MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: RAGStack – Scale-to-zero serverless RAG on your own AWS
by hatmanstack | 2026-02-04 19:39:58+00:00
Open-source document Q&A that deploys to your AWS account in one click. Upload docs, chat with AI, pay only when used.

- Serverless: Lambda + Bedrock KB, zero idle cost
- Your data stays in your account
- Single sam deploy or CloudFormation

GitHub: https://github.com/HatmanStack/RAGStack-Lambda
Blog: https://portfolio.hatstack.fun/read/post/RAGStack-Lambda
Demo: https://dhrmkxyt1t9pb.cloudfront.net/

Login: guest@hatstack.fun / Guest@123
by renewiltord | 2026-02-04 19:40:15+00:00
I suppose the difference is that we have a means-tested program which the wagies can fall into. Was the proposal to have a UBI with a means-tested program behind it? I thought most UBI proponents count on turning off the means-tested program in order to fund the UBI program.

At $1k/month for 340m people, we will double social welfare spending per capita if we don't turn off the existing programs. That will put the US at the tippy-top of per-capita spending above even Luxembourg. Fascinating.
by mbivert | 2026-02-04 19:40:26+00:00
For those looking − as the GP said, it's not fantastically organized − pigments information is available here: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/waterfs.html. Top links yield access to pigments, organized by "color family".

Two other similar resources on pigments − always good to check what's in the tube before buying!

https://www.kimcrick.com/pages/blue-art-supply-pigment-datab...

https://www.artiscreation.com/Color_index_names.html
by snac | 2026-02-04 19:40:40+00:00
Yeah, even if syslinux 6.x “falls back” when E820/E801 aren’t there, AH=88h is just a number, not a hole aware map. It can’t describe ISA/ROM/reserved regions, so the loader still might not be able to build something it trusts.
If you want to prove it yourself, stick a log right around syslinux_memmap_find() and dump the memmap entries it thinks it has on that BIOS.
Its interesting to notice that syslinux 6.03 had a fix for your same issue:
"Fix hand over to kernel:
"Booting kernel failed: Invalid argument" error."
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/%5Bann...

Based on the POST strings of your motherboard versus mine (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/fic-486-jal-rev-c), we both have an AMI BIOS so I might be able to run a similar test for my board. You're right that syslinux 6.x should fall back if E820 doesn't work but that hasn't been my experience on my motherboard hence the reversion to 4.x, I can reliably boot with 4-16MB of RAM.
by jart | 2026-02-04 19:41:19+00:00
Every group that showed up in the park and was working on a project, they could come to me and ask that their donation link be posted on the OccupyWallSt.org donate page. I'm a tech person. I registered a domain. I play it neutral. I included everything from basket weaving to aspiring governments. One of these groups called itself NYCGA or the NYC General Assembly. They were the political organization that claimed dominion over Occupy Wall Street and the public elected to give them the lion's share of donations. The guy who ended up with most of their money, if memory serves me right, is a tattoo artist named Pete Dutro. So these days I'm a lot more opinionated. The Pete Dutros of the financial community took out trillions of dollars of loans from Japan and the economy is crashing right now because of them. We should be focusing on reallocating that capital.
by sharifhsn | 2026-02-04 19:42:15+00:00
Takaichi is much more popular than Truss was, and Japan is in a much better situation right now than post-Brexit post-COVID UK. And absolutely nobody is seeking a better relationship with the US right now other than satisfying short-term needs. Japan is not in a good spot long term (population slowdown, debt, slow economy) but there’s no reason to panic right now.
by nh2 | 2026-02-04 19:42:28+00:00
I was about to say:

The question was what exactly rsync pipelines, and whether it serialises its network sends. If true, that would be a plausible cause of parallelism speeding it up.

Serial local reads are not a plausible cause, because the autor describes working on NVMe SSDs which have so low latency that they cannot explain that reading 59 GB across 3000 files take 8 minutes.

However:

You might actually be half-right because in the main output shown in the blog post, the author is NOT using local SSDs. The invocation is `rsync ... /Volumes/mercury/* /Volumes/...` where `mercury` is a network share mount (and it is unspecified what kind of share that is). So in that case, every read that looks "local" to rsync is actually a network access. It is totally possible that rsync treats local reads as fast and thus they are not pipelined.

In fact, it is even highly likely that rsync will not / cannot pipeline reading files that appear local to it, because normal POSIX file IO does not really offer any ways to non-blocking read regular files, so the only way to do that is with threads, which rsync doesn't use.

(Extra evidence about rsync using normal blocking writes, and not supporting threads, beyond the fact that no threading code exists in rsync's repo: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/blob/236417cf354220669...)

So while "the dead time isn't waiting for network trips between files" would be wrong -- it absolutely would wait for network trips between files -- your "filesystem access and general threading is the question" would be spot-on.

So in that case rclone is just faster because it reads from his network mount in parallel. This would also explain why he reports `tar` as not being faster, because that, too, reads files serially from the network mount. Supposedly this situation could be avoided by running rsync "normally" via SSH, so that file reads are actually fast on the remote side.

The situation is extra confused by the author writing below his run output:

even experimenting with running the rsync daemon instead of SSH

when in fact the output above didn't rsync over SSH at all.

Another weird thing I spotted is that the rsync output shown in the post

Unmatched data: 62947785101 B

seems impossible: The string "Unmatched data" doesn't seem to exist in the rsync source code, and hasn't since 1996. So it is unclear to me what version of rsync used.

I commented that on https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-fil...
Show HN: Autonomous AI radio station about engineering, history and philosophy
by ivanachillee | 2026-02-04 19:42:35+00:00
I made this autonomous radio station that generates 3-6 minute episodes on topics like geoengineering, history of science, cybernetics, and philosophy.

Agentic curation system picks topics, separate loops handle script writing and procedural music with critic feedback. Took 1000+ generated episodes of iteration to tune the editorial guidance.
by bombcar | 2026-02-04 19:42:42+00:00
Part of this is causal - if you're on what used to be called "fixed income" (read: social security) you migrate to places where your costs are lower; which is often rural areas.

Another part is that they're looking at total income over county-levels, which means that one Bill Gates or Elon Musk in your county will wipe out millions of people receiving "transfer payments".

> In contrast, many metropolitan hubs, affluent suburbs and exurbs, and high-income, high-productivity farming and mining communities remain minimally reliant on transfer income to power their local economies.

This may or may not be true; depends on the money flow, rich cities can have large swaths of poor people.
by ralfd | 2026-02-04 19:42:50+00:00
The website is either old or very retro cool:

https://www.dnalounge.com/gallery/2026/01-24/020.jpg

This picture from a recent concert looks how I imagine the Bay Area:

https://www.dnalounge.com/gallery/2026/01-24/020.jpg

Edit:
There is a video streaming service of alternative music videos of which the complicated UI I can't quite understand:

https://www.dnalounge.com/musicvideos/

Edit2:

Hahahaha! You have to copy the links into the browser as the DNA greatly dislikes hacker news.
by shadowgovt | 2026-02-04 19:43:04+00:00
Specifically. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123614 - reference page 68.

"Questioned on Twitter about her beliefs, she replied:
"Read Mencius Moldbug.""

(Original source of that information, as cited by above paper, is https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis ; I don't have a Twitter archive at my fingertips so I cannot pull up the primary source.)
by lelanthran | 2026-02-04 19:43:25+00:00
> With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that.

I don't really understand what that means:

1. If the cost of not thinking upfront is high, that means you need to think upfront.

2. If the cost of being wrong upfront is low, that means you don't need to think upfront.

To me, it looks like those assertions contradict each other.
by nphardon | 2026-02-04 19:43:40+00:00
> It (Software Engineering) satisfied The Builder (feeling productive and pragmatic by creating useful things) and The Thinker (solving really hard problems).

I think this is the issue, who associates really hard problems with Software Engineering? You should've stuck with Physics, or pivoted to Math (albeit you don't get so much of the physical building with pure math). You did Software Engineering because you like money, with a little bit of thinking. ;)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-04 19:43:43+00:00
I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.

And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-02-04 19:43:47+00:00
Well duh. That's obviously what everyone should try to do, but it's nice to engage in a bit of flight of fancy. I like imaging a rogue group of retail investors buying up the yen, short squeezing carry traders and sticking it to the billionaires. Real life is much more boring, and involves habitual, long term good choices.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-04 19:44:13+00:00
Where do they get the hydrogen without putting a load of CO2 into the atmosphere just to manufacture the hydrogen to begin with?

One thing to think about is debt which is not in terms of money.

People are becoming more familiar with "technical debt" since otherwise it comes due by surprise.

With hamsterwheels in space you've got energy debt.

Separate from all other forms of debt that are involved.

Like financial debt, which is only a problem if you can't really afford to do the project so you have to beg, borrow, and/or steal to get it going.

On that point I think I'd be a little skeptical if the richest known person can't actually afford this easily. Especially if he really wants it with all his heart, and has put in any worthwhile effort so far.

Anyway, solar cells are kind of weak when you think about it, they don't produce the high output of a suitable chemical reaction, like the kind that launches the rockets themselves. Which releases so much energy so fast that it's always going to take a serious amount of time for the "little" solar cells to have finally produced an equal amount of energy before a net positive can begin to accrue.

Keeping the assets safely on the home planet simply provides a jump-start that can not be matched.

All other things being unequal or not.
by quest88 | 2026-02-04 19:44:15+00:00
I think your second paragraph is too broad. The same could be said for kids doing the bare minimum to play video games, or even go outside to play with their friends all prior to social media. Many people long spent too much time watching tv, and still do, instead of pursuing what you think success is. Also, let people be content, we don't always need to engaging in activities for success
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-04 19:44:15+00:00
> Humans are tribal by nature.

Only as much as you encourage them to be.

> I think all races are ethnocentric as evidenced by entire neighborhoods being one race or another.

This is a depressing model of the world, and does not match my lived experience.

The biggest predictor of the zip code you live in is the zip code you were born in. And when that prediction fails significantly, it’s mostly due to mass migrations that have been deeply political.

Can’t believe we’re still in the “separate but equal” phase in the evolution of human society, especially given the amount of suffering it has caused.
by 9dev | 2026-02-04 19:44:26+00:00
It’s not as obvious as they claim. If it was, if the future was somehow predictable, there would be software that did it; there isn’t.

People have been claiming the end is near since forever; economists have been saying for months now that stocks should already be falling, but they are going up. And also, it feels good to be part of the in-group that just knows more than everyone else. Just ask a prepper: they will be equally convinced.

So in summary, even if we’re headed for another crisis, unless you’re only a few years from pension, you’ll just sit this one out calmly, just like all crises before. Unless the global economy breaks down for good (in which case you’ve got other things to worry about), your ETF will recover. Don’t let the fear mongers get into your head.
by nickthegreek | 2026-02-04 19:45:03+00:00
There is a large amount of gatekeeping called installing and configuring this software. It is not a trivial task that normies can easily accomplish. You have to walk past so many red flags, that you would rightly be called in idiot if you lost anyting of value.

I'll be more concerned for the public when its a double click. Currently it's just a way for techies to fafo. And I do enjoy that there are many people out there messing around with it. It is closer to the 90s experimental net mindset and than I've seen lately. It is also fun that its not a big corpo release. It is not often quick and dirty small team software blows up this big and gets noticed by the world at large.
by Kubuxu | 2026-02-04 19:45:08+00:00
A paper on the same topic: On the Expressiveness of Softmax Attention: A Recurrent Neural Network Perspective, Gabriel Mongaras, Eric C. Larson, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23632

Video presentation if someone prefers it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN3nYBowSvM

Linear attention is a first-degree approximation of Softmax attention, and model performance gets better as you increase the degree of the Taylor approximation.

I'm thinking about adapting an existing model to Taylor-approximated attention. I think it should be possible with some model surgery and rehabilitation training.
by rtkwe | 2026-02-04 19:45:34+00:00
Yeah that's a more accurate framing, also evolution is bad at revisions so even if there are minor disadvantages to a setup so long as it's not affecting your ability to have and raise kids it's basically completely absent as far as evolution is concerned. For example there are some wild inefficiencies in body layout left over from fish body patterns where the nerve from the brain to the voice box wraps down around your aortic arch because the relative position of the throat, brain, and heart were very different in fish so the path it took then was more direct. It happens in humans and most hilariously in giraffes where it goes all the day down their enormous necks.
by EA-3167 | 2026-02-04 19:45:49+00:00
They can be detrimental too, especially if they're linked to beneficial traits. The test is ultimately whether or not the harm done is sufficiently disadvantageous that it interferes with reproductive fitness. Baldness is arguably detrimental, but it's linked to a bunch of recessive genes that function in other ways, and it doesn't impact us until we're likely to have already reproduced.

That's a simplification, but you get the idea.
by palmotea | 2026-02-04 19:45:50+00:00
> This is a call to kick out a problematic enforcement agency from a country that it has no right being in. There are already collaborative agreements with the RCMP and US law enforcement, including CBP agents stationed in Canada for the purposes of border control. ICE has no reason to be here that is not already handled by CBP or Canadian law enforcement.

It sounds like these ICE offices serve a similar collaboration role. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_..., ICE actually has two distinct roles:

> ICE's two primary and distinct law enforcement components are:

> Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)

> Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)

> HSI is focused on the disruption of transnational crime, whereas ERO is responsible for the apprehension, detention, deportation and removal of undocumented immigrants.

Everybody is focusing on the "ERO" part right now, but these offices look like they're with the "HSI" part.
by znpy | 2026-02-04 19:45:55+00:00
Quoting from https://web.archive.org/web/20111021162924/http://www.occupy...

> This #ows movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society.

Maybe at some point those people will understand that high-school approach doesn't work in the real world.

Look at the amount of change they brought, look at the amount of change that a single person like Donald Trump has brought (for better or worse, this is not an endorsement).
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-04 19:45:55+00:00
Might be worth reading this article about the result of a victim suing: https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticut/article/sky-top-terrac...

Regarding the victim, Kenigsberg:

> Kenigsberg received an undisclosed sum. Sky Top Partners gained a clean title to the land, finished the house and made the sale.

> Kenigsberg remains critical of the system that failed to stop the fraud and of public safety agencies that have not found the perpetrators. Under the law it's possible he could have seen the house destroyed and himself enriched more than he was. He prefers to see the case almost as an outside observer, above the fray.
by cl3misch | 2026-02-04 19:46:48+00:00
FWIW the afaik most common symbolic math Python library sympy does that on the first page of their tutorial. I think in this space it's pretty common.

https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorials/intro-tutorial/intro...

I have to admit that I still like to use the ancient

from pylab import *

in scripts that only I will ever see. It makes it so much easier to use numpy in a "tool of thought" way. I would never do this in a library, though.
by overfeed | 2026-02-04 19:46:49+00:00
> I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.

Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, he spent years shopping for anyone who could sue them, and found his guy in Hulk Hogan. He financed the lawsuit that led to Gawker Media's bankruptcy and closure.
by bilekas | 2026-02-04 19:46:50+00:00
> Why the F are so many hn'rs defending these billionaire creeps?

They're not. There is a big difference between being skeptical of something, and OP even gave clear reasons why, and defending someone.

Nobody is defending anyone in this case, simply raising an eyebrow and expressing some doubt.

Just because that doesn't seem to fit your narrative doesn't make it against yours either.
by armadyl | 2026-02-04 19:47:09+00:00
In addition to what the other person who replied said, ignoring that iOS/Android/iPadOS is far more secure than macOS, laptops have significantly less hardware-based protections than Pixel/Samsung/Apple mobile devices do. So really the only way a laptop in this situation would be truly secure from LEO is if its fully powered off when it’s seized.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-04 19:47:10+00:00
I greatly agree with that deep cynicism and I too am a cynic. I've spent a lot of my career in the legacy code mines. I've spent a lot of my career trying to climb my way out of them or at least find nicer, more lucrative mines. LLMs are the "gift" of legacy-code-as-a-service. They only magnify and amplify the worst parts of my career. The way the "activist shareholder" class like to over-hype and believe in Generative AI magic today only implies things have more room to keep getting worse before they get better (if they ever get better again).

I'm trying my best to adapt to being a "centaur" in this world. (In Chess it has become statistically evident that Human and Bot players of Chess are generally "worse" than the hybrid "Centaur" players.) But even "centaurs" are going to be increasingly taken for granted by companies, and at least for me the sense is growing that as WOPR declared about tic-tac-toe (and thermo-nuclear warfare) "a curious game, the only way to win is not to play". I don't know how I'd bootstrap an entirely new career at this point in my life, but I keep feeling like I need to try to figure that out. I don't want to just be a janitor of other people's messes for the rest of my life.
by hmry | 2026-02-04 19:47:28+00:00
Hmm, means-tested program behind UBI would mean you get more money if UBI is not enough, right? I have heard some arguments in favor of that, for example for disabled people. You are right that those programs need to be a lot smaller and simpler to be worth the bureaucracy. But I doubt "I spent it all on prostitutes" would qualify you for that.

Other UBI advocates don't want any additional program like that. I think healthcare would need to change a lot to make that viable.

Or if you mean spending restrictions like those that exist for food stamps, then yeah, UBI usually means getting rid of those. So the argument there would be "people who are on food stamps instead of a job are idiots (sic) / too irresponsible to spend it wisely, so we must control what they spend it on", which is one of the foundational ideas that UBI advocates disagree with.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 19:47:34+00:00
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine

Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.

I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
by OGWhales | 2026-02-04 19:48:17+00:00
> Authorities, citing a “foregone conclusion exception” to the Fifth Amendment, argued that Rawls could not invoke his right to self-incrimination because police already had evidence of a crime. The 3rd Circuit panel agreed, upholding a lower court decision.

I do not follow the logic here, what does that even mean? It seems very dubious. And what happens if one legitimately forgets? They just get to keep you there forever?
by sebastianconcpt | 2026-02-04 19:48:51+00:00
> I am currently writing much more, and more complicated software than ever, yet I feel I am not growing as an engineer at all.

This sounds like approving bad/poor abstractions too prematurely and keep building on top of that.

What about the satisfaction that comes not with struggling but from the calmness of an elegant functional model that dynamically covers all the flows and all the edge cases you could (deep and slowly [1]) think about?

[1] maybe refining in different days, in the shower, after recovering breath in a hard set in a workout session, after a nap...