MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2026-02-08 17:00:49+00:00
Chomsky is very well known for the fact that his anti-US imperialism stance is strong enough that he becomes a standard bearer for any malodorous regime the US is against, starting from his denial of the Cambodian genocide and attempted habilitation of the Pol Pot regime through to, most recently, his denial of any Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine (his last major public commentary before his stroke).

It is entirely in line with Chomsky's historical pattern that Epstein could walk up to him, say "the US government hates me and claims I'm a pedophile" and for Chomsky to then treat him like his best friend. It is also worth noting that when he eventually recanted his Cambodian genocide denial, he basically said something along the lines of "how could anyone have possibly known just how bad the regime was?" which is... essentially what this response is attempting to be, "how could we have possibly known that Epstein was actually a pedophile?"
by dauertewigkeit | 2026-02-08 17:01:23+00:00
Hmm, yes they are. There's always at least one pony tailed guy, late 20s early 30s, at the local gathering of whatever stands for your progressive party, basically preying on gullible 18 year olds.

I'm not even coming at this from a political angle since I'm more left than right. I just stay true to my perception of the world. Being left of center does not make you somehow morally superior and there are many areas of life where left leaning people have worse morals. And in particular when it comes to intimate relationships, I do feel like many of them have rather loose morals, including around areas of what counts as consent. Maybe that's also the reason why predominantly leftist women are so outspoken about the topic, because they have had so much experience with it. Whereas more conservative leaning women tend to just not fall prey to the sleazy pony tailed guy.
by highspeedbus | 2026-02-08 17:02:16+00:00
Obviously AI generated article. And the author hasn't made any attempt to disclose it. Take that into consideration.

Yet, The Machine has good points.

>For someone whose entire career is built on "if it broke, I can find out why," this is deeply unsettling. Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, grinding, background-anxiety way. You can never fully trust the output. You can never fully relax. Every interaction requires vigilance.

> you are collaborating with a probabilistic system, and your brain is wired for deterministic ones. That mismatch is a constant, low-grade source of stress.

Back when I bought my first computer, it was a crappy machine that crashed all the time. (Peak of the fake capacitors plague in 2006). That made me doubt and second guess everything that is usually taken for granted in hardware and software (Like simply booting up). That mindset proved useful latter in my career.

I’m not saying anything new. Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have written about it in a way better way. I find it to still hold very relevant guidelines.

https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/lieber/courses/csg1...

>Think! About Your Work

>Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
Would you use a CLI tool that turns English into local automation workflows?
by losalah | 2026-02-08 17:02:22+00:00
I'm building Viba: a terminal-first automation tool.

You type "every Monday at 9am, query Postgres and email the CSV to team@" and it compiles that to a DETERMINISTIC CONFIG workflow spec, then executes it locally with a daemon.

No cloud dependency, no GUI. Runs over SSH, in containers, wherever you have a terminal. Credentials stay on your machine (AES-256). Uses your own OpenAI/Anthropic key for the NL planning.

Core is working (file ops, HTTP, email, cron, file watchers). Looking for early users and collaborators to help build out integrations.

Is this something you'd actually use? What integrations would matter most to you?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-08 17:02:29+00:00
YMMV. I found EEAAO to be engaging but shambolic. It was an experiment that kinda worked, kinda not. The chaos of it can't be cleaned up, it's intrinsic to the concept.

It's not going to a template for lots of similar films. It's more of a one-off.

But anyway, that was several years ago, it stretches the meaning of "recent".
by TFSFVentures | 2026-02-08 17:03:02+00:00
We've seen this exact scenario before, where the promise of AI tools like Cursor clashes with the realities of complex engineering work. The tension between management's expectations and the on-the-ground experience of engineers trying to understand old codebases or solve problems is a common challenge. This usually comes down to a misalignment in understanding what these tools are actually capable of and how they integrate into existing workflows without eroding trust or creating more work.
by stared | 2026-02-08 17:03:25+00:00
I have serious doubts that these discoveries were truly independent.

Phase transitions and statistical mechanics have a long history in physics. Over time, physicists and applied mathematicians began applying these techniques to other domains under the banner of "complex systems" (see, for example, https://complexsystemstheory.net/murray-gell-mann/).

Rather than independent reinvention, it seems much more likely that these fields adopted existing physics machinery. It wouldn't be the first time authors claimed novelty for applied concepts; if they tried this within physics, they’d be eaten alive. However, in other fields, reviewers might accept these techniques as novel simply because they lack the background in statistical mechanics.
by gww | 2026-02-08 17:03:56+00:00
There are other examples of oncoviruses including: Epstein-Barr virus and Human herpes virus 8 (Kaposi's Sarcoma).

Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?

There are billions of dollars spent on this problem through huge DNA/RNA/Epigenomics/Chromatin Accessibility sequencing initiatives. There is also a huge amount of model system work such as mouse models.
by ryukoposting | 2026-02-08 17:05:01+00:00
I watched a recording of the hearing. It sounds a lot like the Amazon Fresh thing, at a glance, but it's not.

Amazon admitted that they had a bunch of people in India looking at the camera feeds and validating orders post-facto. The media took this as "the Indian workers are processing your Amazon Fresh purchase, not the computers" which is disingenuous at best. And yeah, it sounds like Waymos usually, nearly always are fully autonomous.

The huge, gargantuan, enormous difference is that, in Waymo's case, the overseas folks are taking control of a fucking car. That's not post-facto like the Amazon thing. And, more importantly, the ramifications of even the tiniest mistake are massive by comparison.

Indian Amazon guy screws up? Shoot, I paid for two heads of lettuce when I only got one. Filipino Waymo guy screws up? Car accident.

By the way: Imagine driving a real, actual car with trans-oceanic ping.
Show HN: Bore – A tunneling tool with TUI traffic inspection
by aditya_ds_1806 | 2026-02-08 17:05:41+00:00
Bore is a free, open source, self-hostable tunneling tool to expose local services to the internet, with real-time traffic inspection via a TUI and a simple web inspector.

It’s still early, but already usable for daily workflows. Feedback welcome.
by pawelwentpawel | 2026-02-08 17:05:44+00:00
I like programming by hand too. Like many of us here, I've been doing this for decades. I'm still proud of the work I produced and the effort I put in. For me it's a highly rewarding and enjoyable activity, just like studying mathematics.

Nevertheless, the main motivator for me has been always the final outcome - a product or tool that other people use. Using AI helps me to move much faster and frees up a lot of time to focus on the core which is building the best possible thing I can build.

> But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer.

Opus 4.5 just came out around 3 months ago. We are still very early in this game. Creating things this year already makes me feel like I'm in the Enchanted Pencil (*) cartoon in which the boy draws an object with a magic pencil and makes it reality within seconds. With the collective effort of everyone involved in building the AI tools and the incentives aligned (as they are right now) the progress will continue be very rapid. You can still code by hand but it will be very hard to compete in the market without the use of AI.

(*) It's a Polish cartoon from the 60s/70s (no language barrier) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-inIMrU1t7s*
by kkfx | 2026-02-08 17:07:12+00:00
Same for me, I made a choice back then, and only realized it was a mistake in hindsight, to set up a small storage system, thinking it would just serve as a backup for blackouts. Since those have mostly been very short so far (a few seconds or minutes), I went with 8kWh, while the car has 74...

Today I'm expanding it, aiming for 38kWh, which is still much less than the car. Even though the price of LFP batteries has dropped significantly, it hasn't fallen enough, nor has the cost of grid power risen enough, to justify aiming for 100kWh to have substantial autonomy for most of the year, including heating.

Using the car as part of the system would be fantastic, and the technology is all there to make it happen, except for the will of manufacturers and the political drive to go in that direction. It's not happening because they don't want people to be self-sufficient; they want large power plants, not semi-autonomous homes and warehouses. But the fact is, economically and technically, the former makes no sense, while the latter does.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-08 17:07:20+00:00
Why stop there? Perhaps we must recurse our conspiracy theories one level more: what if the faction of the cancer industry that wants after the fact treatment is propagating theories like yours so that they can make the cancer industry seem like all frauds and stop research until proven otherwise. Then they’ll be able to sell their current methods even longer.

Hmm, a disturbing and dangerous thought. But what does that mean for my comment? Who is paying me? What do they want? Will the lizard men of Hippocrates command the subtle ghasts of Papilla to inflict deep and lasting injury to our very souls?

Troubling. We must investigate.
by 93po | 2026-02-08 17:07:22+00:00
idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because

1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen

2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years

3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do

i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it.

i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-08 17:07:30+00:00
Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity?

My experience is different than others, but what I am seeing, people around me, building software with 99% AI written code.

They do review it, but the code, exploration primarily done by AI and debugging is done together (e.g. XYZ is not compiling what do I do,...)
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-08 17:07:40+00:00
> All of those jobs are mandated by law to done by accredited and liable humans.

Good point. The jobs I listed will be protected for a little while due to statutory limitations. At first, firms will have one AI-augmented lawyer take on the work of a dozen lawyers. Of course his salary won't increase, and the others will be fired. Eventually, he'll just be rubber-stamping the AI's results, purely for the sake of compliance. Then the ruling class will petition the legislature to change the law in the name of "efficiency," and that will be the end of that.

Meanwhile, programmers have no such protection. Nor do customer service agents, secretaries, publishers, copywriters, banker, office managers. There is no safety net.
by deaux | 2026-02-08 17:08:03+00:00
Rapidly falling? Looks like it's hit an equilibrium since October, >=40% at this point is hilariously high and proves the point well enough.

> If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies

I'm sure you're aware that the overwhelming majority of these go to agriculture. If you genuinely think whoever gets elected will be running on stopping those, that's blindly optimistic.
by JodieBenitez | 2026-02-08 17:08:08+00:00
Stuff that works ok for me:

- documentation for well-known frameworks and libs, "how do I do [x] in [z]?" questions
- port small code chunks from one language to another
- port configuration from one software to another (example: I got this Apache config, make me the equivalent in NGinX)

Which is already pretty cool if you don't think about the massive amount of energy spent for this, but definitely not the "10x" productivity boost I hear about.

> trust the output and not review it

Not gonna happen here :)
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-08 17:08:31+00:00
Can't you trivially force this to happen for any sequence?

1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 4, 4,

Goes to

1, 3, 3, 3, 2... Etc.

I could extend this trivially too since the bottom sequence trails the sequence we write up top. If i wanted another '2' down the bottom whatever number i choose up top i just write twice right?

So there's nothing about this particular sequence? I can just create any such sequences trivially; Whenever you start a new count, choose a random number and repeat for a many times as needed for the trailing sequence to match the top sequence.

It seems that this particular variant is uninteresting in the broader picture right? I could write another similar one

2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1

2, 2, 1, 1, ... etc.

I don't get the specialness here?
by fullstackchris | 2026-02-08 17:08:55+00:00
and the "hype-wits" don't realize openclaw is just claude with good mcp. there is nothing new under the sun. its just the first time someone was benevolent enough to open source the codebase to the public or it went viral enough to matter... and yet what people focus on is its "emergence" or "agi" - neither of which are remotely true. but good luck "crushing" those "mid-wits"
by idontknowmuch | 2026-02-08 17:08:57+00:00
Viruses are just another "mutagen". No different from UV causing DNA damage in your skin cells, other than the mechanism in which it occurs. The cause for cancer is well-known and, in hindisght, obvious, which is mutation.

The challenge though is mutations can happen in a plethora of ways and their effect is highly dependent on which gene is mutated. There is also the tissue context, e.g. inflammation, spatial structure, etc., that can setup a background for increased mutation. That is why targeted therapies are often the most effective, because they target the general causative feature of a given tumour subtype, the problem is not every protein can be targeted now and each tumour, even within the same subtype has their own unique mutational profile due to the stochasticity of the way mutations occur over repeated rounds of cell division.

And back to viruses, yes they cause cancer because they can mutate DNA. But it's pretty clear, most of the viral "enriched" cancer types are generally in places where transmission is commonplace, e.g. reproductive organs or head/neck.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-08 17:08:57+00:00
How does this help sovereignty?

Yes in the most basic sense it does since they build their own tool instead of getting a foreign one. To be a little bit provocative I could say that Warsaw Pact countries used to do the same and built plenty of uncompetitive products themselves...

But beyond that it isn't a plan because it does not scale, it does not help the country develop its own industry and economy, it does not help competitiveness, and it is a huge cost for very little. Again, the sovereignty aspect means all of this must be addressed otherwise it is just a stunt and waste of taxpayers' money.

You've got to have a competitive industry to achieve and maintain 'sovereignty' in a broader and positive sense otherwise you end up like the Warsaw Pact or China before it realised that. You might survive but look more and more like North Korea (poor and obsolete but, yes, sovereign).

So yes, taxpayer-funded and state-developed internally in isolation for the sake of it is pretty much universally bad.

Taxpayer-funded is not bad per se, as already said in my previous comment, but here it is indeed more than that, it's the government building random stuff internally for frankly no good reason. Maybe next the government will manufacture its own 'sovereign' pencils as well?

They could have spent the same amount of money supporting small companies to develop similar products and that would have helped creating a competitive 'sovereign' ecosystem and commercial products to sell to everyone at home and also abroad. Much more bang for their buck and long term virtuous circle.

So, again have you got a point to discuss beyond just wanting to argue against me?

Edit:

An example of why competitiveness is important: Arianespace. It's great, Europe has the 'sovereign' ability to launch satelittes. That's useful for government agencies, a niche use-case. But everyone else in Europe who wants to launch a satelitte uses SpaceX because Arianespace is not competitive and is obsolete at this point.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 17:09:15+00:00
You're raising the right question, and the paper addresses it directly. The transfer wasn't as clean as "physicists applied their tools to other fields."

Some specific cases: Wissel (1984) derived critical slowing down for ecology independently and was ignored for 20 years. The actual import to ecology came via economist Buz Brock, not a physicist. Nolasco & Dahlen (1968) derived period-doubling for cardiac tissue before Feigenbaum's universality result. Jaeger (2001) derived the edge-of-chaos condition for recurrent neural networks without citing Bak, Kauffman, or Langton.

The complex systems movement you reference existed. The paper documents that it didn't actually solve the transfer problem. The cross-citation analysis shows the gaps persisted through the 2000s and 2010s.

You're right that some domains imported rather than reinvented. The paper maps where each transfer was independent, where it was imported, and where it was partial. That's the point — the pattern is messier and more interesting than either "all independent" or "all imported."
by 9rx | 2026-02-08 17:09:28+00:00
> Nope, that's incorrect english

There is no correct or incorrect here, but I will say it looks perfectly fine to me — naturally, as anything goes. I don't understand it. Is that what you are trying to communicate? There are many words I don't understand; even ones used commonly enough to be found in the dictionary. That is nothing new.

Here's the magic: I don't need to understand. Nobody is born with the understanding. Where communication is desired, we use other devices to express lack of understanding and keep trying to convey intent until a shared understanding is reached. I don't yet understand what that means, but assuming you are here in good faith, I eventually will as you continue to work to communicate your intent behind it.

I know computer people who spend their days writing in programming languages that never talk back struggle with this concept, but one's difficulties in understanding the world around them doesn't define that world.

> there are rules around "language" and "words".

If you are trying to suggest that there is some kind of purity test, it is widely recognized that what is often called Friesian is the closest thing to English as it used to be spoken. What you are writing looks nothing like it. If there are English rules, why don't you follow them? The answer, of course, is that the only "rules" are the ones you decide to make up in the moment. Hence why English today is different from English yesterday and is very different from English centuries ago.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-08 17:09:42+00:00
> So what do we really learn?

We will learn if the magical capabilities attributed to these tools are really true or not. Capabilities like they can magically solve any math problem out there. This is important because AI hype is creating the narrative that these tools can solve PhD level problems and this will dis-infect that narrative. In my book, any tests that refute and dispel false narratives make a huge contribution.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 17:09:56+00:00
You wrote

> I would hate to have a boss/client that says "it needs to do X" and the framework writer (or SDK, ala Android/Xcode) say "no, that hurts my profits/privacy busting".

An answer to such request should be: "We would need to ship a custom version of Android". Just like if you need to setup a web server on a Linux system, you would need to be root. You don't choose a shared hosting and then complain about the lack of permissions.
by ariaalam | 2026-02-08 17:09:57+00:00
I built a desktop Mars colony survival game called Underhill, in homage to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Land on Mars, build solar panels and greenhouses, and try not to pass out during dust storms. Eventually your colonists split into factions: Greens who want to terraform and Reds who want to preserve Mars.

There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed.

Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-08 17:10:20+00:00
There's nothing unsustainable about that btw. Imagine everyone puts $1 into a central pension fund for 40 working years, until they retire and withdraw $40 at 65. Now just cut out the bank account and have the working people fund the payments directly. Works out to the same given a constant rate of people. There's more nuance of course about the time value of money and demographics, but the direct new->old connection does not imply it's a scheme of any kind. Ponzis require exponential growth in new entrants by contrast rather than just population entry rate ~= exit rate.
by ramon156 | 2026-02-08 17:10:36+00:00
The laat comment is a person pretending to be a maintainer of Microsoft. I have a gut feeling that these kind of people will only increase, and we'll have vibe engineers scouring popular repositories to ""contribute"" (note that the suggested fix is vague).

I completely understand why some projects are in whitelist-contributors-only mode. It's becoming a mess.
by andrewjneumann | 2026-02-08 17:10:50+00:00
We strip away the doomerism to look at the mechanics of the transition. We explore why generating a compiler isn't the same as maintaining a product, why "vibe coding" fails at scale, and why we might be hitting the diminishing returns of LLM scaling laws. The era of writing syntax is ending, replaced by an era of systems architecture, context engineering, and high-level judgment.