MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway2056 | 2026-01-27 19:45:01+00:00
> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the

Why?

If you go that far then

- senate

- scotus

- violence

- SV

- tech bros

- lies about AI

What is not broken.

The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.
by code_biologist | 2026-01-27 19:45:33+00:00
I have bad ADHD and printed the strangestloop.io blog post out and put it on the wall by my work desk in Oct 2023 according to the printout timestamp. I still haven't done the thing in some meaningful areas, and the print has honestly kind of been dispiriting. I'm going to take this post as the prompt to take it down.
by gizzlon | 2026-01-27 19:45:34+00:00
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ

No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.

In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.

Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".

Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.

1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-27 19:46:10+00:00
> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.

While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).

Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.
by ahmadyan | 2026-01-27 19:46:11+00:00
Claims in the article are incorrect. They conveniently ignore Meta CWM models, which are open-sourced [1] and open-weight [2] and are at 65% SWE-bench verified (with TTS) and 54% pass@1 and the same size (32B dense). So claims like "surpassing prior open-source state-of-the-art coding models of comparable sizes and context lengths" and conveniently leaving out the previous OSS SOTA out of your eval tables are ... sketch.

[1]https://github.com/facebookresearch/cwm
[2]https://huggingface.co/facebook/cwm
by lugu | 2026-01-27 19:46:14+00:00
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*.

I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
by auronsavant | 2026-01-27 19:46:25+00:00
I'm sorry but I just don't believe anyone who says this. Israel has a military expenditure above Turkey's with almost a tenth of the population. They could do everything they did and then some with no Western backing.

The number of progressives shutting the fuck up in a scenario where Israel does the same thing they're doing but without Western funding is I imagine approximately 0.
by mbrameld | 2026-01-27 19:46:34+00:00
That's been exactly my experience recently in the US. Most recently it was some Hot Hands hand warmers. They just had me go to the end of the line where you get your bags ouf of the scanner and the agent brought my bag down there on the other side of the rollers. They set it on the table in front of me, and there was a monitor above the table where they pointed to the hand warmers on the screen. They said something along the lines of, "Looks like you might have some hand warmers in the main pocket, would you mind taking them out?" I pulled them out, showed them to them, they thanked me and I put it back in the bag and went on my way. This was in Juneau, AK.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 19:46:39+00:00
You're absolutely right, but considering Windows requirements drive the PC spec, this capability can be used to force Linux distributions in bad ways.

So, some of the people doing "typical HN rage-posting about DRM" are also absolutely right.

The capabilities locking down macOS and iOS and related hardware also can be used for good, but they are not used for that.
Show HN: P.ai.os – A local, modular AI "operating" system for macOS (M4/MLX)
by vag-mac-mini | 2026-01-27 19:46:44+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m sharing a personal project I’ve been working on: a modular, "headless" operating system for my digital life, hosted locally on a Mac Mini M4.

The source code is available here:

https://github.com/vag-mac-mini/PAIOS_Public

I travel frequently and wanted a "sovereign" system that doesn't rely on SaaS subscriptions or cloud data. The stack is:
- Hardware: Headless Mac Mini M4 (16GB).
- AI Core: Qwen 3 VL 8B (Abliterated) running via MLX.
- Network: Tailscale (for remote access via PWA).
- Agentic Layer: Custom Python scripts for tool use (API calls, system control).

The constraint for this project was unique: I did not write the code manually. I utilized Google Gemini to architect and generate the Python files with Antigravity IDE, acting as the "product manager". The code structure is admittedly messy in places, but it is fully functional.

The OS currently runs 10 active modules, categorized by function:

-- Intelligence & Memory --
* Digital Diary: Uses Vision AI to analyze screen activity/productivity and logs daily summaries to Apple Notes.
* Voice & Memory: Indexes voice transcriptions into a searchable "Second Brain."
* Ghostwriter: Remixes rough voice notes into structured essays or book chapters.

-- Global Logistics --
* Travel Command: Aggregates flight/visa data and summarizes local security risks via Tavily API.Gives recommendations for packing based on country/city/period/weather.
* Aero Intel: Audits flight paths and generates deep links for travel logistics.
* Chronos Calendar: A master schedule that integrates financial timelines with travel itineraries.

-- Network & Security --
* Network Sentry: Monitors the local ARP table for unknown devices.
* Secure Dead Drop: An encrypted P2P file tunnel between my devices.
* CRM & Network: A relationship database that parses raw notes into structured contacts.

Latest update that is not on GitHub, created a python script and added it on cron where it uses an api to check all the bank holidays across the globe(excluding the major ones) checks my contacts, which could be from all over the world, see's who is from the country with the bank holiday and I receive an iMessage in the morning in order to wish them happy whatever holiday.

This is not a SaaS or a commercial product. I am open to feedback on the architecture or suggestions for other "sovereign" modules I could add.

Thanks.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-27 19:47:06+00:00
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
by antonvs | 2026-01-27 19:47:19+00:00
> In the last year, token context window increased by about 100x and halved in cost at the same time.

So? It's nowhere close to solving the issue.

I'm not anti-LLM. I'm very senior at a company that's had an AI-centric primary product since before the GPT explosion. But in order to navigate what's going on now, we need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the technology currently, as well as what it's likely to be in the near, medium, and far future.

The cost of LLMs dealing with their own generated multi-million LOC systems is very unlikely to become tractable in the near future, and possibly not even medium-term. Besides, no-one has yet demonstrated an LLM-based system for even achieving that, i.e. resolving the technical debt that it created.

Don't let fanboism get in the way of rationality.
by dtdynasty | 2026-01-27 19:47:31+00:00
I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do.

I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons.

- Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult.

- the value of research can be large from a few contributors.
by KolmogorovComp | 2026-01-27 19:47:32+00:00
It’s really a shame git storage use files as the unit for storage. That’s what makes it improper for usage with many of small files, or large files.

Content-based chunking like Xethub uses really should become the default. It’s not like it’s new either, rsync is based on it.

https://huggingface.co/blog/xethub-joins-hf
by epistasis | 2026-01-27 19:47:43+00:00
Presumably: AI automates the person-to-pseudonym connection, the searching of small bits of biographical data that accounts leak over long periods of time, across all accounts over the internet. Dedicated sleuths could do this in the past, but now it's fast and easy and at the touch of a button.

So people that are at risk, say, by having a government job, or doing publicly funded research that produces science for the common good, can now be automatically identified, blacklisted, fired, etc. etc. etc. en masse. This would have taken too many person-hours to be worthwhile for a newly installed political manager at NSF or NIH. But that list is now an easy purchase from a government contractor, named after a nefarious communication device from an SF novel, and grants are currently being cancelled on far flimsier political grounds than that.
by zakeerms | 2026-01-27 19:47:47+00:00
This is a strong idea. Data engineers have lacked a true git like workflow for data for a long time especially around safe experimentation, schema evolution, and fast rollback.

Treating data, schema, and ETL as versioned first-class assets makes a lot of sense, and the AI angle only works because rollback is built in.

Curious how you handle branching/merging at scale and how this compares to Iceberg/Delta time travel. If you can nail trust, observability, and cost predictability, this could be a meaningful primitive for data engineers.
by coffeeaddict1 | 2026-01-27 19:47:52+00:00
But how can you be a responsible builder if you don't have trust in the LLMs doing the "right thing"? Suppose you're the head of a software team where you've picked up the best candidates for a given project, in that scenario I can see how one is able to trust the team members to orchestrate the implementation of your ideas and intentions, with you not being intimately familiar with the details.
Can we place the same trust in LLM agents? I'm not sure. Even if one could somehow prove that LLM are very reliable, the fact an AI agents aren't accountable beings renders the whole situation vastly different than the human equivalent.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-01-27 19:48:07+00:00
"Doing it badly is doing the thing."

This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.
by dmix | 2026-01-27 19:48:36+00:00
> Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025.

> At most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave.

So similar to most of the other federal agency reductions, around 5-10% were formally let go but the majority left voluntarily.
by Macha | 2026-01-27 19:48:43+00:00
> - What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?

Starcraft and Factorio are exactly what it is not. Starcraft has a loooot of micro involved at any level beyond medium, despite all the "pro macros and beats gold league with mass queens" meme videos. I guess it could be like Factorio if you're playing it by plugging together blueprint books from other people but I don't think that's how most people play.

At that level of abstraction, it's more like grand strategy if you're to compare it to any video game? You're controlling high level pushes and then the units "do stuff" and then you react to the results.
Show HN: I build production web video and image editors (WebGL, Fabric.js, Next)
by pablituuu | 2026-01-27 19:49:01+00:00
I’m a frontend developer specialized in building complex web-based video and image editors.

This project is a production-grade video editor built with Next.js, WebGL and Fabric.js, designed to handle timelines, layers and real-time interactions directly in the browser.

Key aspects:
- Canvas-based editing with Fabric.js + WebGL
- Timeline-driven video composition
- AI-assisted workflow (Gemini) for content manipulation
- Built for performance and real-world usage
- Deployed on GCP

I’m sharing this to get feedback from the HN community and also to connect with startups or teams looking to build custom video or image editors on the web.

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-27 19:49:11+00:00
Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order.

That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability.

If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work.

That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.
by dpc050505 | 2026-01-27 19:49:18+00:00
It took about 30 years for every geologist to reach consensus on tectonic plates and continental drift. Old heads who'd invested a lot of their credibility arguing against it had a lot to lose by admitting they were wrong, so they refused to do it.

Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
by geminigemino | 2026-01-27 19:49:19+00:00
Thanks! I get that and short version: it’s not a realistic genetic model, it’s a trait-inheritance system with evolutionary flavor.

Each organism just has a set of numeric traits (size, armor, spikes, tentacles, aggression, reproduction rate, etc). There are no genes, codons, chromosomes, or genetic sequences. When organisms reproduce, offspring traits are basically noisy, heritable copies of the parents, with per-trait heritability and mutation.

Structural traits (like size) are strongly inherited, behavioral traits are more plastic. Big size, armor, high reproduction, etc all come with metabolic and mobility tradeoffs and mutation rates can go up under stress.

So it’s a phenotype-level evolutionary model, not a molecular genetics simulator. The goal is to get interesting evolutionary dynamics and tradeoffs, not to simulate real DNA or genetic architectures.

You can zoom into (and capture a snapshot of) each organism by clicking it and see a lot of details on traits.
by mjuarez | 2026-01-27 19:49:21+00:00
This is misleading. It's actually taxing 36% of _assumed gains_ of 5% on all assets. So if you have $1M in savings, you'll end up paying 1.8% or $18K/annum, regardless of the actual investment return. I can see it would be painful during down years, but most of the time it would be ok.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-27 19:49:23+00:00
Not trying to diss or anything but a capable engineer could spin this up within their organization in a day or two. So I’m not sure how useful this is going to be to the average customer. Perhaps to the largest customers who have sophisticated security and compliance needs but even for them this would need to be very very competitively priced to be worthwhile (cheaper than the salary of 2 devs for a year).

The true moat of Tailscale is the core product. That can’t be easily replicated (still). Perhaps some product to simplify controlling what resources agents in the organization have access to and having 100% visibility + audatability for them will be way more useful.
by barbacoa | 2026-01-27 19:49:28+00:00
>concrete and cement production are quite bad.

Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
by pablituuu | 2026-01-27 19:49:36+00:00
I shared an earlier version of this project a few days ago, but since then I’ve clarified the scope and expanded the work.

In addition to this editor, I’ve also built a React + Remotion-based video editor focused on programmatic video generation:
https://github.com/Pablituuu/react-video-editor

My goal is to focus on building custom video/image editors for startups, so feedback or collaborations are very welcome.
by mmooss | 2026-01-27 19:50:34+00:00
The people of the Olduvan industry from 2.58 mya tools (the earliest accepted by consensus [0]) manufactured their tools - that's exactly what archaeologists are talking about.

Chimps and New Caledonian Crows (and maybe some other animals) also manufacture their tools, at least sometimes, BTW. IIRC the crows strip sticks and bend them into hooks to grab at objects.

Why would someone imply otherwise if they don't know? What are people trying to prove in this discussion?

[0] There's strong evidence of 3.3 mya; see other comments.
by py4 | 2026-01-27 19:50:39+00:00
Let's say you want to make an architectural change. There are two options:

1. Ask AI to come up with the different options and let you review it

2. You think about the options and ask AI for feedback

#1 is much faster but results in atrophy (you are not critically coming up with the architecture changes)

#2 uses your and AI skills but it's gonna be slower.

which one will you choose? currently i'm doing #1
by jfalcon | 2026-01-27 19:50:54+00:00
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/INTERN...

Too bad mobile killed the dialtone.
by iknowstuff | 2026-01-27 19:51:04+00:00
But does your drive look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/13r7fd3/whats...

And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
by TheGRS | 2026-01-27 19:51:09+00:00
I'm trying it out with Godot for my little side projects. It can handle writing the GUI files for nodes and settings. The workflow is asking cursor to change something, I review the code changes, then load up the game in Godot to check out the changes. Works pretty well. I'm curious if any Unity or Unreal devs are using it since I'm sure its a similar experience.
by in-silico | 2026-01-27 19:51:09+00:00
A lot of people point to the Muon optimizer that Moonshot (the creators of Kimi) pioneered. Compared to the standard optimizer AdamW, Muon amplifies low-magnitude gradient directions which makes the model learn faster (and maybe gives Kimi its unique qualities).

Muon paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16982
by kccqzy | 2026-01-27 19:51:42+00:00
This is really useful! I only knew about -mcmodel during compilation but I didn’t know the linker would insert thunks for faraway branches. I would’ve thought that the linker would simply complain and ask you to recompile with a larger code model. Also interesting that different linkers (or the same linker on different architectures!) chose different thunk creation algorithms.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-27 19:52:30+00:00
> > > Why is our tax money being wasted on this?

> > The fascists won. That’s why?

> No, they haven’t.

Yes, they did, that’s why they are able to use the executive branch of the federal government to enforce their wishes at the moment, with virtually no constraint yet from the legislative branch, and no significant consequences yet for ignoring contrary orders from the judicial branch.

They may lose at some point in the future, but something that might happen in the future is irrelevant to the question of why what is happening now is happening, and it is happening because they won. Unambiguously.
Show HN: Sciro – SDK to detect learner confusion without cameras or mics
by absmugz | 2026-01-27 19:52:31+00:00
built Sciro to solve the "silent struggle" in online learning.

Most EdTech is a black box—you don't know a student is stuck until they fail a quiz or quit. Sciro uses interaction signals (behavioral telemetry) to detect confusion and fatigue in real-time, allowing for instant AI or human intervention.

Tech: On-device inference engine using interaction event streams. No PII, no cameras, no microphones.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the privacy-first approach and the data schema!