MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AIorNot | 2026-01-30 01:13:43+00:00
Let me introduce you to Idealism

And more specifically Analytic Idealism

https://youtu.be/P-rXm7Uk9Ys?si=q7Kefl7PbYfGiChZ

Google DeepMind’s Project Genie is being framed as a “world model.” Given a text prompt, it generates a coherent, navigable, photorealistic world in real time. An agent can move through it, act within it, and the world responds consistently. Past interactions are remembered. Physics holds. Cause and effect persist.

From a technical standpoint, this is impressive engineering. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s an unexpectedly clean metaphor.

In analytic idealism, the claim is not that the physical world is fake or arbitrary. The claim is that what we call the “physical world” is how reality appears from a particular perspective. Experience is primary. The world is structured appearance.

Genie makes this intuitive.

There is no “world” inside Genie in the classical sense. There is no pre-existing ocean, mountain, fox, or library. There is a generative substrate that produces a coherent environment only when a perspective is instantiated. The world exists as something navigable because there is a point of view moving through it.

Change the character, and the same environment becomes a different lived reality. Change the prompt, and an entirely different universe appears. The underlying system remains, but the experienced world is perspective-dependent.

This mirrors a core idealist intuition: reality is not a collection of objects waiting to be perceived. It is a structured field of possible experiences, disclosed through perspectives.

The interesting part is not that Genie “creates worlds.” It’s that the worlds only exist as worlds for an agent. Without a perspective, there is no up, down, motion, danger, beauty, or meaning. Just latent structure.

Seen this way, Genie is not a model of consciousness. It’s a model of how worlds arise from viewpoints.

If you replace “agent” with “local mind,” and “world model” with “cosmic mental process,” the analogy becomes hard to ignore. A universal consciousness need not experience everything at once. It can explore itself through constrained perspectives, each generating a coherent, law-bound world from the inside.

That doesn’t prove idealism. But it makes the idea less mystical and more concrete. We are already building systems where worlds are not fundamental, but perspectival.

And that alone is worth sitting with.
by throw__away7391 | 2026-01-30 01:14:00+00:00
You can watch the screen and see what it can detect, and it is impressive. On a dark road at night in Santa Monica it was able to identify that there were two pedestrians at the end of the next block on the sidewalk obscured by a row of parked cars and covered by a canopy of overgrown vegetation. There is absolutely no way any human would have been able to spot them at this distance in these conditions. You really can "feel" it paying 100% attention at all times in all directions.
by omneity | 2026-01-30 01:14:40+00:00
The model being 32B could run in <20GB VRAM with Q4 quantization (minimal loss of quality), or 80GB unquantized at full fidelity. The quoted 160GB is for their recommended evaluation settings.

There's a few pre-quantized options[0] or you can quantize it yourself with llama.cpp[1]. You can run the resulting gguf with llama.cpp `llama-cli` or `llama-server`, with LM Studio or with Ollama.

0: https://huggingface.co/models?search=cwm%20q4%20gguf

1: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ggml-org/gguf-my-repo
by snvzz | 2026-01-30 01:15:02+00:00
Indeed, the focus for preservation would be to increase the accuracy of emulators.

pcsx2 is pretty good today in terms of running games (there is a single digit list of games it does not run), but it's far from accurate to the hardware.

Porting to current systems via recompilation is cool, but it has very little to do with preservation.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-30 01:15:04+00:00
It's going to sound batshit insane what I say - the problem is, if we don't praise company PR, the other side will use this as an excuse to push even harder regulations, not allow them in newer cities, slow down the adoption rate, while factually ignoring that this is just a safer method of transport. I wish I was not a bootlicker, but I really want robotaxis to be available everywhere in the world at some point, and such issues should not slow them down IF it's better, and especially, not worse than humans on average.
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-30 01:16:28+00:00
Tesla has to pay for the operational and maintenance costs of the vehicle which Uber can offload to the drivers (most drivers barely break even after taking these cost into account), on top of all the ride management infrastructure that Uber deals with.

Higher costs means higher revenue is necessary to break even. It's basic math. Don't even need to get to first order principles.
by pietroppeter | 2026-01-30 01:16:34+00:00
> You can easily make the case that Tadej Pogačar is one of the world’s best athletes. Plus he enjoys a wholesome reputation, a cherubic look at races and a cheerful presence on social media. Good luck finding someone who knows him to say a bad word. He ought to be the face of Kelloggs cereal, Gillette razors, Pepsi Cola or Visa cards. Maybe all of them at the same time. Crypto? Meh, but why not. But Ku Coin?
by Grimblewald | 2026-01-30 01:16:37+00:00
I'd say they need to rebuild trust in their suitability for re-earning trust first. This isn't the first time MS fucked us. Personally I'm sick of falling for the "we're sowee" shtick that barely lasts a few years before we're back to being fucked. MS has shown us it cannot change, and we deserve it if we fall for it yet again. It's time for MS to wither and die, let better things grow in the vacuum left by it's corpse.
by _--__--__ | 2026-01-30 01:17:13+00:00
I'm skeptical as well but from the earlier linked faq (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-biow...):

>BCS3-L1 has four main genetic modifications:

It produces a weak antibiotic, mutacin-1140, which kills competing oral bacteria.

It’s immune to mutacin-1140, so it doesn’t kill itself.

It metabolizes sugar through a different chemical pathway that ends in alcohol instead of lactic acid.

It lacks a peptide that its species usually uses to arrange gene transfers with other bacteria.
by gtowey | 2026-01-30 01:17:29+00:00
> No one needs to be competent at their job anymore

That's actually the whole point. Placing incompetents in positions of authority means they know absolutely to whom they owe their loyalty. Because they know they would never have that job on merit. And since they don't really know how to do the job, they have no moral qualms about doing a poor job, or strong opinions on what they should be doing -- other than whatever mission their patron has given them. It's a tool used by weak leaders and it's unfortunately very effective.
by joebates | 2026-01-30 01:17:52+00:00
It's still not always reliable.

I have a skill in a project named "determine-feature-directory" with a short description explaining that it is meant to determine the feature directory of a current branch. The initial prompt I provide will tell it to determine the feature directory and do other work. Claude will even state "I need to determine the feature directory..."

Then, about 5-10% of the time, it will not use the skill. It does use the skill most of the time, but the low failure rate is frustrating because it makes it tough to tell whether or not a prompt change actually improved anything. Of course I could be doing something wrong, but it does work most of the time. I miss deterministic bugs.

Recently, I stopped Claude after it skipped using a skill and just said "Aren't you forgetting something?". It then remembered to use the skill. I found that amusing.
by tptacek | 2026-01-30 01:18:00+00:00
A quick fun thing you can do in response to that first graf is to ask Claude or GPT5 to quiz you.

I got:

* The report was written yesterday.

* The committee approved the proposal.

* The door was open when I arrived.

* The window was broken during the storm.

* The window was broken when we bought the house.

* Mistakes were made.

* The system is designed to fail safely.

* The results are surprising.

* The patient was examined and released.

* The data suggests the model was trained improperly.

* There were several errors identified in the report.

* The system appears to have been compromised.

I got two of them wrong, though I think "partially passive" is a total cop-out.
by chris_st | 2026-01-30 01:18:13+00:00
Nope - on macOS, almost all apps are just "drag this to wherever (usually your own personal application folder)" and they work perfectly, since they don't need admin privileges. But this one insists on running from /Applications - the root application directory - and for reason. To install there, you have to be admin. I really don't want apps installed as admin, and possibly then able to get admin privileges. It's just basic security.

There's a thread on their Discord that was reported in February of last year. No fix, no comments.
Show HN: Record your screen and microphone 24/7 and sync to clawdbot instance
by louis030195 | 2026-01-30 01:18:37+00:00
agents shouldn't be prompted

they should watch you and print dollars in the background

so I built a CLI that records your screen/mic, extract text, transcribe, identify speakers 24/7 and sync the data to clawdbot

start recording:

curl -fsSL get.screenpi.pe/cli | sh
screenpipe

then sync all the time to your clawdbot instance:

bunx screenpipe-sync --daemon -r agent@server:~/.screenpipe/

lmk your thoughts on this
by pxc | 2026-01-30 01:18:43+00:00
Generally yes, they experience that routinely and complain and joke about it. Some of them do also describe such jarring experiences as making them cry for a long time.

If you can be respectful and act like a guest, it's worth reading a little there. You'll see the worrisome aspects in more detail but also a level of savvy that sometimes seems quite strange given the level of attachment. It's definitely interesting.
Show HN: Real-time generative MIDI "instrument"
by nukenuke | 2026-01-30 01:19:12+00:00
I built this app to generate music through MIDI with controllable probabilistic parameters. You can change the parameters and the generation will shift in real time. I wanted to explore harnessing randomness to create order and give people the ability to make electronic type music sound more improvised. If you try it and have feedback, let me know!
by Arch485 | 2026-01-30 01:19:23+00:00
That's a fair point! It is true that recruiters are human and cannot review 5k applications per week.

I don't mean to say that recruiters must/should review all applications, because indeed this is sometimes impossible. I'm just saying that, as a recruiter, your job is to review applications and you should therefore not be making things harder for the applicants.

Asking for someone's favourite GIF to filter out junk applications is a great idea. This does not detriment the applicant, and it makes the recruiter's job easier. This is good. Making all applications mail-in is not good, because it detriments the applicant (by way of costing significantly more time and some money), while also not solving some of the larger problems when it comes to the job application process.
by verdverm | 2026-01-30 01:20:23+00:00
The type of decision very much matters, coding is one thing. I met a chap at the bar who ChatGPT had verified his crazy theories and he now outsourced all of his major life decisions to it, very proud and enthusiastic about it all. First IRL case of AI psychosis I have encountered. He was keen for my thoughts, as though I was the first person he met IRL that knew more than the layman about Ai. Hope the questions (contradictions) I left him with helped bring him back a bit.

It's going to get a lot worse
by Terr_ | 2026-01-30 01:20:27+00:00
> Perhaps the key to transparent/interpretable ML is to just replace the ML model with AI-coded traditional software and decision trees. This way it's still fully autonomously trained but you can easily look at the code to see what is going on.

Just yesterday I came across a something a sci-fi webcomic author wrote as backstory back in ~2017, where all future AI has auditable logic-chains, due to a disaster in 2061 involving an American AI defense system.

While the overall concept of "turns on its creators" is not new, I still found the "root cause" darkly amusing:

> [...] until the millisecond that Gordon Smith put his hand on a Bible and swore to defend the constitution.

> Thus, when the POTUS changed from Vanderbilt to Smith, a switch flipped. TIARA [Threat Intel Analysis and Response Algorithm] was now aware of an individual with 1) a common surname, 2) a lot of money and resources, 3) the allegiance of thousands of armed soldiers, 4) many alternate aliases (like "POTUS"), 5) frequent travel, 6) bases of operation around the world, 7) mentioned frequently in terrorist chatter, etc, etc, etc.

> And yes, of course, when TIARA launches a drone strike, it notifies a human operator, who can immediately countermand it. This is, unfortunately, not useful when the drone strike mission has a travel time of zero seconds.

> Thousands of intelligent weapons, finding themselves right on top of a known terrorist's assets, immediately did their job and detonated. In less than fifteen minutes, over ten thousand people lost their lives, and the damage was estimated in the trillions of dollars.

[0] https://forwardcomic.com/archive.php?num=200
by x0x0 | 2026-01-30 01:22:18+00:00
The last req I opened I closed around 500 applicants. I opened it Thursday afternoon and closed it Tuesday morning.

Over 40% were totally nonqualified. The job was for a rails engineer. In the current market, I wanted exactly what I asked for: a senior rails eng. But as long as the applicant had shipped a web app in a dynamic language -- node, react, vue, svelte, django, flask, phoenix, whatever the php folks use, etc -- it's not unreasonable to apply. That 40% had never shipped a webapp. Another 10% or more completely ignored the senior: many had < 1 year of experience.

I ended up using AI to filter because even 1 minute per is an entire 9 hour day. Engaging for 3 minutes per application is 3x that. And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none: I assume the bulk of these were just mass applications.
by allenu | 2026-01-30 01:22:19+00:00
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.

I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-30 01:23:11+00:00
Kind of tangentially related to weird ways tech works: a few weeks ago I finally disassembled my original DMG-01 Game Boy to fix it. There was decades of battery acid corrosion that took a ton of cleaning and resoldering and reflowing the screen connections.

After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.

I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.

No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.

So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.
Show HN: LLMGeoKit – Free scanner for AI/LLM visibility (the new SEO)
by borxtrk | 2026-01-30 01:25:13+00:00
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are replacing Google for millions of searches. But most websites are invisible to them.

LLMGeoKit is a free scanner that analyzes your site across 7 dimensions of LLM visibility:
- Robots.txt & crawler access
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Metadata & Open Graph tags
- Content structure
- llms.txt (the new standard for AI)
- Citation signals
- Content extractability

Get your score in 30 seconds. No signup required.

We built this because SEO is evolving into GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and most companies have no idea where they stand.
by komali2 | 2026-01-30 01:25:17+00:00
Your confidence doesn't mean you're right. Your definition of value doesn't include a mechanism to determine the difference between contextual value, an awkwardness obvious in your comment, after all, the stock market wouldn't exist unless the value for a seller was different than the value for a buyer, or why else would the buyer buy? There's more than just price involved in the consideration.

Also, the word "value" is used outside of monetary contexts. If you said "I value you" to a loved one, I doubt even an avout capitalist libertarian such as yourself would be so heartless as to put a dollar price on that "value." So no, value is not just "what you're willing to pay." That's a Chicago school of economics lie that has been allowed to determine the mechanics of neoliberal society.

In any case this isn't really a conversation if you just keep saying the same thing over and over again, "value is cost," using basically undifferentiated examples.
by cyberax | 2026-01-30 01:25:38+00:00
Interesting parallels with other languages:

1. Slavic languages have several ways to construct "impersonal sentences" that can be used to describe the results of actions or being in a certain state without mentioning the actors. They sound completely natural and are used in common spoken speech.

2. Passive does sound more complicated and marked in English. Descriptions often need to use either passive voice or "fake" subjects (e.g.: "It was raining").

2. In Chinese, true passive voice ("被/叫/...") is extremely uncommon and is used mostly for negative things like "was hit by a car". Some linguists even call it an "adversity marker". And for neutral things like "The package was delivered yesterday" typical constructions look more like "The package is yesterday-delivered", with the "yesterday-delivered" construction acting almost like an adjective.
by borxtrk | 2026-01-30 01:26:20+00:00
I built this to answer: "Is my site optimized for ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity?"

The scanner checks 7 things:
1. robots.txt - are you blocking AI crawlers?
2. Structured data - JSON-LD that LLMs can parse
3. Metadata - title, description, OG tags
4. Content structure - headings, lists, semantic HTML
5. llms.txt - the emerging standard (like robots.txt for AI)
6. Citation signals - author, date, canonical URL
7. Extractability - FAQs, tables, definition lists

Tech stack: FastAPI + Jinja2 + Tailwind (no React). Hosted on Cloud Run. 181 tests.

The thesis: SEO optimized for Google's index. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes for AI training data and retrieval. Different game, different rules.

Happy to discuss the technical approach or GEO strategy. Try it on your own site and let me know what you find.
by mrandish | 2026-01-30 01:26:31+00:00
> Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502

For those who don't know the history, the 6502 was initially the 6501, created to be a cut-down, cheaper alternative to the 6800 by many of the same engineers who designed the 6800 at Motorola. Since the idea of copyrighting an instruction set wasn't really a thing yet, the 6501 started out very, very similar to the 6800. Their goal was to basically make a clone of the 6800, except to cut costs so dramatically many changes had to be made, features cut, registers, instructions and interrupts removed. Even so, the 6501 was still pin for pin compatible with the 6800 until Motorola sued Mostek over it. The settlement was that Mostek change the pin out, so the 6501 became the 6502.

Chuck Peddle was the head technical sales person for the 6800 at Motorola and in every customer meeting where he showed early prototypes, customers loved the CPU but said the price was simply a non-starter. He got so sick of hearing it, he quit, joined Mostek, recruited some 6800 engineers and started the 6500 chip project to compete.
by monkaiju | 2026-01-30 01:26:36+00:00
I mean, Im 10ish years in, so probably have another couple decades at least, and I never use AI assistants for anything. Also one of the two highest performing team members, and the other doesn't use it either.

Its a great time to be a non-AI user, and even better to have never been one, because its easier now than ever to differentiate oneself from those who are reliant on it and, over the long run, much less effective because of it.
by 827a | 2026-01-30 01:26:38+00:00
This is not an "obvious in hindsight" thing, and its also something that was discussed in the physical penetration testing community long before 2019 when this happened. Everyone makes mistakes, and they were legally in the right, but most in physical pentesting know: You're probably going to make someone look like a fool during your work, and your CYA needs to be rock solid to not just absolve the illegality of what you're doing, but the immediate consequences of that newly minted fool also having an ego and authority. A piece of paper will not save your life against a trigger-happy rookie cop in a dark hallway at 2am, even if it might ruin his after you're already dead.

And, by the way: The Sheriff was in the wrong and some of what happened to these pentesters should never have happened. But, this case is not nearly as clear-cut as some one-sided storytelling suggests it is. When the Sheriff called the contact numbers at the State of Iowa, one person didn't answer, and a second person said that they "did not believe the men had permission to conduct physical intrusion." One of the pentesters also blew lightly positive for alcohol. One of the men was from Florida, and the second from Seattle, working for a security firm out of Colorado. That's suspicion enough to end up in jail overnight.

The fact that it went on longer than that more-so gets at the real story. The State was exercising an authority they had, maybe for the first time, against a security force that not only didn't know they were exercising it, but didn't realize they even had the authority in the first place. These guys got caught in the middle. The distribution of blame is pretty significant: The State should have informed the local security, but didn't. The State should have had contacts on-call during the intrusion, but didn't. Coalfire should have confirmed all of this in the interest of protecting their employees, but didn't. The testers shouldn't have been drinking beforehand, but did. The Sheriff should have dropped the matter the next day, but didn't. Sure, some of this is 20-20 hindsight, but taken in its entirety there were a lot of balls dropped, and it paints a picture of a state government that has some box to check for compliance, doesn't care how it gets checked or what gets found, and a security firm that isn't conducting their penetration tests responsibly.