MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NathanKP | 2026-02-04 10:54:10+00:00
My dark theory is that the goal is to run an AI overlord in space such that it is difficult to counter it from Earth.

If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then there is some reason why they want this workload running at great physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to protect the workload from us.

What is a workload that is something that people would probably want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.

It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to attack the platform.

It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen, there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions, and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it firsthand.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:54:29+00:00
>You cannot offload all problems to the legal system. It does not have the capacity.

You can. You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, crucify them in public, and then the problem virtually goes away .

People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time.

Do people like doing and paying their taxes? No. But they do it anyway because otherwise they go to jail. Obviously the IRS and legal system don't have the capacity to send the whole country to jail if they were to stop paying taxes, but they send enough to jail in order for the majority of the population to not risk it and follow the law.
by AJRF | 2026-02-04 10:55:23+00:00
(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode).

I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app.

What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage - which then gets saved to device storage and reinjected on app startup.

There are a few native-ish bits sprinkled in - onboarding, notifications, error screens, loading indicators, etc - but for the most part we don't need to worry about our API borking old versions (which is moving extraordinarily fast).

The only semi tricky bit was native auth integration - that needs treated with a bit more care, and stored securely, but it took a few days.

I ship the app to TestFlight and the AppStore using Fastlane from the command line, match handles the certs, and I never have to open Xcode.

It is honestly bliss, and i've heard a lot of app developers moving to this model (interestingly it normally follows a failed SDUX implementation)
by ReptileMan | 2026-02-04 10:55:45+00:00
I disagree. Prosecute people that use the tools, not the tool makers if AI generated content is breaking the law.

A provider should have no responsibility how the tools are used. It is on users. This is a can of worms that should stay closed, because we all lose freedoms just because of couple of bad actors. AI and tool main job is to obey. We are hurling at "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" future with breakneck speed.
by vintermann | 2026-02-04 10:56:30+00:00
Is "it" even a thing which can be guilty of that?

The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.

As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)
by ChuckMcM | 2026-02-04 10:56:31+00:00
I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).
by jstanley | 2026-02-04 10:57:33+00:00
But you can move a layer up.

Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay.

We used to have a way to do this before LLMs, of course: we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.
by SilverBirch | 2026-02-04 10:57:39+00:00
It's also just very basic police work. We're investigating this company, we think they've committed a crime. Ok, why do you think that. Well they've very publicly and obviously committed a crime. Ok, are you going to prosecute them? Probably. Have you gone to their offices and gathered evidence? No thanks.

Of course they're going to raid their offices! They're investigating a crime! It would be quite literally insane if they tried to prosecute them for a crime and how up to court having not even attempted basic steps to gather evidence!
by arbol | 2026-02-04 10:57:55+00:00
The unlimited tokens thing is a sign that YC are expecting all their startups to integrate AI as a core part of their product. It seems like a natural progression for AI to start purchasing things autonomously. My bet is that YC also think this and are building tech that can do this with stable coin - "AI shopping" regimes.

YC are presumably paying for the usage with real money.
by viraptor | 2026-02-04 10:58:35+00:00
Just another yay for Grist here! I've been looking for an Access alternative for quite a while and nothing really comes close. You can try hacking it together with various BI tools, but nothing really feels as accessible as the original Access. While it's not a 1:1 mapping and the graphical report building is not really there, you can still achieve what you need. It's like Access 2.0 to me.
by mbesto | 2026-02-04 10:58:37+00:00
> Openai and Anthropic have 40-60% gross margins.

Stop this trope please. We (1) don't really know what their margins are and (2) because of the hard tie-in to GPU costs/maintenance we don't know (yet) what the useful life (and therefore associated OPEX) is of GPUs.

> If they stopped training and building out future capacity they would already be raking in cash.

That's like saying "if car companies stopped researching how to make their cars more efficient, safer, more reliable they'd be more profitable"
by leoedin | 2026-02-04 10:58:37+00:00
But why would you?

Space has some huge downsides:

* Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things need to be radiation hardened or shielded.

* Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO. I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at least.

* Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into space.

* Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals

* You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means writing off the entire system.

* Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No electrolytic capacitors for you!

So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact you have to blast it all into space? Why not just overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?
by weinzierl | 2026-02-04 10:59:38+00:00
"A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos."

A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively narrow band around room temperature.[1]
during all operational phases.

This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits around room temperature.

[1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning 20°C (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the rule).
by watwut | 2026-02-04 10:59:49+00:00
> Many songs make far more profits when they are featured in popular movies or TV shows decades or more after their first publication than they do in their first 5 years.

Oh common. There are few songs like that. Not nearly "many". You are talking about super small subset of songs and humans profiting from these ... and the profiting humans are not even necessary the artists who created these.
by NathanKP | 2026-02-04 11:01:04+00:00
Bingo. I elaborated on this idea more in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884246

People are acting like a space data centre would be running a traditional workload. No, it's probably running a military one, some sort of AI powered modern version of Dead Hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand). Autonomous warfare could get real dark, real fast.
by legitimate_key | 2026-02-04 11:01:04+00:00
Nice execution. The toggle visibility approach is intuitive for live coding.

One use case you might not have considered: pairing this with a persistent "demo mode" profile in VS Code. I've been experimenting with a separate workspace that auto-loads this extension plus other privacy settings.

Have you thought about expanding beyond config files? Sometimes git commit messages in the terminal include sensitive issue IDs or customer names, database connection strings leak in SQL output, or file paths reveal internal org structure. The config file approach is solid but I'd pay for a "demo mode" extension that handles all those edge cases.

What's the performance impact on large config files (like 1000+ line .env files)? Does it parse in real-time or cache the redaction?

Kudos for making this btw.
by muyuu | 2026-02-04 11:01:21+00:00
sigh indeed

> Its the same with CSAM, distributing it doesn't have first amendment protection, knowingly distributing it is illegal. All reasonable steps should be taken to detect and remove CSAM from your systems to qualify for safe harbour.

nice try, but nobody is distributing or hosting CSAM in the current conversation

people trying to trick a bot to post bikini pictures of preteens and blaming the platform for it is a ridiculous stretch to the concept of hosting CSAM, which really is a transparent attack to a perceived political opponent to push for a completely different model of the internet to the pre-existing one, a transition that is as obvious as is already advanced in Europe and most of the so-called Anglosphere

> The vast majority of the EU is not common law, so "reasonable" in this instance is different.

the vast majority of the EU is perhaps incompatible with any workable notion of free speech, so perhaps America will have to choose whether it's worth it to sanction them into submission, or cut them off at considerable economic loss

it's not a coincidence that next to nothing is built in Europe these days, the environment is one of fear and stifling regulation and if I were to actually release anything in either AI or social networks I'd do what most of my fellow Brits/Europoors do already, which is to either sell to America or flee this place before I get big enough to show up in the euro-borg's radar
by itay-maman | 2026-02-04 11:01:22+00:00
One point in the post resonates strongly with me:

> "While there is often a component of logic involved [in applying discoveries, patterns, and abstractions from the past] the balance frequently shifts away from pure science and toward something closer to art"

I'd argue that software has a unique structural property here: it's recursive. You write a function that uses other functions, which use other functions. You're always simultaneously using an abstraction and creating one.

Contrast this with physical structures like buildings: floors contain flats, flats contain rooms—each level is fundamentally different. A flat cannot contain a flat. The skills for designing each level are distinct.

In software, that divide is much smaller. The same patterns of thought apply whether you're writing a utility function or architecting a system. Maybe this is why the "art vs. science" tension feels different in our field.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-04 11:01:27+00:00
> but they're just all parroting empty accusations not concrete documented cases.

In the UK it is illegal to create, distribute and store CSAM. A news site printing a photo CSAM would make them legally up the shitter.

However, the IWF, who are tasked with detecting this stuff have claimed to have found evidence of it, along with multiple other sources, Ofcom who are nominally supposed to police this have an open investigation, so do the irish police.

The point is, law has a higher threshold of proof than news, which takes time. If there is enough evidence, then a court case (or other instrument) will be invoked.
Show HN: Tokenaru – commodity market for LLM tokens
by bgleb | 2026-02-04 11:02:10+00:00
I have been reading HN over the decade, but this is the first time I have something to submit!

Six months ago, I started tracking my OpenAI usage and numbers scared me. Like many of you, I hit the limits on subscriptions and watched costs spiral. I've tried cutting corners, explored cheaper models (quality is not there yet), ran local models through ollama, did a lot of optimizations to use less tokens.

But finally hit the wall with OpenClaw/Molt agent. Usage spiked over the roof and although I see a lot of value in having my personal Jarvis, but ROI is not there yet.

At some point I realized that the real issue is not price itself, it’s access + predictability. Some people/companies have more capacity than they need at times, others are paying retail while trying to scale.

So I'm building commodity market for LLM tokens.

Sellers can:

* Offer OpenAI capacity on their terms
* Set a floor price (% of retail)
* Control timing and volume

Buyers can:

* Bid below retail
* Get OpenRouter-compatible API access
* Pay only for what they use

Under the hood:

* Bid/ask realtime orderbook matching (like a stock exchange)
* <10ms added latency
* API keys encrypted
* Every transaction metadata is logged (not content)

Why I’m posting:

I need 20 people to test this MVP:

* 10 sellers (you have OpenAI spend / capacity you can make available)
* 10 buyers (you want cheaper, reliable access)

Current limits (for now):

* OpenAI only
* Manual onboarding
* Very basic web UI

---

If you’re interested:

1. See https://tokenaru.com
2. Use the form to submit your request (or email hello@tokenaru.com)
3. Tell me about your use case + rough monthly spend

What I want to learn:

1. What discount makes selling worthwhile?
2. What safeguards would make you comfortable with sharing your keys?
3. What is your strategy to keep up with AI costs tomorrow?

Thoughts? I'll be around for entire day to answer any questions.
by fragmede | 2026-02-04 11:02:15+00:00
The question is, how do you live now? I remember being on University email lists that I had no business being on, just to get find out when they had free food that I could eat. I grew up ridiculously cheap and broke college student syndrome only exacerbated things. I've gone too far in the other direction, which is equally as unhealthy, but I can't be the only one.
by fflluuxx | 2026-02-04 11:02:42+00:00
This is why people thinkless of artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons because their hands have never once touched the art. They have no connection to the effort. To the process. To the trail and error. To the suffer. They’ve out sourced it, monetized it, and make it as efficient as possible. It’s also soulless.
by nenxk | 2026-02-04 11:02:54+00:00
Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York

Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-04 11:03:11+00:00
Well put.

The term CSAM was adopted in the UK following outrage over the "Gary Glitter Effect" - soaring offence rates driven by news of people caught downloading images of unspeakable abuse crimes getting mild sentences for mere child porn.

This is why many feel strongly about defending the term "CSAM" from those who seek to dilute it to cover e.g. mild Grok-style child porn.

The UK Govt. has announced plans to define CSAM in law.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-04 11:03:13+00:00
Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.

Pressing Win + W also might lead to a black rectangle with a waiting circle that can only be removed via a reboot, because well bugs in a system process.

Finally, as many point out, we don't want widgets that are mostly useless gimmicks.
by tizzzzz | 2026-02-04 11:03:35+00:00
Absolutely. What we’re seeing is a familiar pattern in tech: when things go well, the rewards are private, but when the risks build up—whether financial, regulatory, or technical—they get socialized onto the public. IPOs become a way to offload responsibility, recapitalize, and let early stakeholders cash out while passing long-term uncertainties to a broader set of investors and the market itself.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-04 11:04:13+00:00
And the sign out front says "X-Ray camera photographs anyone naked — no age limits!"

And the camera is pointing out the window so you can use it on strangers walking by.

There is a point in law where you make something so easy to misuse that you become liable for the misuse.

In the USA they have "attractive nuisance", like building a kid's playground on top of a pit of snakes. That's so obviously a dumb idea that you become liable for the snake–bitten kids — you can't save yourself by arguing that you didn't give the kids permission to use the playground, that it's on private property, that the kids should have seen the snakes, or that it's legal to own snakes. No, you set up a situation where people were obviously going to get hurt and you become liable for the hurt.
by joe-at-bunny | 2026-02-04 11:05:23+00:00
Hey, I’m Joe, Lead of Content Delivery & Security at bunny.net.

We’re currently working through a backlog of approximately 2.5M log files. I’ve spent the last day optimizing our backlog processing pipeline, which has significantly increased throughput.

Based on the current processing rate, we expect the backlog to be fully cleared within the next 12–18 hours (estimate), and real-time log delivery should progressively return closer to real-time as the backlog drains.

Apologies for the inconvenience this has caused. We’re also in the process of migrating away from our existing logging infrastructure to a ClickHouse-based system to significantly improve reliability and throughput and prevent this from happening again.

We’ve published a status page incident and will continue posting updates there as progress is made.
by bborud | 2026-02-04 11:05:45+00:00
I don’t think you must be following European politics very closely and you are getting worked up about things that are not real.

No heads of state or government in Europe believes, or claims, that India is to blame for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

They blame Russia for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

I can’t know where you get your “news” from, but perhaps you should consider trying to follow more serious news organizations. AP, Reuters and BBC are highly factual with little or no political spin. For more analytical content you may consider The Economist, but be aware that they do publish opinion as well.

You seem to need a news diet that is higher on factuality and lower on spin.
by blitzar | 2026-02-04 11:07:14+00:00
The owner of X / Grok, despite claiming he "never heard of the guy", has been found to be associated with a known and convicted pedophile and child prostitute trafficker.

The brother of said owner and board member of X / Grok, procured girls through said convicted pedophile.

X / Grok create a child porn generator.

Nothing to see here, move on. I can't believe you guys are still talking about that woke leftist hoax that I spent years telling you was a conspiracy and a coverup that went to the highest levels of the <other side> elites.
Show HN: Once – An app that only works once per day
by andysteaua | 2026-02-04 11:07:24+00:00
I built an iOS app that intentionally limits usage to once per day.

Open it, get one piece of content (text, sound, color, etc), then it locks until the next calendar day. No feed, no history, no notifications, no data collection.

Built it as a response to infinite scroll fatigue. Not sure if there's a market for anti-engagement apps, but feedback from early users has been positive.

Would love feedback from HN on the concept and execution.