MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Telio – AI agents for call/text support, built on sandboxed lakehouses
by exAspArk | 2026-01-08 00:33:02+00:00
Hi HN – founder here.

We built Telio to power AI agents for 24/7 call and text support.

Voice calls and texts need fast access to context. Our approach: aggregate data from multiple sources into a unified data lakehouse using APIs, webhooks, and logical replication.

Key advantages:

- Sandboxed read-only environments for AI agents, so they can't disrupt other systems

- Storing and processing large data volumes on S3 at a fraction of typical costs

- Retrieving all context at once, reducing tool calls and LLM token usage

- Building and querying vector embeddings for semantic search

- Granular column-level permissions to manage PII access

We query the lakehouse as if it were PostgreSQL, but with much better performance on complex queries using our open-source project https://github.com/BemiHQ/BemiDB.

We’d love feedback from the HN community!
by Dig1t | 2026-01-08 00:33:24+00:00
I'm not telling anyone they can't clutch their pearls and tell other people what to do. All I'm saying is that you will never win the cultural battle that way. Building a culture that does things like getting people fired from their jobs for using magic words, even if there is obviously no intentional malice in those words, is a great way to lose elections.
by tombert | 2026-01-08 00:33:58+00:00
> It's amusing how outraged people were when Michelle Obama did her Let's Move campaign focused on eating healthy and exercise and now people are pretending it's all new.

It's the same people who got offended because Obama asked for spicy mustard because they thought that was too fancy, but still actively voted for the guy who actively plates everything with gold so as to maximize how tacky everything looks.

They've never been internally consistent and I'm not entirely convinced that they have any principles outside of "own the libs".
by browningstreet | 2026-01-08 00:34:13+00:00
I vibe coded an app and recorded all the things happening to my 50-something body. I shared that list with a few MDs -- they were useless. They literally can't handle anything except acute cases.

It's like telling someone to ask their doctor about nutrition. It's not in their scope any longer. They'll tell you to try things and figure it out.

The US medical industry abdicated their thing a long time ago. Doctors do something I'm sure, but discuss/advise/inquire isn't really one of them.

This was multiple doctors, in multiple locations, in various modalities, after blood tests and MRIs and CT scans. I live with literally zero of my issues resolved even a little tiny bit. And I paid a lot of money out of pocket (on top of insurance) for this experience.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-08 00:34:18+00:00
<< but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now.

I keep a personal log of specific failures for simple CYA reasons. I do get some, but I can't honestly say it does not seem high to me. A lot likely depends on what is defined as a failure ( to me it typically is a clearly wrong result ). But those clearly wrong results do not seem to cross 10% of output.. so about the same as average human.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-08 00:35:18+00:00
I had only the Jowett translation and probably gave up on passages like that. What got my attention was diagramming. I diagrammed Koine Greek sentences every time in assignments with Apostle Paul or Luke. Greek is intensely inflected (different word endings for subject, object, for starters) A lot of meaning is packed in which makes word order very flexible.

I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-08 00:36:00+00:00
This is ok (could use some diagrams!), but I don't think anyone coming to this for the first time will be able to use it to really teach themselves the LLM attention mechanism. It's a hard topic and requires two or three book chapters at least if you really want to start grokking it!

For anyone serious about coming to grips with this stuff, I would strongly recommend Sebastian Raschka's excellent book Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), which I just finished reading. It's approachable and also detailed.

As an aside, does anyone else find the whole "database lookup" motivation for QKV kind of confusing? (in the article, "Query (Q): What am I looking for? Key (K): What do I contain? Value (V): What information do I actually hold?"). I've never really got it and I just switched to thinking of QKV as a way to construct a fairly general series of linear algebra transformations on the input of a sequence of token embedding vectors x that is quadratic in x and ensures that every token can relate to every other token in the NxN attention matrix. After all, the actual contents and "meaning" of QKV are very opaque: the weights that are used to construct them are learned during training. Furthermore, there is a lot of symmetry between Q and K in the algebra, which gets broken only by the causal mask. Or do people find this motivation useful? What am I missing?
by kingstnap | 2026-01-08 00:36:13+00:00
I think that it should be a ramping rate, the idea being that a 1x landlord should be able to outbid a 2x landlord and so on.

In theory this encourages a sort of spreading effect where at some point the Nth property is too expensive to buy to rent or speculate on, which naturally stops the exponential effect of making land lording your full time gig by continuously expanding the portfolio.
by bigiain | 2026-01-08 00:36:23+00:00
I, for one, look forward to the new 5oz "Donald Trump Freedom Nickel". Probably resulting from a deal he did with the Big Trousers lobby groups to wear out coin pockets faster.

(I would have made a gag about a 7g replacement nickel, but you people have already used up the team "quarter" for different denomination. Although the idea of a new 40 cent coin called an "eight ball" amuses me...)
by aipatselarom | 2026-01-08 00:37:19+00:00
>Would you trust a medical system measured by: which doctor would the average Internet user vote for?

Yes, the system desperately needs this. Many doctors malpractice for DECADES.

I would absolutely seek to, damn, even pay good money to, be able to talk with a doctor's previous patients, particularly if they're going to perform a life-changing procedure on me.
by klipklop | 2026-01-08 00:37:28+00:00
This is pure whataboutism and made in bad faith. I feel for your friend (if they exist beyond you trying to make an argument), but there are various physical and legal ways to protect yourself from this situation in the US. This edge case is not a good enough reason help shield foreign oligarchs and large corps holding real estate in secret. There is probably a compromise somewhere between both extremes.
by asar247 | 2026-01-08 00:37:51+00:00
I created this app beacause I was using similar apps but there were things missing that could have been a time saved and I wanted to to this for me. Things like using camera and AI to create expenses and split with friends directly without needing to introduce items one by one by hand. Splitting not only the expense between friends but the items as well because we had a lot of times when someone didn't want to share items from the check and we need to do the math again removing and splitting manually and it was a headache for us. I hope that this is going to be helpful for others as it is for me at this moment. This was designed for people that travel with friends and need to settle their payments in a better way, I hope this is exactly what it does :)))
by jasonfarnon | 2026-01-08 00:37:56+00:00
This is a common trope here the last couple of years. I really can't tell if the models get worse or its in our heads. I don't use a new model until a few months after release and I still have this experience. So they can't be degrading the models uniformly over time, it would have to be a per-user kind of thing. Possible, but then I should see a difference when I switch to my less-used (wife's) google/openAI accounts, which I don't.
by actionfromafar | 2026-01-08 00:38:01+00:00
There have been quips for many years about the dragnets of intelligence services and that "Stasi couldn't even dream about having such vast data" and similar.

But now we aren't talking about intelligence services anymore. ICE truly is Stasi for America, employing tactics such as "isolating them, depriving them of sleep and using psychological tricks such as threatening to arrest relatives." (From Wikipedia about Stasi.)

This year ICE will also become the "armed wing of the Party" thanks to fresh funding.
by Groxx | 2026-01-08 00:38:31+00:00
Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO.

They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.

I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.
by doug-moen | 2026-01-08 00:39:06+00:00
This is Trump's MAGA diet, a replacement for the lame liberal DEI diet of the Biden administration. Not hyperbole, the web site states all this explicitly if you click through to this link: <https://cdn.realfood.gov/Scientific%20Report.pdf>

The Scientific Report mentions Trump 4 times, so I looked up Trump's diet. Seems he eats a lot of McDonalds takeout and drinks a lot of diet coke. It seems to me that Trump's diet is an exemplary and healthy diet that follows these new recommendations, which prioritizes foods such as beef, oils and animal fat (including full fat dairy) and potatoes. Cheeseburger and fries, and the diet coke avoids added sugar, while promoting hydration. Trump might be prickly about past criticism of his diet; now he can point to these recommendations.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-08 00:39:33+00:00
Drink raw milk, get antibiotic-resistant e. coli, salmonella, and/or listeria.

Cooking is processing. Pasteurization is processing. Not all processing is "bad".

To be consistent with their supposed "values", then they have to end subsidies for field corn, wheat, and soy and subsidize organic produce. That will never happen because these are lifestyle influencers playing bureaucrat when they don't know anything.
by aatd86 | 2026-01-08 00:39:56+00:00
Interesting thought exercise, let me try something:

Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice.
But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities.

Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome.

That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert.
So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system.

That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system.

Randomness provides agency.

That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency.
You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge.

I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about.

A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable?
by xp84 | 2026-01-08 00:40:28+00:00
It actually behaves surprisingly well when you just scroll with the spacebar, as I always do[1].

[1] note: using this method (spacebar to jump one screenful, and shift-spacebar to go back up) on sites that insist on doing the "sTiCkY hEaDeR" idiocy results in losing a line or two on every page, so, I guess, don't get too used to it as it's hard to use today.
by slg | 2026-01-08 00:40:33+00:00
Who said anything about regexp? I was literally talking about something as simple as "if(text.length > 100)". Also the example provided was distinguishing "a 2 page essay or 'asdfasdf'" which clearly can be accomplished with length much easier than either an LLM or even regexp.

We should keep in mind that we're trying to optimize for user's time. "So, she cheated on me" takes less than a second to type. It would probably take the user longer to respond to whatever pop up warning you give than just retyping that text again. So what actual value do you think the LLM is contributing here that justifies the added complexity and overhead?

Plus that benefit needs to overcome the other undesired behavior that an LLM would introduce such as it will now present an unnecessary popup if people enter a little real data and intentionally navigate away from the page (and it should be noted, users will almost certainly be much more likely to intentionally navigate away than accidentally navigate away). LLMs also aren't deterministic. If 90% of the time you navigate away from the page with text entered, the LLM warns you, then 10% of the time it doesn't, those 10% times are going to be a lot more frustrating than if the length check just warned you every single time. And from a user satisfaction perspective, it seems like a mistake to swap frustration caused by user mistakes (accidentally navigating away) with frustration caused by your design decisions (inconsistent behavior). Even if all those numbers end up falling exactly the right way to slightly make the users less frustrated overall, you're still trading users who were previously frustrated at themselves for users being frustrated at you. That seems like a bad business decision.

Like I said, this all just seems like a solution in search of a problem.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-08 00:40:41+00:00
Not all TPM. I've yet to manage it on my MBP M1 Pro or my Pixel. Of course, M1-M3 have broken secure enclave which cannot be fixed by the user.

On AMD with fTPM I get a fat warning if I want to reset the fTPM keys. I think earlier implementations failed here.

> and does not bode well for hardware-backed Passkeys that would also be inherently reliant on TPM storage.

So you revoke the key and auth in another way (or you use a backup). One passkey is never meant to be the one sole way of auth.

I actually like the concept. Consider a situation where you would log into your webmail while in a café or bus. If the password is tied to your hardware, nobody can watch over your shoulder to use it on theirs.

I don't use them much (I've been forced to) because I already use a self-hosted password manager where I never see the password myself. But for the average person, passkeys are better.

Now, if you compare with FIDO2, those are supposed to be with you all the time (something you have). So they can be used on multiple platforms, while a TPM is tied to hardware.
by elbci | 2026-01-08 00:41:11+00:00
Eu is going for "technological sovereignty" by asking people how to install linux (you know, that USA based linux who banned Russian contributors for being Russian but suuurely wouldn't ban other europeans). And if they manage somehow to get Ubuntu going, they'll call themselves 'independent and cyber-secure' because I doubt anybody could be so cruel as to mention to them the hardware problem and the 0 number of fabs they have ;)
by iterance | 2026-01-08 00:41:32+00:00
Restrictions on SNAP are tricky business. You can't ask someone on SNAP to spend time preparing food. Prepared meals are expensive, often not accessible, and sometimes difficult to prepare for people with certain disabilities. It might seem strange, but I have known people, very poor people, who rely on "foods in bar and drink form" out of necessity. I have known poor people for whom eating fruit is physically challenging.

SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.
by ctoth | 2026-01-08 00:41:43+00:00
Ownership share is a stock. Prices get set by flow - transactions. Housing is a thin market; maybe 5-6% of homes change hands in a given year. Price discovery happens at that transaction layer.

Institutional investors own ~3% of single-family rentals nationally. But per CoreLogic they're 29% of purchases in the starter home tier. That's the market where we first-time buyers actually compete.

In some metros it's more concentrated.

Atlanta: ~30% of single-family rentals corporate-owned.

Charlotte neighborhoods in 2022: 50%!!! of sales to institutional buyers.

So for your 1-2-3... maybe something like?

1. Institutional buyers concentrate in starter homes where they're 29% of transactions, not 3% of stock

2. Target metros/neighborhoods go higher still

3. Real estate uses comps-based pricing - their winning bids propagate to surrounding valuations

The mechanism isn't inventory control, it's just a buyer with a different utility function (rental yield vs owner-occupancy) systematically outbidding price-sensitive first-time buyers. In a thick market that gets arbitraged away. In a thin market with sparse comps, each transaction is a price-setting event.

The St. Louis Fed found institutional presence specifically increases price-to-income ratios in the bottom tier.

If you're evil corporate Landlordman You don't need to affect the whole market. You just need to cut off the bottom rung of the ladder.

Is this Trump move the right one? No frickin idea! But I do think we need to reckon with what's actually happening to first-time homebuyers. I bought a place in Englewood Co last year and ... it was pretty rough.
by JobrosDad | 2026-01-08 00:42:32+00:00
I have adapted our "Stealth" pitch to fit their strict format while keeping the "Nerd Bait" hook.
Stealth PropTech Startup | Boston, MA (or Remote) | Founding Full-Stack Engineer | CONTRACT TO HIRE | Competitive Market Rate + Equity
We are looking for a "Mad Scientist" engineer to build a living, gamified dashboard that disrupts a massive legacy industry (Consumer Logistics/Real Estate).
The Stack: React, Next.js, Supabase, Node.js. (Bonus: Framer Motion/GSAP).
The Project:
This isn't a CRUD app. It is a "Command Center" that feels like a video game. It features a dynamic "AI Companion" (Nook) that actively coaches users through complex financial and logistical phases. We need someone who can take a "Frankenstein" MVP concept and turn it into a high-performance, secure, living organism.
About You:
* You treat your IDE like a video game.
* You obsess over micro-interactions and "game feel."
* You want to be Employee #1 on a product that solves a universal anxiety point for 40k+ users in Boston alone.
The Deal:
* Mode: Contract-to-hire. We start with the MVP build (paid project). If you survive the mission, you become the Founding Engineer.
* Culture: No Jira. No PMs. Just code and shipping.
To Apply:
Email me at jobroplus@gmail.com
Do NOT send a resume. Send ONE link to the coolest/weirdest thing you have ever built. Show me code with a soul.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-08 00:42:32+00:00
Different strokes for different folks: I mean who is to say if Bleach or Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World is better?
by boringg | 2026-01-08 00:42:40+00:00
Great visualization.

IMO 2020 regulation unintentionally contributed to global warming while reducing air pollution. This rule drastically cut the amount of sulfur permitted in ship fuel, which improved public health but reduced the reflective effect of atmospheric aerosols that had been masking some global warming.

You'd think the people making the rules would try and look at all the impacts.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-08 00:42:45+00:00
"Trusted Publishing" is just a term of art for OIDC. NPM can and should support federating with CI/CD platforms other than GitHub Actions, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

(It makes sense that they'd target GHA first, since that's where the majority of their users probably are. But the technique itself is fundamentally platform agnostic and interoperable.)
by SecondHandTofu | 2026-01-08 00:43:02+00:00
You haven't actually cited any studies, just "I haven't heard anyone say anything".

We have transaction taxes in the UK, on shares (stamp duty) and on property (stamp duty land tax). They are awful. SDLT used to be lower, around 1%, but it crept up as it's an easy tax to raise politically, the top band is now at 12%.

[The government's own modelling of SDLT is incredible](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsiveness-of...)
A 1% change in the effective tax rate results in almost a 12% change in the number of commercial transactions and a 5-7% change in the number of residential transactions.
This effect still happens at lower thresholds, it's just less dramatic, but it's still distortionary. If you tax something, you get less of it, and why do you want people to move less?

If you prefer anecdotes, these days it's very common to rent in the UK until you can buy a longer term home, rather than buying a starter home. I know very few people who _haven't_ done exactly that, you don't want to pay SDLT on somewhere you'll only live for a few years.

Stamp duty on shares (0.5%) is also widely panned by experts: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/15/how-to-reform-stamp-duty...

It raises very little, distorts the market hugely, it is a large reason that companies choose to list overseas.

Sales taxes are a (bad) form of consumption tax (VAT is better.) Consumption taxes are broadly good, the problem with transaction taxes are when you are purchasing an asset in a market.
by conductr | 2026-01-08 00:43:22+00:00
I think your case on this debate is more sound however

> To do that, you have to be able to generate scarcity, which is exactly what corporate investors aren't doing.

But they did. When inventory was low and then zero percent rates where available, they bought everything they could and drove prices up and created an appreciation bubble. I don’t think they have some other dark patterns for manipulating the market but they had access to a lot of basically free cash. Inventory of houses for sale is a tiny portion of the total market and they could and did contribute to driving prices up. But so did everyone that had the opportunity and inclination to do so, and why not when money is free leverage the shit out of it in an asset class that will generally appreciate without much risk.

I don’t know what ever came of that now that rates have increased. Are they still holding those homes? Did they sell them after driving prices up? (But not fast enough to make prices go down again obviously). Are they landlords now? Etc.

The market is still reeling from that economic situation that created this. Prices may eventually float down but no seller is eager for that so it’s a bit sticky.
by awesome_dude | 2026-01-08 00:43:42+00:00
> By itself, this figure doesn't really mean much. On any given day, less than 1% of people have birthdays, but that doesn't mean there's a small percentage of people who are having most of the birthdays

Yeah, it just means that half the beef eaten per day goes to the 12% having a BBQ, etc, not that only 12% of the population have access to half the beef available each day
by Fnoord | 2026-01-08 00:44:08+00:00
And I lost data with XFS.

Doesn't tell us anything. Which product, version.

Paragon's NTFS driver is now (after open sourced) part of the Linux kernel, and this one is rw.

(My data loss with XFS was some 20 years ago with Linux 2.4.x after a power loss. I've also had RAID5 write hole ZFS data loss a couple of years later, on FreeBSD, and that was with a BBU for the hardware raid. Ever since, I learned to disable write cache, until I've seen NVMe with PLP for cache.)