MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gorgoiler | 2026-01-13 11:35:30+00:00
You’re right, it’s not much, but it is convenient and clean. A few lamps, USB charging, and a router/modem will use a few tens of watts and the big power pack will keep that going for eight hours.

For longer outages there is an outhouse with triple-redundant generators:

- Honda c. 2005

- Honda c. 1985

- Briggs & Stratton c. 1940

The “redundancy” here is that the first is to provide power in the event of a long power outage, and the other two are redundant museum pieces (which turn over!)
by hare2eternity | 2026-01-13 11:35:49+00:00
It sounds like you're making great changes to your health. Although BMI is a population metric and has its flaws it is accurate for the vast majority of people. The reason the weight component _seems_ low is that being overweight is so normalised. Most UFC fighters are in the normal weight range and are clearly more muscular than the average person. Society isn't suffering an over-abundance of buffness, it's just people are generally carrying lots of extra weight.
by MrDOS | 2026-01-13 11:36:33+00:00
You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. If anyone else had come up with it, it would have been ignored completely. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be, but it's not really that compelling for end users, either. As other folks in the thread have pointed out, WebP is basically the static image format that you get “for free” when you've already got a VP8 video decoder.

The funny thing is all the places where Google's own ecosystem has ignored WebP. E.g., the golang stdlib has a WebP decoder, but all of the encoders you'll find are CGo bindings to libwebp.
by enderforth | 2026-01-13 11:36:36+00:00
Okay, everyone here is talking about dick pics but let's be clear hear the goal is

>A major expansion of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) has taken effect, legally obliging digital platforms to deploy surveillance-style systems that scan, detect, and block user content before it can be seen.

Do we really believe that no government forever is not going to use this to prevent certain "misinformation" from circulating?

And by misinformation we mean things like MPs breaking COVID lock down rules or "problematic" information about the PM being involved in a scandal, or the list is endless.

Let's be clear this isn't at all and never has been about dick pics this is 100% about being able to control what you can see and share.
by HPsquared | 2026-01-13 11:37:36+00:00
The things you mention are already illegal. The effective proven solution is to enforce existing laws, to punish and deter bad behaviour like any other crime.

This incongruence is why a lot of people don't take the reasoning at face value and see it as only rhetorical justification for increased surveillance, which is widely understood as something the state wants do do anyway.
by chrisvalleybay | 2026-01-13 11:37:58+00:00
I love this. I also built a business like that[0]. It's super niche. I have maintained this small business for soon to be 13 years now. Most of what has worked has been maintaining great relationships with the few customers I have.
I think the most important thing for me have been offering amazing support. I always reply to all e-mails right away and make it my top priority giving them my best help.

Congratulations on your success, and best of luck going forward!

[0] https://www.mino.no.
by 72deluxe | 2026-01-13 11:38:15+00:00
Yes, modern UIs are baffling. You're meant to know that groping around the screen and swiping at things does magical things, or to swipe from the edges of things for other actions. Combined with the industry's perpetual desire to change what these gestures do every couple of years, along with the constantly changing UI elements (buttons don't look like buttons, then they do, then they look like links, then they look like buttons for a bit, repeat), it is little wonder how older people struggle with new devices and software releases.

Back with Windows 3.11, it came with a paper thick manual telling you how to use the OS. You could read it, and understand it, and you only had to learn how to use the mouse (the difference between right-click and left-click, and how to double-click fast enough), and also knew that scrollbars looked like scrollbars at all times, buttons behaved a certain way at all times, and UI elements were visible and behaved the same at all times.

I think we've lost that with modern UIs and it's a shame.
by stevenhuang | 2026-01-13 11:39:02+00:00
It is pretty clear the author of that article has no idea what he's talking about.

You should look into the physical church turning thesis. If it's false (all known tested physics suggests it's true) then well we're probably living in a dualist universe. This means something outside of material reality (souls? hypercomputation via quantum gravity? weird physics? magic?) somehow influences our cognition.

The brain processes information, in ways analogous to a computer. If you think this is false, then go ahead and disprove the physical church turning thesis!
by bob1029 | 2026-01-13 11:39:15+00:00
In many cases the best solution would be to retrofit the existing facilities and leverage the transmission infrastructure that is already in place. Retrofit doesn't necessarily mean we continue to burn coal, but it might. Without the aid of a time machine, continuing to burn coal (or even restarting a plant) for a limited period of time may have less incremental impact than other options.

I understand the urge to tear these facilities down, but if we actually care about the environment a more nuanced path is probably ideal.

https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/over-100-coal...
Ask HN: Infrastructure teams – what's your biggest compliance headache?
by coppinfra | 2026-01-13 11:39:17+00:00
I'm exploring building automation for infrastructure compliance
and cost optimization (SPLA licensing, backup verification, patch
tracking, cloud cost analysis).

For those managing hybrid infrastructure (on-prem + cloud):

1. What compliance/cost tasks take the most time each month?
2. Which would you pay to automate?
3. What existing tools work well or poorly?

Background: 25 years in infrastructure, trying to validate if
this is worth building or if good solutions already exist.

Looking for honest feedback from people dealing with this day-to-day.
by permo-w | 2026-01-13 11:40:04+00:00
I was wondering this. what is the minimum amount of text an LLM needs to be coherent? fun of an idea as this is, the samples of its responses are basically babbling nonsense. going further, a lot of what makes LLMs so strong isn't their original training data, but the RLHF done afterwards. RLHF would be very difficult in this case
by mikeayles | 2026-01-13 11:40:16+00:00
For AI designed schematics, you need to check out flux.ai (and quilter for layout), I don't have anything to do with this, i'm a little jealous tbh, but having used it, it's not for me (but i'm making fairly complex, FuSa, type approved stuff, for the sorts of boards that would go into phaestus, it would probably be adequate)

I'm pretty in the weeds when it comes to this stuff,

First of all, I made https://www.circuitsnips.com/ , which is like thingiverse for circuits, so users can get bits of designs and copy and paste them into their own designs, but the reception was lukewarm at best, it needed bootstrap data, for which I scraped GH, which could have been a mistake, either way, for the tens of people using it, I think it's pretty neat!

Circuitsnips Blog:https://www.mikeayles.com/#circuitsnips-com
Circuitsnips GH:https://github.com/MichaelAyles/kicad-library

So, then I created a fork of TOON, called TOKN, which is token optimised KiCad notation, which successfully compresses kicad schematic s-expressions by 93%, and is able to regenerate schematics from it. With the intention of trying to generate schematics, one shot them using frontier models, or even post-train an OSS model to see if that works, however when I benchmarked it, I could get 100% syntax validity, but the models hallucinated the components, the pins etc, so they would need grounding.

TOKN Blog:https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn
TOKN GH:https://github.com/MichaelAyles/tokn

Which brings me onto my next, next, (next?) side project:
An embedded documentation MCP server!, Load in your PDF's, it parses them and puts things into a sqlite db that the LLM can interact with more efficiently. I mainly use it for writing hardware abstraction layers for chips that have terrible vendor support (looking at you, NXP KEA128). Honestly, everything about this chip is awful, even the GPIO is laid out terribly, it's like the meme where everything gets put in the square hole. PORTB? nah, you need to do PORTA + 16. Anyway...

Bitwise-MCP Blog:https://www.mikeayles.com/#bitwise-mcp
Bitwise-MCP GH:https://github.com/MichaelAyles/bitwise-mcp

And if you've read this far, here's a little treat:

https://www.mikeayles.com/#kidoom-featured
by roryirvine | 2026-01-13 11:40:16+00:00
Live translation? Circle to search? All the magic reframing and relighting stuff in the camera app? I don't know how good the Apple equivalents are, but those are all deeply integrated into Android and are used pretty heavily as far as I can see.

I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-13 11:40:23+00:00
"The researchers identified two main reasons for the uptick. U.S. electricity demand grew at an unusually fast pace, driven in part by an expansion of power-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence. To meet that demand, electric utilities burned about 13 percent more coal last year than they did in 2024.

...

...the researchers said Mr. Trump’s policies would take time to have an effect and they mostly weren’t responsible for last year’s rise in emissions."
by ngruhn | 2026-01-13 11:41:17+00:00
> Had you simply rebased you would have lost the ability to separate the initial working implementation of D from the modifications required to reconcile it with M

I'd say: cleaning that up is an advantage. Why keep that around? It wouldn't be necessary if there was no update on the main branch in the meantime. With rebase you just pretend you started working after that update on main.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-13 11:41:29+00:00
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.

There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
by river_otter | 2026-01-13 11:41:34+00:00
Thanks for giving it a try! If you can think of any improvements I'm certainly all ears. What i've been doing is using the ios + termius + aoe setup to just keep tasks moving forwards. I log in from my phone, see which sessions are waiting for me, and then type just enough to keep them moving forwards until I get back to my desktop where then I can use aoe again to keep them moving
by samiv | 2026-01-13 11:41:51+00:00
Do the people rushing off to outsource their work to chatbots have a plan to explain to their bosses why they still need to have a job?

What's the play after you have automated yourselves out of a job?

Retrain as a skilled worker? Expect to be the lucky winner who is cahoots with the CEO/CTO and magically gets to keep the job? Expect the society to turn to social democracy and produce UBI? Make enough money to live off investments portfolio?
by hare2eternity | 2026-01-13 11:42:48+00:00
That position does not appear to be supported by clinical evidence. [This study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dar.12433) references several studies that show that taking low (in the context of gym users) doses of steriods and not exercising is more effective at building muscle mass than strength training and not taking steroids.
by zylics | 2026-01-13 11:42:58+00:00
I’ve always found existing online polling rate testers either cluttered with ads or laggy when testing high-performance gaming mice (4000Hz/8000Hz). I wanted to build something minimal, precise, and accessible in multiple languages.

Technical implementation:

Built with vanilla JavaScript using the PointerEvents API.

Utilizes requestAnimationFrame for high-resolution event timing to minimize browser engine overhead.

The tool calculates the interval between movement events to determine the real-time frequency (Hz) and latency (ms).

Why this matters: Many modern mice claim 1000Hz+ but suffer from instability due to USB bus saturation or OS-level interference. I included a "Max" and real-time fluctuations to help gamers identify these stutters.

It’s completely ad-free and open for feedback. I’m particularly interested in hearing how it performs on different OS/browser combinations, as browser event loops can sometimes be tricky with high-frequency input.

Thanks for checking it out!
by andy12_ | 2026-01-13 11:43:05+00:00
The problem is that so far, SOTA generalist models are not excellent at just one particular task. They have a very wide range of tasks they are good at, and good scores in one particular benchmarks correlates very strongly with good scores in almost all other benchmarks, even esoteric benchmarks that AI labs certainly didn't train against.

I'm sure, without any uncertainty, that any generalist model able to do what Einstein did would be AGI, as in, that model would be able to perform any cognitive task that an intelligent human being could complete in a reasonable amount of time (here "reasonable" depends on the task at hand; it could be minutes, hours, days, years, etc).
by dohuyhoangvn93 | 2026-01-13 11:44:32+00:00
Looking for feedback on a core design dilemma: To strict_mode or not?

Thanks for checking out Theus! I’m currently at a crossroads regarding one specific feature and would love to hear your thoughts.

In Theus, the default behavior is Full Transactional Integrity—every mutation happens on a 'Shadow Copy' so we can rollback instantly if an Audit Rule is violated. This is great for safety but can be expensive for high-frequency loops like Reinforcement Learning or processing large Tensors.

To solve this, I’ve implemented a strict_mode=False toggle. When disabled:

Shadow Copying is bypassed: Reading/Writing happens directly on the real object.

Zero Overhead: No transaction objects or audit logs are created.

Trade-off: You lose all safety—no rollbacks, no contract enforcement, and crashes leave the state 'dirty'.

My dilemma: Is providing a 'Strict Mode Toggle' a pragmatic necessity for performance, or does it defeat the entire purpose of a framework built for safety?

Should I keep this global toggle, or should I force developers to use more granular optimizations (like my heavy_ prefix for specific large assets) to keep the 'Safety-First' philosophy intact?

I'd appreciate any architectural insights from those who have built similar state-heavy systems!
by Sammi | 2026-01-13 11:44:58+00:00
You can really treat WebP as a universally available format in 2026. It is an old, boring, and safe format to use now.

Browser support for WebP is excellent now. The last browser to add it was Safari 14 in September 16, 2020: https://caniuse.com/webp

It got into Windows 10 1809 in October 2018. Into MacOS Big Sur in November 2020.

Wikipedia has a great list of popular software that supports it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Graphics_software
by materialpoint | 2026-01-13 11:45:00+00:00
Well, we sorely need something better than the current static code analysis tools, like sub-par products SonarQube and CodeQL that see massive overuse, because these tools do not understand that living and evolving code needs imperfections and that _most_ programmers have already thought through their code and made decisions that can't align with poor text book examples of "correct code".
by leetnewb | 2026-01-13 11:45:03+00:00
Funding and centralization.

Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.

xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.

There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.

I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.
by online_test | 2026-01-13 11:45:08+00:00
How is anyone pretending Iran stuff is about freedom when a genocide continues on in Gaza? Supported by the people here, little children continue to be shot and buildings collapsing on families.

People are going to pretend the internet is about freedom when the US just used it to illegally invade Venezuela? https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/the-internet-venezuela-a...
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-13 11:46:27+00:00
I don't think the fine is automatic like that, it's more if you don't have an appropriate mechanism to manage it. In other words you need a content policy that is enforced.

A mod who deletes nude pictures is probably enough to not get fined.

I think the real issue is what I just said... "probably enough"; that's the real problem with the online safety act. People are mostly illiterate on the law, and now asking them to understand a complex law and implement it (even when the actual implementation is not that much effort or any effort at all for well run spaces) is the real issue.
by Applejinx | 2026-01-13 11:46:33+00:00
If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do.

If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded.

And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior.

These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
Show HN: Policy-governed AI system for offline deployment in expertise deserts
by thepoors | 2026-01-13 11:47:06+00:00
I built an offline-first AI system designed for places where you need expert guidance but can't rely on connectivity or cloud APIs — disaster response, remote clinics, field operations.
The core idea: instead of trusting the model to behave, you cage it. The system uses a dual-model pipeline (worker generates, auditor checks) governed by a policy engine that defines what's allowed before inference runs. Every interaction gets logged to an append-only audit trail with checksum chaining.
Key design constraints:

Offline-first with graceful fallback
Policy-driven toggles (operators set capacity limits, not AI behavior)
Tiered key overrides for credentialed users (a nurse sees different options than a paramedic)
Modular "packs" for different domains (medical triage, structural assessment, water safety, etc.)

This started as a question: how would you deploy AI to a hurricane aftermath where there's no internet, no experts, and high stakes? The answer wasn't "better prompts" — it was architecture that assumes the model will try to do things it shouldn't.
https://github.com/thepoorsatitagain/Tutor-to-disaster-exper...
Looking for feedback on the architecture. I'm not from an AI background — I came at this from the ops/deployment side — so I'm sure there are things I'm missing.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-13 11:47:43+00:00
Nobody can (and should) stop you from learning and educating yourself. It however doesn't mean just because you can use Google or use AI, you think you can become a doctor:

- Bihar teen dies after ‘fake doctor’ conducts surgery using YouTube tutorial: Report - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/bihar-teen-dies-af...

- Surgery performed while watching YouTube video leaves woman dead - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/uttar-pradesh/surgery-perf...

- Woman dies after quack delivers her baby while watching YouTube videos - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/bihar/in-bihar-woman-...

Educating a user about their illness and treatment is a legitimate use case for AI, but acting on its advise to treat yourself or self-medicate would be plain stupidity. (Thankfully, self-medicating isn't as easy because most medication require a prescription. However, so called "alternate" medicines are often a grey area, even with regulations (for example, in India).
Ask HN: Quantum Computation, Computers and Programming
by rramadass | 2026-01-13 11:47:56+00:00
What are some good resources viz. books/papers/articles/videos/etc. to study about the three domains listed above (from Basics to Advanced)?

1) Quantum Computation: What exactly are the abstract models of computation here? Are the Classical Computation models i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_computation applicable? What other new models have been invented?

2) Quantum Computers: What is the Physics, Organization and Architecture of these? In classical computers you have semiconductor physics, electronic elements and voltage thresholds mapping to logical 1's and 0's. This is then used to build layers of abstractions. What are their equivalents in a quantum computer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing has a lot of info. but not quite structured for understanding.

3) Quantum Programming: A lot is mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming and Amazon lists a bunch of books on this topic but am not quite clear on how everything fits.
Also as i understand, quantum computing/programming can be simulated on classical hardware but am not clear on the how.

PS: Some detailed examples as to how quantum computers/programming actually help you solve problems which cannot be solved on classical computers would be helpful to bring everything together. Shor's algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm) is often mentioned but perhaps starting with a far simpler example would be more accessible.

PPS: In particular; I would love to hear from folks who actually study/research/work in this domain regarding what they actually do, its real-world applicabilities and how to go about learning the subject.