MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by da_chicken | 2026-02-04 02:46:56+00:00
No, it's not.

If vim were good enough, neovim wouldn't exist. If neovim were that much better, vim wouldn't still be as popular as it is. And if neither of them did anything worth picking up, then vi would still outrank them.

The conclusion is that they don't do the same things. They just both have the vi interface. But having a vi interface isn't particularly weird anymore. SublimeText and vscode have vi bindings. So does PyCharm/IntelliJ. So does Notepad++! Heck, so does nano! So who gets to claim those editors? Vscode is the most popular editor that supports a vi-like interface. Shouldn't that mean that vscode is the best of the "vi descendants"? Or does it mean that all these people were okay with the vi interface, but had a good reason not to make the choice they did for another editor?

Fundamentally, the issue is: Either choice matters, or popularity doesn't matter. You can't have it both ways.
by skissane | 2026-02-04 02:48:22+00:00
> First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records.

I don’t know what High Court case they are talking about-they didn’t give a citation just a vague recollection-they might be remembering wrong.

But the assumption in the Torrens system is the government database is correct. I can’t promise there are never rare exceptions, but if they exist at all, they are very much exceptional. By contrast, in the US system, a court is totally open to entertaining the argument the county title records are incorrect, in most states there is no presumption against such an argument. (Actually Australia still has the “US system” too-we call it “old title”-but old title is extremely rare. Anyone trying to sell an old title lot is going to convert it to Torrens before selling it. Very few buyers are willing to buy them, I doubt any bank would give you a mortgage. So in practice the only old title lots left are those which haven’t changed ownership in many decades.)

> Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction.

That’s not how it works. Overseas contracts, court judgements, etc - if you don’t lodge them with the land title registry, they don’t legally exist as far as land titles go.
by thadk | 2026-02-04 02:48:33+00:00
It was probably from the other day when roon realized that normal people have it slower than staff.

Then from that they realized they could just run API calls more like staff, fast, not at capacity.

Then they leave the billion other people's calls at remaining capacity.

https://thezvi.substack.com/i/185423735/choose-your-fighter

> Ohqay: Do you get faster speeds on your work account?

> roon: yea it’s super fast bc im sure we’re not running internal deployment at full load
by reilly3000 | 2026-02-04 02:48:43+00:00
I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible. The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap and DIY-able.

I think it’s all farce and technically unsound, but I also think that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It’s really got him ready to rally investors behind “spreading the light of consciousness to the universe”. Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his machine girlfriend)’s machinations.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-04 02:49:40+00:00
> What do you and them know that the countless extremely successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do not?

Did you read my comment?

"I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company."

I am literally referring to extremely successful engineers who have worked directly with Elon.

I'm going to need more than a puff piece on some random Elon stan's medium page to outweigh what I've heard from my friends.
by zen928 | 2026-02-04 02:49:42+00:00
Why? It seems pretty pointless to keep hot memory of the context of every app and tab you have open as to recall what process and tab and window ties to what thing you were doing at what time, when it's effectively all one related workflow inside your Integrated* Development Environment. Do you just keep a separate dedicated tab in your terminal for actions you would only do against a single directory?
by tbrownaw | 2026-02-04 02:49:45+00:00
I assume someone somewhere has a dataset for technology diffusion broken out by country or at least region? Like so[1], but as a table and not limited to just here.

Perhaps that sort of thing could be useful enough to justify the extra bytes?

[1] https://techliberation.com/2009/05/28/on-measuring-technolog...
by 404mm | 2026-02-04 02:49:57+00:00
$1200 is a lot, and it would be a straight dealbreaker to me as well. But I also noticed it draws 580W, which is a lot too.

Besides not wanting to waste the money, I doubt the lamp will last 5 years (not 5 years of projected use of XX minutes per day…). 580W converted to heat on a small disk will take its toll.
by benl | 2026-02-04 02:51:00+00:00
Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.

1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.

2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.

3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.

As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.
by garrjo | 2026-02-04 02:51:05+00:00
This is not an approximation, a surrogate model, or machine learning. It is analytic geometry evaluated exactly on every call. The same inputs always produce the same outputs — no stochastic noise, no training data, no convergence failures. And because analytic evaluation is O(N) instead of O(N³) or worse, what takes an HPC cluster hours takes GDBS milliseconds in your browser.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-04 02:52:39+00:00
There were a lot of reasons for keeping states as states when the US formed. Anything from fears of too much centralized power to being a compromise to get agreement from all of the states at the time. Secession wasn't one listed as a states right though, in either the original Articles of Confederation or in the Constitution.

Since then, the Supreme Court has consistently held it would effectively require a constitutional amendment defining secession for a state to be able to legally secede. So the realistic paths are still only "pretty much the whole country wants to dissolve and come up with something new instead" or "revolution".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States...
by marcosdumay | 2026-02-04 02:52:39+00:00
> the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter

What kinds of measurements are you referring to? Because poor countries are absurdly clearly converging since the end of WWII, but only if you don't ignore things like political independence, lack of civil wars, lack of state sponsored terror, or food security.

Those things contribute less to the GDP than fridges that break every 4 years.

Anyway, yes, there is some serious discussion on whether that process has stopped. This article isn't very good, the source it's extending from isn't trying to compare actual wealth, but still something may have happened recently.

And yes, it's probably the culprit everybody suspects, and economists should be louder in recognizing that some of their schools are in fact fraudulent.
by icedchai | 2026-02-04 02:53:03+00:00
To add further confusion, 57600 was actually a serial port speed, from the computer to the modem, which was higher than the maximum physical line (modem) speed. Many people ran higher serial port speeds to take advantage of compression (115200 was common.)

56000 BPS was the bitrate you could get out of a DS0 channel, which is the digital version of a normal phone line. A DS0 is actually 64000 BPS, but 1 bit out of 8 is "robbed" for overhead/signalling. An analog phone lined got sampled to 56000 BPS, but lines were very noisy, which was fine for voice, but not data.

7 bits per sample * 8000 samples per second = 56000, not 57600.
That was theoretical maximum bandwidth! The FCC also capped modems at 53K or something, so you couldn't even get 56000, not even on a good day.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 02:53:54+00:00
Yes, but also political stability and rule of law. It doesn’t have to be “rule of law” in the sense of liberal democracy. But it has to be reasonably fair and predictable for routine business issues. That’s one thing China has focused a lot on that doesn’t get mentioned much. Apart from politically charged topics or pillars of their industrial policy, you actually can get a relatively fair shake from Chinese courts these days.
Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?
by buchanae | 2026-02-04 02:54:09+00:00
I feel crazy to ask. Over my lifetime, I have seen endless bookmark and read-it-later apps come and go. I've done research today, and most of the things I come across are dead and gone, or seem abandoned somehow. I'm aware of Instapaper. I haven't tried it (yet).

Here are some thoughts on what might fit my personal taste:
- lightweight
- very cheap
- self-hosting might be nice, since I have a VPS currently
- I'd like to easily dump an open tab into a backlog, and get reminded about it later: maybe I go to the app, maybe I get a daily email of suggestions. If I don't feel like reading the page, I can "snooze" it or otherwise put it back in the backlog (or drop it)

I think that's all I really want. I don't need notes or AI summaries or multiple apps for multiple devices, etc.

I might just build it, but curious if anyone has something they love.

Thanks!
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-04 02:54:22+00:00
> Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?

Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".

> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?

I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.

Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.

> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.

That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.

Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.

It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
by data-ottawa | 2026-02-04 02:55:34+00:00
Good for France.

We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you.

It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse.

It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty.

(It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)
by woooooo | 2026-02-04 02:56:41+00:00
Agree wholeheartedly with the exception that Bush 1 alone out of all of them may have actually been a successful shadowy lever-pulling elite. Spends his early life running a tiny front company for the CIA then all of a sudden he's the director, and then a top member of the Republican party. All while maintaining this "aw shucks", dorky persona.
by GMoromisato | 2026-02-04 02:56:44+00:00
I don't think this comment should be flagged, not because I agree with it, but because:

a) Hiding it does not change minds. On the contrary, hiding it makes it seem like we fear the idea. And fear can give ideas power.

b) Hiding it only protects those who believe this. If it were visible, they might someday grow ashamed of it.
by mystraline | 2026-02-04 02:58:45+00:00
Sure. I'll bite.

The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.

They forgot.

They dont care.

They missed the registration deadline.

They're homeless, and no address.

They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.

They're in prison/jail.

The candidates suck, so you dont vote.

Can't afford to take time off work.

They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.

To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-04 02:59:00+00:00
You might not be aware of this, but you are in possession of a secret treasure that many MacOS users desperately want!

There is some input display on Macbook Pros, but that'd account for easily <100ms of the difference we're seeing (I'm holding `control` and measuring from depression of the arrow key).

I tried changing screen resolution, quitting apps like Rectangle, etc. No dice.

In digging more deeply than I had before, I did find some things which were rumored to speed it up. Disabling multi-color preview, and disabling "displays have separate spaces". (I am using only one display). This shaves off some time (taking about 950ms)! (!!!)

There is also a four-finger gesture which, if done fast enough, appears to speed things up. But it's difficult to reproduce and often "overshoots" to other spaces.

I have a few questions, if you'd oblige:

- Are you also using ProMotion (120hz)? (The biggest thing I can find to speed this up is switching to 60hz, but this does not quite get to 250ms).

- Are you also switching using ctrl+arrowkey(left/right)? (Ctrl+number is notably faster, but not what I'm looking for.)

- Were you using MacOS before this M1 Pro? (This is my first MacOS machine, I'm wondering if there might be some hidden configuration carried over from a previous install with faster transitions).
by GMoromisato | 2026-02-04 02:59:11+00:00
I wish I could reply to the original post, but I can't because it is flagged. But if I could reply, I would say the following:

This post is almost certainly wrong--as in, the existence of Big Foot is more likely.

Take an example like Haiti vs. Dominican Republic, two halves of one island. Haiti at #175 is near the bottom of the list in GDP per person, while DR is #71--above both China and Mexico. And consider that as recently as 1960, both had similar GDP per person.

And of course, there's the famous example of North Korea ($600 GDP per person) vs. South Korea ($50,000+ GDP per person).

If countries can diverge so radically, even though they share very similar land and peoples, it is much more likely that the differences between rich countries and poor countries is due entirely to external factors, like governance and history, and not the IQ of people.
by robcohen | 2026-02-04 02:59:52+00:00
Ah yes, the sybil attack.
This is why establishing an identity is useful, and worthwhile. An identity with no proof is likely not a real person, and therefore has little value in being advertised to.

If you're a real person, then yes, it is valuable to show you things.

Want to know how I'm right? Because fingerprinting browsers and tracking people is how we establish that they are real in the current advertising world. Advertisers pay for that. Thus it has value.
Show HN: WarpParse – Rust ETL engine 1.5–8x faster than Vector
by warpparse | 2026-02-04 02:59:53+00:00
Hey HN,
We’ve been working on WarpParse, an open-source (Apache 2.0) ETL engine built in Rust, and we’re excited to share it with you today.
We built it because we found that existing tools often struggled with resource efficiency or configuration complexity when handling massive log volumes. WarpParse aims to solve this with:
Performance: 1.5x to 8x higher throughput than Vector in our benchmarks.
Efficiency: Uses ~1/3 the CPU and ~37% of the memory of Vector under similar loads.
DSLs: We created WPL (Warp Parse Language) for strong-typed parsing and OML (Object Modeling Language) for declarative data enrichment with native SQL integration.
We’ve also built a visual editor (WpEditor) to make rule-writing less of a headache.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the architecture, the DSL approach, or any feedback you have after checking out the repo.
GitHub: https://github.com/wp-labs
Editor: https://editor.warpparse.ai
As a fledgling open-source project, we deeply recognize the power of the community. We hope WarpParse proves helpful to you!Thanks!
by no_wizard | 2026-02-04 03:00:39+00:00
This is one, at least technically. Though in practice I'm considering more like what you see in China, where they have very strict capital controls.

The Remittance tax has an enormous amount of exemption businesses (because no institution that is subject to the Bank Secrecy Act is subject to it, neither is cryptocurrency, which I find interesting) its functionally a tax on individuals that send money to their home countries, as once you work through all the exemptions its the only transfer function left.

While its deplorable, I thought something much more draconian was afoot
by tombert | 2026-02-04 03:00:47+00:00
I don't know anything about reverse engineering, but I have wanted to reverse engineer/decompile the Disney Animation Studio [1] for DOS for years.

I found the software at a thrift store in 2009, when I was eighteen, and I was immediately impressed. This was actually very intuitive, easy-to-use animation software that was very powerful, years before FutureSplash/Flash was released.

There's not a ton of info available on the internet now, but I have been trying to remedy that a bit [2] by uploading the manual. I reached out to Disney to ask if I could potentially buy and release the source code off of them, and they politely told me "no". I reached out to the creators in the credits on LinkedIn to see if there there was any way I could look at the code or if they could at least answer some questions, and they never got back to me.

I think the only way we're going to get the source code to The Animation Studio will be if I learn how to use Ghidra (or something similar) and decompile it myself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Studio

[2] https://archive.org/details/disney_beginner_guide_2/disney_b...
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-04 03:00:57+00:00
> ChatGPT cant do the precise photoshop tasks, not even close, infact the quality of output is worse than quality of input almost always. Ofc we live in this low quality internet now, so you may already be used to terribly edited images by AI.

Again, for 90% of use cases it will be good enough. For the 10% of use cases where it's not, yes, they'll still need to buy and learn Photoshop.

> No, all of these tools have 90+% revenue coming from B2B sales, consumers dont buy software products anyway.

I don't know the exact market breakdown of Photoshop, but I suspect it's not 90%+ B2B corporate. And my point was that even then, most corporate users are not going to need the entire Photoshop feature set, they're using it for one or two tasks that could be done better by a bespoke tool.

> All of the software purchases are tax deductible so corporations buy even if they use very little of it.

This is true now, but will change once procurement and accounting departments realise that LLMs can replace most of it.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 03:02:52+00:00
That's an interesting point about the bank statement. However you still need a second document IIUC. And to even open an account in the first place won't you need similar documentation? I've never tried opening one while in that position - I've always just brought my passport in with me while cursing KYC laws.

So assuming you already have a regular driver's license and a bank account this would make the requirement to fly 1. verify address with bank 2. figure out an additional piece of documentation 3. pay fee for "real" ID 4. wait a while.

How does that improve security? Why do I need any ID at all in the first place? If the concern is weapons or explosives then just search for those ... which they already do.

Another thought occurs to me. What if I grab a homeless person off the street and attempt to fly with him? So now there's an additional $45 "no ID" fee? That hardly seems reasonable. Will they even be able to verify much of anything in that scenario to begin with? (Granted that's an edge case but that doesn't mean it's okay to ignore it.)
by perfmode | 2026-02-04 03:03:23+00:00
Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability.

While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than solve near-term compute constraints.