MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by biglyburrito | 2026-01-13 21:18:57+00:00
I bought mine direct from Samsung for $300 in December 2025. Between the time I placed the order and the time it was delivered 3 days later, the price jumped almost 10% (to $327.99). Crazy.

FWIW the price is $439.99 direct from Samsung -- hardly cheap, but still less than $477:

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...
by NewUser76312 | 2026-01-13 21:19:35+00:00
Ok but can we get into the nuts and bolts of what we actually want these robots to do?

Because every time I think of something, either an existing industrial setup can or will do it better, or a special-purpose device will beat it.

So general intelligence + general form factor (humanoid) sounds great, if feasible. But what will it do exactly? And then let's do a reality check on said application.
by sleepybrett | 2026-01-13 21:19:36+00:00
They don't need to, but they do lose a bunch more of the 'feeder' market. If need to edit video to a semi professional standard I'd pick this bundle at 12.99/month (and get extra tools i might need) vs adobe premiere for 22.99/month.

As someone who came up along side adobe, the only reason photoshop is as entrenched as it is is simply because of piracy. Ditto for premiere. It created the market that they then locked down with subscriptions.

I think you are going to see shops that are smaller, doing their own design stuff internally, increasingly moving away from adobe subscriptions.
by vladms | 2026-01-13 21:20:00+00:00
Do you have any data to back that "it is more socially acceptable to lie"? I looked a bit and could not find anything either way.

The impression can be a bias of growing up. Adults will generally teach and insist that children tell the truth. As one grows, it is less constrained and can say many "white lies" (low impact lies).

We do have more impact for some people (known people, influences, etc.) than before because of network effects.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-13 21:20:03+00:00
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.

> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.

And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-13 21:20:23+00:00
What do you mean by "slavery"? The term has been applied to many practices over time. The more egregious forms (e.g. transatlantic slave trade) were justified by "well, they aren't really people, are they?"; tamer forms, like Roman slavery, were justified as institutions, as being a necessary component of the Correct Way to Organise Society. I don't think being enslaved has ever been considered a good thing (except by comparison with alternatives), although I'd be happy to learn of a counterexample. Likewise, being raped is not considered a good thing, except as far as it forms part of an Institution necessary for the Correct Way to Organise Society (e.g. a patriarchy).

Indeed, you will not even find people defending factory farming, except as far as they defend the institution, which is part of the status quo and therefore necessary for promulgating the status quo. (Usually something about "but farmers will have to change their practices!", as though farmers don't already change their practices so frequently that it's hard to do academic research on farming.) If you want to find something wrong that people will actually defend, in its own capacity, you need to consider examples like bloodsports… but just thinking about what people might say about the topic is no substitute for actually talking to them about it.
by harran | 2026-01-13 21:20:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to share this because the results genuinely surprised me.

The Backstory: I originally wanted to build this background remover on the server side. However, I realized my server specs weren't powerful enough to handle the model inference for multiple users. I almost gave up, but decided to try shifting the entire process to the client's browser as a "last resort."

I had serious doubts about whether it would work or if the quality would be usable. To my surprise, the browser-native performance was excellent and the edge-detection quality was high.

Technical Details:

Inference: Runs 100% in your browser using the user's local GPU/CPU.

Privacy: No images are uploaded to any server. What started as a hardware limitation became a privacy feature.

Performance: Once the model is cached, the tool provides results instantly and works offline.

This tool is part of my larger project, AI Shortcut Lab, where I provide ready lists of AI tools and automated workflows.

I’d love to know: How does the processing speed feel on your machine?
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-13 21:20:40+00:00
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.

The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.

Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
by chasil | 2026-01-13 21:20:52+00:00
For POSIX, yes.

https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomicall...

Windows has a deep well of POSIX in the kernel (plus hard file locks), and it appears to hold there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
by Grosvenor | 2026-01-13 21:20:59+00:00
I'm tugging at my memory with this page:
http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/index.html

I had a teal Indigo2, an O2, and an Indy at various points. Neat stuff, but time moves on.

There's some complex setups listed in the origin/onyx pages. You could mostly mix and match boards to get what you wanted.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-13 21:21:00+00:00
Speaking of evil trolls: The EVIL Scott Adams should not be confused with the GOOD Scott Adams who made Adventures for microcomputers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

I found a great bug in Zork, the original one on MIT-DM, and it was also in the Infocom version. The troll that confronted you under the white house would gobble anything you gave to him. And he had an axe that he menaced you with. So I tried "GIVE AXE TO TROLL", and he ate his own axe, then cowered in the corner! So then I tried "GIVE TROLL TO TROLL" and he unceremoniously ate himself and POOF disappeared in a puff of logic.

Unfortunately it forgot to clear the troll flag, and whenever I tried to exit the room, the troll would reappear, block me from exiting, and disappear. Decades later the Zork source code was leaked and I was able to verify that yes, there WAS a troll flag.

Let's hope the EVIL Scott Adam's troll flag was cleared, and he doesn't ever reappear to menace innocent people, like he accused Black people of being a hate group, and said White people should stay the hell away from Black people!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108936

#ROOM {"MTROL"

"You are in a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
%<> #EXIT {"WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "CRAW4" %,TCHOMP}
"NORTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "PASS1" %,TCHOMP}
"SOUTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "MAZE1" %,TCHOMP}}
(#FIND-OBJ {"TROLL"})}

<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">
by butlike | 2026-01-13 21:21:06+00:00
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
by devilsdata | 2026-01-13 21:21:07+00:00
It does not. I'm Australian and our timezones are ahead of the US (NSW time is about 15-17 hours ahead of US Eastern time). If I took a flight from Sydney to New York (22~ hours) on my birthday, the US custom's officer would wish me happy birthday when I landed the next day.

Therefore, birthdays are not bound by timezone at all.
by dijit | 2026-01-13 21:21:10+00:00
Sure,

and, cards on the table, I will not redact company names because I don't really see the point, these are my experiences not rumours.

Here's two, there's one more but it's a bit too awkward to type out on my phone;

Elastic: there were two Lead SRE positions open, I was recommended to apply, so I applied (friend still works there). I passed the interviews and was offered the job, the other job was filled by someone internal; they rescinded the job offer after having a candidate who was just as qualified but was female. I was offered a position under her. I would have been happy to take the lower position if I hadn't been offered the other one (and accepted) and if it hadn't been on the stated basis that it was because they wanted a woman and that's why, nothing about personality, culture fit, approach or even skill fit.

Ubisoft Massive: I applied for an Architect position (a promotion), I was told that I need not bother applying as the position was only going to be filled when we found someone with a non-white ethnic background, and preferably a girl. This was not long after being told by HR that "my next hire had better be a woman" after hiring a 45+ year old white Swedish guy, so I should have known.

--

For balance; I'll say that my ethnicity has helped me too once, I got a job at Nokia partially because I was natively English speaking, so it's all swings and roundabouts.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-01-13 21:21:31+00:00
> If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression?

i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
by Anamon | 2026-01-13 21:21:35+00:00
> be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly

Then also nothing has really changed. This was, verbatim, the advice everybody was giving when I was a grad student almost 20 years ago.

Back then, the conclusion was to learn the frameworks du jour, even if it was unfulfilling plumbing and the knowledge had a half-life of a few weeks. You needed it to get hired, but you made your career because of all the solid theory you learned and the adaptability that knowing it gave you.

Now, the conclusion is to learn how to tickle the models du jour in the right way, even though it's intellectually braindead, unaspiring work and knowledge with a half-life of a few days. It's still the theoretical foundation that will actually make the junior become a valuable engineer.

The more I read between the lines of AI evangelists' posts like this, the more I'm convinced that expectations will return to grounded reality soon. They are new tools to help the engineer. They enable new workflows and maybe can even allow a two-digit percentage increase in speed while upholding quality. But they're in no way a revolution that will make possible "10× engineers" or considerably replace engineering positions beyond the "it doesn't really matter" area of PoCs, prototypes, one-offs, cookie-cutter solutions, etc.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-13 21:21:48+00:00
/find in page “discovery”, 0 results

A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).

There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.

Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.

So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.

Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
by chis | 2026-01-13 21:21:50+00:00
I wonder how universal these stages are. All I can say is when I worked at a 15 person company, it was extremely clear to me that we needed more structure than "everyone reports to the CEO". We struggled to prioritize between different projects, milestones weren't clearly defined or owned, at times there would be long debates on product direction without a clear decisionmaker, etc etc.

Not to say the article is so wrong. I think their advice to consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads is a great answer. We went with the path of hiring one dedicated "manager" of all engineers and that worked pretty well too.
by NewUser76312 | 2026-01-13 21:21:58+00:00
LLMs have already proven themselves to be economically valuable. At a bare minimum, they can help people develop most low-mid level software considerably faster, at a good enough quality.

They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.

What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.
by bmitc | 2026-01-13 21:22:00+00:00
Do you have a more substantive critique?

I'm particularly sensitive to shallow critiques of new ways of computing, particularly those that encourage and enable people to be creative. Whether a project is successful or not, it's nice to see something that isn't a "bootup your general purpose comouter and then immediately open a browser" style of computing.

Attempting to get people to interact with the real world and also be creative should be commended.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-13 21:22:01+00:00
Totally fair, if this were “single-node HTTP handler on localhost”, then yeah, you can hit big numbers quickly in many stacks.

The point of these numbers is the envelope: 3-node consensus (Raft), real network (not loopback), and sync-majority writes (ACK after 2/3 replicas) plus the crash/recovery semantics (SIGKILL → restart → offsets/data still there).

If you have a quick Python setup that does majority-acked replication + fast crash recovery with similar measurements, I’d honestly love to compare apples-to-apples happy to share exact scripts/config and run the same test conditions.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-13 21:22:14+00:00
> Driving it with some interesting combinations of Raspberry PI's and serial interfaces and custom written Go code, but it works... :)

What protocol is it speaking? I've seen some of the more mainstream models call out that they use Modbus but all the cheap import models either might use Modbus or some custom protocol you have to reverse engineer or hope someone else did.
by something765478 | 2026-01-13 21:22:43+00:00
While I did see some problems with their approach (i.e. doing the IRB reviews retroactively instead of doing them ahead of time, and not properly disclosing the experiments afterwards), I think this research is valuable, and I don't think the authors were too unethical. The event that this most reminds me of the Sokal Squared scandal, where researchers sent bogus papers to journals in order to test those journal's peer review standards.
by vjerancrnjak | 2026-01-13 21:23:10+00:00
RAG, llm pipeline industry just continues in the same fashion of throwing even more glue, insanely slow, expensive, but works due to somehow companies having money to waste, perpetually. Not that much different from the whole Apache stack or similar gluey expensive and slow software.

There is similar mindless glue in all tech stacks. LLMs are trained on it, and successfully do more of it.

Even AI companies just wastefully do massive experiments with suboptimal data and compute bandwidth.
by throwaway_s3434 | 2026-01-13 21:23:26+00:00
The reaction of muslims when comparing between the events of Palestine and Iran is chilling to watch. No matter the education, economic status or how they appear externally muslims unity is so strong internally when it comes to religion. Since the revolution in Iran is anti relgion they are turning a blind eye. How come no one even acknowledges. Its impossible not to wonder what will become of any country once muslims become majority. Do all the negative voting, but please think and reply what solution you got.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-13 21:23:30+00:00
Depends team to team and founder to founder. I've seen early stage startups where most ICs were able to self manage, but others where some form of structure was needed. At the stage that you mentioned, it's natural for founders to end up hiring an Engineering Lead.

> consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads

It is potentially risky - I've seen plenty of talented engineers flounder because they were thrust into an ill-suited management role too soon, but I think if someone is motivated and eased into the role they tend to be superior to an outside hire.
by lifeisstillgood | 2026-01-13 21:23:34+00:00
And that’s probably the OpenAI killer. If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.

This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much as you can.

Really interesting insight
by SpecialistK | 2026-01-13 21:23:55+00:00
Not to mention that AMD likely has a much stronger semi-custom infrastructure (they've been doing it for over 10 years, and the PS4/Xbone chips helped to keep the company afloat during the FX years) plus an existing relationship with Valve. Intel doesn't have that, and they also don't have the objectively superior product that would convince vendors to switch.

I recently bought an MSI Claw A1M handheld gaming PC, because it was cheap. And the performance of the Core Ultra 5-135H is fine, and I think it can handle E33 at 1080p30 with upscaling, and anything else I'd want to play much better than that. But the battery life and power consumption isn't competitive with even the original Steam Deck, and we haven't seen an indication that Intel has anything to leapfrog AMD chips any time soon.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-13 21:24:12+00:00
1) How did they hit stable then? [0]

2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...
by observationist | 2026-01-13 21:24:12+00:00
I'm not saying there aren't people supportive of the status quo. What I'm calling out is the notion that organized mass protests that perfectly align with regime tactics from the past several decades could possibly be legitimate, as opposed to being astroturfed, for which there is plenty of evidence.

The Basij and local militia, ostensibly under the control of the regime, and in coordination with the IRGC, will issue orders to militia/military members and sometimes direct them to bring families with them. Some go willingly, but all go with an implicit gun to their families heads.

https://x.com/impk247/status/2011046265594003705
https://x.com/Skeptic222/status/2010698808456360131

There are a large number of reports and reporting from new media, social media, and so on, but there's no current smoking gun.

https://jamestown.org/the-role-of-the-revolutionary-guards-a...

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

https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...

The IRGC and Basij and forced astroturfing is a frequently used and well understood tactic that the regime has kept in its toolbox. It's not a crazy conspiracy or unfounded, it's just business as usual. Just like I know they're using 7.62 NATO standard ammunition to gun people down, even though I haven't seen even a single picture of spent shell casings or bullets pulled from bodies. It's just how they do things.

It's not taking agency away if you can't tell the difference between someone being forced, pressured, going along to survive, or genuinely invested and supportive of the regime.

What would give them real agency is not living under the thumb of a dystopian authoritarian theocratic dictatorship. Pretending that there's any legitimacy to supporting the regime is also a little crazy. As long as 81 million people think its ok to live that way, you should let them oppress and murder and enslave and exploit the other 9 million? That's right up there with saying the parades for Kim Jong Un in North Korea show us some real support for that regime, or that people who express support of Un could possibly have any legitimacy.

At any rate, I hope any genuine supporters of the regime that are simply ignorant of the abuses and atrocity are simply disappointed and free to grumble about it in the near future, and see their lives radically improved and uplifted by whatever comes next. There's a huge amount of potential funding and international support - not just the US - that could make a free Iran drastically different than Libya or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan.

They've got a cultural core and the diaspora and families who'd love nothing more than to return and rebuild, from all over the world. Even if they don't go the route of restoring the Shah, I think the Shah and that apparatus is willing to support and legitimize whatever comes next.

I honestly thought I'd live my entire life with Iran being a rogue state and perennially agitating and sponsoring terror, that it'd just be the way things are, until AGI, Aliens, or Armageddon.
by michaelt | 2026-01-13 21:24:20+00:00
As I understand it [1], usually if you try to cross the border declaring you intend to engage in sex work, they turn you away. Some combination of prudishness and concern about trafficking.

For there to be a special sex worker visa is a surprise, to me.

[1] https://www.pace-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/3194...