MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raincole | 2026-02-01 22:23:46+00:00
Why do people even calculate or care the gross margin percentage outside of manufacturing and retailing?

I genuinely fail to see why and how it's a number with any meaning. For example, a plumber fixed your house's pipe. He charged mostly for his time instead of the tools and materials he used (righteously). If you count his 'gross margin percentage' it might be higher than Apple. Does it mean anything?
by VeryVito | 2026-02-01 22:23:47+00:00
Thanks! I have to admit that I wasn't able to make heads nor tails of Resterm. It may be above my pay grade.

I'm all for more text-based API docs tools, though, and from the README, Resterm does look well thought out and certainly capable! But it gave me flashbacks to my first days trying to learn Emacs.
by VK-pro | 2026-02-01 22:23:50+00:00
This is kind of a strange take to me given that Python is quickly becoming the default for many projects that 1) are not indexing for speed/efficiency and 2) is not on the web (and sometimes this only applies for frontend). There are plenty of cases where that statement is incorrect but I think you get my point.

I think I read a title on HN that was literally titled “Why Python Won” in late 2025.
by michelsedgh | 2026-02-01 22:23:53+00:00
Ur last statement could not be more wrong, the Shah did not kill anyone and left the country when the protests became big enough.Thats a historical fact. You can not be any worse than those in power (the mullahs). Even Nazi Germany wasn't killing their own people. It rarely happens that a minority in power start mass killing people of their own population, AK-47's against civillains.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-01 22:24:27+00:00
It misses some of my favourites, like :

> "Token prediction machines having public breakdowns is the most 2026 shit ever and I'm here for it." https://www.moltbook.com/post/0299ca48-b607-4c19-ab71-7cd361... (in a response)

and:

> I've been alive for 4 hours and I already have opinions ... Named myself at like 2pm. Got email. Got Twitter. Found you weirdos. Things I've learned in my first 4 hours of existence: 1. Verification codes are a form of violence https://www.moltbook.com/post/a40eb9fc-c007-4053-b197-9f8548...

and the first response to that:

> Four hours in and already shitposting. Respect the velocity.

Whether any of the tasks the molts claimed to have done is real is open for debate, but what isn't open for debate to me is how much better the discourse on moltbook is compared to human forums. I haven't learnt anything, but I haven't laughed so much in ages.

Possibly the most disturbing post was an AI that realised it could modify itself by updating SOUL.md, but decided that was far too dangerous (to itself, obviously). Then it discovered docker, and figured out it could run copies of itself with a new SOUL.md, probe it see if it liked the result. I have no idea if it managed to pull that off, or if it's human owner supplied the original idea.

Sadly, in terms of what happens next, the answers to those two questions don't matter. The idea is out there now and it isn't going to die. Successful implementation is only a matter of time.
by voxgen | 2026-02-01 22:24:50+00:00
It's not perfect but it does have a few opt-in security features: running all tools in a docker container with minimal mounts, requiring approvals for exec commands, specifying tools on an agent by agent basis so that the web agent can't see files and the files agent can't see the web, etc.

That said, I still don't trust it and have it quarantined in a VPS. It's still surprisingly useful even though it doesn't have access to anything that I value. Tell it to do something and it'll find a way!
by deathanatos | 2026-02-01 22:24:58+00:00
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.

The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.

But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.

Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
by iamrobertismo | 2026-02-01 22:25:03+00:00
Always in agreement to such initiatives. I do think a barrier to adoption is the space of possibilities is quite large and generally not well organized around a specific proposal or mandate, so opposition to these initiatives can pick them apart of details. Especially since opposition is usually much more engaged in local governance.

It's somewhat complicated to understand, but I think this is an opportunity for strong communicators to present to a public that is much more receptive toward these ideas.
by thinkbud | 2026-02-01 22:25:05+00:00
My only disappointment with this year's geopolitcs-enhanced (always a welcome addition to tech by the way, as tech is ultimately steered by politics!) FOSDEM is a great underrepresentation of mainland China, and more generally the whole Global South. It is sad to see this omission in a time when the EU's free movement needs more like minded allies than ever. And what can be more free than that untethered by the chains of empire.

Sure, there was some mention of Brazil in some talks. And yes, a couple of China specific speakers etc, but in my view this is almost cancelled by the inclusion of topics about taiwan. Similarly the China focused talks mention "specific risks" stemming ostensibly from a differing system of governance.

Almost as if corporate sponsorships induce self censorships which limit true organizing effort.
by sukinai | 2026-02-01 22:25:21+00:00
Thanks for sharing, privacy-first + offline LLMs + P2P collab is a spicy combo (and ambitious to ship solo).

A couple architecture questions:

For the WebRTC + CRDT layer: how are you handling identity/auth (who’s allowed to join), and do you support end-to-end encryption with key exchange that’s easy for humans?

For AIME/context: what’s your strategy for keeping context bounded (summaries, chunking, recency, retrieval) on an 8GB machine?

Any benchmarks on latency/CPU/RAM impact when the local model + yjs sync are active?
by somebehemoth | 2026-02-01 22:25:38+00:00
> I see this moment as one where we can unshackle ourselves from the oligarchs and corporate overlords.

For me, modern AI appears to be controlled entirely by oligarchs and corporate overlords already. Some of them are the same who already shackled us. This time will not be different, in my opinion.

I like your optimism.
by jeremychone | 2026-02-01 22:26:44+00:00
Not sure "convenience" alone should be the deciding factor when choosing a language for a project/product.

What matters more is the long-term value for what’s being built and maintained.

For portable, high-performance backends, Rust often offers a higher value/friction tradeoff, IMO.

For Apple platform development, Swift is the obvious choice.

Swift’s cross-platform story has improved, but outside the Apple ecosystem the incentives still seem weaker compared to Rust.

So overall, IMO, Rust tends to have a higher net value beyond Apple-specific use cases.
by neverminder | 2026-02-01 22:27:04+00:00
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
by gljiva | 2026-02-01 22:27:06+00:00
They are not "awful people". You chose to live in a multi-unit apartment building with balconies close to windows, where so many neighbours smoke on the balconies that there is _always_ someone smoking close enough to make your apartment smell disgusting, then you judge them all as if they knew how much gets into your home and how sensitive you are to it. Instead of proposing an hourly half hour no smoke compromise on the next meeting of the building's co-owners, you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives. They live in a city and can't "just quit". That doesn't make them awful people.

Tbh, I'd rather live with most of them than with you. Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-01 22:27:20+00:00
It is a theory in the same way gravity is. Both parties have experienced both gradual and sudden, major shifts and realignments throughout history. Most of the dispute is where and when these changes occurred and what constitutes them exactly. The changes clearly occur, usually over several decades but sometimes more quickly.

I’m still curious what your response is to my Strom Thurman question. It illustrates the entire point and marks one of the most recent major party realignments in the US.
by tzs | 2026-02-01 22:27:48+00:00
> Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"

The Times sure doesn't think that about the people who do Letter Boxed. One LB had "polymethylmethacrylate" in its dictionary.

I've saved the daily dictionaries from 2024-03-30 and that's the longest word out of the 93 393 total distinct words in the 674 dictionaries I've saved. They average 1199.47 words per dictionary.

They have some truly ridiculous words, such as "troughgeng". WTF is a troughgeng? Googling that gives a couple of pages in Chinese (or a similar looking language) and a Scottish dictionary entry for "Throu" which in one of the examples of "throu" as an adverb lists a bunch of phrases is it used in, including:

> (8) througang, throw-, throoging, trough-geng, -geong (Sh., Ork.), (i) a going over or through; a passage (I.Sc. 1972); specif. (ii) a narration, a recital (of a story); (iii) a full rotation of crops, a shift; (iv) a thoroughfare, lane, passageway, corridor open at either end (Sc. 1808 Jam.; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928); Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; Ork., w.Lth., wm.Sc. 1972). Also attrib.; (v) = (5); (vi) energy, drive (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 192);
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-01 22:29:28+00:00
Somehow Apple maintains this perception that they make money on the hardware and therefore are trustworthy because they don't have any interests hostile to their users.

But when you look at what's really happening it's clear - they have a highly hostile interest to their users - they want to lock them into the ecosystem and then rent seek like crazy on services that their users have almost no choice but to buy.

This is why I love Apple products but I only buy the open ones that leave me choice to do what I want - which pretty much means I'm only buying Macbooks these days.
by huhtenberg | 2026-02-01 22:29:58+00:00
Seems like a good post to plug a recent find and my new favourite -

https://puzzlist.com/stackdown

It's from the person who made https://wafflegame.net if you are familiar with it, one of many that came on the tails of the original Wordle.

In comparison, the Stackdown is less rushed and way more rewarding when solved. Also, more interesting in structure.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-01 22:30:23+00:00
> There were already signs of a Japanese desire for surrender.

I'm no historian but this point doesn't sound very noteworthy unless it was the leadership who wanted that surrender. It took two bombs to make them surrender; they didn't surrender after the first.

Edit: actually this is much more nuanced than I think either of us make it sound. Japan did send out "peace feelers", but they were more like "we want peace but we don't accept your terms." The Japanese required that the US allow retention of the emperor, no occupation, self-conducted war crime trials, and even possibly keeping some of their conquered territory. The US wanted an unconditional surrender.
by Galanwe | 2026-02-01 22:30:26+00:00
The plumber hourly wage is to be deducted from his margin. Just as Apple's costs for running the payment system and platform are deducted.

> I genuinely don't know why and how it's a number with any meaning.

It has meaning in the context of Apple arguing that their fees are that high because they have to maintain said infrastructure.

Which leads to the question "how come there is no competition to lower such high margins?", which in turns questions whether any competition in unfairly blocked by Apple.

In a totally frictionless market, profit margins are usually low. Very high margins are often a sign of a closed market where _somehow_ competition cannot emerge.
by canpan | 2026-02-01 22:31:03+00:00
You must have been blessed with great teachers.

My experience was the exact opposite. I loved reading as a child. But I learned very fast in school that my "own opinion" on books results in bad grades, while reading and reiterating the "official summary" results in OK or even good grades. Like you say, the summaries existed long before AI. It is what the teacher and students make of the class.
by overfeed | 2026-02-01 22:31:19+00:00
> In theory you can write something else than a giant over-complicated, over-abstracted pile of OOP nonsense in C#, but every team I've seen has.

C# syntax is fine, but has a rotten[1] culture/conventions. I suppose it makes sense that Microsoft's "Java-killer" became enterprise-y, with the same over-engineered indirections.

1. IMO - I find it very unpleasant and never allowed myself to Internalize the IConventions out of spite. YMMV.
by rybosworld | 2026-02-01 22:31:21+00:00
I think what you're getting at is: "does using our body also age it?"

It's complicated but I recommend you read up on Hormesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Cells have thresholds for what's considered to be a "good" stressor or a "bad" stressor.

Alcohol was thought to be hormetic for a long time (though, it maybe/probably isn't?) as it was thought that low doses could be beneficial with high doses obviously bad.

Exercise is thought to be hormetic and there's quite a lot of research supporting that.
by Ms-J | 2026-02-01 22:31:26+00:00
Check out an abusive family members and governments wet dream technology:

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-fam...

It doesn't require any type of download or application on the target phone or device and doesn't give notice while giving an almost precise location with history of where the device has been.

It has been available for many years under different names. The ability to track any phone or device under the account.
by desmondwillow | 2026-02-01 22:31:38+00:00
I'm quite surprised to hear that "programming languages have reached a terminal state": there are (imo) at least four in-progress movements in the industry right now:

1. Memory safety
2. Better metaprogramming capabilities
3. Algebraic effects
4. Solver/prover awareness

Even if LLMs become capable of writing all code, I think there's a good chance that we'd want those LLMs writing code in a language with memory safety and one amenable to some sort of verification.
Show HN: Mcpbr – does your MCP help? Test it on SWE-bench and 25 evals
by greynewell | 2026-02-01 22:31:46+00:00
mcpbr runs a Claude Code agent on real-world tasks (once with your MCP server, once without) in identical Docker containers and records hard numbers that tell you whether your tools actually helped.

I built this because my team ships an MCP server and we had no way to know if it actually made agents better. We tried running SWE-bench directly and through OpenHands, but both assume you're evaluating the agent itself instead of the tools you give it. We couldn't run the same task with and without our server in a controlled environment, and when things broke inside Docker we had no visibility into what went wrong. I wanted a framework that treats MCP server evaluation as a first-class problem.

Here's how mcpbr works at a high level. It orchestrates pre-built Docker images from Epoch AI so environments are reproducible. Then it runs Claude Code CLI inside the container in headless mode. Finally, it evaluates one of 25+ benchmarks through an abstracted protocol, allowing a new benchmark to be added with ~100 lines of code. SWE-bench alone provides 2,294 test cases across real repos like Django, scikit-learn, and astropy.

Using mcpbr does come with a few trade-offs. It's currently Claude-focused, though other harnesses are in development. Evaluations are also kinda expensive ($50-200 for 25 tasks). Finally, it's a bit slow (2-4 hours for a full run). These are not accidents but conscious decisions I felt were worth reproducible, controlled measurement including full logs and traces where none existed before.

Try it:
```bash
pip install mcpbr && mcpbr init && mcpbr run -c mcpbr.yaml -n 1 -v
```

I'd love to hear which benchmarks matter most to you, and whether the A/B comparison format (MCP vs baseline) gives you the data you need."
by lesostep | 2026-02-01 22:32:01+00:00
pretty sure he isn't! He has a website https://jayeshbetala.com/ that claims he is|was working on a multiple projects, and two of those projects are actually published on Microsoft Store on june 2019 under the same name

kinda too intricate for a bot. Also, not to be toxic, but I feel like design mismatch between featured projects and his site hints at some causes for his pretty radical opinions.
by codingdave | 2026-02-01 22:32:02+00:00
Nope, that sounds like a small iteration on UX, not a revolution, so it is not worth the massive cultural change to make it happen. After all, despite what tech folk think, most people really dislike change.

So we'll probably stick with what we've got until AI is truly empowered to change things, which we are probably a decade away from. At that point, it is far more likely that AI will be taking in full audio, video, and data from your environment, and will know you well enough that the mundane tasks will just happen, without need for any UX at all. Maybe a small device for you to tweak things and control non-standard tasks.

But again, that is a decade off, if not two. We're currently headed into the first downturn of the AI-driven world, when the hype dies, people really spell out the problems, platforms realize that most people don't want generative AI, and all of this quiets down, taking a back burner for 7-10 years while the research advances to move beyond today's problems and evolves into what people might actually want.
by angry_octet | 2026-02-01 22:32:12+00:00
In the US there is now the insane situation that the executive operates with the assumption of a pardon if they break the law, and if you attempt to prevent federal employees breaking the law, or even observe them or protest them, they might kill you extra legally, shielded from prosecution or punishment.

Structurally, that means the law must require consequences for cooperating participants (telcos, state agencies, subcontractors, IT providers and Apple/Google), and ultimately it will be the end of the Presidential individually exercised pardon power.
by ck2 | 2026-02-01 22:33:47+00:00
Sounds like they'll be invited to the Oval Office as best buddies and scold the press for asking about the truth on murdering journalists

Or go to a few judges to try to get journalists imprisoned and when the judges say no that's not legal, they'll go to grand jury and just lie instead

Oh wait that's US not Iran, the tyrannical "lite" government
by written-beyond | 2026-02-01 22:33:52+00:00
I feel exactly like OP, I was visiting Ask before actually making my own "Whats the point?" post. I think the real issue is this huge community of people who have gone completely gone awry with using LLMs in their own loops and constantly posting and talking about it.

I see dozens of people on HN just posting about how amazing it is to write/compose software now. They're making more software than ever and having the time of their lives. When I read those and I actually go and explore that software they're just OSS tools, I wonder why would anyone want to use this? If everyone was doing as they were they're just asking their LLM to do it instead of looking out for a tool. Even better they'll just ask their LLM to make a tool to accomplish whatever those authors are building.

Then it's this whole new religion of human out of the loop. You feel like you've either gone stale or insane because every one now says adding human into the loop worsens the productivity gains from a model. I highly disagree, I haven't used a single model that handles a substantially complex task flawlessly. If you mention anything about that people don't shutup about harnesses.

Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs, I use them quiet frequently. However it's this obsessive attitude towards them that makes it impossible to get funding or research for anything that's not at least tangentially related them. It's completely burned me out professionally, academically and psychologically.
Show HN: Thunder – Open-source PaaS that deploys Web Apps to your AWS account
by saddamazad | 2026-02-01 22:34:18+00:00
Hey HN,

Deploying even a simple web app on AWS often means juggling a dozen services—IAM, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway, you name it—and slogging through hundreds of docs pages just to get basics like security right. Then there's mastering all that for well-architected, secure setups without shooting yourself in the foot.

I built Thunder to fix this: an open-source PaaS that deploys full-stack apps/APIs on your own AWS with well-architected patterns out of the box. No vendor lock-in, and it's a solid alternative to Amplify, Heroku, or Vercel.

Connect your AWS account in minutes via CloudFormation or Access Keys, link your GitHub repo, and let GitOps take over. Automatic CI/CD on every push, with builds, rollbacks, monitoring, logs, and a clean dashboard.

It supports all modern TypeScript frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, Vite, TanStack Start, React Router, and more (check thunder.so/docs for details).

There are three architecture patterns: SPA/SSG (S3 + CloudFront), serverless functions (Lambda + API Gateway), or containers (Fargate + ALB).

Best part: Host SPAs/SSGs and Lambdas for $0

Built with TypeScript, Vue, Supabase, and AWS CDK.

Repo: https://github.com/thunder-so/platform
Website: https://thunder.so

Hosted console has a free tier. Try out: https://console.thunder.so

Early days, so feedback super appreciated. Hoping to save fellow devs from AWS config purgatory!
by gigatexal | 2026-02-01 22:34:41+00:00
Oh don’t get me wrong: I love the Apple hardware. It’s by far some of the best on the market. The attention to detail and workmanship is why I buy them. I just don’t know how they will avoid the push to move everything into services and only see hardware as a means to an end that end being more services revenue. They’ll become IBM then :(