MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThrowawayB7 | 2026-02-02 19:19:30+00:00
The difference is that Microsoft didn't receive any direct revenue off of IE and Google had a lot of levers to use (they weren't under antitrust scrutiny at the time) to continue to eat away at IE's market share. It was smart for MS to give up on maintaining their own browser and downright brilliant for them to use their competitor's own browser against them.

On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
by spijdar | 2026-02-02 19:19:42+00:00
Superficially similar, but from a look at the README, it has no polymorphism or generics, which hugely differentiates it from Nim, which leans very, very heavily on templates/generics throughout the entire language/standard library.

Granted, that also means Tomo probably has better incremental compilation, and would likely be more amiable to creating shared libraries. You can do that with Nim, too, but the external interface (generally) has to be "C" semantics (similar to most other "high level" languages).
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-02 19:19:44+00:00
Software is the hardest thing on planet earth. That's why there's this concept of bootcamps. No other profession has this concept of "bootcamps".

Building a plane is easier than building software. That's why they don't have bootcamps for building planes or becoming a rocket engineer. Building rockets or planes as an engineer is a breeze so there's no point in making a bootcamp.

That's the awesome thing about being a swe, it's so hard that it's beyond getting a university degree, beyond requiring higher math to learn. Basically the only way to digest the concept of software is to look at these "tutorials" on the internet or have AI vibe code the whole thing (which shows how incredibly hard it is, just ask chatGPT).

My friend became a rocket engineer and he had to learn calculus, physics and all that easy stuff which university just transferred into his brain in a snap. He didn't have to go through an internet tutorial or bootcamp.
by ProjectBarks | 2026-02-02 19:19:47+00:00
I saw headlines such as ANPA bought Khaby Lames company for ~$900M but nobody is pointing out how sketchy it looks.

What I gathered, the $975M deal was paid in stock = 75,000,000 new ANPA shares to the sellers which is roughly $13 a share.

If they really issue 75M new shares (vs ~12.5M outstanding, ish), doesn't that basically destroy the scarcity and force the price to re-anchor closer to the $13ish deal valuation? Like post, deal you're at ~87.5M shares, so even a ~$1B valuation is like $11/$13 a share not $60/$100/$180.

And... $975M for an influencer operating company sounds totally crazy if there isn't any real revenue/EBITDA that supports it. Does anyone have the actual numbers for Step Distinctive / Khabys business? Any comparable deals where an influencer brand was valued anywhere close to this?

What am I missing?
by rcxdude | 2026-02-02 19:20:18+00:00
I always dreaded trying to create a service with bash-based init scripts. Not only did it involve rolling a heck of a lot yourself (the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things), it varied significantly from distro to distro, and I was never confident I actually got it right (and indeed, I often saw cases where it had most definitely gone wrong). Whereas systemd has a pretty trivial interface for running most anything and having some confidence it'll actually work right (in part because it can actually enforce things, like actually killing every process that's part of a service instead of kind of hoping that killing whats in the PIDfile is sufficient).
by dekhn | 2026-02-02 19:20:58+00:00
The simple model for scp and rsync (it's likely more complex in rsync):
for loop over all files. for each file, determine its metadata with fstat, then fopen and copy bytes in chunks until done. Proceed to next iteration.

I don't know what rsync does on top of that (pipelining could mean many different things), but my empirical experience is that copying 1 1 TB file is far faster than copying 1 billion 1k files (both sum to ~1 TB), and that load balancing/partitioning/parallelizing the tool when copying large numbers of small files leads to significant speedups, likely because the per-file overhead is hidden by the parallelism (in addition to dealing with individual copies stalling due to TCP or whatever else).

I guess the question is whether rsync is using multiple threads or otherwise accessing the filesystem in parallel, which I do not think it does, while tools like rclone, kopia, and aws sync all take advantage of parallelism (multiple ongoing file lookups and copies).
by raincole | 2026-02-02 19:21:09+00:00
I think software was indeed 9/10 accidental activities before AI. Probably still mostly accidental activities with the current LLM.

The essence: query all the users within a certain area and do it as fast as possible

The accident: spending an hour to survey spatial tree library, another hour debating whether to make our own, one more hour reading the algorithm, a few hours to code it, a few days to test and debug it

Many people seem to believe implementing the algorithm is "the essence" of software development so they think the essence is the majority. I strongly disagree. Knowing and writing the specific algorithm is purely accidental in my opinion.
by bonesss | 2026-02-02 19:21:23+00:00
Thinking hard about how CoPilot fits into the MS ecosystem (Power BI, SharePoint, Dynamics, Office entrenchment, etc), and how their consultant mills work, I’m convinced there’s a meaningful space for unnecessary, unpopular, or suboptimal LLM solutions that can still be wildly profitable for MS.

Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations.

Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-02 19:21:38+00:00
Original article: "Efficacy of pink noise and earplugs for mitigating the effects of intermittent environmental noise exposure on sleep" - https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/s...

"Results. Compared to a noise-free control night, EN reduced N3 deep sleep (p < .0001) while PN reduced REM sleep (p < .001). Adding PN to EN worsened sleep structure, despite minor dose-dependent improvements of EN-induced sleep fragmentation and N3 sleep increases. Earplugs mitigated nearly all EN effects on sleep but started failing at the highest EN level (65 dBA). Morning cognition, cardiovascular measures, and hearing were not affected by nighttime noise, but subjective assessments of sleep, alertness and mood were significantly worse after EN and PN exposure.

Conclusions. In contrast to PN, earplugs proved efficacious in mitigating the effects of EN on sleep. Considering the importance of REM sleep for memory, emotion regulation, and neurodevelopment, the negative effects of PN on REM sleep caution against the widespread and indiscriminate use of broadband noise (BN). Additional research on optimal BN color/level and long-term use is needed, especially in vulnerable populations."
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-02 19:21:43+00:00
>ANE is probably the biggest scam "feature" Apple has ever sold.

It is astonishing how often ANE is smeared on here, largely by people who seem to have literally zero idea what they're talking about. It's often pushed by either/or people who bizarrely need to wave a flag.

MLX doesn't use ANE for the single and only reason that Apple hid the ANE behind CoreML, exposing zero public APIs to utilize ANE directly, and MLX -- being basically an experimental grounds -- wanted to hand roll their implementation around the GPU / CPU. They literally, directly state this as the reason. People inventing technical reasons for why MLX doesn't use ANE are basically just manufacturing a fan fiction. This isn't to say that ANE would be suitable for a lot of MLX tasks, and it is a highly optimized, power-efficient inference hardware that doesn't work for a lot of purposes, but its exclusion is not due to technically unsuitability.

Further, the ANE on both my Mac and my iPhone is constantly attenuating and improving my experience. Little stuff like extracting contents from images. Ever browse in Safari and notice that you can highlight text in the image almost instantly after loading a page? Every image, context and features detected effortlessly. Zero fans cycling up. Power usage at a trickle. It just works. It's the same way that when I take a photo I can search "Maine Coon" and get pictures of my cats, ANE used for subject and feature extraction. Computational photography massively leverages the ANE.

At a trickle of power.

Scam? Yeah, I like my battery lasting for more than a couple of minutes.

Apple intended ANE to bring their own NN augmentations to the OS and thus the user experience, and even the availability in CoreML as a runtime engine is more limited than what Apple's own software can do. Apple basically limits the runtime usage to ensure that no third party apps inhibit or restrict Apple's own use of this hardware.
by eesmith | 2026-02-02 19:22:17+00:00
It says "Those wishing to learn more about the Rust Coreutils efforts at the start of 2026 and their successes over 2025 can find the FOSDEM 2026 presentation assets -- the slide deck as well as the video recordings -- at FOSDEM.org"

Anyone else having problems with getting a video from https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DTYYL9-rust-coreutils... ? I get "Service Unavailable".

Or better, know when it will be available again?
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-02 19:22:20+00:00
I mean this failed with the automotive industry. Many different strong laws were passed over the decades to ensure that anyone could repair their car, you can't refuse to sell them parts, you can't sue them for aftermarket, etc. etc.

The end result? You can't do anything to a modern car without going to a manufacturer and using their locked-in ecosystem entirely. They have been caught doing every trick they were told not to do and they get away with it.
by mluogh-xdof | 2026-02-02 19:22:25+00:00
xdof | Robotics Engineers, Infra Engineers, Product Engineers, GTM | SF Bay preferred, NYC & Remote possible for non-robotics roles

At xdof, we're at an inflection point. Frontier labs are racing to build general-purpose robots, and high-quality training data is the bottleneck. We're building the foundation behind the foundation models – the data collection systems, operational capability, exabyte-scale data warehouse, and software toolchain – to help our partners drive the field forward.

Founded by UC Berkeley Robotics PhDs and MechEs, this is a team that executes across software, hardware, and operations faster than I can believe sometimes. This speed and ability to deliver has led to partnerships with many of the top players in the space.

We are not quite yet out of stealth, so not able to share more details here, but are so understaffed relative to demand that I'd like to start semi-public hiring ASAP.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xdof/

If you are interested but can't find a role that suits you, please email me at (check username)
by dang | 2026-02-02 19:22:34+00:00
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858512. Please see the rules at the top of the thread.

I know situations like this are frustrating and the job market in general has a lot of issues, but Who Is Hiring threads aren't a great place to prosecute these topics.

There are links to a lot of past explanations here, in case helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45094555.
by cess11 | 2026-02-02 19:22:55+00:00
I've been making computers obey for close to four decades, and after a stint as developing CTO/'Founder' in a startup-like environment I'm on the lookout for something new. With me you'll get risk-averse compliant systems and product development with a taste for elegance tempered by both business know-how and experience with public sector organisations.

I'm at my strongest on the backend but have no fear of interfaces. Data wrangling and message passing comes easy for me, and if you want me to I'll learn both new programming languages and complex regulations needed to judge what we can and can't do.

A lot of my work experience has been spent on so called legacy code, so that's something I'm good at. Perhaps there are 2 MLOC ticking away on a server that no one has touched in years, perhaps you just bought a competing product and want to chop out the good parts, I'll sit down and fix it and show up on your screen every now and then and tell you how it goes and what it would require to do it faster. You'll also get diagrams and show-and-tells aimed at people with background in non-technical professions, and documentation that smooths the on-boarding of juniors.

English is fine, born into swedish, if you pay me while I do it I'll dust off my german or spanish and aim for fluency within a year. At work I'm not as grumpy as I might be when posting off here, I'm actually pretty easy-going and quite solution oriented, as it is required when doing the kind of work for lawyers, the government and profitable B2B customers that I have.

If you have financing and would like to build a business doing software due diligence, e.g. towards investors, creditors, bankruptcy lawyers or whatever, then I'd really, really like to come into contact with you. That's what I've been doing the past few years but didn't have the organisation to bring to stable profitability.

Location: Sweden
Remote: Yes, ~full remote since 2019, don't care where you are
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: I'll be able to figure most things out but have strong experience in Java, PHP, Elixir, SQL, testing, Linux. Some experience in CI/CD, cloud/OpenShift, distributed systems.
Résumé/CV: Available on request
Email: hk atsign internetpatrullen dotsign se
by lelandbatey | 2026-02-02 19:23:00+00:00
It's typically a disk-latency thing, as just stat-ing the many files in a directory can have significant latency implications (especially on spinning HDDs) vs opening a single file (the tar) and read-()ing that one file in memory before writing to the network.

If copying a folder with many files is slower than tarring that folder and the moving the tar (but not counting the untar) then disk latency is your bottleneck.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-02 19:23:35+00:00
Our biggest cost multiplier was "conversational drift" - not the initial call, but what happens when you let users iterate.

In our email marketing tool, a user might say "make it more punchy" → AI rewrites → "actually, more professional" → rewrite → "can we A/B test both versions?" → now you're generating multiple variants. One "simple" email could spiral into 15+ LLM calls.

What worked for us:

1. *Session-level budgets, not request-level.* We cap total tokens per session rather than per call. Users can iterate freely within their budget, but can't inadvertently 10x their usage.

2. *Explicit "done" signals.* Instead of letting users endlessly refine, we added a clear "I'm happy with this" button that closes the generation loop. Sounds UX-y but it cut our average calls-per-task by 60%.

3. *Cascade to cheaper models for iteration.* First generation uses Claude 3.5. Tweaks and refinements use Haiku. Users can't tell the difference for small edits, and it cut iteration costs ~80%.

4. *Cache aggressively at the semantic level.* "Make it shorter" and "condense this" should hit the same cache key. We use embeddings to identify semantically similar requests and serve cached results when possible.

The counterintuitive insight: your biggest cost driver is probably user behavior, not model choice. The difference between GPT-4 and Claude matters less than how you architect the interaction loop.
by ProjectBarks | 2026-02-02 19:23:49+00:00
Found a good Forbes Article [https://web.archive.org/web/20260201051310/https://www.forbe...]

> Hong Kong-based Rich Sparkle Holdings (ANPA) reported to the SEC on Jan. 9 it was acquiring Lame's Step Distinctive Limited, and announced the $975 million all-stock transaction closed in a press release two days later.

> Rich Sparkle boasted the deal would offer a "structured, exclusive, full-chain, platform-style commercialization system" around Lame, who would be a "controlling shareholder," and whose likeness would be replicated by an "AI Digital Twin."

> Soon after, Rich Sparkle's stock skyrocketed over 650%, reaching a high of $180.64 per share on January 15, with Lame's stake worth $6.6 billion (based on his 49% ownership of Step Distinctive, which gave him a 41% stake in its buyer), though due to limited disclosure requirements for foreign entities, it's unclear whether Lame sold any shares.

> Rich Sparkle had first listed on Nasdaq six months prior in July, in a small offering of 1.25 million shares priced at $4 each with an implied enterprise value of about $50 million, according to SEC filings, and it disclosed 2024 revenue of under $6 million from "designing and printing high quality financial materials."

> Rich Sparkle's sudden shift in focus, explosive stock growth and quick crash---it's dropped as low as $41, 77% from its peak---has some critics raising "red flags."

> Lame, who has over 160 million followers on TikTok and 78 million on Instagram, only commented on the deal 11 days after Rich Sparkle announced it had closed, saying "Congratulations to the team at ANPA very excited to be a shareholder and looking forward to doing great things!" (Lame and Rich Sparkle have not responded to Forbes' requests for comment).

> Based on Rich Sparkle's most recent stock price, Lame's net worth appears to be $3 billion, but given its tiny float of less than 5%, Forbes would value it based on its financials and not its stock price, meaning he's nowhere close to being a billionaire.
by lowbloodsugar | 2026-02-02 19:23:52+00:00
>If you largely accept their edits unchanged, your codebase will accrue massive technical debt over time and ultimately slow you down vs semi-automatic LLM use.

Worse, as its planning the next change, it's reading all this bad code that it wrote before, but now that bad code is blessed input. It writes more of it, and instructions to use a better approach are outweighed by the "evidence".

Also, it's not tech debt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27990979#28010192
by 13415 | 2026-02-02 19:23:52+00:00
I have to strongly disagree with that. I provably never was as productive as when I used REALbasic, which was a classical RAD tool. I sold the software made with it successfully for quite a while.

As most people here probably know, it's now called Xojo and in my opinion both somewhat outdated and expensive. So I'm not recommending it, but credit to were it's due and it certainly was due for early versions of REALbasic when it was still affordable shareware.

The problem with all RAD tools seems to be that they eventually morph into expensive corporate tools no matter what their origins were. I don't know any cross-platform exception (I don't count Purebasic as RAD and it's also not structured).

As for AI, it seems to be just the same. The right AI tool accelerates the easy parts so you have more time for the hard parts. Another thing that bothers me a lot when alleged "professionals" are arguing against everyday computing for everyone. They're accelerating the death of general computing platforms and in the end no one will benefit from that.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-02-02 19:25:04+00:00
I own one (a Kubota L3302) with a 33 HP engine, and there are a few guys around me who have 25 HP subcompacts (Kubota, Kioti, and JD) that do similar work to mine. It's astonishing how much everything around those 25hp tractors stinks of diesel. All the time. And how everything gets coated in a fine black greasy dust. I have very little of that.

I've read before that for the average homeowner, the particulate/NOx/CO emissions from their little 5 HP 4-stroke carbureted lawnmower and 40cc 2-stroke carbureted blower/stringtrimmer/etc are often greater than that of their 150 HP automobile - which has an ECU and oxygen sensors and fuel injectors and catalytic converters and so on.

The price bump to go up to the 33 HP engine with the emissions controls was significant (much more than the 8HP performance bump), and every 30 hours or so it wants to run a "regen" cycle which always seems to be at the worst possible moment in my workload, but I feel a lot less guilty about running it knowing that my exhaust isn't nearly as bad for the environment and for my lungs as it could be at a slightly lower performance tier.
by yann-gael | 2026-02-02 19:25:16+00:00
Digital Forensics is the process of identifying, collecting analyzing and preserving digital evidence from computers, mobile devices, network or cloud systems. The purpose being to support crime investigation, legal proceedings, cybersecurity response and corporate investigations with the key principle of maintaining integrity evidence so as to ensure admissibility in court. At the East Africa Forensic Conference, it was shown that the cybercrime issue has proved to be a thorn to multiple countries and in other cases not even caring for nation borders to the point of showing the need for international cooperation so as to combat cybercrimes as the perpetrators will use national borders and jurisdictions to their advantage.
by tylerappeared | 2026-02-02 19:25:24+00:00
Range Finance | Mclean, Virginia - On-site | Software Engineers (Senior/Staff/Principal) | Full-time https://www.range.com/public/careers

We're building the first AI wealth platform. Hiring senior+ software engineers to partner closely with our co-founders and engineering leadership team. We're a Series C company with ~90 people passionate about making wealth management better, faster, and cheaper for every household. We're open to relocating candidates. Email me (tyler at range dot com) your LinkedIn profile if you have strong technical experience and you're interested!

Stack: Claude, Node, GraphQL, React, Typescript, AWS Comp: $150 - 300k base + equity