MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-04 17:22:18+00:00
IMHO the "killer app" aspect of OpenClaw (and similar) is that everything is now an API.

We think of chat apps, like WhatsApp, as being ways to communicate with people, which is a nice way of saying they are protocols. When you want something, you send a message, and you get an answer, just like with HTTP, except the endpoints have been controlled by meat. With OpenClaw, the meat is gone. Now you can send a message on WhatsApp to schedule a date with your spouse, their OpenClaw will respond with availability, they'll negotiate a time and place. We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the interface library.

You can say "make an appointment at my dentist" and even if your dentist doesn't have a website, the bot can call up and schedule an appointment. (I don't know if OpenClaw can do this now, but it seems inevitable.) In other words, the (human) receptionist is now an API that can be accessed programmatically.
by umvi | 2026-02-04 17:22:18+00:00
- Generating your own left pad means you don't have to pull in an external left pad

- Which in turn means left pad doesn't show up on your SBOM

- Which in turn means CVEs won't show up for left pad when you run your SBOM through through SCA

- Which means you don't have to do any CVE triage, risk analysis, and mitigation (patching) for left pad

- It also means you don't have to do SOUP testing for left pad

Now imagine you've done that for a dozen libraries that you are only using a small piece of. That's a ton of regulatory and cybersecurity work you've saved yourself. I never claimed generating code makes your software more secure, I claimed it can reduce the regulatory and cybersecurity burden on your SDLC, which it does as demonstrated above. Taken to the extreme (0 external dependencies), your regulatory burden for SOUP and SCA goes to zero.
by buildsjets | 2026-02-04 17:22:26+00:00
Well first, the linked article was regarding a weather balloon that impacted the windscreen, not the engine, and it did cause an injury to the flight crew. Here are pictures of the bloody, glass-shard filled flight deck. https://www.facebook.com/aviation247/posts/n17327-united-air... So the hazard is real.

Now back to your uninformed comment. I do certification testing of jet engines, and we most certainly DO NOT test jet engines against the ingestion of airborne electronics.

I have personally loaded and fired the five barrel bird gun at General Electric’s Peebles Test operation many times over the years. We use a range of birds and bird simulators, but none of them are ever chickens, and none of them are frozen.

There is not any requirement for zero engine damage. Little sparrows will do no damage. Ducks and geese cause extensive damage every single time. Extensive engine damage is permitted so long that the engine shuts down without causing catastrophic damage to the airframe. The specific damage that must be prevented, per 14 cfr 33.75, is below. Any other damage is acceptable.

(i) Non-containment of high-energy debris;

(ii) Concentration of toxic products in the engine bleed air intended for the cabin sufficient to incapacitate crew or passengers;

(iii) Significant thrust in the opposite direction to that commanded by the pilot;

(iv) Uncontrolled fire;

(v) Failure of the engine mount system leading to inadvertent engine separation;

(vi) Release of the propeller by the engine, if applicable; and

(vii) Complete inability to shut the engine down.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
by rangestransform | 2026-02-04 17:22:32+00:00
Deindustrialization has hollowed out most American cities outside of major cities, and the corresponding anti globalism tantrum contributed to the current political situation. Because of the apportionment of House and Senate seats, these people hold most Americans hostage with their disproportionate voting power, and paying a ransom seems better than the alternative we are living through.
by hellohello2 | 2026-02-04 17:22:34+00:00
I'm not saying if the paper is correct or not (since I can't tell), but I don't think your argument really holds. Consider applying it to multiplication:

Fundamentally, multiplication need to look at every pair of integer from the two input numbers. It must be O(n^2); N digits looking at N other digits is quadratic. Any sub-quadratic multiplication must hence necessarily lose some information.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-04 17:23:01+00:00
There's a section of town that was developed on an old swampy bit of land. They drained the swamp but did not let the land dry/settle long enough after draining the water. This caused parts of the road to sink, but not enough to break/crack the roads. Instead, they just have swells as you're driving along. It's actually impressive on how much sinking happened without breaking the road itself.
by louiereederson | 2026-02-04 17:23:18+00:00
- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?

- Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.

- Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?

- Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?

- If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your reminders. Better yet, summarize them.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-04 17:23:45+00:00
Indeed, but you must message it aggressively and continually as such politically, and even then, there are immense vested interests who are going to try to hold you back [1]. Even Texas had to fight very hard against itself politically to ensure they could keep deploying solar at scale [2].

> Cheap power is a competitive advantage --- period, the end. The leadership in China gets this, US leadership doesn't.

Strongly agree. With that said, humans are notoriously irrational and self-interested, and collective action problems and governance are fraught with peril.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/exx...

[2] Texas Legislature Beats Back Assault on Clean Energy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277367 - June 2025
by rsynnott | 2026-02-04 17:24:03+00:00
Eh? The thing I linked to was a policy document on what was allowed.

> “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”

This is not a bug report; this is the _rules_ (or was the rules; Facebook say they have changed them after the media found out about them).
by GeekyBear | 2026-02-04 17:24:09+00:00
> With a previous case it seemed (to me) like Apple might have pushed an update to give access

You're going to have to provide a cite here, since Apple has publicity stated that they have not and will not ever do this on behalf of any nation state.

For instance, Apple's public statement when the FBI ordered them to do so:

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-04 17:24:09+00:00
Can't say Win 11 is really that bad.

Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-04 17:24:16+00:00
Yeah, two things to add:

1) Even when you move things to a server, or remove it from your device, evidence is still left over without your knowledge sometimes.

2) Evidence of data destruction, is in itself as the name implies, evidence. And it can be used to prove things.

For example, an ext4 journal or NTFS USN $J journal entry that shows "grok_version_2.4_schema.json" where twitter is claiming grok version 2.4 was never deployed in France/UK is important. That's why tools like shred and SDelete rename files before destroying them. But even then, when those tools rename and destroy files, it stands out, it might even be worse because investigators can speculate more. It might corroborate some other piece of evidence (e.g.: sdelete's prefetch entry on windows, or download history from a browser for the same tool), and that might be a more serious charge (obstruction of justice in the US).
by harlanji | 2026-02-04 17:24:38+00:00
Location: Sacramento, CA (1hr North) / Bay Area

Remote: Preferred initially.

On-site: Can travel to Sac / Bay Area weekly, fly within US monthly.

Willing to relocate: Yes, within NorCal, after probation.

Technologies: Python web, Javascript vanilla, JVM 9-era, SQL postgres + sqlite, Linux, Docker, Redis, Nginx, RTMP.

Specialties: CI, Protocols/Formats, Databases, Full Stack Web, Streaming Video.

Adjacent Skills: writing, speaking (podcaster), e-commerce platforms, small biz stuff, food service business.

Education: B.S. Computer Science, U. MN.. Focus: Software Engineering (dev over time).

Résumé/CV: Empty. Last 7 years are restaurant/grocery/temp. If you need it I can make one.

Email: h.iverson@gmail.com

I've been hacking on my vision and the money out here just isn't enough so I
want limited duration tech work, 40hr+ time for a short period, or like half
time on an ongoing basis. I could be fractional CTO, have been offered
a Director position.

Thanks for reading.
by Anvoker | 2026-02-04 17:24:44+00:00
One issue is that security theater creates demand for itself. Do things that induce worry and a tendency towards paranoia in the more susceptible parts of the population and then you will gradually raise the general alertness of the population. This then manufactures a desire for these measures. It largely rides off of people's general unwillingness to entertain just how many of the measures are ineffective or nonsensical. "It can't all be pointless. Surely some of it must make us safer." It's not an unreasonable belief in itself, but everyone having that attitude lets security theater grow cancerously.
by observationist | 2026-02-04 17:25:06+00:00
And when you go to your local government, demand a fix, they'll contract a union shop to do the work, often mandated by law, and they will advocate for the least durable, most expensive fix, so as to ensure recurring work happens at a maximum frequency. Attention to certain roads, duration of work is often politicized - someone with good friends gets quick, top tier fixes, but someone who annoys the local council might see months of roadwork dragging on forever, or halfassed repairs, or potholes ignored for years.

Lovely little civilization we have, eh?
by kjshsh123 | 2026-02-04 17:25:28+00:00
The existence of different modes of production is an absurd and false dichotomy. Worker co-ops exist today. People are free to make them, and join them if the co-ops will take them.

And by socialist system with a free market do you mean one where private ownership of the modes of production remains legal, but simply isn't chosen, or do you consider banning private ownership compatible with free markets?
by theYipster | 2026-02-04 17:25:47+00:00
Assuming you are using the flagship copilot that is a $30 / mo add on to a 365 subscription, and maybe, maybe if Microsoft replaced CoPilot’s “brain” with Opus 4.5. In my experience, while flagship CoPilot does deliver value if setup correctly, it’s no where near as capable an “agent” as Claude. (And even though Open Claw is now model agnostic, there is a reason for its association to Claude. Despite it’s expense, I find Opus 4.5 works best.)
by rbanffy | 2026-02-04 17:26:12+00:00
> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan

I see a lot of posturing and sabre rattling, but I don't think Xi would make this mistake - there is too much interest from the West in an independent Taiwan and, as it is now, it's not really an urgent matter to settle it.

China always plays the long game. They are not in this for any quick wins, because there is no political benefit from it - their political system ensures popular and populist measures never prevail over long-term strategy.

That's quite an advantage over most Western democracies, where politicians always prioritise what will give them more votes in the next election over anything that will benefit the country a couple terms down the road.
by mmooss | 2026-02-04 17:26:22+00:00
At least some relatively well-known research finds that all languages have similar information density in terms of bits/second (~39 bits/second based on a quick search). Languages do it with different amounts of phonetic sound / syllables / words per bit and per second, but the bps comes out the same.

I don't know how widely accepted that conclusion is, what exceptions there may be, etc.
by 0xcb0 | 2026-02-04 17:27:00+00:00
I was looking for a way to isolate my agents in a more convenient way, and I really love your idea. I'm going to give this a try over the weekend and will report back.

But the one-time setup seems like a really fair investment for having a more secure development. Of course, what concerns the problem of getting malicious code to production, this will not help. But this will, with a little overhead, I think, really make development locally much more secure.

And you can automate it a lot.
And it will be finally my chance to get more into NixOS :D
by runjake | 2026-02-04 17:27:44+00:00
Asking the question "Are ISPs evil" isn't useful. Asking "What motivates ISPs?" is.

Caveat: there are a lot of non-ISP entities in that diagram, and they are often more motivated by control and political power than direct profit. But, I'm going to assume you really do mean ISPs.

The answer:

ISPs are driven by profit and the need to provide acceptable service to their customers.

"Acceptable" being defined as "enough so that they don't quit being customers".

Sometimes, an upstart ISP will show up and offer exceptional service at remarkable rates. However, they often fail, run out of funds, or are acquired by an equity firm or a larger ISP. At that point, their focus is shifted back to profit and delivering only acceptable service.
by bravetraveler | 2026-02-04 17:29:19+00:00
So, don't take this the wrong way, but basically: https://newsliteracy.wsj.com/news-opinion

I was poorly trying to raise this trite distinction, asserting skepticism falls closer to Opinion than Journalism. The line gets more fine every day. I know. Take it up with them/their peers.

'Rigorous' would be "Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'", not "Billionaire says '<crazy shit>'... and here's how we feel/think about it".
by rbanffy | 2026-02-04 17:30:03+00:00
I find the Chinese political system very interesting. I read somewhere that, in order to run for any position, you need to have taken a role below that, so you'll never lead the executive branch as your first job just because you are very popular.

Would you mind detailing how it works a little bit more? This "onboarding path" seems to be part of the "secret sauce" that keeps the policies consistent over time.
by ewalk153 | 2026-02-04 17:30:04+00:00
Assuming this was user tested in hand with your wife, it’s nice to this kind of project built for a real user.

So often, these tools lack usability because they’re built generically any use case. Here, it was designed for your wife’s bakery.

The process to build a site/app like this will only get easier and more defect-free over the coming months.
by zwaps | 2026-02-04 17:30:05+00:00
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.

Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.

However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.

Copilot should not have been released.
A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.

For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.

People hate it, and for hood reason.

It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.

Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams

Bah
I have static meeting links. My AI solved the calendly problem.§
by Mrakermo | 2026-02-04 17:30:19+00:00
not sure if anyone else feels this, but calendly links startes breaking my days.

I got 7 different meetings per day, and constant context switching.

Important meetings land between semi important. Team meetings get scattered. My calendar stopped reflecting what actually mattered.

So we built something simple:
It’s still a meeting link, but the guest shortly explains what the meeting is about, and an AI suggests the best time based on my priorities, focus, and team context.

If both people use it, the agents just coordinate and pick the best time automatically.

Sounds small, but already better than a static
meeting link.

Curious if others here feel the same pain or if I’m just bad at calendars

https://atimeforeveryone.xyz/
by chicagobuss | 2026-02-04 17:30:20+00:00
Duckbill is hiring three-five engineers for 3 roles with hybrid work in downtown SF. We're in-office MWF and WFH Tuesday and Thursdays. Relocation is an option but sponsorship / remote is not.

We're working on Skyway, a new kind of enterprise-grade finops tool born out of the Duckbill Group's consulting business. We're staying small (team-wise) but focusing on the largest of the SaaS spenders and their problems exclusively. We ship daily and have several unfair advantages.

1. Senior Front-end Engineer (TS/JS/React + bit of Python back-end)

2. Senior Back-end Engineer (Python + bit of front-end)

3. Senior Data Engineer (Python, airflow, duckdb, s3, bigquery)

More details are on our careers page (apply through this): https://www.duckbillhq.com/careers/
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-04 17:30:25+00:00
Those card suits in that post show up (for everyone) in HN because they are the proto-emoji ancient "Wingdings range" further encoded in the direction of HN without an emoji presentation variation selector. (Emoji presentation selector will color them, so hearts and diamonds would be more red, among other subtle distinctions in most fonts/OSes today.)

The number of "proto-emoji" that HN does not block is interesting given HN's preference to block emoji, but also illustrates some of the fun compatibility complexity of Unicode.
by dave_universetf | 2026-02-04 17:31:27+00:00
Both, with caveats. The attention computation is fundamentally quadratic: for every token in the sequence, you're doing a computation that has to read every other token in the sequence. So it's O(N) per token, O(N^2) for the whole sequence.

The big mitigation for this is that in causal transformers (i.e. all the chatbot type applications, where each token is only allowed to see tokens before it), you're running inference repeatedly on the same prefix in order to grow it by one token at a time. So if you cache the computations for tokens 0..N-1, on each inference pass you only have to compute O(N) for the newly added token at the end of the sequence.

That's why caching (and caching charges) appear so prominently everywhere in the pricing of inference.

In practice, caching is most beneficial at inference time, because you typically have relatively long conversations that start with the same cacheable prefix (the system prompt). At training time the same optimization can apply, but you're typically not pushing the same prefixes through the model repeatedly so you end up paying the quadratic cost more often.

The quadratic cost of attention is the fundamental compute bottleneck for transformer architectures, which is why there's research like this trying to find shortcuts in computing attention, as well as research into completely new primitives to replace attention (e.g. SSM, which is O(N) on a cold cache and O(1) on a warm cache).
by MisterTea | 2026-02-04 17:31:30+00:00
Yet Disney was allowed to buy up Hulu, Fox, Marvel, Lucasfilm - large swaths of American entertainment which shapes culture - yet Netflix is too big and woke.

> Netflix is facing a competing bid from Paramount Skydance, run by CEO David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump’s close ally and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

I'm totally sure this is all about the great concern over anti-trust, woke, and trans ideologies and nothing to do with blatant cronyism. This administration is a joke.
by elil17 | 2026-02-04 17:31:54+00:00
Well a few considerations:

- You have to size your cooling towers for your hottest hour. Doing this saves you no capital costs.

- You barely have to run the fans on your cooling towers in the winter because the air is so cold. So often this also won’t save you much operating costs.

- Already there is an essentially unlimited amount of so called “waste heat” from power plants and factories. Building district heating systems is extremely capital intensive, which is why this isn’t done more.

- As a municipality it’s just a horrible idea to make the heating system of your whole city rely on a random company continuing to operate (even worse if said company is in a potential bubble). This is why most district heating systems work with power plants - they already have the government involved in ensuring their continuing operations.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-04 17:32:03+00:00
It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.

PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.

There certainly other examples that I failed to address.

This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
Show HN: IncidentFox – Debug prod incidents without leaving Slack (open source)
by chiehminwei | 2026-02-04 17:32:10+00:00
Hi HN,

My cofounder and I left Roblox to build IncidentFox (https://github.com/incidentfox/incidentfox) — an open-source AI SRE that investigates incidents and finds root causes.

We know AI SREs exist, and you’ve probably seen a hundred of them pitched. In our experience, they don’t work because they lack context about your systems and ask you to spend weeks building integrations. Who has time to build their own MCP servers?

Our take: context is everything, and UX matters more than people think. When things are on fire at 3am, you don’t want to open another tab. So we keep everything in Slack — paste a screenshot, drop a log file, view full traces, all without leaving the thread. On setup, we analyze your codebase and past incidents to understand your stack, then auto-build the integrations so things work out of the box.

Try it in our Slack (no setup): https://join.slack.com/t/incidentfox/shared_invite/zt-3ojlxv...

Or self-host the whole thing (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/incidentfox/incidentfox

We’d love to hear what you think!

Main website: https://www.incidentfox.ai/
by jazzyjackson | 2026-02-04 17:32:16+00:00
Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys

Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf

https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)