MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-08 02:22:51+00:00
America tests nukes and figures out the viability of its stockpile through sophisticated simulations right? Isn’t that what those supercomputers at DOE labs do? I can’t exactly blame other countries for testing however they can, if they don’t have the same capability. Especially in this day and age, where perhaps they fear military action from America and need to feel more confident about their deterrents.
by dwaite | 2026-02-08 02:23:01+00:00
In addition, there is a clause added (IIRC because of the patent shield licensing deal between Novell and Microsoft) that third party patent licensing needs to cover downstream GPLv3 usage. You cannot simply license a patent for your binary distribution.

So it is possible Apple's lawyers read this section as meaning an injunction against GPLv3 code may be infeasible to solve with licensing the patent, and instead require Apple to make changes on a time-table they would not be happy with.

Sticking to GPLv2 lets Apple control the time table it has taken to license, reimplement or remove components which had moved to GPLv3.

I can't tell you why it took them until El Capitan to remove the Emacs install though.
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-08 02:23:14+00:00
I posted this before, but Ill post again - this is one of the few things I feel confident enough to say that most people in the space are doing wrong. You can save my post and reference it when we actually get full self driving (i.e you can take a nap in the backseat while your car drives you), because its going to be implemented pretty much like this:

Humans don't drive well because we map vision policy to actions. We drive well (an in general, manipulate physical objects well), because we can do simulations inside our head to predict what the outcome will be. We aren't burdened by our inability to recognize certain things - when something is in the road, no matter what it is, we auto predict that we would likely collide with that thing because we understand the concept of 3d space and moving within it, and take appropriate action. Sure, there is some level of direct mapping as many people can drive while "spaced out", but attentive driving involves mostly the above.

The self driving system that can actually self drive needs to do the same. When you have this, you will no longer need to do things like simulate driving conditions in a computationally expensive sim. You aren't going to be concerned with training model on edge cases. All you would need to to ensure that your sensor processing results in a 3d representation of the driving conditions, and the model will then be able to do what humans do and explore a latent space of things it can do and predict outcomes then chose the best one.

You want proof? It exists in the form of Mu Zero, and it worked amazingly well. And driving can be easily reformated as a game that the engine plays in a simulator that doesn't involve vision, and learns both the available moves and also the optimal policy.

The reason everyone is doing end to end today is because they are basically trying to catch up to Tesla, and from a business perspective, nobody is willing to put money and pay smart enough people to research this, especially because there is also a legal bridge to cross when it comes to proving that the system can self drive while you napping. But nevertheless, if you ever want self driving, this is the right approach.

Meanwhile, Google who came up with Mu Zero, is now doing more advanced robotic stuff than anyone out there.
by bloqs | 2026-02-08 02:23:33+00:00
and I would ban fanboying such as your username

I agree with you, that it is irritating when people make sweeping statements that casually dismiss a lot of things as not existing when they do, but it's an endless arguement. Operating systems are not the problem, support is. Just making a good operating system isn't what drives adoption.

reducing _pain_ does. Nerds arent good at empathy, so the response is normally "just read x and use y" and call people stupid if they still cant figure it how to use it
Ask HN: The Coming Class War
by fud101 | 2026-02-08 02:23:39+00:00
For years now, it was clear if you wanted to do cutting edge research in ML you needed access to GPUs that could only be provided by billion dollar companies or governments. Now we're seeing the same spillover to general coding, where unless you can spend tokens, you can't compete against those who can pay afford to do that. How does this end?

I might pay $120 a year to GH copilot. I won't pay $2000/month to claude no matter how much hype their users claim, on principle.
by habinero | 2026-02-08 02:23:42+00:00
My unpopular opinion is AI sucks at writing tests. Like, really sucks. It can churn out a lot of them, but they're shitty.

Actually writing good tests that exercise the behavior you want, guard against regressions, and isn't overfitted to your code is pretty difficult, really. You need to both understand the function and understand the structure to do it

Even for hobby projects, it's not great. I'm learning asyncio by writing a matrix scraper and writing good functional tests as you go is worth it to make sure you actually do understand the concepts
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-08 02:24:04+00:00
Virtually all humans of average intelligence are capable of making scientific discoveries -- admittedly minor ones -- if they devote themselves to a field, work at its frontiers, and apply themselves. They are also capable of originality in other domains, in other ways.

I am not at all sure that the same thing is even theoretically possible for LLMs.

Not to be facetious, but you need to spend more time playing with Suno. It really drives home how limited these models are. With text, there's a vast conceptual space that's hard to probe; it's much easier when the same structure is ported to music. The number of things it can't do absolutely outweighs the number of things it can do. Within days, even mere hours, you'll become aware of its peculiar rigidity.
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 02:26:33+00:00
I wouldn’t put vapes in the same category as patented pharmaceuticals.

They are already an unhealthy vice for one thing. They do not require a prescription and are sold over the counter to anyone who presents an ID showing they are of age.

Those vapes were also largely made by relatively fly-by-night manufacturers selling into mostly shady retail shops. Additionally there was (still is? Haven’t kept up on it) no real consensus that vitamin E acetate was a dangerous chemical unfit for purpose.

This is the first time in my lifetime that I can recall of major companies blatantly end-arounding the entire pharmaceutical approval process for a prescription drug. Full on advertising their disregard for the rules on public airwaves and everything.

FDA being slow to react to a public health concern due to an adulterated over the counter product imo is not the same category. This is literally telling the FDA and major pharma “come at me bro” and expecting the delay to be profitable enough to offset any future penalties.
by zdc1 | 2026-02-08 02:27:39+00:00
I believe we say "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to also poke at the fact that there are mechanisms and design decisions (tradeoffs) at play that lead to certain results, and that if we want to change outcomes, we need to change the system.

Votes matter more in some systems than others. Preference voting allows for smaller parties to more easily gain seats while first-past-the-post supports two-party systems. In the UK and AU, the prime minister must hold a seat, and so can be removed from parliament through (a subset of) citizen votes removing them from their seat, even if the majority party stays in power. In the US, the President (who can issue executive orders) is elected by an electoral college--none of whom are directly elected by citizen votes. Maybe it's not a big conspiracy, but these systems are doing what they are known to do, and will do so unless they are changed.

Of course there are systems in place to change these systems, which are also quite hard to utilise. And strangely (or not), no one is rushing to improve voter power and representation. So there's some interesting questions there around what changes can be made that would best improve representation, and what could be blocking those changes from being made.
by blackqueeriroh | 2026-02-08 02:28:33+00:00
because in all of this change we can’t be bothered to imagine a world where people have money without jobs? Do you think billionaires are just going to want to stop making more money?

The best bull case for us reaching luxury gay space communism is that people not working and having near infinite capital to buy whatever they want to enjoy is the only way the billionaires get to see their pot growing forever.
by majormajor | 2026-02-08 02:28:34+00:00
Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.

(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)

Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.
by cjbenedikt | 2026-02-08 02:28:35+00:00
"personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though the media still refers to them as if they are real countries with collective decision-making. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider."
Hmmm...why does that sound so familiar with a major western country??? ;-p
by IhateAI_3 | 2026-02-08 02:28:39+00:00
Please name a single "startup" you've shipped from vibe coding thats gotten a paying customer that you didnt know IRL.

Everyone thinks they're a startup founder now is a major part of the problem. Y'all are falling for the billionaire marketing. Anything that can be built with vibe coding for a startup can be instantly copied by someone else. This makes no sense.
by tombert | 2026-02-08 02:28:44+00:00
I personally think that overeating is an addiction, not a moral failing, and is often the side effect of other mental illnesses.

I don't do this as much as others, but as someone who has suffered from Major Depressive Disorder [1], it can be really easy to eat your feelings away. When I've had really bad depressive episodes, I don't want to cook, I don't want a fucking salad, I mostly just want to feel bad about myself and I end up getting a huge meal at Taco Bell and sadly eating that. Doing that one day isn't that bad. Even doing that two days isn't that bad, but when you have a long extended depressive episode, it can easily become a pattern of weeks where you're getting unhealthy fast food every day.

I know a lot of people act like depression is a moral failing as well [2], but I personally don't think that, and it feels like obesity can be a symptom of major depression. If you ever watch "My 600lb Life", you'll see that a lot of the people on there are really going through serious mental disorders and/or dealing from PTSD from sexual abuse, and the overeating can come as a result from that.

I guess I just feel like it's reductive to say "they did this to themselves". The human brain and human psychology are complicated and irritating.

[1] Fortunately my current set of meds has really helped...medical science is pretty cool sometimes!

[2] Not saying that you said that, to be clear.
by ragall | 2026-02-08 02:29:28+00:00
It also depends on your legal system and how much discretion it allows managers. Let me give you an example: my startup used to allow people to expense a car rental when travelling to HQ in the Bay Area, which was in general cheaper than Ubering everywhere (a daily Corolla is cheaper than two Uber rides per day unless the hotel is extremely close to the office). Some people decided to abuse that, fly in on a Saturday, rent a rather expensive car, drive the whole day around, then expense all that.

After someone noticed this was happening, the CEO decided to forbid expensing car rentals, instead of having to come up with a very detailed policy. The thing is that in my home country, the abusers' managers would have been allowed to simply deny the reimbursement on discretion, on grounds that those joy rides were unreasonable, which would easily hold in court (where a plaintiff would be automatically forced to pay the defender's attorney fees too). But due to the highly litigious US legal system, a CEO can't allow that and companies must have extremely detailed policies, otherwise they risk very costly lawsuits where even if they win they'd lose a lot of money.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-08 02:31:05+00:00
China most certainly can destroy Taiwan. What would be very hard is taking it intact. That needs lots of boots on the ground--and how do you get those boots on the ground when any ship that tries to get too close finds itself facing a variety of seeker weapons. China shoot them down when they are fired from a few miles out? Not likely. Even not near land, look at what happened to the Moskova--targeting a sea skimmer is hard.

And it's a sea battle--drones can pick their own targets and thus can't be jammed. What happens when the ship is met by a hundred drones with explosives? Doesn't take much of a processor to compare the image of a ship with the ocean.
by macintux | 2026-02-08 02:31:24+00:00
I've favorited a fair number of compiler discussions here. Some you may find useful, either for the linked content or the discussions therein:

- Writing a Compiler is Surprisingly Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38182461

- Write your own retro compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591662

- Compiling a Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39216904

- Writing a C Compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41227716

- Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593088

- Working through 'Writing a C Compiler' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44541565

- Build a Compiler in Five Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031220

Personally I found Crafting Interpreters to be a terrific introduction to the key concepts: https://craftinginterpreters.com

(But I'm just a kibitzer, I've never written anything more serious than a DSL in Perl.)
by jmspring | 2026-02-08 02:31:53+00:00
I'm not sure how this guideline makes sense. LLMs are great at dumb things I shouldn't have to type but can be well defined before they write something.

This statement, makes almost zero sense - A perfectly reasonable rule in software organizations is: For greenfield code, LLMs are strictly required for 1st-pass prototyping (also required!). And then: Hand writes (within reason) for production code. Your company will not lose their competitive edge following this guideline, and this includes your hard-earned skills.

"Give me a proxy, written in go, that can handle jwt authentication" isn't your traditional crud stuff, but Claude answers that quite well.
by toss1 | 2026-02-08 02:32:25+00:00
All that very justifiable work to avoid a cloud-connected OS . . . and then switch to OnShape which (afaict) has zero local option and requires a full cloud connection to run at all?

Seems like walking a tightrope across the river to avoid soaking your suit, then jumping in from the dock once you successfully get to the other side?
by theParadox42 | 2026-02-08 02:35:42+00:00
I am excited to see more competitors in this space. Openclaw feels like a hot mess with poor abstractions. I got bit by a race condition for the past 36 hours that skipped all of my cron jobs, as did many others before getting fixed. The CLI is also painfully slow for no reason other than it was vibe coded in typescript. And the errors messages are poor and hidden and the TUIs are broken… and the CLI has bad path conventions. All I really want is a nice way to authenticate between various APIs and then let the agent build and manage the rest of its own infrastructure.
by devin | 2026-02-08 02:35:50+00:00
I agree that Claude does this stuff. I also think the Chinese menus of options it provides are weak in their imagination, which means that for thoroughly specified problem spaces with reference implementations you're in good shape, but if you want to come up with a novel system, experience is required, otherwise you will end up in design hell. I think the danger is in juniors thinking the Chinese menu of options provided are "good" options in the first place. Simply because they are coherent does not mean they are good, and the combinations of "a little of this, a little of that" game of tradeoffs during design is lost.
by IhateAI_3 | 2026-02-08 02:36:03+00:00
Just because a high skilled programmer can use an LLM with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability. You LLM-kiddies are worse than nft people in 2021 claiming they're making art.

I really cant wait until the inference providers 5x their prices and you guys realize you're completely incompetent and that you've tied your competency 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford. You're going to be a character from the movie idiocracy.

Of course you'll still be coping by claiming you're so productive using some budget kimi 2.5 endpoint that consumes all your personal data and trains on your inputs.
by vdupras | 2026-02-08 02:36:07+00:00
It's such a weird take. You have a project, it costs X to make. Either it's worth it or it's not worth it. Some tool might bring the cost down, but the breakdown is the same. If X is too high, don't do the project.

If the tools you use are cheaper, shouldn't it make you more competitive? If the expensive tools are worth it, wouldn't it mean that you can jack your price? Where's the problem?
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-08 02:36:14+00:00
Which is why we must never give Ukraine enough firepower to pose a threat to the Russian regime.

But that does not mean we can't arm them with long range stuff, just in fairly small quantities. A Tomahawk can't take down Russia. A Tomahawk a day raining down in areas away from the battle front--that can make Russia very much want to quit provoking them. Provide such weapons on the basis that the supply will be immediately cut off at status quo ante.
by viraptor | 2026-02-08 02:37:12+00:00
Some questions:

- why patent it when you give permissions via Apache licence anyway?

- you can't use an external keyboard with this, right?

- can you remove content from the middle of the record without breaking signatures? For example if someone makes an online purchase during a break in the writing and forget to turn off the system, is their credit card number forever bound to that text?
by dvt | 2026-02-08 02:38:00+00:00
So weird/cool/interesting/cyberpunk that we have stuff like this in the year of our Lord 2026:

├── MEMORY.md # Long-term knowledge (auto-loaded each session)
├── HEARTBEAT.md # Autonomous task queue
├── SOUL.md # Personality and behavioral guidance

Say what you will, but AI really does feel like living in the future. As far as the project is concerned, pretty neat, but I'm not really sure about calling it "local-first" as it's still reliant on an `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`.

I do think that local-first will end up being the future long-term though. I built something similar last year (unreleased) also in Rust, but it was also running the model locally (you can see how slow/fast it is here[1], keeping in mind I have a 3080Ti and was running Mistral-Instruct).

I need to re-visit this project and release it, but building in the context of the OS is pretty mindblowing, so kudos to you. I think that the paradigm of how we interact with our devices will fundamentally shift in the next 5-10 years.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRrKQl0kzvQ
by samrus | 2026-02-08 02:38:27+00:00
Scaling alone wont get us to AGI. We are in the latter half of this AI summer where the real research has slowed down and even stopped and the MBAs and moguls are doing stupid things

For us to take the next step towards AGI, we need an AI winter to hit and the next AI summer to start, the first half of which will produce the advancement we actually need
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-08 02:38:38+00:00
> if the mainland wants the island, they surround the island on day 1, take over the island on day 2, and install their own government on day 3

Now add typhoon season, the artillery batteries in the mountains, China’s lack of blue-water naval operations (let alone combined arms) and, in terms of allies, the Philippines and Japan.

Sorry. But this analogy reeks of Moscow ca. 2022.
by cman1444 | 2026-02-08 02:38:40+00:00
Of course there's jobs that don't have a productivity boost from AI. The question is whether across the entire economy there will be a 5% GDP boost.

Teachers, cleaners, and daycare workers may see 0% gains, but don't be surprised if that is made up for by 10% gains the productivity of tech, law, marketing, advertising, manufacturing, government, etc. (okay maybe not government).
by blackqueeriroh | 2026-02-08 02:38:44+00:00
Why will you be destitute? Consider this: how do billionaires make most of their money?

I’ll answer you: people buy their stuff.

What happens if nobody has jobs? Oh, that’s right! Nobody’s buying stuff.

Then what happens? Oh yeah! Billionaires get poorer.

There’s a very rational, self-interested reason sama has been running UBI pilots and Elon is also talking about UBI - the only way they keep more money flowing into their pockets is if the largest number of people have disposable income.
by eichin | 2026-02-08 02:39:48+00:00
Back in the 90s gcc did a three-stage build to isolate the result from weakness in the vendor native compiler (so, vendor builds gcc0, gcc0 builds gcc1, gcc1 builds gcc2 - and you compare gcc2 to gcc1 to look for problems.) It was popularly considered a "self test suite" until someone did some actual profiling and concluded that gcc only needed about 20% of gcc to compile itself :-)
by eddythompson80 | 2026-02-08 02:40:47+00:00
No because you literally have no idea what the citizen united ruling was based on what you wrote. Those 99.9% of people use “Citizen United” the way you used it. As a catch all for “corporate political contributions” except it wasn’t that impactful of a ruling regarding that.

If you actually know what it was then answer how does limiting non-electioneering advertisements from PACs for 30 days out of the year changes anything?
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-08 02:40:57+00:00
The Atlantic did a write-up in December [0] about retatrutide availability and they named at least one well known vendor (who also sells tirzepatide, semaglutide, and all the other usual peptides). Not the cheapest vendor, but well known, does the batch lyophilization in the US, still takes credit cards, and gets pretty solid group test participation due to their popularity. And if you know how their pre-sales work, the price premium isn't too terrible, worth it for the test participation IMO.

If you want to know who else to avoid, join the Discord the vendor links to from their web page and ask around in the general discussion topics, people will share.

[0] https://archive.ph/n0daP