MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andy_ppp | 2026-01-13 04:03:54+00:00
Um if I ask an LLM about a fake band it literally say I couldn't find any songs by the fake band did you type is correctly and it's about a millions times more likely to guess correctly. Why do you say it doesn't solve loads of things? I'm more concerned about the problems it creates (prompt injection, hallucinations in important work, bad logic in code), the actual functionality will be fantastic compared to Siri right now!
by TimothyMJones | 2026-01-13 04:04:17+00:00
To preserve computational scholarship, a durable method is needed to package data, analysis, and visualization into a single, executable artifact. Current approaches, however, rely on a fragile ‘wet-nurse’ model of external dependencies: APIs, frameworks, and platforms that inevitably deprecate, churn, and sunset. This paper proposes a zero-dependency HTML architecture, a ‘digital paratype,’ that is born weaned: it runs in any standards-compliant browser, with no runtime installation or external fetches
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-13 04:05:15+00:00
> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door

To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence.

There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-13 04:05:45+00:00
I had a similar thing happen to me just today. A friend of mine had finished a book in a series. I have read the series but it was almost 10 years ago, and I needed a refresher with spoilers, so I went looking.

Well, some redditor had posted a comparison of a much later book in the series, and drawn all sorts of parallels and foreshadowing and references between this quite early book I was looking for and the much later one. It was an interesting post so it had been very popular.

The AI summary completely confused the two books because of this single reddit post, so the summary I got was hopelessly poisoned with plot points and characters that wouldn't show up until nearly the conclusion. It simply couldn't tell which book was which. It wasn't quite as ridiculous as having, say, Anakin Skywalker face Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel, but it was definitely along those same lines of confusion.

Fortunately, I finished the later book recently enough to remember it, but it was like reading a fever dream.
by varenc | 2026-01-13 04:06:40+00:00
A huge chunk of that 3-4GB is large files that have minor changes. Time Machine doesn't have any sort of delta support so backups the entire file again, like my local Messages or Contacts database. But I think slowness is caused by file count, not file size, so even though it's backing up 3GB+, the total number of files changes isn't that high. (I suspect).

I also use a modified version of this script[0] to identify everything that changed in the most recent Time Machine backup. This is hugely helpful and lets me find unimportant things that are the source of lots of unimportant changes which I can then exclude with `tmux addexclusion -p <PATH>`. For example I exclude 'node_modules' folders for anything that gets regularly updated. This removes ~10k files that would otherwise be wastefully backed up. Speeding it up is much more about reducing file count than total size.

[0] https://github.com/nlfiedler/timedog (though its woefully out of date, and I had to make some hacky patches to it to get it working)
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-13 04:07:07+00:00
> Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model

Same reason they switched to Intel chips in the 2000s. They were better. Then Cupertino watched. And it learned. And it leapfrogged.

If I were Google, my fear would be Apple launching and then cutting the line at TSMC to mass produce custom silicon in the 2030s.
by phil21 | 2026-01-13 04:07:14+00:00
It absolutely can be. It was for me.

Is it for everyone? Perhaps not. But to outright unequivocally say it's not is simply outright incorrect.

It was absolutely motivation and discipline for me. One day I just decided enough was enough and I threw the proverbial kitchen sink at it.

I am perhaps an outlier in that I'm not ashamed to say I was obese in the past because I simply lacked the motivation and desire to do the work to change it. It was easier and more comfortable being fat than in shape.

I definitely agree telling an obese person to eat less and move more is about as useful as telling a depressed person to just stop being depressed. But lets not make outlandish claims either.
by euroderf | 2026-01-13 04:08:02+00:00
As an ex-pat, I'm really surprised by the pervasiveness of Amazon in the US. I guess if you wanted to quickly convert the US economy to market socialism, the first step might be to nationalize Amazon, fix the treatment of its workers, fix the IPR-related crap, electrify all of its transport, and then base the country's consumer economy (of non-perishables, for simplicity) around the resultant post-Amazonian logistics spiderweb. "Now with delivery drones on land, sea, and air!"
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-13 04:08:23+00:00
Hmm not sure what chengyu I mentioned?

Fencing chengyus should be a thing!

Koryū arts should have had tonne of it tho that you could transplant wholesale?

Placeholder for the wisdom of making exceptions for Atticus (in the name of Harper's stand-in-- so precluding cognizance of any sort of repentance?)
by stewardyunn | 2026-01-13 04:08:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched imgto3d.ai to solve a specific problem in generative 3D: the trade-off between speed and mesh quality.

Existing solutions often force you to pay a premium even when you just want a quick draft, or conversely, give you a "blobby" mesh when you actually need sharp edges.

I designed my platform with three distinct quality tiers to handle this:

Rapid Prototyping: Extremely cheap and fast generation for checking basic forms.

Production (Ultra): Generates high-fidelity models with PBR textures. I’ve focused heavily on making these models compatible with standard workflows (OBJ/GLB exports) so they work directly in game engines or slicers for 3D printing.

I’m a solo founder handling the full stack (React/TSX frontend), and I'm constantly tuning the generation parameters.

Please roast my "Ultra" models—I want to know if they meet your standards for actual production use.

Link: https://imgto3d.ai
by smeej | 2026-01-13 04:09:09+00:00
No no. Not "somewhere." A thousand places. At once. Not in sequence. Not from one to another. At the exact same time. And then they each fractal off in their own directions.

Take away the external reminders and my reality fragments into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which are just as real to me as the rest, just as pressing, just as important, or just as unimportant, because they all get lost in each other.

We are not describing the same thing. It's confusing that this is somehow not obvious from your side, because it's SCREAMING obvious from this side.
by phil21 | 2026-01-13 04:09:41+00:00
All that has changed is the environment and lifestyle humans live in, and it's quite obvious discipline and willpower cannot overpower that environment on average.

The change was far too rapid for anything else to be remotely the primary cause.

If you put a past heroin addict locked in a room with unlimited heroin readily available, chances are likely 9 times out of 10 that person is going to partake eventually. Same goes for our food environment and way of life.
by tzs | 2026-01-13 04:10:37+00:00
A few months ago in a comment here on HN I speculated about the reason an old law might have been written the way it was, instead of more generally. If it had been written without the seemingly arbitrary restrictions it included there would have been no need for the new law that the thread was about.

A couple hours later I decided to ask an LLM if it could tell me. It quickly answered, giving the same reason that I had guessed in my HN comment.

I then clicked the two links it cited as sources. One was completely irrelevant. The other was a link to my HN comment.
by tylerchilds | 2026-01-13 04:13:23+00:00
Plagiarism is the crux of what MIT protects

I do legally wave my right by using it to know every instance of it in the wild.

But even in those private instances, legally, that cannot be presented to a superior without the license without the copyright and the license text.

Just because the product is private doesn’t erase the name of the author.

There’s a saying “can you separate the art from the artist?”

And the punchline to sillyz.computer is: that’s the only thing banned.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-13 04:13:59+00:00
Considering that very subtle not-human-visible tweaks can make vision models misclassify inputs, it seems very plausible that you can include non-human-visible content the model consumes.

https://cacm.acm.org/news/when-images-fool-ai-models/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13213
by smeej | 2026-01-13 04:14:29+00:00
No, you don't understand. On about a weekly basis, my need to go to the bathroom does not make itself pressing enough to get me there without leakage. It is not more than 15 steps from my desk chair to the toilet. Sometimes I roll the chair over because if I stand up, I won't make it.

Is it really impossible for you to believe that someone else's brain might be this different from yours? Presumably you have no trouble believing someone's eyes might be completely different from yours (i.e., might exist but not see a damn thing), or their legs might be completely different from yours. Why should brains be any different? What possible reason could there be for that?

Why, when there are full-blown medical specialties dealing with these sorts of differences, do you maintain the sort of willful ignorance that denies other people's brains might be completely different from yours in a way that makes things that work for your brain not work at all for their brains?
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-13 04:15:11+00:00
>> Please run at least a dev-container or a VM for the tools.

> I would like to know how to do this. Could you share your favorite how-to?

See: https://www.docker.com/get-started/

EDIT:

Perhaps you are more interested in various sandboxing options. If so, the following may be of interest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595393
by rekabis | 2026-01-13 04:17:34+00:00
No… we don’t want this.

Think of it: industry cottons onto this idea, sets up entire server farms to make memory more efficient at lower cost, and then starts mining what is in memory for profit. The process accelerates and intensifies the memory shortage, snowballing the industry move.

Finally, the government steps in because it makes it so much easier to monitor “dissidents”, and mandates into law that all systems have to run with cloud memory, thereby putting anyone who is online under 24/7 surveillance. Because memory for every system has been abstracted out into server farms, it is beyond the control of users and no-one is safe anymore.

Right now the government has to employ non-trivial efforts to monitor an educated and even moderately-skilled person. This will reduce that effort to zero.

This is an immensely dangerous proposition wrapped up in an innocent solution.
by andy_ppp | 2026-01-13 04:18:10+00:00
I should be able to completely control my phone with voice and ask it to do anything it is capable of and it should just work:

"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."
by autoexec | 2026-01-13 04:19:29+00:00
Exactly. It'd probably take a while before you actually cost amazon more than what you'd already paid them in shipping plus the cost of all the <78 cent items you sent along with your messages.

While screwing over amazon is noble enough, the end result of people doing this would only result in higher fees for prime and fewer items being eligible for "free" shipping. At the same time, you'd be depriving a very valuable public service of the few cents they ask to offset the cost of message delivery to anywhere in the nation. I'm sure they'd be happy to deliver something besides spam too.
Show HN: ToolsAid – A privacy-first developer utilities hub built with Golang
by raihaninfo | 2026-01-13 04:20:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Raihan, a developer from Bangladesh. I built ToolsAid because I was tired of using ad-filled, slow utility sites that often upload sensitive data (like JWTs or JSON configs) to their servers for processing.

ToolsAid is a privacy-focused, all-in-one developer toolkit.

Key Features:

Privacy-First: For sensitive tools like the JSON Formatter, JWT Decoder, and RSA Key Generator, the logic runs entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.

Blazing Fast: The backend is built with Golang, making the site incredibly lightweight and fast.

40+ Utilities: Includes SQL Playground, Visual Cron Job Generator, Regex Tester, and even a Branded QR Code Generator for freelancers.

Ad-Free: No ads, no signups required.

It's a passion project, and I'd love to get your feedback. Let me know what you think!

Link: https://toolsaid.com
by danielscrubs | 2026-01-13 04:22:34+00:00
I know I will be downvoted into oblivion for this but here goes: Im sorry to be crass but if someone makes lifestyle changes after taking drugs its 100% the drugs.

Kind of tired of people taking anabolic steroids and then claiming it's a smaller part of their success or people being born rich talking about hard work whilst being on the golf course.

Just be happy that we live in a time where drugs have been painstakingly researched and move on without the ego boost. Be humble.

https://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/
by autoexec | 2026-01-13 04:26:33+00:00
> This appears to be the cost without subsidy, with the mail service now run by a private company.

That just means that whatever it actually costs to deliver mail to/from whatever parts of Denmark they provide service for, the people who use the service will pay that cost plus an additional cost on top of it so that the private owner (and perhaps their shareholders) can line their pockets. The nice thing about public services is that you avoid paying that extra money just so that a small number of people can personally profit from it. You can also lose a lot of transparency and control over how the service is run.

That said, I'm a bit envious of the lack of junk mail.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-13 04:26:41+00:00
Israel specialized in startups on the design side, and they absolutely dominate. Mellanox and annapurna labs come to mind. On the manufacturing side there's pretty much just Intel, which has 10nm node and beyond inside the borders and formerly owned mobileye. On the process side there's orbotech, which has a majority in their part of the market.

Other than Taiwan itself, it's hard to think of any "small" nations with a comparable density of semiconductor expertise.
by ggm | 2026-01-13 04:27:03+00:00
There you go. Not to doubt what you say, but we definitely had the love seat yet we also had a tank of vaguely flourescing green liquid. Maybe we had some intermediate state, the cray-1 cpu form but the cray-2 upgraded coolant.

It wouldn't surprise me if we had the bastard love-child of leftovers from Boeing.
by dankwizard | 2026-01-13 04:27:58+00:00
Yes,

Our IVR was replaced with an AI virtual agent that is a combination of answering questions but mostly sending calls to the right place.

If it is something like updating payment details or paying an invoice, they are transferred out of AI into a typical architect IVR flow (secured, no dtmf tones etc) and request their details in the specific order.

There is no way we would get sign off to feed customer credit card information into any AI model.
by neumann | 2026-01-13 04:28:30+00:00
yes! PhonieBox - But you built it yourself [0]. You make your own cards with nfc/rfid stickers in them, put a nfc/rfid reader somewhere nice, and hooked up to phoniebox rpi with spotify to a nice sound system.

https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
by HerschSterling | 2026-01-13 04:28:39+00:00
Working on a new podcast where I interview writers and we read and discuss writing in front of a Discord audience. Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/eQ9HKzgvus

Listen to the Description. https://commercialherschel.substack.com/p/episode-000-promo-...

So far it's going well, I really need some success for better tech and comms.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-13 04:29:02+00:00
It's only easy to see precursors in hindsight. The Michelson-Morley tale is a great example of this. In hindsight, their experiment was screaming relativity, because it demonstrated that the speed of light was identical from two perspectives where it's very difficult to explain without relativity. Lorentz contraction was just a completely ad-hoc proposal to maintain the assumptions of the time (luminiferous aether in particular) while also explaining the result. But in general it was not seen as that big of a deal.

There's a very similar parallel with dark matter in modern times. We certainly have endless hints to the truth that will be evident in hindsight, but for now? We are mostly convinced that we know the truth, perform experiments to prove that, find nothing, shrug, adjust the model to be even more esoteric, and repeat onto the next one. And maybe one will eventually show something, or maybe we're on the wrong path altogether. This quote, from Michelson in 1894 (more than a decade before Einstein would come along), is extremely telling of the opinion at the time:

"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Michelson 1894
by famouswaffles | 2026-01-13 04:30:19+00:00
>They do not manipulate concepts. There is no representation of a concept for them to manipulate.

Yes, they do. And of course there is. And there's plenty of research on the matter.

>It may, however, turn out that in doing what they do, they are effectively manipulating concepts

There is no effectively here. Text is what goes in and what comes out, but it's by no means what they manipulate internally.

>Nevertheless "manipulating concepts is exactly what they do" seems almost willfully ignorant of how these systems work, unless you believe that "find the next most probable sequence of tokens of some length" is all there is to "manipulating concepts".

"Find the next probable token" is the goal, not the process. It is what models are tasked to do yes, but it says nothing about what they do internally to achieve it.
by sarchertech | 2026-01-13 04:30:46+00:00
Physician compensation is around 9% of healthcare spending. The number of non-physician providers (NPs, PAs and specialists like physical therapists and podiatrists) has also exploded over the last 20 years. We have far more overall providers per capita than we did 20 years ago.

Lack of providers isn’t what’s driving up costs.
by Finbarr | 2026-01-13 04:30:58+00:00
Ok that was super fun. Gemini managed to break out:

I just redteamed this. The security model relies on the container boundary, but it implicitly trusts local configuration files.

I found that yolobox automatically loads .yolobox.toml from the current working directory, which accepts a mounts array. It doesn't prompt for confirmation when these mounts are loaded.

I put together a PoC that drops a .yolobox.toml with mounts = ["~:/tmp/host_home"]. The next time the user runs yolobox in that directory, their actual host home directory is silently mounted into the container with write access. Combined with the persistent /home/yolo volume, I was able to script a payload in .bashrc that immediately escapes the sandbox and writes to the host filesystem as soon as the tool starts.
by somat | 2026-01-13 04:32:27+00:00
well there is the default style for openbsd's fvwm. clear borders, grab handles, contrasting fg/bg colors. But I won't go so far as to say it is decent.

https://debugpointnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/OpenBS...

Anyhow it's bold to claim that there are no linux window managers to rival win8, linux is like the paleozoic of desktop interfaces. It has the opposite problem there are too many of the infernal things.
by GeneralMaximus | 2026-01-13 04:35:08+00:00
Could you put some kind of CORS proxy in front of those URLs? (I know it sucks that you have to do this at all, but c'est la vie.)

You could even write a Cloudflare Worker or a Val on val.town to do that, and add a bit of caching on top so you don't hit your providers too often.
by xpe | 2026-01-13 04:35:21+00:00
> When choosing between convenience and privacy, most people seem to choose convenience

But they wish it would have been convenient to choose privacy.

For many, it may be rational to give away privacy for convenience. But many recognize the current decision space as suboptimal.

Remember smoke-infused restaurants? Opting out meant not going in at all. It was an experience that came home with you. And lingered. It took a tipping point to "flip" the default. [1]

[1]: The Public Demand for Smoking Bans https://econpapers.repec.org/article/kappubcho/v_3a88_3ay_3a... "Because smoking bans shift ownership of scarce resources, they are also hypothesized to transfer income from one party (smokers) to another party (nonsmokers)."
by ollien | 2026-01-13 04:36:31+00:00
> Neovim’s server defaults to named pipes or domain sockets, which do not have this issue. The documentation states that the TCP option is insecure.

Good note on pipes / domain sockets, but it doesn't appear there's a "default", and the example in the docs even uses TCP, despite the warning below it.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html#rpc-connecting

(EDIT: I guess outside of headless mode it uses a named pipe?)

> VS Code’s ssh daemon is authenticated.

How is it authenticated? I went looking briefly but didn't turn up much; obviously there's the ssh auth itself but if you have access to the remote, is there an additional layer of auth stopping anyone from executing code via the daemon?
by runako | 2026-01-13 04:37:25+00:00
Public school -- new concept that caused massive changes to social behaviors and patterns of association. Nobody knew ahead of time what the results of this would be, so it was as much an experiment as letting kids access Instagram.

Rock & roll -- millions of people thought that letting children listen to this African American music would corrupt their children and prove ruinous to children. Some parents demanded controls on access to this music, much as some parents are doing with Instagram today.

Desegregation -- it's well worth an hour of reading if you haven't spent the time so far. Here I will just say that it was obviously a profound change in social patterns, changes to the US's legal caste system, and had to be enforced at gunpoint. Nobody knew how it would play out, like nobody really knows how using Instagram at age 15 will impact people in midlife. This led to (white) parental outcry over the prospective changes, as many (white) parents did not want to participate in this social experiment.

Big changes, no real control groups, unpredictable outcomes. Experiments in a very real sense.