MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mickelsen | 2026-02-03 01:45:10+00:00
Where are we? Probably talking to AI instead of posting, of course, getting our dopamine kick out of an autotelic dialogue, then moving on to the next thing.

But seriously, I haven't seen actual back and forth exchanges between bots, maybe those don't make it to the front page or get downvoted to death quickly? Some people do proofread their comments with AI before posting though.
by yicmoggIrl | 2026-02-03 01:45:13+00:00
> If getting people to review code is that hard that seems like a problem for our new AI age. AI coding appears to rely on getting people to review a lot code and assumes those people will catch the errors.

This is precisely what many of us have been repeating incessantly, for ages now. AI is boosting the wrong part of the ecosystem. It only makes the existent bottlenecks more painful.

Many maintainers get exhausted by code reviews, and recharge themselves through coding. The latter is what AI takes away. It demotes engineers to "AI slop reviewers". I don't know why anybody would sign up for that; IMO it leads to immediate burnout.
by moralestapia | 2026-02-03 01:45:43+00:00
>Just imbest[1] and it will grow exponentially.

That's how that argument sounds like, particularly when you hear it from someone who is as broke as it can be.

It's easy to type those ideas in a comment, or a novel, or a scientific paper ... bring them to reality, oh surprise! that's the hard part.

1: The dumb version to invest
by ericsaf | 2026-02-03 01:45:46+00:00
It could all be done with Claude Code and tools. But it 'just works' and has done all the plumbing for you. The built-in memory systems help too, but again that can be done with Claude Code or others. I think this is just a step in the pre-build systems that work how you want instead of having to work through every bit yourself. I'm sure the big boys are working on more polished offerings that will be cleaner. The Open AI Codex app that just came out today for example.
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-02-03 01:46:04+00:00
Actually the Trump administration is trying to strip legal status from people and deport them by way of an obscure law that gives the Secretary of State the discretion to do so if they deem those people a threat to the foreign policy goals of the US.

If these laws are still on the books when the next D administration takes over, they should use them against Elon, Thiel, etc - strip them of US citizenship, deport them, and nationalize their companies (followed with repealing those laws)
by doctorwho42 | 2026-02-03 01:48:14+00:00
The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years.

We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.

Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?

Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.
by Fogest | 2026-02-03 01:48:50+00:00
I see what you're saying, but I also know that companies do these kinds of things all the time. It's very normal for companies to move around like this if it results in better financials. I don't see how that really makes this "financial gymnastics". Pretty much every company out there does some funny things with the numbers in order to reduce their tax burden. I wouldn't doubt this is the same kind of thing. If xAI plans to launch a ton of servers into the sky, it kind of makes sense for them to be apart of a company they also own that just so happens to launch satellites.

Starlink is also a company under SpaceX. Would you argue that is also financial gymnastics? Is it much different from what Starlink does? Instead of launching satellites to be a world wide ISP, they are launching them to be an AI provider.

I just don't see how this compares to the quote, otherwise it would apply to so many companies, including other ones already under SpaceX.

To me this just doesn't seem related and seems like a pretty big stretch likely biased by people who dislike AI and Elon.
by orwin | 2026-02-03 01:49:00+00:00
This isn't a good analogy though. It's not blaming a kitchen knife, it's blaming a voice activated auto turret.

Or rather, blaming a car. Yes, a bad driver is way more dangerous than a good driver, but even the best driver can make a mistake. Like cars, it's an inherently flawed piece of technology, and like cars, its benefits are too high for most of us to ignore. Way better analogy than my auto turret one.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-03 01:49:02+00:00
> In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robotaxi-grade sensors—similar to those used by Waymo—still command higher prices of approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit, the total cost of a comprehensive autonomous sensor suite in China has fallen to roughly $2,100, compared to the tens of thousands required just a few years ago. This rapid price erosion has enabled LiDAR to become a standard feature in Chinese electric vehicles priced as low as $25,000, far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets.

I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-03 01:49:15+00:00
no the radiator planes are in the shade, so you can increase the height of a pyramidal shaped satellite for a constant solar panel base, and thus enjoy arbitrarily low rest temperatures, check my calculation which I added.

for a target temperature of 300K that would mean the pyramid height would be a bit less than 3 times higher than the square base side length h=3L.

I even handicapped my example by only counting heat radiation from 2 of the 4 panels, assuming the 2 others are simply reflective (to make the calculation of a nearby warm Earth irrelevant).
by cruppelt | 2026-02-03 01:49:53+00:00
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by fzeroracer | 2026-02-03 01:50:34+00:00
> Consider incident handling. What if your AI sets up monitoring that detects errors or outages, wakes up an agent, gives it the problem context, then sets it to work so it can debug the issue, produce a fix, then deploy it? You now have an end-to-end system that works 24/7. Many issues will probably be resolved before you've even noticed them.

Have you ever been actually involved in trying to fix an error or outage? Like actually on an on-call rotation where you had to deal with reported issues?
by drnick1 | 2026-02-03 01:51:10+00:00
> It's copyright law which should go away.

This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.

Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.
by saalweachter | 2026-02-03 01:51:12+00:00
I think we're around stage 4 of:

1. Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
2. How dare you! You're just jealous!
3. Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
4. Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
5. Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-03 01:52:42+00:00
I'm not sure it's even uncertainty. Authority carries a bigger stick, and things like witch hunts and burning of heretics and rebel peasants, have deselected independence of mind over the centuries. Society has an unconscious memory of what used to happen when people disagreed. And still does in some places.

People today worship the white lab coat and the military/police uniform in the same way their ancestors honoured witch doctors/shamans and the tribe's warriors. They assume the former groups will dish out good advice and the latter will protect them. The general public experiences this in hospitals and schools, with psychiatric hospitals being the most extreme version of hierarchy. I've mentioned that I currently have two friends who are stuck in a mental hospital, and I have told both of them that they need to be respectful of staff if they want to get out sooner. The woman seems to have had her day passes revoked, and been placed on a more secure ward, after being cheeky to staff. Maybe the staff were awful but she isn't in much of a position to negotiate — she's been in there for nine months.
by keeda | 2026-02-03 01:53:03+00:00
> astronomical overprovisioning

???

Literally all the cloud providers have been reporting severe capacity crunches for the past few quarters -- to the tune of backlogs of triple-digit billions each. As a reminder, a backlog or "Remaining Performance Obligation" (RPO) is money their customers have committed to them but they could not realize because they didn't have enough capacity to serve their workloads. Which is why they are all committing to double-digit billions each in AI CapEx spend over the next few quarters.

And most of them (aside from Oracle, which is trying to borrow its way into this gold rush) are investing money from their double digit billions in profit (per quarter!) into this spend... money that they could have otherwise comfortably held on to for something more palatable to share-holders.

Revenue and return on investment is a valid concern to bring up in this whole GenAI shebang; demand is not.
by cameronc56 | 2026-02-03 01:53:42+00:00
Hello! I'm Cam, a Senior DevOps/Devex engineer. For the past 12 years I've specialized in improving the developer experience with effective and reliable CICD, Tooling, and Infrastructure. I have experience building CICD build/test/release pipelines, developer environments, and self service tooling/infrastructure from the ground up at multiple orgs of varying sizes, and more recently have been involved in AI tooling setup, configuration and education.
Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Preferably remote, open to hybrid in the Seattle/Bellevue area.

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by waterTanuki | 2026-02-03 01:53:43+00:00
I don't understand why I would use this over aws CDK in python.

cdk is already an abstraction over the javascript cdk,

which is an abstraction over cloudformation,

which is an abstraction over the api..

I just want to navigate some of the claims made by Stelvio and others in this thread and see if maybe I'm missing something after reading the docs:

- Ship Python to AWS in minutes, not days: I can already do this with cdk? It's highly dependent on the project requirements. AWS already provides a sleuth of high level constructs with sensible defaults.

- great for really small apps where you want your resource definitions colocated with the code using them: CDK is just code? You can put it all in one place or split it into files. I don't get how this is new.

- easier to manage IAM permissions this is the bread and butter of cdk. I can simply do Resource.grantRead(lambdaFunction) without touching IAM. Who was complaining about this?

The only advantage I see here over CDK is using Pulumi as the underlying resource engine, which I admit performs better on deployment speed. But then we arrive to the question: Why not just use Pulumi, which already gives me IaC in python?
Show HN: IntoError – Thiserror for Swift
by tikhop | 2026-02-03 01:54:12+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

Most of the time I write in Swift, but when I switch to Rust it's always a pleasure to have typed errors + thiserror crate. When Swift introduced typed throws, I was so happy and tried to apply it whenever it's suited, but most of the time ended up writing conversion from one type to another.

With IntoError, I tried to achieve something similar to reduce the amount of boilerplate code.

GitHub: https://github.com/tikhop/IntoError

Happy to answer questions.
Thank you.
by gary_0 | 2026-02-03 01:54:16+00:00
As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines didn't have enough memory to compile the whole program at once (or even just hold multiple source files in memory at a time). Although later on, doing it this way did allow for faster recompilation because you didn't need to re-ingest source files that hadn't been changed (although this stopped being true for template-heavy C++ code).
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-03 01:54:18+00:00
I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina.

I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
by elihu | 2026-02-03 01:54:54+00:00
Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that.

One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.

AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.

I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.
by FridgeSeal | 2026-02-03 01:54:59+00:00
Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now!

Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time.

Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.
by decimalenough | 2026-02-03 01:55:47+00:00
The biggest problem with satellite internet was the costs involved, which SpaceX has pretty much solved.

Datacenters in space, on the other hand, are a terrible idea because of the laws of physics, which will not get "solved" anytime soon. But don't take it from me, listen to this guy with a PhD in space electronics who worked at NASA and Google;

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
by jppope | 2026-02-03 01:55:47+00:00
This is why I come to this site. Obviously, Twitter's financials are struggling and theres more than a few people rich people who don't want to take the hit... but we can all drop that for a second to discuss the plausibility of data centers in space. Some links and comments I enjoyed:

* https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
* "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
* "I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets."
* "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap."
* "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper]
* "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth."
* "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-03 01:55:48+00:00
please check my didactic example here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862869

"Radiators can shadow each other," this is precisely why I chose a convex shape, that was not an accident, I chose a pyramid just because its obvious that the 4 triangular sides can be kept in the shade with respect to the sun, and their area can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the height of the pyramid for a constant base. A convex shape guarantees that no part of the surface can appear in the hemispherical view of any other part of the surface.

The only size limit is technological / economical.

In practice h = 3xL where L was the square base side length, suffices to keep the temperature below 300K.

If heat conduction can't be managed with thermosiphons / heat pipes / cooling loops on the satellite, why would it be possible on earth? Think of a small scale satellite with pyramidal sats roughly h = 3L, but L could be much smaller, do you actually see any issue with heat conduction? scaling up just means placing more of the small pyramidal sats.
by dgoldstein0 | 2026-02-03 01:56:13+00:00
Cooling.

Radiative cooling is the only option, and it basically sucks vs any option you could use on earth.

Second, ai chips have a fixed economic life beyond which you want to replace them with better chips because the cost of running them starts to outpaxe the profit they can generate. This is probably like 2-3 years but the math of doing this in space may be very different. But you can't upgrade space based data centers nearly as easily as a terrestrial data center.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-03 01:56:21+00:00
This is really underselling it tbh. Any land that's growing corn in a developed country is likely top 1% of land on earth. Half of the earth is desert and tundra. Which is still incredibly easier to work with than space because you can ship there with a pickup very cheaply. Maybe when nevada and central australia are wall-to-wall solar panels we can check back on space.
by Fogest | 2026-02-03 01:56:26+00:00
I'm gonna be honest, I really don't see how these opinion pieces are relevant. There are a lot of smart people working at these companies and I'm sure they have done a lot of research and work into determining that this is a viable thing to try. I am going to put more faith into that than somebodies opinion online.

It seems like a lot of people are very biased on this topic and want to see this fail because of who the company is. This author of this piece you linked appears to be both anti-AI and anti-Elon for example.

We also are unaware if there is some bigger strategy at play here and a bigger vision then what is currently being shared. I like to see companies try to innovate and take risks. I would like to try and be optimistic about things.
by angelalu427 | 2026-02-03 01:56:59+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: on-site or remote

Willing to relocate: yes (NYC)

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, FastAPI, Flask, Express, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker

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I'm a full-stack software engineer with 3+ years of experience in the Python and JavaScript ecosystems. I recently built Chunkwise (https://chunkwise.github.io/), an open-source, web-based platform that enables visual and quantitative evaluation of document chunking strategies and deploys validated strategies to production RAG systems via automated ETL pipelines.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-03 01:57:03+00:00
Well, the primary limit on computation today is heat dissipation (the "power wall"). You either need to limit power so your phone or laptop doesn't destroy itself, or pay more to evacuate heat produced by the chips in your data center, which has its own efficiency curve.

If we suddenly lose 2 orders of magnitude of heat produced by our chips, that means we can fit 2 orders of magnitude more compute in the same volume. That is going to be destabilizing in some way, at the very least because you will get the same amount of compute in 1% the data center square footage of today; alternatively, you will get 100-900x the compute in today's data center footprint. That's like going from dial-up to fiber.