MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nl | 2026-01-27 01:19:18+00:00
Much of DID itself is basically a standardization of the idea behind Keybase, ie, using control of a private key as a marker of identity.

This in itself is a pretty good idea (with some bad usability, but at least technically interesting)

DID falls over because it has a bad interop story, and much of it is based on crypto-based implementations (again, technically interesting but bad usability plus a monetary incentive to go after your details).
by Nursie | 2026-01-27 01:19:49+00:00
> So at what point can we start saying that violence because of words (or shirts) is bad?

Straight away!

> Should we act as if you're a good guy, because it was just a punch?

No, and nobody is asking you to. In fact this is the whole point, can you not distinguish between those two guys?

Neither one is good. You're not being asked to decide one is 'good' and the other 'bad'. You're not being asked to accept that the more minor one is OK because it's not as bad as the other one.

They can both be bad. But they aren't the same. We don't say "Dude A was upset about someone talking smack about his sister too, so he's just as bad as Dude B". Or at least most people wouldn't. But we also don't say "It's fine to punch someone in the gut because at least he didn't cut the guy's throat". Dude A probably gets a night in the cells and a minor punishment, maybe a conviction for assault and released on parole for time served. B gets serious jail time.

> now it's somehow become "shitty, but not as bad, because in some other land you'd get shot instead," (and similar excuses)

Nobody's making excuses. That's all on you and how you're deciding to ascribe motivations to other posters. Let me say it again - nobody is saying it's OK. I'm not defending anything. If you think I am I'd invite you to re-read the thread.

> How much closer must UK come to iranian levels, before you start seeing the parallels between the behaviour of the two governments?

One is a strict conservative, theocratic dictatorship that is commiting mass murder in order to hold on to power. The other is a troubled democracy that, as far as anyone can tell, isn't murdering its citizens to keep order but has made some pretty fucked up decisions about what constitutes terrorism and a terrorist organisation. Both of these are bad. But they aren't the same, and proclaiming that the UK or the EU are just as bad as Iran or Russia or China provides cover for atrocities IMHO, and is straight out of the propaganda playbook those countries like to put about the place. It also just destroys nuance of discussion when basically anything negative may as well be Hitler.

> 10 years ago, getting arrested for wearing a tshirt

Was something that happened occasionally under varying different laws. It was shit then too.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/oct/11/manchester-man-ja...

And if you'd worn a pro-IRA t-shirt in the 80s/90s, you'd have faced arrest for that too. The major change with the Plasticine/Palestine action cases is the classification of a pro-Human Rights, direct-action group as terrorist.
by lebuffon | 2026-01-27 01:20:41+00:00
Our station had an art department that used a hot press to create text boards that were set on an easel that had a camera pointed at it. By using a black background with white text you could merge the text camera with a camera in the studio and "super-imposed the text into the video feed.

"And if you tell the kids that today, they won't believe it!"
by rescbr | 2026-01-27 01:20:58+00:00
> Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.

That's why I'm of the opinion that for senior developers/architects, these coding agents are awesome tools.

For a junior developer? Unless they are of the curious type and develop the systems-level understanding on their own... I'd say there's a big chance the machine is going to replace their job.
by daotoad | 2026-01-27 01:21:12+00:00
Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like:

1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things

2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you use "catalog ID" and other places you use "item ID" (using separate words and spaces here because case is irrelevant).

3. the name you chose makes it easy to conflate two or more concepts in your system

4. the name you chose calls into question whether you correctly understood the problem domain you are addressing

I'm sure there are other good naming comments, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of things a good comment will address.

However, most naming comments are just bike shedding.
by teeray | 2026-01-27 01:21:21+00:00
Yes, you can learn to walk in the mech suit. Let’s put one leg forward, then the next, good. You are now 100% production ready at walking. Let’s run a load test. You’re running now. Now you’re running into the ocean. “I want to swim now.” You’re absolutely right! You should be swimming. Since we don’t have a full implementation of swimming let me try flailing the arms while increasing leg speed. That doesn’t seem to work. The user is upside down on the ocean floor burrowing themselves into the silt. Task Complete. Summary: the user has learned to walk.
by tonymet | 2026-01-27 01:21:23+00:00
Nearly all of the complaints about AI , Ads and Search in Windows are easily bypassed with a few settings (look up Debloat or run the settings manually).

There are quality issues, some severe, but no worse than iOS or MacOS. Honestly Windows 11 performance on my $300 mini PC exceeds latest iOS on my $1400 iPhone 17 pro.

Instead of shaming Microsoft, we should all be a bit more introspective about performance, latency , quality control and the overall decline in software.

1gb memory for a browser tab is more shameful than a Copilot button on the taskbar
by baubino | 2026-01-27 01:21:37+00:00
> Zerzan [the agency’s general counsel] appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

I don’t know what to be more disturbed by: that a taxpayer-funded government wants to cede the work of governing to AI or that said government’s counsel openly admits that neither the quality nor the accuracy of proposed government regulations will matter.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-27 01:21:41+00:00
Absolutely agreed, we should be more eager to celebrate having tried and lost.

One good example that comes to mind is "Such a Loser" by Garfunkel and Oates, with its poignant "It's better to be a loser than a spectator"

https://youtu.be/m_JI5cqakIU
by strken | 2026-01-27 01:21:48+00:00
It's also just a matter of logistics and support.

If Aliceville attacks Bobtopia, there are existing military and civilian organisations in Bobtopia that can take foreign aid and use it effectively. The population of Bobtopia are generally going to support their homeland or at least be neutral, and are available for conscription so they'll do all the dying and international forces don't have to.

If Bobtopia just starts massacring its own people, then:

A) You have to dismantle those same military structures along with many of the civilian ones, and you're now in charge of building an entire government from the ground up.

B) Some of the population, e.g. the ones who were doing the massacring, are now shooting at you instead. Some of their victims are probably going to shoot at you too.

C) You can't exactly conscript Bobtopians during a civil war you started and have them be an effective fighting force, because they're not unified, don't have a government, and often hate you. If you try to work with Bobtopian militias, you'll find yourself embroiled in Bobtopian politics.

This all holds true regardless of who has to declare war on whom.
by beloch | 2026-01-27 01:22:51+00:00
MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".

Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.

e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
by ignoramous | 2026-01-27 01:23:56+00:00
The paper itself: https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Using_Apple_Watch...

Seems like Apple's 95% accuracy estimate for VO2 max holds up.

Thirty participants wore an Apple Watch for 5-10 days to generate a VO2 max estimate. Subsequently, they underwent a maximal exercise treadmill test in accordance with the modified Åstrand protocol. The agreement between measurements from Apple Watch and indirect calorimetry was assessed using Bland-Altman analysis, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean absolute error (MAE).

Overall, Apple Watch underestimated VO2 max, with a mean difference of 6.07 mL/kg/min (95% CI 3.77–8.38). Limits of agreement indicated variability between measurement methods (lower -6.11 mL/kg/min; upper 18.26 mL/kg/min). MAPE was calculated as 13.31% (95% CI 10.01–16.61), and MAE was 6.92 mL/kg/min (95% CI 4.89–8.94).

These findings indicate that Apple Watch VO2 max estimates require further refinement prior to clinical implementation. However, further consideration of Apple Watch as an alternative to conventional VO2 max prediction from submaximal exercise is warranted, given its practical utility.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12080799/
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-27 01:24:10+00:00
Actual title: You Have to Know How to Drive the Car.

Actual theme: LARGE tech companies suck.

Declared subject: you have to know how tech companies work

Actually subject: you have to know how large-and-or-disfunctional-and-or-sales-or-finance-bro-led-companies work.

Tagging @dang re title.
by ColorSwitchDev | 2026-01-27 01:24:13+00:00
I built a sparse MoE to train ML bots for Color Switch before I knew what one was. LSTM networks trained via PPO would overfit to obstacle subsets and fail to generalize. Routing inputs through clustered ensembles fixed it.

The Problem
Color Switch is a mobile game where players navigate obstacles by matching colors. I trained bots using Unity ML-Agents with LSTM networks.

Individual networks would learn to pass ~30% of obstacles, then fail on the rest. Training new networks learned different subsets. No single network generalized.

The Architecture
1. Cluster obstacles by feature vectors

Each obstacle had metadata: colors, collider counts, rotation speeds, size. Encoded as min-max scaled feature vectors.

K-means clustering grouped visually and mechanically similar obstacles naturally.

2. Train one ensemble per cluster

Separate ensembles (multiple LSTMs each) for each cluster, trained independently.

3. Route inputs to correct ensemble

At inference:

Identify approaching obstacle via spatial hash (O(1) lookup)
Look up obstacle's cluster ID
Route observations to corresponding ensemble
Weighted average of outputs → action
Router was a cached lookup table. No learned routing, just precomputed K-means assignments.

What Worked
Generalization: Bot trained on Classic mode played 5 different modes without retraining. No previous architecture achieved this.

Modular retraining: New obstacle in a cluster? Retrain one ensemble. Underperforming network? Retrain just that network. Ensembles trained in parallel.

Emergent disentanglement: I now think of this as disentangling the manifold at a coarse level before networks learned finer representations. Obstacles with similar dynamics got processed together. The network didn't have to learn "this is a circle thing" and "how to pass circle things" simultaneously.

What Didn't Work
Random speed changes: Obstacles that changed speed mid-interaction broke the bots. Architecture helped but didn't solve this.

Superhuman performance: Never achieved. Ceiling was "good human player."

Connection to Transformer MoEs
Didn't know this was even called a sparse MoE until the GPT-4 leak.

Same pattern: input arrives → router selects expert(s) → outputs combined.

DeepSeek's MoE paper describes "centroids" as expert identifiers with cosine similarity routing. Mine used Euclidean distance to K-means centroids. Same idea, less sophisticated.

Takeaways
Routing to specialized sub-networks based on input similarity works without transformers
K-means on feature vectors produces surprisingly good routing clusters
Modular architectures enable incremental retraining
Generalization improved when I stopped training one network to handle everything

Happy to answer implementation questions.
by sbarre | 2026-01-27 01:24:17+00:00
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.

A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.

Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.

One bill for all the things is convenient.

I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).

If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.

Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
by rvz | 2026-01-27 01:24:49+00:00
> The future belongs to generalists!

Couldn't be more correct.

The experienced generalists with techniques of verification testing are the winners [0] in this.

But one thing you cannot do, is openly admit or to be found out to say something like: "I don't know a single line of Rust/Go/Typescript/$LANG code but I used an AI to do all of it" and the system breaks down and you can't fix it.

It would be quite difficult to take a SWE seriously that prides themselves in having zero understanding and experience of building production systems and runs the risk of losing the company time and money.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772520
by jedwards1211 | 2026-01-27 01:25:22+00:00
I know what you mean, but from a physics perspective, no, it just takes force to move mass. More mass will generate more downward force due to gravity, and more force in other directions due to momentum once it’s moving, but there’s more to generating force than just mass. I’m not a kinesiologist but I would think how much force muscles generate depends on the amount and size of the fibers (mass) but also on their contractive efficiency and the amount of energy they can obtain and employ to contract (not necessarily proportional to mass, involves cardiovascular fitness)
by nsoonhui | 2026-01-27 01:25:25+00:00
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.

So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761870

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
by mlajtos | 2026-01-27 01:25:32+00:00
Pure visual object tracking in visionOS is considerable laggy (even with increased detection rate). Natively tracked peripherals (Logitech Muse, PSVR2 controllers) are super responsive, but are designed for hands and are too specialized. There is a place for generic 6DoF tracking device that can be attached to any object you want to track. This could be tiny IR LED array if you want to track it inside the field of view, but when you need precise position outside of your FoV, your options are limited.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-27 01:26:31+00:00
Well, what we could expect? It is a fucking Large Language Model. You're feeding it a very long multi-variable time series, it can't make any sense of it, but it is going to generate text.

If you are lucky, maybe it was finetuned to see a long comma-delimited sequence of values as a table and then emit a series of tool calls to generate some deterministic code to calculate a set of descriptive statistics that then will be close in the latent space to some hopefully current medical literature, and it will generate some things that makes sense and it is not absurdly wrong.

It is a fucking LLM, it is not 2001's HAL.
by tzs | 2026-01-27 01:26:35+00:00
I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles.

Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs.

Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio.

Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle.

As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.
by mythz | 2026-01-27 01:27:10+00:00
MCP allows AI Models that doesn't support Image generation the ability to generate images/audio via tool calling.

But you can just select the Image Generation model you prefer to use directly [1]. Currently supports Google, Open AI, OpenRouter, Chutes, Z.ai and Nvidia.

I tried Replicate's MCP, but it looks like everything but generate images which I didn't understand, surely image generation would be its most sought after feature?

[1] https://llmspy.org/docs/v3#image-generation-support
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-27 01:27:10+00:00
Citation please. Doesn't pass the sniff test.

I suspect the ocean in its various states provides quite a bit of dispersion. Replacing deck plates on a ship is a normal part of maintenance. I find it very hard to believe they'd induce randomness rather than having just that one plate get a different hardness (I know some people will screech about that but trust me, the warship industry is well practiced at such things).
by Telaneo | 2026-01-27 01:27:14+00:00
> and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)

Do they use Office-Office (or Microslop Copilot 365 xXxQuickScoperz42069xXx or whatever it's called today)? Is there any reason they can't use Libreoffice and the like, or does that fail instantly when they try it for whatever reason? Or is the idea of using not-Office-Office rejected instantly and you can't even get them to the point of trying it?

My grandma's been on Libreoffice for 10+ years, since she doesn't use any of the fancy features of actual Word and Excel. In reality, she'd probably be fine on Wordpad (although she would need an actual spreadsheet program, but even Calc is overkill for her, and it works fine anyway), so I fail to see why seniors would complain about not being able to use an office program, assuming you can get them in front of a Mac running one.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-27 01:27:36+00:00
> No Canadian VCs

Pretty much.

Israel [0], China [1], and increasingly India [2][3] worked on resolving this issue by establishing funds of funds that partnered with private sector players by matching dollar-to-dollar with them to help build a VC ecosystem.

It's the same problem in the EU as well despite ECB proclamations. Heck, Norway's (ik not EU, it's EFTA) PIF has been conspicuously absent from any sort of statment of solidarity for Greenland unlike their Swedish, Finnish, and Danish peers because 25% of Norway's budget is dependent on the PIF maintaining double digit performance.

Edit: can't reply

> I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small [...]

Israel is even smaller than Canada - 9 million people versus 40 million - and the median Israeli remains poorer [4] than the median Canada [5]. That didn't stop Israel.

Size of home country doesn't matter. The only difference is vision (and moreso lack thereof amongst Canadian and European decisionmakers).

[0] - https://www.yozmagroup.com/overview

[1] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202512/26/content_WS694e4e56...

[2] - https://idtalliance.org/

[3] - https://www.sidbivcf.in/en

[4] - https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/bjn8ppfz2

[5] - https://www.statcan.gc.ca/hub-carrefour/quality-life-qualite...
by ipaddr | 2026-01-27 01:28:12+00:00
Why would companies keep open sourcing for anything new if vanity is off of the table. Many companies open sourced as a signal or to find free help. Those are not important anymore.

99 percent of developers go to the effort of open sourcing for vanity reasons. They want to show off what they made hope others like it.

The world of solutions to core problems is such a small part of open source

The other thing to consider is you will have mountains of AI slope like tailwind landing pages and alike crowding out original thought.
by cheschire | 2026-01-27 01:28:27+00:00
My interpretation is that Asimov assumed that humans would require understanding at the deepest levels of artificial intelligence before it could be created. He built the robot concepts rooted in the mechanical world rather than the world of the integrated circuit.

He never imagined, I suppose, that we would have the computing power necessary to just YOLO-dump the sum of all human knowledge into a few math problems and get really smart sounding responses generated in return.

The risks can be generalized well enough. Man’s hubris is its downfall etc etc.

But the specific issues we are dealing with have little to do with us feeling safe and protected behind some immutable rules that are built into the system.