MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by turtlesdown11 | 2026-02-04 12:51:38+00:00
> by the guy who keeps doing the impossible

What exactly has Elon done that's "impossible"? Like the Boring Company where he promised 1,000x faster boring? It turned into a mile or two of a poorly routed hole with some Teslas tossed down into it. He and his shills hand waved away the problem, confident their brilliance would allow them to dig 1,000x faster than modern commercial boring. It never happened.

The only impossible thing Elon has done is make fantasy claims and real people fall for it.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 12:52:03+00:00
It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.

Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
Show HN: A 3D chessboard sandbox with optional WebGPU path tracing
by danjl | 2026-02-04 12:52:20+00:00
I wanted to explore GPU ray tracing, so I built a free chess board that feels like playing at a café in real life.

The goal was over-the-board (OTB) realism. It’s a physics-based sandbox where you manually drag pieces, move the rook for castling, and clear captured pieces yourself. You can even knock them over. The original idea came from my friend, Drew Olbrich (lunarskydiving.com), who built an SGI-based version of this concept at PDI in the '90s.

I spent three decades writing rendering code at PDI/DreamWorks and NVIDIA. I wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch in WebGPU. It defaults to an optimized rasterized "fast path" but if you have a good GPU, you can enable a real-time path tracer in the settings. I implemented this using a 4-layer depth-peeled G-Buffer and Hierarchical Z-Buffer DDA for ray marching, supporting multi-bounce GI and environment map importance sampling.

The scene is lit entirely by a single HDRI environment map, with no local light sources. Since I’m a programmer and not a lighting artist, I’ve exposed all material settings for you to tweak and share.

For multiplayer, I used WebRTC (via PeerJS) to avoid central server lag. The app integrates with Lichess.org to challenge your existing friends, or you can play a local Stockfish web worker. Each client runs its own rigid body simulation to keep the physics responsive while the logical game state stays synced.

The app requires WebGPU (Chrome 113+, Edge 113+, or Safari 17.4+). Tested on latest Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android. It might take several seconds to load the graphics resources if you have a slow network connection.

I’d love to hear how the performance holds up on your hardware, and suggestions for future features, like adding refractions, allowing spectators, or annotations?
by duxup | 2026-02-04 12:53:05+00:00
I wonder about that.

I'm older now, work with a lot of great young peers. Their lifestyle though at that age is nothing like mine was. I worked through school (admittedly because I wasn't very good at school). My first real jobs just barely paid for everything. First apartment was pretty, spartan. Eating out or going out was infrequent.

That's not the lifestyle I see today. I don't blame younger folks for wanting it, it's shown to them everywhere. But the expectations are different and living them has financial consequences too.
by st_goliath | 2026-02-04 12:53:50+00:00
It's a DataExpert OPTI-495SX: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dataexpert-opti-495sx

It is running some AMI BIOS variant with a copyright date of 1992, I currently don't have the exact version string around to compare with the ROM dumps on retroweb. vbindiff says the "F" and "M" images are identical and the "H" only has a few 1-byte differences, mostly typos in ASCII strings.

I've written a small boot sector program once that tries out memory and CPU information gathering techniques, so I know the INT 15h, E820h, E801h are not implemented but INT 12h and INT 15h AH=88h return something sane. When I have more than 16M installed, the later reports the full 31M of HIMEM, but I'm not sure how the ISA memory hole factors into this.

From what I saw glancing at the scanning code yesterday, syslinux 6.x should fall back onto AH=88h if AX=E820/E801 doesn't work. It's interesting to know that this worked in older SYSLINUX, I'm curious to check out what changed.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-04 12:54:09+00:00
You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.

That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.

With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.

They must be able to control their printers from their phone.

The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "

Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".
by williamcotton | 2026-02-04 12:55:26+00:00
Photography’s rapid commercialisation [21] meant that many painters – or prospective painters – were tempted to take up photography instead of, or in addition to, their painting careers. Most of these new photographers produced portraits. As these were far cheaper and easier to produce than painted portraits, portraits ceased to be the privilege of the well-off and, in a sense, became democratised [22].

Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].

https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...
by duskdozer | 2026-02-04 12:56:21+00:00
There's clearly a gap in how or for what LLM-enthusiasts and I would use LLMs. When I've tried it, I've found it just as frustrating as you describe, and it takes away the elements of programming that make it tolerable for me to do. I don't even think I have especially high standards - I can be pretty lazy for anything outside of work.
by smashedtoatoms | 2026-02-04 12:56:37+00:00
Isn't it our responsibility to own our dependencies? I get this is frustrating, but if your client deliverables hinge on your $200 subscription to meet, you need to figure out some redundancy.

The need to reimburse for time down, but not for lost revenue/opportunity. That's our responsibility, as builders, to plan for.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-04 12:56:58+00:00
I did a recent Xoom (owned by Paypal) vs Wise analysis recently. I couldn't believe just how bad Xoom's exchange rates are. This makes me think Paypal is just not competitive as a company. If they're this far behind Wise in cross border transfers, are they also this far behind other competitors in other payment areas?

To send $20 to GBP, you get 11.48 GBP with Xoom and 14.57 GBP with Wise.

To send $100 to GBP, you get 66.45 GBP with Xoom and 72.85 GBP with Wise.

To send $1000 to GBP, you get 709.70 GBP with Xoom and 728.54 GBP with Wise.

To send $10,000 to GBP, you get 7,154 GBP with Xoom and 7,286.24 GBP with Wise.

Sources:

https://www.xoom.com/united-kingdom/send-money

https://wise.com/gb/currency-converter/usd-to-gbp-rate?amoun...
by melvinroest | 2026-02-04 12:57:02+00:00
What I know from my marketing experience is this: tools are much better forms of content marketing than content itself is. It's more unique, more novel, less rehashed and so on. But this only makes sense if you can then offer a service behind the tool.

If I understand it correctly, you are betting that you can basically do some implementation consulting. That could work. It depends on who comes on your path.

In your case, what you could also do is offer lifetime access for free but only for a limited time. Be upfront that it is a marketing thing. Also be upfront that if you happen to become a billion dollar business that they'd still have free access.

I'm going to do something similar-ish. I'm currently building a course for people to learn SQL at a data analyst level. I'm going to offer it for free. I think people should just know SQL, period. The idea is also that it will be a marketing tool for other courses or services that I'll develop that are related to that space. I'm not sure where I want to go yet since I'm just focusing on the SQL course for now. But I know it can work and I find it nice to think that I'll help the world be better at SQL for free, regardless of whether they need any service from me or not.

And I know there are other free SQL courses out there. A good one is here [1]. But I'll be honest, I still paid for SQL courses despite having seen that. So I'm addressing those pain points. It's a good SQL guide, but it didn't wet my appetite to learn it and I still went the paid route. Also, it's more comprehensive, a data analyst doesn't need to know certain sections.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents and context for how I came about these thoughts. I hope it helps.

[1] https://gvwilson.github.io/querynomicon/
by muyuu | 2026-02-04 12:57:32+00:00
there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU because it's clear that this is a very plausible endgame

currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
by JoBrad | 2026-02-04 12:57:51+00:00
My repos are littered with agent-specific files containing “treat this other file as if it were this one.” We’re moving so fast on so many fronts, and it seems odd that this is the persistent problem. It doesn’t even help lock folks into one agent, so I’m not clear why the industry hasn’t yet standardized on one project-specific file name yet.
by dhab | 2026-02-04 12:57:58+00:00
By combining ai with space, in addition to any other plays that he might be playing around legal or financial areas, he's positioning (marketing) spaceX for the bandwagon that everyone else might jump into to deploy a space datacentre. He's providing the medium (spacex rockets) to realise this potentially unfeasible idea. He makes additional money that way - to then create a new type of money-making fuel after that. HN audience might be calculative - but the rest of the population is far less so.

This might also be a new vehicle to mask any space warfare technology deployments.
by energy123 | 2026-02-04 12:59:02+00:00
There was some credible analysis that I don't have the link to which estimated 50% gross margins for OpenAI, largely eaten up by operational expenses. So not awful unit economics, but not good either.

Assuming that's even true, the big asterisk is uncertainty around efficiency gains in the future. The intelligence divided by cost ratio is changing very quickly. It is hard to make confident predictions more than 3 months out.
by red75prime | 2026-02-04 13:00:01+00:00
A giant space datacenter with square kilometers of solar panels doesn't make sense. A cluster of Starlink-sized satellites, which orbit near each other(1) and which are connected using laser-links might make sense.

(1) There are orbital arrangements that allow satellites to stay close together with minimal orbital corrections. Scott Manley mentioned this in one of his videos.
by catapart | 2026-02-04 13:00:18+00:00
I've got no dog in this fight, since I don't use any AI, but the math feels unfinished in this. Calculated the $150USD/day for the loss, but not the $X for how much the app is speeding you up when you are able to use it. Obviously the net loss would be the benefit minus the loss. So, unless the claim is that you use the AI and it gives you no performance enhancement whatsoever (in which case, why use it?), then the numbers are a bit incomplete.

That said, I do feel like this is just one person's way of coming around to the realization that they don't actually need this product. At least not in this form. One more step towards normalizing local-only llms that produce better results with smaller scopes and fewer resources.
by mpalmer | 2026-02-04 13:00:32+00:00
This is inane.

Someone posing as a freelance dev trying to con Anthropic out of money they themselves would be incapable of making on their own.

Can't even write their own impassioned write-up.

Whoever prompted Claude to write this: figure out what YOU can do that's actually marketable. You don't seem to have found it yet.
by crote | 2026-02-04 13:00:58+00:00
Prusa used to be king.

Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.
Show HN: Crnd – Cron daemon built for scripts and AI agents
by ysm0622 | 2026-02-04 13:01:04+00:00
Been using cron forever but every modern alternative wants me to click through dashboards or write 50 lines of yaml. So I built crnd (pronounced "crowned") - just a CLI that does what you tell it.

Main thing: no prompts, no interactive wizards. Just commands that work in scripts.

`crnd schedule -n backup -s "0 2 * * *" -- rsync -a ~/docs ~/backup`

Thats it. Jobs live in a toml file that hot-reloads. Daemon runs as a real OS process, not some container abstraction.

Also supports one-time scheduled jobs which cron cant do:
`crnd schedule -n reminder -i 5m -- say "stretch break"`

Built it mainly because I'm using AI coding agents and they kept choking on interactive prompts. Now they can just parse --json output and schedule stuff.

No cloud, no docker, no account. Just a single binary.

https://github.com/ysm-dev/crnd

Would love feedback - especially if youre automating things with scripts or agents.
by trashb | 2026-02-04 13:01:40+00:00
From what I understand it is in part swapping it, in part upgrading it. Some of it is preventative some of it is reactive. They could overbuild the hardware and slowly disable capacity I think that will not really work. Data centers are static in infrastructure but not in the systems running within them. Actually they are constantly changing to meet the needs.

Overbuilding also comes with a cost when talking about space, it is still very costly to get stuff up there and there is limited bandwidth downstream, you want to balance those two. So if you're overbuilding it costs a lot to get up there, if you disable what's up there you don't fully utilize the bandwidth.

For example AI data centers now use very different hardware compared to 5 or 10 years ago that upgrade path is just a lot harder when your data center is in space.
by acdha | 2026-02-04 13:01:47+00:00
If you trust Microsoft enough to run their operating system, you trust them enough to develop a package manager.

Suppose, for example, that they caught up to where Debian was 30 years ago and Windows shipped with a default list of sources for the core OS to which you could add your internal or preferred partners (e.g. Adobe in many companies). Literally millions of systems wouldn’t have been compromised because they had unpatched apps. If they’d had a curated list of responsible vendors, multiple generations of people wouldn’t have been trained that it’s normal to run installers because a web page told you so.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-04 13:02:13+00:00
i have often pondered if the (sometimes facetiously, sometimes seriously) postulated AI utopia scenario of humans who don’t need to work but can devote their time to art and recreational pursuits, might be a hellscape for many industrious people.

This essay captures that.

Even the pure artist, for whom utility may not seem to matter, manufactures meaning not just from creative exploration directly, but also from the difficulty (which can take many forms) involved in doing something genuinely new, and what they learn from that.

What happens to that when we even have “new” on tap.
by xtiansimon | 2026-02-04 13:03:04+00:00
> “…big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.”

My work uses these services and it’s interesting to see the divide between companies who have documented APIs (some also with “marketplaces”), and others who have many thousands of dollars partnerships license requirements to get API access.

Or companies who are very restrictive about what they will let you do with their API, presumably in an effort to control the ecosystem around their products—whether it’s because they fear being open would devalue their product, or they have a strong notion of their market position and won’t admit any integration which upsets their governance.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 13:03:07+00:00
> are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics.

We definitely do not agree on that point. I mean sure, I can imagine a scenario where a company chooses not to publish in a particular language for a political reason. But I do not believe that is typically the case.

If I pull up a Japanese ActivityPub node and notice that the people there are posting in Japanese (not English!) is that political? I don't see how. They're using the language that is convenient for them in that context. So too a Chinese outfit publishing documentation in Chinese for a chip they only ever intended to sell domestically. Or perhaps they fully intended to export it but decided to cut costs by not bothering to translate the documentation. Cutting costs is a universal pressure that transcends all boundaries. Working in one's native language doesn't seem even remotely politically charged to me.

> If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.

The point of my original analogy (that I feel still stands) is that wanting to categorize something for some purpose is not necessarily political in nature. Sure, it could be motivated by such. But it doesn't have to be. Perhaps you have a legitimate reason to want to sort your vegetables by fat content. It doesn't have to be political (though it certainly can be).

It follows that me not wanting political conversations in a certain venue is not necessarily a politically motivated position in and of itself. It could be (my intention could be to manipulate the discourse for a political purpose) but it doesn't have to be.

> politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)

Politics influence the vast majority of human activity almost by definition. It doesn't follow that everything is political. Words are intended to mean things. If "everything is A" then what is the point of A as a category? Obviously categories are only useful to the extent that they exclude things.
by Folabi9 | 2026-02-04 13:03:20+00:00
EnigmoFi | DevOps Engineer (Cloud & Infrastructure) | Remote | Full-time | $192k + bonus

EnigmoFi is a fast-growing crypto financial startup building secure and scalable digital finance infrastructure.

We’re hiring a DevOps Engineer to help maintain, optimize, and scale our cloud and deployment systems. The role focuses on:

Cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Automation and Infrastructure as Code

Monitoring and reliability

CI/CD pipeline management

Security best practices across platforms

Start date: March 1, 2026
Compensation: $192,000 USD base + performance bonus + benefits
Location: Fully remote

Strong fit if you have experience in crypto, blockchain, or DeFi infrastructure environments.

Email: bayonleafolabi@enigmofi.com
with your resume or LinkedIn.
by ririfdddd | 2026-02-04 13:03:26+00:00
There’s an irony where tech folks use a forum to discuss ideas, amongst which involve Generative Language Models which aid and abet political astroturf campaigns that make ridiculous arguments to waste people’s energy when they use tech forums…

It’s like a drain and the usefulness of the forum is swirling around and largely depleted

The interesting problem for tomorrow’s internet is how to automatically root out this nonsense. That’s a browser addin / AI tool that would be useful. Take the comments and probabilistically score the nonsense factor. A new PageRank if you will.

The value is in the well trained bullshit detector. One that could have read the parent comment on everyone’s behalf and saved us all the bother.

Let the corporate/pr/oil industry shills exist in their own space, and enable legitimate discussion to continue
by anthk | 2026-02-04 13:03:35+00:00
>Golden age of desktop customization

Laughs from FVWM, GKRellm and so on. Or WindowMaker, Fluxbox and more with a dockapp slit 'tray' (or compatible tool).

Later KDE4-6 got a similar stack. but I remember Gnome2 having GDesklets.

Still, when in Unix can customize a keybinding to anything, (and with wmctrl spawn any window on top from their title), these gadgets are useless. When you can open, for instance, some messaging tool with the win+i keybinding, on top of everything and close it with win+q, suddenly these tiny tools don't matter anymore.

Ditto with the weather, opened windows, some shell with RSS feed (sfed for instance) which would spawn as fast as any widget ever.
by HK-NC | 2026-02-04 13:03:45+00:00
Perhaps its my phone browser or they removed it but Im not seeing a swastika logo loading the site at the moment.
I do think theres more going on than that though. If a cukture creates a boogeyman the counterculture are boubd to embrace it, even if its only surface level (the nazis were not anti abortion or pro christian, for example)
by 112233 | 2026-02-04 13:04:08+00:00
> increasingly trust code they haven't personally reviewed

while the problems you describe are valid, my personal experience is fully opposite — trust is decreasing. I do not remember anyone worrying about supply chain 15ish years ago — windows was where the viruses lived, and unix people were installing distros, compiling kernel modules and building tarballs without auditing anything.