MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bloody_bocker | 2026-01-31 05:32:44+00:00
Yeah - same things I noticed with people enthusiastically using genAI for old photo coloring. Initially it looks awesome, until you realize it can even alter the human face in such a way, that it no longer looks like that person.

My father was really happy with some old photos colored, until I pointed out he does not look like him. Strangely enough he wasnt bothered...
by item007 | 2026-01-31 05:36:06+00:00
+1 to “organization as procrastination”. I’m trying to avoid making the archive more “beautiful” and instead make it more actionable.

It seems you're more accustomed to treating stored information as memories rather than a knowledge base. That's perfectly fine. However, I personally believe that the progress humans and AI have made to reach our current stage likely stems largely from the accumulation of knowledge, combined with the evolution driven by new challenges!
by dirteater_ | 2026-01-31 05:36:34+00:00
IMO the SotA for this is https://www.speechsuper.com/. Amazon suffers for similar

> One annoyance is that for Mandarin, the percentage is calculated at the character level, whereas with English, it gives you a more granular score at the phoneme level.

This is the case for most solutions you'd find for this task. Probably because of the 1 character -> 1 syllable property. It's pretty straightforward to split the detected pinyin into initial+final and build a score from that though.
by YZF | 2026-01-31 05:37:05+00:00
The rules based order is mostly a fabrication of recent history. Perhaps between the fall of the Soviet Union, China becoming more open, and the general peace and prosperity it seemed like it existed.

Politics between countries has always been around interests. Countries have no interest in giving up their sovereignty. They may pretend to respect these "rules" when it suits them and then ignore them when it doesn't. Everyone is focused on how "bad" the US is but a) the US has always more or less done whatever it wants b) Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".

Canada's Carney whines about "international order" when just a few years ago China simply abducted Canadians in response to the supposed "orderly" arrest of the Huawei CFO to be extradited to the US. So Canada basically abducts the CFO of a major Chinese company and China abducts Canadians in retaliation and that's a rules based order to who exactly? And we can put together an endless list of an endless number of countries. So when exactly was there ever a rules based order except as a tool for countries to bully each other and for the poorer dictator led countries to try and get a seat at the table because they can vote in the UN general assembly.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-31 05:37:21+00:00
This is a weird headline. There's absolutely no expectation that sanctions would (or should) prevent this.

The kind of broad, crippling sanctions Russia is currently facing are not designed to prevent you from trading. They're designed to add friction, they add absolutely immense amounts of it.

Commodity kit like this will always be the least impacted, you can have a Chinese company buy it and send it in a truck to anywhere you want. The added unit cost will be a few % at worst if you're importing at scale.

Where you really start to feel the pain are things like commercial manufacturing equipment, it's not an easy trick to just go out and buy some precision equipment capable of machining artillery gun barrels.
by graemep | 2026-01-31 05:39:00+00:00
There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths. It is certainly not obvious to me that calculators will have a negative effect - I certainly always allowed my kids to use them.

LLMs are trickier and use needs to be restricted to stop cheating, just as my kids had restrictions on what calculators they could use in some exams. That does not mean they are all bad or even net bad if used correctly.
by peyton | 2026-01-31 05:39:35+00:00
> I don't think it's even in China's interest to see a large decline of the US, after all they're a big customer.

Yeah aren’t they just Leninist but using us as a signal of what to make? I thought rough shape of the scheme was you get to build a factory using free loans in bullshit money that buys rice and apartments but can’t leave the country, then use that to get real money you can take elsewhere by making shit Americans want to buy. You can’t trade the bullshit money for real money without the factory step.
by runako | 2026-01-31 05:39:59+00:00
This whole thread is about whether the most valuable startup of all time will be able to raise enough money to see the next calendar year.

It's definitely rational to decide to pay wholesale for LLMs given:

- consumer adoption is unclear. The "killer app" for OS integration has yet to ship by any vendor.

- owning SOTA foundation models can put you into a situation where you need to spend $100B with no clear return. This money gets spent up front regardless of how much value consumers derive from the product, or if they even use it at all. This is a lot of money!

- as apple has "missed" the last couple of years of the AI craze, there has been no meaningful ill effects to their business. Beyond the tech press, nobody cares yet.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-31 05:40:54+00:00
Yes.

Zinc can do this too. But I like silver, its oxide has decent conductivity.

One of the common arrangements on a basic two-electrode sensor is to have one gold electrode to make contact with the electrolyte, and the electrolyte provides conductivity to a sacrificial silver electrode. With electrolyte exposed to the atmosphere through an oxygen-permeable membrane.

As oxygen makes its way through the membrane, it is consumed by the silver at a steady rate and equilibrium is achieved relative to how much oxygen is in the atmosphere. This generates a steady current which is amplified to move a needle on a gauge, where there are knobs to adjust the meter until it displays the correct amount of oxygen during calibration against a known concentration. And must also be calibrated to display zero when there is no oxygen.

Eventually even if the membrane never gets fouled the oxidized silver builds up in the electrolyte chamber and response deteriorates so maintenance is needed. Remove the membrane, polish the silver, put in fresh electrolyte, new membrane, and re-calibrate.

Adding a third electrode opens up a number of further possibilities.

One of them is the option to use an additional inert gold or platinum contact or a salt bridge as electrical reference against the original gold or silver as the sensor. Plus using a more complex circuit than a plain amplifier, apply controlled responsive current to the sacrificial silver at the same time. So rather than directly amplifying the current produced by different concentrations of oxygen existing in the electrolyte (and waiting for it to equilibrate), instead with 3 (or 4) electrodes the ionic silver concentration in the electrolyte can be maintained electronically in a steady state, and as oxygen permeates, the current required to replace the consumed silver is designed to make a dfferent kind of meter move the needle the same way as above. In this way the oxygen concentration in the electrolyte varies to a much more limited extent compared to waiting for it to be depleted from a high amount to zero before the meter will bottom out.

This can be equivalent to constant-ion electrochemical titration.

Disclaimer: I always like to handle things like this like lives depended on it, because lives depended on it.
by edm0nd | 2026-01-31 05:44:19+00:00
yes, that is correct.

most people are long on silver and gold. who cares if there was a slight correction.

I bought the bulk of my silver in the $20-30 range and am still buying. I bought on the way up, I bought at $120, I'll buy at $85. The price at the time I buy really doesnt matter to me. Only when I sell will it matter.

I hope to cash out and buy ~150 acres of land with it to hunt on and live on.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-31 05:44:28+00:00
> Some users may knowingly install this software on their devices, lured by the promise of “monetizing” their spare bandwidth.

Sounds like they’re targeting networks even if the users are ok participating in, precisely what you’re saying is ok.

As for malware enrolling people into the network, it depends if the operator is doing it or if the malware is 3rd parties trying to get a portion of the cash flow. In the latter case the network would be the victim that’s double victimized by Google also attacking them.
by wtallis | 2026-01-31 05:44:37+00:00
My Motorola phone gives me a notification asking me to rate the audio quality after every single call. I can't turn off those notifications without rooting the phone. All I can do is uninstall updates to the phone app and disable automatic updates for that app, so at least they won't add more notification spam and can't keep rearranging the UI of the most important app on the phone.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-01-31 05:45:33+00:00
If you're going to chart-gaze, you need to have a healthy skepticism about the chart itself - is what it's measuring still meaningful? Every chart is an isolation of variables in an ocean of variables. The shark attack / ice cream sales chart will mysteriously stop working when everyone is on Ozempic and stops craving icecream! Likewise, there's a very real possibility that "inverted yield curve means recession imminent" logic only works during a particular era of USA dominance in the world, which we have thoroughly left behind. Food for thought, I hope.
by wincy | 2026-01-31 05:46:57+00:00
How have we underestimated them? We’ve absolutely dominated every single ecosystem that we push in to. We’ve long ago destroyed all of the minds that could have possibly challenged us, all the other members of the Homo family. The reason humanity makes an estimation that we’re the smartest is because for the last 40,000 years, it’s been the truth, proved over countless eons.
by mmooss | 2026-01-31 05:47:48+00:00
> Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief.

> But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.

Many have absorbed and believe the argument of the might-makes-right crowd that their vision is 'real' and their enemies' vision is 'imaginary'. Unless people believe in what they seek, they are lost.

There's nothing imaginary about it; that theory is paper thin and doesn't survive simple examination. Obviously, humans are social animals that live in groups, have powerful intellects, and therefore have tremendous ability to cooperate and work together toward greater good; we've done it many, many times. Freedom and democracy have appealed powerfully to people worldwide, in a tremendously wide variety of cultures. That model was created by people who had experienced WWI and WWII; they knew more of your 'reality' than probably you or I ever will, and with that knowledge and experience they created this order.

And the greater good long predates that; religions and similar ethical codes based on the greater good long predate modern democracy and the rules-based order. Rules-based orders predate it. The Gospels in the New Testament are an easy, very familiar example, from 2,000 years ago (and a significant basis of modern freedom and democracy). Similar is true for abstractions like law, government, justice, etc.

We all are biologically the same, essentially, as the best of humanity and the worst - both are in all of us. It's our choice, our moral choice, what we do. That is also a fundamental that long predates the post-war order, democracy, the Englightenment, etc. Inevitability is a cheap tactic long used by those whose ideas are undesireable and don't withstand scrutiny.

Our choice is easier than those who survived WWII, and their predecessors. Our ancestors gave us the tools, the institutions, etc. They had to build them from nothing for a skeptical world.
Show HN: A Slack bot that summarizes decisions and ignores lunch talk
by noruya | 2026-01-31 05:49:58+00:00
ame back from PTO to 300+ unread messages. 90% was noise ("Where for lunch?", "Nice weather").I'm building a bot that parses threads, filters out the chit-chat, and emails a 3-bullet summary of actual decisions and links every morning. Would love feedback.
by fancy_pantser | 2026-01-31 05:53:07+00:00
Sure. Someone on /r/LocalLLaMA was seeing 12.5 tokens/s on dual Strix Halo 128GB machines (run you $6-8K total?) with 1.8bits per parameter. It performs far below the unquantized model, so it would not be my personal pick for a one-local-LLM-forever, but it is compelling because it has image and video understanding. You lose those features if you choose, say, gpt-oss-120B.

Also, that's with no context, so it would be slower as it filled (I don't think K2.5 uses the Kimi-Linear KDA attention mechanism, so it's sub-quadratic but not their lowest).
by vkou | 2026-01-31 05:53:38+00:00
Gun control (for minorities), speech policing (for liberals), deficit spending (when they are in charge), and a plenary executive (when Obama isn't president) are core conservative beliefs.

They say that they don't like those things, but you can't listen to what politicians and talking heads on TV say. Politicians and talking heads lie all the fucking time. You have to look at what people do.

They aren't stupid in not understanding the hypocrisy.

We are... for thinking that they don't know that they are hypocrites.
Ask HN: What's so special about Sam Altman?
by chirau | 2026-01-31 05:56:50+00:00
I honestly do not get the hype. Has he done anything particularly remarkable at any point? Loopt was nothing to write home about.

Besides fund raising, what else can we really say wow about? I am genuinely curious. He seems to me like a beneficiary of a system that rewards his type/kind, not much else.

I could be wrong. I am very curious. What about him stands out?
by SirMaster | 2026-01-31 05:57:44+00:00
I say because I actually do when I drive through places like active school zones like that.

I don't care what the average driver does, that's a dumb excuse IMO. I care what I do. If I am going to make my car self-driving, it better be at least as good if not better than me if I am going to trust it to transport my family etc.

We should hold self driving to a higher standard than "average driver" because average is bad.
by maxglute | 2026-01-31 05:58:33+00:00
>They must be repaid in US dollars

IMO this one of those cases where dollars is ultimately benchmark than requirement, IOU/settlement forms can always be restructured/renegotiated if USD is no longer lender of last resort, i.e. alternative payment systems enables take it or leave it deals in medium/long term.

USD/reserve status snowballed because US controlled techstack postwar which US leveraged (along with military hegemony) to USD controlling primary energy (petrodollar). Civilization/modernity was locked behind USD. Money followed existential goods provider, that's the real USD / unipolarity moat. There's no take it / leave it from US company scrip because leaving eurodollar system = technical default (most usd loans hardcoded on newyork/english law) from eurodollar western financial system = death sentence. Once that lock/dependency erodes all kinds of force majeure geopolitics can rationalize breaking dollar contracts. AKA multipolarity.

If alternate techstack/payment systems pops up and reach tipping point, country A can just say to country B who only wants USD (due to alignment or whatever), I don't have enough USD, here's RMB & cips/Brics+ & mbridge basket of equivalent value. This geopolitical layer, if BRIC+ can offer fossil, food without US and PRC can offer renewable energy, capital goods, consumer goods, technology, including 80% as good semi and civil aviation... etc if chokepoint goods are no longer exclusively under USD perview, then USD enforcement mechanism simply dies.

If we're talking about loans/aid, IMF is really pittance, low hundreds of billions. It's why PRC is now using their 3T USD surplus to basically do their own shadow USD lending without IMF conditionalities... countries now don't need to buy USD from US. And somehow PRC currently lending / providing swaplines with their USD at lower rates than US treasury. Incidentally, this dollar recycling also lowers demand for new USD bonds, further reduce type1 margin buyers. This circles back to other nations own trillions of USD to each other... when you remove type1s, you're left with type2 private sector / non bank financial institutions - these are the buys where each USD bought increases triffin burden, i.e. they are the exorbitant curse / payday loans traps that makes USD reserve more expensive to maintain. Their demand is a trap, not a benefit.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 05:58:38+00:00
Thank you for your feedback.
That makes sense — for many people notes are primarily a memory/idea-filter, not a task generator.

Context, long-term memory, and storage issues are indeed challenges currently facing AI and large language models (LLMs), and they're not unique to the scenarios we're discussing. However, with technological advancements, I believe these issues will eventually be resolved.

Based on your requirements, it seems you need to grant the AI sufficiently broad access and privacy permissions. That said, leveraging what you've already stored, achieving the fuzzy retrieval functionality you mentioned should be feasible.

It's impressive that you can recall exactly where to find your notes! That said, active retrieval still requires you to remember what you're looking for. I think your fuzzy retrieval concept shares some similarities with what I'm aiming for—where the AI offers suggestions based on your intended actions, even when you haven't consciously decided what to search for. Wouldn't you welcome that kind of assistance?
by benburton | 2026-01-31 05:59:00+00:00
I love writing documentation, and I love teaching people how to solve problems. At my day job I've written a lot of the organization's most trafficked explanations and how-to guides for understanding our codebase and engineering principles.

The other week an engineer in another group fed all of my documents, and all of our codebase, into an LLM. They were able to ask it questions, and get immediate answers that were by and large better than the guidance I would have been able to provide in between my other responsibilities.

As much as I love writing and explaining, I think we're sadly past the point that it needs to be done by humans. I have always considered documentation to be an imperfect, point in time, reflection of a codebase. When an LLM can read and synthesize all of code and immediately respond with up to date information... what's the point in writing documentation anymore?
by bigiain | 2026-01-31 05:59:20+00:00
Am I the only one cynically thinking that "Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc" is the "But think of the chiiildren!!!" excuse for doing this?

And when Google say

"IPIDEA’s proxy infrastructure is a little-known component of the digital ecosystem leveraged by a wide array of bad actors."

What they really mean is " ... leveraged by actors indiscriminately scraping the web and ignoring copyright - that are not us."

I can't help but feel this is just Google trying to pull the ladder up behind then and make it more difficult for other companies to collect training data.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 05:59:55+00:00
Totally fair. If it isn’t self-hosted / open-source, many people will never allow it near their notes.
If you imagine a local-first version: what would you actually want first — (a) local semantic search/RAG, (b) extracting action items on demand, or (c) proactive suggestions?
I’m trying to understand what’s worth building even under strict constraints.
by barrell | 2026-01-31 06:00:10+00:00
I recently started learning a tonal language, and so far have not struggled too much wrt tones when everything is slow. There was an original strangeness and refusal for my vocal cords to want to work that way, but probably only for the first month or so.

At least, this is the case for slow text. Once the text is sped up it’s amazing how my brain just stops processing that information. Both listening and speaking.

I’m sure this will come with practice and time but for now I find it fascinating
by gpt5 | 2026-01-31 06:04:41+00:00
This is true - all the global multinationals that essentially make the US stock market earn a good portion of their revenue in foreign currency, so their revenue and profits will increase.

In addition, they are all cheaper when priced in USD, so their stock will go up regardless.

This is just counting short term effect of currency devaluation. Long term there are also effects around trade balance and jobs.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-31 06:04:46+00:00
> The FBI raided the ICE agents home to remove incriminating paraphernalia and blocked normal investigative processes

Can you share what source you’re using for this? I don’t really know how we could definitively know this happened, and I’m extremely skeptical of most media outlets at this point because I have observed them lying nonstop for years.

> The entire fact that ICE is in Minnesota instead of a border state

I believe the official reply to this is that border states such as Texas are cooperating with ICE so there hasn’t been much drama there. That sounds plausible to me. As far as I know they are actively removing people from border states also, and I’m not aware of the people being removed from Minnesota being greater than those removed from Texas relative to state population or number of illegals. Have you seen that actually quantified somewhere?

> And you disapprove of outrage over an innocent man being extrajudicially executed

The police make mistakes sometimes. They always have. As long as the process to hold the individuals accountable is followed, I don’t really see what the big deal is, relative to any other time in history. Of course it is a big deal for the people involved and their families and friends, I’m just speaking from the perspective of third parties such as myself and the people I’ve observed in hysterics over this and various other events in the past years.

> Let me know how the boot tasted

I’m not in any proximity to whatever boots are or aren’t coming down, unless we buy into the “every mean-feeling action is a slippery slope to fascism” angle, which personally I do not. We are very far in the direction of permissiveness on immigration and rule of law generally. If we just rolled back to the laws and culture of 1900 for example, this would be tremendously further than anything Trump has hinted at doing. Like for much of American history most people being deported wouldn’t have been allowed to be citizens, at all, no matter how long they were here. It was only about 100 years ago that there was a Supreme Court case testing whether Indians were white for the purposes of citizenship. They weren’t, and they were deported. It’s like people’s view of American history starts in the 1960s. If we reverted to 1850 laws it wouldn’t be some kind of insane totalitarianism, even though that would be going miles and miles and miles further than we are today. It’s like everyone has been led to believe that our own history is evil.

One hint that things are weird is that if you think about the views of the average American man from 1940, the people in hysterics now would regard him as a fascist, which is obviously ahistorical, particularly since everyone’s fascism benchmarks come specifically from that era. The culture has shifted in ways that really don’t make any sense.