MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bs7280 | 2026-02-04 00:21:56+00:00
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.

I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:

- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem

- stronger materials

- 3d computer chips

I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
by frozenlettuce | 2026-02-04 00:22:06+00:00
If you take your idea and add some web ui to manage the creation of apps and connect the pieces, I believe that there's great potential!

A couple years back I had a similar idea, but with a postgres+deno, and using .md files as the spec that generated the code https://github.com/lfarroco/verbo-lang

I think that in the future we might have specialized agents that operate under a specific opinionated tech stack. Like having one that is specialized in creating cli apps, another one for react+django+whatever, etc.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-04 00:22:16+00:00
If your software is only for you, keep it private. Period.

When you make it public, the public have the right to fix it and share their fixes with each other. They can do it on another repo, but they discovered the code through your repo, so the easiest way is by linking it to your repo. If you don't want to hear from people at all, just publish the source without giving anyone access to the repo, or send notifications to junk folder, or use a lockdown bot like in the other post, host it on your own server and publish it on your own site, the solutions for you are endless. For the public, which you've exposed your software to, not so much. and that's the problem.

You should understand that this line of thinking is exactly why everyone is trying to require developers to identify themselves, sign their code,etc... We're depending on software too much to be tolerant of willful sabotage and reckless endangerment (e.g.: security patches).
by jonjacky | 2026-02-04 00:22:25+00:00
It's not the number of actions, it's because the slide rule is analog and physical. The smaller numbers are to the left, the larger to the right, and you have to slide the rule to the first number, then the hairline cursor to the second number. There's no way you could mix up a large number like 987 with a small number like 187.
by breput | 2026-02-04 00:22:28+00:00
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.

[0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
by mr_toad | 2026-02-04 00:22:37+00:00
> It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down.

Delta V from just about anywhere in the solar system is lower than launching from the surface of Earth. You could launch stuff from Mars and bring it back to Earth orbit with less energy than launching it from Earth. The rocket equation is really punishing.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-04 00:22:56+00:00
> The adults in the room found a way to compromise and turn a zero sum game into a stag hunt and anyone repeating tired tropes like above is either extremely uninformed or a bot.

If there were adults in the room in 2023, trump doesn’t get elected.

The adults in the room bypassed a democratic primary. The adults in the room proffered up a candidate whose vote platform was solely based on “I’m not him!”

Adults cut from the same cloth made the same emotional decisions with this trade agreement: “we aren’t trading with trump!” Fuck yeah, now what?

The adults in the room lost the plot decades ago.
by antonymoose | 2026-02-04 00:23:00+00:00
I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-04 00:23:28+00:00
Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking.

It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/a4gnr3/makes_perf...

(Sorry for the reddit link, it's a common image but that was the first url I found from a quick search that had it up front and center).
by ventegus | 2026-02-04 00:23:28+00:00
There is a perception that the use of the archive by the HN community has some positive value for the archive.

But in fact:

1. HN uses a free service that someone else pays for.

2. HN abuses its paywall bypass function, which is not its main function, is not advertised (unlike 12ft).

3. HN creates legal problems for the archive by highlighting and framing the archive as a paywall-circumvention tool first.

4. HN promotes doxing.

Who would be more motivated in reducing traffic here?
by tootie | 2026-02-04 00:23:39+00:00
A dehumidifier is the same thing as an air conditioner. The coolant coils are still just exposed to the ambient air in the room. The same way a window air conditioner drips moisture, the dryer is like a backwards air conditioner that blows cold air into the room and hot air into the drum and condensed water drips down the drain. I suppose it ultimately doesn't matter once you open the dryer door and everything mixes together.
by Tostino | 2026-02-04 00:23:43+00:00
Uh, I'd say that something has in fact been lost in that every single printer sold watermarks every document printed regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.

There are plenty of people who change their behavior because that tracking is in place, regardless of if what they are doing (or would be doing) is in any way illegal.

Terrible example IMO.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-04 00:24:01+00:00
You can go one further and just mount a squirrel cage fan in place of or on the front or top of the wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanWing

Or go further and use rotating drums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_airplane

Or you can use a horizontal-axis style helicopter rotor with variable pitch, and it gets you omnidirectional thrust (VTOL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclogyro

There are a lot of interesting possible alternate histories (only requiring a few tweaks to physics) where fixed wings never really work and horizontal rotorcraft dominate, especially in a world where lighter-than-air craft are common - something like a hybrid between a zeppelin and a paddleboat.
by tyre | 2026-02-04 00:24:05+00:00
I’m well aware. (Probably any American who can name East Timor, let alone is aware of our participation in their genocide, is more likely than not to be familiar with our history.)

What you said doesn’t discount that we are better with free democracies, regardless of whether we see that through. Democracies tend to raise the per capita income across the population, which, in concert with free markets, gives our multinational corporations new markets to sell shit to.

Sometimes we have other more pressing concerns, like oil in Iran/Iraq (a democracy destroyed and created, respectively); global shipping / colonialism in our support of Israel in conflicts with Egypt over the Suez; abandoning our Kurdish allies to keep Turkey happy enough to keep military assets there.

Geopolitics doesn’t always do one thing or another, even if it were perfectly rational. And no foreign policy is that.
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-04 00:24:07+00:00
The 1200ms was an estimation, but it's definitely closer to 1200ms than it is for 250ms for me. There's definitely a difference in set up here- I'm on a Macbook Pro with an M1 Pro chip.

From a screen recording, I count 53 screen-recorded frames from the apparent start of the animation (which occurs after it's invoked) to desktop widgets becoming transparent (which appears to be the point input is no longer blocked). IINA says the video is 50.582 fps (very strange frame rate?) so that would be ~1050ms.

Of course, that doesn't include any input latency or the display latency, so I also took a video with my phone. I took two trials and I recorded a full 1.08 seconds from key depression to transparent widgets. I did two more with Reduce Motion on and got the exact same time.

I am very curious what your set up is, because I am invested in getting this as close to 8.3 ms as possible.

edit: For comparison, my Linux desktop with a similar experimental set up, this takes about 24ms from key depression to the next desktop becoming visible. The only experimental difference is that I had to switch to the "slow mo" camera to record the difference, and I have a 240hz monitor. The desktop is also considered one of the slower ones (GNOME).

TLDR: It takes 1.08 seconds, on my Macbook, to complete a desktop transition.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-04 00:24:41+00:00
You make a better case than the report does. I think what you say is valid; what I took issue with is the report specifically fixating on issues that everyone faces, and advocating for legislation that only solves the problem for a privileged class. If in addition to passing laws to protect everyone from data brokers, additional measures needed to be put in place to protect civil servants from abuse unique to the job, I am certainly not opposed to that. Unfortunately the report did not acknowledge that such problems exist, let alone propose solutions to that effect.
by hysan | 2026-02-04 00:25:15+00:00
I’ll be honest and say that while I agree, I’d be one of those who’d get significantly burned financially if this were to happen. Having made significant lifestyle cuts to eventually get our foot in the door and now dealing with one of us being laid off (100% due to the current administration), devaluing housing would essentially lock us into where we currently live for the rest of our lives and prevent us from moving to a lower cost of living area near retirement (which was part of our original financial planning). Combined with the fact that our generation is unlikely to see social security as a viable pillar of support (ex: retirement age requirements increasing), I want to support the idea but I have yet to see a solution that won’t burn the population of people like myself. To support this would be to offer ourselves up as sacrifices and that is something I don’t think I could ask of someone. If someone could crack that nut and have a “soft landing” for those who are going to get screwed, then I think there’s a fighting chance that we solve this before it all becomes untenable.

(Edit: To clarify, when I hear devaluing housing, I’m interpreting that as an enormous price decrease. The impact to us is that we wouldn’t be able to sell our house for anywhere near the cost we paid for it. We didn’t buy as it as an asset but we also didn’t plan for it to become a huge loss that could have instead gone into retirement savings.)
by simianwords | 2026-02-04 00:25:39+00:00
I meant that LLMs can be trusted to do searches and not hallucinate while doing it. You’ve taken that to mean it can comply with anything.

The thing is, LLMs are quite good at search and probably way way more strong that whatever RAG setup this company has. What failure mode are you looking at from a search perspective? Will ChatGPT just end up providing random links?
by jjcm | 2026-02-04 00:25:40+00:00
I did something similar, but a slightly different approach. I installed grow lights in my ceiling conches: amazon.com/dp/B07BRKT56T?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1

In my office I have 6 of these, for a total of around 13,000 lumens. It effectively 6x'd my light output for around $150. Worked wonders, especially in the PNW winter.
Show HN: Ec – a terminal Git conflict resolver inspired by IntelliJ
by neozz | 2026-02-04 00:25:42+00:00
Hi HN, I built ec because my friends who are new to development kept getting stuck on Git conflicts.

Most TUI merge tools felt hard to use or non-intuitive for them. The only flow they found easy was the IntelliJ (JetBrains) conflict resolver, so I recreated that experience in the terminal.

ec is a terminal-native, 3-pane conflict resolver with a focused, step-by-step flow.
If you try it and leave feedback, I would be really grateful. Thanks!

Repo: https://github.com/chojs23/ec
by tamimio | 2026-02-04 00:26:18+00:00
Year 2027: beep boop beep boop, scan your implanted rfid digital ID chip to authenticate:

- your social media consumption and any post you make

- your app installations

- registering a new account or keeping an already existing one

- driving your car

- 3D printing something

- watching a YouTube video

- buying anything online

- receive any gov support or healthcare

- any transaction including cash ones

And all of that is synced with your digital wallet (TM) for convenience, internet is not needed!!
I am so glad we are protecting the 16yo from accessing tiktok, or something something deportations if you are the other team!!
by rep_lodsb | 2026-02-04 00:26:42+00:00
RAMAC, not RAMDAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...

However it doesn't seem to be divided into sectors at all, more like each track is like a loop of magnetic tape. In that context it makes a bit more sense to use decimal units, measuring in bits per second like for serial comms.

Or maybe there were some extra characters used for ECC? 5 million / 100 / 100 = 500 characters per track, leaves 72 bits over for that purpose if the actual size was 512.

First floppy disks - also from IBM - had 128-byte sectors. IIRC, it was chosen because it was the smallest power of two that could store an 80-column line of text (made standard by IBM punched cards).

Disk controllers need to know how many bytes to read for each sector, and the easiest way to do this is by detecting overflow of an n-bit counter. Comparing with 80 or 100 would take more circuitry.
by avmich | 2026-02-04 00:26:43+00:00
> it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC

This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60 satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per year of today's Falcon 9...

The argument about problems of dissipating heat still stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically, out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on LEO.
by briHass | 2026-02-04 00:26:46+00:00
Check who used to own your place and who owns that lot now and see if any names line up.

I still receive occasional postcards from real estate mogul wannabes for a property out in Colorado (I'm in PA). The previous owners of our house moved to Colorado after they sold us their house, and I assume their name is linked to our address in some gray-market/online DB. Why they wouldn't just send purchase offers direct to the house in CO instead of what they think is the owner's primary address (ours) I don't know, but I'm sure they fire off thousands of these things and don't really care how many are accurate.
by bsder | 2026-02-04 00:26:49+00:00
I like humor, however, for the peanut gallery who might not get sarcasm:

Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.

More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.
by Fwirt | 2026-02-04 00:26:56+00:00
The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.

Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
by belorn | 2026-02-04 00:26:58+00:00
In Sweden there is a additional review board that go through the decision made by the inspector. The idea is to limit the power that a single inspector has. In practice however the review board tend to rubber stamp decisions, so incompetence/malice still happens.

There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-04 00:27:23+00:00
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...

Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...

The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
by pidge | 2026-02-04 00:28:22+00:00
> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system

A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.

Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.

> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.

So if you’re area constrained maybe.
by cs702 | 2026-02-04 00:28:22+00:00
> Who out there is working on ... infinite history?

Many people are still working on improving RNNs, mostly in academia. Examples off the top of my head:

* RWKV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16236 / https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13048

* Linear attention: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14456

* State space models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00752 / https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21060

* Linear RNNs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201

Industry OTOH has gone all-in on Transformers.
by narjo | 2026-02-04 00:28:47+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA, USA

Remote: Yes, hybrid/onsite preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, Typescript, React, Express, Nodejs, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker, Nginx

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xdf1ZstfspVewjXxyC__sybvHJB...

Email: nathanj.th@gmail.com

I'm a full stack software engineer with experience in the JavaScript ecosystem. Recently I built Vizier (https://vizier-platform.com), a platform for deploying full stack apps to AWS.
by jjcm | 2026-02-04 00:28:59+00:00
Relinking what I've already linked in a sibling comment, but I've just started having these die after 4 years of continuous use ~12hrs/day: amazon.com/dp/B07BRKT56T

Interestingly, 4 of the 6 that I had running all died in the same ~3mo period, but still I was pretty happy for 4 years of use for $25/ea.
by MagicMoonlight | 2026-02-04 00:29:19+00:00
The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.

The British army only has maybe 20,000 actual soldiers. You could manufacture enough robots to kill them all in a week. Then you’d just have a whole country.

It’ll completely change the game. There’s no point selling it to a state for their army, when you could just instantly make yourself the owner of the state.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-04 00:30:05+00:00
That skips an important part: the "deep" in "deep learning".

Attention already composes across layers.

After layer 1, you're not comparing raw tokens anymore. You're comparing tokens-informed-by-their-context. By layer 20, you're effectively comparing rich representations that encode phrases, relationships, and abstract patterns. The "higher-order" stuff emerges from depth. This is the whole point of deep networks, and attention.

TL;DR for rest of comment: people have tried shallow-and-wide instead of deep, it doesn't work in practice. (rest of comment fleshes out search/ChatGPT prompt terms to look into to understand more of the technical stuff here)

A shallow network can approximate any function (universal approximation theorem), but it may need exponentially more neurons. Deep networks represent the same functions with way fewer parameters. There's formal work on "depth separation",functions that deep nets compute efficiently, but shallow nets need exponential width to match.

Empirically, People have tried shallow-and-wide vs. deep-and-narrow many times, across many domains. Deep wins consistently for the same parameter budget. This is part of why "deep learning" took off, the depth is load-bearing.

For transformers specifically, stacking attention layers is crucial. A single attention layer, even with more heads or bigger dimensions, doesn't match what you get from depth. The representations genuinely get richer in ways that width alone can't replicate.