MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fedeb95 | 2026-02-12 10:58:54+00:00
Every time UBI or some variant of it are presented, it is always presented as a benefit, so ti seems really nive. What I don't ever see addressed, is how it will work from a cost perspective. UBI is a cost: a Universal Basic Cost. Who will pay basic incomes? Businesses? The tax payers? In both of this cases, why resort to an inefficient method (the state setting prices) instead on relying on price formation as (roughly) it is today? I too don't care about moral, and I'm also sad that both supporters and detractors talk about morals. I'm honestly curious in how it could ever work: because money doesn't grow on trees, that is, value is not extracted from the Earth without labor (and innovation of technologies to work less for the same extraction work). So, in the end, it's a way of redistributing resources.

This is setting morals aside. Moral and ethics could be considered, but it's a far wider topic than a HN comment allows. An hint: nobody asks why a moral phenomenon came up in the first place. It must have had a function in society... maybe it still has today.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-12 10:59:08+00:00
British accent review time!

"Nature Show Host": not David Attenborough, suprisingly

"Compelling Lady": nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday

"Upset Girl": this is more the voiceover that would be used on depressing animal charity adverts

"Magnetic Man": you can't fool me, that's an American

"Patient Man": patience gives you reverb. The word "British" is spoken with a very non-British accent.
by vintermann | 2026-02-12 10:59:16+00:00
It seems to me that also if you succeed in making child-only spaces, those spaces become a magnet for adult abusers. They become an all the more desirable prize for them. Whereas spaces like this - hacker news, that is - don't need any age verification because although it's a safe bet some users are underage here too, the abusers would have to search a long time for them and the seemingly most common manipulation techniques (like pretending to be a child yourself) probably wouldn't work.
by chmod775 | 2026-02-12 10:59:30+00:00
> In China cameras use your gait to automatically ticket you for J-walking and automatically deduct funds from your bank account. I’ve read that before at least.

China is a huge place with a population larger than the entire western world combined, so I don't doubt something like that could have happened somewhere at some point. However chances are that it was just some guy holding an office in a backwater place of barely a few million people saying that it might be a thing at some point. Possibly they even had a cool tech demo.

However in general that absolutely is not a thing. If you pick any of China's megacities and walk down a street it will take all of 5 minutes to realize how absolutely not a thing that is.
by 9NRtKyP4 | 2026-02-12 10:59:37+00:00
I don’t use a notebook and have done fine over the years - for those of you that are reading this and getting anxious you’re not doing your job the “right way”. I don’t have a particularly prodigious memory.

I’ve sometimes thought there’s a value to forgetting. If it matters I’ll learn it through repetition, like compression almost. It always seemed like reconstructing things from first principles saves brain space and allows for generalisation and creativity.
by altacc | 2026-02-12 10:59:52+00:00
False argument. The unemployed in Ireland get unemployment benefits, so this isn't favouring one over the other. The Artist's UBI is not enough to live on (neither are most countries' unemployment benefits to be fair) but in general a salesperson or carpet installer when in employment will make a decent living, whereas artists don't. Society tends to under value the arts and overvalue commerce (and any free market arguments about this consistently fail to reflect reality), and this address some of the balance. They did an analysis (probably generously) and found that there would actually be an ROI for this UBI.
by graemep | 2026-02-12 11:00:21+00:00
Art is not a free market. The art market is heavily manipulated by investors in art.

The subsidies and tax exemptions artists receive are small so if you are arguing for less state subsidy or its the least of the problems you should look at.

I am not convinced that this particular scheme is a good idea, but the alternative is not a free market.

> then maybe small businesses?

Big business already receives both explicit exemptions and defacto ones. Ireland is part of the mechanism that lets they structure their businesses in ways that avoid tax that are not available to small businesses.
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 11:00:24+00:00
I definitely phrased my comment badly; but to your point, it depends on the era. Here's the House of Commons estimate in 2002, I don't know how different it would have been in 2000: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmni...

(Table 1): RIRA Estimated running costs (per year) "£500,00", Estimated fundraising capacity (per year) "£5 million".

I'm assuming that's a typo missing a zero (i.e. should be half a million), not a typo substituting comma for decimal (i.e. five hundred quid). Even with 24 years of inflation, that spend does not suggest a big group to me.
by vladms | 2026-02-12 11:01:08+00:00
I think what matters are the percentages. Out of the 16mn users where there more or less than in the general population? I think it is reasonable to think they were as many percentage wise, if not more - because internet provides anonymity which is an advantage.

Nowadays with the number of users of the internet converging slowly to the total populations, the percentages are probably converging as well.
by ragazzina | 2026-02-12 11:01:31+00:00
I have heard of Siri, I would never expect anyone to mention Siri while enumerating "new and advanced" things Apple developed.

OP said whatever the next shift in technology, Apple will be left behind. You said Apple actually developed new advanced products, but only mentioned hardware examples. If the new big shift in technology is in software (such as AI), we have no reason to predict Apple will fare well there.
by chistev | 2026-02-12 11:01:36+00:00
Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven.

https://www.rxjourney.net/the-possibility-of-life-after-deat...
by retsibsi | 2026-02-12 11:01:57+00:00
They said "between", not "during"; I think the point was that they didn't spend a full weekend with Claude.

edit: anyone care to explain why this is a bad comment, rather than just downvoting? The GP comment says "Over a weekend, between board games and time with my kids,", and the parent comment lectures them based on an obvious strawman: "I can prompt AI while playing with the kids"
by lesostep | 2026-02-12 11:02:32+00:00
>> This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive

Not if the rule includes easy rule circumvention. For example, if you could parent-control lock the camera roll to a white list of apps.

Want to post on social media so your friends would see? No can do, but you can send it to them through chat apps.
Want to watch tik-tok? Go ahead. Want to post on tik-tok? It's easier to ask parent to allow it on the list, then circumvent, and then the parent would know that their child has a tik-tok presence, and — if necessary — could help the child by monitoring it.

The current options for parent control are very limited indeed. You can't switch most apps to readonly, even if you are okay with your child reading them — it's posting you are worried about.

But in ideal world there would be better options that would provide more privacy and security for the child, while helping parents restrict options if they fell their child isn't ready to use some of the functions.
by mwban | 2026-02-12 11:03:26+00:00
I wondered this as well. Asking claude, it poses the following arguments.

- Archaeological context. The style of the monument, the associated stratigraphy, and other artifacts found at Tres Zapotes are consistent with the Late Formative period (roughly the 1st century BCE), which matches the inscribed date. If the date referred to some distant past event, you'd expect a mismatch between the monument's physical/archaeological dating and the inscribed date — but they align.

- Unlike the Maya creation date on Quiriguá's Stela C, there's no indication that 7.16.6.16.18 is a cosmologically significant anchor date. It doesn't fall on a period ending or a round number. It looks like a "regular" date — the kind you'd use to record a contemporary event.

- Comparison with other Mesoamerican monuments. When stelae record mythological deep-time dates, they tend to be dramatically ancient and often fall on calendrically significant positions. A date just a few baktuns back doesn't fit that pattern.

- The other side of the stela. The reverse side depicts a figure, likely a ruler. Commemorating a ruler alongside a date strongly suggests the date marks something in that ruler's lifetime — a dedication, accession, or victory.
by danlitt | 2026-02-12 11:04:33+00:00
This argument has a lot of holes in it. Notably,

> Planned economies have historically failed.

Very much false - the US war and post-war economy was very heavily planned, and was perhaps the most successful economy in history (precisely until it was gutted in the 70s/80s).

> best case scenario, create a proportional inflation

You give no reason to expect that this inflation will at best be proportional. It is perfectly possible (in fact likely) that the inflation will be less than proportional, because the price-setters (companies) are being taxed to give money to people on low incomes, who are economically speaking mostly consumers.

> Each of this "tax exemptions" or subsidies eats the profits of someone else. Very rarely it's the richest luxuries that are taken away.

Defeatist argument. It is obvious from history that taxation can be recouped from the rich, we just don't generally try to do that at the moment. We should start.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-12 11:05:15+00:00
>If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence.

“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
by submeta | 2026-02-12 11:05:36+00:00
Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant.

What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.

At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.

Today, I still cannot reliably:

- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction

- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”

- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent

These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.

The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-02-12 11:06:10+00:00
Solo founder here building B2B SaaS in a niche vertical (accounting automation). My take: your moat at pre-seed isn't IP, it's domain depth.

I decided early not to patent anything. Not because our technical approach isn't novel - we have some genuinely interesting pattern matching pipelines - but because the defensibility comes from accumulated domain knowledge that's almost impossible to replicate quickly. We've hand-built logic for 16 different VAT code classifications, edge cases in how platforms handle API fields differently, quirks in how bank statement descriptions vary across hundreds of merchants. None of that is patentable. All of it is incredibly hard to reproduce.

A competitor could read a patent filing and build a workaround in months. They can't shortcut two years of discovering that one accounting platform silently ignores a field that every other platform respects, or that merchant descriptions follow completely different patterns at different transaction amounts.

The practical concern with provisionals is the 12-month clock. If you file one, you've committed to either converting to a full patent (expensive, time-consuming) or letting it lapse. At pre-seed, that's a decision you're forcing on your future self at potentially the worst possible time.

If your "core technical approaches" are truly about AI model architecture, that's a different conversation - but if it's mostly about how you apply models to a specific domain, I'd argue your time is better spent going deeper into the domain than drafting patent claims.
by rramadass | 2026-02-12 11:06:11+00:00
Your very comments prove that you are just trolling. The fact that your account was newly created with so pathetic a moniker is a dead giveaway of your intentions.

The thread's topic is "Feynman Lectures" and not "Feynman, his life and behaviour". If you really wanted to discuss the latter you would start a new thread with adequate information and let people decide. Instead, you are actively engaged in steering conversations in this thread with deceptive/manipulative comments.

As the OP, i do get to say what i am expecting out of this thread and call out negative behaviour and irrelevant nonsense.
Show HN: I built a voice keyboard for Android that adapts to whats on the screen
by mansehej | 2026-02-12 11:06:25+00:00
I built Tapfree because I always felt mobile typing feels stuck in the past. When I'm moving fast, my ideas don’t arrive as perfect sentences. They come as fragments, quick reactions, and rough thoughts I need to shape into something coherent.

Most keyboards and dictation tools don’t help much. They transcribe words literally, miss context, butcher names, and leave me fixing formatting by hand. Writing an email, a chat reply, or a document all need very different handling.

What makes Tapfree different is how it understands context. Tapfree uses on-screen context (the text field and surrounding UI), not just the app you’re in, to produce cleaner, more relevant dictation.

It also handles the way people actually talk. You say "Could you get some coffee... sorry, tea on the way back?" and Tapfree writes: "Could you get some tea on the way back?". It catches your corrections mid-sentence so you don't have to go back and fix them.

If you give it a try, I’d love specific feedback:
- Which app or scenario felt noticeably better (or worse) than usual dictation?
- Any "wow" moments with the context understanding?
- What would make it even more useful for you?

I would love all kinds of feedback, as this is very much a side project and I’m still shaping it.
by eesmith | 2026-02-12 11:06:42+00:00
I assumed when you wrote "war being declared" you meant in Constitutional sense which reserves to Congress the power to declare war.

Not in the metaphorical "war on poverty" sort of way.

FWIW, examples in addition to Maduro are Aguinaldo (Philippines), Noriega (Panama), Hussein (Iraq), and Aristide (Haiti).

(Technically speaking, the US didn't recognize Philippine independence so didn't consider Aguinaldo to be its president, but instead a rightful cession from the Kingdom of Spain due to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish–American War, where the US had made a formal declaration of war.)

(Also, the US says Aristide's departure was voluntary.)
by adityaathalye | 2026-02-12 11:07:06+00:00
To add to your critique... The piece proposes fast fashion as a solution to the woes of essentially a bespoke, made-to-order craft. How can this not lead down the path from the alleged Prada-ification to a (inevitable) Zara-ification of the woven product... motifs clashing with motifs; culture and context loudly absent.

Quoting:

"For a heritage boutique, this offers a data-driven way to align traditional korvai patterns with modern market appetites knowing, for instance, that a specific shade of "Cyber Lime" will be trending in Paris next season and weaving it into a classic gopuram border."

Um. No please.

The buyer of a Kanjeevaram (or Paithani, or Navvari, or Balucheri, or any number of other traditions) is looking for something outside of time. The very inheritance exists because it is beauty, art, craft, taste of person-hood and---ultimately indescribable but deeply felt---quality that transcends the generations. To be worn until worn out, and then converted to another timeless piece with which the next few generations would adorn themselves.
by vintermann | 2026-02-12 11:07:52+00:00
Yes, it has been possible for a long time to provide anonymous attestations. But somehow, they also always seem to require that you have something like Google play services running for you to ask for the attestation in the first place. And with PKI, even though they could do with just the public key, they somehow also always insist on generating the keys for you (so they have the private key as well).
by eitally | 2026-02-12 11:08:06+00:00
From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.
by palata | 2026-02-12 11:08:30+00:00
Have you heard of Meta opening a port in the Facebook and Instagram apps and sending them tracking data from the browser [1]? Would you say it meaningfully contributes to Internet privacy?

Or Google being fined for abuse of their dominant position [2]?

Do you think that when you make an LLM request, it uses full homomorphic encryption not to disclose your information?

I guess I don't even have to give an example for Amazon, do I?

> It’s frankly not even hard to find Google authors of RFCs that meaningfully contribute to Internet privacy.

Well I didn't want to say that Google employees are malevolent, or that Google doesn't create good technology. But Big Tech (including Google) clearly regularly abuse their dominant position.

Back to "Google knows everything". Would you say that Google Search is built in a way that the Google servers cannot associate an IP to its search requests? Would you say that Gmail is built in a way that the Google servers don't have access to all the emails? What about calendar, documents, drive? Google maps requests? How does Google offer information about what's happening "nearby" without knowing the location of the device?

And now back to the location in particular: what about the "Find Hub" / "Find my device"? You can go on the website and ask Google where your device is, after you click a popup that says you allow Google to retrieve this information. Doesn't this obviously show that Google has access to it? They could access it without asking the permission, couldn't they?

So to the question: "do we need to develop a new WiFi technology and deploy it in order to have the technical capability of mass surveillance?", the answer is "no, we have the technical capability already". And by "we", we mean "Big Tech".

[1]: https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/
[2]: https://www.techspot.com/news/109360-eu-fines-google-35-bill...
by Pinus | 2026-02-12 11:08:48+00:00
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, turns out to be a false start, whatever. Once all that is fixed, what is left gets tidied up into some sort of digital form, usually program code. I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook.

I suppose there might be a value in stopping right before the tidying-up stage (or perhaps right after it) and summarise the steps that led up to it (including abandoned approaches, and why) into some sort of document but that, for me, would be a digital file somewhere, not paper.
Show HN: SCPN Fusion Core – Tokamak plasma SIM and neuromorphic SNN control
by anulum | 2026-02-12 11:09:10+00:00
SCPN Fusion Core is an open-source Python/Rust suite for tokamak plasma simulation with neuro-symbolic compilation to stochastic spiking neural networks for real-time, fault-tolerant control.

Key features:
- 26 simulation modes (equilibrium, transport, optimizer, flight simulator, neuro-control, etc.)
- Neuro-symbolic compiler: Petri nets → stochastic LIF neurons (sub-ms latency, 40%+ bit-flip resilience)
- Validation: SPARC high-field equilibria + ITPA H-mode database (20 entries, 10 machines) + IPB98(y,2) scaling
- Multigrid solvers, property-based testing, Rust acceleration, Streamlit dashboard
- Install: pip install scpn-fusion

GitHub: https://github.com/anulum/scpn-fusion-core

Built to explore neuromorphic approaches to fusion reactor control. Happy to answer questions about the models, compiler, validation, or performance.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-12 11:09:13+00:00
> If you have a well secured LAN where trust is social SSH gets you nothing. SMTP telnet http being plain were from days when users were able to actually reason about what was happening within their OS

I've had this conversation recently with a "Cyber Architect" who was losing his shit over SNMPv1 on our network passing community strings as plaintext.

Yes. If you sniff the traffic you can see the read-only password, which is left as default, and from that you can deduce that the ODU temperature for the microwave link is 32°C at the moment (pretty toasty for 3° outside air temperature). Big Fucking Whoop.

Concentrate on not having "bad actors" sniffing traffic on our network.

If the burglar is in your kitchen eating your sandwich out of the fridge, the problem is that the burglar is in your kitchen, not that he's eating your sandwich.