MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andhuman | 2026-01-24 07:52:20+00:00
I built this recently. I used nvidia parakeet as STT, open wake word as the wake word detection, mistral ministral 14b as LLM and pocket tts for tts. Fits snugly in my 16 gb VRAM. Pocket is small and fast and has good enough voice cloning. I first used the chatterbox turbo model, which perform better and even supported some simple paralinguistic word like (chuckle) that made it more fun, but it was just a bit too big for my rig.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-24 07:53:34+00:00
> when it became clear the work could be financially exploited

That is not the obvious reason for the change. Training models got a lot more expensive than anyone thought it would.

You can of course always cast shade on people's true motivations and intentions, but there is a plain truth here that is simply silly to ignore.

Training "frontier" open LLMs seems to be exactly possible when a) you are Meta, have substantial revenue from other sources and simply are okay with burning your cash reserves to try to make something happen and b) you copy and distill from the existing models.
by FuckButtons | 2026-01-24 07:53:43+00:00
I can run Minimax-m2.1 on my m4 MacBook Pro at ~26 tokens/second. It’s not opus, but it can definitely do useful work when kept on a tight leash. If models improve at anything like the rate we have seen over the last 2 years I would imagine something as good as opus 4.5 will run on similarly specced new hardware by then.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-24 07:54:00+00:00
Falsifying the logical inverse is fine. The key though is that showing the inverse of what you believe can not be true is much harder than showing that what you believe might be true.

Preregistration only helps with a select set of researcher bias, specifically where they retroactively change parts of their model to get the intended result. However it does nothing to protect against bias baked into the model ahead of time. Presumably the same reasons that researchers are strongly politically opinionated are the reasons they emphasize certain things over others in their models long before they see any data.
by gorset | 2026-01-24 07:54:59+00:00
One of the advantages of of protobuf I never see anyone highlight is how neat and well-designed the wireformat is, in terms of backward/forward compatibility and lowlevel stuff you can do with it. Very useful when building big and demanding systems over time.

For high performance and critical stuff, SBE is much more suitable, but it doesn't have as good of a schema evolution story as protobuf.
by hnaccount_rng | 2026-01-24 07:56:42+00:00
I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language.

But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including
by seec | 2026-01-24 07:57:12+00:00
There is no trackpad connected, just the Magic Mouse that was charging.
Maybe it is because of some setting stored inside the mouse (it's a Razer mini). I think it has something to do with the scroll speed that macOS cannot deal with.

As I said, I'm sure I can fix it, but the point is that it works just fine as is on Windows and Linux.

Logitech mice are appreciated on Macs because they generally make drivers to deal with macOS idiosyncracies. A generic mouse will probably work OK but will be painful to deal with.
macOS expects scrolling to work with inertia because of their focus on the trackpad or touch surface for the Magic Mouse.

Having used both extensively, it's not all bad, and I think they actually got some things right, but the problem is they make it hard for 3rd parties to make hardware because the APIs are lacking or inaccessible. For example, they just enabled linear mouse movement without relying on 3rd-party software; Windows has had that option since basically forever.

Apple does have some good things, but you can't argue with the fact that they make it very hard to integrate 3rd-party solutions (display are the same, notably for brightness control, etc).
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-24 07:57:34+00:00
> What's the equivalent of thinking users are this stupid?

What's the equivalent of thinking security aficionados are clueless?

Security advice is dumb and detached from life, and puts ubdue burden on people that's not like anything else in life.

Sharing passwords is a feature, or rather a workaround because this industry doesn't recognize the concept of temporary delegation of authority, even though it's the basics of everyday life and work.

Asking users to keep their 2FA recovery keys or disk encryption keys safe on their own - that's beyond ridiculous. Nothing else in life works that way. Not your government ID, not your bank account, not your password, not even the nuclear launch codes. Everything people are used to is fixable; there's always a recovery path for losing access to accounts or data. It may take time and might involve paying a notary or a court case, but there is always a way. But not so with encryption keys to your shitposts and vacation pictures in the cloud.

Why would you expect people to follow security advice correctly? It's detached from reality, dumb, and as Bitcoin showed, even having millions of dollars on the line doesn't make regular people capable of being responsible with encryption keys.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-24 07:58:34+00:00
This is soooo challenging because it’s a two part problem.

1. You have to be in a position to see the great frustration, inefficiency, or obstruction. You will know it when you see it. It will be scary obvious when you do see it while everyone else just continues accepting broken practices as the accepted reality. It takes a special person in the right place at the right time to accomplish this, which is like a magical opportunity.

2. That first step is like a rare constellation alignment of the stars, and yet as rare as it is it’s the easy part. The challenging part is convincing people your solution is better.
by wao0uuno | 2026-01-24 07:58:51+00:00
I bought mine like 6 years ago and at first thought "wow what a cheap piece of plasticky crap. I bet I'm gonna have to replace it every two years or so."
I used and abused it every day since then. It never skipped a beat. I took showers with it, I sweated all over it, I dropped it and it only required a single battery replacement since I purchased it. It keeps time well. I'll probably keep using these until the day I die.
I also highly recommend getting metal adapters for straps and purring a decent nato strap on it.
by bicepjai | 2026-01-24 07:59:39+00:00
Why don’t we have something more “torrent-like” for search?

Imagine a decentralized network where volunteers run crawler nodes that each fetch and extract a tiny slice of the web. Those partial results get merged into open, versioned indexes that can be distributed via P2P (or mirrored anywhere). Then anyone can build ranking, vertical search, or specialized tools on top of that shared index layer.

I get that reproducing Google’s “Coca-Cola formula” (ranking, spam fighting, infra, freshness, etc.) is probably unrealistic. But I’d happily use the coconut-water version: an open baseline index that’s good enough, extensible, and not owned by a single gatekeeper.

I know we have common crawl, but small processing nodes can be more efficient and fresh
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 08:00:58+00:00
Where do you think the first generations from C++ programmers come from?

There is this urban myth C is simple, from folks that never read either ISO C manual, can't read legalese, never spent much time browsing the compiler reference manual.

Mostly learnt K&R C, assume the world is simple, until the code gets ported into another platform or compiler.

Yet in such a simple language, I keep waiting to meet the magical developer that never wrote memory corruption errors with pointer arithmetic, string and memory library functions.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-24 08:01:48+00:00
It’s funny, from his books I always imagined he spent years up there in the Yukon. But it turns out he trekked in (by far the hardest experience of the Yukon Gold Rush rush was just getting there with the mandated 1 year of food and all your mining equipment), staked an unprofitable claim, talked to a lot of people in bars in Dawson City, spent an uncomfortable winter in a small cabin with some other gold-rushers eating just bread and beans and bacon, got scurvy from eating just bread and beans and bacon, and then got the hell out and went back to San Francisco.

I say this not to minimize the depth or the hardship of his experience (it sounds like a nightmare) but more in amazement at all the compressed experiences he had and the folder for stories he amassed during that one year. Certain years in life flash by (or they seem that way to me) and others are formative and seem to last forever. Clearly this was the latter for him.
by genewitch | 2026-01-24 08:01:59+00:00
a couple hundred TB arranged how? and for what purpose, generally? archival, warm, hot?

for the first two, depending on throughput desired, you can do with spinning rust. you pick your exposure, single platter or not, speed or not, and interface. And no fancy raid hardware needed.

I've had decent luck with 3+1 warm and 4+1 archival. if you don't need quick seeks but want streaming data to be nice, make sure your largest file fits on a single drive, and do two parity disks for archive, a single for warm. md + lvm; ext4 fs, too. my very biased opinion based on tried everything and am out of ideas, and i am tired, and that stuff just works. I am not quick to the point but you need to split your storage up. use 18+ SMR disks, shingled magnetic recording hard drives, for larger stuff that you don't need to transfer very fast. 4k video for consumption on a 4k televsion fits here. Use faster, more reliable disks for data used a lot, &c

Hot or fast seeks & transfers is different, but i didn't get the idea that's what you were after. Hadoop ought be used for hot data, imo. People may argue that zfs of xfs or jfs or ffs is better than ext4, but are they gunna jump in and fix it for free when something goes wrong for whatever reason?

sorry, this is confusing. Unsure how to fix that. i have files on this style system that have been in continuous readable condition since the mid 1990s. There's been some bumps as i tried every [sic] other system and method.

TL;dr to scale my 1/10th size up, i personally would just get a bigger box to put the disks in, and add an additional /volumeN/ mountpoint for each additional array i added. it goes without saying that under that directory i would CIFS/NFS share subdirectories that fit that array's specifications. again, i am just tired of all of this, i'm also all socialed out so, apologies.
by wiether | 2026-01-24 08:04:31+00:00
My understanding of Cloudflare's history is that they built their reputation and their client base on some high quality products.

And instead on focusing on maintaining those, they decided to go for more money, first adding new features on their products (at the risk of breaking them) and then adding new products altogether in a move to start being an actual cloud provider.

Priorities shifted from the quality products to pushing features daily, and the person who built and maintained the good products probably left or have been assigned to shinier products, leaving the base to decay.

As a daily user, its quite frustrating to have a console that is getting far worse than AWS/Azure, and features that are more a POC than actual production-ready features.
by f311a | 2026-01-24 08:04:33+00:00
They don't understand codebases.

They are trained on other code, ignore how your codebase is structured, and lack knowledge of it. To do so, you would need to feed the whole codebase every time you ask it for something, with extensive comments about the style, architecture, and so on. No amount of md files will help with that.

In large codebases, they struggle with code reuse, unless you point the agent to look for specific code.

Finding bugs has nothing to do with understanding the codebase. They find local bugs. If they could understand the whole codebase, we would be finding RCEs for popular OSS projects so easily, including browsers.
by vulkoingim | 2026-01-24 08:04:55+00:00
I'm using https://spokenly.app/ in local mode, which is free. Very happy with it. It supports a bunch of models, including whisper and parakeet. Right now I'm mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast. I cycle betwen it and Distil-Whisper Large V3.5, which is a bit slower.

On iOS I'm also using the same app, with the Apple Speech model, which I found out to be better performing for me than the parakeet/whisper. One drawback for the apple model is that you need iOS/Mac 26+ - and I haven't bothered to update to Tahoe on my mac.

Both of the models work instantly for me (Mac M1, iphone 17 Pro).

Edit: Aaaand I just saw that you're looking for speech-to-speech. Oops, still sleeping.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-24 08:04:59+00:00
That’s a pretty excellent article actually and I think does a good job describing how having over-specifications in your simulated model makes it brittle in the transfer.

I think something that was kind of overlooked was fine tuning post transfer so that you’re basically transferring a gross motor policy and then fine-tuning it with the PID feedback into a fine-grained motor policy
by seec | 2026-01-24 08:05:19+00:00
Maybe that's it. It is really dependent on the radio environment indeed. And it uses Wi-Fi Direct for large transfers.

Once I had weird dropouts streaming to a friend's Bluetooth speakers because it had weird interaction with my Apple Watch, my iPhone, and his iPhone. That was in a cabin basically in the middle of nowhere...

But that's basically my point. Wireless everything is cool and convenient at first sight, but then you often have to deal with all kinds of problems, making you wish you could just connect a cable, browse the file system, and exchange stuff that way.

I have a friend who connects his Android phone to his Macbook, and he drags and drops the photos in/out of storage. Simple, efficient, no need for any cloud, no need for internet/wireless connectivity, no need to wait for any syncing, it just works.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-24 08:05:26+00:00
Same way as the hard sciences - you make a prediction for something that you would never observe if the hypothesis is true, and then you go look for it. If you find it, then the hypothesis must be rejected. I might suspect that hunter gatherer tribes don't go to war, and I might observe many such tribes which don't, but that doesn't prove my hypothesis right. On the other hand, if I can find just one tribe which does go to war, then the hypothesis has been falsified.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-24 08:06:00+00:00
Not a pro data guy but someone running something like what you're talking about for many years. These days 200TiB is "normal storage server" territory, not anything exotic. You can just do the most boring thing and it will be fine. I'm just running 1, tho. The hard parts are having it be efficient, quiet and cheap which always feels like an impossible triangle.

Yeah, resilvers will take 24h if your pool is getting full but with RAIDZ2 it's not that scary.

I'm running TrueNAS scale. I used to just use Ubuntu (more flexible!) but over many years I had a some bad upgrades where kernel & zfs stopped being friends. My rack is pretty nearby so for me, a big 4U case with 120mm front fans was high priority, it has a good noise profile if you replace with Noctuas, you get a constant "whoosh" rather than a whine etc.

Running 8+2 with 24tb drives. I used to run with 20 slots full of old ex-cloud SAS drives but it's more heat / noise / power intensive. Also, you lose flexibility if you don't have free slots. So eventually ponied up for 24tb disks. It hurt my wallet but greatly reduced noise and power.

Case: RM43-320-RS 4U

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz (4C/8T, 22nm, 80W TDP)
RAM: 32GB DDR3 ECC
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F (microATX, LGA1150 socket)
- Onboard: Dual Intel I210 1GbE (unused)
- Onboard: LSI SAS2308 8-port SAS2 controller (6Gbps, IT mode)
- Onboard: Intel C220 chipset 6-port SATA controller

Storage Controllers:
- LSI SAS2308 (onboard) → Intel RES2SV240 backplane (SFF-8087 cables)
- Intel C220 SATA (onboard) → boot SSD

Backplane:
- Intel RES2SV240 24-bay 2U/3U SAS2 Expander
- 20× 3.5" hot-swap bays (10 populated, 10 empty)
- Connects via Mini SAS HD SFF-8643 to Mini SAS SFF-8087 Cable, 0.8M x 5

Boot/Cache:
- Intel 120GB SSD SSDSC2CW120A3 (boot drive, SATA)
- Intel Optane 280GB SSDPED1D280GA (ZFS SLOG device, NVMe)

Network:
- Intel 82599ES dual-port 10GbE SFP+ NIC (PCIe x8 add-in card)

It's a super old box but it does fine and will max 10Gbe for sequential and do 10k write iops / 1k random read iops without problems. Not great, not terrible. You don't really need the SLOG unless you plan to run VMs or databases off it.

I personally try to run with no more than 10 slots out of 20 used. This gives a bit of flexibility for expanding, auxiliary pools, etc etc. Often you find you need twice as much storage as you're planning on directly using. For upgrades, snapshots, transfers, ad-hoc stuff etc.

Re: dedup, I would personally look to dedup at the application layer rather than in the filesystem if I possibly could? If you are running custom archiving software then it's something you'd want to handle in the scope of that. Depends on the data obviously, but it's going to be more predictable, and you understand your data the best. I don't have zfs de-dup turned on but for a 200TiB pool with 128k blocks, the zfs DDT will want like 500GiB ram. Which is NOT cheap in 2026.

I also run a 7-node ceph cluster "for funsies". I love the flexibility of it... but I don't think ceph truly makes sense until you have multiple racks or you have hard 24/7 requirements.
by attila-lendvai | 2026-01-24 08:07:12+00:00
it's easy to design a system where the center doesn't have the key and thus can't be compelled.

but they didn't do so.

and it's surely just a coincidence, because m$ has always been such an ethical company.

and it's surely not by design to centralize power by locking out competing criminals from the user's data, but not themselves.
by nexoft | 2026-01-24 08:07:22+00:00
Proton have a real problem with intrusive practices.
2 things that happened on the span of 2 years and almost got me to leave them :

1 - there was a persistent, very visible at all time big ass button on the Proton-Mail UI asking/suggesting to upgrade to a more premium plan, while I was already a paid customer. It was done in a way that was so wrong. Never experienced such frustrating things elsewhere even with my 99% full google drive.

2 - This must’ve been 2022 or 2023 Black Friday/cyber Monday season and there was a persistant, hardcoded, very annoying pop up that would immediately spawn each time I was opening Proton-Mail, asking me against to upgrade to the more premium plan than the premium I had, this will spawn every time I refresh despite hitting “don’t show this again”.

There are so many slick and smart way to get customer to use more services. Shoving unsolicited pop ups and spams is the worst thing you could do for your brand. I even start to wonder about their core values of privacy and whatnot, they play the suiss neutral privacy friendly so badly, their head of marketing is either so bad and should be fired or we going to discover another [Crypto AG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG) scandal.
by noelwelsh | 2026-01-24 08:07:29+00:00
The innovation here is, I think, the use of union types. The problem with errors as standard algebraic data types (ADTs) is you end up with lots of boilerplate to transform from one ADT to another, as errors propagate through the system. With union types (as found in Typescript and Scala 3) you can add and remove types from the union in an ad-hoc manner. IIRC Elm doesn't have union types, so I think the blog post is a bit inaccurate.
by Someone | 2026-01-24 08:08:24+00:00
> Sure, these automata are “wide”, with lots of branches, but they’re also shallow, since they run on UTF-8 encoded characters whose maximum length is four and average length is much less

I would consider splitting this task into two:

- extracting the next Unicode code unit

- determining whether it’s in the code class

For the second, instead of using an automaton, one could use a perfect hash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function). That could make that part branch-free.

Is that a good idea?
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-24 08:10:03+00:00
It's absolutely a true dichotomy. If unchecked exceptions exist, all code must be carefully written to be exception-safe, and the compiler is not going to help you at all.

Of course it's convenient to be able to ignore error paths when you're writing code. It's also a lot less convenient when those error paths cause unexpected runtime failures and data corruption in production.

A preference for unchecked exceptions is one of my most basic litmus tests for whether a developer prioritizes thinking deeply about invariants and fully modeling system behavior. Those that don't, write buggy code.
by AngryData | 2026-01-24 08:11:04+00:00
States have window tinting laws to help police to pull over, harass, identify, and/or profile people in the pursuit of profit and control. The main justification for window tint laws is "protecting law enforcement", which is itself is a bad excuse, but everything beyond that is definitely complete bullcrap because the tinting laws differ so completely between states, with some states not caring at all.
Many states with tinting laws have zero laws about maintenance or inspection of vehicles which is all but proof that the safety of the public is not even a real consideration. You can literally have sharp jagged chunks of rusty metal hanging off your car and its not illegal.
by danhau | 2026-01-24 08:13:44+00:00
> But then anyone could just instantiate an invalid Name without calling the parse_name function and pass it around wherever

This is nothing new in C. This problem has always existed by virtue of all struct members being public. Generally, programmers know to search the header file / documentation for constructor functions, instead of doing raw struct instantiation. Don‘t underestimate how good documentation can drive correct programming choices.

C++ is worse in this regard, as constructors don‘t really allow this pattern, since they can‘t return a None / false. The alternative is to throw an exception, which requires a runtime similar to malloc.
by genewitch | 2026-01-24 08:13:48+00:00
not an issue for me in general. side channels for nearly everyone i'd need email-style communication with, especially if their primary contact method is handled by any FAANG. I send test emails manually; usually when a semiweekly newsletter sends a plaintext "apparently our newsletters are bouncing", which they detect by autoresponders autoresponding. they say it's been consistently 8 median autoresponses per newsletter for 18 years, so when they get zero...
by yolovoe | 2026-01-24 08:14:16+00:00
Fedora is good and fairly stable, but it has bugged on me a few times.

In the past 3 years:
- mouse/cursor issues due to some kernel upgrade I think, as Fedora stays close to upstream
- unresponsive computer due to a bug in the AMD graphics driver

Both were easy to fix (kernel cmdline change or just kept updating my computer), and I absolutely recommend Fedora. That's what I'd use if I had servers. But, you'll probably have to debug _some_ issues if you use something less-used like AMD.