MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mkmccjr | 2026-02-05 22:30:07+00:00
Hello. I am the author of the post. The goal of this was to provide a pedagogical example of applying Bayesian hierarchical modeling principles to real world datasets. These datasets often contain inherent structure that is important to explicitly model (eg clinical trials across multiple hospitals). Oftentimes a single model cannot capture this over-dispersion but there is not enough data to split out the results (nor should you).

The idea behind hypernetworks is that they enable Gelman-style partial pooling to explicitly modeling the data generation process while leveraging the flexibility of neural network tooling. I’m curious to read more about your recommendations: their connection to the described problems is not immediately obvious to me but I would be curious to dig a bit deeper.

I agree that hypernetworks have some challenges associated with them due to the fragility of maximum likelihood estimates. In the follow-up post, I dug into how explicit Bayesian sampling addresses these issues.
Show HN: I reviewed about 300 academic papers of 2025 to write a book on startup
by albertoasquer | 2026-02-05 22:30:17+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the author of The 2025 Entrepreneurship Research Playbook.

I am an academic (SOAS University of London) who usually works in public policy. In 2023, I designed a "mini-MBA" for founders and realized a massive inefficiency: my students were dealing with problems that scholars study every day (liability of newness, signaling theory, dynamic capabilities, etc.), but they never saw the research because it was locked behind paywalls or written in dense academic-speak or just too recent to have added to the reading list!

I decided to bridge that gap. I performed a literature review and selected about 300 peer-reviewed entrepreneurship articles published in academic journals in 2025 and synthesized the findings into a practical guide.

Some non-obvious findings from the 2025 literature:

The "Ideator's Dilemma" in GenAI: Research shows GenAI reduces the cost of idea generation but creates a new cognitive burden: distinguishing between "hallucinated" viability and ideas that seem wrong only because they are novel/counter-intuitive (Chapter 3).

The "Passion" Paradox: While popular advice says "be passionate," recent studies (Jin et al., 2025) suggest that high-intensity passion in pitches actually increases perceived risk for investors unless balanced with specific "promotion-focused" language.

Signaling in Crowdfunding: "Linguistic hedging" (vague language) in campaign descriptions is now measurable as a negative signal, whereas specific disclosure of risks (not just strengths) increases trust/authenticity (Chapter 4).

The book is available here: https://entrepreneurshipscience.com/

I posted more contents in the linked website. I’m looking for feedback on which academic concepts feel most relevant to your actual daily grind as founders.

Happy to answer questions about the research!

(I hope the post is fine, I have just joined!)
by zapzupnz | 2026-02-05 22:30:44+00:00
A study from 16 years ago is hardly relevant anymore. Back in 2003, people were still familiar with Office 2003's layout; most people have long since forgotten that layout or never learnt it in the first place.

The author doesn't discuss users' existing familiarity with Office 2003 and they only mention the word 'training' once, that "software design to interact with technology should require the least amount of training as possible" whilst never acknowledging that training in, and even qualifications in, the use of the Office suite was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Even then, the most problems were had in Excel. Advanced usage of Excel is done by technical people who would have had some training. Word and PowerPoint weren't shown to have significant difference in usability; arguably, Word is the program most people forced to use the Office suite spend their time in.

Never mind the ways by which the Ribbon and computers have changed since Office 2007. Options moved around, the Ribbon height reduced, screens having gotten wider to compress fewer options into submenus…

The author states at the end of their conclusion:

> In order to determine if the result of the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists and are not due to the learning curve the experiment can be repeated with users having at least three years using this version.

Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up?

It would be more interesting to see a comparison between Office 365 now that the interface has effectively become the de facto standard (same as Windows, macOS, mobile, tablet, and the web version) and Google Sheets (which retains the menus, toolbar, etc.).

I'm no lover of the Ribbon myself but I feel like there's better evidence for it not being the ideal interface than this which wouldn't have convinced me even at the time.

This isn't the proof that'll bring down the titan.
by kazinator | 2026-02-05 22:31:06+00:00
I'm lucky that I use a greymarket app for Japanese TV that runs on mainstream consumer boxes.

If the vendor is insisting that you use their box and locks the application to that, that is suspicious; it clearly indicates they are not really serious about the service and really want that specific box in your home for some reason unrelated to the service. Huge red flag.

Everyone normal who wants to sell a service would much rather just sell you the service for $200, without that having to include any hardware; dealing hardware is a hassle. Except in one sense in that you can sell a validated total configuration that requires less support.
by tavavex | 2026-02-05 22:31:12+00:00
I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-05 22:31:14+00:00
This is a surprising take. So you know that this gun salesman is targeting the youth, and that parents can only resolve it by massive collective action, but they are to blame, and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?

Do you think a crack dealer should be allowed to hang around on the playground and every kid has to talk to him too (and its up to parents to make sure the kids know not to buy his stuff)?
by jcion | 2026-02-05 22:31:16+00:00
It’s interesting seeing the gameplay logic broken down like this. From playing civ for many years my (human) early game strategy feels effortless. Cool to see the stark contrast with an agent going through the rigorous analysis:

Turn 29: I have 3 cities but TWO are undefended (Antium and Westhold) - critical risk. I have 17 warriors, many with 0 moves already used this turn. I need to garrison the undefended cities immediately. Unit #125 is at (6,57) with moves and goto - it's near Westhold (7,57), move it there. For Antium (13,59), I need to find a warrior with moves near it. Looking at warriors with moves: #125 at (6,57), #120, #122, #124, #132, #133, #136, #144, #145, #146 - need to check which have moves remaining. Units #128, #137, #141, #127 have 0 moves. Let me move #125 to Westhold and find someone for Antium. I'll also fortify units that are in cities, move explorers, and set worker #107 to work. Need to research tech too. With 17 warriors I should be exploring aggressively and preparing for expansion. I'll move warriors toward undefended cities and fortify defenders.
by canadiantim | 2026-02-05 22:31:36+00:00
What do you think of the approach that pg_roll takes?

Seems like the top contenders, at least for Postgres, are:

sqldef: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845239

pgschema: https://github.com/pgschema/pgschema

pg_roll: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll

atlas: https://github.com/ariga/atlas

grate (minimal SQL-based migrations): https://grate-devs.github.io/grate/

pg-schema-diff: https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff

results: https://github.com/djrobstep/results

https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...
by tombert | 2026-02-05 22:31:54+00:00
Actually kind of excited for this. I've been using 5.2 for awhile now, and it's already pretty impressive if you set the context window to "high".

Something I have been experimenting with is AI-assisted proofs. Right now I've been playing with TLAPS to help write some more comprehensive correctness proofs for a thing I've been building, and 5.2 didn't seem quite up to it; I was able to figure out proofs on my own a bit better than it was, even when I would tell it to keep trying until it got it right.

I'm excited to see if 5.3 fairs a bit better; if I can get mechanized proofs working, then Fields Medal here I come!
by conductr | 2026-02-05 22:31:55+00:00
Curious question. If opex is so exceedingly high for cloud, pushing people back to capex to save money, then why has no cloud entrant come around with a price competitive alternative?

It seems the main issue is that everyone is anchored to AWS so they have no incentive to reduce their prices. Probably same for Azure. I think Google is just risky because they kill products so easily.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-05 22:31:58+00:00
IMO diffing might have made sense to do here, but that's not what they chose to do.

What's apparently happening is that React tells Ink to update (re-render) the UI "scene graph", and Ink then generates a new full-screen image of how the terminal should look, then passes this screen image to another library, log-update, to draw to the terminal. log-update draws these screen images by a flicker-inducing clear-then-redraw, which it has now fixed by using escape codes to have the terminal buffer and combine these clear-then-redraw commands, thereby hiding the clear.

An alternative solution, rather than using the flicker-inducing clear-then-redraw in the first place, would have been just to do terminal screen image diffs and draw the changes (which is something I did back in the day for fun, sending full-screen ASCII digital clock diffs over a slow 9600baud serial link to a real terminal).
by xnyan | 2026-02-05 22:31:59+00:00
>This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.

You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.

*edited for spelling
by dgxyz | 2026-02-05 22:33:05+00:00
Neither.

Just use memcache for query cache if you have to. And only if you have to, because invalidation is hard. It's cheap, reliable, mature, fast, scalable, requires little understanding, has decent quality clients in most languages, is not stateful and available off the shelf in most cloud providers and works in-clusetr in kubernetes if you want to do it that way.

I can't find a use case for Redis that postgres or postgres+memcache isn't a simpler and/or superior solution.

Just to give you an idea how good memcache is, I think we had 9 billion requests across half a dozen nodes over a few years without a single process restart.
by xz18r | 2026-02-05 22:33:06+00:00
I wrote some automation scripts that are not triggered via browser extensions (e.g., open all my sales colleagues’ profiles and like their 4 most recent unliked posts to boost their SSI[1], which is probably the most ‘innocent’ of my use-cases). It has random sleep intervals. I’ve done this for years and never faced a ban hammer.

Wonder if with things like Moltbot taking the scene, a form of “undetectable LinkedIn automation” will start to manifest. At some point they won’t be able to distinguish between a chronically online seller adding 100 people per day with personalized messages, or an AI doing it with the same mannerisms.

[1] https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling...
by shakna | 2026-02-05 22:34:04+00:00
Yeah, didn't mention gas or ld, for similar reasons. I agree that a compiler doesn't necessarily "need" those.

I don't agree that all the claims are backed up by their own comments, which means that there's probably other places where it falls down.

Its... Misrepresentation.

Like Chicken is a Scheme compiler. But they're very up front that it depends on a C compiler.

Here, they wrote a C compiler that is at least sometimes reliant on having a different C compiler around. So is the project at 50%? 75%?

Even if its 99%, thats not the same story as they tried to write. And if they wrote that tale instead, it would be more impressive, rather than "There's some holes. How many?"
by n1b0m | 2026-02-05 22:34:04+00:00
While it’s true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a centralized, surveilled state.

Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
by mlyle | 2026-02-05 22:35:19+00:00
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.

Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.

During the 19th century.

Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
by calderarrow | 2026-02-05 22:35:25+00:00
This is the proper approach when deciding whether to use any type of tool or technology. Is the increased amount of cognitive overhead for someone with minimal exposure to your system (who will have to maintain it when you’ve moved on) worth the increased performance on a dollars-per-hour basis? If so, it may be a good option. If not, it doesn’t matter how much better the relative performance is.
by tavavex | 2026-02-05 22:35:31+00:00
And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.
by conductr | 2026-02-05 22:35:43+00:00
CFO here and I capex everything I can, never understood why you'd want to opex this. I'm trying to make EBITDA as enticing as possible for investors and anyone else that cares. Also want to show we have control over technology cost and it grows at a step function instead of a linear. Capex spending is usually large and planned, so we monitor it more closely and need to see a good reason to approve a large new purchase. Giving AWS a credit card is giving devs a blank check.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-05 22:36:02+00:00
a compiler introducing bugs into code it compiles is a nightmare thankfully few have faced. The only thing worse would be a CPU bug like the legendary Pentium bug. Imagine you compile something like Postgres only to have it crash in some unpredictable way. How long do you stare at Postgres source before suspecting the compiler? What if this compiler was used to compile code in software running all over cloud stacks? Bugs in compilers are very bad news, they have to be correct.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 22:36:03+00:00
Application-specific AI models can be much smaller and faster than the general purpose, do-everything LLM models. This allows them to run locally.

They can also be made to be deterministic. Some extra care is required to avoid computation paths that lead to numerical differences on different machines, but this can be accomplished reliably with small models that use integer math and use kernels that follow a specific order of operations. You get a lot more freedom to do these things on the small, application-specific models than you do when you're trying to run a big LLM across different GPU implementations in floating point.
by jhancock | 2026-02-05 22:36:32+00:00
Depends on your app cache needs. If it's moderate, I'd start with postgres...ie. not have operate another piece of infra and the extra code. If you are doing the shared-nothing app server approach (rails, django) where the app server remembers nothing after each request Redis can be a handy choice. I often go with having a fat long lived server process (jvm) where it also acts for my live caching needs. #tradeoffs
by chillingeffect | 2026-02-05 22:36:54+00:00
yes and also no ;) Think of stirling engines as driven by "heat differentials" as opposed to "heat." At first when you fire up the GPU, it's hotter than everythign else and can start driving a stirling...but eventually everything heats up to the same temp and it stops moving. To get it moving again, requires a heat differential, so part of it would need to radiate, which is blatantly difficult in a vacuum(1), such as space.

In case it's not clear: Little-St. James Wannabe Invitee, Nazi-Saluter, Musk's full of it again, but to recognize it requires being halfway through college physics to understand it, so all the elites will be glazed over thinking they're onto the next big thing. grift, grift, grift, grift.

(1) a giant flipping vacuum.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-05 22:37:17+00:00
Yes, to uniq7 and others -- you keep saying "identity verification will be used for nefarious purposes". Lets take the alcohol and tobacco case, was it used for nefarious purposes? Did adults suddenly lose rights and/or have something bad happen to them?

The government can and does already track whatever they want about you. Businesses already track you unless you are extremely thorough about erasing your footprint. Adding a zero-knowledge proof through a trusted system that you are 18+ doesn't seem like the mountain people are claiming. You already have to provide ID and credit card to get ISP access, the byte patterns are traced back to your household. They already have a unique fingerprint on your browser and computer. The real harm is just the obvious encroachment that we can all see and have known about since early 2000s. They don't need a "backdoor", it feels like alarmism over a possible problem, when there is a very real harm to children and teens (suicide rates, depression, bullying, mental health, etc).

to go back to smoking / alcohol / guns, one could argue it is an infringement, but ultimately it does seem to have been the right choice for society at large, and the increased "invasion of privacy" has been pretty minor. If anything, the opt-in stuff like credit cards, cell phones, GPS, car apps, streaming services have all been far larger invasions of privacy that people willingly embrace.
by rvz | 2026-02-05 22:37:56+00:00
The same thing was done with Meta researchers with Llama 4 and what can go wrong when 'independent' researchers begin to game AI benchmarks. [0]

You always have to question these benchmarks, especially when the in-house researchers can potentially game them if they wanted to.

Which is why it must be independent.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/meta-cheated-on-ai-benchmarks-and-its-a-...
by culi | 2026-02-05 22:38:01+00:00
San Marcos in central Texas also disabled them recently

Santa Clara County (which includes MV) seems on the precipice of doing the same

Evanston, IL found them to be in violation of state privacy laws and disabled them in Sep.

In Eugene, OR the police tried to disable them in December but Flock turned them back on

Here is a map of upcoming city council meetings in the US where Flock surveillance will be discussed: https://alpr.watch/
by resonious | 2026-02-05 22:38:13+00:00
If you want this to extend to all compliance checkboxes, I think it'd be an endless can of worms.

How do you enforce (with code) that all new applications created by various teams get added to the right inventory? At some point a human has to determine if an application is in- or out-of-scope for certain restrictions.

If a compliance framework requires certain hashing algorithms for certain types of data, how does your company-as-code system enforce that?

What I see with compliance is that a lot of it is the framework saying "you must do X and Y and Z", and the solution is to write a document saying "employees must do X and Y and Z" then share it with everyone. Then you take a screenshot of that happening (if even possible - you might instead just swear that it's happening).

I guess what I'm getting at is that there's a huge human element here to begin with. If the article is proposing a structured language for declaring your company and policies, how is that different from a Word doc? That is, unless your structured language is actually interpreted by a program that is capable of enforcing what it says. And I think building that enforcement system would be quite hellish.
by Calavar | 2026-02-05 22:38:36+00:00
By the classical definition of a clean room implementation, it's something that's made by looking at the output but not at the source.

I agree that having a reference compiler available is a huge caveat though. Their developing against a programmatic checker for a spec that's already had millions of man hours put into it. This is an optimal scenario for agentic coding, but the vast majorty of problems that people are going to want to tackle with agentic coding are not going to look like that
by rglover | 2026-02-05 22:38:41+00:00
The presumed ethos flew out the door the second that fundamentals were traded for chasing the very asset bitcoin was trying to replace (an inevitability vis-a-vis human behavior).

That said, I don't think it's "dead," but rather showing itself for what it is: a well-intentioned attempt at solving corruption of money, predictably co-opted by (and made the bitch of) the very forces it sought to replace. Now, it seems to best exist as a secondary financial rail that you can use if and when it suits your needs.

The original ideological base case failed miserably, unfortunately (sound money).
by alecco | 2026-02-05 22:39:00+00:00
Counterpoint: "Why I'm Selling All My GPUs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6mu2QRVNSE

TL;DW: GPU rental arbitrage is dead. Regulation hell. GPU prices. Rental price erosion. Building costs rising. Complexity of things like backup power. Delays of connection to energy grid. Staffing costs.
by vunderba | 2026-02-05 22:39:03+00:00
I think the opposite would be just as likely, though.

During the mid-2000s ZIRP, the tech industry was flush with cash and hurling high six-figure salaries at anyone who could use a flexbox in CSS.

With the promise of all this money and high demand came a massive proliferation of coding bootcamps promising to land you one of these lucrative jobs.

That drew in lots of people with zero genuine interest in computer science.

Anecdotally, everyone in my graduating class majoring in compsci seemed to love the field, but this was back when software dev positions were a lot closer in salary to regular engineering (electrical and mechanical).
by kvemkon | 2026-02-05 22:39:17+00:00
Very nice looking UI! Powered by forked GTK+ 2 [1]. (First release almost 24 years ago [2]).

[1] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/9.0/libs/tk/ytk

[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2002-March/msg00136...