MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bmelton | 2026-02-04 13:27:22+00:00
Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.

But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.

Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.

I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.

But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.
by losvedir | 2026-02-04 13:27:49+00:00
The bitter lesson is different, and applies to the learning process. It's not directly relevant here.

If we're just pattern matching to adjacent memes that might provide insight, I'd also throw "sufficiently smart compiler" into the mix. Like, yes, in theory as the compiler gets better you shouldn't have to worry about implementing random optimizations yourself, but in practice you do.

In theory, you just need normal docs and a sufficiently smart LLM and agent harness can use them, but in practice there's still benefit in organizing them a certain way to more directly manage the context window yourself.
by xaldir | 2026-02-04 13:28:44+00:00
Maybe it's just a PR stunt, maybe not, we'll find out in due time.

The thing is, there has been a lot of announcement like that in the past, but when the dust settles, you find out that every other ministry just signed another contract with Microsoft, so yeah.

The DINUM (the state agency behind these tools) just try very hard to be relevant, but in the end, the ministries are relatively autonomous in their choices.
by dwaite | 2026-02-04 13:29:25+00:00
Supposedly when Michelangelo was asked about how he created the statue of David, he said "I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David.”

Your work is influenced by the medium by which you work. I used to be able to tell very quickly if a website was developed in Ruby on Rails, because some approaches to solve a problem are easy and some contain dragons.

If you are coding in clay, the problem is getting turned into a problem solvable in clay.

The challenge if you are directing others (people or agents) to do the work is that you don't know if they are taking into account the properties of the clay. That may be the difference between clean code - and something which barely works and is unmaintainable.

I'd say in both cases of delegation, you are responsible for making sure the work is done correctly. And, in both cases, if you do not have personal experiences in the medium you may not be prepared to judge the work.
Ask HN: Who is building ClawdWatch, or the AI that watches the AI?
by cedel2k1 | 2026-02-04 13:29:50+00:00
If you'd need to make 3 bets on who's going to build the AI that watches the AI, who would bet on? Up and coming startups (Lakers, ...), some enterprise company (Palo Alto Networks, ...) or something open source (OpenGuardrails, ...)?
by Nevermark | 2026-02-04 13:30:06+00:00
Heat energy shedding is often talked about as an Achilles Heal of orbital computation.

But heat radiation rates are proportional to temperature to the 4th power!!!!

That is a magical law. The quality of heat pumps used to concentrate heat, will drive the economics and structure of heat dissipation.

Seldom do we get constraints that favorable to work with.
by gchamonlive | 2026-02-04 13:30:08+00:00
All of a sudden everybody is a writing style critic. The only question that is pertinent is if the message of the post is relevant.

Think about it. You wouldn't give someone crap for writing in broken English because there are many really smart people that are non English speakers. So why are we giving crap for people using AI to write better posts? If the idea is relevant, what's the point in criticizing the style?

A fair question would be "is the idea in the post actually the writer's or was it entirely done by AI"? However how can one actually tell if the idea, not the style is original? You can't. So it's pointless to be angry about style. Focus on the message.
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-04 13:30:23+00:00
Knowing the difference between a think tank and experts might be hard without some rudimentary knowledge to spot nonsense? I don't know, actually asking. It seems to me that the primary skill we need in our leaders is that of spotting experts talking within their field and actually listen to them while ignoring others. The primary trait, which is even more important, is character so that they act on what they here in our best interests instead of their own.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-04 13:30:42+00:00
I believe that keys with optical switches are less reliable, being sensitive to things like sensor misalignment or dust.

I have not used any keyboard with optical switches, but several decades ago I have used keyboards with hall sensors, which had a superb quality and reliability, much better than anything that I have used later.

Sadly, I had to abandon the first keyboard that I have used with computers owned by me, which had Hall sensors, because it was not IBM PC compatible (its origin was in some DEC-compatible video terminal and I had used it with a Motorola MC68000 based PC, which I have replaced with a PC/AT clone, for which I had to use a compatible keyboard, of much lower quality).

Otherwise, I am certain that it would have remained perfectly functional until today, unlike the many keyboards that I had to replace since then, when too worn out.
Show HN: MedTimer, an open source medication reminder for Android
by futsch | 2026-02-04 13:31:02+00:00
Been working on this for almost two years now and want to ask for feedback here.

Started from the wish to have an open-source, privacy focused medication tracker, where at the time being none existed. So I created one myself.

Core features are:

- Fully offline (does not even have permission to access the net)
- Unlimited medications and reminders
- Various reminder types (daily at a certain time, interval, daily intervals etc.)
- Highly configurable reminder engine (repeating reminders, reminders as alarms, snoozing)
- Medication stock tracking with configurable alarms for stock thresholds and expiration date
- Medication intake is logged and can be exported as PDF or CSV

I started with Java and XML, but have gradually shifted to using (and learning) Kotlin. Compose is on my to-learn-and-do-list for this year.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-04 13:31:34+00:00
I wrote some code to send SSTV because everything was either proprietary and didn't work, shareware and didn't work (and often with the original author gone Silent Key so no way to get the real version), or under some vaguely-specified licence and written with Tk widgets in Fortran or some damn thing.

I wrote it about 25 years ago and can't currently find it but it's one one of these hard disks in these here blue moving crates somewhere. It'd take less time to recreate than find, I suspect, especially if I also wanted to make it build nicely in gcc from this decade.

It just grabbed from a V4L2 source, and emitted a burst of Robot36 over the soundcard. In conjunction with a heavy-duty Tait T2000-family transceiver I used it to livestream a drive across Glasgow, slowly and noisily, sending one picture per minute which gave the poor PA transistor time to cool a bit ;-)
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-04 13:32:02+00:00
They need fresh water which is scarce unlike salt water, once they use it, it can't be used for anything else. They're competing with water supplies of municipalities these days. Not a big deal if you're near the great lakes or the missisipi, but a big deal in california, arizona, utah,etc.. and that's just the US. There are places that are becoming unlivable because of water supply issues, and datacenters are needing to be built near them.
by CodingJeebus | 2026-02-04 13:32:02+00:00
> The gaming doesn’t stop at disability. Stanford requires undergrads to purchase an $7,944 annual meal plan—unless they claim a religious dietary restriction the cafeteria can’t accommodate.

Isn’t the mandatory meal plan also a game by the university? A really frustrating trend I’ve seen more companies do nowadays is to tack on mandatory charges for crap that I don’t need or want, and it’s happening everywhere.

If declaring a disability is what it takes to get out of a compulsory meal charge, then it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.

It’s not just students or consumers playing a game, companies (or universities in this case) are playing one too, and it’s called: how to get as much money out of our customers as possible.
by mud_dauber | 2026-02-04 13:32:09+00:00
Location: Charleston WV

Remote: yes (reluctantly)

Relocate: no (elderly parents)

Technologies: semiconductors, rails, bash, python

Resume: LinkedIn.com/in/brianpiercy - bjpcjp@gmail.com

I’m in WV helping my parents. That workload has diminished over the last year, and I need a purpose.

I spent 30+ years at Freescale Semi, GSI Semi, AMD and a couple of startups. PM, operations, supply chain, SW development.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
by grosswait | 2026-02-04 13:33:33+00:00
I am not a reverse engineer. In fact, I only consider myself an intermediate coder(more of a scripter tbh), but I have decades of (fairly deep) technical experienced as a generalist. With Claude code and another Ghidra MCP I was able to reverse engineer a ransomware encryptor and decryptor (had both) to create a much more reliable version of the decryptor. Saved terabytes of data. Felt like a super power!
by zmhanham | 2026-02-04 13:34:02+00:00
> If you know how to write clean code.

If we're assuming that:

I find it less time consuming to just write the code, understand it 99% (since I wrote it), and debug the rest, than it is to try to describe it to the AI, understand a fraction of what it spits out, and spend more time understanding it and fixing it.

If you can just write clean code just do that. Also, you will improve your skills even more the more you do that (shocker). So the next time you have to do that it will be even easier. This is called learning a skill.

Sorry for the rough tone, reading that back haha. But still posting because I'm just passionate about it, it's nothing personal though.
by DrScientist | 2026-02-04 13:34:28+00:00
Wasn't the smart meter rollout ( and the poor choice of hardware etc ) a central government initiative. Octopus merely used their software agility to make the most of it.

ie not sure issues with the smart meters themselves is the fault of Octopus - as the meter standards are set centrally so they can still work if you switch supplier?

Back to another old adage,

"people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
by constantius | 2026-02-04 13:34:46+00:00
Arguably, we'd have fared worse: we'd be starting our days by taking a power stance while listening to the TV broadcast of lists of positive words to prime ourselves into greatness, then we'd go out and salute people with "Most people in your neighbourhood are having a great day". All exams would be not-eating-marshmallows exams. Only upshot I can think of is HN would be called PHackerNews.

No, if there's one social science we should have picked, it's anthropology I tell you.
by jnsie | 2026-02-04 13:34:53+00:00
Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.
by chc4 | 2026-02-04 13:35:03+00:00
Or better yet, the built-in Version Tracker, which is designed for porting markup to newer versions of binaries with several different heuristic tools for correlating functions that are the same due to e.g. the same data or function xrefs, and not purely off of identical function hashes...

Going off of only FunctionID will either have a lot of false positives or false negatives, depending on if you compute them masking out operands or not. If you mask out operands, then it says that "*param_1 = 4" and "*param_1 = 123" are the same hash. If you don't mask out operands, then it says that nearly all functions are different because your call displacements have shifted due to different code layout. That's why the built-in Version Tracker tool uses hashes for only one of the heuristics, and has other correlation heuristics to apply as well in addition.
by itay-maman | 2026-02-04 13:35:38+00:00
I think everything is absurdly chaotic at the moment, and a major question is whether it will ever calm down or perhaps this level of chaos is the new norm.

Case in point is Moltbook: it went from being an idea to going viral in a matter of days, and now it could either become the ecosystem that powers the next wave of innovation or the textbook example of the risks of vibe coding.
by nate | 2026-02-04 13:35:46+00:00
author obviously isn't wrong. it's easy to fall into this trap. and it does take willpower to get out of it. and the AI (christ i'm going to sound like they paid me) can actually be a tool to get there.

i was working for months on an entity resolution system at work. i inherited the basic algo of it: Locality Sensitive Hashing. Basically breaking up a word into little chunks and comparing the chunk fingerprints to see which strings matched(ish). But it was slow, blew up memory constraints, and full of false negatives (didn't find matches).

of course i had claude seek through this looking to help me and it would find things. and would have solutions super fast to things that I couldn't immediately comprehend how it got there in its diff.

but here's a few things that helped me get on top of lazy mode. Basically, use Claude in slow mode. Not lazy mode:

1. everyone wants one shot solutions. but instead do the opposite. just focus on fixing one small step at a time. so you have time to grok what the frig just happened.
2. instead of asking claude for code immediately, ask for more architectural thoughts. not claude "plans". but choices. "claude, this sql model is slow. and grows out of our memory box. what options are on the table to fix this." and now go back and forth getting the pros and cons of the fixes. don't just ask "make this faster". Of course this is the slower way to work with Claude. But it will get you to a solution you more deeply understand and avoid the hallucinations where it decides "oh just add where 1!=1 to your sql and it will be super fast".
3. sign yourself up to explain what you just built. not just get through a code review. but now you are going to have a lunch and learn to teach others how these algorithms or code you just wrote work. you better believe you are going to force yourself to internalize the stuff claude came up with easily. i gave multiple presentations all over our company and to our acquirers how this complicated thing worked. I HAD TO UNDERSTAND. There's no way I could show up and be like "i have no idea why we wrote that algorithm that way".
4. get claude to teach it to you over and over and over again. if you spot a thing you don't really know yet, like what the hell is is this algorithm doing. make it show you in agonizingly slow detail how the concept works. didn't sink in, do it again. and again. ask it for the 5 year old explanation. yes, we have a super smart, over confident and naive engineer here, but we also have a teacher we can berate with questions who never tires of trying to teach us something, not matter how stupid we can be or sound.

Were there some lazy moments where I felt like I wasn't thinking. Yes. But using Claude in slow mode I've learned the space of entity resolution faster and more thoroughly than I could have without it and feel like I actually, personally invented here within it.
by fallingfrog | 2026-02-04 13:35:57+00:00
Yeah so I realize that at some point manufacturers of hard drives started to cheat and claim 10gb hard drives that were actually a bit less, using a 1000kb megabyte as their rationale, but that's just the marketing team engaging in false advertising. There's no reason to dignify such deception by inventing new words. They just lied. A mb is 1024 kbytes and a gb is 1024 mb. Sorry thats just how the math works out. A 16 kb address space can access 64kb or 65536 unique memory locations.
by dogtimeimmortal | 2026-02-04 13:36:02+00:00
> blog.adafruit.com
Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
Click here for more information

if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
by nindalf | 2026-02-04 13:38:02+00:00
For me it’s a related but different worry. If I’m no longer thinking deeply, then maybe my thinking skills will simply atrophy and die. Then when I really need it, I won’t have it. I’ll be reduced to yanking the lever on the AI slot machine, hoping it comes up with something that’s good enough.

But at that point, will I even have the ability to distinguish a good solution from a bad one? How would I know, if I’ve been relying on AI to evaluate if ideas are good or not? I’d just be pushing mediocre solutions off as my own, without even realising that they’re mediocre.
by crote | 2026-02-04 13:38:04+00:00
Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.

The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.
by zbentley | 2026-02-04 13:38:07+00:00
Similarly fair point.

I think there's a wide regulatory spectrum available between "ban something outright" and "completely lassiez-faire noninterventionist approach". For stock buybacks, that spectrum includes (and I don't have a specific pitch or favorite in this non-exhaustive, non-mutually-exclusive list):

- Requiring federal approval before a buyback event in excess of a certain value or capitalization percentage, similar to the way that mergers can be curtailed by regulators.

- Restricting the volume of buyback activity per year/quarter.

- Imposing different taxation behavior triggered by buybacks or as a percentage of buyback value.

- Giving the government preferential purchase opportunities in the event of a buyback for large companies (I.e. "you can buy back 10% of your capitalization, but the government reserves the right to instead purchase half of that--5% of your capitalization--at the buyback rate"), under the rationalization that, if you're huge and doing well enough for a buyback event, then you're doing well enough that the public interest should have influence over your business's future.

Previous HN discussions of this topic, selected non-rigorously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762582

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664553

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606733
Tell HN: Claude Has Had 57 Incidents in the Past 3 Months
by shikkra | 2026-02-04 13:38:16+00:00
Today I tried to use claude.ai ($100 Max plan) with Opus 4.5 and extended thinking enabled. I was met with a weird retry message. It tried to generate a response 10 times and then automatically switched to a different model without any indication or confirmation.

I've been noticing different issues crop up frequently, both on the web and in Claude Code. So I decided to look into how often this has been happening.

Here's the number of incidents per month based on their own status page https://status.claude.com/history as of today:

February 2026 : 10 incidents (we’re only 4 days in)
January 2026 : 26 incidents
December 2025 : 21 incidents

At least 16 of these directly affected their most capable model Claude Opus 4.5:

3 incidents (Dec 21-23)
9 incidents (Jan 7, 12, 13, 14, 20, 25-26, 28 x2)
4 incidents (Feb 1, 2, 3, 4)

Ten more are related to the claude.ai platform itself. And that's not even counting how buggy it is day to day. I don't think I'm the only one who's had it generate a nearly complete response, only for something to go wrong and wipe the entire thing from the conversation. No way to recover it, just wasted tokens.

How is Anthropic not addressing this? They are one of the highest valued AI companies out there. Clearly they have the resources and engineers to fix these issues. Why isn’t reliability a priority?
by clejack | 2026-02-04 13:38:24+00:00
The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.

So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.

Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.
by jatora | 2026-02-04 13:38:42+00:00
Absolutely nah. I know it feels good to jump into the 'thinker' camp and lump the users of AI into a non-thinker group, but this dichotomy is very poorly suited. Builders/engineers want a great tool to build faster with. Coders want to write code and find elegance in the prose. Both are thinkers.
by mystraline | 2026-02-04 13:39:04+00:00
> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.

Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?

It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.

As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.

> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.

So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.

It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".

> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Holy crap, the dog whistles.

Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"

Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.

And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?