MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by clickety_clack | 2026-01-26 16:05:24+00:00
I don’t know how many people have bought them, but I’m going to guess it’s in the millions since Apple are updating it. All those people presumably do find it useful separate from their devices.

Personally I don’t always have an Apple device in my backpack, and when traveling you can’t put devices in checked luggage, so I use them for those use cases at least.
by yabones | 2026-01-26 16:05:29+00:00
They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-26 16:05:31+00:00
Anyone who is unironically saying China attacking Taiwan is a real threat (eg The Anthropic CEO quoted in the article) is either simply echoing the administration's painting of China as a geopolitical bogeyman or they're just ignorant of geopolitics, likely because they're projecting American economic imperialism onto China.

I'm glad the article dismissed this as a threat because it isn't one. The official policy of the US is the One China policy. You'll see this described as "strategic ambiguity". That's another way of saying that the official policy is simply to lie about supporting Taiwan's independence.

China can only hurt their position by taking military action against Taiwan. Also, it's highly debatable if they even have the military capability to invade Taiwan. Naval blockade? Sure. But to what end?

China is going to make their own chips. They'll just hire the right people to replicate EUV lithography. The article brought up nuclear weapons. It's a good analogy. At the end of WW2 the thinking of the US military was that the USSR would take 20+ years to get the bomb if they ever got it. It took 4 years. The gap with the hydrogen bomb was even less.

Western chauvinism in policy circles completely underestimates China's capacity to catch up in lithography. Not selling the best chips to China created a captive market for Chinese chipmakers.

I also think TSMC is being understandably cautious in not expanding their CapEx. AI companies really should focus on an economic use case for AI more than worry that foundry capacity will somehow limit a theoretical future AI use case.
by alphazard | 2026-01-26 16:06:04+00:00
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
There's no reason to believe that's the case.

LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon.
They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving.
We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
by zeristor | 2026-01-26 16:06:12+00:00
There was a huge Lucasfilm book on the costume design of The Phantom Menace, it looked amazing, I would have bought it at Forbidden Planet but I was between jobs at the time.

It went into to much detail, the film has its detractors, but the book itself was fascinating. Although I still buy books I don't think I spend enough time reading them.

'Dressing a Galaxy': https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Dressing_a_Galaxy:_The_Cost...
by ottah | 2026-01-26 16:06:22+00:00
The models are not smarter than us by far. Have you not run into issues with reasoning and comprehension with them? They get confused, they miss big details, build complicated code thats ineffective. They don't work well at tasks that require a larger holistic understanding of the problem. The models are weak, brittle reasoners, because they have an indirect and contradictory understanding of the wold. We're several breakthroughs away and several hardware generations from having models that are robust reasoners for grounded, non-kind problems.
by raphinou | 2026-01-26 16:06:59+00:00
I use ai to develop, but at every code review I find stuff to be corrected, which motivates me to continuing the reviews. It's still a win I think though. I've incrementally increased my use of ai in development [1], but I'm at a plateau now I think. I don't plan to go over to complete vibe coding for anything serious or to be maintained.

1: https://asfaload.com/blog/ai_use/
by mzweav | 2026-01-26 16:07:31+00:00
I'm the other dev of Crane. Our current plan is to use BRiCk (https://skylabsai.github.io/BRiCk/index.html) to directly verify that the C++ implementation our STM primitives are extracted to matches the functional specification of STM. Having done that, we can then axiomatize the functional specification over our monadic, interaction tree interface and reason directly over the functional code in Rocq without needing to worry about the gritty details of the C++ interpretation.
by chandlernguyen | 2026-01-26 16:07:36+00:00
I have complicated feelings about AI-generated content. I've argued that AI should amplify expertise, not replace it.

So why did I just spend two weeks rebuilding DIALØGUE—an AI podcast generator?

The honest answer: I got hooked.

After using Claude Code to redesign my site in 3 days, I couldn't stop. The speed was intoxicating.

That curiosity led to 119 commits and some uncomfortable thoughts about my daughter's future.

Here's what haunts me:

DIALØGUE v1 → 6 months
STRAŦUM (2-3x more complex) → 75 days
DIALØGUE v2 → 14 days

484 files changed. 89,000+ lines. Code I personally wrote: ~0

I have a teenage daughter. Smart, curious, hardworking.

And I have no idea what to tell her about her future.

The skills I learned over 18 years in advertising—strategic thinking, understanding human psychology—those still matter. But the execution skills? AI can do that now. Often better than I could. Getting better every month.

I used to think "critical thinking" was the answer.

But AI can give you 50-70% of the critical thinking for any problem. The floor has been raised so high that "I can think critically" isn't the differentiator it used to be.

What's left? Taste? Judgment? Maybe. But I'm not confident enough to bet my daughter's career on it.

I'm excited about what I built. But I'm also scared. Not of the technology. Of the pace.

Society isn't ready. Our education systems aren't ready. None of it is ready.

I'm not ready. And I'm one of the people building these tools.

Full breakdown above
by mellosouls | 2026-01-26 16:07:36+00:00
This is an interesting and thoughtful article I think, but worth evaluating in the context of the service ("cognitive security") its author is trying to sell.

That's not to undermine the substance of the discussion on political/constitutional risk under the inference-hoarding of authority, but I think it would be useful to bear in mind the author's commercial framing (or more charitably the motivation for the service if this philosophical consideration preceded it).

A couple of arguments against the idea of singular control would be that it requires technical experts to produce and manage it, and would be distributed internationally given any countries advanced enough would have their own versions; but it would of course provide tricky questions for elected representatives in the democratic countries to answer.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 16:08:05+00:00
I don't think anyone is talking about "medical sites" but rather medical sites. Indeed "medical sites" are no better than unvetted youtube videos created by "experts".

That said, if (hypothetically) gemini were citing only videos posted by professional physicians or perhaps videos uploaded to the channel of a medical school that would be fine. The present situation is similar to an LLM generating lots of citations to vixra.
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-26 16:08:15+00:00
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.

I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).

I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.

It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-26 16:08:19+00:00
I really don't understand why companies are ignoring intel's foundry services... for the first time since probably the 2000's, intel's 18A nodes are significantly ahead of what TSMC is offering. Apparently they have capacity and are demonstrating wafer production with their own chips.

It seems wholly illogical that Apple would get refused wafer volume by TSMC and still refuse to give volume to intel foundry services. When you layer on geopolitical factors and national security implications + the fact that Apple is a US company - what reason could they possibly have to turn the shoulder to intel's foundries?

If Taiwan ends up imploding in any of the numerous ways we are aware of today - and which this article adds to - I think there are exactly zero reasons to feel like this couldn't have been avoided.
by coldpie | 2026-01-26 16:08:39+00:00
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.

It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).

I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
by Arnt | 2026-01-26 16:08:53+00:00
The problem? As in, the only one?

A matter of opinion. As I see it the several carcinogenic components of ICE exhausts are problems. Dying of cancer may be a small problem compared to an uninhabitable planet and I can see how one might consider it insignificant in comparison, but in my opinion, cancer is a real problem, including cancer caused by smog.
by thinkcontext | 2026-01-26 16:09:07+00:00
The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...

California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.
Introducing AgentKit – a production-ready starter for building real AI agents
by anayat | 2026-01-26 16:09:33+00:00
A production-ready starter to build AI agents fast — with web search, auth, persistence, and a clean UI.

Comes with:
→ real-time streaming chat
→ web search toggle + sources
→ visible tool calls, file uploads, user-scoped memory
→ production-ready auth + DB

Live Demo - https://www.agentkitt.xyz/

Source code - https://github.com/anayatkhan1/agentkit-starter

Thank!
by saghm | 2026-01-26 16:09:44+00:00
I don't think it's as simple as "run this one thing to package it", so if the process rather than the format is what you're looking for, this won't work, but that sounds a lot like how AppImages work from the user perspective. My understanding is that an AppImage is basically a static binary paired with a small filesystem image containing the "root" for the application (including the expected libraries under /usr/lib or wherever they belong). I don't line everything about the format, but overall it feels a lot less prescriptive than other "universal" packages like flatpak or snap, and the fact that you can easily extract it and pick out the pieces you want to repackage without needing any external tools (there are built-in flags on the binary like --appimage-extract) in helps a lot.
by orev | 2026-01-26 16:10:03+00:00
The point of going to school is to learn all the details of what goes into making things, so when you actually make a thing, you understand how it’s supposed to come together, including important details like correct design that can support the goal, etc. That’s the “getting stronger” part that you can’t skip if you expect to be successful. Only after you’ve done the work and understand the details can you be successful using the power tools to make things.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-26 16:10:07+00:00
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding, once you "upgrade" the connection to a websocket connection, it's pretty much a bog standard TLS socket... I'm not sure what you mean by a size explosion, compared to what? As to latency or overhead, yeah there's some, but generally very minimal on anything resembling modern hardware, there are literally trillions of bytes transported over HTTPS/TLS every day from watches to super computers.

Beyond this, there are libraries and tunnels for everything under the sun, and it's one of the least likely options to see mass breakages in general given it handshakes over 443 (https). Assuming you want encryption... if you don't then use raw sockets, or websockets without https and/or raw sockets... You can use whatever you like.
by troyvit | 2026-01-26 16:10:11+00:00
Just a piece of advice. If a woman calls it rape it's not on her to prove it. It's on the man to prove it's not. This goes doubly when you're talking about one of the most powerful men in the world. There are dynamics at play here that none of us would be able to comprehend.

Here's another source:

https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/former-google-ceo-s...

An interesting thing is how most of the photos that the media is using to cover this are sexualized images of Ritter and pics of Schmidt in a suit.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-26 16:10:38+00:00
The sentiment I was countering was that American businesses do not invest in technology, nor do American business leaders think about the long term, and the examples surely show that. Successful or not, and selling something detrimental or not, they do spend many, many billions of dollars on bets that may not pay out.

You can even look to pharmaceutical companies for American business that have development timelines measured in the decades and investments measured in the billions. These aren't plays that executives profit from in 6 months, or maybe even 60 months. Real estate development is another business where investment timelines are in the decades.

I don't know enough about Chinese businesses, but I assume I cannot compare the motivations of Chinese business leaders to American business leaders, as Chinese business leaders seem less free than American businesses to capture profits for their investors.
by stewh_eng | 2026-01-26 16:10:44+00:00
Indirectly, this is kind of what I was trying to get at in this weekend project https://github.com/stewhsource/GovernmentGPT using the British commons debate history as a starting point to capture divergent views from political affiliation, region and role. Changes over time would be super interesting - but I never had time to dig into that. Tldr; it worked surprisingly well and I know a few students have picked it up to continue on this theme in their research projects
by kavitha_kavia | 2026-01-26 16:10:51+00:00
See how Kavia delivers comparable results to Claude Code—much faster and with far fewer tokens.

The difference comes down to architecture. Kavia builds a custom knowledge graph as repositories are ingested, allowing LLMs to reason efficiently across large, multi-repo codebases with millions of lines of code. That structured understanding dramatically reduces token usage while speeding up execution.

Because Kavia is built for the full SDLC, you can do everything you’d expect from IDE agents and systems like Claude Code—and extend far beyond that into end-to-end product development.

Kavia also supports all major LLM providers, so teams aren’t locked into a single model.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-26 16:10:51+00:00
I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.

Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes.

Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for accuracy.
by sidchilling | 2026-01-26 16:10:53+00:00
What would a good coding model to run on an M3 Pro (18GB) to get Codex like workflow and quality? Essentially, I am running out quick when using Codex-High on VSCode on the $20 ChatGPT plan and looking for cheaper / free alternatives (even if a little slower, but same quality). Any pointers?
by asadjb | 2026-01-26 16:10:56+00:00
Unfortunately I have started to feel that using AI to code - even with a well designed spec, ends up with code that; in the authors words, looks like

> [Agents write] units of changes that look good in isolation.

I have only been using agents for coding end-to-end for a few months now, but I think I've started to realise why the output doesn't feel that great to me.

Like you said; "it's my job" to create a well designed code base.

Without writing the code myself however, without feeling the rough edges of the abstractions I've written, without getting a sense of how things should change to make the code better architected, I just don't know how to make it better.

I've always worked in smaller increments, creating the small piece I know I need and then building on top of that. That process highlights the rough edges, the inconsistent abstractions, and that leads to a better codebase.

AI (it seems) decides on a direction and then writes 100s of LOC at one. It doesn't need to build abstractions because it can write the same piece of code a thousand times without caring.

I write one function at a time, and as soon I try to use it in a different context I realise a better abstraction. The AI just writes another function with 90% similar code.
Transformers v5 GA is out
by unofficialmerve | 2026-01-26 16:11:20+00:00
We've finally released the first stable release of transformers v5 in general audience, it comes with many goodies:

- Performance especially for Mixture-of-Experts (6x-11x speedups)

- No more slow/fast tokenizers: way simpler API, explicit backends, better performance

- dynamic weight loading: way faster, MoE now working with quants, tp, PEFT..

We have a migration guide on the main branch; please take a look at it in case you run into issues, we also have documented everything in release notes. We appreciate the feedbacks, so feel free to create issues if you have any!
by tgtweak | 2026-01-26 16:12:08+00:00
TSMC's Arizona fabs (edit: need to qualify this with "today" and in the near future) are wholly inadequate to shift wafer volume out of Tawian if that were to ever happen. TSMC themselves have been candid about this - both the fact there is insufficient skilled labor and insufficient economics (materials supply chain, construction costs/process, subsidies, OPEX). If TSMC was serious about this they'd have invested heavily both in staff pipeline (university programs and hiring onramps), domestic executive function and supply chain - aside from taking subsidies and building tiny fabs that trail their Taiwan process nodes considerably, they've done little to diversify their fabs.
by throw10920 | 2026-01-26 16:12:14+00:00
This comment is wrong and/or malicious along every dimension.

> "safe spaces" (like HN)

HN is not a "safe space". Saying that most politics is off-limit most of the time for very good reasons (that only either insane or malicious people would deny) does not make this a "safe space". Go look up how Wikipedia defines it and it's easy to see that your statement is literally false.

> where there's a "no politics" rule

This is false. There is no "no politics" rule.

> enabling people to hide and avoid being confronted with the ramifications of their actions.

This statement is just insane. The direct logical conclusion of this statement is that if every site on the internet is not blasting out political news all the time, that it's enabling people to "hide" from something. That's not just false - that's a deranged position that 99.999% of people will disagree with.

> It's all inherently political.

False. Deciding your backend architecture (microserves vs monolith) is not political. Picking a text editor is not political. Helping a friend install Linux is not political. Not everything is political - the fact that you is means that something is wrong with the way that you view the world.

And even for the things that are political - only a crazy and/or evil person would take the fact that emacs is made by GNU and vim is not as a reason to incite political flamewars on the internet and try to inject politics into every online forum.

People like you are the main reason that modern American culture is so toxic and politically polarized and that democratic discourse is breaking down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space
by throwfaraway4 | 2026-01-26 16:12:21+00:00
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task

Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"

>unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case.

How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
by medvezhenok | 2026-01-26 16:12:57+00:00
Short answer: there is none. You can't get frontier-level performance from any open source model, much less one that would work on an M3 Pro.

If you had more like 200GB ram you might be able to run something like MiniMax M2.1 to get last-gen performance at something resembling usable speed - but it's still a far cry from codex on high.