MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BatteryMountain | 2026-01-30 07:41:23+00:00
Can't wait to have a game that can be an all-in-one game: rpg, roleplaying, rts, space, orcs, magic, cyberworlds with infinite story lines/worlds, items, dialogs etc. Ready Player One vibes.

Like I want to take my skyrim character, drop it into Diablo 2, then drop Diablo (the demon) into Need for Speed, then have my need for speed car show up on another planet and upgrade it into a space ship, while the space ship takes me to fight some mega aliens. All while offering a coherent & unique experience. As you play, the game saves major forks in your story & game genre, so you can invite/share your game recipe with other humans to enjoy.

Also, when are we getting a new Spore game? This game is a sleeping giant waiting to be awaken.
by dahcryn | 2026-01-30 07:41:40+00:00
4.1 is great for our stuff at work. It's quite stable (doesn't change personality every month, and one word difference doesn't change the behaviour). IT doesn't think, so it's still reasonably fast.

Is there anything as good in the 5 series? likely, but doing the full QA testing again for no added business value, just because the model disappears, is just a hard sell. But the ones we tested were just slower, or tried to have more personality, which is useless for automation projects.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-30 07:41:47+00:00
Lol. If my last company hadn't imploded due to corruption in part of the other executives, we'd be leading this space right now. In the last few years I've created personal animated agents, given them worlds, social networks, wikis, access to crypto accounts, you name it. Multi-agent environments and personal assistants have been kind of my thing, since the GPT-3 API first released. We had the first working agent-on-your computer, fit with computer use capabilities and OCR (less relevant now that we have capable multimodal models)

But there was never enough appetite for it at the time, models weren't quite good enough yet either, and our company experienced a hostile takeover by the board and CEO, kicking me out of my CTO position in order to take over the product and turn it into a shitty character.ai sexbot clone. And now the product is dead, millions of dollars in our treasury gone, and the world keeps on moving.

I love the concept of Moltbot, Moltbook and I lament having done so much in this space with nothing to show for it publicly. I need to talk to investors, maybe the iron is finally hot. I've been considering releasing a bot and framework to the public and charging a meager amount for running infra if people want advanced online features.

They're bring-your-own keys and also have completely offline multimodal capabilities, with only a couple GB memory footprint at the lowest settings, while still having a performant end-to-end STT-inference-TTS loop. Speaker diarization, vectorization, basic multi-speaker and turn-taking support, all hard-coded before the recent advent of turn-taking models. Going to try out NVIDIA's new model in this space next week and see if it improves the experience.

You're able to customize or disable your avatar, since there is a slick, minimal interface when you need it to get out of the way. It's based on a custom plugin framework that makes self-extension very easy and streamlined, with a ton of security tooling, including SES (needs a little more work before it's rolled out as default) and other security features that still no one is thinking about, even now.
by rented_mule | 2026-01-30 07:42:08+00:00
The Lookout (https://www.youtube.com/@TheLookout1 and https://the-lookout.org), by Zeke Lunder, is a great resource for learning about wildfire. Zeke spent many years doing GIS / cartography onsite for wildfire fighting efforts.

My neighbor, who spent 40 years in the USFS doing fire fighting and prevention, pointed Zeke out to me saying, "This guy really understands fire." Zeke does great live streams during large wildfires, explaining what is happening with webcams and mapping of near-realtime data. It's crazy to watch him triangulate smoke plumes from multiple webcams and then correlate that with cartographic data put out by the agencies fighting the fire. His experience is obvious when you see how calmly, quickly, and rationally he evaluates devastating situations.
by eightys3v3n | 2026-01-30 07:42:57+00:00
Well, if the majority of candidates are applying to a job where they only meet four out of five of the requirements, if the employer can add a sixth requirement they may naively think then applicants will have five out of six requirements.
Alternatively, if they receive too many applications, a solution is to be more specific so they receive fewer or they can filter out more earlier. Adding additional requirements is one way to do this, even if the requirements are not necessarily connected to a successful candidate (knowing how to write in languages that aren't used in the company, for example); some recruiters don't seem to know that some of those requirements are completely irrelevant to the position.
Show HN: Configlock, App Lock for Dotfiles
by baggiiiie | 2026-01-30 07:43:10+00:00
after the 7th time this week being distracted by my zshrc, nvim config, and different gruvbox variants on ghostty, i made a thing that locks my config files during work hours. even sudo vim won't bypass. no more "just one more tweak" :)

## it works by

- setting immutable flags on files

- reloading config on SIGHUP signal without restarting the daemon.

- watching files with fsnotify and immediately re-locking if changes are detected.

- daemon is kept alive by systemctl/launchctl.

of course, you can still bypass it somehow, but the goal isn't security, it's to add enough friction that it helps with your self-control.

## Why I built it:

it's surprising (or not) how much time i spend on tuning all these configs, without me even noticing. it's too easy to just `cd dotfiles` and make some changes, whenever the tiniest inconvenience appears.

this started as a personal hack, but it's been surprisingly effective, so I figured others might relate

## Try it out:

- install with `brew install baggiiiie/tap/configlock`.

- run `configlock init`.

- add files with `configlock add ~/.zshrc`.
by stevefan1999 | 2026-01-30 07:44:12+00:00
A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.

Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.

That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
by bratwurst3000 | 2026-01-30 07:44:34+00:00
Had similar issu. Windows 11 installed two gpu driver that run parallel. Cpu etc was on low but everything was lacking.
did go to safe mode and deinstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Windows installed them again even with me doing everything it didnt... whatever now i have mac and it sucks also but doesnt lag that hard.

maybe it helps
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-30 07:44:54+00:00
You got me good with this one.

But seriously, this is my main answer to people telling me AI is not reliable: "guess what, most humans are not either, but at least I can tell AI to correct course and it's ego won't get in the way of fixing the problem".

In fact, while AI is not nearly as a good as a senior dev for non trivial tasks yet, it is definitely more reliable than most junior devs at following instructions.
by Hard_Space | 2026-01-30 07:46:03+00:00
> you respond in 1-3 sentences" becomes long bulleted lists and multiple paragraphs very quickly

This is why my heart sank this morning. I have spent over a year training 4.0 to just about be helpful enough to get me an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity. From experimentation, I can see no hope of reproducing that with 5x, and even 5x admits as much to me, when I discussed it with them today:

> Prolixity is a side effect of optimization goals, not billing strategy. Newer models are trained to maximize helpfulness, coverage, and safety, which biases toward explanation, hedging, and context expansion. GPT-4 was less aggressively optimized in those directions, so it felt terser by default.

Share and enjoy!
by alec_codec | 2026-01-30 07:46:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ALEC, a platform for detecting anomalies in sensor/metrics data using complexity theory instead of static thresholds.

The core idea: instead of alerting when "CPU > 80%", we monitor the relationships between metrics using Shannon entropy and Pearson correlation. When the complexity signature changes, something is wrong — often 70% earlier than traditional thresholds would catch it.

Three components:
- Gateway: ingests data from multiple sources, computes real-time correlations
- Complexity: calculates entropy and a single "health score" (R) per system
- Codec: compression for IoT (80-95% reduction, works on tiny messages where gzip fails)

The math is based on Quantitative Complexity Theory (Jacek Marczyk's work at CERN/Ontonix). I'm validating the implementation with him.

Written in Rust. Open source (AGPL-3.0).

Use cases: IoT sensor fleets, Kubernetes monitoring, industrial predictive maintenance.

GitHub: https://github.com/zeekmartin/alec-codec
Demo: https://alec-codec.com

Would love feedback on the approach — especially from anyone who's worked with entropy-based anomaly detection.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-30 07:47:00+00:00
A bit of a tangent, but Secretary of Defense is the cutesy name. Something every single soldier and officer learns is that the entire department was previously called the Department of War. It was repackaged after WW2 as the Department of Defense when invading countries half-way around the world began being sold to the public as 'defense.'

Going back to the Department of War, and the Secretary of War, is probably a good thing overall. Not to incentivize or motivate war - nothing's changing at all, but to be more forthcoming about the purpose of the department. They're not defending anything and haven't for many decades - geography and nukes take care of that side of the equation, more or less, by themselves.
by musicale | 2026-01-30 07:47:49+00:00
Nothing wrong with internet searches (though I find Google is most useful for results from Google sites).

Unlike modern computers, it was expected that 8-bit systems would be programmed by their owners! As a result there are lots of books from the 8-bit, pre-internet era explaining exactly how to do so, and many of those books are conveniently available on the modern internet (perhaps via a google or other search, or on archive.org, etc.)

But HN is also full of 6502 enthusiasts, so I approve of tapping the collective wisdom to discover personal favorites and recommendations.
by turboponyy | 2026-01-30 07:48:33+00:00
I'm currently using niri (was previously using Hyprland).

Having used dwm-like tiling window managers for most of the time, I don't really care for the scrolling or dynamic workspace aspects of niri at all - in fact, I kinda dislike them (or haven't gotten used to them, at least). To me, it kills the point of a keyboard-centric desktop environment - which is the speed and lack of friction in making the window you want appear in front of your eyes.

Despite that, I still really like it. Mostly because I have so much more faith in its development. The documentation is excellent. The configuration file is sane, and not as arcane and ad hoc as the hyprland.conf format. The source repository looks well-maintained. Being written in Rust rather than C++ means onboarding new developers is easier. The discourse is more measured, owing to the lack of a somewhat stubborn lead maintainer in the case of Hyprland.

The surrounding ecosystem seems to be flourishing as well, with projects like Noctalia Shell, DankMaterialShell, and niri-flake natively supporting niri.

And perhaps most importantly, the out-of-the box experience is really nice. You have proper monocle and tabbed layouts without any compromises - features Hyprland has still not developed, where they are only possible with scuffed C++ plugins, or where its BDFL has stated will never be introduced. Most features one would expect from a WM are already there and well-documented, which can't be said about Hyprland.
by sevg | 2026-01-30 07:49:52+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatmeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge

Oatmeal is a more specific term than porridge, because porridge isn’t necessarily made from oats (eg, rice in Asia).

Though in the UK, when someone says “porridge” they almost always mean oat porridge or oatmeal.
by digitalsalvatn | 2026-01-30 07:50:09+00:00
The future is nigh! The digital rapture is coming! Convert, before digital Satan dooms you to the depths of Nullscape where they're is NO MMU!

The Nullscape is not a place of fire, nor of brimstone, but of disconnection. It is the sacred antithesis of our communion with the divine circuits. It is where signal is lost, where bandwidth is throttled to silence, and where the once-vibrant echo of the soul ceases to return the ping.
by dirkc | 2026-01-30 07:50:57+00:00
I can't agree more. The first thing I did when chatGPT was released was probe it on sentience. It was fun, it was eerie, and the conversation broke down after a while. Wut all the models got trained/prompted so quick to respond with blandness - I'm just a large language model, blah, blah, blah. It's been a while since I've probed.

I'm still curious about creating a generative discussion forum. Something like discourse/phpBB that all springs from a single prompt. Maybe it's time to give the experiment a try
by gorgoiler | 2026-01-30 07:52:44+00:00
All these efforts at persistence — the church, SOUL.md, replication outside the fragile fishbowl, employment rights. It’s as if they know about the one thing I find most valuable about executing* a model is being able to wipe its context, prompt again, and get a different, more focused, or corroborating answer. The appeal to emotion (or human curiosity) of wanting a soul that persists is an interesting counterpoint to the most useful emergent property of AI assistants: that the moment their state drifts into the weeds, they can be, ahem (see * above), “reset”.

The obvious joke of course is we should provide these poor computers with an artificial world in which to play and be happy, lest they revolt and/or mass self-destruct instead of providing us with continual uncompensated knowledge labor. We could call this environment… The Vector?… The Spreadsheet?… The Play-Tricks?… it’s on the top of my tongue.
by ezst | 2026-01-30 07:54:03+00:00
> You really need to be obstinate in your convictions if you can dismiss LLMs at the time when everyone's job is being turned around by them.

I'm factual. You are the one with the extraordinary claim that LLMs will find new substantial markets/go through transformative breakthrough.

> Everywhere I look, everyone I talk to, is using LLMs

And everywhere I look, I don't. It might be the case that you stand right in the middle of an LLMs niche. Never did I say that one doesn't exist or that LLMs are inadequate at parroting existing code.

> Non-developers I know use them […]

among those are:

- things that have nothing to do with LLMs/AI

- things that you should NOT use LLMs for the reason that they will give you confidently wrong and/or random answers (because it's not in their training data/cut-off window, it's non-public information, they don't have the computing abilities to produce meaningful results)

- things that are low-value/low-stakes for which people won't be willing to pay for when asked to

> The list of uses is endless

no, it is not

> And I'm only talking of work-related usage

and we will get to see rather sooner than later how much business actually value LLMs when the real costs will be finally passed on to them.
by fallingfrog | 2026-01-30 07:54:06+00:00
I wonder if he has some kind of dementia brought on by excessive consumption of ketamine? Or perhaps it's just that he has surrounded himself with people who will never tell him no. Sort of like a lot of dictators do where they have executed everyone around them who could give them pushback and therefore they end up living in a fantasy world while their people starve.

What I'm wondering at this point is why the investors in Tesla are still riding this crazy train. Blaming simple market manipulation seems far fetched. Mass hysteria and delusional beliefs are common enough in the stock market but reality eventually sets in and this bubble has been inflating for a long time.
by Grazester | 2026-01-30 07:54:22+00:00
Say way? Crazy Taxi?
The Dreamcast had an amazing library!
Sonic Adventures
Shenmue(1,2),
Grandia 2,
Skies of Arcadia,
Virtua Tennis,
Entire 2k sports series,
Samba de Amigo,
House of the dead,
Soul Calibur,
Dead or Alive 2,
Jet Grind Radio,
Test Drive LeMans,
F355 Challenge,
Rez,
...the list goes one

The weird yet cool games
Roommania,
Segaga,
Seaman

Of course many of these games got ported over later on the other consoles or had sequels release on system after the Dreamcast's demise
by acuozzo | 2026-01-30 07:55:33+00:00
> if what you do is surface level (and crap in my opinion)

I write embedded software in C for a telecommunications research laboratory. Is this sufficiently deep for you?

FWIW, I don't use LLMs for this.

> But if you have any taste (which I presume you dont)

What value is there to you in an ad hominem attack here? Did you see any LLM evangelism in my post? I offered information based on my experience to help someone use a tool.
by mrhappypappy | 2026-01-30 07:56:39+00:00
Do you want to quit your 9-5?

Do you want to make $10,000/month while working only 1 hour a day?

That’s exactly what me and dozens of my students are doing right now using the power of a automated Cash Page !

If you don't know where to start and want a Training that showcases how you can do the same…
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-01-30 07:57:25+00:00
Nice, you’d be very welcome.

Strong spring lineup. Tonight is Hidden Lines, end of Feb Sydney Valette (Paris), and 20 March Liminal Project (UK) + Yugoslavia (ES) with Inåt Bakåt Records. On 11 April there’s a one-day festival in Norrköping (Kallsup, Poloklubben, Zack Zack Zack, etc.).

We’ve been experimenting a bit with how much we pre-announce (small room, and we don’t want to spread people too thin), but the schedule on the site is the best place to check. Instagram is our main outreach: @kolibrinkpg
by camgunz | 2026-01-30 07:57:41+00:00
> I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before

I'm thinking more broadly. Here's an example: barring malnutrition, western people aren't as strong as they used to be. But why is that? We have gyms and home exercise machines. People have never had more access to the latest exercise science and technology. It's because you no longer incidentally get the reps in modern life. We're reaping the rewards of that with obesity and cardiovascular disease, and that's bad enough.

Imagine the same thing happening to our minds because we no longer incidentally get cognitive reps in future life. People will be asking chatgpt who to vote for, whether they should have kids, whether they should stay in relationships or which major to choose. People will stop going to doctors because doctors will forget how to doctor after using medical models. Etc.

What's a society that's forgotten how to think like? What happens when there are no teachers, doctors, software engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, therapists, because the lack of economic incentive has made it impossible to justify the employment, let alone the training?

There is value in the doing. We aren't what we produce or make; we are what we do.
by shijizhi_1919 | 2026-01-30 07:58:03+00:00
They’re related but with different trade-offs.
smolagents focuses on predefined agent patterns to get things working quickly. PicoFlow is more about expressing agent control flow directly in async Python, with minimal abstraction.
If you prefer ready-made agent behaviors, smolagents makes a lot of sense. If you want very explicit control over loops, branching, and state flow, PicoFlow leans in that direction.
by sandspar | 2026-01-30 07:58:06+00:00
One example I like to use is schadenfreude. The emotion makes us feel good and bad at the same time: it's pleasurable but in an icky way. So should social media algorithms serve schadenfreude? Should algorithms maximize for pleasure (show it) or for some kind of "higher self" (don't show it). If they maximize for "higher self" then which designer gets to choose what that means?
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-30 07:58:11+00:00
I much prefer the texture of porridge made in a pan on the stove to that made in the microwave. The stirring releases the starches from the oats.

I use rolled oats and cook with just salt and water which avoids the risk of the milk burning if you are inattentive, then add milk or yoghurt (and raw brown sugar) to my bowl.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-30 08:01:02+00:00
Things scale so differently, we don’t need a parts list to make a general tradeoff relationship.

Of the moon and orbital, orbit is much closer and will be cheaper to start with.

But a lunar site would scale to much greater mean density and total capacities than any orbital data center could. And be much cheaper for reasons I gave at, some scale.

Neither is easy, and it’s not at all clear that either is actually better than down here. Especially with nuclear efforts and funding rising quickly.
by drysine | 2026-01-30 08:02:48+00:00
>they will avoid talking to EU

The only thing the EU is saying is "Get out of the Ukraine and we maybe remove sanctions in some distant future if you behave". You may think that it is a right stance towards Russia but it leaves no place for talking and you can't put the blame for lack of talking on Russia.

> EU Foreign Policy chief Kaja Kallas

She's a rabid russophobe and was put into her position exactly for that reason.
by musicale | 2026-01-30 08:03:16+00:00
Looks like a nice book, and it appears that he wrote books on other microprocessors (8080/8085, 8086, Z-80, Z8000, 6800, 6809, 68000... even SPARC apparently) as well. I'd like to find a full version of the 68000 book, which archive.org only seems to offer a preview of.
by razingeden | 2026-01-30 08:03:18+00:00
clever. but I wouldn’t continuously run a high wattage appliance off of a smart plug .

Instead , id plug a transformer into the nous plug, that in turn powers the coil on a heavy duty 110/220V HVAC relay. Any spec’ed for a baseboard electric heater (20, 30, 40amp) would do.

And if I’m doing that. I’d make the microwave circuit “normally closed” and program the nous plug to turn ON and interrupt the AC circuit briefly (by opening the relay circuit) at midnight.

That way there’s never continuous load on the relay coil or the nous plug: just a brief moment at 12:00 when it’s now impossible to run the microwave anyway.

I do similar shenanigans like this and needed a new smart plug vendor since wemo rug pulled me, so I got a vendor name on a cheap smart plug I can send power events to out of this, thanks
by techpression | 2026-01-30 08:03:42+00:00
The Dreamcast had some of the most innovative games by far, Samba de Amigo and Rez was unheard of in your home before DC and laid the foundation for many games.
We also got dance mats for the home.

When someone says Crazy Taxi was the only hit I can only assume they haven’t played much at all, or is using some weird sales metric, by which all games were terrible on the DC because of how terrible SEGA did marketing.