MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-11 23:51:38+00:00
I think it's a little early to make that claim. Jim Farley is definitely paying attention, for example. He drove a Chinese EV for a year, IIRC, and on many occasions talked bout the challenges of competing with them.

I don't know what the real barrier to success will be, but I don't think it will be blindness. It may be difficulty competing on labor cost, but that's a good case for carefully applied tariffs to keep competition fair.
by gear54rus | 2026-01-11 23:51:40+00:00
Agreed, this sounds like some complicated ass-backwards way to do what k8s already does. If it's too big for you, just use k3s or k0s and you will still benefit from the absolutely massive ecosystem.

But instead we go with multiple moving parts all configured independently? CoreOS, Terraform and a dependence on Vultr thing. Lol.

Never in a million years I would think it's a good idea to disable SSH access. Like why? Keys and non-standard port already bring China login attempts to like 0 a year.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2026-01-11 23:51:42+00:00
His SDF probably puts out a depth buffer, so with some effort (shadows might be hard?) you can just mix it with traditional polygons. The same way raytracing and polygons mix in AAA games.

He's using the SDFs to fill a space sort of like Unreal's Nanite virtual geometry. Nanite also doesn't support general animation. They only recently added support for foliage. So you'd use SDF / Nanite for your "infinite detail" / kit-bashing individual pebbles all the way to the horizon, and then draw polygon characters and props on top of that.

In fact I was surprised to see that Nanite flipped from triangle supremacy to using voxels in their new foliage tech. So maybe the two technologies will converge. The guy who did the initial research for Nanite (his talk also cites Dreams ofc) said that voxels weren't practical. But I guess they hit the limits of what they can do with pixel-sized triangles.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-11 23:51:46+00:00
Depends on your risk tolerance.

I personally wouldn't trust a machine if a container was exploited on it, you don't know if there were any successful container escapes, kernel exploits, etc. Even if they escaped with user permissions, that can fill your box with boobytraps if they have container-granted capabilities.

I'd just prefer to nuke the VPS entirely and start over than worry if the server and the rest of my services are okay.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-11 23:52:14+00:00
Only thing is you can't run Proxmox which makes self hosting much better, and you'll be limited to ARM builds, which on server is at least a lot easier than trying to run desktop apps. Modern micro desktops are also fairly power efficient, perhaps not quite as low as the mac, but much lower than a regular gaming desktop idling.

Avoid stacking in too many hard drives since each one uses almost as much power as the desktop does at idle.
by ViscountPenguin | 2026-01-11 23:52:46+00:00
Any chance of raising the paywall on this article?

I was quite enjoying it, but then the paywall hit me right in the middle of the chemical synthesis section.

I have no problem with you wanting to earn money from your work, but it's a bit odd to post an unreadable article to hn (odd enough that I assume it was by mistake?).
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 23:52:55+00:00
I think where we actually converge is on the phenomenon itself rather than on any moral judgment about it.

What I was trying to point at is how strange it is to watch this happen in real time. You can see something unfolding directly in front of you. You can observe systems improving, replacing workflows, changing incentives. None of it is abstract. And yet the implications of what is happening are so negative for some people that the mind simply refuses to integrate them. It is not that the facts are unknown. It is that the outcome is psychologically intolerable.

At that point something unusual happens. People do not argue with conclusions, they argue with perception. They insist the thing they are watching is not really happening, or that it does not count, or that it will somehow stop before it matters. It is not a failure of intelligence or ethics. It is a human coping mechanism when reality threatens meaning, livelihood, or future stability.

Meaning and intrinsic motivation absolutely matter here. The tragedy is not that meaningful work suddenly becomes meaningless. It is that it can remain meaningful while becoming economically unsustainable. That combination is brutal. But denying the shift does not preserve meaning. It only delays the moment where a person has to decide how to respond.

What I find unsettling is not the fear or the resistance. It is watching people stand next to you, looking at the same evidence, and then effectively unsee it because accepting it would force a reckoning they are not ready for.

>I'm unsure if you've written it with AI-assistance, but even if that's the case, I'll tolerate it.

Even if it was, the world is changing. You already need to tolerate AI in code, it's inevitable AI will be part of writing.
by martinmeba | 2026-01-11 23:54:20+00:00
I had an XPS laptop purchased around 2020. It was a very well spec-ed machine on paper and worked reasonably well. It just did not hold up.
1. Bulging battery - replaced
2. USB-C charging blew up the charge controller - laptop completely unable to charge - replaced motherboard
3. USB-C charging blew up the charge controller again (~6 months later)

#3 was out of warranty and I had just changed companies so it went into the trash. It lasted 3 years tops.

I also have a dell ultrasharp 4K monitor that had to be replaced under warrant within ~1 year of purchase and I am just waiting for it to go again now that it is out of warranty.

Dell seems to have had reasonable service(in-warranty) but their stuff is always breaking down.

I have had several macbooks. Each lasted ~10 years+.
by tmerc | 2026-01-11 23:54:35+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to give a thorough explanation. I'm going to have to spend more time reading through, but on a first read, I think you know way more about this than I do. I can't find "edit" to call out my mistake in the parent, but I agree it's a mistake from my lack of knowledge here.
Sorry again for calling it bs. Your cynicism comment does hit home a bit, so I'll make some efforts to temper that in the future :)
by dpark | 2026-01-11 23:55:02+00:00
I still feel like in most of these discussions the criticism of LLMs is that they are poor replacements for great engineers. Yeah. They are. LLMs are great tools for great engineers. They won’t replace good engineers and they won’t make shitty engineers good.

You can’t ask an LLM to autonomously write complex test suites. You have to guide it. But when AI creates a solid test suite with 20 minutes of prodding instead of 4 hours of hand coding, that’s a win. It doesn’t need to do everything alone to be useful.

> writing tests that matters

Yeah. So make sure it writes them. My experience so far is that it writes a decent set of tests with little prompting, honestly exceeding what I see a lot of engineers put together (lots of engineers suck at writing tests). With additional prompting it can make them great.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-11 23:55:07+00:00
Yes we do. We have nice big wide roads. Heck, my European immigrant friends love trucks more than natives, in my experience. If you have the space for them, there are some very appealing attributes. My Lightning will carry anything I want, tow big trailers, has huge interior space for the family, will outrun most cars (even many 'fast' ones), and is more fuel efficient than a [non-plugin] Prius.

I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.
by dangmanhtruong | 2026-01-11 23:55:41+00:00
I'm working on a CUDA implementation of Forman-Ricci curvature-based clustering (I checked online and saw that there is currently no GPU/CUDA implementation, so I thought why not do it). Hopefully it would help with my CV.

Github link: https://github.com/dangmanhtruong1995/Ricci-curvature-cluste...
by spankibalt | 2026-01-11 23:56:01+00:00
> "I'm not quite sure how good LLMs are in this area though. Perhaps they're really good and I'm wasting my time (again)."

Yes, it's certainly an interesting conundrum, both on a strictly individual as well as collective level. One solution is to get one's coding as far away from the digital equivalent of plumbing as possible. In other words: One concentrates on the artistic, non-utilitarian (in the Wildean sense) stuff. A manifestation of cultural expression, a transfer of "the personal". That doesn't have to exclude the utilitarian, of course; it's offered more as a door which might neccessitate a deeper reflection before the commitment (e. g. Joanna Maciejewska's oneliner on "AI").
by frizlab | 2026-01-11 23:56:30+00:00
Oh no. Raw AppleScript in a Swift program. Don’t people know stuff anymore? I’m especially disappointed since it’s coming from Steipete…

Anyways, that’s how you do AppleScript in Swift (it’s even type-safe!) [1]

[1] https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bb...
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-11 23:56:49+00:00
My work WiFi blocked traffic to port 51820, the default WireGuard port. I was wondering why my VPN started failing to handshake one day. I changed my ports to 51821 that night and back in business. I checked our technology policy and there’s no “thou shalt not use a VPN” clause so no clue why someone one day decided to drop WireGuard traffic on the network.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-11 23:57:06+00:00
My impression was that the state of the are was still to generate high-level data from your inputs, then react with a mixture of ML and algorithmic rules to those inputs. For example you'd use a mix of LIDAR and vision to detect that there's a pedestrian, use past frames and ML to predict the pedestrian's next position, then algorithmically check whether your vehicle's path is likely to intersect with the pedestrian's path and take appropriate action if that's the case

Under that model, LIDAR training data is easy to generate. Create situations in a lab or take recordings from real drives, label them with the high-level information contained in them and train your models to extract it. Making use of that information is the next step but doesn't fundamentally change with your sensor choice, apart from the amount of information available at different speeds, distances and driving conditions
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-11 23:57:14+00:00
I actually didn't know I had. At the time I didn't properly know how docker networking worked and I exposed redis to the host so my other containers could access it. And then since this was on a VPS with a dedicated IP, this made it exposed to the whole internet.

I now know better, but there are still a million other pitfalls to fall in to if you are not a full time system admin. So I prefer to just put it all behind a VPN and know that it's safe.
by AyyEye | 2026-01-11 23:57:15+00:00
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before

100% of the people I have spoken with, from uber drivers to grandparents, have all noticed, hated, and are sympathetic to the fight against the rental/subscription economy. In 2025 I don't think I've had a single person defend the status quo because they all know what's coming.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2026-01-11 23:57:36+00:00
For nearfield, I think so; the 8341A is basically unbeatable there. But it still suffers from three problems (even more in midfield): the ridiculous price of their subwoofers, the way too primitive handling of multi-sub by GLM and the eye-watering price of the W371A compared to other fully cardioid solutions (D&D 8C + subs, AsciLab BX8C); I'm also skeptical of the (unpublished) directivity matching of the combination.

Still, Genelec's legendary reliability and GLM are worth it.
by jfengel | 2026-01-11 23:57:42+00:00
I could imagine a world where LLM coding was fun. It would sound like "imagine a game, like Galaxians but using tractor trailers, and as a first person shooter." And it pumps out a draft and you say, "No, let's try it again with an army of bagpipers."

In other words, getting to be the "ideas guy", but without sounding like a dipstick who can't do anything.

I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet. Instead we're at the same point where we are with self-driving: not doing anything but on constant alert.
by dajt | 2026-01-11 23:57:52+00:00
I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them.

The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-11 23:58:30+00:00
Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.

Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.

It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 23:58:41+00:00
Isn't this common on HN? People with opinions voice their opinions confidently. People who disagree calmly state they disagree and state why.

The question is more why did my post trigger you... why would my opinion trigger you? Does disagreement trigger you? If I said something that is obviously untrue that you disagreed with, for example: "The world is flat." Would this trigger you? I don't think it would. So why was my post different?

Maybe this is more of a question you should ask yourself.
by overfeed | 2026-01-11 23:58:59+00:00
> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?

It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 23:59:16+00:00
The repository logs make it clear that this framework was conceived as a "constitution" long before this conversation ever took place.

I didn't "retreat" to the idea of a framework because the scientific argument failed. On the contrary, I designed the engineering variables specifically to give that framework "teeth." My goal isn't to prove a "simple observation"—it is to provide a functional architecture for human agency that conventional science, in its current state, is failing to protect.

https://github.com/daiki-kadowaki/judgment-transparency-prin...
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-11 23:59:42+00:00
I'll say that the 'Zero' products have gotten quite good. Not indistinguishable, but closer than I expected. On a couple of occasions I've inadvertently purchased real Dr Pepper instead of Dr Pepper Zero and not realized I was drinking the real thing. That's high praise for the Zero version (notably, the Diet version of Dr Pepper, while it has a following of its own, is extremely unlike real Dr Pepper).
Show HN: I built an autopilot investor outreach tool – and it became my startup
by citizenbab | 2026-01-11 23:59:54+00:00
So… I needed to raise funds for my startup idea and started building a tool to automate investor outreach.

While building it to raise funding for my own startup idea, I realized other founders might need this too, so I pivoted it into my main product.

I’d love feedback from founders, investors, or anyone curious about automating outreach. You can check it out here: www.pilt.ai

Happy to answer questions about how it works, lessons learned, or pitfalls I ran into while building it.
by bitwize | 2026-01-12 00:00:33+00:00
OK, so what do I hear about LLMs? Oh, it's just like having an intern. A fresh graduate. Now you're not building the thing yourself, you're giving directives and delegating the actual building of the thing. What does this sound like?

The managerial class believes that all the value in a business comes from managerial work. LLMs are being hyped by the managerial class because they are turning software development into managerial work and eliminating "programmer" as a professional category. The key insight Milt Bryce had with PRIDE is that software is a product that can be manufactured just like any other product. The ideal software production workflow is that of a factory, and the ideal factory is staffed by no more than a man and a dog—in other words, fully automated.

So the rules of business in your father's or grandfather's time prevail once again. It's up or out. Learn people skills, learn the business, and take on more responsibilities putting those skills to use and fewer responsibilities involving code. Or find yourself increasingly irrelevant.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-12 00:01:00+00:00
Where's the evidence that "AI slop" actually originates from "goyslop", though? Just because one predates the other and both contain the same root word? It's equally if not more likely that both terms were derived independently. Like I said, "slop" is a word in common usage that precisely matches the usage of both terms: something bland, low-quality, and high-quantity.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-12 00:01:06+00:00
> advanced trigonometry

There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.

But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-12 00:01:12+00:00
You are very mistaken if you think the current administration is uniquely bad for free speech. Biden and other libs censored a lot of people for his whole administration. Outside of speech that creates harmful and immediate situations like yelling "Fire" in a theater, free speech needs to be absolute or it is not free at all. This was all well-known philosophy but it seems every new generation has to fight about the same damn issue. Free speech advocates such as the Jews who rallied to protect the free speech of Nazis in the US decades ago understood very well that any restrictions on speech for any purpose would be used to censor people who desperately need to be allowed to speak.

Musk may rub people wrong but he is a free speech advocate for the most part. To the extent he does censor for personal reasons, I must submit that liberals asked for this treatment before he bought it with their constant chanting of "It's a private platform, so free speech does not apply!" I cannot listen to complaints about this until liberals admit that they did censor conservatives, and that they are sorry.

The only actual censorship the current government seems to be pursuing is censorship and harassment of critics of Israel. I don't like this at all but these censorious policies will probably be knocked down eventually.
by wsh | 2026-01-12 00:01:50+00:00
FS.COM Limited (深圳市飞速创新技术股份有限公司, https://cn.fs.com/) was founded in Shenzhen in 2009. They’ve applied to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; here’s the draft prospectus from a month ago:

https://www1.hkexnews.hk/app/sehk/2025/107950/documents/sehk...
by danpalmer | 2026-01-12 00:02:26+00:00
Or you could read man pages, ask people for help, read books... all of which are more closely aligned with self-hosting than outsourcing the whole process.

I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the actual content.
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 00:02:59+00:00
Why would you dislike LLMs for 1?

I have my personal projects where every single line if authored by hand.

Still, I will ask LLMs for feedback or look for ideas when I have the feeling something could be rearchitected/improved but I don't see how.

More often than not, they fluke, but occasionally they will still provide valid feedback which otherwise I'd missed.

LLMs aren't just for the "lets dump large amounts of lower-level work" use case.
by amluto | 2026-01-12 00:03:00+00:00
> You can run separate containers in the same network namespace with the "--network" option [0].

Oh, right, thanks. I think I did notice that last time I dug into this. But:

> or you can manually create a new netns with "podman network create <name>" and then join all the containers to it with "--network=<name>".

I don’t think this has the desired effect at all. And the docs for podman network connect don’t mention pods at all, which is odd. In general, I have not been very impressed by podman.

Incidentally, apptainer seems to have a more or less first class ability to join an existing netns, and it supports CNI. Maybe I should give it a try.
by noosphr | 2026-01-12 00:03:22+00:00
I've been building Ai apps since gpt 3 so 5 years now.

The pro AI people don't understand what quadratic attention means and the anti-ai people don't understand how much information can be contained in a tb of weights.

At the end of the day both will be hugely disappointed.

>The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation.

Intuition does not translate between models. Whatever you think dense llms were good at deepseek completely upended it in an afternoon. The difference between major revisions of model families is substantial enough that intuition is a drawback not an asset.
by fhennig | 2026-01-12 00:03:42+00:00
I think it's great that people are getting into self-hosting, but I don't think it's _the_ solution to get us off of big tech.

Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.

This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:04:05+00:00
The great thing about working with LLMs is that you don't need people skills, even though managing them is a loose imitation of that.

You don't have to consider the feelings of your coding agent, or their specific taste, or what challenges would best help them advance in their skills or career.

You tell them to do something, and if they do it wrong you tell them what to fix, and you can keep on hammering away at them until you get the right result.

If they go too far off the tracks you reboot them with a clean slate and set them on the task again in a different direction.
by Macha | 2026-01-12 00:04:48+00:00
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

Meanwhile on MacOS my displays may work. Or they might not work. Or they might work but randomly locked to 30hz. It depends on what order they wake up in or get plugged in.

I suspect the root of the problem is one of them is a very high refresh rate monitor (1440p360hz) and probably related to the display bandwidth limitations that provide a relatively low monitor limit for such a high cost machine.