MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 01:21:19+00:00
If the point argued is solely "the speed of light is a huge limitation" (and not: "getting anywhere near the speed of light is a big issue"), I'd say accepting that "even basic much lesser speed is a huge problem" is hardly a refutation of that. Nor is it an argument towards the feasibility of the actual feat being discussed (interstellar travel).

I guess you're technically correct though: the speed of light is not an issue, if 1/10th the speed of light is already unachievable.
by jama211 | 2026-02-08 01:22:13+00:00
You’re complaining they didn’t want to expose themselves to legal risk with the IRS over a $5 bar. It didn’t cost them more to deal with this over just letting you expense it because they’re bad at economics. It cost them more to deal with this instead of letting you expense it because you were being a difficult employee who was demanding they bend the rules and expose themselves to risk over a $5 bar.
by botro | 2026-02-08 01:22:38+00:00
>On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes.

I'm not understanding this part. If these drugs have solved obesity and the whole host of associated diseases, including the number one killer; heart disease, shouldn't the insurance companies be clambering over each other to cover these drugs and heavily encouraging their use considering the cost reduction on the overall health system.

And if the incentives are misaligned with insurance companies why are governments not handing out GLP-1s to anyone who asks?
by chainbuilder | 2026-02-08 01:22:58+00:00
This is an experiment in creating finite, competitive digital advertising space using NFTs. The system consists of a fixed grid of positions, where each position is represented by an NFT and ranked by bid value. Higher bids move ads upward in the grid, while displaced ads shift downward rather than being removed. There are no buyouts, no resets, and no infinite inventory — just continuous price discovery over scarce digital real estate.

NFTs are used here not as art objects but as transferable claims to ranked positions within a bounded system. Ownership, bidding history, and placement are verifiable, while most ordering logic remains off-chain to keep costs low. The goal isn’t click-through optimization but persistent visibility and transparent competition, closer to a public billboard than traditional digital advertising.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-08 01:23:10+00:00
Third party anonymous middleman that can observe what site(s) a user wants to read

Keywords: anonymous, third party

The websites with the webpages that a user seeks to read, e.g., some page on www.washingtonpost.com, are not third party websites. They are "first party" websites

Other archives are third parties but are generally not run by anonymous operators that keep shifting between different IP addresses and domain names

Other archives generally do not serve CAPTCHAs or require Javascript

Will provide examples if requested

No Anubis:

{
printf 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: www.kernel.org\r\n\r\n'
}|busybox ssl_client 146.75.109.55

NB. Replace 255.255.255.255 with user's IP address, replace cc with country code, replace 123456789 with some 9-digit number

</script></div></div><img style="position:absolute" width="1" height="1" src="https://255.255.255.255.cc.VSY1.123456789.pixel.archive.md/x.gif"><script type="text/javascript">

This is from December 2024. May have changed since then
by jjav | 2026-02-08 01:23:18+00:00
Two trains of thought; I was reacting to the OP line of "People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away", which I maintain is a nearly impossible scenario.

(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)

The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").

But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.

A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
by mediaman | 2026-02-08 01:23:28+00:00
If there are low switching costs, and if there are multiple highly capable models, and if the hardware is openly purchasable (all of these are true), then the price will converge to a reasonable cash flow return on GPUs deployed net of operating expenses of running these data centers.

If they start showing much higher returns on assets, then one of the many infra providers just builds a data center, fills it with GPUs, and rents it out at 5% lower price. This is the market mechanism.

Looking at who owns the compute is barking up the wrong tree, because it has little moat. Maybe GPU manufacturers would be a better place to look, but then the argument is that you're beholden to NVIDIA's pricing to the hyperscalers. There's some truth to that, but you already see that market position eroding because of TPUs and belatedly AMD. All of these giant companies are looking to degrade Jensen's moat, and they're starting to succeed.

Is the argument here that somehow all the hyperscalers are going to merge to one and there will be only one supplier of compute? How do you defend the idea that nobody else could get compute?
by zzo38computer | 2026-02-08 01:23:36+00:00
> That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model.

Not all software now is SaaS, but unfortunately it is too common now.

> But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies.

Some people (including myself) prefer to write programs without too many dependencies, in order to avoid that problem. Other things also help, including some people write programs for older systems which can be emulated, or will use a more simpler portable C code, etc. There are things that can be done, to avoid too many dependencies.

There is uxn, which is a simple enough instruction set that people can probably implement it without too much difficulty. Although some programs might need some extensions, and some might use file names, etc, many programs will work, because it is designed in a simple way that it will work.
by YokoZar | 2026-02-08 01:23:57+00:00
> On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes. It would make you cost them $3-6k/yr more. Insurance premiums would rise for everyone if insurance was subsidizing this - no free lunch.

It's often up to the employer whether these meds are covered - many insurers just offer it as an option to check or not check.

That said, even at 3-6k/year, it wouldn't surprise me if these drugs were net savings to cover for a lot of patients due to their extremely positive effects as preventative care.
by mwwaters | 2026-02-08 01:24:06+00:00
The issue in the late-90s was all the investment created a lot of real revenue for telecoms and other companies. Even though there were a lot of shenanigans with revenue, a lot of real money was spent on fiber and tech generally.

But the real money was investment that didn’t see a return for the investor. The investments needed to have higher final consumption (such as through better productivity or through displacing other costs) to pay back the investment.
by jopsen | 2026-02-08 01:24:33+00:00
Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the material costs are near zero and your ability to increase productivity using technology is very low.

You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to clean faster and better at the same time.

These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI. The only optimization is lower overhead or lower salaries.

Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)
by jimbokun | 2026-02-08 01:25:17+00:00
1. Do you have insider knowledge of the Reddit code base and the Moltbook code base and how much it reproduced?

2. Copying an existing product should take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to evolve the original.

3. I glanced at some of the Moltbook comments which were meaningless slop, very few having any replies.
Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory
by yi_wang | 2026-02-08 01:26:38+00:00
I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system).

It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required.

Key features:

- Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format
- Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed)
- Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval
- CLI + web interface + desktop GUI
- Multi-provider: Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama etc
- Apache 2.0

Install: `cargo install localgpt`

I use it daily as a knowledge accumulator, research assistant, and autonomous task runner for my side projects. The memory compounds — every session makes the next one better.

GitHub: https://github.com/localgpt-app/localgpt
Website: https://localgpt.app

Would love feedback on the architecture or feature ideas.
by skydhash | 2026-02-08 01:26:44+00:00
> you shouldn’t be ashamed of doing so and we can all judge by ourselves how the quality of the service evolves.

That's kinda my bar at this point. On YouTube, there are so many talks and other videos about people using technology X to build Y software or managing Z infrastructure. But here all we got is slop, toys that should have been a shell script, or vague claims like GP.

Even ed(1) is more useful that what has been presented so far.
by pixelsort | 2026-02-08 01:26:49+00:00
Thanks. The hardest part has been slogging through the segfaults and documenting all the unprincipled things I've had to add. Post-bootstrap, I have to undo it all because my IR is a semantically rich JSON format that is turing-incomplete by design. I'm building a substrate for rich applications over bounded computation, like eBPF but for applications and inference.
by throwgraway | 2026-02-08 01:27:14+00:00
From my former employee and my current experience with email lists:

- Avoid purchased lists at all costs
- Apply double opt-in to confirm someone really wants to hear from you (most of the email software supports this out of the box)
- maintain a healthy list (no duplicates, dead domains etc)
- do not let your list to be covered by dust (for example: if you collected an email and consent from someone a year ago, and there were no sends to this person since, consider removing it from the list).
- Spread sends in time - bigger email providers have special requirements for mass mailing, and you will have your sending domain reputation busted if you would not comply.

Additionally, treat the "opens and clicks" statistics with a grain of salt as they are basically unreliable these days - Apple Mail will read that email before the recipient does, Microsoft outlook will click all the links on the message to check for malicious content, some email clients will not fetch images from the message (hence no image responsible for click would be recorded).
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 01:28:15+00:00
How did your equivalent assembly program without a definition of _main to?

You're doing that thing. I think it's called "trolling". It goes like "hurr durr, they said take one, but they wouldn't let me take one plate" or "hurr durr, I filled my gas tank with nitrogen, which is a gas, but my car doesn't go" or "hurr durr, they said C++ features are all optional, but I don't want to use letters, how can I write C++ without using letters?"

At least when that guy asked Stack Overflow how to make gcc compile his .png, it was actually funny.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 01:29:13+00:00
You have to try it. You can write anything you want in C. Or assembler. It's hardly going to be very productive but... productivity is greater than zero, and the more you try the better you get. Rollercoaster Tycoon was written by hand in assembly, as were all NES and SNES games including ones like Earthbound and A Link to the Past — and SNES assembly isn't nearly as nice as x64.
by browningstreet | 2026-02-08 01:30:47+00:00
Oh yes, indeed. On iOS I quite prefer it, but I also use it daily on Linux. But the linux web version is still much better than the terrible Windows client. That thing is plain terrible.

I think the Apple Music service is still good. There are little features that I rely on a lot, like the asterisk next to the prominent/popular songs on a given album.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-08 01:32:42+00:00
> I highly recommend checking out the terms of trumprx.gov

The website is very good marketing for people who don't typically follow drug pricing. Here is more about why the only folks who will benefit are those without insurance—but those people will find better prices in several places, sometimes significantly better prices [1]. Further, it's likely that they're already finding those prices, since the website prices are no better than what you can get today outside fertility medication; and fertility medications are neither new, nor the most expensive part of that process.

This site has nothing to do with the effective subsidies that Americans provide to the world, and it will change nothing about that. The major thing that would help all Americans, negotiating for drug prices, has been neutered by the current administration. In fact, an executive order has specifically lengthened the amount of time that new drugs will be able to charge higher prices to Americans [2].

We should all be very careful in parsing news items that are not in our field of expertise.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/health/trumprx-online-dru...

2. https://www.kff.org/medicare/the-effect-of-delaying-the-sele...
by latch | 2026-02-08 01:33:25+00:00
Claude code has those "thoughts" you say it never will. In plan mode, it isn't uncommon that it'll ask you: do you want to do this the quick and simple way, or would you prefer to "extract this code into a reusable component". It also will back out and say "Actually, this is getting messy, 'boss' what do you think?"

I could just be lucky that I work in a field with a thorough specification and numerous reference implementations.
by cyode | 2026-02-08 01:33:32+00:00
> I could never register susam.com for myself though. That domain was always used by some business selling Turkish cuisines.

Looks like the .com is for sale, in case you didn’t notice. https://sedo.com/search/?keyword=Susam.com

You could probably acquire it (for less than asking price IMO) if you have a sentimental attachment. Nothing wrong with your .net, of course.

Thanks for sharing the stories.
Show HN: Isolating AI-generated code from human code | Vibe as a Code
by bstrama | 2026-02-08 01:33:38+00:00
Small Vite plugin: you put decorators on empty functions, run the build, and the function bodies are generated at build time into ./ai. Your source files stay unchanged.

The idea is to prototype fast without handing over project architecture to AI. Another use case is saving AI window context when generating generic code (e.g. JSX). For now it doesn’t understand full project context.

This is a working prototype of the idea - curious what others think.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-08 01:33:47+00:00
I'm guessing that they were referring to the depth of the decision tree able to be computed in a given amount of time?

In essence, it used to be (I have not stayed current) that the "AI" was limited on how many moves into the future it could use to determine which move was most optimal.

That limit means that it is impossible to determine all the possible moves and which is guaranteed to lead to a win. (The "best" than can be done is to have a Machine Learning algorithm choose the most likely set of moves that a human would take from the current state, and which of that set would most likely lead to a win.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-08 01:34:53+00:00
Yes, exactly this. My biggest issue is how uncurious the approach seems. Setting a "no-look" policy seems cutting edge for two seconds, but prevents any actual learning about how and why things fail when you have all the details. They are just hamstringing their learning.

We still need to specify precisely what we want to have built. All we know from this post is what they aren't doing and that they are pissing money on LLMs. I want to know how they maintain control and specificity, share control and state between employees, handle conflicts and errors, manage design and architectural choices, etc.

All of this seems fun when hacking out a demo but how in the world does this make sense when there are any outside influences or requirements or context that needs to be considered or workflows that need to be integrated or scaling that needs to occur in a certain way or any of the number of actual concerns that software has when it isn't built in a bubble?
by Frotag | 2026-02-08 01:34:59+00:00
> No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.

Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.

Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
by bakugo | 2026-02-08 01:35:00+00:00
The writing has been on the wall since day 1. They wouldn't be marketing a subscription being sold at a loss as hard as they are if the intention wasn't to lock you in and then increase the price later.

What I expect to happen is that they'll slowly decrease the usage limits on the existing subscriptions over time, and introduce new, more expensive subscription tiers with more usage. There's a reason why AI subscriptions generally don't tell you exactly what the limits are, they're intended to be "flexible" to allow for this.
by II2II | 2026-02-08 01:36:06+00:00
> My favorites are [...] mostly interchangeable.

Those are the key words. You have the option to walk away from one distribution to use another if things start getting bad. Such has happened in the past, either because of distribution maintainers making decisions that certain users don't like (think Ubuntu from Unity onward) or because of distribution makers maintainers making decisions that put them ahead of the pack (think early Ubuntu). Overall, it has resulted in a competitive marketplace.

And if things got really bad, people can either fork the offending software or (if they use Linux as a more traditional Unix environment) there are various versions of BSD. If you use Linux for desktop applications, there is even the option of switching to Macintosh or Windows since open source applications tend to be multi-platform.

Being a Windows guy is a bit different. They are sticking all of their eggs in one basket. There isn't a viable Windows-like alternative to Windows if Microsoft messes up. Heck, it is growing increasingly difficult to stick with versions of Windows that are out of support. While I won't go as far as calling this brand loyalty, it means one is pretty much at the whim of the brand.
by LarsKrimi | 2026-02-08 01:36:44+00:00
"We"?

Sorry if my comment went over your head.

The comment was about the style of articles that were in vogue in the mid 10's.

A good sample here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewjosuweit/2017/10/22/5-ind...

If I need to condense it further the connection I see is that weird people feel a need to see new market trends and uses of the system as coordinated efforts of malice.

Instead it's probably just that young people aren't thriving. Better information lets people know more about systems of assistance.

Some defective humans really dislike any assistance programs and invent phantoms and weird statistics. Tale as old as time
by phil21 | 2026-02-08 01:37:15+00:00
Because “this” is about the biggest in-your-face blatant disregard for FDA rules that has quite literally ever existed in history. The scale is unprecedented.

If there was a single thing an understaffed FDA would go after it would be the compounding pharmacies and that whole ecosystem blatantly thumbing their nose at it all.

Not that I agree with the rules - but if this is allowed it’s essentially an end-around the entire prescription drug regime as we know it.
by godelski | 2026-02-08 01:37:17+00:00
I think you have the correct approach. Tests are signals, not proofs.

I do often hear on HN people advocating for Test Driven Development (TDD) but that I think is a different category of error. It encourages people to write to the tests, not to the spec. They'll claim the test is the spec but not understand that the spec can't be written down in full. The spec is the intent, the written spec is an approximation of that, the tests are an approximation of that.

The problem with TDD is it makes it easy to believe that by passing the tests your code is complete and bug free. It's easy to test tests as proofs.

But just because tests aren't proofs doesn't mean they're not useful. They narrow the space in which errors exist. Tests also are a form of communication. It can tell others about your assumptions, again, making the search space for debugging smaller.

Tests are useful, but no one can write tests that are complete.
by weare138 | 2026-02-08 01:37:28+00:00
Youtube isn't doing that for your health. It's so they're not wasting ads and bandwidth on users who aren't watching anymore to maximize their profits. The sole purpose of a for-profit corporation is to generate revenue for its owners and shareholders. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Do not expect anything different. Corporations only care so long as its profitable.