MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-03 15:10:01+00:00
Similar point applies to being able to use a sextant for celestial navigation in bluewater sailing. GPS is great, until you lose power or your equipment malfunctions. Of course, you can have double or triple redundancy to make such cases vanishingly rare, but still — it’s nice to have a backup that relies on nothing outside your control.

Some of it is pure nostalgia, though, I’ll admit. It a way to honor how people solved similar problems in the past. In the 18th century a sextant plus accurate chronometer or lunar distance table was one of the pivotal technologies of the age; you could use it to pinpoint your location on the boundless ocean within a few miles. That demands respect, and it’s also just really cool it was possible in an era before electricity and radio.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-03 15:10:01+00:00
The observation about agents not using skills without being explicitly asked resonates. In practice, I've found success treating skills as explicit "workflows" rather than background context.

The pattern that works: skills that represent complete, self-contained sequences - "do X, then Y, then Z, then verify" - with clear trigger conditions. The agent recognizes these as distinct modes of operation rather than optional reference material.

What doesn't work: skills as general guidelines or "best practices" documents. These get lost in context or ignored entirely because the agent has no clear signal for when to apply them.

The mental model shift: think of skills less like documentation and more like subroutines you'd explicitly invoke. If you wouldn't write a function for it, it probably shouldn't be a skill.
by nunez | 2026-02-03 15:10:27+00:00
It's the same with Gemini for Google Workspace.

I asked it to create a slide deck for me, within Slides, based on a block of notes I wrote. It wouldn't do it. The chat assistant at gemini.google.com wouldn't do it either. They told me how to do it step by step though...which I knew how to do already. Useless.

I also tried the `AI()` Sheets function to fill a range in based on some other data in the sheet. It doesn't accept other ranges, even if you use the &CELL_REF& notation.
by xsznix | 2026-02-03 15:10:52+00:00
I used a slide rule for some of my high school physics tests in the 2010s, just for fun. I lost a few points from messing up order of magnitude calculations, but it was totally worth it. I've since collected a few more slide rules from estate sales in my neighborhood. I wish more people knew about them—they're such a neat and elegant part of engineering history, which is why I keep them around.

I have no use for them on a day-to-day basis, though. An abacus is more useful for things like counting board game points and adding up taxes.
by rcxdude | 2026-02-03 15:10:52+00:00
Electricity prices are set by the marginal producer, which in the UK a lot of the time means gas turbines which are expensive to run. Which mainly means that the renewables plants are making money hand over fist, creating a big push to create more. It's only once that percentage grows enough that the price pressure will go downwards in general. (currently the UK is roughly an even split between gas turbines, nuclear/biomass, and renewables). You can already take advantage of the low price of renewables in some cases, though, if you have a flexible tariff and electricity demand (like a water heater, a house battery, or charging an EV), by drawing when the gas turbines are not necessary to meet demand.
by bvogelzang | 2026-02-03 15:11:07+00:00
Pricing Details:

While in public preview, Bunny Database is free.

When idle, Bunny Database only incurs storage costs. One primary region is charged continuously, while read replicas only add storage costs when serving traffic (metered by the hour).

Reads - $0.30 per billion rows
Writes - $0.30 per million rows
Storage - $0.10 per GB per active region (monthly)
by tensility | 2026-02-03 15:11:20+00:00
It would have to be a very serious security bug. Even then, unless they've totally upended their software development workflows in the past couple of years, the Apple I knew extremely well from the inside couldn't turn around a software fix this quickly, from PR to OS release, even if its existence depended on it. There's simply too much bureaucracy and process around submitting anything, no matter how vital.
by eldaisfish | 2026-02-03 15:11:22+00:00
I am an electrical engineer based in Ontario, Canada. I'm very interested in the energy transition, especially the shift to electric vehicles, electric heat and the opportunities this creates in the electricity sector.

Looking for contract, part-time or volunteer work, specifically in renewable energy or smart grid consulting. I can also help write/review grant applications for Canadian federal/provincial support, but outside my areas of direct work.

Preferably smart grid technology, wind energy, solar PV, energy policy. Happy to chat about the long term revenue streams on the electricity grid, especially opportunities on the distribution system.

Location: Remote, prefer opportunities in US/Canada

Experience - Fifteen years total. Wind energy design background (Netherlands), Power systems degrees, experience working with the Canadian Federal government.

Remote: Yes, please. Willing to relocate: No.

Résumé/CV: On request. See linkedin: https://www.linkedin.co/in/eldrichrebello Email: eldrich [at] eldrichrebello.ca Scientific publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=a0oog-YAAAAJ
by throwpoaster | 2026-02-03 15:11:26+00:00
I will, I apologize, and I love the site.

I do try to contribute constructively but am annoyed at getting downvote-hammered by what I perceive as an echo chamber.

It is very possible that I lack the social skills to understand how what I am doing is inappropriate. I will read the guidelines.

Sorry, and thanks for your efforts.
by bikelang | 2026-02-03 15:11:28+00:00
I completely agree. I do everything I can to avoid leaded ammunition. I do not want lead touching the meat I harvest. It can be really tricky to find lead-free ammo of certain sizes. I mostly use waterfowl ammo for upland bird and rabbit - and it works fine. But even ordering ammo online it is quite hard to get .270 solid copper. And in a store? Forget about it
by M95D | 2026-02-03 15:11:39+00:00
I don't know how Linux driver updates FAT, but if it doesn't do it the way DOS did, then it's a bug that puts data at risk.

1) Allocate space in FAT#2, 2) Write data in file, 3) Allocate space in FAT#1, 4) Update directory entry (file size), 5) Update free space count.

Rename in FAT is an atomic operation. Overwrite old name with new name in the directory entry, which is just 1 sector write (or 2 if it has a long file name too).
by featurevoid | 2026-02-03 15:11:44+00:00
i built pseudocoder because i kept wanting to review diffs, accept or reject changes, and approve cli tool requests when i was away from my laptop. you can continue the same coding session via tmux on your phone without an account, any cloud servers involed, or a bunch of complicated setup. ios beta is live, android is submitted and waiting approval.

-would you use this or something similar? what would you need to trust it?
-what would you expect this to do on day one?
-what is the minimum you would need for it to fit into your workflow?

i would really appreciate any feedback! please dont hesitate to reach out with any questions
by ghtbircshotbe | 2026-02-03 15:11:45+00:00
This problem has already been solved. The legislature creates the laws, the executive executes the laws, and the judiciary interprets the laws. But now we're in a situation where the executive does whatever it wants including illegally shutting down congressionally created programs, the legislature lets it happen despite not having the votes to legally change the law, and the judiciary is also letting it happen when they aren't inventing new constitutional amendments. If you're asking how to prevent society from descending into authoritarianism, they've been trying to figure that out since Caesar at least.
by kaifahmad1 | 2026-02-03 15:12:07+00:00
Hi HN
We built Semantica after struggling to explain why GraphRAG systems produced certain answers and where facts came from in production.

The goal is to make semantics and provenance explicit and queryable, rather than hidden in prompts or embeddings.

It’s open source and used in real systems. Feedback and criticism are very welcome.
by verdverm | 2026-02-03 15:12:09+00:00
Wouldn't the thing to do to give them their own account id / email so we can use standard git blame tools?

Why do we need a plugin or new tools to accomplish this?

Don't know why this has been resubmitted and placed on the front of HN. (See 2day old peer comment) What's the feature of this post that warrants special treatment?
Show HN: Workflow – A Git-native, local-first DAG orchestrator in Go
by stackframe | 2026-02-03 15:12:19+00:00
I built workflow because I was tired of the "infrastructure tax" required to run simple task pipelines. Most orchestrators assume you want a distributed system with a web UI and a database server.

I wanted something simple and reliable, but with the features of a modern data orchestrator:

- Stateful: It uses a local SQLite DB to track every run and retry. If a task fails, you can fix it and resume.

- Deterministic: Strict topological ordering based on depends_on logic.

- Static: A single Go binary. Just drop it in your path.

- Git-Native: Workflows are defined in TOML, making them easy to version control and code-review.

It’s currently v0.1.0. I’m using it for local ETL and complex build scripts.

Repo: https://github.com/joelfokou/workflow

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the approach, especially regarding the decision to use SQLite for local state persistence.
by mvdwoord | 2026-02-03 15:13:04+00:00
I have some from my father, but even though he showed me how to use them a long time ago, I never actually used them. I do however encourage anyone with an interest to go to the Arithmeum in Bonn (Germany) if you have the chance. It houses an large collection of regular and specialized sliderules as well as other (mechanical) computational devices.

https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/en/arithmeum.html
by Shocka1 | 2026-02-03 15:13:13+00:00
Top quality comment here, and 100% agreed. The influencer/crypto bro mentality has dug its heels into the space and I don't think we are turning back anytime soon. We always had the get rich quick and Grant Cardone types, but now that you can create a web app in a few minutes we are overflowing with them.

How much AI and LLM technology has progressed but seems to have taken society as a whole two steps back is fascinating, sad, and scary at the same time. When I was a young engineer I thought Kaczynski was off his rocker when I read his manifesto, but the last decade or so I'm thinking he was onto something. Having said that, I have to add that I do not support any form of violence or terrorism.
by throw0101a | 2026-02-03 15:13:32+00:00
> I can't remember the name, but I read about a rust project a few months ago which claimed that even doas had too much feature creep.

Features are added because people cannot do X and want to, and so it is added.

I'm happy to have a spectrum of privilege-escalation utilities of varying capabilities, but just because one person does not need certain functionality (like talking to LDAP) does not mean I don't.
Show HN: WardGate, give AI agents API access without giving them credentials
by avoutic | 2026-02-03 15:13:40+00:00
WardGate is my project to solve the issue of having something nice as OpenClaw, but not having to share my precious credentials and all access that comes with that.

WardGate is a go binary, for which you can define endpoints that your AI Agent can use. It passes the request on as-is (as long as it's allowed), so the agent can just do its regular curl calls or use API libraries (but with a different endpoint URL).

And you can then limit the endpoint (e.g. Google Calendar), to just allow reading, but not deleting.

It has special adapters for SMTP and IMAP, so you can allow access to certain folders, or only send e-mail (via the official hooman's account) after said human's approval.

It's making my life with OpenClaw (and Claude, Codex, etc) much more bearable.

Open for contributions, additional API presets, suggestions, improvements, et al!
by Enginerrrd | 2026-02-03 15:13:47+00:00
I have one on my watch. It’s a citizen with a circular slide rule /E6B flight computer. I need my reading glasses to use it, but it’s fun.

It can reliably get me 2 sig figs, and a decent guess at a third. But… if I think about it for a minute, I can usually get that in my head anyway. Being able to setup a ratio is great though for unit conversions and things.

It’s also really good for answering that question when driving where you’re like, ok if I go 10mph faster how much sooner will I get there which is otherwise hard to do mentally.

Most of the benefit of using a slide rule in my experience comes not from using it, but from thinking LIKE you’re going to use a slide rule. You learn to freely use scientific notation with ease, and mental estimation to get the order of magnitude right.

And just my 2 cents, but circular slide rules are where it’s at.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-03 15:13:51+00:00
Yea If I remember correctly, its the backend which is case-sensitive.

Don't worry though. I am still thinking of fixing the case-sensitive issue.

I had gone to run some errands. Right now, how I am thinking of fixing it is via thinking of using algolia api or maybe by having a singular request to news.ycombinator.com itself while still being client side but I have to see if that's possible/what's easier.
by philipp-gayret | 2026-02-03 15:14:54+00:00
Better yet is a system which activates skills in certain situations. I use hooks for this with Claude, works great. The skill descriptions are "Do not activate unless instructed by guidance."

Example: A Python file is read or written, guidance is given back (once, with a long cooldown) to activate global and company-specific Python skills. Claude activates the skills and writes Python to our preference.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-03 15:15:06+00:00
Neither does a 3D scan like an iPhone. As far as facial recognition better because it has up to date pictures. This has been solved without up to date pictures for years. My phone can - on device recognize my son from the time he was 9 to today at 25. If my phone can do it on device, do you think this is a hard problem on a server farm?
by smithkl42 | 2026-02-03 15:15:19+00:00
It's all about managing context. The bitter lesson applies over the long haul - and yes, over the long haul, as context windows get larger or go away entirely with different architectures, this sort of thing won't be needed. But we've defined enough skills in the last month or two that if we were to put them all in CLAUDE.md, we wouldn't have any context left for coding. I can only imagine that this will be a temporary standard, but given the current state of the art, it's a helpful one.
by burnerRhodov2 | 2026-02-03 15:15:24+00:00
>Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...

Lets go through this one by one

[1]Robotaxi.
Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.

[2]
Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.

[3] Lunar Lander
Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.

[4]Space Datacenter
Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?

Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.
by loudmax | 2026-02-03 15:15:37+00:00
This paper indicates that we should probably be less fearful of Terminator style accidental or emergent AI-misalignment. At least, as far as the existing auto-regressive LLM architecture is concerned. We may want to revisit these concerns if and when other types of artificial general intelligent models are deployed.

The "mis-alignment" we do need to worry about is intentional. Naturally, the hyperscalers are deploying these models in order to benefit themselves. Ideally, customers will select models that are most grounded and accurate. In practice, there's a danger that people will select models that tell them what they want to hear, rather than what they should hear. We've seen this with journalism and social media.

The other danger is that absent a competitive marketplace for AI, a single corporation or a cartel will shape the narrative. The market valuations of some AI providers seem to be based on this assumption.
by kamranjon | 2026-02-03 15:15:51+00:00
I think it's driven from an understanding that being constantly connected is potentially unhealthy for ones mental health. Not saying that's 100% true but I think enough people feel it that they are looking for solutions in things like dumb phones, digital detox, purpose-built devices etc.

I understand your lament about people just being able to be bored, but I think this gets at something deeper, that when we aren't bored and do want to do something, we are often distracted because of the nature of smart phones.
by riskable | 2026-02-03 15:15:59+00:00
Supposedly the latest trend deciding what novels get accepted by literary agents isn't the total number of words in the book, it's the total number of words in each chapter. They're getting much more strict about wanting chapters that are 1250-1500 words.

The reason is audiobooks: Having shorter chapters is a better user experience and audiobooks are really hot (money makers) right now.

This is just an anecdote though. I'm not an expert (only wrote one novel and my chapters were like ~2,500-3,500 words).
by ghaff | 2026-02-03 15:16:22+00:00
Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it.

As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
by nerdponx | 2026-02-03 15:16:23+00:00
Which is precisely why I said originally that data centers in space have never been a thing and will never be a thing. Because the whole premise is "it's cold in space so that's great for data centers", but that fundamental premise is fundamentally wrong and based in a misunderstanding of the physics involved. There is no other redeeming argument for it, therefore it's not going to happen. Anyone trying to sell you on data centers in space is grifting.
by vidarh | 2026-02-03 15:16:50+00:00
The description "just" needs to be excruciatingly precise about when to use the skill, because the frontmatter is all the model will see in context.

But on the other hand, in Claude Code, at least, the skill "foo" is accessible as /foo, as the generalisation of the old commands/ directory, so I tend to favour being explicit that way.
by jtbayly | 2026-02-03 15:17:23+00:00
Agreed! A fix would be nice. But owning a tractor could get you sued. Going outside could get you sued. Being a good neighbor could get you sued. There's no reason to think that modifying your tractor makes you more likely to get sued. Let alone the dealership.

The very act of existing as a corporation with a lot of money is what makes you a lawsuit magnet. Nothing you can do will prevent that. Trying to prevent people from making modifications to their tractors they bought from you is just as likely to get you sued as not trying to stand in their way.
by wanderbyte | 2026-02-03 15:17:30+00:00
I’m an early-stage founder and recently came across something called the Founders Judges Pitch Awards while looking for feedback opportunities.

It looks fairly well put together (judges, criteria, external submission platform), but it’s clearly new, no prior years or winners yet. They also require short video submissions instead of a deck, which is different from what I’ve seen.

Before I spend time applying:

- How do you usually tell whether these kinds of awards or pitch competitions are legit vs. a waste of time?

- Are video-based applications a red flag, or just a different format?

- Have any of you found real value in similar programs, or do you mostly ignore them?
Show HN: Folion – Local-first Windows file search with a semantic RAG layer
by Ranuja01 | 2026-02-03 15:17:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a solo dev, and after a first push amongst some close friends, I’m finally sharing Folion (https://www.folionapp.com).

I built this because I struggle with what I call digital hoarding. My folders are full of files like final_v2_edit.docx and draft_2024_backup.pdf. Tools like Everything are great if I remember the filename, but I usually only remember the concept of what was inside.

The Tech & Privacy: Folion indexes your folders locally using a vector store on your machine. I’ve added a RAG-based search engine that operates locally and an LLM layer via AWS Bedrock so you can chat with your files. Your index and embeddings never leave your device; only the specific snippets retrieved for a query are sent to the LLM for response generation.

Quick 30-second trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94puRu4GMKg (Full 14-min demo on the website).

Being Realistic About Limitations: Since this is a solo project, I want to be upfront about what it is and isn't:

It’s a Precision Tool: For the best results, I recommend pointing it at specific project folders. While you can use the isolated file search on any number of files (with RAM considerations for huge folders), narrowing the scope for chatting significantly improves accuracy.

Context Limits: It pulls ~4k–6k tokens of context. It’s great for summarizing/comparing small to medium bits of information or finding specific facts, but it’s not (yet) for comparing fifty 100-page documents at once.

RAG & Context Boundaries: Folion uses a sophisticated hybrid search to pull relevant context, but because large files are processed in segments (chunks), the LLM can occasionally lose the relation between distant pages or sections. While the metadata always tracks the source file, the chat interface is best used as a high-speed assistant to point you to the right place or synthesize ideas, rather than a 100% autonomous replacement for a manual check of critical data.

The Windows "Unknown Publisher" Warning: Since Folion is new and I’m an unlisted publisher, you will likely see a SmartScreen warning. I’ve submitted the build to Microsoft for manual analysis, but until that clears, the warning is unfortunately here to stay.

For transparency, here is the VirusTotal scan (2 flags from ML engines Arctic Wolf/Trapmine, but Microsoft's own engine cleared it): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/eeaf41768daeca794b361b21...

Why the Subscription? Because I’m billed for LLM usage per token, I’ve gone with a monthly model ($7.99+) to keep the project sustainable. I’ve included a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) with enough tokens for ~20 chats so you can see if it fits your workflow first.

I’ll be here all day to answer questions. I'd love to hear your feedback!

- Ranuja / support@folionapp.com