MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwup238 | 2026-02-10 01:30:13+00:00
Isn’t charge quantized? Observable isolated charges are quantized in units of e. You can call it -3 and +3 but that just changes the relative value for the quanta. The interesting question is still why the positive and neutral particles are nonelementary particles made up of quarks with a fraction of e, the math made possible only by including negatively charged ones (and yet electrons are elementary particles).
by vel0city | 2026-02-10 01:30:28+00:00
> Facebook+Instagram+Whatsapp/iMessage is a "natural monopoly" because of their network effect, just like the older monopolies

They're natural monopolies and yet I don't use any of them and somehow successfully talk to you here, right now. Strange huh, I thought they were a monopoly on internet communication. Can't possibly make a platform for people to talk without Facebook or iMessage and yet here we are. I guess Discord is also really Facebook? Signal? Telegram? I guess this is really just Facebook or iMessage behind the scenes for all of these things?

> If I give you the money to buy and operate the required amount of servers, will you be able to launch a Facebook competitor in the next year? I doubt so.

If you give me less than a week and some budget that scales with users I'll have something thrown together that can scale to at least several hundred thousand users. How long did it take for Moltbook to be made? How much do you think they spent building it? You think they spent years and millions on that? Do you really think it actually cost them that many millions to make Truth Social?

> You can run a telephone cable to your neighbor, but good luck reaching anyone else.

The lines are already run, it's called the internet. We're already all connected to each other. We can reach practically anywhere on the planet with the wire or signal coming into your home. That is a natural monopoly. There is probably only one fiber or coax provider, there's only so much useful RF bandwidth, etc.

If you give me an hour I'll give you a page on the Internet saying anything you want it to say, and everyone in the world (outside of Iran or North Korea) will be able to see it and interact with it.

Competition is a click away. Compared to the industries where there's often only one telephone provider, only one train company, only one major airline, etc.

> Also a lot of government agencies themselves basically only post up to date information on Facebook/Twitter.

Those agencies have websites and other means to disseminate information. They are in no way limited to only Facebook. Many have the ability to make every single phone and radio and TV station say whatever message they need to get across. They have lots of means to get information to you.
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-10 01:30:59+00:00
It's a very practical ML-family language. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It doesn't really sacrifice anything, either. The last thing I delivered with it was a network health utility, which did UDP and TCP sockets and platform API calls very cleanly. It's really not a toy language. Distribution is cool too, because you can build for a system with the runtime installed or build a single-file executable. My suggestion: build a utility program with it for your own purposes and if you're productive with it.
by agwa | 2026-02-10 01:31:14+00:00
Having the customer send me the key is less secure because that key never gets rotated. Google wants to discourage long-lived credentials so badly that new organizations can't even create service account keys by default anymore.

Having the customer grant permission to a single master service account is vulnerable to confused deputy attacks.

In any case, why should I have to pursue "other solutions" to something that's in their documentation?
by camdenreslink | 2026-02-10 01:31:29+00:00
This is very interesting to me. I’ve been working on a side project with interactive Python tutorials in the browser, and I’ve been somewhat discouraged recently by how LLMs have been changing the landscape.

It seems SEO for this sort of thing is dead, so another funnel/channel is needed. Also, CS enrollment seems to be down this past fall for the first time in a while (based on the CERP pulse survey).

But maybe there is still a market for that sort of educational content.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-10 01:31:33+00:00
I worked with people that defended the idea that code should not have comments, the code should self explain itself.

I am not a developer and I completely disagree with that, the python scripts I wrote, Ansible playbook, they all have comments because 1 month down the road I no longer remember why I did what I did, was that a system limitation or software limitation or the easiest solution at the time???
by Andrex | 2026-02-10 01:32:27+00:00
Very weird it happened twice! But that's a kind of a cool factoid to tell people haha.

Even with devs and publishers that don't die or are killed, they still lay hundreds off when a game is done. Then the studio limps along in pre-production mode on their next game for 4-5 years it seems like...

Maybe the only job stability in the industry is with indies, and... Nintendo?
by torginus | 2026-02-10 01:32:50+00:00
You misunderstand me - first, almost all modern compilers (that I know of) use SSA, so that's not much of a thing you need to point out. The point I was making, is that by looking at the assembler, it seems the generated code is totally unoptimized, even though it was mentioned that Claude implemented SSA opt passes.

The generated code's quality is more inline with 'undergrad course compiler backend', that is, basically doing as little work on the backend as possible, and always doing all the work conservatively.

Basic SSA optimizations such as constant propagation, copy propagation or common subexpression propagation are clearly missing from the assembly, the register allocator is also pretty bad, even though there are simple algorithms for that sort of thing that perform decently.

So even though the generated code works, I feel like something's gone majorly wrong inside the compiler.

The 300k LoC things isnt encouraging either, its way too much for what the code actually does.

I just want to point out, that I think a competent-ish dev (me?) could build something like this (a reasonably accurate C compiler), by a more human-in-the-loop workflow. The result would be much more reasonable code and design, much shorter, and the codebase wouldn't be full of surprises like it is now, and would conform to sane engineering practices.

Honestly I would certainly prefer to do things like this as opposed to having AI build it, then clean it up manually.

And it would be possible without these fancy agent orchestration frameworks and spending tens of thousands of dollars on API.

This is basically what went down with Cursor's agentic browser, vs an implementation that was recreated by just one guy in a week, with AI dev tools and a premium subscription.

There's no doubt that this is impressive, but I wouldn't say that agentic sofware engineering is here just yet.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-10 01:32:52+00:00
If you need a server, AWS is much more expensive over said server's lifetime.

I think cloud is great for auto scaling from zero to billions of requests if you go full orchestration, but if you're running a stable operation where a box just runs 24/7 you will make back only the hardware cost in just a few months. Even with management AWS is much more expensive (and that needs to be managed too)

I think there's a point to cloud but picking up boxes and moving them to AWS, basically moving traditional equipment into cloud without actually transforming it to a cloud service, isn't it. You're just paying too much for someone else's computer without taking advantage of the special added value.

Which just happens to be exactly what my work is doing. We don't even take advantage of automated management like ansible, it's a joke really. The only reason is that we can say 'We're a cloud outfit' and some bookkeeping tricks moving capex to opex. But we burn much more money this way and have less control.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-10 01:33:15+00:00
Maybe? We seem to be able to characterize all the stuff we have access to. That doesn't mean we couldn't say produce new and interesting materials with new knowledge. Before we knew about nuclear fission we didn't realize that we couldn't predict that anything would happen from a big chunk of uranium or the useful applications of that. New physics might be quite subtle or specific but still useful.
by tabbott | 2026-02-10 01:33:29+00:00
Regarding risk: I certainly won't blame you for feeling risk-averse given the history of the tech industry. I can tell you about some unusual choices we've intentionally made to minimize risk for our users:

- We eschewed VC funding. A big part of my motivation was that I felt that VC funding usually requires eventual enshittification. https://zulip.com/values/ talks more about this.

- Zulip has been 100% FOSS software for more than a decade.

- At the very beginning, we built a complete data import/export system that allows migrating between our Cloud hosting and self-hosting; we put a lot of care into maintaining it well.

I can't promise that we'll never have something to sell for self-hosting communities. For example, I could imagine offering a paid add-on for encrypted backups.

That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.
by Robinbuilds1 | 2026-02-10 01:33:30+00:00
I built this because I was running OpenClaw and had no visibility into what my agent was costing me. ClawWatcher gives you real-time token usage, cost per model, and a full breakdown of skills and actions. One command to set up. Solo founder, built it through coding in about 40 hours and It's free to use. Would love feedback.
by o175 | 2026-02-10 01:34:37+00:00
I've been wanting something exactly like this for the "wait where does this even get called" moments. The handful of times I've tried to build mental maps of unfamiliar codebases, I end up with a browser full of GitHub tabs and a text file of orphaned function names, which is basically just externalizing my confusion.

What I'm curious about is how you're handling the clustering. Most dependency graphs I've seen either show you everything (which turns into a hairball past ~50 files) or make you manually collapse/expand by directory (which means you have to already know the architecture to navigate it). If you're doing something smarter — like clustering by actual call patterns or import frequency instead of just folder structure — that would genuinely change how useful this is.

Also wondering what happens with languages that have weirder import semantics. Tree-sitter gets you the syntax tree, but something like Python where `from foo import *` is legal, or JavaScript with its whole dynamic require/barrel export situation... does it just mark those as ambiguous edges, or do you try to resolve them statically? Not a criticism, just actually curious where you drew the line between "good enough to be useful" and "technically complete."

Either way, this feels like the right level of tool. Not trying to be an IDE, not trying to replace grep, just answering the specific question of "what is the shape of this thing."
by auntienomen | 2026-02-10 01:34:48+00:00
There does appear to be a deeper reason, but it's really not well understood.

Consistent quantum field theories involving chiral fermions (such as the Standard Model) are relatively rare: the charges have to satisfy a set of polynomial relationships with the inspiring name "gauge anomaly cancellation conditions". If these conditions aren't satisfied, the mathematical model will fail pretty spectacularly. It won't be unitary, can't couple consistently to gravity, won't allow high and low energy behavior to decouple,..

For the Standard Model, the anomaly cancellation conditions imply that the sum of electric charges within a generation must vanish, which they do:

3 colors of quark * ( up charge 2/3 - down charge 1/3) + electron charge -1 + neutrino charge 0 = 0.

So, there's something quite special about the charge assignments in the Standard Model. They're nowhere near as arbitrary as they could be a priori.

Historically, this has been taken as a hint that the standard model should come from a simpler "grand unified" model. Particle accelerators and cosmology hace turned up at best circumstantial evidence for these so far. To me, it's one of the great mysteries.
by Robinbuilds1 | 2026-02-10 01:34:50+00:00
Hey HN, I built ClawWatcher because I was running OpenClaw and had zero visibility into what my agent was actually costing me. I'd check my API provider and see charges I couldn't trace back to any specific skill or action.

ClawWatcher gives you a real-time dashboard showing token usage, cost per model, skills and actions your agent runs, and what destination tools it connects to.

Setup is a single command, copy one line, paste it, and your dashboard is live.

It's completely free. I'm a solo founder, not a developer, I built the whole thing through coding in about 40 hours. and it's totally free.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone running OpenClaw who's dealt with the same cost visibility problem.
by robocat | 2026-02-10 01:35:40+00:00
I childishly looked for a historical quote on how we should all be doing science at home now. Google referred me to a gorgeous article written by Isaac Asimov:

While computers and robots are doing the scut-work of society so that the world, in 2019, will seem more and more to be “running itself,” more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure.

This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research, in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.

Fortunately our good friends at the Public Gaming Research Institute have republished the article originally published in the Toronto Star where Asimov imagined the world 35+ years in his future.

Unfortunately the link seems to contain some advertisements so perhaps google yourself to find a better source. I looked for a filetype:pdf but that didn't help me (although Gemini AI did helpfully summarise the same article).

We are definitely fortunate to live in a world with free access to information.

Unfortunately my skills at search are getting rusty.
by notatoad | 2026-02-10 01:35:43+00:00
so these ships are abandoned by the companies that own them, with the crew still on board? and then the crew is just stuck there with dwindling food supplies until somebody comes to rescue them?

in my head this seems like a problem that could be solved by getting on the radio to a nearby port and saying "hey, we've got a tanker carrying $50m worth of crude oil, you can have it if you let us dock", but obviously it can't be that simple if that's not happening. why not?
by Robinbuilds1 | 2026-02-10 01:36:17+00:00
Hey HN, I built ClawWatcher.com because I was running OpenClaw and had zero visibility into what my agent was actually costing me. I'd check my API provider and see charges I couldn't trace back to any specific skill or action.

ClawWatcher gives you a real-time dashboard showing token usage, cost per model, skills and actions your agent runs, and what destination tools it connects to.

Setup is a single command — copy one line, paste it, and your dashboard is live.

It's completely free. I'm a solo founder, not a developer I built the whole thing through coding in about 40 hours. and it's totally free.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone running OpenClaw who's dealt with the same cost visibility problem.
by Edmond | 2026-02-10 01:36:20+00:00
For an example of what an "async" agent implementation should help you accomplish:
https://youtu.be/hGhnB0LTBUk?si=q78QjgsN5Kml5F1E&t=5m15s

You can use the idea to spin-off background agent tasks that can then be seamlessly merged back into context when they complete.

The example above is a product specific approach but the idea should be applicable in other environments.... it's really an attempt to integrate long running background tasks while continuing with existing context in an interactive manner.

When you start working on the problem of working with automation programs (AKA agents) in an interactive human-in-the-loop fashion, you will naturally run into these kinds of problems.

We've all seen sci-fi movies with AI assistants that seamlessly work with humans in a back and forth manner, async spin-offs are essential for making that work in practice for long running background tasks.
by briHass | 2026-02-10 01:37:07+00:00
And... this is why the hyperscale cloud is such a compelling choice, even though it costs 10x what running your own servers would cost.

Adding the security feature(s) you need is just a +$100/m checkbox, and they generally have sane defaults or templates that will position you better than some 3rd party vendor with confusing documentation and infrequent updates that require downtime windows to apply.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-10 01:37:20+00:00
Why is it the responsibility of private industry to support a “living wage?” Should we index on a single person living alone? A teenager living with their parents? A single mom of three kids? A single mom with a single disabled kid?

Private industry should concentrate on paying people their market wages. Government should tax industries and individuals and provide a safety net.

Let me tell you from first hand experience what happens when unions get involved with manufacturing industries where they can pick up and go elsewhere - they do. Growing up, the city I lived in had 5 factories - all but one left because of fights with unions.

Where I use to live in the burbs of Atlanta, according to the website, the living wage is $45 an hour. Should we have a minimum wage there of $45 an hour?
by reactordev | 2026-02-10 01:38:21+00:00
this is fascinating because I'm red/green color deficient yet I have no problem seeing most reds or greens. I feel there's a "spectrum" of color that we all see and each of us is slightly different. My shade of green may not be your shade of green. Yet, when I point out my shade of green - it matches your shade of green because of our eyes. Even though we may be perceiving entirely different colors.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-10 01:38:32+00:00
>It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place.

You are missing the biggest root cause of the problem you describe: People write code differently!

There are "cough" developers whose code is copy/paste from all over the internet. I am not even getting into the AI folks going full copy/paste mode.

When investigating said code, you will be like why this code in here??
You call tell when a python script contains different logic for example.
Sure, 50 lines will be easy to ready, expand that to 100 lines and you be left on life support.
by digiown | 2026-02-10 01:38:50+00:00
> I don't use any of them and somehow successfully talk to you here

There's no train monopoly, I can just walk to the office! A monopoly does not have to exert total control to be a problem.

I shouldn't have to walk to the office because the train company has a problem with my viewpoints. I shouldn't have to spend a ton of extra effort to communicate with people and businesses because Facebook doesn't like my viewpoints, either. No private company should have that kind of power.

> that can scale to at least several hundred thousand users

It can scale for sure. Will it have all these users though? I can also go buy several containers worth of fiber optics cables. But that doesn't make me a competitor to the local ISP because there is such an incredible amount of human friction I must go through to compete with their network that it effectively locks out competitors.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-10 01:39:10+00:00
Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.

Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.

Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.
by Revolution1120 | 2026-02-10 01:39:20+00:00
Over a decade ago, when Facebook held a monopoly, having one's first sexual experience at age 12 or even earlier was an incredibly prestigious and fashionable thing. If Zuckerberg truly held this view, it wouldn't be surprising at all; it would even be considered perfectly reasonable. And those who want to censor these things aren't leftists, but genuine conservatives. Despite the efforts of Musk and other Silicon Valley figures to distort the definition of conservative through their propaganda, and even with many people having short memories, their lies are easily exposed. Unless "having sex at age 12" is a long-standing American traditional value, it's no closer to conservatism than the so-called Muslim immigrants. Looking back now, the propaganda advocating for sex at age 12 may very well have been a carefully orchestrated global pedophile ideology infiltration by elite pedophiles of Epstein's class. It wasn't limited to the Americas or Europe; it was also widespread and accepted in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. After Epstein's death in 2019, has such propaganda decreased significantly? Is this a coincidence? It's very likely not a coincidence. This argument is worth exploring; following this line of thought might uncover even more valuable research on field of deep state. While Epstein was a billionaire, he wasn't exceptionally wealthy on paper and shouldn't have possessed such immense influence and control. Therefore, there's only one possibility is profound: Epstein was Satoshi Nakamoto!
by brucehoult | 2026-02-10 01:40:11+00:00
Here's a not bad (and accidental!) 342 km one from 7 months ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1m9p0bh/tapuaeo...

In theory there should be a 365.3 km one just barely to the left of the obvious twin peaks, but I'm not seeing it.

Quite a bit short of the longest in the world, but still pretty far to see.
by Andrex | 2026-02-10 01:40:31+00:00
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.

Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-10 01:40:43+00:00
The CA/B is basically some Apple and Google people plus a bunch of people who rubber stamp the Apple and Google positions. Everyone is culpable and it creates a self-fulfilling process. Everyone is the expert for their company's certificate policy so nobody can tell them it's dumb and everyone else can say they have no choice because the CA/B decided it.

Even Google and Apple from a corporate level likely have no idea what their CA/B reps are doing and would trust their expertise if asked, regardless of how many billions of dollars it is burning.

The CA/B has basically made itself accountable to nobody including itself, it has no incentives to balance practicality or measure effectiveness. It's basically a runaway train of ineffective policy and procedure.