MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 112233 | 2026-02-05 16:58:10+00:00
By these criteria printing press was much more programmable than the loom. The Babbage's machine was not notable for being "symbolically programmable", it was a machine capable of universal computation. That is huge step beyond any complex programmable automata such as were made for clocks and music boxes.

The "It had no conditional logic or flow control. No stored symbolic instructions." you mention applies to the loom too. It copied what was poked into cards to different medium, not unlike Gutenberg's press did.

I'm obviously missing the big differentiator of Jacquard's loom, but so far I have not seen it clearly explained in the articles I've read.
Show HN: Relai – Share context between AI assistants, 100% local
by kpolevoy1 | 2026-02-05 16:58:21+00:00
Hey HN — I built this because I switch between Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity constantly and got tired of re-explaining context every time.

It's a Chrome extension that captures conversations and transfers them between platforms with one click. Everything stays in IndexedDB, no external servers.

Chrome Web Store if you want to try it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/relai/inkojohbljaag...

Known limitations: long conversations can lose formatting, and platform DOM changes will break extractors until I patch them. Built with vanilla JS, no frameworks, no build step.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
by apike | 2026-02-05 16:58:34+00:00
This is a great technique!

In this case, I had made an overlarge squashed merge that included both the Intercom integration (a suspiciously likely cause of slowness) and the feedback button that added the heart – so I needed to go deeper to figure out the true cause. (Noto Emoji was in the app from before, but wasn't triggered in the dashboard until we added an emoji there.)
by cubefox | 2026-02-05 16:59:29+00:00
That should be easy to test: test a 16 bit model on various benchmarks, once with fresh context and once with the context filled up with irrelevant tokens. Record the relative performance degradation, and then do the same for a quantized model. Compare whether the quantized model has a significant relatively larger performance drop from context rot. If so, numerical error should be the cause.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 16:59:34+00:00
On the software side... depending on your business model, you can factor in a lot of the cost structures into your structure. Especially for say B2B arrangements.

Cloud integrations, for example, allow you to simply use a different database instance altogether per customer, while you can share services that utilize a given db connection. But actually setting up and managing that type of database infrastructure yourself may be much more resource intensive from a head count perspective.

I mention this, because having completely separate databases is an abstraction that cloud operations have already solved... while you can choose other options, such as more complex data models to otherwise isolate or share resources how does this complexity affect your services down-stream and the overall data complexities across one or all clients.

Harder still, if your data/service is centered around b2b clients of yours that have direct consumer interactions... then what if the industry is health or finance where there are even more legal concerns. Figuring a minimal (off the top) cost of each client of yours and scaling to the number of users under them isn't too hard to consider if you're using a mix of cloud services in concert with your own systems/services.

So yeah.. there's definitely considerations in either direction.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-05 16:59:44+00:00
> Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Apple doesn't take proven ones of anything. What they do is arrive at something proven from first principles. Everyone else did it faster because they borrowed, but Apple did it from scratch, with all the detail-oriented UX niceties that entails.

This was more prevalent when Jobs was still around. Apple still has some of that philosophy at its core, but it's been eroding over time (for example with "AI" and now Liquid Ass). They still do their own QA, though, and so on. They're not copying the market, they have their own.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-05 17:00:01+00:00
Help me here

Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app?

There’s are EU companies that make teams alternatives:

https://euroalternative.eu/alternatives/microsoft-teams

Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor
by oaba_omar | 2026-02-05 17:00:07+00:00
Hi HN :)
I’m Omar, the maker.

This came from repeatedly wanting to give feedback on projects I found interesting, but not knowing where or how the maker wanted feedback submitted.

I’d love to hear:

whether this is a real problem or just a personal preference

cases where this would feel redundant

or what you currently expect to find when you click “feedback” on an early product

Happy to answer questions or clarify design choices.
by jfengel | 2026-02-05 17:00:25+00:00
I think they don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a lot wrong with AI, but it doesn't seem to be completely without value.

As is typical of Democrats, they're trying to balance multiple interest groups (authors, artists, programmers, users, tech vendors, international markets, etc), arriving at a complex, multifaceted, reasonable position that everybody hates.
by robhawkes | 2026-02-05 17:00:43+00:00
Tech stack is a mix of things, but the big-ticket items:

- Dagster for data pipeline

- Parquet files for data format

- Cloudflare R2 for data storage

- DuckDB for data processing

- NodeJS for API

- NextJS + React for the app

- MapLibre for the base map functionality

- Deck.gl for the complex map layer (eg. wind particles)

- WeatherLayers (+ GFS) for the wind particles

- Cloudflare as a caching layer

The main difficulty was learning about the underlying data and industry nuances. I've been working on this map the past few years and I'm still learning new things that force me to change my approach. It's an incredibly complex domain and it's part of the reason I made this, to try and make this complex data a bit more digestible.
by kmaitreys | 2026-02-05 17:01:16+00:00
I see this retort pasted everywhere. What exactly are you referring to? I think it's fair to assume any competent person never spends their brain in what may be considered as rote in the first place. If one was doing that, well it's unfortunate.

I just keep coming to the conclusion about devs who use agents or other AI tooling extensively: these are programmers who did not like to program.
by raphaelmolly8 | 2026-02-05 17:02:25+00:00
The 4k LOC claim is interesting but I think the real insight is about what you remove rather than what you keep. Looking at the codebase, they've essentially bet that LLMs with 100k+ context windows make most RAG pipelines redundant - just give the agent grep/rg and let it iterate.

What's clever is treating memory as filesystem ops rather than vector stores. For codebases this works great since code has natural structure (imports, function calls) that grep understands. The question is whether this scales to truly unstructured knowledge where semantic similarity matters.

Would love to see benchmarks comparing retrieval accuracy vs a proper embedding pipeline on something like personal notes or research papers.
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 17:02:33+00:00
The degree is whatever you want to deal with. I had a rack at my last house (need to redesign the space for it at new house) with 3x Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster, running K8s, serving Ceph from NVMe drives over Infiniband (for the mesh traffic), and 2x Supermicros running independent ZFS pools.

It was fun to build - especially Infiniband - but my next iteration is going to be a single beefy server, maybe with storage attached externally. What I had had outstanding uptime, but ultimately it was massively overkill, noisy, hot, and sucked power down.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 17:02:35+00:00
And if each of your clients is in the Healthcare industry and dealing with end-user medical data? Or financial data? Are you prepared for appropriate data isolation/sharding and controls? Do you have a strategy for scaling database operations per client or across all clients?

It really depends on the business model as to how well you might support your own infrastructure vs. relying on a new backend instance per client in a cloud infrastructure that has already solved many of the issues at play.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-05 17:03:24+00:00
If you place the coil asymmetrically you are getting into the 'end effect' of the ferrite rod, so some of the magnetic field lines will escape and that will marginally reduce your inductance. It's as if you cut off a few windings from your coil. So the coil exactly in the middle has maximum inductance, moving it off to the side will reduce it very slowly until you hit the end, after that it falls off a cliff.

hth.
by oasisbob | 2026-02-05 17:03:58+00:00
I don't agree. I have two theories about these overused patterns, because they're way over represented

One, they're rhetorical devices popular in oral speech, and are being picked up from transcripts and commercial sources eg, television ads or political talking head shows.

Two, they're popular with reviewers while models are going through post training. Either because they help paper over logical gaps, or provide a stylistic gloss which feels professional in small doses.

There is no way these patterns are in normal written English in the training corpus in the same proportion as they're being output.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-05 17:04:00+00:00
Yeah I think we're actually agreeing more than it seems. I'm not arguing for shipping without review - more that the review itself is where things fall through.

In practice, that "single review at the end" is often a 500-line diff that someone skims at 5pm. The sandbox did its job, the code runs, tests pass. But the reviewer misses that the auth middleware doesn't actually check token expiry, or that there's a path traversal buried in a file upload handler. Not because they're bad at reviewing - because AI-generated code has different failure modes than human-written code and we're not trained to spot them yet.

Scanning tools don't replace review, they're more like a checklist that runs before the human even looks at it. Catches the stuff humans consistently miss so the reviewer can focus on logic and architecture instead of hunting for missing input validation.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-05 17:04:18+00:00
Sure, in theory. But "assumed good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Most people picking a local fallback model are optimizing for cost and latency, not carefully evaluating its security alignment characteristics. They grab whatever fits in VRAM and call it a day.

Not saying that's wrong, just that it's a gap worth being aware of.
by giuliomagnifico | 2026-02-05 17:04:21+00:00
>Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as major broadcasters, will be obliged to reinvest at least 8% of the annual revenue they earn in Germany back into the local industry.

>However, the measures state that if the streamers and broadcasters opt to invest 12% or more, they will be exempt from complex regulations obliging them to, for example, produce films in the German language.
by spacebanana7 | 2026-02-05 17:04:28+00:00
It’s not really about the numbers though.

Even spending 10k recurring can be easier administratively that spending 10k on a one time purchase that depreciates over a 3 year cycle in some organisations because you don’t have to go into meetings to debate whether it’s actually a 2 or 4 year depreciation or discuss opportunity costs of locking up capital for 3 years etc.

Getting things done is mostly a matter of getting through bureaucracy. Projects fail because of getting stuck in approvals far more often than they fail because of going overbudget.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2026-02-05 17:04:47+00:00
Isn't the point that this is the source of truth?

If someone needs access to a secret, you would implement it in this DSL and commit that to the system. A side effect would run on that which would grant access to that secret. When you want to revoke access, you commit a change removing that permission and the side effect runs to revoke it.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-05 17:04:48+00:00
That's a fair point - you're talking about data security (not sending code to third parties) and I was talking about output quality security (what the model generates). Two different dimensions of "secure" and honestly both matter.

For side projects I'd probably agree with you. For anything touching production with customer data, I want both - local execution AND a model that won't silently produce insecure patterns.
by csours | 2026-02-05 17:04:49+00:00
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845650

---

Pertinent quote from this article:

Everyone seems to be interpreting this paper as follows:

Aha! We thought the heritability of lifespan was 23-35%. But it turns out that it’s around 50%. Now we know!

I understand this. Clearly, when the editors at Science chose the title for this paper, their goal was to lead you to that conclusion. But this is not what the paper says. What it says is this:

We built a mathematical model of alternate universe in which nobody died from accidents, murder, drug overdoses, or infectious disease. In that model, heritability was about 50%.
by reedlaw | 2026-02-05 17:04:57+00:00
I've already tried to do what the article claims to be doing: handing-off the context of the current session to another model. I tried various combinations of hooks, prompts and workarounds, but nothing worked like the first screenshot in the article implies ("You've hit your limit [...] Use an open source local LLM"). The best I could come up with is to watch for the warning of high usage and then ask Claude to create a HANDOFF.md with the current context. Then I could load that into another model. Anyone have any better solutions?
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-05 17:05:10+00:00
Hmm that's actually a good reframe. You're right that awareness is way up - nobody was talking about supply chain attacks 15 years ago and now it's a whole discipline.

I think what I was getting at is more that the volume of unreviewed code is increasing faster than our ability to review it. We're more aware of the risks, but we're also running `npm install` on packages with 200 transitive dependencies and now asking AI to write whole features. The awareness went up but so did the attack surface, and I'm not sure the first is keeping pace with the second.
by possiblelion | 2026-02-05 17:05:30+00:00
Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with Safaricom's Daraja API.

If you've ever tried to accept M-Pesa payments in East Africa, you know the pain: XML callbacks, rotating OAuth tokens, undocumented error codes, etc.

M-Pesa processes over $300B annually. It's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours.

Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-05 17:05:30+00:00
The Thompson paper is a great reference, thanks. And yeah, Notepad++ with file system access is a perfect example of why sandboxing alone doesn't save you - users would just grant the permissions anyway because that's what the tool needs to do its job.

I think the AI coding angle adds a new wrinkle to Thompson's original point though. With compiled binaries you at least had a known author and a signed release. With AI-generated code, you're trusting a model that produces different output each time, and the "author" is a weighted average of everyone's code it trained on. The trust chain gets weirder.
by scblock | 2026-02-05 17:05:48+00:00
I use Collabora online all the time (via Nextcloud) but I don't quite understand why I'd use this over LibreOffice on the desktop, which feels significantly more powerful than the online tool.

The few screenshots they show make this look similar to the existing online tool, which is fine for a lot of work, but like Word Online hits a wall with more complex documents.
by apike | 2026-02-05 17:06:31+00:00
How well agents can do this is mostly proportional to how well they can understand and navigate your codebase broadly. There are various contributing factors to this, but they include clear docs, notes and refactors that clear up parts the agent commonly gets confused by, choosing boring technology (your dependencies are well understood) and access to command-line tools that let it lint + typecheck + test the code. A lot of the scaffolding and wiring necessary are built into Cursor and Claude Code themselves now. Hope that helps!
by adamcharnock | 2026-02-05 17:06:49+00:00
Hello! I think this is a fair question, and improving the communication on the website is something that is steadily climbing up our priority list.

We're not really that kind of product company; we're more of a services company. What we do is deploy Kubernetes clusters onto bare metal servers. That's the core technical offering. However, everything beyond that is somewhat per-client. Some clients need a lot of compute. Some clients need a custom object storage cluster. Some clients need a lot of high-speed internal networking. Which is why we prefer to have a call to figure out specifically what your needs are. But I can also see how this isn't necessarily satisfying if you're used to just grabbing the API docs and having a look around.

What we will do is take your company's software stack and migrate it off AWS/Azure/Google and deploy it onto our new infrastructure. We will then become (or work with) your DevOps team to supporting you. This can be anything from containerising workloads to diagnosing performance issues to deploying a new multi-region Postgres cluster. Whatever you need done on your hardware that we feel we can reasonably support. We are the ones on-call should NATS fall over at 4am.

Your team also has full access to the Kubernetes cluster to deploy to as you wish.

I think the pricing page is the most concrete thing on our website, and it is entirely accurate. If you were to phone us and say, "I want that exact hardware," we would do it for you. But the real value we also offer is in the DevOps support we provide, actually doing the migration up-front (at our own cost), and being there working with your team every week.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 17:06:52+00:00
I'm not disagreeing... but it depends on how you shift the complexity/work and how you lean into or don't lean into the services a given cloud provider offer or not.

Just database management is a pretty specialized skill, separate from development or optimizing the structures of said data... For a lot of SaaS providers, if you aren't at a point where you can afford a dedicated DBA/Ops staff just for data, that's one reason you might lean into cloud operations or hybrid ops just for dbms management, security and backups. This is a low hanging fruit in terms of cloud offerings evem... but can shift a lot of burden in terms of operational overhead.

Again, depending on your business and data models.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-05 17:06:59+00:00
On the extreme end, simply decode the image and reencode it using an encoder that you have vetted to not include any metadata.

But I agree, presumably the image data part of the file is well and exhaustively defined. I would be very interested in counterexamples that have practical consequences.

Note that there will still be concerns about stenography and fingerprinting which would warrant such a disclaimer from the creator of a tool aimed at a nontechnical audience.
by jfengel | 2026-02-05 17:08:04+00:00
The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.

That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.

But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.

It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
by 2b3a51 | 2026-02-05 17:08:21+00:00
Is your team looking at the cloud version or a local install?

If latter would suggest checking current version of LibreOffice (which is Collabra Office Classic) as a local (i.e. on client computer) install. If former, then I'd imagine you will have to fill the form in to get access.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901100
Another commenter has summarised the differences between Collabora Office and Collabora Office Classic (aka LibreOffice) for us
by fkdjdshkajdh | 2026-02-05 17:08:25+00:00
Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation, as well as its isolation. Yep, that's a classic trick with State Department propaganda. There are never any huge whoppers, instead the lies they tell are through omission and the subtle shifting of blame ("If Venezuela didn't want to be bombed, they should have given us their oil", etc) in order to craft a narrative that's incongruent with reality.
by graeme | 2026-02-05 17:08:26+00:00
Millions of people around the world looked at the CIA world factbook. It was useful. It gives you a warm feeling about the USA and the CIA. Warm feelings are useful.

If you deny this argument do you claim:

1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or

2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or

3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your organization or country.
by watwut | 2026-02-05 17:09:08+00:00
I find it great that we now get to see what kind of men pick winners and loosers and how they operate. The fact that we now see the hypocrisy and moral rot of supposed meritocracy is not a bug.

And no, Epstein did not stopped his abuses after his network got him incredibly sweet deal and prevented further investigation. He did not even operated in secrecy after that.
by seemaze | 2026-02-05 17:09:35+00:00
Nice weld, and nice project!

I'm learning with you.. the polarity was fresh in my mind because I recently got half way through a project with little bb's splattering everywhere before a friend with more knowledge asked if I had recently changed wire.

Welding seems to be a lot like baking; It is very deterministic in a sealed environment and the parameters are well understood, but in practice the experts rely heavily on feel and experience more akin to an artist.