MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d--b | 2026-02-10 22:55:58+00:00
I mean that they're not really numbers.

Usually they explain it something like: oh, at first people didn't know what 2-5 added up to, but then we invented negative numbers. Well, complex numbers are that but for square roots of negative numbers.

But that's a completely misleading way to explain these things. Complex numbers aren't numbers aren't numbers really.
by PKop | 2026-02-10 22:56:57+00:00
For one thing that document argues that one of the single greatest costs to citizens of immigration is somehow a benefit: increased housing costs. They talk of higher property tax collections from increased home values, this is just another way to say immigration is increasing housing costs and taxes for native population.

The Federal Reserve confirmed this a couple years ago that housing inflation was in part due to a large increase in immigrant population over last few years.
by baxtr | 2026-02-10 22:57:22+00:00
I love that you brought this up.

Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula.

In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name…

And that’s fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is.

I mean it’s fine to dream things up, but let’s be fair and call it what it is.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-10 22:57:36+00:00
This is a hilariously narrow view of family life.

Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former)

But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought publicly!
by jvandreae | 2026-02-10 22:57:38+00:00
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?

The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
by noupdates | 2026-02-10 22:57:46+00:00
The profession is basically no longer a "knowledge" profession to the degree that we knew it before. You had to be technical and a self learner with hands on experience to be a developer. Those requirements have simply dropped. More people will be able to ship production grade software, so, what does this mean for society? I don't know. I'm certain all of us can buy fabric and sew a few shirts and pants if we really wanted to, but society largely doesn't do so.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-10 22:58:50+00:00
It is called a metonymy where you substitute a name that is associated to some other thing instead of mentionning that thing.

Some examples:
Wall Street = NY Stock Exchange
the White House = US president and his cabinet
the Pentagon = US Dept of Defense
Downing Street = UK prime minister

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
Scotland Yard = Greater London Metropolitan Police
Tehran = Government/officials of the islamic republic of Iran
by bananaflag | 2026-02-10 22:58:53+00:00
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.

This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.

My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.

It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
Show HN: LLMs are getting pretty good at Active Directory exploitation
by danieltk76 | 2026-02-10 22:59:07+00:00
One thing I will say is that at Vulnetic we will basically jumble different misconfigurations into a network and the agent always seems to find a way to exploit them. We have tried making them esoteric, and we are even now using EDR and tools like Wazuh to evaluate how our agent evades detection. These models are improving at hacking fast.
by skipkey | 2026-02-10 22:59:30+00:00
In 1993 I paid a shade under $10k for a new Chevy S10 where the only options were AC (not actually optional in Texas) and CD player in the radio. It was manual transmission, V6. Indexed to inflation that would be, what, about $24k today if regs allowed them to be built?

If it existed they would fill every rural high school parking lot in the south. Allow them to exist and someone will build them.
by randerson | 2026-02-10 22:59:35+00:00
Good handling is certainly somewhat subjective (along the lines of "fun, communicative, begging to be pushed to its limits"). But even when its not about pure numbers, I still haven't seen the Taycan voted best-handling among enthusiast reviewers (except when qualified with "for an EV"). I'm curious what criteria you might be referring to? The "most fun" handling cars still seem to go to the lightweights like the Miata.
by SyzygyRhythm | 2026-02-10 22:59:36+00:00
Is it two, or is it infinite? The quaternions have three imaginary units, i, j, and k. They're distinct, and yet each of them could be used for the complex numbers and they'd work the same way. How would I know that "my" imaginary unit i is the same as some other person's i? Maybe theirs is j, or k, or something else entirely.
by maybewhenthesun | 2026-02-10 22:59:46+00:00
It is possible of course that the highways you drive are just too busy and the max speed is actually set too high for how busy the road is. That happens more than you'd want because lowering the max of a highway is always an unpopular thing to, even if it's needed.

Still, I tend to find that people underestimate the danger of short distances. Often it's just better to accept a 100 cars going in front of you than to shrug off following someone at 1.5 seconds. It can go well for years because crashes are rare, but when you are in a crash you will be royally screwed when you don't have the reaction distance needed.
by eastbayjake | 2026-02-10 22:59:46+00:00
I'm not mixing -- if I have $0 in my bank account today and I don't get paid until Friday, I cannot buy food today with a debit card. Being able to buy things today on the promise of future cash flows is a risk-based financial product and risk comes with premiums. (Again: could you solve this problem by having more money in your account? Sure! But there are a lot of downstream consequences of every consumer and business in society operating that way and there are real trade-offs that should be discussed with more nuance than "monopoly hoard ledger")
by kccqzy | 2026-02-10 22:59:49+00:00
Yes it’s just because of the Philippines. The mention of the Philippines is triggering some additional scrutiny. When Waymo themselves announced this back in 2024[1] they made no mention of the country where these humans are located. Now people are raising questions about data sovereignty and local training such as U.S. driving license. Or you can say it’s xenophobia.

[1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
by logicprog | 2026-02-10 23:00:02+00:00
I think framing it as a site for people that are positive about AI is probably the wrong way to go, but around it kf you don't want just a bunch of AI psychosis posts and nothing else.

I think it would be better if, instead of being defined in terms of being "positive" about AI (in the sense of saying that everything to do with AI is all great and rosy and awesome, and thinking every new AI thing is the next big thing, and praising every vibe-coded piece of slop), the focus was explicitly on having mature, software engineering-focused discussions of how to actually understand, make, and use AI and AI tools/harnesses, where it's taken as common ground that these are tools, not magical genies that will usher in the rapture of the nerds or make software development obsolete, nor uniquely evil technologies that only fascists could ever use or like or that are completely useless, or tools that only talentless hacks who don't care about the craft, good use. So basically to avoid shallow dismissals and endless culture of war arguments.

I would love to have a place that discusses the pros and cons of different ways of approaching specification, natural language programming, DSLs, property-based testing, behavior-driven development, lightweight formal methods like model checking, or even more heavyweight formal methods like doing proofs, etc, as means of using the extra time and lowered cognitive load allowed by AI coding agents to actually increase the reliability and improve the documentation of your project and as a result, get better reliability and more productivity out of the agents themselves!

Some examples of this kind of discussion that I actually find useful are:

- https://kiro.dev/blog/kiro-and-the-future-of-software-develo...
- https://kiro.dev/blog/property-based-testing/ <--- especially this one
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09008
- https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/12/16/natural-language.html
- https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code.html
- https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati... <--- and this one!
- https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
- https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-...
- https://checkeagle.com/checklists/njr/a-month-of-chat-orient...
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey
- example of the stuff I'm trying out: https://gist.github.com/alexispurslane/4d01ac5522f1b58be2bc1...
by joacon | 2026-02-10 23:00:20+00:00
I’m the developer of Connective, kind of social app, but built with the idea of meeting people in real life, just a minimum of online interaction.

You can organize or join others reunions and share the same interests.

Is available for both, iOS and Android. Check out this web: www.connective-app.com

Please let me know what you think
by drnick1 | 2026-02-10 23:00:31+00:00
Privacy crash course (non exhaustive):

- Do not use social media

- Install Linux on your PC/laptop, buy a phone compatible with GrapheneOS

- Self-host any cloud services you may need (file sharing etc.)

- Communicate over Signal or self-hosted Matrix/XMPP

- Use throwaway SIM cards and phone numbers when needed

- Unplug the cellular modem found in your car (if applicable)

- Pay with cash or crypto

- Use fake identities for anything that isn't government related (paying taxes)
by mtmail | 2026-02-10 23:00:32+00:00
Not happy with Heroku's recent announcement and looked at https://hatchbox.io/ . If anything I'd prefer whatever is most similar to Heroku: automated deploys, some VMs to choose from, tight database integration (no worries about replication, backups etc). hatchbox's pricing seems too low (too good to be true?) There might be a market for those trying to leave Heroku by offering a great, comprehensive and straight forward migration guide. https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku
by tlavoie | 2026-02-10 23:00:34+00:00
Along with all the general discussion, I found the concept of defensive parsing striking a chord when reading this as well: "The Seven Turrets of Babel: A Taxonomy of LangSec Errors and How to Expunge Them", https://langsec.org/papers/langsec-cwes-secdev2016.pdf

I'd love for these ideas to take hold at work, but I'm on the fringes in infosec, not a dev.
by yorwba | 2026-02-10 23:00:41+00:00
They're not the same. i ≠
−i, no matter which square root of negative one i is. They're merely indiscernible in the sense that if φ(i) is a formula where i is the only free variable, ∀i ∈ ℂ. i² = −1 ⇒ (φ(i) ⇔ φ(−i)) is a true formula. But if you add another free variable j, φ(i, j) can be true while φ(−i, j) is false, i.e. it's not the case that ∀j ∈ ℂ. ∀i ∈ ℂ. i² = −1 ⇒ (φ(i, j) ⇔ φ(−i, j)).
by sdellis | 2026-02-10 23:00:58+00:00
Sure, monopolies are great for the C-suite, but they turn out to be really bad for the end users and customers, the real losers when there is no competition.

Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
by d4mi3n | 2026-02-10 23:00:58+00:00
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with Anubis that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.

There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.
Show HN: Agentplatform.app – Plugin-Based LLM Workflows
by dougbarrett | 2026-02-10 23:01:26+00:00
Hi all - I created agentplatform.app to be a place to build agentic workflows, and create plugins that tap into those. I wanted to build upon the idea of a skill for something that can be deeply integrated into the entire lifecycle of the application, and modular in a way where plugins can be easily reused across different applications.

I also wanted a way for people to go on and create their own plugins and be paid for their work - so as you create plugins you're able to add them to the marketplace for others to use for free or to 'subscribe' to them for a max monthly rate that is applicable as long as an application is running. The plugins are go-code, and when you apply them to an application and deploy it, it's deployed into it's own isolated machine from other applications - running native Go code.

If anyone is interested in helping me test this, please send me a DM after signing up on the site and I'll approve your account and set it up to bypass billing during testing.
by evo | 2026-02-10 23:01:40+00:00
I wish them the best, but to my knowledge most metal laser sintering setups involve powders so fine as to be both a fairly serious health concern and (depending on the metal) a plausible fuel-air explosive if there's sufficient concentration in the air.

It's not something that instills me with confidence when they self-describe as "scrappy", I'd like to see extra vigilance into the safety concerns.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-10 23:03:20+00:00
The Kernel was released in 2024...

Have you used Fedora? After using Fedora I was actually offended how bad Windows was and how bad Debian family was.

Its the best OS I've used in my lifetime by what feels like an order of magnitude.

My only terminal commands were to unblock some minecraft ports for my kid. You won't find a Ubuntu/Debian user with that experience.
by kej | 2026-02-10 23:03:23+00:00
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
by bsder | 2026-02-10 23:03:51+00:00
As much as I like to slag on CAFE, we have been here before.

Automakers simply hate making affordable cars. MBAs extol "Number must go up! BRRRRRRR!" and you cannot do that with cheap cars.

Remember the 70s? What did the big automakers do? They made bigger and bigger cars ever shittier and jacked up the prices. Sound familiar?

And then what happened? Japan showed up and cleaned their clock. And then the protectionist laws got passed, but it didn't matter because the Japanese cars were smaller and better and used less gas. Sound familiar?

History may not repeat itself, but it sure likes to rhyme.
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-10 23:04:21+00:00
> but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code

Uh what? You can sit there step by step and execute assembly code, writing things down on a piece of paper and get the correct final result. The limits are things like attention span, which is separate from intelligence.

Human brains operate continuously, with multiple parts being active at once, with weight adjustment done in real time both in the style of backpropagation, and real time updates for things like "memory". How do you train an LLM to behave like that?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-10 23:04:26+00:00
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal

You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
by Sophira | 2026-02-10 23:04:41+00:00
> IMO systems should be shipped in "Setup Mode" by default with no keys preinstalled. On first boot which ever OS you decide to install should be able to enroll its keys.

Let's be clear here. Most computers ship with Windows pre-installed, thanks to Microsoft's exclusivity deals with OEMs and the general assumption of Windows as the default OS.

Most users, even those who want to use Linux exclusively, will never be able to utilize the first-OS-install functionality you propose, because the OEM will already have installed Windows on their behalf.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-10 23:04:56+00:00
> And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

The reality is more complicated.

I have had Visa or Mastercard being refused in other countries by some retail outlets / institutions.

In fact I never travel with only one card from a single bank because I always want to have a backup. And it is not really Visa vs Mastercard because I have had occurences of having 2 Visas, one of which would work and another would not on a specific shop for no obvious nor documented reason.
by pelzatessa | 2026-02-10 23:05:16+00:00
Some time ago I actually downloaded bazzite to run in a VM in order to play some indie games from itch.io and to not worry about them doing some shady things on my computer. I installed the OS and everything was fine, but to my surprise..... wine was not installed by default (I'm not familiar with wine environment, i just got that impression because the terminal didn't recognize the wine command when i typed it manually).

I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.

On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.
Will consciousness be the only thing humans have left?
by syntex | 2026-02-10 23:05:26+00:00
I have been thinking about how we slowly give our mental tasks to technology. Each major invention takes a job away from our brains:

Writing -> We stopped needing to remember everything (outsourced memory)

Printing Press -> We stopped needing to copy knowledge by hand

Calculators -> We stopped doing math in our heads

The Internet -> We stopped needing to "know" facts. We just look them up

LLMs -> We are starting to give away reasoning and combining ideas

What is next?

Soon, AI will likely handle:

- Planning

- Ideas

- Execution

What remains for us?

If AI does the "thinking" and the "doing," maybe humans are left with only:

- Experiencing: Feeling what it is like to be alive

- Choosing: Deciding what we actually want

- Valuing: Deciding what is important or "good."

- Being aware: Just being a witness to the process

And not sure if these are "safe" human roles? Or will AI eventually take over "choosing" and "valuing" too? If an algorithm knows what you want before you do, is our consciousness still in control?
by gustavopezzi | 2026-02-10 23:05:30+00:00
If I look back, it was not even AI, since I don't use any AI model (almost at all). So, I don't think AI was really the main divisor for me. I have a feeling it was the "you don't own anything and everything is now a cloud/subscription" that was the main disappointment, which happened years before LLMs or AI-assisted programming.
by dwroberts | 2026-02-10 23:06:27+00:00
Think it is a much bigger deal than you’re making out, because we don’t have figures on how often the cars need assistance.

We assume it’s just occasionally but we don’t actually know that. They could be requesting assistance constantly and Waymo would have an incentive to keep that hush-hush. Certainly would not be the first time a big SV company has faked it until they technically worked.
by HighGoldstein | 2026-02-10 23:07:52+00:00
>Do you know what an opinion is?

Cool, what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans?

>Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in.

Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-10 23:08:27+00:00
I'm not sure that we are on the same page

Are you saying that you want multiple build tagged files each with a different implementation of the function, all in the same package? (eg. windows, linux, arm)

I mean, the example given by the GP is two implementations in the same package, the standard library version is used in the prod file and the test implementation in the test files - the _test.go is the (implicit) build tag

Or do you have something else in mind?
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-10 23:08:39+00:00
Well one concern could be something like - ride share companies already extracted a lot of the profit share of local taxi companies out of their local economies and moved it to Silicon Valley. But at least there were local jobs so a good amount of money stayed in the local economy.

Now with driverless all the money leaves the local economy to go to Silicon Valley. And then what human labor is required is then offshored.