MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cocoa19 | 2026-01-31 04:52:23+00:00
Have you tried the Azure Speech Studio? I wonder how your custom model compares to this solution.

I played around with python scripts for the same purpose. The AI gives feedback that can be transformed to a percentage of correctness. One annoyance is that for Mandarin, the percentage is calculated at the character level, whereas with English, it gives you a more granular score at the phoneme level.
Ask HN: Better approach for plagiarism detection in self-hosted LMS?
by pigon1002 | 2026-01-31 04:52:26+00:00
I'm building an open-source LMS and added plagiarism detection using OpenSearch's more_like_this query plus character n-grams for similarity scoring.

Basically when a student submits an answer, I search for similar answers from other students on the same question. Works decently but feels a bit hacky - just reusing the search engine I already had.

Current setup:

search = cls.search().filter(
"nested", path="answers",
query={"term": {"answers.question_id": str(question_id)}}
)
search = search.query(
"nested",
path="answers",
query={
"more_like_this": {
"fields": ["answers.answer"],
"like": text,
"min_term_freq": 1,
"minimum_should_match": "1%",
}
},
)

# get top 10, then re-rank in Python
def normalize(t):
return re.sub(r"\s+", "", t.strip())

def char_ngrams(t, n=3):
return set(t[i:i+n] for i in range(len(t)-n+1))

norm_text = normalize(text)
text_ngrams = char_ngrams(norm_text)

for hit in response.hits:
norm_answer = normalize(hit.answer)
answer_ngrams = char_ngrams(norm_answer)

intersection = len(text_ngrams & answer_ngrams)
union = len(text_ngrams | answer_ngrams)
ratio = int((intersection / union) * 100)

if ratio >= 60:
# flag as similar

Constraints:
- Self-hosted only, no external APIs
- Few thousand students
- Want simple operations, already running OpenSearch anyway

Questions:
- Is this approach reasonable or am I missing something obvious?
- What do other self-hosted systems use? Checked Moodle docs but their plagiarism plugins mostly call external services
- Anyone tried lightweight ML models for this that don't need GPU?

The search engine approach works but curious if there's a better way that fits our constraints.
by shimman | 2026-01-31 04:53:41+00:00
Dude you falling for so obvious corpo-psyops is so sad. Tobacco companies literally published research that said cigarettes were dangerous too, that didn't stop them from lying to Congress and saying cigarettes weren't totally safe.

Some of you are the reason why there needs to be a new luddite movement (fun fact, the luddites were completely correct in their movements; they fought against oppressive factory owners that treated their fellow humans terrible, smashing the very same machines they used themselves. Entrepreneurs were literally ushering in a new hell on Earth where their factors were killing so many orphans (because many people refused to work in such places originally, until forced by dying in the streets or dying from their labor in such places) they had to ship the bodies of children across towns to not draw suspicion). Until the entrepreneurs started killing them and convincing the king reagent to kill them with the state, they had massive support. Support so high that when suspected luddites were escaping from the "police" you could hear entire towns cheering them on helping them escape).

People rightfully hate this stuff and you refuse to see, the evidence says it's terrible but hey let's still sell it anyway what's the worse that can happen?
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-31 04:53:52+00:00
I know the question is tongue-in-cheek, but I think it’s a fascinating question, so I’ll take it seriously. If you predict the crash and it happens two years later, i think you basically cannot profit off that guess, so I’d say no. Although i haven’t provided data for the two-year claim, there certainly exists some period N for which the prediction no longer pays off, given a fixed drop. But if you can predict it 6 months in advance, you probably could profit! I think a certain amount of annoying repetition is fine for profitability.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-31 04:54:59+00:00
Russia has adapted to drone warfare quite adeptly and Ukraine currently increasingly lacks the requisite technology and counter measures to deal with it. Faster, Harder to Shoot Down: Jet-Powered Shahed Drones Strike Kyiv at Speeds Over 500 km/h - https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57347 (See also - Missiles of desperation: Inside Ukraine’s last-ditch weapons gamble - https://www.rt.com/russia/624739-missiles-of-desperation-ukr... ).
by westurner | 2026-01-31 04:56:07+00:00
/? STUN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There is a Native Sockets spec draft that only Chrome implements;

"Direct Sockets API":
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/iwa/direct-sockets :

> The Direct Sockets API addresses this limitation by enabling Isolated Web Apps (IWAs) to establish direct TCP and UDP connections without a relay server. With IWAs, thanks to additional security measures—such as strict Content Security Policy (CSP) and cross-origin isolation— this API can be safely exposed.

Similar: "Breaking the QR Limit: The Discovery of a Serverless WebRTC Protocol – Magarcia" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829296 re: Quick Share, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Aware, BLE Beacons, BSSIDs and the Geolocation API
by westurner | 2026-01-31 04:56:27+00:00
> Prior work exists: animated QR sequences that flash frames until the scanner captures all parts23, and fountain codes (TXQR4) that tolerate missed frames. These achieve ~9 KB/s under ideal conditions but require holding steady for 10+ seconds

Consideration for Photosensitive epilepsy; how to avoid this risk? What bitrates are realistic given these updated constraints?

/? hertz epilepsy:
https://www.google.com/search?q=hertz+epilepsy ...
https://share.google/aimode/14ylo2plM3ajp3Vwy

"Nearby peer discovery without GPS using environmental fingerprints" (2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003606

The Google Geolocation API uses the wifi BSSID lists to determine location. "How the Geolocation API works":
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geolocation...

Quick Share > Technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Share#Technology

> Internally, Quick Share relies on standard Wi-Fi technologies such as Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi Aware (Neighbor Awareness Networking), BLE,

> 2025, Google extended Quick Share to support interoperable sharing with Apple's AirDrop on devices running iOS 26

Android > Google Awareness API > Snapshot API:
https://developers.google.com/awareness/android-api/snapshot...

get_nearby_beacons:
https://developers.google.com/awareness/android-api/snapshot...

But Gemini says that's deprecated since 2021; to instead use a third-party library like AltBeacon for finding BLE beacons:

AltBeacon/android-beacon-library:
https://github.com/AltBeacon/android-beacon-library :

> By default, this library will only detect beacons meeting the AltBeacon specification.

> If you want this library to work with proprietary or custom beacons, see the BeaconParser class.

davidgyoung/beacon-parsers:
https://github.com/davidgyoung/beacon-parsers :

> IBeaconParser,
EddystoneUidParser,
EddystoneUrlParser,
UrlBeaconParser

What are BLE beacon chipsets and costs, and what bitrates can a BLE beacon push?

Wifi-direct > Fetch the list of peers:
https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/wifi/wifi...

Notes also for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46833627
by t-3 | 2026-01-31 04:56:49+00:00
The trillion dollars a year pumped into the military support the stock prices of quite a few highly-valued companies. A sudden collapse of hegemony would be bad for "the market", but that seems unlikely unless WW3 actually kicks off instead of a few more rounds of opportunistic snatching and bullying by the big countries, and in that case few people would care about the stock market.
by stego-tech | 2026-01-31 04:58:06+00:00
I can't time the market worth shit - I got my first investments out before the 2008 collapse in earnest, and got into the job market at its peak. I waited through the 2010s to accumulate money to invest, only to start doing so amidst rampant speculation in crypto, then NFTs, then meme stocks, then AI.

So yeah. I am not getting a job at a financial firm anytime soon.

That said, the societal gestalt seems primed for something to go horribly wrong. AI boosters are positing their models as solving all of society's ills, which first requires acknowledgement that these are in fact problems facing society requiring solutions. Everyone is broadly on the same side - wealth inequality is a problem, climate change is a problem, energy dependence is a problem, job security is a problem, housing is a problem, etc - but we're all varied on the approach to solving these problems based on personal biases and perspectives. YouTube is infested with AI slop, social media is filled with doomers and preppers, and subcultures are simultaneously splitting off from larger groups (like those leaving Twitter/X for BlueSky or Mastodon) while also forming newer alliances and communities around shared goals or ideologies. Even those in positions of power acknowledge the polycrisis before us, while exacerbating it further by firing swaths of workers to fund their own bunkers, yachts, and contingency plans via share price bumps.

It's in the air, this horrid pit in the stomach that doom lingers just around the corner. It's been there for a decade, long before COVID, festering beneath the surface. Hell, for many of us pre-9/11 Americans, it's been a gradual decline since the heydays of the maximum-employment 1990s. So many of us feel it that it just cannot be ignored, and thus it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: enough of us believe something bad is coming, therefore something bad must happen to quell those feelings.

There's two things that give me (and my OCD) solace of a sort:

* We'll all find out together, regardless of status or strata

* Most of us - statistically, generally, based on prior events and barring any explosive escalation - will likely be relatively fine

Yeah, the shifting of geopolitics is likely to result in more violent conflicts with the potential to kill billions if things go NBC. If we don't address climate change, millions will die from wholly preventable causes and tens of trillions of dollars of property will be destroyed over the next century. Misuse of AI could result in doomsday scenarios that Sci-Fi has warned us about for decades. Wealth inequality appears poised to create a modern version of the Coal Wars, if current events are any indication.

Technology alone won't save our asses. Neither will some mythical billionaire genius, or AGI deity. It'll have to be us, regular humans, rejecting the present and choosing to build a better future together.

And I think we can do that.
by majormajor | 2026-01-31 04:58:36+00:00
> Complicated-enough LLMs also are aboslutely doing a lot more than "just trying to predict the next word", as Anthropic's papers investigating the internals of trained models show - there's a lot more decision-making going on than that.

Are there newer changes that are actually doing prediction of tokens out of order or such, or are this a case of immense internal model state tracking but still using it to drive the prediction of a next token, one at a time?

(Wrapped in a variety of tooling/prompts/meta-prompts to further shape what sorts of paragraphs are produced compared to ye olden days of the gpt3 chat completion api.)
by michaelsshaw | 2026-01-31 05:00:49+00:00
> How much coal do they burn? Did climate change suddenly become NOT an existential threat?

As in any developing country, China has relied on cheap fossil fuels for rapid growth. Now, China is a global leader in reducing emissions, essentially blowing every other country out of the water.

> Are their global fishing fleets sustainable?

Is literally anything about the US sustainable?

> Where do the precursors for fentanyl come from?

You mean the legal drug that is absolutely 100% necessary for use in hospitals? Yeah, don't care.

It seems you're supremely focused on "China bad" gotchas as a desperate final gasp because you may be realizing that you don't actually have anything interesting to add to any conversation on any topic. Perhaps think more before opening your mouth.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-31 05:01:06+00:00
NB. There is no claim being made that biometrics on phones does not have "legitimate" uses other than data collection for commercial or other purposes that benefit so-called "tech" companies that control the closed-source software

To assume such a claim is to detach oneself from reality

On the contrary, what is being stated here is that this "feature" may, like many others, be used to benefit the company that is engaged in data collection, surveillance and ad services as a "business model", whether this is the majority segment of their business or a growing minority

To ignore this possibility is to separate oneself from reality, namely the reality of the company's business interests in data collection, surveillance and ad services and the total lack of transparency into and deficiency of regulation over how the company operates
by trhway | 2026-01-31 05:01:32+00:00
I don't know what you're so surprised about. The ticket reads like any other typical [Big] enterprise ticket. UI works, headless - not. Headless is what hackers use. O, found the support guy who knows what headless is and the doc page with a number of workarounds. Even ssh tunnel (how is that made in into enterprise docs?!) and classic - copy logged in credentials from UI machine once you logged in there. Bla-bal-bla and again classic:

Root Cause
The backend enforces an Enterprise-only entitlement for codex_device_code_auth on POST /backend-api/accounts/{account_id}/beta_features. Your account is on the Team plan, so the server rejects the toggle with {"detail":"Enterprise plan required."}

and so on and so forth. At any given day i have several such long-term tickets that get ultimately escalated to me (i'm in dev and usually the guy who would pull the page with ssh tunnel :)
by bahmboo | 2026-01-31 05:02:21+00:00
For me the interesting part of his argument is that we reframe things we see in real life based on the recorded version of the similar thing we have seen before. It often makes it more compelling and easier to relate to. Then it becomes the way we interpret our world and since so many people consume it similarly it becomes a mass mental constraint on our perception, understanding and interpretation of the real world.

This excerpt isn't really about football per se, so if you take it only that way you might be missing his point.

I like Klosterman. I can't write as well.
by jaggederest | 2026-01-31 05:03:09+00:00
LLM summary, for discussion only:

The article’s core argument is that the U.S. dollar isn’t going to lose global dominance in some dramatic, headline-friendly collapse; instead, like every reserve currency before it, it will slowly erode at the margins as users quietly reduce reliance on it. Historical transitions (sterling to dollar) didn’t happen because of declarations or crises, but because the world gradually found alternatives that were good enough for specific needs. What’s changing now isn’t that the dollar has “failed,” but that the global financial system has evolved past some of the assumptions that made dollar dominance frictionless. The freezing of Russia’s reserves in 2022 shattered the idea that reserve assets are politically neutral, prompting central banks to hedge geopolitical risk via gold, bilateral trade arrangements, and non-dollar settlement systems. The result isn’t de-dollarization as revolution, but de-dollarization as creep: a long, largely invisible process that only looks obvious once it’s mostly done.
by kristopolous | 2026-01-31 05:03:15+00:00
I tried a few these ... they are pretty slow. If you are looking for free inference you'd have to be pretty desperate.

example:

$ OLLAMA_HOST=http://47.101.61.248:9000/ ollama run gemma3:27b "outline ww2"

Many appear to be proxies. I'm familiar with some "serverless" architectures that do things like this https://www.shodan.io/host/34.255.41.58 ... you can see this has a bunch of ollama ports running really really old versions

You can pull down "new" manifests but very few ollamas are new enough for decent modern models like glm-4.7-flash. The free tier for the kimi-k2.5:cloud is going to be far more useful then pasting these into you OLLAMA_HOST variable.

I think the real headline is: "thousands of slow machines running mediocre small models from last year. Totally open..."

Anyways, if codellama:13b is your jam, go wild I guess.
by rambojohnson | 2026-01-31 05:04:43+00:00
but users do care eventually. they just don’t yet have the vocabulary that “other sausage makers” do. dismissing these concerns implies that outcomes matter and provenance doesn’t, which may be convenient if you’re building wrappers, but it’s corrosive if you care about ecosystems, incentives, and long-term quality when the app is compared to others in the market.

that app is not the only app in the market that focuses on conversation. feedback like this is worth taking seriously rather than waving off.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-31 05:05:07+00:00
Agreed. But, as an all-day agentic dev tool user, I know this pattern well. To avoid this regurgitated pixelation, I start a new conversation/chat as often as possible, and then human-in-the-middle curate the correct .md and json files when I kick off the next chat. My tools try their best to do exactly this, but they still suck.

These OpenClaw agents are not even close to there yet. They are throwing the entire thread into the context window each time, correct? This reminds me of what happens when you recursively upload a photo to an LLM, or upload a video recursively to YouTube. It gets not good. Compression sucks.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-31 05:08:20+00:00
> The same way you test any system - you find a sampling of test subjects, have them interact with the system and then evaluate those interactions.

That’s not strictly how I test my systems. I can release with confidence because of a litany of SWE best practices learned and borrowed from decades of my own and other people’s experiences.

> No system is guaranteed to never fail, it's all about degree of effectiveness and resilience.

It seems like the product space for services built on generative AI is diminishing by the day with respect to “effectiveness and resilience”. I was just laughing with some friends about how terrible most of the results are when using Apple’s new Genmoji feature. Apple, the company with one of the largest market caps in the world.

I can definitely use LLMs and other generative AI directly, and understand the caveats, and even get great results from them. But so far every service I’ve interacted with that was a “white label” repackaging of generative AI has been absolute dogwater.
by riddlemethat | 2026-01-31 05:08:58+00:00
Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.
by panick21_ | 2026-01-31 05:11:05+00:00
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.

This is a very wrong way to tell the story.

Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.

And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.

By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.

Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.

Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.

There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.

But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.

But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.
by t-3 | 2026-01-31 05:11:35+00:00
No, it's because Obama disillusioned the left, and Biden just hammered it home. Those who thought the Democrats could actually represent the "big tent" have all been disappointed over and over again by sheepdogging and ignoring popular issues with bipartisan support in favor of corporate interests with only an occasional performative nod towards liberal ideals. That's why the right showed up to vote and the left stayed home.
by Leftium | 2026-01-31 05:12:54+00:00
Oh~ I missed "Shared items split cleanly" in the copy. And I didn't feel like creating a new account to check it out. Would be nice if you didn't have to sign up/login. (Maybe like how a shopping cart allows creating an account at checkout)

(And I initially thought "TabChop" would be a windows management tool: split windows...)
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-01-31 05:13:07+00:00
Hasn't AI been annoying the piss out of us for well over a year now? I've definitely been hearing "10x productivity" for that long.

So - where is it all? Where's all the 10 years of software dev that happened over the last year? Where's the companies blowing their competitors out of the water by compressing a decade of production into a year?

The proof is in the pudding. Or lack thereof. If the claims were anything like they say, we'd see something by now.
by bsder | 2026-01-31 05:13:52+00:00
And I would be VERY interested to see if that increasing NFL revenue was due to people spending more hours watching/attending or because the NFL have a ton of deals with all the online gambling sites whose revenue is going apeshit.

My gut feel is that people are actually spending a lot fewer hours watching NFL games.

Even when I have been at parties where an NFL game was on, the younger crowd were diddling with their phones--generally playing games. No judgment, it's not like phone games are inferior to vegetating in front of the boob tube--but I suspect that while an NFL game may be "on", it's not really the "focus" anymore.
by zdc1 | 2026-01-31 05:15:16+00:00
I completely agree with this. There's a certain confidence you get when you can hear a word you don't know, but can still comprehend it well enough to know what pinyin to type into your dictionary app. Mandarin Blueprint has a nice pinyin pronunciation video on YouTube that I worked through a while ago, and then followed with a few weeks of immersion in Taiwan, I was able to really pick out what people were saying.

I feel like listening is the key to speaking. You don't necessarily need to rote learn the tones for each word. You just need say words as you hear them spoken by others.