MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varjag | 2026-02-07 22:52:33+00:00
Indeed many people who subscribe to Rational Actor theory of politics are stupefied by this. However the thing about personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though media still refers to them as if they are real collective entities. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider.

Say some dictator lived through a trauma that he projects onto some group of people. Or that he considers himself a spiritual successor (perhaps even the reincarnation) of Ivan the Great, the Collector or Lands. Once you ease yourself into this mindset you see the logic.
by chris_swenson | 2026-02-07 22:52:45+00:00
“mov rcx, 0”. At least one assembler (the Go assembler) would at one point blindly (and arguably, incorrectly) rewrite this to “xor rcx, rcx”, which is smaller but modifies flags, which “mov” does not. I believe Go fixed this later, possibly by looking at surrounding instructions to see if the flags were being used, for instance by an “adc” later, to know if the assembler needs to pick the larger “mov” encoding.

Whether that logic should belong in a compiler or an assembler is a separate issue, but it definitely was in the assembler there.
by nullocator | 2026-02-07 22:52:53+00:00
Let's not omit the fact that Trump's handling of Covid was selfish (deny it exists), reckless (deny it exists even harder), foolish (inject bleach), and destabilizing (constantly spewing conflicting information and undermining scientists and experts, you'll to this day still find a steady stream of HN commenters that hold an eternal vendetta against Anthony Fauci for some perceived unforgivable inarticulable wrong he's done.)
by ffworld | 2026-02-07 22:53:03+00:00
You talk about an algorithm. However, you never visited any of the practical implementations of Chroma from Luma, which is used in Production.

It is part of the AV1/2 video codec; for instance, it has been widely adopted too since 2018.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.03951

So do IETF early draft of the idea. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-midtskogen-netvc-chro...

Give a read of the work if not:)
by johnohara | 2026-02-07 22:53:07+00:00
I'll give you props for studying the systems manuals and not the handmade Adventure maps drawn on green-bar paper and hidden behind the back of the last 3270 at the far end of the row of tape request consoles.

I was on the DEC side with an amber VT220 and always thought it was cool that the 3270 could scream "mount me now dammit!" in flashing red block letters while the operators weren't sure if they should drop the keys or pick up the lantern.
by krackers | 2026-02-07 22:53:16+00:00
>blantatly skirting patent laws

Why is this a bad thing? The quickest way to fix the medical/insurance/bureaucracy complex is to just allow people to sell direct to consumer.

The best (worst) example of this is CPAP. Ideally you'd just be able to go and buy one for $300, but instead there is a complex around "necessity" and "prescription", which creates an effective monopoly where the exact same hardware can be sold at different price points with software locked features.
by johnvanommen | 2026-02-07 22:53:25+00:00
> That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))

You’re ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.

That industry is bigger than Hollywood.

Desktop computers will invariably follow.

The RAM shortage will drive the transition.

For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four days a year.

People like that won’t be buying personal desktops or laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a transition into thin clients.

I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.
by IsruAlpha | 2026-02-07 22:54:13+00:00
Hey!

Valentine's is great.

But for singles it isn't.

So i built a way to actually text your crush and shoot your shot. (safely)

- customize your crush with the actual pfp
- put her/his name
- start chatting for free.

(it can also sends a message even if you don't)

Try it → 14.israelfirew.co

also you can find me on my telegram channel (t.me/day_dreamers1)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-07 22:54:14+00:00
> I am not bragging, I’m old those are table stakes to being able to stay in this game for 3 decades

I'm not old. But slightly past where most would call "young". I see a decent career for the first 5-6 years and then a disruption that completely cuts down on the things you likely had your entire career. Enough time to get a taste of the good times,not enough time to get stable. Meanwhile you buult networks, accomplishments, a seal of trust, in times with overall lower standards.

I don't even use AI but AI has shaped the way I need to navigate the job market and verify knowledge. If you have plenty of pre-AI colleagues and projects to point to you skip all this. But it's a hellscape for people like me.

And I'm sure its an absolute wasteland for new grads
by antonvs | 2026-02-07 22:54:36+00:00
Spoken like someone who’s never read the Relativistic Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/...

I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-02-07 22:55:42+00:00
After 6 weeks in Taiwan, one thing became very evident, mainland China can take the island in 3 days without firing a single shot. While I was there mainland China told the people of Taiwan to shut their mouths and nobody said a word about China after.

The reason mainland China hasn't taken Taiwan is because they don't have to and more important they gain nothing.

I do not like the government of China, however, they are building infrastructure around the world especially in Africa, Asia, and South America. They are not destroying things like Russia does every single day. Their approach to diplomacy now is building.

For the same reason, China isn't commit terrorist attacks on other countries. However, Russia is committing terrorist attacks on other countries so it easy to believe that they are responsible for terrorist attacks.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-07 22:55:53+00:00
TDM won’t work in practice for a few reasons.

The rails act like very noisy transmission lines where the return path is partly the other rail, partly ground, and it changes with ballast moisture and geometry. Every joint, weld, switch, crossing, impedance bond, and termination creates reflections. The bigger problem though is the gap often left between tracks for thermal expansion.

There are ways to lay down other signal lines along the track that can measure things but they tend to be expensive unless they use a telecom line laid along the track. There’s other techniques like differential injection rail-to-rail with careful coupling + filtering, and baseline subtraction, but I don’t know how widely deployed that is.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-07 22:56:00+00:00
I explored the different mental frameworks for how we use LLMs here: https://yagmin.com/blog/llms-arent-tools/ I think the "software factory" is currently the end state of using LLMs in most people's minds, but I think there is (at least) one more level: LLMs as applications.

Which is more or less creating a customized harness. There is a lot more that is possiible once we move past the idea that harnesses are just for workflow variations for engineers.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-07 22:56:59+00:00
Author here. This started as a literature review and turned into something stranger.

We found the same mathematical structure — operator kernels with specific symmetry properties — appearing independently in physics (phase transitions), finance (market crashes), ecology (extinction cascades), neuroscience (neural criticality), and network science (cascade failures).

Each field derived it from first principles. Each named it differently. Minimal cross-citation. The paper traces the convergent discovery and asks: if the same structure keeps emerging, what does that tell us about how we organize knowledge? Freethemath.org is our summary for non-specialists.
by haunter | 2026-02-07 22:57:31+00:00
Yeah it's basically anarchy (to some extent)

https://repo.or.cz/h/mob.html

>The idea is to provide unmoderated side channel for random contributors to work on a project, with similar rationale as e.g. Wikipedia - that given enough interested people, the quality will grow rapidly and occassional "vandalism" will get fixed quickly. Of course this may not work nearly as well for software, but here we are, to give it a try.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-07 22:57:34+00:00
They're for those within the population that are willing to submit themselves to the whim of the state and whose prosperity in some way directly benefits the oligarchs that run the state.

Certainly, as just a few examples, they are not for the well-being of the Uyghar population or pro-democracy activists or journalists investigating human rights violation or supporters of Tibetan independence.
by monero-xmr | 2026-02-07 22:57:43+00:00
I own (cofounded) a medium-sized saas business with hundreds of employees. I maintain final decision of everything technical and still code every day because it’s important. All of the engineers use LLM tools, you’d be stupid not to. But I need good engineers, I replace good engineers when someone leaves, and the business itself is so much larger than just programming. The system is just so huge and complex, and I am the benevolent dictator that architected it and maintains the core design decisions, that the LLM does not replace the need for engineers nor my own expertise.

Furthermore if we were truly in the utopia the author describes, why do all the LLM companies employ (and pay top dollar) for so many engineers? Why does OpenAI pay for slack when they could just vibe code a chat app in an hour?

The challenge of building a real, valuable software business (or any business) is so much harder than using LLM to prompt “build me a successful software business”
by echelon | 2026-02-07 22:57:51+00:00
These models are nothing short of astounding.

I can write a spec for an entirely new endpoint, and Claude figures out all of the middleware plumbing and the database queries. (The catch: this is in Rust and the SQL is raw, without an ORM. It just gets it. I'm reviewing the code, too, and it's mostly excellent.)

I can ask Claude to add new data to the return payloads - it does it, and it can figure out the cache invalidation.

These models are blowing my mind. It's like I have an army of juniors I can actually trust.
by sleazylice | 2026-02-07 22:58:02+00:00
The State Department announced today they're deleting all @StateDept tweets from before Jan 20, 2025 - that's 17 years of diplomatic communications (2009-2025).

They claim it will be "internally archived" but public access will require FOIA requests. This is a significant departure from past transitions where social media was publicly archived.

I attempted to archive via xAI's API but only captured ~60 tweets (API limitations). The full archive likely contains 40,000-60,000 tweets covering major diplomatic events: Arab Spring, Ukraine conflicts, Iran nuclear deal, COVID response, etc.

This affects not just @StateDept but all embassy, ambassador, and bureau accounts.

Does anyone have tools/access to pull complete Twitter timelines? The deletion could happen any day now.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-07 22:58:17+00:00
"Following this hypothesis, what C did to assembler, what Java did to C, what Javascript/Python/Perl did to Java, now LLM agents are doing to all programming languages."

This is not an appropriate analogy, at least not right now.

Code Agents are generating code from prompts, in that sense the metaphor is correct. However Agents then read the code and it becomes input and they generate more code. This was never the case for compilers, an LLM used in this sense is strictly not a compiler because it is not cyclic and not directional.
by mmooss | 2026-02-07 22:58:22+00:00
You're in an IT forum and can't imagine implementations of both the smallest and largest scales? ICs are built at nanoscale and have to deal with quantum effects. PNT systems are so large that they have to deal with the speed of light and relativistic effects.

Many things humanity builds are on the scale of colliders.

> The problem is that fundamental physics

I didn't know there was a problem. It seems like one of humanity's greatest successes.
by simonw | 2026-02-07 22:59:13+00:00
I do find value in papers. I have a series of posts where I dig into papers that I find noteworthy and try to translate them into more easily understood terms. I wish more people would do that - it frustrates me that paper authors themselves only occasionally post accompanying commentary that helps explain the paper outside of the confines of academic writing. https://simonwillison.net/tags/paper-review/

One challenge we have here is that there are a lot of people who are desperate for evidence that LLMs are a waste of time, and they will leap on any paper that supports that narrative. This leads to a slightly perverse incentive where publishing papers that are critical of AI is a great way to get a whole lot of attention on that paper.

In that way academic papers and blogging aren't as distinct as you might hope!
by WalterBright | 2026-02-07 22:59:29+00:00
1. A loan is not a subsidy. Loans get paid back with interest.

2. Tax credits - the tax code is full of various credits. Anyone can use those credits.

3. Other subsidies - like what?

> which literally would not be possible without the US government

The US government buying launches at prices far cheaper than NASA is not a subsidy.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-02-07 22:59:34+00:00
I would like to hijack the "high level language" term to mean dopamine hits from using an LLM.

"Generate a Frontend End for me now please so I don't need to think"

LLM starts outputting tokens

Dopamine hit to the brain as I get my reward without having to run npm and figure out what packages to use

Then out of a shadowy alleyway a man in a trenchcoat approaches

"Pssssttt, all the suckers are using that tool, come try some Opus 4.6"

"How much?"

"Oh that'll be $200.... and your muscle memory for running maven commands"

"Shut up and take my money"

----- 5 months later, washed up and disconnected from cloud LLMs ------

"Anyone got any spare tokens I could use?"
by nh2 | 2026-02-07 22:59:48+00:00
I guess until we know what that network share is and how it works, we cannot really progress. Taking 10 ms to fetch the 19 KB file is definitely not great, it would be ~50 LAN roundtrips.

> whatever's preventing that 250MB file from ramping up all the way to 10Gbps

Probably that network share does small reads if small reads are requested.

Might be good if the author ran `dd` or a similar tool where the read buffer size can be controlled.
by andylytic | 2026-02-07 22:59:56+00:00
First post ever on hacker news. Spent months building an extremely fast <1 second response AI overlay. I made it invisible to all screen capture and recordings (besides apple's ctrl + cmd + 5). You can screenshot it on macOS and it errors out and wont show in any screenshots or recordings.

In short this is what it does.
Hotkey, drag a region on your screen, AI reads it (OCR or vision since it decides based on heuristics), answer appears in an overlay without copy-paste, no tab switching, works on any app.

Phantom Mode. This is the invisibility cloak. Your screen looks normal to you, but recordings/captures show nothing

Crazy part is I got last place in product hunt at #252 and 0 upvotes on launch. Revenge is around the corner. Is LowLighter deserving of more recognition?
by ixude | 2026-02-07 23:00:39+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | France (UTC+1)

DevSecOps & Fullstack Engineer (Ex-Thales / BlueTrusty)

I build secure systems and fix critical backends. I don't just ship code; I ensure it doesn't get hacked.

Tech Stack:

Core: Go (Golang), C++ (Qt), Node.js/TypeScript.

Ops/Sec: Docker, Forensic Analysis, Hardening.

Recent Work:

Crisis Mgmt: Led forensic response & network reconstruction during a ransomware attack.

Product: Built & shipped "Parkto" mobile app to stores (Node.js/Stripe).

Industry: C++/Qt dev for medical imaging (Therapixel).

Availability: 15-20h/week. Perfect for technical audits, complex bug-fixing, or adding security-critical features.

Contact: news.ycombinator.com.squad508@passmail.net Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanuel-lena/
by skydhash | 2026-02-07 23:01:00+00:00
> You can't 100% trust a human either.

We do have a system of checks and balances that does a reasonable job of it. Not everyone in position of power is willing to burn their reputation and land in jail. You don't check the food at the restaurant for poison, nor check the gas in your tank if it's ok. But you would if the cook or the gas manufacturer was as reliable as current LLMs.
by ozim | 2026-02-07 23:01:11+00:00
I think that is easy to understand for a lot of people but I will spell it out.

This looks like AI companies marketing that is something in line 1+1 or buy 3 for 2.

Money you don’t spend on tokens are the only saved money, period.

With employees you have to pay them anyway you can’t just say „these requirements make no sense, park for two days until I get them right”.

You would have to be damn sure of that you are doing the right thing to burn $1k a day on tokens.

With humans I can see many reasons why would you pay anyway and it is on you that you should provide sensible requirements to be built and make use of employees time.
by ixude | 2026-02-07 23:01:17+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | France (UTC+1)

DevSecOps & Fullstack Engineer

I build secure systems and fix critical backends. I don't just ship code; I ensure it doesn't get hacked.

Tech Stack:

Core: Go (Golang), C++ (Qt), Node.js/TypeScript.

Ops/Sec: Docker, Forensic Analysis, Hardening.

Recent Work:

Crisis Mgmt: Led forensic response & network reconstruction during a ransomware attack.

Product: Built & shipped "Parkto" mobile app to stores (Node.js/Stripe).

Industry: C++/Qt dev for medical imaging (Therapixel).

Availability: 15-20h/week. Perfect for technical audits, complex bug-fixing, or adding security-critical features.

Contact: news.ycombinator.com.squad508@passmail.net Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanuel-lena/
by alexpotato | 2026-02-07 23:01:37+00:00
Speaking as someone who has been both a SRE/DevOps from all levels from IC to Global Head of a team:

- I 100% believe this is happening and is probably going to be the case in the next 6 months. I've seen Claude and Grok debug issues when they only had half of the relevant evidence (e.g. Given A and B, it's most likely X). It can even debug complex issues between systems using logs, metrics etc. In other words, everything a human would do (and sometimes better).

- The situation described is actually not that different from being a SRE manager. e.g. as you get more senior, you aren't doing the investigations yourself. It's usually your direct reports that are actually looking at the logs etc. You may occasionally get involved for more complex issues or big outages but the direct reports are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

- All of the above being said, I can imagine errors so weird/complex etc that the LLMs either can't figure it out, don't have the MCP or skill to resolve it or there is some giant technology issue that breaks a lot of stuff. Facebook engineers using angle grinders to get into the data center due to DNS issues comes to mind for the last one.

Which probably means we are all going to start to be more like airline pilots:

- highly trained in debugging AND managing fleets of LLMs

- managing autonomous systems

- around "just in case" the LLMs fall over

P.S. I've been very well paid over the years and being a SRE is how I feed my family. I do worry, like many, about how all of this is going to affect that. Sobering stuff.

-
by dsr_ | 2026-02-07 23:02:09+00:00
It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things.

"I prompted it like this"

"I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"

It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.
by simonw | 2026-02-07 23:02:23+00:00
> Who else has the sort of resources to train and run SOTA models at scale?

Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Reka AI, Alibaba (Qwen), 01 AI, Cohere, DeepSeek, Nvidia, Mistral, NexusFlow, Z.ai (GLM), xAI, Ai2, Princeton, Tencent, MiniMax, Moonshot (Kimi) and I've certainly missed some.

All of those organizations have trained what I'd class as a GPT-4+ level model.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-07 23:02:25+00:00
That github repo is just a mirror, and if you checked the official website you'd see:

> Please note: The main LuaJIT author (Mike Pall) is working on unrelated projects and cannot accept bigger sponsorships at this time. But other community members may be open to sponsorship offers — please ask on the LuaJIT mailing list for any takers.

Mailing list is here: https://luajit.org/list.html
by buildsjets | 2026-02-07 23:03:07+00:00
And you are proposing that none of the Cesium 137 escaped into the ambient environment during the 19 year exposure period? That is statistically impossible. The source had ha mechanical shutter that allowed it to be directly exposed to the environment for almost 20 years, with no human to maintain it. Corrosion, spalling, and release of radioactive material though freeze-thaw cycles are all ways that bits of the source can become liberated.

Are you also proposing that this was the only experiment that released radionuclides into the environment at BNL? I certainly remember the furor of them getting caught pissing tritium into the groundwater. I am sure there are many, many things they did which were not detected.

https://www.gao.gov/products/rced-98-26

It is well know and well documented that the defense industry has taken a cavalier approach to public nuclear safety from it’s very inception. And make no mistake, BNL exists primarily as a national defense asset.
by mancerayder | 2026-02-07 23:03:07+00:00
I'm with you on the avoiding tedium, on-call and monitoring and overall Operations pieces of it.

There's an infrastructure creation aspect where you're creating automation systems and passing it along for others to maintain. I personally think that's a sweet spot.

Everything you said here I relate to, it seemed like you were arguing that infrastructure design and systems engineering is just "app dev ++" as opposed to a collection of skill sets that take years to learn.

It's no different than AI slop if someone thinks cloud automation is just another programming framework to learn. I've worked exactly in 0 companies that got it right when it came to intelligently designed, bullet proof systems. Some of the slop and chaos is so bad it takes big new projects and smarter hires to repair it.