MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AngryData | 2026-02-11 20:55:59+00:00
If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit.

Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.
by timschmidt | 2026-02-11 20:56:02+00:00
> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash

Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.

Consumers are often presented the least expensive option with the worst outcomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
by kenjackson | 2026-02-11 20:56:16+00:00
Cameras do more than just that kind of security.

Our camera has been of great use. In fact has largely made us money. We had an incident where a fire truck damaged our car in the street with its hose. We thought a kid with a bat did the damage at first. The camera though showed the real culprit. When we told the fire department they denied it and said there were no firetrucks in the area. We sent the video footage and then they sent a city lawyer with a checkbook.
by nostrademons | 2026-02-11 20:56:49+00:00
The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans. Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead.

Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.

(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-11 20:56:50+00:00
> might need many years to become stable again

People really fail to grasp the significance of this part.

One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established.

With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives.

It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.

While the other side of climate change might an hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).

The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
by XorNot | 2026-02-11 20:56:51+00:00
The front camera is the best thing I added to my 2004 Prius. The hood on that car is very good for visibility, but with the birds eye cameras I can roll it up within centimeters of things in front of me (there's a slight risk that you can absolutely poke the nose under stuff but at that point it's quite obvious out the windshield too).
by mbesto | 2026-02-11 20:57:18+00:00
This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite.

> Find your most socially competent engineer,

These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.
by filoeleven | 2026-02-11 20:57:44+00:00
> 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.

Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.

They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
by Lerc | 2026-02-11 20:57:51+00:00
I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.

As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.
by andy_ppp | 2026-02-11 20:58:20+00:00
I think rich people have too much influence, I probably agree with Garry Tan on a lot but we need to get money out of politics. Let’s face it we’re all meant to get one vote but rich people spend money on this stuff so that they manipulate what and who can be voted for.

I do think that if this current system is the result of democracy + the internet we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy.
by Windchaser | 2026-02-11 20:58:31+00:00
To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are really GHG intense.

So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork.

https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
by mlinsey | 2026-02-11 20:58:38+00:00
Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use soft-skills to move the rest of the org focus on users more. I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of engineers in a more productive direction.

The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company, distribution advantages and traction of previous products will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF.

> Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month

This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt those changes, and making sure the original user insights make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product management.

But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into this role, but it may have been a mistake.
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-11 20:58:42+00:00
You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
by TheCondor | 2026-02-11 20:58:48+00:00
I have that sort of arrangement. I've been wondering though. What's the proper data access protocol? Like I want it available, easily, if the police need it and I'm not there but at the same time, I don't want anyone to just screw around with it because I've got directions and password printed on paper somewhere.

We did have some repeated night time visitors (long story, but it was some mistaken identity that took a while to sleuth out) it wasn't difficult to export data for the police but it wasn't something I'd just ask my wife or kids to do either. Scan the footage, find the timestamps, export the data then upload the data somewhere where they can get at it. It wasn't hard but it was chores and it took time with high emotions.

First off, it's not inexpensive. It's not a giant investment either but my cameras cost in the same range as the Nest cameras do and then there is a relatively powerful mini pc, and an accelerator for AI detection and then drives to store the data, PoE switch, network segmentation... I'm rocking home assistant and frigate and 8 8k cameras. Then the much more subtle part is I have a pretty good idea when I'd like the police to have all the data and when I don't want that. That's not so easy if I was abducted. Perhaps an off the shelf complete solution is better and has that sort of law enforcement access situation sorted out. This is sort of the 0.000001% kind of thing though. Over the years, I've replaced drives a couple times too, it's becomes a living and breathing system that needs support and love.
by sillywalk | 2026-02-11 21:00:12+00:00
This has been policy for years. I just can't make myself upgrade to Tahoe.

From [0]:

"Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26, and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18, and so on)."

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/depc4c80847...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/apple-clarifies-secu...
by ajross | 2026-02-11 21:00:24+00:00
I'd prefer to see more of them do so, personally. That said, to watch Tan wading into a local fistfight about school curriculum and housing zoning and whatnot in the age of ICE abduction, targetted political prosecution and wanton macroeconomic regulatory chaos seems... frustrating.

I mean, I kinda agree with him about most of the centrist stuff. But really, Gary? This is what you need to be spending your money and time on?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-02-11 21:00:44+00:00
> apart from growing forests and keeping them protected)

I’m in a loop. I must be.

How are people still basic at this? No. Forests are not “carbon capture” devices.

Plant a big forest and “protect” (which means thinning it, unless you are California) and in 100 years most trees have died, rotted, released their carbon.

There is so much wrong with the alarmism here, so much hand waving away of scale when it is inconvenient… that it’s like people are doing more damage than good when they jump up and down over this stuff.

It’s almost like if the jumping up and down and alarmism has a different purpose, a whole separate game removed from the issues at hand.
by davidw | 2026-02-11 21:00:47+00:00
And almost all of them have plenty of other benefits too:

Multifamily housing is generally cheaper in high land cost areas. It helps solve the housing shortage.

More bikes and transit and fewer cars means cleaner air and fewer traffic deaths.

Less fossil fuel usage in general means less pollution.

Cities that use land more efficiently tend to be more walkable, pleasant, and don't gobble up things like farmland or forests outside the city.
by svnt | 2026-02-11 21:00:55+00:00
They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes.

There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%.

Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can get itself out.
by Windchaser | 2026-02-11 21:00:59+00:00
> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"

Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen within a billion years.
by mekod | 2026-02-11 21:01:44+00:00
There was no login option in the app, and I was expecting spam. By toxic content, I mean meaningless and empty. There were at least 200 people from the Hacker News community, and hundreds more were sharing content. Even these people didn't try to leave a meaningful mark, which was unexpected. And regarding spam, I was very afraid of it and took serious precautions on the backend, but I still didn't see any spam other than attempts to spoof the algorithm (by spoofing the algorithm, I mean a post could rank higher based on its freshness, depending on how many clicks and shares it received).
by oliverchoy | 2026-02-11 21:01:59+00:00
Privacy-first tooling is still underexploited. Seeing you go all-in on local-first encryption is smart.

One question I'd love your take on: As you scale, what's the bigger opportunity—API monetization for other privacy tools, or enterprise licensing to compliance-heavy teams?

Asking because I help founders validate exactly this kind of positioning dilemma using 4 frontier models (GPT-5, Sonnet, Opus, Gemini). Each model debates the TAM, competitive positioning, and business model implications. Basically gives you articulated doubt before you bet wrong.

If you're at a feature or monetization crossroads, worth exploring. No pressure—just a resource if useful.

ELFA looks like exactly what the market needs.
by svnt | 2026-02-11 21:02:07+00:00
They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes.

There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%.

Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can get itself out.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-11 21:02:33+00:00
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.
by acdha | 2026-02-11 21:02:40+00:00
> The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split.

Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.

Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.

I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.
by ronsor | 2026-02-11 21:02:41+00:00
From one Twitter user:

> It's just a demo instance, but, these front ends are barely revealed to the public

This genuinely doesn't look any different from the control panels of commercial infostealers and RATs sold on Russian hacking forums. Those usually sell for between $200 and $20,000 depending on features and pricing model (one-time vs. ongoing subscription).

These spyware companies hype themselves up, but they're really not any different from Ivan's RAT-as-a-Service, besides having extra exploits to burn and wealthier customers.
by vaylian | 2026-02-11 21:02:46+00:00
Hank Green did a good short video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ

TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.

You need to start somewhere.
by gchamonlive | 2026-02-11 21:03:08+00:00
> My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point

Ah yes, understood. That makes total sense. In fact I was thinking about a practical system that could be used to bypass silent modes and do not disturb configs for such emergencies. Back when MSN was a thing you had a buzz button that would play an alarm, vibrate the chat window and steal the window focus. It was as amusing as it was annoying, but there are practical uses for this.
by anthonymu | 2026-02-11 21:03:35+00:00
Hey HN,
I've been working on ARIA Protocol — an open-source P2P network for distributed AI inference using 1-bit quantized models (ternary weights: -1, 0, +1). The key insight: multiplications become additions/subtractions, so any CPU can run LLMs efficiently without a GPU.
Real benchmarks (AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX, 8 threads):

0.7B model: 89.65 tokens/s — ~11 mJ/token
2.4B model: 36.94 tokens/s — ~27 mJ/token
8.0B model: 15.03 tokens/s — ~66 mJ/token
Memory: 10x reduction (2B model: 4.0 GB → 0.4 GB)

Based on Microsoft Research's BitNet b1.58 (arXiv:2402.17764) and bitnet.cpp. These are natively-trained 1-bit models, not post-training quantization — the quality gap is fundamentally different.
How it works:

Each node contributes CPU cycles to run real AI inference (Proof of Useful Work — every compute cycle produces actual output, zero wasted computation)
Models are sharded across nodes via pipeline parallelism (Node A: layers 0-7, Node B: 8-15, etc.)
Every inference is recorded on a lightweight provenance ledger (not a heavy PoW chain — just timestamped hashes for traceability)
Energy is tracked per-token (Proof of Sobriety) — 70-82% reduction vs GPU-based inference
Explicit consent contracts: you set CPU/RAM limits, time windows, and task types

What's built:

Python backend: 11 modules, 196 passing tests, OpenAI-compatible API
Desktop app (Tauri 2.0 / Electron): 1-click node setup, AI chat, model manager, energy dashboard — 12 languages
Auto-download from HuggingFace, P2P WebSocket mesh with TLS
Full threat model documented (Sybil, Eclipse, MITM mitigations)

Total cost of ownership (3 years, 10M tokens/day): $76 on existing CPU hardware vs $164K on cloud APIs. That's a 2,161x difference.
What's next: Testnet Alpha (v0.6.0) — Kademlia DHT, NAT traversal, Falcon3 1-bit models (1B to 10B from TII Abu Dhabi, which outperform Microsoft's original BitNet at 53.17% vs 51.54% avg accuracy), and public bootstrap nodes.
The bottleneck is memory bandwidth, not compute — 1-bit LUT kernels are memory-bound, which is why CPUs can compete. Optimal at 8 threads regardless of core count.
MIT licensed, fully reproducible benchmarks, no token/crypto component.
GitHub: https://github.com/spmfrance-cloud/aria-protocol
Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, energy methodology (CPU-time × TDP estimation, not direct measurement — transparency matters), or the P2P consensus design.
by mcilroy | 2026-02-11 21:03:39+00:00
a few weeks ago I wanted to see if Opus 4.5 could build and improve upon a real open source library from scratch.

so I specced out globlin, a drop-in replacement for glob v13. up to 7.5x faster than glob, and up to 3.2x faster than fast-glob. all powered by Rust.

I defined the architecture, the API surface, every edge case I could think of: broken symlinks, extglobs, Windows drive letters, cyclic directories, permission errors.

kept asking Opus to poke holes until there were none.

then I let it cook.

158 commits. 21,000 lines of code. 1,451 tests across 53 files. cross-platform CI. all green.

it wrote fuzz tests. property-based tests. UNC path tests. macOS sandbox tests. more thorough than most human-written test suites I've seen.

npm install globlin, drop it in, done.

fully open source and MIT licensed under the Cap umbrella.

I don't know how to feel. this is insane. it works.