MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oceanplexian | 2026-01-08 16:12:05+00:00
> Their pricing models are simply not sustainable. I hope everyone realizes that the current LLMs are subsidized, like your Seamless and Uber was in the early days.

If you run these models at home it's easy to see how this is totally untrue.

You can build a pretty competent machine that will run Kimi or Deepseek for $10-20k and generate an unlimited amount of tokens all day long (I did a budget version with an Epyc machine for about $4k). Amortize that over a couple years, and it's cheaper than most people spend on a car payment. The pricing is sustainable, and that's ignoring the fact that these big model providers are operating on economies of scale, they're able to parallelize the GPUs and pack in requests much more efficiently.
by beloch | 2026-01-08 16:12:05+00:00
I think that was "Beats by Dre" headphones, and even that was possibly not true.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/59188/do-beats-...

I'd take this with a huge grain of salt. For headphones, lighter is better and usually more expensive. If a counterfeiter could produce lighter knock-offs of Beats headphones that sounded similar, they'd probably be better off just selling them as a superior competitor. This, of course, ignores branding, which Beats is extremely good at.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-08 16:12:06+00:00
I absolutely would pass this kind of quiz 100% with any New Testament quote, thanks to having put Life and Truth Dramatized Audio New Testament on in the background literally 24/7 for a few years straight. Also John Rhys-Davies reads Hebrews so well with his classical training and Welsh accent that it's hard not to memorize large parts of it verbatim.
by LAsteNERD | 2026-01-08 16:12:13+00:00
Article from Los Alamos is about the ICE House, a facility where they test electronics by blasting them with neutrons that mimic what you’d get flying at 35,000 feet for decades. One hour of testing = 100 years of cosmic radiation.

It’s part of a larger effort to make electronics rad-hard — so that microchips don’t randomly glitch or die in flight (or in orbit). Especially relevant as chips shrink and transistor counts hit hundreds of billions (i.e. more chances for failure).

Some highlights:

Neutrons from space can flip bits or cause “latch-ups” (think: permanent short circuits).

These upsets can lead to weird bugs, BSODs, or worse — especially at altitude.

The ICE House runs ~24/7 and still can’t keep up with demand from avionics and chip companies.

They’re now planning a third beamline to expand testing capacity, and even working on proton-based testing for space use cases.

If you’re into hardware reliability, aerospace, or just cosmic-ray horror stories for computers, this is worth the read.
by tombert | 2026-01-08 16:12:23+00:00
I commend Go for popularizing the channel-based concurrency, since I do think that that is a very elegant way of structuring stuff (especially compared to mutexes), but I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of fun writing Go.

I agree with a lot of the sentiment of this post; the weirdness with “tuples”, the weirdness of the error types, and etc. It’s not a “bad” language, just one that I don’t enjoy using.

Historically to get something similar to Go-style concurrency I would use Clojure with core.async, but more recently I have started using Rust and Tokio.
by ryukoposting | 2026-01-08 16:12:56+00:00
This is fascinating stuff, especially the per-subsystem data. I've worked with CAN in several different professional and amateur settings, I'm not surprised to see it near the bottom of this list. That's not a dig against the kernel or the folks who work on it... more of a heavy sigh about the state of the industries that use CAN.

On a related note, I'm seeing a correlation between "level of hoopla" and a "level of attention/maintenance." While it's hard to distinguish that correlation from "level of use," the fact that CAN is so far down the list suggests to me that hoopla matters; it's everywhere but nobody talks about it. If a kernel bug takes down someone's datacenter, boy are we gonna hear about it. But if a kernel bug makes a DeviceNet widget freak out in a factory somewhere? Probably not going to make the front page of HN, let alone CNN.
by walterbell | 2026-01-08 16:13:05+00:00
Thanks Bose for opencycling Bose hardware into OSS audio ecosystems that could support multiple vendors.

https://github.com/captivus/bose-soundtouch

This library provides a clean, Pythonic interface to control SoundTouch speakers over your local network, ensuring your speakers remain fully functional even after cloud services end.

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

Lyrion Music Server (LMS) is a streaming audio server supported by the LMS community and formerly supported by Logitech, developed in particular to support their Squeezebox [discontinued in 2012] range of digital audio receivers.. [LMS] also works with networked music players, such as the Roku SoundBridge M1001, Chumby, O2 Joggler, RPi and the SqueezeAMP open source hardware player.
by nogridbag | 2026-01-08 16:13:08+00:00
I believe that's always been a thing. A long time ago I read this teardown article [1] of real vs counterfeit Beats headphones. And even the counterfeit versions had metal weight added to make it feel like the real Beats headphones!

[1] https://blog.bolt.io/our-beats-were-counterfeit/
by broochcoach | 2026-01-08 16:13:14+00:00
That seems very intuitive to me. If you want extremely specific changes made at extremely specific locations in an extremely specific way then you probably need to do that yourself because a language model can’t read your mind. I think there are very large set of problems where implementation details do not actually matter and cheap, disposable code is not a problem. I don’t think vibecoding is a good idea for missile guidance. Probably OK for a dashboard a manager isn’t really going to use anyway.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-01-08 16:13:16+00:00
As of course you should be. Doctors, who are generally pretty caring and empathetic humans, try to invoke the mantra "You can't care about your patient's health more than they do" due to how deeply frustrating it is to try to treat someone who's not invested in the outcome.

It's when "being your own health advocate" turns into "being your own doctor" that the system starts to break down.
by perardi | 2026-01-08 16:13:24+00:00
That doesn’t reflect my (I would say extensive) experience at this point, nor does it reflect the benchmarks. (I realize benchmarks have issues.)

Are you using Claude as an agent in VSCode or via Claude Code, or are you asking questions in the web interface? I find Claude is the best model when it’s working with a strongly typed language with a verbose linter and compiler. It excels with Go and TypeScript in Cursor.
Show HN: I stopped writing prompts and just trigger modes in Codex
by kyounsgookim | 2026-01-08 16:13:52+00:00
I got tired of writing long prompts and watching the model plan forever.

What works better for me now is a skills-style workflow:
instead of explaining steps, I just trigger a mode.

In Codex, I paste one line like:

use vf: build a login page

That tells the model to plan, execute, test, and finish
with minimal back-and-forth and no mid-stream questions.

This setup is adapted from the official Claude skills approach,
but tuned to work directly in plain Codex chat.

It’s a small personal repo I use daily across machines:
https://github.com/kks0488/vibe-skills

Happy to answer questions or explain the workflow.
Show HN: Versioned and encrypted backups for macOS app settings
by stefanostraus | 2026-01-08 16:14:20+00:00
I built SettingsSentry to back up and restore macOS application configuration.

It follows a similar idea to Mackup, but adds versioned backups, optional encryption, dry run support, and explicit restore steps.

No daemon, no background sync. Designed for unattended and cron based usage.

Feedback welcome.
by palmotea | 2026-01-08 16:14:48+00:00
Why would a maker of a cheap TV bother with cell connectivity? It doesn't come for free as there would be extra components and an ongoing cell service subscription they'd have to pay for, and that could add up to a big fraction of the total cost at the low end. Plus the vast majority of buyers are going to connect the TV to their network anyway to use streaming apps.
by HackeNewsFan234 | 2026-01-08 16:14:55+00:00
I thought I'd say something meaningful. Instead, it is more of a rant:

This is hard to discuss without context: country, big city, town/village, and freeway.

Big city driving: in a well-lit city, one could almost get by with just the position lights on. I say almost because of 1. driving in unusually dark areas and 2. regular headlights project light at a good angle to catch reflection off of cyclists. My point is that not much light is needed. Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.

town/village is roughly the same as a big city, but with less public lighting and fewer marked crossings. So, basically, this is just a reasonable low bean scenario. I'd argue that setting up for this situation and accepting it for the big city is good enough.

Country driving: bright and wide. Doing 80-100 km/h+ in the country and I want to see far and wide. Great use of high beams. Auto high beams do not function well enough to respect other drivers and drivers seems to have forgotten what it means when someone flashes their high beams. I attribute that to ignorant/lazy/entitled drivers

freeway: Need to be able see directly ahead and be visible to other drivers. Low beams when other are around, high beams when no one is in front of me and the road isn't lit.

Trucks vs cars: As we all know, headlights on trucks are too high compared to small cars. While this can be mitigated by not looking directly at the lights. A problem with this: If I'm at an intersection and there is a truck with bright lights that I am trying not to look at, I miss the immediate area near the truck with a possible pedestrian. Plus the contrast of the bright lights hides dark pedestrians. My quick Chat GPT'ing says that physically lowering the lights would not decrease the effectiveness of retroreflectors, so mounting the lights lower seems like a good option. There could even be separate high beams that are mounted physically higher when needed.

We all know this is bad and we just can't work together to get something done. Not to mention that even if there are new standards, it would take 10+ years for them to really matter because of the existing cars on the roads.
by egglemonsoup | 2026-01-08 16:15:01+00:00
I tried [redacted] and [redacted] first as well.*

Perhaps I should make it clearer that correctly identifying the book on the first try is not the expectation. Maybe I will add a clarification that the goal is "as few guesses as possible" or maybe "as few guesses as you can".

It's quite a variable challenge. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not. (Usually it's not.) I appreciate your feedback.

*Despite them both being in the same section. Oops.
by eager_learner | 2026-01-08 16:15:04+00:00
That's a valid thought. AS AI generates a lot of content, some of which may be hallucinations, the new cycle of training will be probably using the old + the_new_AI_slop data, and as a result degrade the final result.

Unless the AIs find out where mistakes occur, and find this out in the code they themselves generate, your conclusion seems logically valid.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-08 16:15:10+00:00
This may just be me misremembering, but as I recall, the bug of Heartbleed was ultimately a very complex macro system which supported multiple very old architectures. The bug, IIRC, was the interaction between that old macro system and the new code which is what made it hard to recognize as a bug.

Part of the resolution to the problem was I believe they ended up removing a fair number of unsupported platforms. It also ended up spawning alternatives to openssl like boring ssl which tried to remove as much as possible to guard against this very bug.
by nradov | 2026-01-08 16:15:13+00:00
The AMA has no authority over the number of slots for new doctors. The primary bottleneck is the number of residency slots. Teaching hospitals are free to add more slots but generally refuse to do so due to financial constraints without more funding from Medicare. At one point the AMA lobbied Congress to restrict that funding but they reversed that position some years back. If you want more doctors then ask your members of Congress to boost residency funding.

https://savegme.org/
by cthalupa | 2026-01-08 16:15:32+00:00
Nothing in that video, even if taken at face value, disagrees with a single point I made.

The ICE agent is maybe pushed by a car moving at low speed. Maybe. He is still never in danger of losing his life or being seriously harmed. The car still accelerates more after he has shot the woman than it did before he shot her.

Meanwhile taking that all at face value relies entirely on low res and heavily compressed video taken at a distance, vs. what we appear to see in the much closer, much higher res, much less compressed footage. We even see the officer after the shooting holster his weapon, calmly move around without any sign of injury, no limp, etc.
by lifebex | 2026-01-08 16:16:06+00:00
I've noticed something interesting: some people making $200K feel broke, while others making $50K feel comfortable. Most of us don't have a clear picture of our financial situation.

So I built Lifebex to help answer:
- Am I doing okay financially?
- Is my income good for where I live?
- How does my cost of living compare to other cities?

It shows your income percentile (city/state/national), compares cost of living across 500+ US cities, and uses real IRS, Census & BLS data.

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind. Completely free, no signup.

Would love feedback from the HN community! Thanks everyone!
by nobodyandproud | 2026-01-08 16:16:12+00:00
Mind you I don't have access to Microsoft code, so this is all indirect, and a lot of this knowledge was when I was fledgling developer.

The Windows NT code was engineered to be portable across many different architectures--not just X86--so it has a hardware abstraction layer. The kernel only ever communicated to the device-driver implementation through this abstraction layer; so the kernel code itself was isolated.

That doesn't mean the device drivers were running in user-land privilege, but it does mean that the kernel code is quite stable and easy to reason about.

When Microsoft decided to compromise on this design, I remember senior engineers--when I first started my career--being abuzz about it for Windows NT 4.0 (or apparently earlier?).
by alexgotoi | 2026-01-08 16:16:16+00:00
The jobs come about 70% from the feeds with the paying parters. I pull about 20k jobs their feed, then run my script to select about 100 relevant jobs. The other 30% I get them manually from Linkedin, Indeed, etc. I have alerts on all big sites with some deep filtering.

It took about 2 months to get a constant 100/day average visits, but I had ~5000 connections on Linkedin in the HR space (I work in HR Tech). I also got to 2000 newsletter subs in about 2 months.

My advantage was that I was already active in the HR community, I would need another “me” to build in more industries.
by Snuggly73 | 2026-01-08 16:16:17+00:00
Yes, and for some cases no.

The models are gotten very good, but I rather have an obviously broken pile of crap that I can spot immediately, than something that is deep fried with RL to always succeed, but has subtle problems that someone will lgtm :( I guess its not much different with human written code, but the models seem to have weirdly inhuman failures - like, you would just skim some code, cause you just cant believe that anyone can do it wrong, and it turns out to be.
by danw1979 | 2026-01-08 16:16:19+00:00
The question on my mind is will the SoundTouch app continue to be supported on new mobile
OS versions ?

Is it the same app that caters for other speakers too ? If it is, and Bose continue to include their old speakers on the functionality of the app, then I can hardly see how this is a true EoL. They’re really continuing to support the speakers in their app, at least.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-08 16:16:40+00:00
If it interferes with their opportunity to engage in their favorite narratives, such as espousing racial ideology, this turn of events can't have done anything except impair that.

And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.
by vunderba | 2026-01-08 16:16:46+00:00
Nice job. I'd recommend adding either a Zoom In/Out slider or Fit to Screen though - since even on a full-width browser the table cuts off.

Related: this one also has some nice visualizations that help illustrate corresponding practical applications for each element.

https://elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.html

And if you're ever feeling particularly masochistic, I built a slide puzzle game which randomly chooses elements and challenges you to re-arrange them by atomic number.

https://slide-puzzles.specr.net
by makach | 2026-01-08 16:17:09+00:00
Some of their high priced noise cancelling headphones have excellent quality. I purchased the QC-25 ages ago, and when it stopped working I reached out to support, this was beyond their 3y warranty, provided serial number and they sent me a new QC-35 no questions asked replacement unit.

I am very happy with my QC-35 headphones. They are probably 5y+ now and they go with me everywhere. I think it is unfair to state their hw quality is low. It is much better than low.
by 15155 | 2026-01-08 16:17:20+00:00
The dealership customarily earns 2-3%+ in quarterly holdback payments from the manufacturer. They sell you a $100k car at invoice, later that quarter they're getting a $3000 payment - this is pure profit, the deal was long-since done and they didn't take a loss at time of sale.

Dealerships are also earning miscellaneous per-car bonuses which are also profit, which go up based on overall volume: if they sell 50 cars, they get $200/car, if they sell 100 units this might jump to $500/car - just a random example.

If a car is in high-demand or really uncommon (in reality, not sales-speak, and a customer has no other options), they can afford to not sell a car at invoice - but this is an exceptional circumstance.
by kbolino | 2026-01-08 16:17:23+00:00
You may already know these things, but for others who may not: the AWS SDK for Go suffers from shockingly bad discoverability.

For example, take the S3 library, github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/service/s3. If you have an s3.Client and you look at e.g. the ListObjectsV2 method, you might have no idea that there is a ListObjectsV2Paginator which makes it much easier to use, because nowhere in the method docs is it mentioned. Indeed, most operations that paginate have more ergonomic paginators, but none of them tell you this.

But that isn't even the worst of it. Say you want to do download or upload a file to S3. If you haven't worked with AWS for other languages, you might think that you just do GetObject and PutObject. And yes, for small files, that's generally fine. But for large files you want to use resumable downloads and multipart uploads. So you look and lo, there is nothing in the AWS SDK for Go. But actually, there is! It's in a totally unrelated and unlinked package, called github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/feature/s3/manager.

Now you're getting some religion, so you ask "what are the other so-called 'feature' packages?" and you try to browse pkg.go.dev at the github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/feature level but nope, that's not a Go module so there's nothing to see there. In fact, you can't even browse the other s3 features, never mind find out what other services have features. Fortunately, you can browse their GitHub repo at least: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/tree/main/feature

It's quite clear that they use poorly thought-out cross-language codegen for this, which partly explains the lack of ergonomics, but also shows that they don't much care whether you use their stuff properly.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-08 16:17:25+00:00
Even a developmentally disabled human tends to be significantly more complex than a stopped clock so the analogy doesn't work well.

if anything it is more than a computer with a lousy video and sound card, you don't use it for games or streaming movies or most things, but due to some other things (which I am not going to take the time to create a plausible scenario why this should be) the computer is actually really superior as a server, so you have set it up for that. Do you give out a cookie for the computer that works really well at serving content over port 80 despite it sucks for anything you enjoy?
by hardmaru | 2026-01-08 16:17:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I am one of the authors from Sakana AI and MIT. We just released this paper where we hooked up LLMs to the classic 1984 programming game Core War. For those who haven't played it, Core War involves writing assembly programs in a language called Redcode that battle for control of a virtual computer's memory. You win by crashing the opponent's process while keeping yours running. It is a Turing-complete environment where code and data share the same address space, which leads to some very chaotic self-modifying code dynamics.

We did not just ask the model to write winning code from scratch. Instead, we treated the LLM as a mutation operator within a quality-diversity algorithm called MAP-Elites. The system runs an adversarial evolutionary loop where new warriors are continually evolved to defeat the champions of all previous rounds. We call this Digital Red Queen because it mimics the biological hypothesis that species must continually adapt just to survive against changing competitors.

The most interesting result for us was observing convergent evolution. We ran independent experiments starting from completely different random seeds, yet the populations consistently gravitated toward similar behavioral phenotypes, specifically regarding memory coverage and thread spawning. It mirrors how biological species independently evolve similar traits like eyes to solve similar problems. We also found that this training loop produced generalist warriors that were robust even against human-written strategies they had never encountered during training.

We think Core War is an under-utilized sandbox for studying these kinds of adversarial dynamics. It lets us simulate how automated systems might eventually compete for computational resources in the real world, but in a totally isolated environment. The simulation code and the prompts we used are open source on GitHub.

Other info other than the blog link:

Paper (website): https://pub.sakana.ai/drq/

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03335

Code: https://github.com/SakanaAI/drq
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-08 16:17:47+00:00
> But inference costs are dropping dramatically over time, and that trend shows no signs of slowing. So even if a task costs $8 today thanks to VC subsidies, I can be reasonably confident that the same task will cost $8 or less without subsidies in the not-too-distant future.

I'd like to see this statement plotted against current trends in hardware prices ISO performance. Ram, for example, is not meaningfully better than it was 2 years ago, and yet is 3x the price.

I fail to see how costs can drop while valuations for all major hardware vendors continue to go up. I don't think the markets would price companies in this way if the thought all major hardware vendors were going to see margins shrink a la commodity like you've implied.
by perardi | 2026-01-08 16:17:54+00:00
Strongly disagree.

Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft all have a very confusing product naming strategy where it’s all lumped under Gemini/ChatGPT/Copilot, and the individual product names are not memorable and really quite obscure. (What does Codex do again?)

Nano Banana doesn’t tell you what the product does, but you sure remember the name. It really rolls off the tongue, and it looks really catchy on social media.