MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creature_x | 2026-02-10 23:58:09+00:00
I am currently building an agentic process to help me with social media marketing for my apps, as this is my biggest obstacle in terms of gaining traction. This involves disparate processes: AN entire workflow to generate high-quality blogs that are germane to my product domain, crafting posts on X/replies to comments in a tone that is uniquely mine, conducting one-on-one outreach on my behalf, etc..

I recently released what I think is an incredibly fun brain training app. It's heavy on toilet humor, but the goal is to improve your working memory, processing speed, and mental math. It's called Turd Turf and it's completely free to play- you can check it out here: https://turdturf.app
by devnavigator | 2026-02-10 23:58:13+00:00
AI compliance is entering a new phase in 2026. What was once treated as a legal or security afterthought is now shaping how organizations design, deploy, and scale AI itself. As AI systems move closer to regulated decisions, financial reporting, and core operations, compliance expectations are converging across industries. This article breaks down AI compliance into five practical domains that reflect how AI is actually governed today. Rather than listing regulations in isolation, it presents a layered view of AI compliance that mirrors real enterprise workflows, highlighting where scrutiny is highest, where standards are still emerging, and why governance maturity has become a competitive advantage.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-10 23:58:40+00:00
The whole idea of an imaginary number is that it squares to a negative number. Everything else is accidental. Nobody expected that exp(ia)=cos(a)+isin(a). Totally wacky discovery.

Imaginary numbers don't work in 3D, by the way. The most natural representation of a 3D rotation is a normalized 4D quaternion, and it's still pretty weird.
by mediaman | 2026-02-10 23:58:42+00:00
People from the West always complain when people from the developing world are hired to do work for people in the west.

They got angry about China, the Philippines, India, Kenya.

Oddly, it’s never the people in those countries complaining that they got a better paying job!

Only rich people who think, apparently, that this new middle class ought to be kicked back to the farm fields.
by nice_byte | 2026-02-10 23:59:00+00:00
> I want the simple approach in addition what exists now, so we can both have our cakes.

The simple approach can be implemented on top of what Vulkan exposes currently.

In fact, it takes only a few lines to wrap that VMA snippet above and you never have to stare at those pesky structs again!

But Vulkan the API can't afford to be "like CUDA" because Vulkan is not a compute API for Nvidia GPUs. It has to balance a lot of things, that's the main reason it's so un-ergonomic (that's not to say there were no bad decisions made. Renderpasses were always a bad idea.)
by groundtruthdev | 2026-02-10 23:59:10+00:00
This defense is missing the point. Yes, humans aren’t remote-driving the cars, and yes, most miles are autonomous. But the relevant question isn’t how often a human intervenes — it’s how many humans must be continuously available for the system to function at all. Even if interventions are rare, Waymo still needs operators on shift, fully alert, low-latency, and trained for local conditions, and that cost exists whether they’re doing something or not. Capacity planning is driven by correlated failures, not averages: blackouts, construction, special events, and weather can cause many vehicles to request help at once, and we’ve already seen queues form. That means the human layer is sized for worst-case concurrency, not “99.99% of miles.” So no, it’s not “just guys in the Philippines driving cars,” but it’s also not “so infrequent you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a highly autonomous system with a permanent human ops shadow, and the fact that this work is offshored strongly suggests that shadow is economically material. Miles are autonomous. Ops are not.
by pm90 | 2026-02-10 23:59:35+00:00
I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-02-10 23:59:56+00:00
> I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

Hi, you don't have the break the control on the strongest device. You only have to break it on the weakest device that's not blacklisted.
by fruitworks | 2026-02-11 00:00:04+00:00
there are multiple credit card companies, but only 3 big payment systems: Europay, Mastercard, Visa. that is the protocol: a triopoly that controls everything and then a handful of companies that wrap the same product and can't fundamentally change it.

Not unlike generic laptops that are made by OEMs in taiwan and resold by dell, and whatever small company.

"Solving" the problem of signing up clients and vendors at the same time is a different problem for the companies. They benefit from the vendor lock-in. The "solution" is to establish a monopoly
Show HN: Thoth – Obsidian AI Research Assistant
by acertainKnight | 2026-02-11 00:01:01+00:00
I'm an ML scientist who was drowning in papers. Every research tool I tried locked me into their workflow, their sources, their extraction schemas. The real friction wasn't features—it was the interface. Why am I editing files and settings when I could just tell the agent what I want? How do I find new research thats relevant to ME and keep up to date? How do i have my agent actually LEARN about my work and my research paths?

So I built Thoth. Three design decisions that drove everything:

1. HOT-LOADING SKILLS
Agents start minimal—no tools loaded. When you ask "find papers on attention mechanisms," the agent loads the paper-discovery skill, which attaches its MCP tools dynamically. When you switch to "analyze this citation network," it loads the citation skill. 10 bundled skills, users can create their own. This keeps context windows small and agents focused.

2. CHAT AS CONFIGURATION
Every setting, every source, every extraction schema can be changed through conversation. "Add NeurIPS as a source" just works. "Change the extraction schema to include methodology sections" just works. No config files required (though power users can still edit them).

3. AUTOMATED SOURCE DISCOVERY
Give the agent any URL. It uses Playwright + an LLM to auto-detect article elements and creates a working scraper. Zero configuration. If it gets something wrong, tell it in natural language and it iterates. Then tell the agent about a broad research idea you have and let it help you refine that topic, create a new research job, automatically add sources and run recurring updates. You always have the most up to date research for YOUR work not just the hot topic of the day.

Other stuff:
- 64 MCP tools across 16 categories
- Letta-powered persistent memory (6 memory blocks per agent)
- Hybrid RAG: pgvector + BM25 + Reciprocal Rank Fusion + reranking
- 6-stage citation resolution (Crossref → OpenAlex → ArXiv → fuzzy matching)
- 7 pre-built source plugins (ArXiv, Semantic Scholar, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.)
- One-command install: curl | bash
- Obsidian plugin for the UI
- Fully local / privacy-first

Stack: Python 3.12, FastAPI, Letta, PostgreSQL+pgvector, TypeScript, Docker

https://github.com/acertainKnight/project-thoth

Would love feedback. Defnitiely will have some bugs here and there but its been great for my own workflows.
by dekhn | 2026-02-11 00:01:46+00:00
To be clear, California's legislators are paying close attention to Waymo, both because it's being deployed in their major cities, and because Alphabet is a California company.

Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.

Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-11 00:01:46+00:00
> Usually they do not hold them for very long.

I am confused here. If the law grants ICE (or whatever is the umbrella agency that ICE operates under) the power to detain to determine legality of the status, ICE does it, and then releases people back, the law works as intended, no?

I am confused what is the difference between this, and police who can detain a “tall man in black short and red hat” and 10 hours later (or whenever) release back due to new information, or mistake in ID?

I understand that we absolutely have to strive to zero of such cases, but operations at scale (like law enforcement) have zero chance to have no mistakes.
by WillPostForFood | 2026-02-11 00:02:35+00:00
The way the Waymo rep answered strongly implied they only have workers on this task in the The Philippines.

--

Markey: In what countries are these employees located?

Waymo guy: The Philippines.

Markey: Excuse me?

Waymo guy: the Philippines.

Markey: So they are in the Philippines.

----

If they aren't in the Philippines, they need to fire Waymo guy..
by linkregister | 2026-02-11 00:02:45+00:00
It's a recommendation for us to lobby Congress to make an amendment to US Code. It would add a requirement for mandatory disciplinary action for agents in the government who breach public trust, with a series of specific elements to ensure a narrow application of the policy.

It's delightfully surprising to see text interpreted in different ways. It would not have occurred to me to have considered your understanding.
by egorelik | 2026-02-11 00:02:54+00:00
I am talking about constructivism, but that's not entirely the same as saying the reals are not uncountable. One of the harder things to grasp one's head around in logic is that there is a difference between, so to speak, what a theory thinks is true vs. what is actually true in a model of that theory. It is entirely possible to have a countable model of a theory that thinks it is uncountable. (In fact, there is a theorem that countable models of first order theories always exist, though it requires the Axiom of Choice).
by creata | 2026-02-11 00:03:04+00:00
> For computers, you could use a complex number since it's effectively a cache of sin(a) and cos(a), but you often want general affine transformations and not just rotations, so you use a matrix instead.

That makes sense in some contexts but in, say, 2D physics simulations, you don't want general homogeneous matrices or affine transformations to represent the position/orientation of a rigid body, because you want to be able to easily update it over time without breaking the orthogonality constraint.

I guess you could say that your tuple (c, s) is a matrix [ c -s ; s c ] instead of a complex number c + si, or that it's some abstract element of SO(2), or indeed that it's "a cache of sin(a) and cos(a)", but it's simplest to just say it's a unit complex number.
by throwaway260210 | 2026-02-11 00:03:19+00:00
I’ve been reading your blogs for the past 8-years.

Question: do you not have income concerns / pressures?

Please take this question from a positive place but it seems like you’ve been able to sustain years of relatively low pay (especially since you’re a father now) without concern.

I’m not sure most people can endure as long as you have and it makes me wonder if you have supplemental income not accounted for.

Not asking you to share anything you don’t feel comfortable with … and your transparency over the years has hugely influenced my thinking on should I start my own business.
by estearum | 2026-02-11 00:03:24+00:00
A corollary I don't see mentioned enough by the morons who believe there are roving hordes of violent illegal criminals:

Let's assume there was. Then what on earth is the administration doing tracking down and putting cuffs on so many people who do not fit in that category?

Every seat in a detention center, courtroom, or plane filled by a random guy stopped in the Home Depot parking lot is a seat taken away from one of these allegedly numerous violent rapist/murders/whatever.

So even if you were stupid enough to believe all the transparent bullshit from this gang of liars, they'd still be fucking awful!

All this stuff does, in addition to squelching public appetite for immigration enforcement writ large, is keeps the actual bad guys inside the country even longer!
by m-schuetz | 2026-02-11 00:03:36+00:00
> In fact, it takes only a few lines to wrap that VMA snippet above and you never have to stare at those pesky structs again!

If it were just this issue, perhaps. But there are so many more unnecessary issues that I have no desire to deal with, so I just started software-rasterizing everything in Cuda instead. Which is way easier because Cuda always provides the simple API and makes complexity opt-in.
by simonsarris | 2026-02-11 00:03:41+00:00
Mostly because when social security was designed there was a retiree to worker ration of 1:130. Today it is closer to 1:3. Soon it will be 1:2.

We already allocate immense resources to the elderly (over 50% of US federal budget is for old people + national debt, where debt accrues for fungible reasons but the biggest explosion is money transfers/healthcare to the old). We have a few levers we can pull there - we don't have to give money transfers to the wealthiest members of what are, in fact, the wealthiest generation by taking from younger people. We could maybe means-test some of it. But they are politically hairy and come kind-of late. All that debt is essentially already borrowing from people who don't yet exist to pay off the old of today.

So it would be somewhat nice to have more people in the future because we have already borrowed their money (or if you are 30, our money).

That makes things difficult. Even if we did not set up the entire USG to do this, having more retirees than workers makes it hard economically. You could imagine a decade where every 4th person is working in a nursing home, basically.

But other than the massive looming financial crisis and the care problem, yeah, its not so bad.
by SR2Z | 2026-02-11 00:03:47+00:00
So a company should not be able to recommend therapy ads if I seem stressed? Ozempic if I seem like I want to lose weight? Laxatives if I seem constipated, or energy drinks if I'm sleep deprived?

Trying to moralize ad targeting is exhausting. It's not inherently a bad thing to target an ad to someone who's in a bad spot, or really in general.

People who buy the product are presumably competent enough to manage their own finances. Acting like they're being exploited constantly because ads hinted that they weren't masculine enough, or too fat, or being their peers, etc. is ridiculous. Ads aren't like cigarettes.
by evanb | 2026-02-11 00:04:06+00:00
I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").

Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.
by Twisol | 2026-02-11 00:04:09+00:00
As a MUD enthusiast of two decades, this is not accurate. Where are you getting this information?

Most MUDs implement RFC 854, and a number of non-standard Telnet option subnegotiation protocols have been adopted for compression (MCCP2), transmission of unrendered data (ATCP, GMCP, ZMP), and even a mechanism for enabling marking up the normal content using XML-style tags (MXP). These telopts build on the subnegotiation facility in standard Telnet, whose designers knew that the base protocol would be insufficient for many needs; there are a great number of IANA-controlled and standardized telopt codes that demonstrate this, and the MUD community has developed extensions using that same mechanism.

> You can usually connect to a MUD using a Telnet client, but most players hate the experience and often deride this method in favor of a dedicated, programmable client.

I think you are confusing "telnet" the program with "telnet" the protocol. I am speaking here of the protocol, defined at base in RFC 854, for which "telnet" the program is but one particularly common implementation. You look at any of those "dedicated, programmable clients" and they will contain an implementation of RFC 854, probably also an implementation of RFC 1143 (which nails down the rules of subnegotiation in order to prevent negotiation loops), and an implementation of the RFCs for several standard telopts as well as non-standardized MUD community telopts. I can speak for the behavior of MUSHclient in especial regard here, though I am also familiar with the underlying Telnet nature of Mudlet, ZMud, and CMUD, not to mention my very own custom-made prototype client for which I very much needed to implement Telnet as described above.
by skybrian | 2026-02-11 00:04:42+00:00
I'm pretty happy using Shelley, which stores agent conversations in a Sqlite database. I can refer to a previous conversation and the agent can easily do a Sqlite query to see what happened.

Although this isn't stored in git, I don't see any particularly need to since it's too detailed. Instead I have the agent write design docs (as an alternative to plan mode) and check those in. That seems like enough.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-11 00:04:51+00:00
You can define that, but (if you don't already know about complex numbers) it's not obvious that it does anything mathematically interesting. It's just a cache for sin and cos, not a new type of anything. I could say that when evaluating 4th degree polynomials it's useful to have x, x^2 and x^3 immediately at hand, but the combination of those three isn't a new type of number, just a cache.
by tuetuopay | 2026-02-11 00:05:07+00:00
The idea is for the US to not be able to shutdown CC transactions at points of sale in Europe on a whim. All cards in europe are dual-issued under Visa or Mastercard, and under a national card payment processor. In France, that's CB (Carte Bancaire). When you pay in europe, it uses the European network. Outside, it uses Visa/Mastercard.

So sorry, we do definitely get what this entails :)
by al_borland | 2026-02-11 00:06:03+00:00
I get GetHub Copilot at work, it’s all we’re allowed to use. I don’t know what they pay for it, but based on how useful it is to me, I’m not sure I’d pay for it at all. We’re supposed to get Microsoft Copilot “soon”, but I’ve been hearing that for a year.

Personally, I am a Kagi subscriber and use their Assistant, which gives me access to multiple AI chat models. I pay $10/month for this, but also paid it before AI was a big thing. My token usage within my Kagi account is generally between $1 and $3. If that were to go over $10 I’d need to pay some more. I’m in no danger of that currently.
by hex4def6 | 2026-02-11 00:06:10+00:00
Same.

I've been exploring some computer vision recognition stuff. Being able to reason through my ideas with an LLM, and make visualizations like t-SNE to show how far apart a coke can and a bag of cheetos are in feature-space has been mind blowing. ("How much of a difference does tint make for recognition? Implement a slider that can show that can regenerate the 512-D features array and replot the chart")

It's helping me get an intuitive understanding 10x faster than I could reading a textbook.
by rcxdude | 2026-02-11 00:06:25+00:00
The Amazon Go situation was also wildly misrepresented in media, to be clear. It's fairly obvious that they did actually have some vaguely accurate video processing tech, it's just that the reliability never hit a level that the cost of fixing up errors actually saved money vs the alternative.

(The same consideration also applies to Waymo: even if they are not controlling the car like a RC car, does the cost of running their interventions turn the unit economics of their business upside-down? And if not, would this still be true if they were paying US wages for it?)
by murderboard | 2026-02-11 00:06:27+00:00
I'm not a bot, but maybe i could turn down my tism a little...
Fair points, especially on 5. The B2B play for lawyers solves the maintenance incentive problem neatly - they need up-to-date forms, they'll pay for them, and that funds the free tier. Smart structure.
The DIY framing in 4 is clear. My concern was more about how DIY applicants perceive risk, but if you're already getting traction in immigration subreddits and FB groups, the audience self-selects. People in those communities already know they're doing it themselves.
Good luck with it.
by scythe | 2026-02-11 00:07:00+00:00
There's a related idea in mathematics, the proof that the real numbers are a vector space over the rational numbers. If you scramble the basis vectors, you obtain an isomorphic vector space, but it is effectively a "permutation" of |R. Of course, vector spaces don't even have multiplication, but one interesting thing is that the proof requires the axiom of choice.

I think that actually constructing a "nontrivial" model of C using the field conception might require choosing a member from each of an infinite family of sets, i.e. it requires applying the axiom of choice, similar to the way you construct R as a vector space.
by jedberg | 2026-02-11 00:07:25+00:00
Any time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why.

To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.

This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
by rapatel0 | 2026-02-11 00:07:32+00:00
>True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left.

Not true. There are plenty of grifters on the left.

Both sides use the same pattern:

- Look at the crazy stuff *their* people are doing.

- We should all be angry -> generates clicks revenue.

- Donate/Buy XYZ to save the humanity/yourself.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-11 00:08:05+00:00
If the drug has a relatively low marginal cost of production, and the stomach just breaks down 99% of it without side effects, you can just manufacture 100x more, give it orally, and eat the cost of the 99% that gets lost along the way.

Injectable Semaglutide/Tirzepatide (>99.8% pure) are currently sold at a profit from China for around $2-3/weekly dose. Rybelsus (oral semaglutide) is sold at roughly the same cost per milligram, even though it's made in FDA-approved facilities (you just need to take >= 40x more milligrams per month, bringing it to $1000/month in the USA)

So manufacturing oral doses 100x higher than injectable seems to be economically viable.