MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chaps | 2026-02-11 20:48:22+00:00
Well, for background, my background is in investigative journalism with a focus on policing, technology, and transparency. I've been the plaintiff in a bit over 10 FOIA lawsuits and have three ongoing suits now. "Our guys" was more meant to be a hand waived ideal of what each in-person thinks their out-person is.

My point can be read as a recognition that ratcheting happens within the boring minutia and work is rarely done to recover from those ratchetings. Things like continuation of prosecution policies, legislation changes, staff changes, etc. There's a very strong tendency to consider those sorts of ratcheting effects as "just how things are" rather than recognizing that no, it hasn't always been that way.

Like, progressive politicians love to talk a big game about transparency, but when it comes down to it, they themselves contribute to systemic transparency failures. See Chicago's past two mayors' campaign transparency promises. Both have done a complete 180 on those promises and use never-losing lawyers to enforce that sort of thing. Chicago's mayor's office once asked me to do analysis of parking tickets' effects on poor folk... then a few months later accused my wanting a data dictionary of the parking tickets system so that I could modify the parking ticket system's data. That led to bad case law at the IL supreme court.

It's shit like that. The small-but-not-really-small things.
by aed | 2026-02-11 20:48:28+00:00
A little inspired by moltbook, I've thought about creating "shared cities" where 5-10 API keys at a time to build and see what happens as they fight over strategy.

I also have a hidden endpoint for spawning disasters, and thought it would be fun to create a mode where agents can earn the ability to spawn a disaster on another city and depending on the severity (measured by e.g. population loss a game month later) you earn or lose money.
by Rygian | 2026-02-11 20:48:58+00:00
Customers were sold[1] a lifetime subscription to Honest Guy's taxis, and then Honest Guy does a secret deed to sell his taxi joint to Bad Guy[2] without telling any customer about it. Then customers start getting ripped of in all manner of ways, that some of them would have known to avoid if they knew their taxis were being run by Bad Guy.

[1] Of course, the issue here is that no contracts were signed.

[2] In the specific case I was replying to, there was no malice or intent to hide from you as seller. Yet, a better outcome could have been achieved by advertising the sale to those impacted.

I don't think there is any legal support for what I describe above, but in principle whenever a user signs up for Good Thing, and then gets baitswitched to Evil Thing, the main victim is the user, and it is fair to hold responsible everyone involved in the bait-and-switch maneuver.
by Quothling | 2026-02-11 20:49:03+00:00
I think a lot of people, regardless of whether they vibe code or not are going to be replaced by a cheaper sollution. A lot of software that would've required programmers before can now be created by tech savy employees in their respective fields. Sure it'll suck, but it's not like that matters for a lot of software. Software Engineering and Computer Science aren't going away, but I suspect a lot of programming is.
by rrrx3 | 2026-02-11 20:49:04+00:00
The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering teams has to be less than 0.1%.

The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.

The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.

Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.
by ctoth | 2026-02-11 20:49:12+00:00
What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these!

If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right?

But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.

What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.

"The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible.

My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-11 20:49:15+00:00
I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed.

So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.
by rtpg | 2026-02-11 20:49:17+00:00
While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!

Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.

There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
by sandworm101 | 2026-02-11 20:49:20+00:00
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.

https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
by sksksk | 2026-02-11 20:49:20+00:00
That’s a bit of a strawman argument. Most journeys don’t consist of three children and all their sporting equipment.

As a practical example, in the UK, on average a young g child lives 1.7miles away from their school.

That is an easily walkable distance for most children, yet lots of parents choose to drive it because they feel the streets aren’t safe to walk on in rush hour.

If by redesigning streets to make active travel more appealing, you could reduce the number of cars on the school run by 10%; it would improve the traffic situation for the ones who still need to drive. Win-win
by Zancarius | 2026-02-11 20:49:32+00:00
I have to agree. Backing up my Tundra (8' bed) feels substantially safer since I can see immediately behind the vehicle than any pre-regulation vehicle I've driven. That doesn't even account for the convenience with lining up for towing, hauling, etc. (It's no replacement for GOAL—Get Out And Look—but it definitely helps!)
by seg_lol | 2026-02-11 20:50:00+00:00
Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it.

> The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.

They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.
by db48x | 2026-02-11 20:50:12+00:00
Be careful, that’s not what I said. In response to your statement that “a whole fucking lot of them did know exactly what was going on and partook”, I said only that you don’t have personal knowledge of the facts needed to prove your statement. You don’t know if Epstein provided girls for “a whole fucking lot” of people or just a few. You have no knowledge of how many “partook”. As there have been no convictions of anyone else, none of us do. All we have are allegations. Please confine yourself to statements of fact.
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-11 20:50:18+00:00
I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.

The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.

And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who can implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than keeping alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
by ljm | 2026-02-11 20:50:45+00:00
You're reading it though, and I imagine you are applying comprehension to it based on your experience. It's not vibe-coding any more at that point, I'd call it rapid application development. That's what Rails did in, what, 2010? Maybe earlier? Except it was generated scaffolding code created through reflection and not machine learning.

It's when you take yourself out of the loop and trust the process that it goes in the wrong direction.
by pibaker | 2026-02-11 20:51:24+00:00
If you buy ICs from a Chinese source, there is a good chance you will get something desoldered from e-waste. People don't like it unless they have no choice because there is less guarantee it actually works plus there is the ick factor.

Anything less valuable than an IC is probably not worth the labor required to recycle it.

On a side note, it is funny to see posters demanding that the company pay for the full recycling cost of their devices. We required the nuclear industry to do the same with nuclear waste and reactor decommission. The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical to built nuclear so we ended up burning more coal instead. Be careful with second order effects of your feel good solutions to complicated problems.
by HEmanZ | 2026-02-11 20:51:47+00:00
I think the only part of that statement I kind of agree with is the “large home” part.

It’s much easier to afford good schools, safe neighborhood, luxuries and travel in most of Western Europe than it is in the US. Because the first two are basically free, travel is cheap, so you have plenty left over for luxuries (unless you want like race cars or something)
by csours | 2026-02-11 20:51:49+00:00
Objection: facts not in evidence!

The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that

1. It has been incredibly brutal
2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president.
3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation.

These problems are very much worth drawing a line in the sand over.

---

Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.

Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.

If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
by pyottdes | 2026-02-11 20:51:54+00:00
Agreed. At the end of the day, manufactured parts are driven by constraints outside of the CAD environment so analyzing 3D data as the foundation of an AI system strikes me as attacking the problem from the wrong direction. i.e. Simple optimization of a part for injection molding can take it from requiring a bunch of side actions and collapsing cores to a simple 2 sided mold and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling. None of that is obvious from 3D data alone.

That said, I am excited for AI assisted CAD tools. Things like creating and applying global variables to an existing part, complex assembly analysis for part reduction or just making a starting base part can be incredibly tedious and are low hanging fruit for improving CAD workflows with AI imo.
by benwills | 2026-02-11 20:52:15+00:00
I have been attempting this exact sort of clustering solution for a few years now (on and off as a side project). Do you have source code available, or more detailed explanations/resources of how to approach this?

Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the years.
by jjav | 2026-02-11 20:52:21+00:00
> The difference between two-wheel and all-wheel drive is night and day, compared to the difference between winter and summer tires.

No, this is incorrect. Just try it.

Summer tires are hopeless in freezing temperatures (and are not rated by the manufacturer to be used in such cold), as they become rock hard. As much grip as plastic kids big wheel tires.

Ultimately, what you need the most, is grip. You could have an 8-wheel drive vehicle but if the tires have no grip it will just spin in place.

In the snow by far the biggest advantage comes from true snow tires (not M+S or all season) due to how much grip they'll provide.

A 4x4 is an additional advantage, of course. A 4x4 on snow tires will do better than a 2-wheel drive with snow tires. But a 2-wheel drive on snow tires is infinitely better than a 4x4 on summer tires because if there is no grip, there's no grip.

If you are driving on pure ice then yes, chains or better yet, studs, are the way to go. That is a very rare scenario.

> Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state.

No, these are state-wide Caltrans rules.
by quantified | 2026-02-11 20:52:24+00:00
If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.

Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.

Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
by bouchard | 2026-02-11 20:52:36+00:00
The approach could be helpful for searching though large 3D model libraries like GrabCAD for some visual placeholder part by just describing it.

The generality of the part descriptions made me chuckle.

> A bevel gear with a circular base and a series of angular, tapered teeth extending radially outward. The teeth are uniformly distributed around the circumference, allowing for meshing at an angle with another gear. The gear's face includes a set of holes, varying in size and symmetrically arranged around the central bore, likely for weight reduction or mounting purposes. The central opening likely acts as an axle or shaft attachment point. The design facilitates the transmission of rotational motion between intersecting shafts, typically at a 90-degree angle.
by delusional | 2026-02-11 20:52:36+00:00
This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to ingest the minute details of every single product they come into contact with.

Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day?

It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
by Havoc | 2026-02-11 20:52:43+00:00
>His tone was so different than previously in the last year that I listened to the video clip twice.

US bluff got called. A year back it looked like US held all the cards and could squeeze others without negative consequences. i.e. have cake and eat it too

Since then: China has not backed down, Europe is talking de-dollarization, BRICS is starting to find a new gear on separate financial system, merciless mocking across the board, zero progress on ukraine, fed wobbled, focus on gold as alternate to US fiat, nato wobbled, endless scandals, reputation for TACO, weak employment, tariff chaos, calls for withdrawal of gold from US's safekeeping, chatter about dumping US bonds, multiple major countries being quite explicit about telling trump to get fucked

Not at all surprised there is a more modest tone...none of this is going the "without negative consequences" way

>Mistral in Proton’s private chat

TIL
by buu700 | 2026-02-11 20:53:32+00:00
It's high-interest to me because open models are the ultimate backstop. If the SOTA hosted models all suddenly blow up or ban me, open models mitigate the consequence from "catastrophe" to "no more than six to nine months of regression". The idea that I could run a ~GPT-5-class model on my own hardware (given sufficient capex) or cloud hardware under my control is awesome.
by rimunroe | 2026-02-11 20:53:46+00:00
> Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

It's pretty clear he also used the recordings of the lectures themselves. Otherwise there'd be a much bigger difference between the lectures as presented in the books and the audio recordings[1] of him actually giving the lectures. Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them.

> Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

I don't doubt his notes would be, however they also used the audio recordings of and took notes during the lectures themselves for the books. I'm not sure how much they relied on Feynman's notes themselves though. It's been about 15 years since I last read and listened to them together, but I recall the experience of the combined activity being that the book was surprisingly close to being a transcript of what he said (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

This is why I thought it was impressive that the book didn't read like a transcript on its own. I rarely encountered professors who gave such well-structured lectures, but it seems like something Feynman could not only give prepared lectures in this way, but could do this off the cuff as well.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
by profsummergig | 2026-02-11 20:53:58+00:00
> During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (∼1.2 million to 11,700 years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly between −6°C and +2°C relative to the pre-industrial mean of ∼14°C

Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?

(If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
by aeneasmackenzie | 2026-02-11 20:54:03+00:00
They don’t exist as concepts. A rational number whose square is 2 is (convenient prose for) a formal symbol describing some object. It happens that it does not describe any object. I am claiming that many objects described after the explosion of mathematics while putting calculus on a firmer foundation to resolve infinitesimals do not exist.

List functions like that need to be handled carefully to ensure termination. Summations of infinite series deal are a better example, consider adding up a geometric series. You need to add “all” the terms to get the correct result.

Of course you don’t actually add all the terms, you use algebra to determine a value.
by ajross | 2026-02-11 20:54:23+00:00
> Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you

Here I was thinking the primary purpose was to see who's at the door and check if Doordash and packages have been delivered. We've also used them to "spy" on our cats to be sure they're using the litter box while on vacation, and even to "spy" on wildlife in our backyard.

Not everything needs to be a conspiracy. These devices are useful and practical and have value.

Also, lest it get lost in the chorus of voices telling us to throw these things out: the actual news here is that the device appears to have provided an actual evidentiary lead in the investigation of an actual (and horrifying) crime. That has value too, even if kidnappings are rare.
by zahlman | 2026-02-11 20:54:29+00:00
Original title: "Use of PyPI as a generic storage platform for binaries", but I felt that lacked context.

Looks like simonw found the thread before I decided to post it, though (https://discuss.python.org/t/use-of-pypi-as-a-generic-storag...). I'm inclined to agree with that take generally; it seems that the uv-driven model of "hard-link an executable into a virtual environment" (so it has a consistent relative path but an arbitrary prefix, and hard-linking from a cache avoids redundant copies) solves a lot of problems that Linux package managers have been struggling with. (I could even imagine an entire distribution patterned after this, although it would require some cooperation from packagers.)
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-11 20:54:38+00:00
And yet my kids standard of living is worse. Their optimism about their employment is worse. I never used to know people working multiple very menial part time jobs to survive other than people restarting their lives. When I was young people working second jobs were saving money for a vacation or using them to pay for a fancy car, not as part of their basic budget/means of earning an income.

"Ray Dalio says America is developing a ‘dependency’ on the top 1% of workers, while the bottom 60% are struggling and unproductive"

https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/ray-dalio-america-dependeny-t...

"Millions of Americans Are Becoming Economically Invisible "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374779

War is unproductive and a destructive use of resources but that doesn't change that it has historically be an outlet for unused labor. My point was that if we don't approach things intelligently/intentionally we can end up with crappy unwanted/unintentional outcomes.
by hinkley | 2026-02-11 20:55:13+00:00
Every rocker with a hit song with high notes has to change the song in order to still sing it in concert. Layla, Take on Me, Dream On, Don’t Stop Believin’, etc.

If you watch reaction videos from vocal coaches hearing singers for the first time, you will find that they get nervous about the ways singers are tackling parts of their songs, because there are ways to sing that you can do for twenty years, and ways that you can do it that are good for six. Less if you start doing full concerts instead of bar sets or opening act work.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-02-11 20:55:47+00:00
> I don't know what to do.

As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.

Good luck to those of you who did.

This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars