MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-08 01:56:08+00:00
>Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.

It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.

I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.

Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-08 01:56:09+00:00
I would love to see setups where $1000/day is productive right now.

I am one of the most pro vibe-coding^H^H^H^H engineering people I know, and i am like "one claude code max $200/mo and one codex $200/mo will keep you super stressed out to keep them busy" (at least before the new generation of models I would hit limits on one but never both - my human inefficiency in tech-leading these AIs was the limit)
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 01:56:35+00:00
There is zero need to “pirate” ozempic (semaglutide) as there are already US alternatives on the market (Tirzepatide) and about to be more (Retatrutide) that outperform all other medications in the class.

Just have insurers stop insuring ozempic/wegovy but have them insure mounjaro/zepbound and it’s a done deal. No need to even ban it.
by A1kmm | 2026-02-08 01:57:09+00:00
In a free-market approach to drug development, if the expected loss of attempting to develop as drug is negative, and the cost isn't too high, then there is an incentive to develop that.

The best public policy outcome in such an approach would be for losses to be only slightly negative. Positive or zero expected losses mean no drug development, and highly negative expected losses mean the drug is more expensive than necessary and reduces the accessibility of the drug.

However, current patent law allows companies to minimise their expected loss, with no controls to prevent highly negative expected losses.

There are alternative models - such as state funding of drug development. This model has benefit that it is possible to optimise more directly for measures like QALY Saved (Quality Adjusted Life Years Saved) - which drug sale revenue is an imperfect proxy for due to some diseases being more prevalent amongst affluent people, and because one-time cures can be high QALY Saved but lower revenue.

The complexity of state funding is it still has the free-rider problem at a international level (some states invest less per capita in funding). This is a problem which can be solved to an extent with treaties, and which doesn't need to be solved perfectly to do a lot of good.
by _alternator_ | 2026-02-08 01:57:18+00:00
I’m confused by this comment. I’m pretty sure that someone at all the bigs labs is running these questions through their models and will report back as soon as the results arrive (if not sooner, assuming they can somehow verify the answers).

The fact that you find it odd that this landed on arXiv is maybe a cultural thing… mathematicians kinda reflexively throw work up there that they think should be taken seriously. I doubt that they intend to publish it in a peer reviewed journal.
by hdaz0017 | 2026-02-08 01:58:50+00:00
ok so some people call it "brittle" it's 2026, what would impress were if people raised the issues and helped fixing them!

writing in another language, how much more complexity do you want to introducing :)

I believe bash scripts can be anything you want them to be, if they are useful to you then happy day's.

if you hit performance issues or want to experiment else where cool.

error handling in ruby is almost impossible

error handling in python is wildly hit and miss

error handling in golang is rather annoying

error handling in powershell, good luck you will need it

error handling in perl ok i'll stop now you probably get the picture.
by scheeseman486 | 2026-02-08 01:58:55+00:00
> CachyOS or Bazzite would have provided a smoother Steam experience. But it’s also illustrative of the problem. Saying you use Linux is almost meaningless because there are so many different flavors.

"Saying you like PCs is meaningless because there's so many different options" is an equally stupid thing to say with about as much justification for it. This article is just the author trying to rationalize a bunch of poor choices.
by hintymad | 2026-02-08 01:59:56+00:00
Then these workers should be fired immediately. I don't get how tech workers are so arrogant that they think they are always at the moral high ground. In fact, they should be fired when the sabotage the contract between Google and the US military. No, I wish they could be sent to the country that was invaded for no reason because the country didn't have a strong army, so they can taste what "all military is evil".
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-08 02:03:37+00:00
Canada's laws around this are...odd.

The law prohibits ads from simultaneously naming a prescription drug and its therapeutic use. So you might see an ad pushing a specific drug, but it will never say what it's used for. Or you might see an ad where people talk about treatments for a condition but never mention the drug, just saying talk to your doctor.

Sometimes they get around this subtly. In one ad a number of overweight actors discuss how much they love a specific drug, but it's never mentioned what it's for but is implied.

And of course when US channels are simulcast in Canada, US ads just run as is.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-08 02:04:42+00:00
One of the coolest tricks is using tcc to compile "on demand." This allows you to use a compiled language like Nim for scripting, with almost no noticeable performance difference compared to interpreted languages.

#!/usr/bin/env -S nim r --cc:tcc -d:useMalloc --verbosity:0 --hints:off --tlsEmulation:on --passL:-lm
echo "Hello from Nim via TCC!"

Here's a comparison (bash script at [1]) of a minimal binary compiled this way with different interpreters. First line is the noise. Measured by tim[2] written by @cb321.

1.151 +- 0.028 ms (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
1.219 +- 0.037 ms bash -c exit
2.498 +- 0.040 ms fish --no-config --private -c exit
1.682 +- 0.058 ms perl -e 'exit 0'
1.621 +- 0.043 ms gawk 'BEGIN{exit 0}'
15.8 +- 2.2 ms python3 -c 'exit(0)'
20.0 +- 5.7 ms node -e 'process.exit(0)'
-2.384 +- 0.041 ms tcc -run x.c
153.2 +- 4.6 ms nim r --cc:tcc x.nim
164.5 +- 1.2 ms nim r --cc:tcc -d:release x.nim

Measured on a laptop without any care to clean the environment, except turning the performance governor. Even with `-d:release` compiling nim code is comparable.

The fact that tcc compilation cycle measures negative here is a nice punchline.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/ZoomRmc/58743a34d3bb222aa5ec02a5e2b6...

[2]: https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/tim.md
by ecaglar | 2026-02-08 02:05:03+00:00
I run multiple side projects , web apps and mobile apps. For the longest time I had Stripe open in one tab, a cost spreadsheet in another, tasks in Notion, and no real way to answer the question: "which of these projects is actually worth my time?"

So I built SidePop — an operating system for indie hackers. Not another project management tool. Not another analytics dashboard. A single place where you see the full picture across all your projects.

The core feature is a Health Score (0–100) for the business (all projects) based on profitability, growth, runway, development velocity, and revenue health. One number that tells you whether a project is thriving or quietly dying.

Beyond that it includes:

Revenue tracking across web and mobile apps (Stripe + RevenueCat)

Cost breakdown with burn rate tracking

Kanban boards for tickets and milestones

Marketing planner with ROI and cost-per-acquisition tracking

Pre-built marketing playbooks for Product Hunt launches, Twitter threads, etc.

AI-powered revenue forecasting

14-day free trial, no credit card required. Interactive demo on alnding page.
Would love feedback from fellow builders. Thanks!
by zbentley | 2026-02-08 02:05:35+00:00
The copy on the linked "UK geoblocking" page doesn't contradict that, though.

The authors say, basically, that there's a risk of prosecution in the UK that would financially devastate anyone that works on the project, and that the act of determining how to comply with UK laws is itself an extremely resource-intensive legal task that they can't or won't do. In other words, they're geoblocking the UK not out of activism but out of pragmatic self-preservation.

That's not in any way mutually exclusive with collective action.

...also, couldn't deciding to geoblock the UK be a form of collective action? If that's what you originally meant, I sincerely apologize for reading it backwards.
by the_pwner224 | 2026-02-08 02:05:39+00:00
You can do the same in the US, zennioptical.com. You need to measure your PD which is very easy (Most optometry shops are hesitant to tell you your PD. And it's normally measured when you go to order the glasses, not as part of the initial eye exam.)

As for needing a prescription <1 year old, if your vision hasn't changed, just edit the date in the PDF. Same for contact lens prescriptions.

As part of the regular eye exam, they generally use an autorefractor machine on your current glasses and/or eyes to get a baseline before they manually fine tune with the 1/2 on the eye chart test. But yeah, you can't just get the quick prescription from the autorefractor like you talked about in Japan.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 02:05:59+00:00
You've actually described the exact mechanism we found. Each field needed math for tipping-point detection, couldn't find it translated into their domain language, and rebuilt it from scratch. Five times over, independently.

The paper isn't arguing this should stop — domain-specific derivation produces genuinely useful adaptations. But the lack of a shared catalog means each field is also rediscovering failure modes and limitations that others already solved.

That's what we're trying to build at freethemath.org — not "here's the abstract math, figure it out," but "here's the same structure as it appears in YOUR field, with worked examples." Appendix B of the paper (page 17) is our first attempt at that bridge.
by lbreakjai | 2026-02-08 02:06:28+00:00
The starting point was that competition would prevent AI providers from doubling the price of tokens, because there's lots of models running on lots of providers.

This is in the context of the article, that paints a world where it would be unreasonable not to spend $250k per head per year in tokens.

My argument is the current situation is temporary, and _if_ LLMs provide that much value, then the market will consolidate into a handful of providers, that'll be mostly free to dictate their prices.

> If they start showing much higher returns on assets, then one of the many infra providers just builds a data center, fills it with GPUs, and rents it out at 5% lower price. This is the market mechanism.

Except when the GPUs, memory, and power are in short supply. The demand is higher than the supply, prices go up, and whoever has the deeper pockets, usually the bigger and more established party, wins.
by stooart | 2026-02-08 02:10:44+00:00
IBM's CICS has web support https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/5.6.0?topic=fundamentals...

It does turn out that 3270 streams and web forms are similar. Transmit a form, wait for the user to fill in the fields on the form, then receive the fields when the user submits it. It is how a mainframe in the 1970s/80s can support 100s of terminals, despite being small by modern standards.
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 02:11:09+00:00
There is no way for a compounder to acquire “legit” semaglutide or Tirzepatide as novo and Lilly are the sole manufacturers of it using the FDA approved process.

Every other source is acquiring the APIs from China and effectively buying from the same sources that the random sites selling a vial of lypholized “research chemical” powder are getting it from.

The huge compounding companies might skip the lypholization step and mix it directly due to cost savings at scale, but it’s effectively the same sources you could buy direct from China from if you spent a bit of time researching.
by camdenreslink | 2026-02-08 02:11:15+00:00
Well maintained, popular frameworks have github issues that frequently get resolved with newly patched versions of the framework. Sometimes bugs get fixed that you didn't even run into yet so everybody benefits.

Will your bespoke LLM code have that? Every issue will actually be an issue in production experienced by your customers, that will have to be identified (better have good logging and instrumentation), and fixed in your codebase.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2026-02-08 02:11:29+00:00
There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.

I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.
by erelong | 2026-02-08 02:12:22+00:00
After reading a bunch of blog posts like this, I'm now kind of glad to see "good code" go away and am also glad to pour more gasoline on the flames of fire burning away at such code, so to speak

I think "good code" t was a "nice" pursuit but became too much of an end in itself while code was always - for me - just a means to create something that "just werks"

But I'm not sure the "good code" fans need to worry because they might be able to obsess over "proper prompting" and the "correct way to use agents" or "appopriate ai tooling" or something like that on this next wave of "code creation"
by clipsy | 2026-02-08 02:12:29+00:00
> In a November 2024 exchange, @beaverd weighed in after another user commented on photos of then-President-elect Donald Trump meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House. “Weird that he looks so happy while hanging out with literally Hitler,” the other user commented, to which @beaverd replied: “God I wish he was literally Hitler.”

Sounds pretty straightforward to me. What do you think he meant?
by bbbhammy | 2026-02-08 02:12:57+00:00
This is logical, but it relies on the purchaser being able to evaluate if the tool sucks or not. Each blogger hyping it or advertisement promotes the idea of how automatic, transformative and intelligent these tools are. The decision makers such as execs, VPs, or directors spending begin to lose a clear boundry on what AI is what it can or cant do. So they write the check, rather than miss out, its human nature to follow the pack.

My managers/bosses are non technical so for them watching an agent write python code to scrape a website is like magic because its beyond what they know. And while its not a large upfront cost, it make take a while to see the errors or critical biases in a system one doesnt understand.

So i would argue its more devious because its hard to measure if its really what its marketed to be, but it sure feeeeels like it to less technical people.

this is more about large scale corporate adoption, what you say is true for individual engineers imo
by tombert | 2026-02-08 02:13:22+00:00
Yeah, my employer changed insurance a few months ago from UHC to Cigna.

Cigna is terrible, even worse than UHC, I'm not happy that we have them but that's a whole separate rant I don't care to get into right now, but one thing I was really annoyed by was that UHC covered Zepbound, but then Cigna didn't. They actually wouldn't cover any GLP-1s unless you are already diabetic, so my wife had to stop.

I initially blamed Cigna for this, but eventually I found out that my employer deliberately opted out of it, so now I'm mad at my employer and Cigna.

We've had to use a compounding pharmacy for my wife to continue her terzepazide, which has worked fine and at least thus far hasn't been an issue, but I knew that these things were on borrowed time due to their kind of gray legality.
by krackers | 2026-02-08 02:14:17+00:00
European Respiratory society disagrees on the cancer risk fwiw https://www.ersnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Update-on-... but yeah obviously degraded foam isn't good. The foam isn't actually a required part, it's just for sound reduction.

But I think that proves my point, the supposedly "rigorous" FDA review didn't flag concerns about foam in the airpath of something you breathe through, so what exactly is the approval process buying you? Philips issued a voluntary recall but resmed uses foam in their units too, and while they claim it's a different type of foam it seems there are better ways to engineer sound reduction than putting foam in the air channel and potentially breathing in microplastics.
by timothyduong | 2026-02-08 02:15:05+00:00
Would matmul acceleration in m5 do much to improve token Generation? I’m planning to upgrade when the new studio updates to m5 but if it’s not much of a shift I’ll probably look at a second hand 256+ ram m3 studio.

Edit: of course the software would need to leverage the neural accelerators which is another variable if the software supports it in the first place
by a_n | 2026-02-08 02:16:25+00:00
I made this site where you upload a photo of your face and it ranks your face on a bunch of measurable parameters , and then gives you a final rating based on how close your features are to the ideal face. There is also a public leaderboard.
This went kind of viral at my uni when i launched it, like over a 1000 people have gotten their ratings and people seem so exicted to see where there friends rank etc. curious to see what y'all think
by morkalork | 2026-02-08 02:16:53+00:00
Hmmmm another weeeeird comment. Try this on for size:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...

Edit: I guess all the downvotes are from totally "domestic" groups and not Russian bots, right? Get fucked Ruskies.
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 02:19:04+00:00
It’s regulated quite tightly. But if you can’t shut down the illicit street drug market you aren’t going to be able to shut down the illicit make-your-life-better black market either.

I think what’s happening now is about right. FDA approval process for the vast majority of people, and make those who want to play drug astronaut biohacker find it via underground methods. No reason to crack down super hard on such folks since the societal impact is likely net positive - unlike fentanyl or what have you.

Perhaps there could be better enforcement for the folks being totally blatant about it as it risks going “mainstream” and hitting people who don’t have informed consent, but I imagine that’s coming as law enforcement catches up.
by randycupertino | 2026-02-08 02:20:18+00:00
> The US is the only country, aside from New Zealand, that allows direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription only medicines.

What interesting here is that Hims & Hers are able to skirt the pharmaceutical marketing regulations. They are able to blanket the world in their ads whereas pharma companies have to abide by strict safety information requirements in their commercials. Him/Hers give literally zero safety and side effect info.

The other weird thing is that the companies like Hims/Hers are basically dial a script. You call them and get whatever you want. They probably deny no one and don't turn anyone away. Unethical and lacks physician oversight.
by tombert | 2026-02-08 02:20:47+00:00
I've been taking metformin off-label for weight loss, and it's been working well. I'm a little annoyed that I have to resort to off label stuff because I too have Cigna and I have not been successful at getting them to cover it.

I think it's more my employer's fault than anything else; fortunately metformin actually seems to be doing the job. They won't cover that either but even without insurance it's so cheap that it's not worth complaining about.
by mmooss | 2026-02-08 02:21:11+00:00
> lots of cheap orbital rockets

It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).
by Fezzik | 2026-02-08 02:21:20+00:00
I just started taking Wegovy. Went the regulated route through my doctor, getting a prescription. She’s been monitoring loads of patients and noted that some of her patients going the ‘compound’ route had, in fact, had allergic reactions to their shots, or experienced their shots being less effective, after months of no problems. Nothing life threatening. But the fact is there is no oversight to what the GLP-1 is compounded with.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-08 02:21:45+00:00
This makes no sense.

Israel responds to words with words. They respond to force with force. And they are busy enough dealing with the trouble that Iran keeps stirring up, they're not going to do anything to Spain. (Not to say that it would be out of the question for them to go after terrorists who were in Spain, but it would be very focused. Look at what happened after Munich--multiple European countries were incredibly inept about extraditing the attackers so Israel responded with assassination teams. Not strikes on anything they didn't believe had hurt them.)

(And there never was a genocide, but this isn't the thread for it.)
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-08 02:22:01+00:00
It’s not at all surprising to see this. It looks a lot like X is just rewarding people who promoted the Articles feature AND align ideologically with Elon or are Elon sycophants. For example, Kaizen Asiedu regularly sucks up to Elon and posts low-tier ‘critical thinking’ type posts that try to polish the absurd things Elon says on Twitter. It’s not surprising to see Nick Shirley there either - this person harasses minority owned daycares to allege fraud, even though there is already a functional auditing program that has convicted people for fraud. And somehow his viral videos have tricked MAGA cultists into caring more about fraud alleged to be in the billions instead of the literal trillions in new national debt that Trump is adding through massive spending increases that are often going to friends and family.

As for the person who won - the article mentions several example of his posts, and they sound just like what Elon posts about nearly daily. Promoting white people or white culture above others. Attacking multi culturalism. Supporting deportation. The article even shows that both Elon and this person have shared verbatim slogans like ‘no more white guilt’.

It’s obvious what’s happening here.