MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw310822 | 2026-02-08 22:14:55+00:00
> This is circular, because you are assuming their world-model of biking can be expressed in language. It can't!

Ok. So I think I get it. For me, producing coherent discourse about things requires a world model, because you can't just make up coherent relationships between objects and actions long enough if you don't understand what their properties are and how they relate to each other.

You, on the other hand, claim that there are infinite firsthand sensory experiences (maybe we can call them qualia?) that fall in between the cracks of language and are rarely communicated (though we use for that a wealth of metaphors and synesthesia) and can only be understood by those who have experienced them firsthand.

I can agree with that if that's what you mean, but at the same time I'm not sure they constitute such a big part of our thought and communication. For example, we are discussing about reality in this thread and yet there are no necessary references to first hand experiences. Any time we talk about history, physics, space, maths, philosophy, we're basically juggling concepts in our heads with zero direct experience of them.
by patcon | 2026-02-08 22:15:16+00:00
I feel this is a bit too pessimistic. For example, people can make tutorials that auto-certify in vouch. Or others can write agent skills that share etiquette, which agents must demonstrate usage of before
PRs can be created.

Yes, there's room for deception, but this is mostly about superhuman skills and newcomer ignorance and a new eternal September that we'll surely figure out
by girvo | 2026-02-08 22:15:16+00:00
> Especially when you’re deep into the context window.

Though that is, at least to me, a bit of an anti-pattern for exactly that reason. I've found it far more successful to blow away the context and restart with a new prompt from the old context instead of having a very long running back-and-forward.

Its better than it was with the latest models, I can have them stick around longer, but it's still a useful pattern to use even with 4.6/5.3
by dedzycide | 2026-02-08 22:15:31+00:00
i believe he is talking about Twitter(X) and not x11. so a political stance from the x.com in the description. i love running x11 too, wayland is still not there yet sadly, still has a few quirks.

if not mistaken x11 is what mitchell is running rightn ow https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config/blob/0c42252d8951a...
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-08 22:15:59+00:00
You're not throwing away frames, though. You're blending the lines from the odd and even frames so that you get the full vertical resolution, with a certain amount of motion blur on moving vertical edges.

Analogue video is 25 frames per second, 50 fields per second. You could guess at what the "missing" lines in a field are, but that doesn't magically make it 50p video.
by nomel | 2026-02-08 22:16:01+00:00
> This just hit a building

Please be specific on what you mean by "just"? From the article:

> Amazon told CBS Texas that it’s investigating the cause of the crash that happened Wednesday afternoon.

Did it hit a bird? Did the wind blow something into it? Was it a 0.01% occurrence of some hardware failure? Who knows. Design flaw?

Extrapolating a few crashes within this new tech use case to a some fundamental flaw of drone flight isn't reasonable, at the moment.

I suppose a safe alternative would be pneumatic tubes dug to everyone's door. But, only things that are economically feasible can exist in the world. So, instead of perfection, we're left with the iteration and compromise that is engineering, regulations and enforcement to bound it, and insurance to catch the edge cases.

A large part of the FAA regulation around drones is one based on existing in reality, and it's lack of perfection, which is how much damage they can do (this is what limits the weight and speed).
by mitchellh | 2026-02-08 22:16:15+00:00
It's a text string, platform can be anything you want, then use the vouch CLI (or parse it yourself) to do whatever you want. We don't do identity mapping, because cross-forge projects are rare and maintaining that would centralize the system and its not what we're trying to do. The whole thing is explicitly decentralized with tiny, community specific networks that you build up.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-08 22:16:52+00:00
I do not think that growing is difficult, but extracting the oil from it in such a way that it will have a correct composition is likely to be impossible without complex chemical equipment.

For growing it would be difficult to obtain a good strain. The strains used by commercial producers were originally isolated from some mangrove forests or other such places on sea shores, but then they have passed through years of selection and/or gene manipulation. Even when a good strain would be available, a culture that is grown in less controlled conditions could be susceptible to being wiped out by a disease, I have no idea.

In any case, I think the difficulty is in the oil extraction, not in the culture. In industrial conditions the extraction could be made with supercritical carbon dioxide, for maximum cleanness of the extracted oil, but that would not be feasible at home. Using an organic solvent, like hexane, might be possible at home, but that would be dangerous and there is the risk of contamination of the edible oil with solvent residues.

Accurate chemical analysis of the oil would be needed, to determine the fatty acid profile and validate the extraction method.
by gigel82 | 2026-02-08 22:16:56+00:00
That is still signal that the email address is valid. I'd prefer something like the server immediately sending a SMTP 550 5.1.1 (unknown recipient error), for anything that's immediately recognized as spam (or marked as spam in the past by the user). That gives no signal at all and might even persuade some scammers to remove your email address from their list.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-08 22:17:58+00:00
Not really, no. Newer versions of standard can (and do, although rarely, I have give it to C standard committee) introduce incompatibilities with earlier versions of standard. E.g. at one point the standard explicitly allowed to #undef "bool", "true", and "false" (and to redefine them later) but IIRC this has been deprecated and removed.

In any case: blindly switching what is essentially a typedef-ed int into _Bool has no business working as expected, since _Bool is a rather quirky type.
by spockz | 2026-02-08 22:18:11+00:00
It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly.

Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.

On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.

Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.
by prmph | 2026-02-08 22:18:47+00:00
Sad story.

It is partly also due to all the guns and the shooting-obsessed culture, folks. The way people are quick to use guns is not normal. I was shocked by the recent ICE shootings.

And the fact the woman was of an ethnicity most associate with crime didn't help either, I daresay. The man probably had his biases confirmed and resorted to deadly violence without much tought.
by Fnoord | 2026-02-08 22:20:15+00:00
That is indeed a weakness of Web of Trust.

Thing is, this system isn't supposed to be perfect. It is supposed to be better, while worth the hassle.

I doubt I'll get vouched anywhere (tho IMO it depends on context), but I firmly believe humanity (including me) will benefit from this system. And if you aren't a bad actor with bad intentions, I believe you will, too.

Only side effect is genuine contributors who aren't popular / in the know need to put in a little bit more effort. But again, that is part of worth the hassle. I'll take it for granted.
by birdsongs | 2026-02-08 22:20:19+00:00
Not sure what you can find in your country but we have tinned mackerel (with tomato typically) in Norway. I can highly recommend.

It's not thaaat fishy, I didn't grow up eating it. After having it a few times it really grew on me.

Super cheap and an easy way to get it into my diet. I have 2-3 tins per week. I eat it for breakfast mashed on bread (our bread is like a hard cracker), sometimes with a bit of mustard, or butter spread first.
by timsneath | 2026-02-08 22:21:14+00:00
Swift goes further down the stack than you might at first imagine -- there's a lot of Swift written at Apple even in places where you might expect C.

The container CLI tool wraps the underlying Containerization framework, which in turn vends packages for things like EXT4 file system support -- all written in Swift. Here's one example as a jumping off point.
https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/main/Sources/...
by ethin | 2026-02-08 22:21:29+00:00
It's really ironic that this appeared on the front page when it did, because I've spent the last couple days replacing the ZQuake sound system with FMOD and Atmoky TrueSpatial for HRTF and such. This was my first time ever working on a code base from 1996-2000. And in pure C no less. C feels so foreign to me since I'm so used to writing in C++ and Zig and such. But it was still really fun!

And I mean it doesn't seem super impressive, but it's something. Lol
by dTal | 2026-02-08 22:21:34+00:00
I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying nukes, why should there be orders of magnitude between today and [insert scifi]?

No, the real question is, where the hell is this exponential increase coming from? I think anyone would agree that, along most obvious metrics, the difference between 1800 and 1945 is much more pronounced than between 1945 and 2020. Yet the first was a 4x increase, and the second, over 7x. And in a third the time, too.

I'd like to see it broken down by country. I'll bet a lot of the increase actually comes from very poor countries turning into rich ones. In the west, our at-home per-capita energy use has not changed much from 1945 - may even have declined for some demographics (1945 houses were poorly insulated). But China lifted some hundreds of millions of peasant farmers into a middle class existence. That's got to be a bigger factor than the fact that I own a laptop and my grandpa didn't.
by mook | 2026-02-08 22:21:45+00:00
Unfortunately only the first one (arborist) actually links to something that the workflow outputs (a created issue), so it's hard to see actual examples of what those things do. Some of the earlier comments said they output giant workflow files, but there weren't really any examples either.

Basically it feels like a long article that says "we have this new thing that does cool things", but never gives enough concrete details. It probably worked great for you, but it needs to communicate to random people off the street what the win is.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-08 22:21:55+00:00
The multimodality of most current popular models is quite limited (mostly text is used to improve capacity in vision tasks, but the reverse is not true, except in some special cases). I made this point below at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939091

Otherwise, I don't understand the way you are using "conscious" and "unconscious" here.

My main point about conscious reasoning is that when we introspect to try to understand our thinking, we tend to see e.g. linguistic, imagistic, tactile, and various sensory processes / representations. Some people focus only on the linguistic parts and downplay e.g. imagery ("wordcels vs. shape rotators meme"), but in either case, it is a common mistake to think the most important parts of thinking must always necessarily be (1) linguistic, (2) are clearly related to what appears during introspection.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-08 22:22:01+00:00
LLMs aren't modeling "humans modeling the world" - they're modeling patterns in data that reflect the world directly. When an LLM learns physics from textbooks, scientific papers, and code, it's learning the same compressed representations of reality that humans use, not a "model of a model."

Your argument would suggest that because you learned about quantum mechanics through language (textbooks, lectures), you only have access to "humans' modeling of humans' modeling of quantum mechanics" - an infinite regress that's clearly absurd.
by kingkongjaffa | 2026-02-08 22:23:39+00:00
I went looking for the latest line of apple computers after reading this thread and I noticed they force you into the higher CPU's in order to get the higher amounts of unified memory.

So not only are they content charging +$400 or +$600 for RAM which in itself ludicrously overpriced, they force you to upgrade +$1000-2000 on the top CPU's.

Its impossible to spec a macbook pro or a mac mini with a base CPU and a decent amount of RAM. Total scam since they know people want the RAM to use with local LLMs.

This was not always the case - When I specced out my macbook pro M1 16gb it was entirely possible to get 32 and 64gb without any tie-in to CPU upgrades.

I was ready to drop a few grand on a new macbook pro M5 or M4 pro with a decent amount of RAM but it's currently set up to be an insane price gouge.

To get 32GB of RAM it's an M5 chip price $1999.

To get 64GB of RAM you are forced to to grab the M4 max CPU, and it's $3,899 on apple right now. What a scam.
by arcologies1985 | 2026-02-08 22:24:08+00:00
I have worked at organizations where most engineering and many product decisions were made bottom-up, through written RFDs and ADRs, and horizontal conversations between lead, staff and principal engineers. The tradeoff is that it can take weeks, months or years to both agree or schedule work on larger projects, where other (especially small) organizations might take hours to weeks.
Tell HN: Apple Price Gouging
by kingkongjaffa | 2026-02-08 22:24:10+00:00
I went looking for the latest line of apple computers I noticed they force you into the higher CPU's in order to get the higher amounts of unified memory.

So not only are they content charging +$400 or +$600 for RAM which in itself ludicrously overpriced, they force you to upgrade +$1000-2000 on the top CPU's.

Its impossible to spec a macbook pro or a mac mini with a base CPU and a decent amount of RAM. Total scam since they know people want the RAM to use with local LLMs.

This was not always the case - When I specced out my macbook pro M1 16gb it was entirely possible to get 32 and 64gb without any tie-in to CPU upgrades.

I was ready to drop a few grand on a new macbook pro M5 or M4 pro with a decent amount of RAM but it's currently set up to be an insane price gouge.

To get 32GB of RAM it's an M5 chip price $1999.

To get 64GB of RAM you are forced to to grab the M4 max CPU, and it's $3,899 on apple right now. What a scam.
by greycol | 2026-02-08 22:24:26+00:00
This is like saying fish can survive around 21C so the lower temperature of 19.8C that is keeping it in a -4C freezer for 3.5 hours before searing it for 30 minutes at 200C is fine.

A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.

Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.

I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.
by Aeolun | 2026-02-08 22:25:01+00:00
I think on mobile it’s natural to walk to the guy and tap on him. Not helped by the fact that the screen shows ‘tap’ over the highlighted tile, which does nothing. You need to walk and position the guy under your cursor, then press ‘act’.

The position yourself, then long press on ‘act’ to build when you can’t see where to put the building anymore is pretty awkward too. I’d expect to click to build, position it, then press confirm or reject or something.
by tzs | 2026-02-08 22:26:24+00:00
What many people overlook is that, in Marvel terms, Epstein was not the kind of villain that Magneto or the Red Skull or Thanos are/were.

Epstein was the kind of villain that Wilson Fisk or Norman Osborn or Alexander Pierce are/were.

The former don't make any attempt to hide their evil.

The latter go to great effort to have public personas that do good.

Wilson Fisk for example was known to the public and most authorities as a philanthropic New York City businessman known for his major donations that the city and its institutions. Behind the scenes he was know as the Kingpin of Crime running a large organized crime, human trafficking, drug, and assassination operation. But only a few heroes (Daredevil and Spider-Man) and some officials knew or suspected.

To succeed in the latter kind of villainy it is essential that you cultivate relationships with a lot of respectable people who you make sure do not get involved in the evil side so you can keep the public persona's reputation clean.
by ethin | 2026-02-08 22:26:25+00:00
I've only played Quake I (and a modified version of it at that which had accessibility features). I did purchase quake II and III from Steam a few years ago, but it's much harder to play them because they have no accessibility to speak of (and I'm not entirely certain where to begin to try to replicate what was done with my version of Quake I). Quake in general has always been an insanely fun game for me, and I started playing it in like 2010. I still love playing it even now because it's got something to it that most other games I have just lack. Don't ask me to explain what it is because I can't really put it into words but...
by apitman | 2026-02-08 22:26:30+00:00
I think relatively few programs need to be large. Most complexity in software today comes from scale, which usually results in an inferior UX. Take Google drive for example. Very complicated to build a system like that, but most people would be better served by a WebDAV server hosted by a local company. You'd get way better latency and file transfer speeds, and the company could use off the shelf OSS, or write their own.
by magnumpowers | 2026-02-08 22:27:26+00:00
I've implemented Odoo Community for a few small orgs and it's solid for nonprofits if you have the technical resources to maintain it. The main gotchas are: it requires significant PostgreSQL knowledge for customizations, the upgrade path between major versions can be painful (especially with custom modules), and while the community edition is free, you'll likely need paid modules for advanced CRM features like email marketing automation.

Since you mentioned migration - the data import process is where most projects get stuck. Odoo's import tools are decent but you'll probably need custom Python scripts for complex data transformations from your current CRM.

One thing I learned while building automation tools is that many small nonprofits actually need something simpler than a full CRM - often they just need better task management and follow-up tracking from their existing email communications. I've been beta testing ungrind.ai which handles that specific piece (auto-creates tasks from emails/meetings), though it's designed more for individual consultants than organizations.

What's your current CRM and roughly how many contacts/complexity are you migrating? That would help determine if Odoo Community's data model limitations might be an issue.
by asdff | 2026-02-08 22:27:32+00:00
The only reason why the shirt is cheap is because we value your labor in the dollars an hour and the shirt maker's labor in the pennies.

Now what if you made that same $5 a week as the shirt maker. Is that $22 shirt still cheap? How many might you own? Now think of what shirt the $5 week shirt maker is wearing. It says Chicago Bulls on it and was given to them by a nonprofit. The nonprofit only had this shirt available because people like him make 1000 shirts a day to sell to westerners to wear for a few weeks collectively before they give it for free to goodwill.

Does this seem like a sustainable, scalable system of resource and labor distribution to you? Or is it based entirely on the fact that there exist some orphan crushing machine still in some corner of the world to make it seem cheap and frictionless for those of us in the global 1%?
by treelover | 2026-02-08 22:28:22+00:00
"The U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago.

The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened.

Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12].

Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking."

Yup, nothing unexpected here.
by bodge5000 | 2026-02-08 22:28:32+00:00
> Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.

> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.

> etc...

The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time
by bhadass | 2026-02-08 22:29:05+00:00
i agree w/ the the complexity analysis point, but that theoretical understanding actually translates to real world deployment decisions in both subfields. knowing an algorithm is O() tells you surprisingly little about whether itll actually outperform alternatives on real hardware with real cache hierarchies, branch predictors, and memory access patterns. same thing with ML (just with the very different nature of GPU hw), both subfields hve massive graveyards of "improvements" that looked great on paper (or in controlled environments) but never made it into production systems. arxiv is full of architecture tweaks showing SOTA on some benchmark and the same w/ novels data structures/algorithms that nobody ever uses at scale.