 20 years become enshittified - nobody believes in the magical market theory thay “then prices will come down” - because they haven’t.

Electricity isn't a tech product. Tech products become enshittified as a result of market consolidation.

But also, you're saying the prices of tech products haven't come down? The industry that has actually been doing that for decades?

> Water consumption and the infrastructure to leverage it can’t be nullified by pointing to… the Great Lakes. That’s not how that works.

Water consumption in the midwest is a nonsense issue. There is no lack of water there and it comes from rain rather than aquifers, which is the same place it goes back to when used for evaporative cooling.

> We don’t need the country to have an infinite pool of data centers, we need healthcare, clean air and water, etc.

This is like complaining about landlords or utility companies because they don't provide you with medical services. That's the wrong tree.

> We should stop these dumb ass data centers, and also ban all crypto.

It seems like you're blaming tech companies for enshittifying things when that was really a result of the banks having them buy each other up, and then also blaming them for trying to disrupt the banks.

> Tech people were supposed to help usher in Star Trek

This is what I mean by the media writing a stream of hit pieces.

Think about the actual technology in Star Trek. You can talk to the computer and it understands natural language, that's NLP. There is a Holodeck that you can provide with a narrative and it fills in the rest of the story and generates images for it, that's LLMs and image generation.

They're actually working on the thing you're asking for but you're demanding that they stop because the early implementations are primordial and someone keeps telling you to hate them.
by npodbielski | 2026-02-03 04:46:12+00:00
> With good insulation you can easily store heat for a day which is all you need. You're never going to get close to storing summer heat for the winter. That's not impossible but not feasible for something this scale (and not cost effective at any scale).

This is ground basically. How deep varies but few meters underground you basically have average yearly temperature. You could pump heat from house to the ground to take it out from the ground during winter.
by amluto | 2026-02-03 04:46:29+00:00
Hmm, Elon really did run that flywheel pretty well. He built the Roadster to drum up some cash and excitement so he could develop the Model S, then he used that success to do the Model X, and then he expanded capacity to develop the 3 and Y, and he reinvested the profits to develop the Model 2, finally bringing EVs to the masses, displacing ICEs everywhere, and becoming the undisputed leader of both EV and battery manufacturering.

Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen, because he got distracted or something? He doesn’t really have battery capacity worth writing home about, the Chinese are surpassing Tesla in EV manufacturing, and Waymo is far ahead in self-driving.

The amazing space computation cost reduction process sounds rather more challenging than the Model 2, and I’m not sure why anyone should bet on Elon pulling it off.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-03 04:46:36+00:00
A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with.

The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-03 04:47:10+00:00
Perhaps I haven't gotten a representative sample, but in 100% of the content I've seen from self-described "first amendment auditors", they're acting unpleasant and suspicious for absolutely no reason other than provoking a reaction. To me this seems like antisocial behavior that degrades rather than supports First Amendment protections. I consider myself a pretty strong First Amendment supporter, but if I routinely found strange men filming me as I walked down the street, I would support basically any legal change required to make them stop.
by YZF | 2026-02-03 04:48:01+00:00
Rich and powerful people go to jail all the time. SBF? Ghislaine Maxwell? Maybe that boundary is pushed but at least in theory in the "western/democratic" world you can't get away with breaking the law simply by having power (and yeah Trump and such - but in general). So sure, there is some erosion of rule of the law in the western world, but it's still a thing.

But you are right that people assume that. They also assume the rich pay no taxes. So they "assume" a bunch of nonsense. Some once told me assume makes an ass of you and me.

I think people think the US is supposed to follow this thing called international law, or at least they'll express some outrage when it doesn't.

The manipulation is that people believe in this thing called international law as something that anyone has to follow where in practice no country would ever let international law supersede its laws if it went against their interest and there is no mechanism to force this. You keep seeing news about this and that being against international law (be it Israel or the US or Russia, would be the typical use case) and people actually think this is a real thing, like there's some law book somewhere that applies universally to every country. Very few people have the real and correct understanding that these are just norms or treaties or agreements that countries decide to follow or not on a case by case basis as per their interest, i.e. not a law in any real sense of the word.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-02-03 04:49:56+00:00
Disagree.

CLEAR is basically (mostly) self-service pre-verification by a commercial entity, achieves near the same exact thing as it is done at the TSA agent with RealID now.

The CLEAR system uses CAT or CAT-2 to send info to TSA to validate. Same, exact protocol and information as it is with the TSA Agent.

The only meaningful difference is that the biometrics is pre-stored with CLEAR, while the other travelers are collected at the TSA agent stands and compared to RealID.

There are multiple countries where all of this is done with dark technomagic. You can see this witchcraft working with Global Entry (CBP, not TSA).

What is interesting about this is that CLEAR has a relationship with the airports (mostly), not TSA. Airports are the ones pushing CLEAR so they do not have insane queues, not TSA.

Wait till you see PreCheck Touchless ID.
by degamad | 2026-02-03 04:50:25+00:00
> originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.

We agree that that was its initial stated intention.

However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
by defrost | 2026-02-03 04:50:51+00:00
In proper English usage it would only be a bigoted

(obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group)

check if it was unreasonable to suspect a Sikh of carrying a Kirpan.

The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion.

Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.
by cjonas | 2026-02-03 04:51:11+00:00
ya... the number of ways to infiltrate a malicious prompt and exfil data is overwhelming almost unlimited. Any tool that can hit a arbitrary url or make a dns request is basic an exfil path.

I recently did a test of a system that was triggering off email and had access to write to google sheets. Easy exfil via `IMPORTDATA`, but there's probably hundreds of ways to do it.
by olivia-banks | 2026-02-03 04:51:45+00:00
I think this is a really cool project! The syntax here is interesting. I was wondering if you could shed some light on it, I wasn't able to find what `[@] : ` or `[%] : ` meant.

Also, can I ask why the source code for the interpreter looks like that? This is an honest question. I thought it might have been machine generated (via a sort of self-hosting G transpiler) but the comments at the top dissuade me from this view.
by mym1990 | 2026-02-03 04:51:45+00:00
Laughter is a decent signal, but it can be noise if the audience is uncomfortable or trying to please. Does the joke teller count as being part of the audience? I imagine if someone is telling the joke...they must think it is funny, so in most cases at least 1 participant thinks its funny. Sometimes jokes are unintended, maybe a faux pas, and it might be inappropriate for someone to laugh...does it make it not a joke, or does it make it not funny if I cannot laugh?

Lots of layers to this, but I guess the old adage "it depends" is very fitting here!
by intermerda | 2026-02-03 04:51:59+00:00
You seem to be under the impression that the word "screening" means TSA can do whatever it wants. When in fact, if you click on the link under the word "Screening" in the own link you posted, there is a definition provided.

> (4) Screening defined .— In this subsection the term “screening” means a physical examination or non-intrusive methods of assessing whether cargo poses a threat to transportation security.

You should consider reading what you posted.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-03 04:52:27+00:00
you should have learned by now what trump et al are doing… these “cases” they are “losing” are just smoke&mirrors for the general public to go “see, they obey the law” on things they do not particularly give a hoot about. the ones they do care about no one is “stopping” - the way you can tell which one is which is when they completely ignore the constitution and any existing law(s) or when they hit up the judicial extension of their party - the scotus - to rubberstamp something. even there, once in a while, they’ll make a call to (often temporarily) “lose”
by smelendez | 2026-02-03 04:53:43+00:00
It used to be normal in the U.S. to walk people to the gate until 9/11.

Now you can escort someone to the check-in counter and up to the security checkpoint, and meet people at the luggage area to help with bags.

But in practice it seems rare to do so if there isn’t a particular reason, probably because you’d have to pay to park or ride transit and it’s usually a trek beyond that. Honestly if they allowed you to go through security with the passenger and wait at the gate, I’m not sure how many people would even do it here (or how many passengers would want their loved ones to do so).
by throwaway7783 | 2026-02-03 04:54:43+00:00
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by dismalaf | 2026-02-03 04:54:50+00:00
It is still developed, although it feels a bit like it was mostly "done" 10 years ago.

https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc

Quite a few recent commits and their blog/X account mentioned their LSP now being bundled with the language...

https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2026/02/last-week-in-pony---feb...

Dunno, now it feels like the "hot" thing is either manual memory languages like Zig, Odin an Rust or languages with novel type systems like Lean, Koka, Idris, etc... GC'd "systems" languages like Nim, Crystal, Pony, Go, etc... all seem kind of old fashioned now.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-03 04:55:38+00:00
There's another way to look at it, though. If the data center satellites can be built and launched cheap enough, you can still come out ahead on performance/cost. I.e. if the space data center has 1/10 the performance of a ground one, and they can be built and launched for less than 10% of the cost, then you've got a business. And there are costs that won't be incurred - no electric bill, no cost for land, no charge for maintenance.

I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss Musk.
by jjcm | 2026-02-03 04:56:08+00:00
This was effectively what OpenAI did in the very early days with Dota 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five

As someone who's been playing dota for nearly 20 years now, it was fascinating to watch it play. Some of it's decision making process didn't seem logical in the short term, but would often be set ups for future plays, even though their observation window was fairly small. Even more impressively was the ai bot changed the meta of professional players, since tactics that arose out of its training ended up being more optimal.

I wish we got to the point where other ai bots were out there, but it's entirely understandable that you couldn't drive a complex game like Dota with LLMs, whereas you can with the ones the Game Arena has selected.
by noduerme | 2026-02-03 04:56:11+00:00
It's screwed up that skin color is a marker that would lead an ignorant provincial quasi-cop to assume someone is of a particular ethnicity, and even more so that that ethnicity would lead them to believe an individual adheres to a belief system that might lead them to blow up an aircraft. Very poor set of assumptions and flawed tooling, to say the least.
by chr15m | 2026-02-03 04:56:17+00:00
Thanks for pointing out those follow ups. Interesting stuff!

> correct and uncontraversial

From the original quote it is clear he was referring to the idea of aliens being detectable by infrared because they will absorb all of their sun's energy. Later in the same paragraph he says:

> Unfortunately I went on to speculate about possible ways of building a shell, for example by using the mass of Jupiter...
> These remarks about building a shell were only order-of-magnitude estimates, but were misunderstood by journalists and science-fiction writers as describing real objects. The essential idea of an advanced civilization emitting infrared radiation was already published by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker in 1937.

So the Dyson Sphere is a rhetorical vehicle to make an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a description of a thing that he thought could physically exist.

Full quote from the video cited before "the idea was a good one":

> science fiction writers got hold of this phrase and imagined it then to be a spherical rigid object. And the aliens would be living on some kind of artificial shell. a rigid structure surrounding a star. which wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but then in any case, that's become then a favorite object of science fiction writers. They call it the Dyson sphere, which was a name I don't altogether approve of, but anyway, I mean that's I'm stuck with it. But the idea was a good one.

Again he explicitly says this "wasn't exactly what I had in mind." This one hedges a bit more and could be interpreted as his saying the idea of a Dyson Sphere is a good one. He may have meant that in the sense of it being a good science fiction idea though, and he subsequently goes on to talk about that.

The Dyson Sphere is good for order-of-magnitude calculations about hypothetical aliens, and also for selling vapourware to the types of people who uncritically think that vapourware is real.
by FuckButtons | 2026-02-03 04:56:36+00:00
So, the hidden mental model that the OP is expressing and failed to elucidate on is that llm’s can be thought of as compressing related concepts into approximately orthogonal subspaces of the vector space that is upper bounded by the superposition of all of their weights. Since training has the effect of compressing knowledge into subspaces, a necessary corollary of that fact is that there are now regions within the vector space that contain nothing very much. Those are the valleys that need to be tunneled through, ie the model needs to activate disparate regions of its knowledge manifold simultaneously, which, seems like it might be difficult to do. I’m not sure if this is a good way of looking at things though, because inference isn’t topology and I’m not sure that abstract reasoning can be reduced down to finding ways to connect concepts that have been learned in isolation.
by Peaches4Rent | 2026-02-03 04:57:21+00:00
Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes".

I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future.

It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense.

Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-03 04:57:34+00:00
The deal they made values xAI at $230 Billion. It’s a made up number, with no trustworthy financial justification to back it up. It is set to provide a certain return to xAI’s investors (the valuation decides the amount you get per share), who in turn are bailing out the earlier acquisition of X (Twitter). All of this is basically a shell game where Elon is using one company to bail out another. It’s a way of reducing the risk of new ventures by spreading them out between his companies. It’s also really bad for SpaceX employees and investors, who are basically subsidizing other companies.

The thing is, everyone knows Elon is not a real CEO of any of these companies. There isn’t enough time to even be the CEO of one company and a parent. This guy has 10 companies and 10 children. He’s just holding the position and preventing others from being in that position, so he can enact changes like this. And his boards are all stacked with family members, close friends, and sycophants who won’t oppose his agenda.
by iterance | 2026-02-03 04:58:11+00:00
Many community-oriented programs have failed after acquisition because they came out too firm, too decided, and too purposeful, only to realize the community is still skeptical and turning against them six months in.

Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
by Shank | 2026-02-03 04:59:02+00:00
It is academically very interesting to think about this in light of their long-standing dispute with Cloudflare (https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...) over EDNS, which could have privacy implications attached.

I think no matter how you slice it though, it's unethical and reprehensible to coordinate (even a shoddy) DDoS leveraging your visitors as middlemen. This is effectively coordinating a botnet, and we shouldn't condone this behavior as a community.
by lmm | 2026-02-03 04:59:15+00:00
> Doesn't that also lead to the conclusion that "software engineers" are going to lose their ability to command high salaries, if the real value is in the domain expertise and not in the ability of optimizing some part of the business process?

I mean the job has always required both - just being good at leetcode isn't enough to get paid well (except perhaps where there is a dysfunctional interview process), the key skill is being able to translate back and forth between the world of software and the world of business. Regular folk seemingly still find it difficult to think rigorously, in the way that fully correct automation requires, and AI hasn't actually helped with that any, so I think people with that skill will still command a premium. Work that doesn't benefit from rigour - being able to slap together a quick marketing site on wordpress or what have you - will pay badly if at all, but that was already the low end of the industry I think.
by noduerme | 2026-02-03 05:00:31+00:00
As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.