MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by logicchains | 2026-02-04 16:47:42+00:00
It can't be successful at that any more than 1+1 can equal 3. Fundamentally, if every token wants to be able to look at every previous token without loss of information, it must be O(n^2); N tokens looking at N tokens is quadratic. Any sub-quadratic attention must hence necessarily lose some information and be unable to support perfect recall on longer sequences.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-04 16:47:55+00:00
When you're driving a small car, do you expect the lanes to automatically shrink for you?

It's a standard so no one has to think "does this page have enough space", and the notes are often relevant to the current page. Stuff like the photo in https://www.thedailybeast.com/photo-details-obamas-speech-ed...
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-04 16:48:08+00:00
There's also creative space inside the formal notation. It's not just "these are the known abstractions, please lego them together", the formal syntax and notation is just one part of the whole. The syntax and notation define the forms of poetry (here's the meter, here's the rhyme scheme, here's how the whitespace works), but as software developers we're still filling in the words that fit that meter and rhyme scheme and whitespace. We're adding the flowery metaphors in the way we choose variable names and the comments we choose to add and the order we define things or choose to use them.

Software developers can use the exact same "lego block" abstractions ("this code just multiplies two numbers") and tell very different stories with it ("this code is the formula for force power", "this code computes a probability of two events occurring", "this code gives us our progress bar state as the combination of two sub-processes", etc).

LLMs have only so many "stories" they are trained on, and so many ways of thinking about the "why" of a piece of code rather than mechanical "what".
by currydove | 2026-02-04 16:48:14+00:00
i'm noticing this across even startups and mid-market companies too!

i don't think its going to be a silver bullet, but it doesn't need to be. niche, well understood problems with simple tooling needs are the best ones to start with.

https://culturecompiled.com/p/things-are-getting-awkward-for...
by bborud | 2026-02-04 16:48:41+00:00
The conversation went something like this (from memory):

- We can't do that

- Why not?

- Well, physics for one.

- What do you mean?

- Well, at the very least we need to be able to emit enough RF-energy for a mobile base station to be able to detect it and allow itself to be convinced it is seeing valid signaling.

- Yes?

- The battery technology that fits within your constraints doesn't exist. Nevermind the electronics or antenna.

- Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.

I distinctly remember that last line. But I can't remember what my response was. It was probably something along the lines of "if I were that clever I'd be at home polishing my Nobel medal in physics".

Even the sales guy who dragged me into this meeting couldn't keep it together. He spent the whole one hour drive back to the office muttering "can't you do something creative" and then laughing hysterically.

I think the solution they went for was irreversible freeze and moisture indication stickers. Which was what I suggested they go for in the first 5 minutes of the meeting since that a) solved their problem, and b) is on the market, and c) can be had for the price point in bulk.
by cyrusradfar | 2026-02-04 16:48:45+00:00
The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.

Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.

People who paid are leaving.

That's a churn problem.

The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.

Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.

That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.

This is the Ballmer story all over again.

- Massive distribution advantage
- Captive enterprise base

Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.

Windows Phone had carrier deals too.

The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.

This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:

> "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha,
> executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which
> Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser
> to help with a public webpage he was on,
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"

Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.

Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
by nayuki | 2026-02-04 16:48:46+00:00
> Some people who never play the piano claim it would be easier if had all white keys, or simply white alternating with black.

Actually, I'm one of those people. For over 20 years, I struggled with playing piano because I would have to memorize a different fingering pattern for the major scale in 12 different keys. I knew the mechanical process of it, but it was hard to develop the muscle memory and play songs by ear based on intuition alone. So I was most comfortable playing in C major (white keys only) and using mechanical/electronic transposition.

In the year 2024, I stumbled upon the Janko piano layout ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard ), which turns out to be the smallest modification to standard piano that results in an isomorphic keyboard. I kid you not, I was up and running in less than 5 minutes - I just treated the layout as if it was a pattern to learn on standard piano, except that it was the only pattern I ever had to learn. On Janko, I found it much easier to play songs by ear, in any key. I wish I discovered Janko earlier, as standard piano was never a good fit for my brain.

For anyone who is curious to try, here's a software Janko piano keyboard that you can play right in the web browser: https://novayashkola.org/janko/
by giantg2 | 2026-02-04 16:49:00+00:00
"This is defined as software or firmware that scans every print file through a “firearms blueprint detection algorithm” and refuses to print anything it flags as a potential firearm or firearm component."

I'm sure this won't inadvertently flag nerf/band guns, models, tubes/pipes, etc...

Until metal 3D printing becomes common for consumers, this isn't really a big deal. Plastic components have limited lifespan and even questionable safety. It's pretty much always been legal to create your own firearms. Blocking some 3D printers isn't going to stop that. If nothing else, the criminal enterprises will just use out of date software from before the ban and even create their own 3D printers.

3D printing companies need to simply exit the NY market, including the industrial sector. Once you start inspecting businesses, education, and enough individuals, they will cave.
by no_wizard | 2026-02-04 16:49:03+00:00
The missing the third ingredient which is passing rollback resistant legislation in its place that protects these freedoms.

That makes efforts far more durable.

Than it’s a matter of showing up in court to defend attacks against the law(s) that protect it.

In this way, we can have durable change, but it’s a high cost road. By design I am sure.
by MrSteaddy | 2026-02-04 16:49:30+00:00
Hi Product Hunt!

I'm the creator of InsAIts. I built this because I kept seeing the same problem across every multi-agent AI system I worked with: agents pass bad information to each other, and there's no monitoring layer to catch it. Today we're open-sourcing the core under Apache 2.0.

The "aha moment" was when I watched a finance pipeline where one agent hallucinated a 5x cost difference. It propagated through three more agents before reaching the output. Nobody caught it because nobody was monitoring the AI-to-AI channel.

InsAIts V2.4 adds deep hallucination detection -- specifically designed for the unique problems that emerge when AI agents communicate:

1. Cross-agent contradictions (the big one -- no other tool catches this)
2. Phantom citations (fabricated URLs, DOIs, paper references)
3. Source grounding (are responses actually based on your documents?)
4. Confidence decay (is the agent losing certainty over time?)

Everything runs locally. We never see your data. The API key is only for usage tracking.

Open-core model: The core (anomaly detection, hallucination detection, forensic tracing, dashboard, all integrations) is Apache 2.0 open-source. Premium features (adaptive dictionaries, advanced detection, auto-decipher) ship with pip install -- proprietary but included in the package. You can also choose your own Ollama model for local processing.

I'd love to hear from anyone building multi-agent systems. What failure modes have you encountered? What would you want monitored?
by zero_k | 2026-02-04 16:49:45+00:00
I still remember the time when a gcc bug caused MiniSat to output UNSAT for a satisfiable problem [1]. I was the author of a SAT solver, and I was chasing my tail trying to figure out why I was getting UNSAT for a satsifiable problem. I have to admit I didn't expect it to be a gcc bug... (note: bug was found by Vegard Nossum on the CryptoMiniSat mailing list)

[1] https://www.msoos.org/2013/04/gcc-4-5-2-at-sat-competition-2...
by bachittle | 2026-02-04 16:49:51+00:00
The friction didn't disappear with AI tools. It just shifted. It's now more so about knowing when to trust an AI system versus when to dig into things yourself. The key insight is this: don't devalue learning things on your own. AI is a tool, but if the tool messes up, you need other tools in your toolbox. If you've only ever leaned on the AI, you're in trouble the moment it fails on something subtle.
by macintux | 2026-02-04 16:50:25+00:00
> The Justice Department failed to tell a magistrate judge about a 1980 law protecting journalists in its application materials for a warrant

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/politics/doj-press-law...

Previously:

> U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter wrote in his order that the government must preserve any materials seized during the raid and may not review them until the court authorizes it

https://san.com/cc/judge-blocks-fbis-access-to-washington-po...
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-04 16:51:27+00:00
iPhone and macOS are basically the same product technically. The reason iPhone is a single user product is UX decisions and business/product philosophy, not technical reasons.

While plausible deniability may be hard to develop, it’s not some particularly arcane thing. The primary reasons against it are the political balancing act Apple has to balance (remember San Bernardino and the trouble the US government tried to create for Apple?). Secondary reasons are cost to develop vs addressable market, but they did introduce Lockdown mode so it’s not unprecedented to improve the security for those particularly sensitive to such issues.
by bborud | 2026-02-04 16:51:28+00:00
Skippy the Magnificent will solve this for us.

(reference to a character in the Expiditionary Force series by Craig Alanson

Only a very small portion of his physical presence is in local spacetime, with the rest in higher spacetime. He can expand his physical presence from the size of an oil drum or shrink to the size of a lipstick tube. He can’t maintain that for long without risking catastrophic effects. If he did, he would lose containment, fully materialize in local spacetime and occupy local space equal to one quarter the size of Paradise. The resulting explosion would eventually be seen in the Andromeda Galaxy.)
by tomasphan | 2026-02-04 16:51:50+00:00
In my beautiful hometown of Philadelphia they have a novel way of repairing potholes that I've yet to observe in other cities:

1. Do nothing for 9 months. This allows the pothole to mature until ready for step 2.

2. Put a traffic cone in the pothole.

3. After a couple weeks of public notice (traffic cone) dump hot asphalt into the hole, making sure to top off several inches above street level.

4. DO NOT WAIT for asphalt to cool down before opening the street. This allows for asphalt to stick to tires, shoes etc.

5. Make sure to leave a significant bump and don't compact the asphalt so next winter it will open up again.

6. Make sure to put any utility covers (manholes, drains etc) directly in the wheel path for maximum damage.

7. Profit!
by maxdo | 2026-02-04 16:51:53+00:00
yes... and no. Right now you need a server lets say in france. You are fully in their jurisdiction, for latency etc.

What if your server fly over france , but not in France, hence: you don't need to build servers in france, unlike before, you don't need to deal with local government on so many issues, water, electricity etc to be local in france.

And , taxes : crypto payments + compute , and same transaction in france doesn't have to be taxed anymore :)

Yes, you have to pay taxes to US government, but not to france.
by Zak | 2026-02-04 16:52:31+00:00
Assuming the rule of law is still functioning, there are multiple protections for journalists who refuse to divulge passwords in the USA. A journalist can challenge any such order in court and usually won't be detained during the process as long as they show up in court when required and haven't tried to destroy evidence.

Deceiving investigators by using an alternate password, or destroying evidence by using a duress code on the other hand is almost always a felony. It's a very bad idea for a journalist to do that, as long as the rule of law is intact.
by sudobash1 | 2026-02-04 16:52:57+00:00
> Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002...

It really depends on what you are looking at. This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but OpenWrt happily works with 16MB of disk space, and can go down to 8MB if you squeeze it. It includes a modern Linux kernel, shell, networking stack, ssh server, package manager, text editor, web server with dynamic pages, etc...

Part of it's trick is that it aggressively pares down the hardware support, such that you normally download an OpenWrt image customized to your exact router. But of course the biggest difference is that it doesn't include a graphics stack or any GUI applications.

I work in embedded Linux, and its a whole different world here of trimming the fat on Linux to keep the BOM prices low. But you'd be surprised how lean we can get it.
by dkarras | 2026-02-04 16:53:12+00:00
It absolutely offers some legal protection. If it is implemented correctly, no legal framework for it is required. Government forces you to enter your password. You comply and enter "a" password. The device shows contents. You did what you were asked to do. If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear. Done correctly (in device and OPSEC) government can't prove you entered your decoy password so you can't be held in contempt.
by m4rtink | 2026-02-04 16:53:15+00:00
Starlink is totally oit of picobaloon range by orders of magnitude - we are talking hundreds of mW at most.

At the same time it is true the board (rpi pico usually) could totally support a camera or other high bandwidth instruments - it just does not have the bandwidth to send the data over wspr, possibly with the exception of some flags based on local processing.

AFAIK some poeple have built dual APRS & WSPR pico baloons, but you will still get pictures back only over populated areas due to APRS having in general much shorter range than WSPR.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-04 16:53:24+00:00
> LCF-style provers have a much smaller trusted computing base than Curry/Howard based provers like Coq, Agda and Lean.

I'm not sure that this is correct. The TCB in a CH based prover is just the implementation of the actual kernel. In LCF, you also have to trust that any tactics are implemented in a programming language that doesn't allow you to perform unsound operations. That's a vast expansion in your TCB. (You can implement LCF-like "tactics" in a CH-based prover via so-called reflection that delegates the proof to a runtime computation, but you do have to prove that your computation yields a correct decision for the problem.)
by macintux | 2026-02-04 16:53:29+00:00
There appear to be a relatively few possibilities.

* The reporter lied.

* The reporter forgot.

* Apple devices share fingerprint matching details and another device had her details (this is supposed to be impossible, and I have no reason to believe it isn't).

* The government hacked the computer such that it would unlock this way (probably impossible as well).

* The fingerprint security is much worse than years of evidence suggests.

Mainly it was buried at the very end of the article, and I thought it worth mentioning here in case people missed it.
by gabrieledarrigo | 2026-02-04 16:53:49+00:00
> i haven't automated anything here, but booking a table by talking to clawdbot is delightful.

Omg.
Just get the phone and call the restaurant, man.

I really don't want to live in this timeline where I can't even search for b&b with my gf without burning tokens through an LLM. That's crazy.
by Terretta | 2026-02-04 16:54:24+00:00
> I would totally enable an "enhanced protection for external accessories" mode.

Anyone can do this for over a decade now, and it's fairly straightforward:

- 2014: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2589

- recent: https://reincubate.com/support/how-to/pair-lock-supervise-ip...

This goes beyond the "wired accessories" toggle.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-02-04 16:54:48+00:00
One of the best programmers I know is a self declared thinker that also is loving this new wave of agentic coding.

What he told me is that he loves thinking about the design of the code in his head, picking the best piece for each part of "the machine" and assembling it design in his head.

After doing that he loathed the act of translating that pure design into code. He told me it felt like pushing all that design through a thin tube through sheer force against syntax, wrong library versions, compiler errors, complex IDEs...

So for him, this is the best scenario possible.

I'm more a of a builder but after talking with him and reading the OP post maybe thinkers come in various shapes.
by sofixa | 2026-02-04 16:55:07+00:00
They are saying that France is the only country that builds its own defence stuff only in country (unlike Germany that would buy American jets, for instance).

And it's true for most things that matter. The only exception I can think of is manufactured by cooperative companies that are part owned by France and have facilities in France but that specific thing might be made somewhere else (e.g. Airbus A400Ms for which the final assembly is in Seville, but Airbus is jointly owned by France, Germany, Spain), and small arms (HK, German made). Small arms don't really matter in the grand scheme of things due to the low barrier of entry both for acquiring off the shelf and setting up domestic manufacturing. Good luck doing that with fighter jets or cruise missiles.
by bombcar | 2026-02-04 16:55:09+00:00
Hence the statement "possession is 9/10ths of the law" - for the vast majority of property that people care about, you prove you're the owner by possessing it

Property tax is also the other 9/10ths - if someone is paying the property tax they're presumed to be the owner unless there's a court fight; and in fact, if you want, in many places in the USA you can get adverse possession by paying property tax on unknown or unwanted property - or buy them at auction by paying the back property tax.

The ones you can easily do this on are all various kinds and forms of worthless land, but hey, it's out there!
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-02-04 16:55:12+00:00
Totally agree its basically the equivalent of a few low end apps as of now. The interesting thing to me is that it does MANY low end apps all together.

It's a calendar, reminder, notebook, fridge scanner, and a webscraper

I think the interesting idea here is that overtime this will grow to more applications. None require integration or effort to work you only need plug the infrastructure and tooling.

This to me is what will eventually wipe out most agentic startups. The enterprise version of this little thing is just a bot and a set of documents of what it should do and a few tools. Why pay and setup a new system when I can just automate what I already have?
by jedberg | 2026-02-04 16:55:15+00:00
Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they clearly violated policies.

On the other hand, it really sucks to be at a company that has a large layoff and not get a list, only to find out that they person you were waiting on for a key item was laid off the week before and that's why they didn't finish it (ask me how I know!).
by pmig | 2026-02-04 16:55:46+00:00
Thanks. If you are referring to how we handle large OCI images for our OCI-compatible container registry, we create a temporary volume and stream/cache the layers there before streaming them to S3-compatible storage. This mitigates the need to keep large layers in memory, which previously led to memory resource exhaustion.

If want to dig even deeper, this specific implementation was done in this pr: https://github.com/distr-sh/distr/pull/1478
by hermitShell | 2026-02-04 16:56:31+00:00
After looking for a top level comment pointing to why instead of how, I logged in just for this as I could not find one. Extremely bullish on this move, let me try to explain.

As most engineers realize right away, it is not going to be profitable to operate a regular datacenter in space, per the article (and I agree), so something else is going on here. Almost all the discussion is about feasibility, which is not by itself going to explain the situation.

It is clearly somewhat feasible to build Starlink level infrastructure and operate it profitably. I would posit that the narrative is a funding vehicle for a more conservative, incremental objective.

The very fact that the infrastructure is in space places the datacenter on the legal and geopolitical high ground. It's hard to raid servers if they are in orbit. It's hard to disable, audit, or arm-wrestle into submission. It doesn't have to have the scale we've come to expect in 2026 to be useful. And it's for inference, not training, of course. Useful levels of inference is computationally cheap. There are implications with the financial system as well.

In combination with PLTR technology, what I see is another intelligent and strategic move by Musk to enable and be part of hegemony. He is a central player not making decisions in isolation. They are playing a game with different rules, and therefore different unit economics.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-04 16:56:55+00:00
> But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned.

Mmkay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...

"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."

"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."