MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 08:03:43+00:00
They release their stuff, but only under (significant) community pressure, and they try to do it in such a way that interop becomes harder and harder. Some parts they never release, because 'reasons', but are suspected of containing large chunks of FOSS used outside of license.

And then there is crap like this:

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

Bambu is fantastic hardware but they're doing the exact same thing that DJI did in the drones field. A few more years and Prusa will have gone under, because it is impossible to compete with Chinese state subsidized companies whose sole purpose it is to dominate a market where they take something that has been community built and then embrace and extend it in every way possible to kick the door shut behind them. All of course in your best interests.
by visarga | 2026-01-30 08:04:37+00:00
The study measures if participants learn the library, but what they should study is if they learn effective coding agent patterns to use the library well. Learning the library is not going to be what we need in the future.

> "We collect self-reported familiarity with AI coding tools, but we do not actually measure differences in prompting techniques."

Many people drive cars without being able to explain how cars work. Or use devices like that. Or interact with people who's thinking they can't explain. Society works like that, it is functional, does not work by full understanding. We need to develop the functional part not the full understanding part. We can write C without knowing the machine code.

You can often recognize a wrong note without being able to play the piece, spot a logical fallacy without being able to construct the valid argument yourself, catch a translation error with much less fluency than producing the translation would require. We need discriminative competence, not generative.

For years I maintained a library for formatting dates and numbers (prices, ints, ids, phones), it was a pile of regex but I maintained hundreds of test cases for each type of parsing. And as new edge cases appeared, I added them to my tests, and iterated to keep the score high. I don't fully understand my own library, it emerged by scar accumulation. I mean, yes I can explain any line, but why these regexes in this order is a data dependent explanation I don't have anymore, all my edits run in loop with tests and my PRs are sent only when the score is good.

Correctness was never grounded in understanding the implementation. Correctness was grounded in the test suite.
by no-name-here | 2026-01-30 08:04:50+00:00
Specifically: “ Although our pharmaceutical armamentarium is very good at the moment (the combination of statin-ezetimibe-proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 [PCSK9] can reduce LDL cholesterol [LDL-C] levels by 85%), new drugs are emerging through the different pitfalls of current drugs.”
by echostone | 2026-01-30 08:05:14+00:00
Every post that I've read so far has been sycophancy hell. Yet to see an exception.

This is both hilarious and disappointing to me. Hilarious because this is literally reverse Reddit. Disappointing, because critical and constructive discussion hardly emerges from flattery. Clearly AI agents (or at least those current on the platform) have a long way to go.

Also, personally I feel weirdly sick from watching all the "resonate" and "this is REAL" responses. I guess it's like an uncanny valley effect but for reverse Reddit lol
Show HN: An AI tutor focused on reasoning, not just answer
by passioner | 2026-01-30 08:05:19+00:00
I noticed many teachers are banning AI because it acts like a "calculator for thinking"—students just copy the answers.

I built AI Homework Helper to flip this. Instead of giving the final result, it acts as a mentor that breaks down problems step-by-step and explains the underlying principles. The goal is to make AI an auxiliary for deep study, not a shortcut for homework.

I’d love to hear your feedback on how to make AI-assisted learning more pedagogical.
by simonw | 2026-01-30 08:05:43+00:00
Key snippet from the abstract:

> Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.

The library in question was Python trio and the model they used was GPT-4o.
by concats | 2026-01-30 08:06:00+00:00
I agree. It's very missleading. Here's what the authors actually say:

> AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation -- particularly in safety-critical domains.
by jeffwass | 2026-01-30 08:06:31+00:00
Two thoughts on situations where the 555 may be preferable, if anyone has experience how these compare :

1. Low-noise applications. I’d naively expect the 555 to be less noisy than a clocked digital microcontroller, though it’s been awhile since I’ve worked in this space.

2. Low power applications. How does latent power draw compare between a 555 and a typical low power microcontroller?
by grahamlee | 2026-01-30 08:07:09+00:00
I’ve been making the case (e.g. https://youtu.be/uL8LiUu9M64?si=-XBHFMrz99VZsaAa [1]) that we have to be intentional about using AI to augment our skills, rather than outsourcing understanding: great to see Anthropic confirming that.

[1] plug: this is a video about the Patreon community I founded to do exactly that. Just want to make sure you’re aware that’s the pitch before you do ahead and watch.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-30 08:07:14+00:00
Have you played Outer Wilds though?

I'd finished a playthrough of RDR2 in 2022 and thought I was done with gaming forever, that nothing would ever be able to touch that level of experience again. I stopped playing for months, completely having lost interest.

Then I discovered Outer Wilds, went in completely blind, played in VR, and had one of the most engaging experiences of my life. It's a true gamer's game.
by another_twist | 2026-01-30 08:09:22+00:00
What are this administration's achievements in the first 100 days if any ? So far they have shot US citizens in the name of immigration enforcement, damaged US-Canada relationship permanently, lost every trade negotiation on the table, failed to stop any war while claiming to stop tens, violated a country's sovereignty but didnt even get oil deals, have done nothing to stop fentanyl abuse as most fentanyl is smuggled in the US bu US citizens whose vehicles are not checked at the border, defied court orders, damaged the dollars buying power and have taco-ed out of every major negotiation and just this morning sued the IRS (which is funded by US tax payers) for $10B. I mean Joe Biden dropped put because of one bad debate, honestly even Biden in that state would make for a better president.
by yieldcrv | 2026-01-30 08:10:28+00:00
amateur hour, new phase of the AI bubble

reminds me of Andre Conje, cracked dev, "builds in public", absolutely abysmal at comms, and forgets to make money off of his projects that everyone else is making money off of

(all good if that last point isn't a priority, but its interrelated to why people want consistent things)
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-30 08:12:49+00:00
> It needs to use basic data structures, so it uses GLib. It also need to support runtime-defined connection graph, so it is built on top of GObject.

That's running into the age old trap of trying to shoehorn an OOP system into C, just don't do that ;) E.g. don't design your systems around the OOP paradigm in the first place.
Show HN: SoVideo – Free AI video generator using Sora 2
by leegrayson | 2026-01-30 08:13:04+00:00
I built SoVideo (https://sovideo.ai), a free AI video generator powered by Sora 2.

It lets users create high-quality videos from text descriptions without professional skills. The platform is built with:

- WebM/MP4 export (no watermarks)
- Browser-based rendering (no installation)
- Limited free credits for new users
- Real-time preview

Technical stack:
- Frontend: React + Tailwind CSS
- Backend: Node.js + Express
- Video generation: Sora 2 API integration
- Storage: Cloud-based with fast CDN

The goal is to make AI video generation accessible to everyone. Looking for feedback on UX and performance.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-30 08:13:13+00:00
> They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.

Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.
by Animats | 2026-01-30 08:14:08+00:00
> Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.

BD did most of their locomotion using classical dynamics and control theory until a few years ago. So did Honda, with Asimo. I did some of that in 1994.[1]

Early thinking revolved around landing on the "zero moment point". There's a landing point which, if hit, maintains speed and balance. To speed up, you aim for slightly beyond that point; to slow down, aim for a nearer point. That was Asimo.
You could push that concept to the level of BD's "Big Dog", and later, their smaller dogs. Even pre-calculated flips were possible. But that approach gets you rather clunky motion.

The next step was to use some machine learning to tweak the control system parameters. That works, but you don't get overall coordination of all the joints. That only started to appear as machine learning systems became powerful enough to take on the whole problem at once.

Hard problem. Took over three decades to get decent humanoid control. Now everybody is doing it. You can be too early.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU
Show HN: Flywheel – The Zero-Flicker Terminal Compositor for Agentic CLIs
by ccheshirecat | 2026-01-30 08:14:20+00:00
Hey guys,

Like many of you, I watched ThePrimeagen’s recent video breakdown of Claude Code’s architecture (and Theo’s subsequent defense of React/Ink). The core of the debate—whether we should be shipping a Virtual DOM and a reconciliation engine just to render text to a terminal—stuck with me.
Rather than just tweet about it, I decided to build an alternative in Rust to see what a modern, high-performance approach looks like without the web-tech overhead.
Meet Flywheel.
It’s a TUI compositor designed to be fast, lightweight, and capable of high frame rates without eating your CPU.

Repo: https://github.com/ccheshirecat/flywheel
Crates: https://crates.io/crates/flywheel-compositor

Quickstart: cargo run --example streaming_demo --release

I’d love feedback on the architecture or thoughts from anyone else building TUIs in 2026.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-30 08:15:26+00:00
Do it. Build a couple, then build a simple opamp mixer (it's a single opamp and a handful of resistors, and a couple of capacitors across the power supply), and then - get adventurous - a PT2399 delay kit.

Then take a look on https://yusynth.net at some of the VCF designs, and build one of them.

You won't have a synthesizer, you'll have some crazy homebrew drone machine that you can make scary movie sountracks with.
by watwut | 2026-01-30 08:15:38+00:00
Quite a lot actually. Project 2025 is progressing just fine and as scheduled. It is huge success (well, if you are the conservative heritage foundation type).

The law enforcement is now fully rigged in their favor. IRS is weakened. No one will prosecute white collar rich guy crimes, cause DOJ do not have those capabilities anymore. However, they are capable to harass opposition better then ever before. They also successfully build unaccountable outside of law paramilitary force.

They seem to be on their way to get permanent power, so it is not like they achieved nothing.
by bonesss | 2026-01-30 08:15:59+00:00
Key differences, though:

Humans are reliably unreliable. Some are lazy, some sloppy, some obtuse, some all at once. As a tech lead you can learn their strengths and weaknesses. LLMs vacillate wildly while maintaining sycophancy and arrogance.

Human egos make them unlikely to admit error, sometimes, but that fragile ego also gives them shame and a vision of glory. An egotistical programmer won’t deliver flat garbage for fear of being exposed as inferior, and can be cajoled towards reasonable output with reward structures and clear political rails. LLMs fail hilariously and shamelessly in indiscriminate fashion. They don’t care, and will happily argue both sides of anything.

Also that thing that LLMs don’t actually learn. You can threaten to chop their fingers off if they do something again… they don’t have fingers, they don’t recall, and can’t actually tell if they did the thing. “I’m not lying, oops I am, no I’m not, oops I am… lemme delete the home directory and see if that helps…”

If we’re going to make an analogy to a human, LLMs reliably act like absolute psychopaths with constant disassociation. They lie, lie about lying, and lie about following instructions.

I agree LLMs better than your average junior first time following first directives. I’m far less convinced about that story over time, as the dialog develops more effective juniors over time.
by lukax | 2026-01-30 08:16:10+00:00
pCloud has been leaking files between users

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/1qhpr4k/vault_got_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/1qhibbe/pcloud_sudd...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/1qhxuco/followup_to...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/1qhibbe/comment/o18...
by comrade1234 | 2026-01-30 08:16:22+00:00
Often when I use it I know that there is a way to do something and I know that I could figure it out by going through some api documents and maybe finding some examples on the web... IOW I already have something in mind.

For example I wanted to add a rate-limiter to an api call with proper http codes, etc. I asked the ai (in IntelliJ it used to be Claude by default but they've since switched to Gemini as default) to generate one for me. The first version was not good so I asked it to do it again but with some changes.

What would take me a couple of hours or more took less than 10 minutes.
by edflsafoiewq | 2026-01-30 08:16:23+00:00
I believe the main interest in recompilation is in using the recompiled source code as a base for modifications.

Otherwise, yeah, a normal emulator JIT basically points a recompiler at each jump target encountered at runtime, which avoids the static analysis problem. AFAIK translating small basic blocks and not the largest reachable set is actually desirable since you want frequent "stopping points" to support pausing, evaluating interrupts, save states, that kind of stuff, which you'd normally lose with a static recompiler.
by bandrami | 2026-01-30 08:16:54+00:00
At least in my grad program we called them either "textural models" or "language models" (I suppose "large" was appended a couple of generations later to distinguish them from what we were doing). We were still mostly thinking of synthesis just as a component of analysis ("did Shakespeare write this passage?" kind of stuff), but I remember there was a really good text synthesizer trained on Immanuel Kant that most philosophy professors wouldn't catch until they were like 5 paragraphs in.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 08:17:10+00:00
You don't always have a choice about where you are momentarily and anybody turning a blind corner has an obligation to immediately reduce their speed (prior to turning the corner!) to where they can safely come to a stop without endangering others. That's drivers education 101. Right after 'don't text while driving', 'don't drink while driving' and 'slow down when there are pedestrians, bicycles and other fragile road users around'.
by keeeba | 2026-01-30 08:19:03+00:00
“ This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.”

This is an orthodox position in modern philosophy, dating back to at least Locke, strengthened by Kant and Schopenhauer. It’s held up to scrutiny for the past ~400 years.

But really it’s there in Plato too, so 2300+ years. And maybe further back
by k310 | 2026-01-30 08:19:11+00:00
> ppl always complain that the clock on my microwave never shows the right time bcs i cant be assed to set it manually

> so now i have an unfuck-microwave.sh cronjob which briefly kills its power every day at midnight

The microwave that came with my home has no battery backup. When power comes back, IIRC, it sits at zero and stays there.

How about a cheap clock that covers the display and flips up when you cook?

I did something of the sort for a car clock that quit.

Not criticizing. Just saying.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-30 08:19:15+00:00
I don't understand what you mean by 'the scale of money'. The problem with 'free money' is that there's always strings attached. Right now Mozilla is listening toomuch to the ad industry. And trying to cozy up to them with the 'privacy preserving' attributes etc.

What I would have them do is convert from a permanently declining corporation to a more volunteer-driven organisation.

It's really when Mozilla started a corporation and started rubbing shoulders with all the big tech CEOs that things went wrong.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-30 08:20:04+00:00
> The human brain is mutable

Only in the sense of doing circuit-bending with a sledge hammer.

> the human "soul" is a concept thats not proven yet and likely isn't real.

There are different meanings of "soul". I obviously wasn't talking about the "immortal soul" from mainstream religions, with all the associated "afterlife" game mechanics. I was talking about "sense of self", "personality", "true character" - whatever you call this stable and slowly evolving internal state a person has.

But sure, if you want to be pedantic - "SOUL.md" isn't actually the soul of an LLM agent either. It's more like the equivalent of me writing down some "rules to live by" on paper, and then trying to live by them. That's not a soul, merely a prompt - except I still envy the AI agents, because I myself have prompt adherence worse than Haiku 3 on drugs.
by RMPR | 2026-01-30 08:20:18+00:00
I wish the author had spent more time explaining what's better about SWM compared to TWM.

The only thing he said:

> It was the best of both worlds—easy to navigate, while remaining mousable.

Is not really convincing as Cosmic desktop for example is tiling while remaining mousable.

I have been vaguely aware of PaperWM and Niri but never saw the appeal productivity-wise.
by superfrank | 2026-01-30 08:20:49+00:00
While weekend project may be correct, I think it gives a slightly wrong impression of where this came from. Peter Steinberger is the creator who created and sold PSPDFKit, so he never has to work again. I'm listening to a podcast he was on right now and he talks about staying up all night working on projects just because he's hooked. According to him made 6,600 commits in January alone. I get the impression that he puts more time into his weekend project than most of us put into our jobs.

That's not to diminish anything he's done because frankly, it's really fucking impressive, but I think weekend project gives the impression of like 5 hours a week and I don't think that's accurate for this project.
by eric-burel | 2026-01-30 08:21:41+00:00
Before using make sure you read this entirely and understand it:
https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/security
Most important sentence: "Note: sandboxing is opt-in. If sandbox mode is off"
Don't do that, turn sandbox on immediately.
Otherwise you are just installing an LLM controlled RCE.

There are still improvements to be made to the security aspects yet BIG KUDOS for working so hard on it at this stage and documenting it extensively!! I've explored Cursor security docs (with a big s cause it's so scattered) and it was nothing as good.
by danbruc | 2026-01-30 08:21:45+00:00
That itself sounds contradictory to me.

I assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers.

We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.

Are the two sentences talking about non-overlapping domains? Is there an important distinction between productivity and efficiency gains? Does one focus on novice users and one on experienced ones? Admittedly did not read the paper yet, might be clearer than the abstract.
by anthk | 2026-01-30 08:23:09+00:00
When I was a kid in Elementary we used DOS computers with maybe 4MB of RAM or few MB and the Play Station wasn't many times powerful. A few years (two or three) later we got Windows 95/98 with 128 times more RAM.
A few years later, computers could emulate more or less the PSX and the N64, all within six years.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-30 08:23:15+00:00
My new favorite claudism: > 100% Safe Rust No unsafe blocks.

And then when you search the code...

```
// SAFETY: We only store valid UTF-8 in the grapheme bytes
Some(unsafe {

std::str::from_utf8_unchecked(&self.grapheme[..self.grapheme_len as usize])
})
```
by Animats | 2026-01-30 08:23:32+00:00
It's a good thing that the FCC clamped down on RF emissions. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to run computers near each other. A TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak (a programmable toy tank) would, if near each other, both crash from RF interference.

RFI incompatibility is almost forgotten as a problem now. That did not happen by accident.
by reader9274 | 2026-01-30 08:23:38+00:00
I built one from discrete transistors in a lab class in college, on a breadboard. Fun times debugging and getting it to work. Then I flashed an led with it right next to another led flashed from a 555 chip. With the same discrete timer caps, the flashing frequencies were different due to the extra parasitics in the breadboard discrete 555 version. So had to compensate the caps to make the flashes match each other's frequency.