MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2026-02-10 23:27:04+00:00
Here is a list of ways bioactivity is achieved in 6 cases via 7 mechanisms:

Cyclization + N-methylation — lipophilicity, protease resistance (cyclosporine)

D-amino acid substitution — protease evasion (desmopressin)

Permeation enhancers — transient tight-junction opening or membrane fluidization (semaglutide/SNAC, insulin formulations)

Extreme potency — tolerating <1% bioavailability (desmopressin)

Minimizing size to di/tripeptides — exploiting PepT1 active transport (collagen hydrolysates)

Prodrug masking — protecting reactive groups, intracellular unmasking (S-acetyl-glutathione)

Local buffering — pH microenvironment control (semaglutide)

One I take, PEP19, apparently is unique in being naturally bioactive. Evidence is early stage, but I get noticably better sleep with it (by some non-drowsiness mechanism), taking 6mg, 3x the recommended dosage for sleep, but the higher dose may promote fat burning and fat browning at night (only 1 study). It only has 10 residues which apparently avoid having typical cleavage points, fragments may retain bioactivity, and it has extreme potency in very small doses so any absorption means a lot.

Despite a plethora of peptides, successes are not common.
by DANmode | 2026-02-10 23:28:41+00:00
> What if matrix could be used like email! now that would make it stand out won't it? i.e.: DANmode@danssite.net , you could post your matrix address like that, and matrix clients could resolve it using SRV records for matrix, and querying the correct homeserver designated on danssite.net.

We are here.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-10 23:28:50+00:00
Original article: "Synchronisation in two-dimensional damped-driven Navier–Stokes turbulence: insights from data assimilation and Lyapunov analysis" - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid-mec...

Abstract: "In Navier–Stokes (NS) turbulence, large-scale turbulent flows inevitably determine small-scale flows. Previous studies using data assimilation with the three-dimensional (3-D) NS equations indicate that employing observational data resolved down to a specific length scale, ℓ<sup>3-D</sup><sub>∗</sub>, enables the successful reconstruction of small-scale flows. Such a length scale of ‘essential resolution of observation’ for reconstruction ℓ<sup>3-D</sup><sub>∗</sub> is close to the dissipation scale in three-dimensional NS turbulence. Here, we study the equivalent length scale in two-dimensional (2-D) NS turbulence, ℓ<sup>2-D</sup><sub>∗</sub>, and compare with the three-dimensional case. Our numerical studies using data assimilation and conditional Lyapunov exponents reveal that, for Kolmogorov flows with Ekman drag, the length scale ℓ<sup>2-D</sup><sub>∗</sub> is actually close to the forcing scale, substantially larger than the dissipation scale. Furthermore, we discuss the origin of the significant relative difference between the length scales, ℓ<sup>2-D</sup><sub>∗</sub> and ℓ<sup>3-D</sup><sub>∗</sub>, based on inter-scale interactions, ‘cascades’ and orbital instabilities in turbulence dynamics."
by llbbdd | 2026-02-10 23:29:24+00:00
Unless cold fusion allows everyone to literally pull infinite energy out of thin air with no maintenance or labor costs, I don't buy that premise. Many other utilities are effectively free already in some places, but you still need metering to deter bad actors, which is what money is. Otherwise I'm going to take all available cold fusion capacity in existence and use it to build my own artificial sun with my face on it.
by to11mtm | 2026-02-10 23:29:41+00:00
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...

First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...

I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?

Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.

And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]

[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...

[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
by gerdesj | 2026-02-10 23:29:46+00:00
telnet isn't just for ... telnet.

$ telnet smtp.example.co.uk 25
HELO me
MAIL FROM: gerdesj@example2.co.uk
RCPT TO: gerdesj@example.co.uk
DATA

.. or you can use SWAKS! For some odd reason telnet is becoming rare as an installed binary.
by mpakes | 2026-02-10 23:30:10+00:00
If you are feeling the way that James does, that the magic is gone... please try creating things in a new domain.

Try making music, creating videos, making interactive LED art, building robots, or fabricating toys.

The tools we have today suddenly make it far easier and more fun to experiment with a new craft. What was once daunting is now approachable.

Start by using an AI-powered tool—without shame—to make something superficially 'cool'. Yes, we all know you used a 'cheat code' but that's okay! Now you get to dive in and deconstruct what you created. Tear it apart and learn how and why it works. Go as deep as your motivation carries you. Experiment, hack, and modify.

Just as in software, there will be many many layers of abstraction that you can work through and learn about. Many of them are overflowing with magic and sources of inspiration, I promise.

The gears of capitalism will likely continue to aggressively maximize efficiency wherever possible, and this comes with very real costs (some of which are described James's post).. but outside the professional sphere, it appears to me that we are entering a new hobbyist / hacker / creative renaissance. If you can find a way to release enough anxiety and let the curious and creative energy back in, opportunities start showing up everywhere.
by Telaneo | 2026-02-10 23:30:16+00:00
> I don't think many advice non tech people to get in to self hosting, but there are a lot of people who do enjoy messing with computers who these articles are marketing to.

I agree, but even I, someone who does have this as a hobby and does self-host a few things, have my limits for the same reasons that the casuals do. Even when I have a computer that I can use for one more purpose, I rarely do that unless I know it will be set and forget, since having one more thing to deal with in my already overburdened life is a hard sell.

> The average user will only self host when it's a managed box they plug in and it just works. Like how Apple/Google home automation works. Maybe we will see managed products for photo / file syncing pop up.

Very true. I do hope some products like that will appear, but the workflow and UX will have to be damn near perfect, something which home automation often isn't (unless you use Home Assisant and thus have it as a hobby. Funny how that works).
by bink | 2026-02-10 23:30:19+00:00
What I found interesting about this is that on several occasions I've seen Waymos get confused and block intersections (and once Muni tracks). Each time they've sat there for at least 10-15 mins until a police officer showed up and tapped on the window. Then it was another 10-15 mins before the vehicle started to move again. What are these agents doing?
by digiown | 2026-02-10 23:30:22+00:00
> MFA to be a measure against you

Not really, unless the MFA involves the same type of attestation involved in the process. TOTP is fine, and you can put it in your password manager to avoid phones, and can be done without consenting to any spying. And I don't really own the account anyway.

> use their physical cards

The premise of this discussion is these will get replaced by the hostile phone app, since the Europeans are too lazy to make a proper replacement.

> locking down infotainment systems

I don't agree with that either, but you can presumably buy a car without one, and you'd still be allowed to drive. What if the government says, you can't drive anymore UNLESS you use the locked down infotainment system and consent to all the ads/spying that comes with it?
by stevenjgarner | 2026-02-10 23:30:37+00:00
Why is knowledge doubling no longer used as a metric to converge on the limit of the singularity? If we go back to Buckminster Fuller identifying the the "Knowledge Doubling Curve", by observing that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, it was doubling every 25 years. In his 1981 book "Critical Path", he used a conceptual metric he called the "Knowledge Unit." To make his calculations work, he set a baseline:

- He designated the total sum of all human knowledge accumulated from the beginning of recorded history up to the year 1 CE as one "unit."

- He then tracked how long it took for the world to reach two units (which he estimated took about 1,500 years, until the Renaissance).

Ray Kurzweil took Fuller’s doubling concept and applied it to computer processing power via "The Law of Accelerating Returns". The definition of the singularity in this approach is the limit in time where human knowledge doubles instantly.

Why do present day ideas of the singularity not take this approach and instead say "the singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization." - Wikipedia
by rcxdude | 2026-02-10 23:30:41+00:00
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-10 23:30:42+00:00
Ultimately, whether or not people are able to do anything involves consequences for their actions.

There's the "three" boxes of liberty that are meant to give a framework for how humans in a society are to introduce consequences to state actors who abuse rights: the soap box, the ballot box, and the jury box.

So we need to start using at least those three to prevent human rights abuses with regard to search warrants.
by D13Fd | 2026-02-10 23:30:46+00:00
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.

And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
by coldtea | 2026-02-10 23:30:46+00:00
>Not even close. "Neural networks" in code are nothing like real neurons in real biology

Hence the simplified. The weights encoding learning and inteconnectedness and nonlinear activation and distributed representation of knowledge is already an approximation, even if the human architecture is different and more elaborate.

Whether the omitted parts are essential or not, is debatable. “Equations of motion are nothing like real planets" either, but they capture enough to predict and model their motion.

>The "turing test" doesn't exist. Turing talked about a thought experiment in the very early days of "artificial minds". It is not a real experiment.

It is not a real singural experiment protocol, but it's a well enough defined experimental scenario which for over half a century, it was kept as the benchmark of recognition of artificial intelligence, not by laymen (lol) but by major figures in AI research as well, figures like Minsky, McCarthy and others engaged with it.

That researchers haven't done Turing-test studies (taking the setup from turing and even called them that) is patently false. Including openly testing LLMs:

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.290/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313925121

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.08853

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S295016282...
by habitue | 2026-02-10 23:30:49+00:00
Sometimes, in the interest of having something rather than nothing, I have to press publish. This entails getting things wrong, which is regrettable.

I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 23:31:37+00:00
Thanks for reading!

>Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?

I feel like I learned something valuable from all of them.

The ones I'm most proud of are TinyPilot, my book, and my blogging course (in that order). Those are, uncoincidentally, the ones where I found product-market fit, whereas the rest never really achieved that.

TinyPilot was business-oriented by mistake. When I initially made it, I thought the market was entirely hobbyists who would rather make a DIY KVM than buy a $600 enterprise-y device. As I continued working on it, I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution.

But yeah, I think the fact that it appealed to businesses made it more viable than my other business attempts that were consumer-focused.
by delegate | 2026-02-10 23:32:25+00:00
It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games !

It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.

Isn't that amazing ?

Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games.
Of course, that's just a funny angle.

The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ...
AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this.
And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..

Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-02-10 23:32:34+00:00
The irony is that this new payment method has the exact same issue: it's deeply tied to US corporate.

Their site claims that it can only be used on iOS or Android: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...

Also:

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

This seems an even worse situation than carrying around a Maestro (mastercard) with me.
by digiown | 2026-02-10 23:33:28+00:00
It is colluding with a third party to increase their power. What devices pass Play Integrity? Yeah, the same ones with all the telemetry and spying that you can't remove. I thought the government is supposed to protect consumer rights, not to tilt the playing field even further.

Like I said, I'd be fine if they offer a viable alternative, like a card or a physical authentication dongle (which doesn't require spyware to use).
by benhoyt | 2026-02-10 23:33:29+00:00
I'm not very familiar with functional programming and Haskell in particular. I think I understand the gist of this article, and "use data structures that make illegal states unrepresentable". However, is there a similar article but written with more common languages (C#, C++, Java, Go) in mind? Or is a big part of this concept only relevant for strong functional languages with sum types and pattern matching?
by baconbrand | 2026-02-10 23:33:43+00:00
I listed asylum seekers and visa holders in detention but they are definitely grabbing citizens too. Usually they do not hold them for very long.

This happened at the Target I shop at:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...

Two teenagers just doing their jobs, dogpiled by roughly four adult men, beaten up and released hours later. One of them was just dropped off at the Walmart down the street, the other they released at the federal building they’re working out of.
by orwin | 2026-02-10 23:33:50+00:00
True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left. Each time someone get caught putting his hands, or worse, where he shouldn't, he tends to go rightward, and fast. Same thing when they are caught doing MLMs, always to the right. Even with shitcoiners, the right-wing pivot is fast once your 'racism is bad, but this antiracist coin' is done. I honestly don't know why.

Probably you have either more money, or more forgiving/powerful people on the right? Some grift to the center, but it's very rare, when libs are as powerful and rich as conservative, so I've no idea.
by adolph | 2026-02-10 23:33:59+00:00
I think this is a key question. In the May 2024 blog post about "fleet response" it sounds like Waymo has a lawyerly set of rules they follow to distinguish between remote operation and providing guidance to the self-driving system.

Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular
situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet
response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment.
The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the
fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.

[...]

Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly
through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a
particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a
path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from
fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
by arctic-true | 2026-02-10 23:34:11+00:00
This is super interesting. But I have to wonder how much it costs on the back end - it sounds like it’s essentially just running a boatload of specialized agents, constantly, throughout the whole interaction (and with super-token-rich input for each). Neat for a demo, but what would it cost to run this for a 30 minute job interview? Or a 7 hour deposition?

Another concern I’d have is bias. If I am prone to speaking loudly, is it going to say I’m shrill? If my camera is not aligned well, is it going to say I’m not making eye contact?
by clairegraham | 2026-02-10 23:34:33+00:00
I’ve had the same experience (paid user since 2008). Extensions are glitchy, host matching is still a buggy mess, the app tries to be too clever and ends up annoying me. It used to “just work” and not be in my way all the time.

I do like the “op” CLI integration to move ssh keys and other plain text secrets off the file system.

I want to switch but haven’t had the time to investigate a better solution.
by eek2121 | 2026-02-10 23:34:40+00:00
Fun fact, if they are using foreign workers at all, however briefly, they are likely in violation of state law in multiple states.

HOWEVER:

It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.

I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
by Twisol | 2026-02-10 23:34:40+00:00
The difference between "telnet" the program and "telnet" the protocol is especially important in this discussion, I think.

A more "proper" tool for that is netcat -- I doubt SMTP supports the Telnet option negotiations subsystem. (I also doubt SMTP servers can interpret the full suite of Network Virtual Terminal (NVT) commands that the Telnet protocol supports.) There's clearly enough similarity between the two protocols that if you're just using it to transfer plaintext it will probably work out fine, but they are distinct protocols.
by straydusk | 2026-02-10 23:34:46+00:00
> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, Checkpoints capture the full session alongside the commit: the transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls and more.

This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.
by palata | 2026-02-10 23:35:35+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I have been hearing about XMPP forever, and I would love to have an opportunity to try it. Unfortunately it hasn't happened. I have been forced to use Slack, Discord, I have had opportunities to try Matrix, Zulip, of course I have been using IRC for a long time. But XMPP? I may have installed an app, but I haven't had an opportunity to actually use it. Is there a list of communities there?

Then about it being confusing: you're right, that's an outsider point. Because I haven't been able to try it (again nobody ever told me "oh, this project is on XMPP, you can go ask your question with this app/website"), but I have been genuinely interested in it, I ended up on the official pages.

- Check the RFC list: https://xmpp.org/rfcs/#6120. The first one is more than 200 pages, the second more than 100. There are 5 "basic RFCs" and 19 "further RFCs" (whatever "further" is supposed to mean). There is no way I will even open them all. Conclusion: I have no idea how XMPP works, except that there is XML in the mix and a whole bunch of stuff around.

- There is a "technical overview" here: https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/. I invite you to have a look at it. Apart from the fact that it seems to use "XMPP" and "Jabber" interchangeably (I think? I'm confused), it kind of loses me at "Jingle", which seems to be a "multimedia specification" (does that mean it's for video?), and has a bunch of implementations, like "pidgin". Isn't pidgin an XMPP client? Here it's under the Jingle section. And then there are extensions, with a whole section just for "Multi User Chats": so the default is that there are no groups, and if my client supports this extension and the server supports it, then I can join a group? I gave up at "PubSub", I did not even read anything from "BOSH".

As a person who wrote his own IRC client, contributed to Signal and looked into the Matrix protocol (which seems more complex than I am comfortable with), I must say that XMPP is in its very own league.

My conclusion with Matrix was that nobody would ever want to write it from scratch, so there has to be some kind of `libmatrix` on top of which people could build. Seems hard in practice because it feels like it keeps changing.

I don't know how fast XMPP is moving, but I would hope that it is now stable. Is there a libxmpp that contains all the necessary features to write a client? Not clear to me. It feels like it's still a complex ecosystem where it depends on the client, and on the server, and on what you want to do.

> XMPP clients mostly work together much better than Matrix clients, from what I've experienced

I can only take your word on it: I don't know a community that is on XMPP, so I haven't had a chance to try. Matrix has been frustrating, that I can say.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-10 23:35:37+00:00
I found the article mildly interesting "light reading", until I got to this part:

> I was astounded to see that the Google AI overview in effect takes a stand amongst three conceptions

Uh oh. Hype alert. Should we continue reading?

... [a few moments later] ...

Oh, ok, the answer is yes. That was a bit of pandering but the author goes on to discuss how mathematicians think if this issue.

Also, don't miss this gem of a pun :

> Choosing the square root of -1 is a mathematical sin

:-)