MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-07 11:22:36+00:00
I suppose you will then say, you fear your country would become "Muslim" or insert whatever religion you hate. But Muslim is an idea it's not a race. A religion can convert a country without even a single marriage or mixup because it's an idea, so tell me again how do you feel you are safe from a foreign religion just because your "race" is different? And the nice thing is the arabs or whatever race has you wetting your bed will also have had thoroughly had to mix up with the locals by that point, already rendering them "impure". And I have you covered with a great anti-democratic solution for that: forcible state mandated atheism.
by balamatom | 2026-02-07 11:23:51+00:00
>Schizos would be schizos anywhere else.

May I introduce you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia

>Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.

There isn't a common understanding of these mechanisms, because the first thing they were used for, was to brand as "defective" anyone pursuing such understanding on their own terms.

Of course you could always do it by the book i.e. go in blind and debt-enslave yourself until loss of capacity for disentanglement. A small number of such functionaries are indeed required to maintain a colony; and then some surplus ones to keep the first one in their place.

Is that a "conspiracy"? In the sense that you're stuck breathing in sync with a lot of strangers, sure. In the sense of secret master plan? Nah bruh, it's all been out in the open all along. Just mindkillingly terrifying to most of yall. Hence all the phatics.
by hyc_symas | 2026-02-07 11:24:10+00:00
In-memory DBs were always a dead-end waste of time. There will always be bigger slower cheaper secondary storage, no matter how cheap main memory gets. And workloads always grow to exceed the available main memory (unless a system is dying). And secondary storage will always be paged, because it's too inefficient to address it at smaller granularity.
That's just reality, and anyone who ignores reality isn't going to get very far.
by mrjay42 | 2026-02-07 11:24:28+00:00
As with many things in life, see it like stats in an RPG: your 'character' may have "0" in the singing skill INITIALLY. But it's still a skill that you can learn, even if you start low.

However, what is true is that, you will sound like YOU. You can get close or make impressions of artists you like. But ultimately your voice is YOUR instrument and it can gain range, and power, but you'll sound like you.

For instance, I'm well aware that I will never have "Celine Dion's voice". I don't mean her skills, I mean literally her voice.

That's what one of the first AND biggest tough thing to accept when singing: you might never sound exactly like the singers you admire. But it doesn't mean you can't sing or be extremely good at it.

It's like Michael Jackson was sad because he knew he would never be able to sing like Barry White. Does that mean Michael Jackson is not a good singer? Nope.
by saberience | 2026-02-07 11:25:02+00:00
I really don't understand the use-case here.

My models are writing code all day in 3/4 different languages, why would I want to:

a) Restrict them to Python

b) Restrict them to a cutdown, less-useful version of Python?

My models write me Typescript and C# and Python all day with zero issues. Why do I need this?
by austinjp | 2026-02-07 11:26:33+00:00
Have a look at Complete Vocal Technique.

https://completevocalinstitute.com/complete-vocal-technique/

Their work includes pedagogical research to develop a consistent terminology which abandons lots of outdated and confusing terms such as you mention. No more ambiguous words like "project" or "space" or "support".

Their research also includes using endosciopic cameras to directly observe the vocal tracts of professional singers.

I've not actually trained with them, I just like their research and approach.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 11:26:35+00:00
"For example in the 19th century linguists were able to deduce that the Proto-Indo-European language must have had guttural consonants not found in any extant language, and then later when the Hittite language was decoded, the guttural consonants were right there. The theory was validated on held-out data."

I find reconstruction fascinating, but it will never be completely accurate, because it just can't be. Every language has quirks, and I believe PIE probably had one or two complex features that never survived into the age of writing. Most of its vocabulary is lost, although I hold out more hopes for phonology.
by theothertimcook | 2026-02-07 11:29:11+00:00
A short non-exhuastive history of t3ch moral panics:
The Printing Press - 15th Century
The Industrial Revolution - 18th-19th Century
The Telephone - Late 19th Century
Cinema and Early Media - 20th Century
Video Games - Late 20th Century
Social Media - 21st Century

Okay, maybe that last one hasnt gone so well..

He is kinda right though, music has become a passive feed, if anything I welcome the slopening, if it brings back live, local, experience based music then that's a win.
by GRMPZ23 | 2026-02-07 11:29:57+00:00
About me

My role is not development.

My contribution is problem framing, conceptual clarity, and identifying ideas that actually matter before they become obvious.
I work on pressure points: where technology, narratives, and power structures collide.

I’m good at isolating simple ideas with real-world impact.
I’m fast at naming what is missing, what is avoided, and what can be measured.

I’m not looking to learn how to code a product from scratch.
I’m not interested in long discussions before anything exists.

I’m looking for people who are pragmatic builders:
people who ship first, argue later, and are comfortable turning an idea into a public artifact quickly.

If you like execution, MVPs, benchmarks, dashboards, or tools that exist in the open, we’ll understand each other.

I bring direction and clarity.
You bring implementation and speed.

That’s the deal.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-07 11:31:22+00:00
What is the Roman Empire worse than in your mind? It lasted centuries, its literally perhaps the longest running in history. If it's the fate of the Roman Empire we have to face, then I can't wish for anything better. You can of course say it slid into dictatorship, now prove it was due to the race admixture. Anyone can read anything into the transition and fall of the Roman Empire.
by reverius42 | 2026-02-07 11:31:37+00:00
Even the death marches were fun in their own way (though exploitative).

I think the reason it feels different now is that all the big companies are just constantly doing layoffs (at least every few months). So it always feels like layoffs are looming and everyone is at risk. Jobs used to feel safer (especially when most tech companies were growing rapidly instead of shrinking).
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 11:33:05+00:00
I'm sure he would pick up on some things, but he would also be heavily influenced by much later forms of Greek, where means would have changed. I have spoken to Greeks about ancient texts and their reactions vary — some indicated they could understand a lot and some very little. A bit like a modern English speaker approaching Chaucer — I can understand a fair bit and am helped by my knowledge of Broad Scots but other people complain it is barely intelligible to them. (There are people who complain the same about Shakespeare and even Dickens.)
by orwin | 2026-02-07 11:33:19+00:00
I agree, but i'm shouting at the cloud. Stuff needs to be done, it seems to work at first, so either i just abandon quality and let things rot, or i read everything and underline each time the code smell.

I too use AI, but mostly to generate scripts (the most usefull use of AI is 100-200 line scripts imho), test _cases_ (i write the test itself, the data inside is generated) and HTML/CSS/JS shenanigans (the logic i code, the presentation i'm inferior to any random guy on the internet, so i might as well use an AI). I also use it for stuff that never end in repository, for exploration/proof of concept and outside of scope tests (i like to understand how stuff work, that helps), or to summarize Powerpoint presentations so i can do actual work during 60-person "meetings" and still get the point.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-07 11:35:48+00:00
Interesting to hear someone discuss Hermas. I have never taken to it personally, but have attempted to get into it a few times. Hermas was very popular at one stage, and I've even heard some people argue that it should have been in the canon and the Book of Revelation taken out. (Although both books tend towards metaphorical imagery which is not always clear.)
Show HN: Invoxo – Invoicing with automatic EU VAT for cross-border services
by InvoxoEU | 2026-02-07 11:37:41+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder running a service business through an Estonian e-Residency company (OÜ). Every time I invoiced a client in another EU country, I had to manually check if reverse charge applies, validate their VAT number on VIES, and figure out the correct tax treatment. I got tired of Googling the same rules over and over, so I built the tool I wanted.

Invoxo automatically determines the correct VAT treatment for each invoice based on seller/buyer countries, VAT registration status, and buyer type. It covers:

- VIES VAT number validation (real-time, with proof retention)
- Reverse charge auto-detection for EU B2B
- OSS handling for B2C digital services
- Immutable tax records locked at issuance

The tax engine routes every invoice through a regime-specific decision system — no hardcoded rules in the UI layer. Tax payloads are versioned and hashed for audit.

It's built for service businesses only — no goods, no customs, no margin schemes. That constraint keeps the tax logic correct rather than approximately correct.

Stack: Laravel, TaxRegimeRouter that isolates each regime's decision logic, treatments, and payload schemas.

14-day free trial, plans from €19/month.

https://invoxo.eu

Happy to answer questions about EU VAT edge cases or the architecture.
by jstanley | 2026-02-07 11:38:47+00:00
> But it doesn't matter, because LLMs that try to use a class will get an error message and rewrite their code to not use classes instead.

This is true in a sense, but every little papercut at the lower levels of abstraction degrades performance at higher levels as the LLM needs to spend its efforts on hacking around jank in the Python interpreter instead of solving the real problem.
by ClaraForm | 2026-02-07 11:38:55+00:00
Right? "Go find outsized success, but I'm going to put a non negotiable cap on the size. You can pick a bad direction for good reasons, but only you will be responsible if there are no good directions."

To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.
by viraptor | 2026-02-07 11:39:04+00:00
There are some wild skeletons in that git closet:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260206092423.GB2761602@coredum...

> we did have a
problem with fidelity of commit message in git-rebase, since it was based on a format-patch/am pipeline. And we solved it by teaching "git am" a magic "--rebasing" flag
by rramadass | 2026-02-07 11:40:44+00:00
Your opinions have no basis in facts; talking about quantitative statistics without having any idea of the raw data is ignorance. The documentary/article point you to such data. The article in particular has links to others including the book Ghost Work - https://ghostwork.info/ which contains lots of data. AI content annotation falls under this umbrella.

I had already mentioned that graphic imagery causing psychological harm is well studied. Psychologists call it Secondary Trauma with symptoms similar to PTSD (which you have helpfully noted above) - https://www.ptsduk.org/secondary-trauma/?ref=thebrink.me

In fact, Facebook was taken to court over this, forced to acknowledge the harm done and paid out a hefty amount;

Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job - https://archive.is/M4tdk#selection-1487.0-1487.89

A simple google search would have given you any number of articles/papers on the subject. But instead of educating yourself, you are merely asking to be spoon-fed.

Nevertheless, start here (two broad classes of graphic imagery);

It matters what you see: Graphic media images of war and terror may amplify distress - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318465121

Pornography Consumption and Cognitive-Affective Distress - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10399954/
by spicyjpeg | 2026-02-07 11:41:23+00:00
A similar, even higher profile case that shook the electronics industry around a decade ago was chip manufacturer FTDI releasing an update to their drivers that would detect and semi-permanently brick clones of FTDI USB serial bridge chips [1]. The bricking was performed by setting the USB product ID to zero, preventing Windows and macOS from detecting the device at all; the Linux drivers quickly got updated to recognize the new PID, allowing for the development of unbricking tools. Somewhat ironically, the detection relied on errata of the original parts that the clones fixed [2].

The backlash to this measure was massive, as many legitimate products turned out to use counterfeit FTDI parts without the manufacturers' awareness due to unreliable supply chains. Microsoft quickly pulled the update but FTDI seemed not to care for the most part, eventually releasing another similar update a couple of years later that would deliberately corrupt all data sent through clone chips.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI#Driver_controversy

[2]: https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick#diving-deep
by Tade0 | 2026-02-07 11:42:03+00:00
Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Forgot that there's a another thing named "tsx" out there.

I wouldn't call it running TS natively - what they're doing is either using an external tool, or just stripping types, so several things, like most notably enums, don't work by default.

I mean, that's more than enough for my use cases and I'm happy that the feature exists, but I don't think we'll ever see a native TypeScript engine. Would have been cool, though, considering JS engines define their own internal types anyway.
by LiamPowell | 2026-02-07 11:42:43+00:00
I don't necessarily think we'll ever reach that point and I'm pretty sure we'll never reach that point for some higher risk applications due to natural language being ambiguous.

There are however some applications where ambiguity is fine. For example, I might have a recipe website where I tell a LLM to "add a slider for the user to scale the number of servings". There's a ton of ambiguity there but if you don't care about the exact details then I can see a future where LLMs do something reasonable 99.9999% of the time and no one does more than glance at it and say it looks fine.

How long it is until we reach that point and if we'll ever reach that point is of course still up for debate, but I dnt think it's completely unrealistic.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-07 11:43:46+00:00
So I work for a small defense contractor, for more than 2 years now. The means to success so far is almost entirely in the soft skills. It’s helpful to understand the technology but the soft skills are so much more important. It’s certainly the 80/20 rule.

Here is what I mean by soft skills:

* Actually caring about people. Checking up on your peers and seeing if they need help.

* Constant awareness of the people under your management. Having some idea of what they are working on where their pain points are. They should always know they can come to you if they have a problem.

* Tracking down undocumented requirements by actually talking to people and getting to know more people.

* Constant awareness of hot issues affecting major projects and operating status.

Since my business is technology contracting the business goal is to put people into employment and retain those people to the success of the client. The more I retain people the more successful I am to my employer. The inefficiency of the work is up to the client and coordinating business partners.

I started here as a developer and within a year was promoted to a manager. In the contract I am still a developer. The complexity there is that I operate in partnership with an another company who would prefer I were a junior developer even though I manage 15 seats. It’s still all about the soft skills.
by adrian17 | 2026-02-07 11:45:42+00:00
> Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.

This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.

There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they could.

Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?
by eucyclos | 2026-02-07 11:46:20+00:00
This is all true, but I think the issue is upstream of where you're pointing - democracy declines when the goal becomes to win rather than to serve the constituents. Parties are a way to win and they also reinforce the idea that winning is the goal.

I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.
by vidarh | 2026-02-07 11:46:46+00:00
Sure, but non of those things requires you to watch it work. They're all easy to pick up on when reviewing a finished change, which ideally should come after it's instructions have had it run linters, run sub agents that verify it has added tests, run sub agents doing a code review.

I don't want to waste my time reviewing a change the model can still significantly improve all by itself. My time costs far more than the models.
by TheDong | 2026-02-07 11:48:04+00:00
> you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.

From the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Samsung

> Samsung Book5 - Internal Speakers not working on linux

Also, it caps out at 32GiB of ram, I feel like these days that's pretty low for anyone who uses javascript heavy webpages. Like, my firefox on linux is currently using 42GiB of memory, and that's with under 200 tabs open, and then when I build my nixos config, that usually takes another 10-20GiB of memory
by TuringTest | 2026-02-07 11:49:38+00:00
It is possible to try it, and some people do (high speed trading is just that, plus taking advantage of privileged information that speed provides to react before anyone else).

However there are two fundamental problems to computational predictions. The first one obviously is accuracy. A model is a compressed memorization of everything observed so far; a prediction with it is just projecting into the future the observed patterns. In a chaotic system, that goes only so far; the most regular, predictable patterns are obvious to everybody and give less return, and the chaotic system states where prediction would be more valuable are the less reliable. You cannot build a perfect oracle that would fix that.

The second problem is more insidious. Even if you were able to build a perfect oracle, acting on its predictions would become part of the system itself. That would change the outcomes, making the system behave in a different way as it was trained, and thus less reliable. If several people do it at the same time, there's no way to retrain the model to take into account the new behaviour.

There's the possibility (but not a guarantee) to reach a fixed point, that a Nash equilibrium would appear where such system becomes into a stable cycle, but that's not likely in a changing environment where everybody tries to outdo everyone else.
by tomcam | 2026-02-07 11:50:51+00:00
It can be taught!

I can play instruments but never thought I could sing outside a range of less than an octave in the baritone range.

When I was 50 we had a singing teacher over at our house for my children. I asked if she could help my range. That day she took my voice to a high C. I am actually a tenor and can sing pretty much all the high parts. I am my in-laws’ favorite opera singer now.

Also I was too timid. Singing is really just controlled shouting.
by altmanaltman | 2026-02-07 11:51:43+00:00
Not sure for accountants due to regulations esp in corporate finance, lots of things that only a CPA can do etc. Tax preparers sure but not when it comes to complex tax situations. The reason you pay an accountant to do your taxes is because you trust them to do the right thing and have accountablity (pardon the pun). An AI system doesn't exude the same form of trust imo. For most easy tax filing (still a massive population/market), I guess AI can work.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-07 11:51:58+00:00
This is the final. To give people a chance to see it I'm ballooning past the Show feed to hit new. One. Last. Time.

Since the community has been loving my slopmaxxing so much lately - lapcat I'm gonna beat you to it this time:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dosaygo-studio

11 posts!

As mods and others feel this is not "true HN" stuff, I think this will be the last of these little escapades.

So, it is with much joy that this series bids you all adieu, and I thought I'd let it go out with the ultimate meta reference - HN turned to slop? These posts are all slop? Now it's made real.

Please enjoy Gemini Pro 3's rewrite of the current front page in pure slopmaxxing style.
by rramadass | 2026-02-07 11:52:15+00:00
This is well documented.

In fact, Facebook was taken to court over this, admitted to the harm caused and paid out a hefty amount;

Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job - https://archive.is/M4tdk#selection-1487.0-1487.89

Also watch the documentary i link to here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-07 11:52:52+00:00
https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/WHHWGT-in-defence...

This is good

I would add that "WebPKI" is fundamentally reliant on ICANN DNS

In practice the proponents of WebPKI believe only people who pay for "domain names" can be "trusted"

That's hardly "authentication"

Imagine if PGP in practice required some fee to be paid to some unaccountable corporation that in practice is immune from liability such as ICANN

The corporation performs no work to "authenticate" anything. What is the purpose of the fee

It's internet users who do or don't do the work to "authenticate" other parties on the internet

Why not use public keys as "domain names". It's been done in PoC

Anyone can generate keys ("names") for free. A limitless namespace

The answer is not aesthetics, it's that this would mean the end of the "domain name business", the "certificate authority business", along with countless other "services" that are dependent on ICANN-approved, pay to play "domain names"

Silicon Valley gatekeeping would be threatened

In the early days of the internet domain names were free