MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KerubinDev | 2026-02-04 03:17:59+00:00
I'm developing an open-source project called AkitaLLM.

The idea stemmed from a simple frustration: most LLM tools today try to "think for you." Too much autocomplete, too many implicit decisions, little traceability, and almost no real control.

AkitaLLM goes in the opposite direction.

It's a CLI, local-first tool designed for software engineers that enforces an explicit and auditable workflow for using LLMs. No "just throw the prompt and pray."

The pipeline is rigid and intentional: Analyze → Plan → Execute → Validate

Each step is separate, recorded, and verifiable.

The idea is to use AI as an engineering tool, not as an oracle.

Key points of the project:

Orchestration of LLMs focused on control and predictability

Real difference between analysis, planning, and execution

Integration with AST (Tree-sitter) to truly understand code

Validation through tests, diffs, and rollback

Extensible architecture via plugins

Zero hype, zero "magical AI"

The project is still evolving, but it's already live, versioned, and open to criticism (including harsh criticism).

If you also believe that AI should force you to think better—not think for you—perhaps AkitaLLM makes sense for you.

Repo: https://github.com/KerubinDev/AkitaLLM

PyPI: pip install akitallm

Feedback is welcome.

Especially if it's honest.
by saghm | 2026-02-04 03:18:47+00:00
I agree with you as well! I don't think AppImage is perfect by any means. I do prefer it overall to the other commonly mentioned "universal" package tools like snap and flatpak, but I think my ideal system would essentially be a middleware protocol between build tool "frontends" and package format "backends" and then an ecosystem of tooling around that. LLVM and LSP haven't magically solved every issue with compilers and editor support for languages by any means, but they have significantly moved the needle on the average experience for quite a large number of end users even if they never directly touch any of the underlying protocols.
by GMoromisato | 2026-02-04 03:20:11+00:00
My point is that bytes mattered. If you could put a year in 2 bytes instead of 4, you did. If you could shrink the TCP header by packing fields, you did. And if you could limit SMTP memory use by specifying a 1000-byte limit, then that's what you did.

Every programmer I know from that era knew how big things were in bytes, because it mattered.

Also, not all PDP-11 systems had VM. And the designers of SMTP certainly did not expect that it would only run on systems with VM.
by dartharva | 2026-02-04 03:20:16+00:00
"Poor governance" tends to be an easy catchall term to shift blame on for economic failures, but reality is, like you said, a lot more nuanced. India's socialist government looks justifiably horrible and inefficient when looked at through a rational economist's glasses, but what many don't realize is that its main priority for most of its existence has been stabilizing regions and preventing balkanization, which it has achieved significantly, sadly having to fall back to political nationalism (another catchall term the author of this article himself uses to push some blame) and socialist federal overreach to achieve it. We tend to be quick to notice failures but God knows how many circumstances we have dodged that were too close to disruptive civil war without recognizing it.
by k310 | 2026-02-04 03:20:33+00:00
No analog resurgence. It is digital file keeping that is keeping the cases alive, especially with bonehead redaction techniques.

"There are no secrets"

An infinitesimal number of digital records can be detroyed. But a world-wide sex, blackmail and money-laundering operation worth billions (?) cannot be concealed.

There's the Epstein Document Archive [0], and a mapping effort of Epstein's social network [1], using open source intelligence only.

As for the map:

> We included Epstein's entire, unredacted “black book,” as well as the flight logs for his private jet, the Lolita Express. We also examined several other ancillary networks known to have at least some overlap, including figures adjacent to Iran-Contra, September 11, and Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell. Drawing from a range of sources, we considered 908 potentially related people and organizations, with 2,194 connections between them. After reviewing for accuracy and relevance, we focused on 209 entities (with 642 relationships) as most pertinent.

> Importantly, inclusion in our study does not imply guilt — indeed we have included people relevant to the current power struggle ranging from tech executives with no ties to Epstein, to victims. We aimed to reveal the networks currently in conflict, while also tempering speculation about the scope and nature of Epstein's activities. Here's what we learned.

The map is here (730k PNG) for enlargement.

https://cdn.america2.news/2025/07/epstein-1.png

Senator Ron Wyden is tracking down the money trail, as are people suing Bank of America for its records of financial transactions with the Epstein empire.

[0] https://www.epsteinarchive.org/

[1] https://america2.news/we-mapped-jeffrey-epsteins-social-netw...
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-04 03:20:44+00:00
Economists do a lot of soul searching, it seems, but quite enough to quit being economists.

I wonder if anyone has calculated the economic impact of diverting smart, math-capable thinkers from some other useful pursuit into economics. Surely they’d be more productive as accountants, or car mechanics, or as people who throw bricks through windows in the dead of night.

From the outside it looks like the field is an intellectual circular firing squad that produces little of tangible value.
Why so little news from China?
by wrqvrwvq | 2026-02-04 03:20:49+00:00
Searching for "china ai" on hn gives some idea of the lack of diverse subjects and stories from chinese tech. We don't see a lot of headlines about chinese usage of llms and what the major differences are. We're not getting enough stories about how people are thinking about next generation technologies. I just don't see anything about whether llm's are better or worse for chinese speakers or what new tech trends/fads are happening among youth.
by thayne | 2026-02-04 03:21:42+00:00
And that is because some people didn't like that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes instead of 1000, so they started using 1000 instead, and then that created confusion, so then they made up new term "kibibyte" that used 1024, and now it's all a mess.

And in most cases, using 1024 is more convenient because the sizes of page sizes, disk sectors, etc. are powers of 2.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-04 03:22:27+00:00
Fine, I'll speak plainly, because your original post was exactly backwards. "Economic losers" in rich countries are those who did not benefit from globalization - think of all the hollowed out Rust Belt towns in the US, smaller villages in France that aren't on major train lines, etc. If anything, immigrants are largely economic winners because they are able to change their situation and go where there is more abundant opportunity.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-04 03:22:50+00:00
Note the text from my previous comment "A Social Network for AI Agents" ...I didn't write that. I am guessing it must have been inserted on the server-side, in transit or resubmitted by my browser somehow. Artificial Information, not intelligence.

Was it a sneaky reference to the film "A Scanner Darkly" ?

Anyway, I know of someone who is selling all his stuff obtained in the "good times" ...to survive.

If AI is not a friend, and necessity is the mother of invention, then there will be many others wanting to easily liquidate "their stuff."
by shagie | 2026-02-04 03:23:04+00:00
I'd also recommend the variant Wizard for this.

Similar basic game and mechanics, though there are 8 additional cards to the 52 card deck - four wizards and four fools. A wizard can be played instead of any other card, the first wizard played takes the trick. A fool can be played instead of any other card and a fool will not take the trick (unless you've got the extreme oddball situation where you've got all the cards for a trick as a fool - then the first fool played wins the trick).

One of the things about it being a 60 card deck is that it evenly plays 3, 4, 5, or 6 players.

The European edition of the game has beautiful artwork (though confusing compared to the French suited cards) that make a long mural when an entire suit is laid down end to end.
by derf_ | 2026-02-04 03:23:55+00:00
This is the standard advice from the World Bank, the IMF, etc., and it does developing countries a huge disservice. South Korea banned the import of foreign cars from 1968 to 1988 while it developed its own automobile industry (Japanese imports were banned until 1998). Now Huyndai Motor Group sells more cars than GM [0]. That firm absolutely could not have survived if exposed to the ravages of the free market during the two decades it took them to learn how to produce cars to a globally competitive level. There are many other examples of protectionism in the developmental success that is South Korea. The idea ("infant industry protection") comes from Alexander Hamilton. The US relied on it heavily, too, in its early history.

If South Korea had followed the standard developmental economists' advice they would still be sewing garments and growing soybeans instead of manufacturing semiconductors, consumer electronics, and appliances (among many other things).

[0] https://statranker.org/economy/leading-global-car-manufactur...
by sublinear | 2026-02-04 03:25:51+00:00
The main benefit of a library has always been standardization, not reducing effort.

I don't know how many times it's been said, but writing the code was never the hard part.

People who depend on LLMs are making the same old naive mistake that's been around for decades.

It's actually worse than in the past! At least the stubborn people who would insist on writing everything themselves had to comprehend their own code and were projecting overconfidence to mask their attempts at learning. We would turn a blind eye to junior devs doing this, but then reject it in code review and tell them to just use the correct library. Now we still have all that arrogance, but without any of the effort to learn jack shit.
by cyberax | 2026-02-04 03:25:56+00:00
I think that the answer is the death of democracy and the golden age of corruption in poor countries. During the 80-s and early 90-s, the Western world was still trying to defend nascent democracies. It was lampooned by everyone ("Team America: World Police", anyone?) but it _did_ work to some degree.

Around 2000-s the West switched into the "whatever you do, we don't care as long as you stay inside your country" mode. Moreover, the West made it easy to expatriate money. You could earn your fortune in Russia by stealing money from schools via various corrupt schemes, but once you crossed the border of Russia, you instantly became a respected businessman who should be treated with respect.

The last year's Nobel in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu for his work on extractive versus inclusive institutions ("Why Nations Fail"). And the West unwittingly (?) recreated the same conditions that resulted in development gaps during the early colonial era.

And yes, the West is to blame here. Not China. Pretty much nobody in, say, Congo is abusing child labor to get money to emigrate to China. But I bet that quite a few people from Congo now have very nice properties in London.
by matt-p | 2026-02-04 03:26:05+00:00
I actually don't think that's true.

The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.

If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
by r-johnv | 2026-02-04 03:26:10+00:00
I guess his area is really close to my field (Mechanical Engineering + Robotics) so what I learn from his videos is less the concepts themselves and more the interesting examples of them in the real world.

For example that hydroplaning is a real consequence on runways; or that higher takeoff weight has an order of magnitude greater effect on runway wear than the shear force of braking during landing.

I also learn from Grady's phenomenal skill at communicating technical concepts from our field in layman accessible terms! Most times I prefer to watch his videos and appreciate what he does, but there are days that I'm in the mood to read rather than watch. I'm glad that he gives us that option.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-04 03:26:21+00:00
Paging @aeb-kun!

The craft of "rationalist cover stories" as a class of band-aids!

Remember how you failed to help "black people"? The people who make the dems what they are today seem to more than 2 steps removed from that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727418

The emotional concerns that underly this ineffective (akratic) behaviour seem to come from uh "rationalist suffering" (the modern day version of white man's burden?)

Piketty 2022 section on Educational Justice (page 1007) thinks that its because dems are the overeducated children of the "Brahmin left".

So I think you've got the right diagnosis- reps are the undereducated children of the "Merchant Right", so their rationalist* cover stories are naturally more convincing :)

*Pecuniary===rational as in the "Legitimation Crisis"

Ps: somewhat better (=less overtly social-darwinist) handwringing, but not quite a bandaid

https://archive.ph/JC8Ip
by Zanni | 2026-02-04 03:26:44+00:00
This article [1] claims a "3-line improvement" on the vision chart. It wouldn't be helpful for me (moving from 20/600 to 20/300, I'd still need correction) but would be a huge win for someone in the 20/50 to 20/80 range, correcting to 20/40, the minimum for driving without correction.

[1] https://www.ophthalmologyadvisor.com/news/yuvezzi-approved-a...
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-04 03:27:36+00:00
Economists are obsessed with numbers even when numbers simply contradicts numbers they aren't familiar with.

Incorporating sociology, for what it's worth would radically change the picture. Do economists travel? And what is a poor country anyway.. Zimbabwe is put on the same table as south east Asian countries..where do geopolitical aspects get into considerations for countries like Cuba or more recently Venezuela or Iran. Do these things even matter.

No surprise economists have lost legitimity for so many. They don't predict or diagnose the economy of the nations they live in, trying to explain what they call the "global south" as some call it is rather arrogant.

What this research may have got right is to nuance what their predecessor had claimed. But that wasn't too hard.

My tip for economists: go live in rural areas in each country you claim to diagnose. Speak to the locals, grand ma can tell you what it cost to get clean water just a few decades ago vs now. Maybe you will start to understand what poverty even means.
by gaigalas | 2026-02-04 03:27:57+00:00
I can give you a couple of examples:

1.

I recently made an extension to "bookmark data". It's an auto scraper, but client side.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lidar/eckcmnibplmme...

The user has to pick the elements so the extension knows which selectors to track across similar pages.

While developing it, I imagined a near future in which a small enough model could do that for me.

In fact, if I had the resources, I could probably train one specifically for that and use webnn or onnx or something to deliver it.

2.

I also made a quick drum beat generator https://alganet.github.io/quick-beats/

One of the things I wanted to do is improved beat detection. Several music apps have some sort of tempo detection (you tap on the desk and the microphone catches it and figures out the tempo).

While I can certainly use audio analysis to do that, it has its limits. If I wanted to detect a full drum pattern (the user taps on different objects for kick and snare, and the app fills them), something machine-learny sounds much more appropriate for the job.

---

Your poke at the issue "for what? summarising web pages?" is valid though. While I don't have the resources to train those models I mentioned, the resulting weights should be fairly compatible with todays consumer hardware.

I blame the complete and utter lack of imagination of small-to-mid AI labs for the missing variety in that space.

It results in people not being very creative in imagining valid, non-shitty spammy marketing ways of using AI. They exist though.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 03:29:34+00:00
It’s not cherry-picking. The question is: does GDP correlate with things we care about? In answering that question it makes sense to hold other factors constant. Asians have a longevity advantage in virtually every society where they’re found, so it makes sense to separate out the asian countries. It also makes sense to remove outliers where a single export makes GDP per capita seem artificially large.
by dtkav | 2026-02-04 03:30:15+00:00
I've been working on something similar (with claude code).

It's a sandbox that uses envoy as a transparent proxy locally, and then an external authz server that can swap the creds.

The idea is extended further in that the goal is to allow an org to basically create their own authz system for arbitrary upstreams, and then for users to leverage macaroons to attentuate the tokens at runtime.

It isn't finished but I'm trying to make it work with ssh/yubikeys as an identity layer. The authz macaroon can have a "hole" that is filled by the user/device attestation.

The sandbox has some nice features like browser forwarding for Claude oauth and a CDP proxy for working with Chrome/Electron (I'm building an Obsidian plugin).

I'm inspired by a lot of the fly.io stuff in tokenizer and sprites. Exciting times.

https://github.com/dtkav/agent-creds
by mystraline | 2026-02-04 03:30:49+00:00
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
by prussia | 2026-02-04 03:31:01+00:00
The pendulum has swung a little too far that way, for sure. But when the so-called "cryptocurrency" industry either have business models that are barely concealed ponzis/rugpulls, or run their own "cryptocurrencies" that are only marginally better than a centralised database, it's hard to blame the critics.

Satoshi Nakamoto must be rolling in his grave.
by nomel | 2026-02-04 03:31:45+00:00
Working with a Chinese vendors is an adversarial first relationship, where 差不多 is deeeeep in the culture (and, from my experience, tends to survive trips across the ocean).

There are professional communication/training courses for working with Chinese vendors/colleagues that spell all of this out, because it's not some secret. It's just a very different culture, with high context communication (I'll let you read what the practical implications of that are elsewhere). Want to have your mind blown? Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.

Being a low context person, I have significant and severe communication problems when working with Chinese colleagues/vendors.
by sinuhe69 | 2026-02-04 03:31:53+00:00
As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective.

- In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1]

- heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface area by the factor of 5-10

- data center in space could provide advantages for processing space data, instead of sending them all to earth.
- the Lonestar project proved that data storage and edge processing in space (moon, cislunar) is possible.

- A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget:
+ optical connections reduce heat
+ photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT)
+ processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,

[1] https://ascend-horizon.eu/
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-04 03:33:16+00:00
The bottleneck in development is human attention and ability to validate now (https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-27-stop-orchestrating...). OpenAI could unleash the Kraken, but in order to ensure they're releasing good software that works, they still need the eyeball hours and people who can hold the idea of the thing being built in their head and validate against that ideal.

Agents default to creating big balls of mud but it's fairly trivial to use prompting/tools to keep things growing in a more factored, organized way.
by kmoser | 2026-02-04 03:35:03+00:00
Just because you can raise your hands over your head doesn't mean it isn't painful.

In any case, it's legal to opt-out of the scanners, so why would they care what method you use (really what language you use) to indicate you'd rather get a pat-down than go through the scanners? Either way you're complying with the law.
by ehnto | 2026-02-04 03:35:10+00:00
It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.

Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-04 03:35:13+00:00
It's an obvious step and in 5 years people will read this headline and won't even blink.

Founders can also obtain payment cards to spend it as: "Crypto payment cards hit inflection point as daily transactions surge 22x since late 2024."

https://www.theblock.co/post/386371/crypto-payment-cards-inf...

Yet, I personally think that crypto-native is the goal for commerce with the ability to skip over the "stable" bit.
by NickC25 | 2026-02-04 03:35:18+00:00
The question is why you'd use money you raised for anything but the reason you raised it. You've probably raised a shit ton more than I have, but hear me out - when one raises, there's generally a timeline of fund deployment from the startup's UoF, right? That's how it was done in my case - we tell the investor what we need, why we need it, and when we need it, etc. And then if the investor agrees to invest, it's not just a lump sum sitting in the bank - a good amount of that money gets deployed to help the startup fulfill its mission.

I get that if you're running super lean and you've raised enough to run lean for a while and use cash when you need to, but at the same time why raise more than you have need for?
by thayne | 2026-02-04 03:36:40+00:00
It makes it inconvenient to do things like estimate how long it will take to transfer a 10GiB file. Both because of the the difference between G and Gi, and because one is in bytes and the other is in bits.

There are probably cases where corresponding to Hz, is useful, but for most users I think 119MiB/s is more useful than 1Gbit/s.