MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2026-01-23 07:19:00+00:00
I was similar except it happened a bit earlier. In the UK the last compulsory school exam, GCSE, seemed like a memory test to me. I could often just figure out stuff in the actual exam even if I'd only briefly overheard something mentioned in a lesson. I didn't do a single piece of homework once I realised there were no real consequences and messed around in lessons. Got top marks in all the subjects I cared about and median in everything else (like art, where I didn't even bother to hang up my final piece).

A-level is like the stepping stone to university. It's optional and you only do subjects you like. Suddenly you had to actually understand the stuff. It wasn't just a memory test. The first exams I got B all around. I wasn't happy with this so I started doing homework etc and actually understanding things.

Coincidentally, my breakthrough also came with Newtownian mechanics. I was quite good at integration, but I didn't understand why I was doing it. Suddenly the whole thing started to make sense when I realised it was about rates of change etc.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-23 07:19:23+00:00
The <article> command in HTML can be useful, even if most implementations do not do much with it. For example, a browser could offer the possibility to print or display only the contents of a single <article> block, or to display marks in the scrollbar for which positions in the scrollbar correspond to the contents of the <article> block. It would also be true of <time>; although many implementations do not do much with it, they could do stuff with it. And, also of <h1>, <h2>, etc; although browsers have built-in styles for them, allowing the end user to customize them is helpful, and so is the possibility of using them to automatically display the table of contents in a separate menu. None of these behaviours should need to be standardized; they can be by the implementation and by the end user configuration etc; only the meaning of the commands will be standardized, not their behaviour.
by survirtual | 2026-01-23 07:19:23+00:00
Recursive self-questioning predates external tools and is already well known. What is new is broad access to a low cost, non retaliatory dialogic interface that removes many social, sexual, and status pressures. LLMs do not make people think. They reduce interpersonal distortions that often interfere with thinking. That reduction in specific social biases (while introducing model encoded priors) is what can materially improve cognition for reflective and exploratory tasks.

Simply, when thinking hits a wall, we can now consult a machine via conversation interface lacking conventional human social biases. That is a new superpower.
by consp | 2026-01-23 07:20:15+00:00
> Or is it skimmer-proof?

Put a reader with a shield on the pad and a new pad on top and a small terminal in somewhere out of sight. You won't know the difference. Requires infrastructure though so it is a bit more complicated and a lot more noticeable. Likely used the non-pin entry limit which is always reset after you payed a large amount and had to enter your pin. Not like the strip readers of olden days.

Anecdote: We had a "chip charge" system where you put money in your card via a ATM like device and those sometimes had strange "extensions" in front of it which read your chip while you charged it and immediately took the money. People often don't know what too look for when it comes to skimming devices and with tech it may look like a strange but genuine device.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-23 07:20:29+00:00
I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating.

A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-23 07:20:53+00:00
> Nothing of that requires SPA, and the alternative is certainly not “nothing”.

Yes actually dev teams did have a massive leap in capability with dynamic HTML & updating the page.

> Not sure how you even get to that conclusion, strange rant.

Not sure how you even can miss that shift, strange miss.

(So, uh, do you always have to be such a deorgatory shit that I have to turn your crap faced mean shit back around? Can you talk like not a flaming shit bag? I don't super love turning your shitty mean crap ass personally aggressive negative worded words back at you, but you are just such a mean little shit about everything & so personally shitty about how you phrase things? And you are in such obvious denial. I don't think anyone sees how the web would grow while meeting your ridiculous constraints and that just seems obvious. Whatever third way you are trying to advocate for is clear as mud. But mostly just stop being such an aggressive ass!)
by muchfriction | 2026-01-23 07:21:10+00:00
I was having a similar odd sense of something being off, then got to

> This is not new. Writing has always done this for me. What is different is the speed. I can probe half-formed thoughts, discard bad formulations, and try again without much friction. That encourages a kind of thinking I might have otherwise skipped.

This is a mess. The triple enumeration, twice in a row, right in the middle of a message that warranted a more coherent train of thought. That is, they want to say they already experienced similar gains before from writing as an activity, but the llm conversations are better. Better in what way? Faster, and "less friction". What? What is even the friction in... writing? What made it slow as well, like, are you not writing prompts?

The LLM-ness of the formatting is literally getting in the way of the message. Maybe OOP didn't notice before publishing, but they successfully argued the opposite. Their communication got worse.
by genewitch | 2026-01-23 07:21:54+00:00
> there's a strong correlation between length of response and accuracy

i'd need to see real numbers. I can trigger a thinking model to generate hundreds of tokens and return a 3 word response (however many tokens that is), or switch to a non-thinking model of the same family that just gives the same result. I don't necessarily doubt your experience, i just haven't had that experience tuning SD, for example; which is also xformer based

I'm sure there's some math reason why longer context = more accuracy; but is that intrinsic to transformer-based LLMs? that is, per your thought that the 'scalers want shorter responses, do you think they are expending more effort to get shorter, equivalent accuracy responses; or, are they trying to find some other architecture or whatever to overcome the "limitations" of the current?
by left-struck | 2026-01-23 07:22:05+00:00
I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it:
When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking)

I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps.

God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember.

Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-23 07:24:47+00:00
>Many people intend those programs to work that way, but they don't

It's not as binary. It fails for some people, but it definitely works for most. There's always people slipping through the cracks of the net, even in the most generous welfare states, but that's a long stretch to claim americans are "dying of poverty" when they have an abundance of resources at their disposal to not die.

For example, if you're homeless american in a large city, you can go dumpster diving and get fresh food that's been thrown out just because it looks wrong. If your tummy hurts, you can go to the ER and receive mandated sci-fi healthcare, even if you're homeless. This is a far cry from the definition of "dying of poverty". I suggest you visit places like Russian republics, Myanmar or Nigeria if you want to see what actual dying of poverty looks like where you don't have access to free food and scifi healthcare.

The biggest problem killing americans is drug addiction and mental illnesses. Since if your brain is fried you won't be able to make much use of available free food and healthcare.

>Many would say it's actually the wealthy who are subsidized

That's always been the case since post-WW2 at least and gotten worse since Reagan. What's your suggestion to fix it? The super wealthy have too much power and influence over finance and politics, no matter who you vote for. Elected officials, on either side, will never touch them since they're in this together, so the system is working as intended, there's nothing you can fix here.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-23 07:26:36+00:00
Exactly. As distributed systems legend Leslie Lamport puts it: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” (He added: “Mathematics is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is.”)

I still have a lot of my best ideas in the shower, no paper and pen, no LLM to talk to. But writing them down is the only way to iron out all the ambiguity and sort out what’s really going to work and what isn’t. LLMs are a step up from that because they give you a ready-made critical audience for your writing that can challenge your assumptions and call out gaps and fuzziness (although as I said in my other comment, make sure you tell them to be critical!)

Thinking is great. I love it. And there are advantages to not involving LLMs too early in your process. But it’s just a first step and you need to write your ideas down and submit them to external scrutiny. Best of all for that is another person who you trust to give you a careful and honest reading, but those people are busy and hard to find. LLMs are a reasonable substitute.
by BlueShrimpGames | 2026-01-23 07:26:43+00:00
Thanks for testing it out CatsOnHats

I agree the game is far from original or as polished as it needs to be, that is why it is a Demo. I've fixed many things since the initial launch, which was a marathon 14 week sprint of 1300 commits, and 8-16 hour days, which you can see in the article.

This is my first game I made, and I am proud of the time it was made in, and the fact that it proved that it is possible to use AI coding to make a real game, something people barely believe now, let alone in October 2024 when the majority of the engine was coded. The quality of 'games' going viral on twitter that are 'vibe coded' are an absolute joke, and closer to the 'slop' you mention.

I understand most gamers are anti-ai, but it is what it is, I accept it...we got 400 wish lists, so can't hurt :)

I am aiming to significantly improve it by the full launch, hope you will give it 1 more try before launch :)
by seec | 2026-01-23 07:27:26+00:00
This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts.
I have encountered all of those bugs and more.

The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.

Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.
by bitsage | 2026-01-23 07:27:28+00:00
Venezuelans voted for the party alliance led by Machado and support the removal of Maduro [1].

Iran looks more complicated. Pretty much the only insight we get is from the diaspora and cosmopolitan people from Tehran. There seems to be a very significant armed force clearly in favor of the Ayatollah, so removing him without their complicity will likely lead to turmoil.

1. https://x.com/atlas_intel?lang=en
Show HN: AI Product Video Ads – Upload image and prompt → video ad
by howardV | 2026-01-23 07:28:42+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a tool that generates product video ads from images.

How it works:
1. Upload 1-4 product images
2. Describe your core selling point (e.g., "Ultra-lightweight sneakers")
3. Choose aspect ratio (16:9 or 9:16) and duration (8s-32s)
4. Get a video ad

No templates. No AI talking heads. No monthly subscription. Just pay per video.

Why I built this:
- Creatify, Arcads charge $100-200/month
- Most tools force you into "AI avatar reading script" format
- Small sellers just want simple product videos for social ads

I'm a solo dev running FreyaVideo, a pay-per-use AI video platform. This uses image-to-video models to animate your product photos into short ads.

Pricing: ~$0.10/second of video

Looking for feedback on:
- Output quality
- UX flow
- What features are missing

Try it: https://freyavideo.com/create/ad-generator

Happy to answer any questions.
by Quothling | 2026-01-23 07:29:06+00:00
Lumo will likely be the thing that moves me away from Proton. I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used. The password manager plugin for firefox isn't as good as bitwarden, but when you're paying it's part of the package so... If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really?

Anyway, it is sort of hilarious to report Proton as spam to Proton.
by scott_w | 2026-01-23 07:29:28+00:00
That wasn’t the intention of what I wrote. I was referring more to how people speak. It’s very common in British English to phrase a request as a question. The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.

That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
by mcmcmc | 2026-01-23 07:29:52+00:00
I think you’re doing situational awareness a disservice, and I’m guessing you’ve never worked in a field where it is a trained discipline.

It is not just paying attention to your surroundings, it is actively scanning and evaluating to anticipate changes to your situation. Big difference between standing on a hill taking in the view versus keeping your head on a swivel, identify avenues of approach and egress, all while looking, listening, and smelling for anything out of place.

It is more applicable to the physical world than any software domain.
by sefrost | 2026-01-23 07:29:53+00:00
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there!

But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
by trhway | 2026-01-23 07:30:02+00:00
"However, some read queries must remain on the primary because they’re part of write transactions. "

if there is a read replica that has reached required snapshot - it is usually enough (depends on your task of course) for it to be the snapshot that was at the start of your transaction - and if the read query doesn't need to read your transaction uncommitted data, then that replica can serve the read query.
by arctic-true | 2026-01-23 07:30:37+00:00
I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.
by appsoftware | 2026-01-23 07:30:53+00:00
I agree with the authors observations here. I think rather than it being purely language related, there's a link to the practice of 'rubber ducking', where when you start to explain your problem to someone else it forces you to step through the problem as you start to explain the context, the steps you've tried and where you're stuck. I think LLMs can be that other person for us sometimes, except that other person has a great broad range of expertise.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-23 07:31:05+00:00
I have a Proton mailbox I specifically keep around to serve as a honeypot, for tracking when one of the many annoying little services will inevitably mishandle the contact address I hand them.

Over the years, the only spam I ever received there was from Proton. Quite the way to recalibrate my expectations, eh?
by lovich | 2026-01-23 07:31:37+00:00
There is no world outside of a cult or hype bubble where a 6 day turnaround time from announcement to deprecation is acceptable for a standard.

Standards are something that multiple independent groups can build on and should be somewhat stable.

If this was labeled as experimental than maybe, although its crazy to waste time publishing if you are working on something that rapidly iterating. Its not though, because everyone in this AI boom is rushing to be the winner takes all, and is trying their best to signal to the crowd that they are that winner.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-23 07:31:59+00:00
I've come to distrust a number of "experts" in my time. It's not that I don't believe in expertise. It's that so many people bullshit it. From the people who promise to fix my drywall to the people who promise to fix my van. They are all fucking incompetent. I know because I've fixed the issues they have pointed out better than they have at a lower cost. Multiple times. Even when pricing out my own time at consultant rates.

And I don't mean I've just rejected the lowest offer to DIY shit to oblivion. I've accepted bids and been continuously disappointed with the results. To the point I no longer trust "experts" in these spaces because any "expertise" they bring is pretty shallow at best. The exception I'd point out is the auto-shop I prefer. They are busy enough that if I want to schedule something it's going to be 3-6 months out. As a result I've replaced my own suspension and replaced my alternator and starter myself while waiting for appointments with the rare actual experts in any domain. Actual expertise is rare and most folks don't know how to recognize it, especially outside of domains they are familiar with. Unfortunately it's way more profitable to fake expertise in various domains and collect payments and run than to actually stand behind your business and work. Thus the world we're forced to live in today.
by singron | 2026-01-23 07:32:07+00:00
Their options should be priced lower, but the common stock isn't valued according to the $5.15B. They raised $300M at $12B and $425M at $7.4B, which are both under water, so those shareholders will use their liquidation preference to get paid at least 1x. Assuming those rounds owned 7% of the company, there is at most $4.4B left for the remaining 93% of shareholders. That's about 8% less. If they deducted fees, legal services, or retention packages or had worse liquidation preferences or more underwater rounds, then it gets even lower.
by Someone | 2026-01-23 07:34:17+00:00
> Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.

They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294. Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)
by otabdeveloper4 | 2026-01-23 07:34:53+00:00
> discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families

I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly.

Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants".

Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.
by menaerus | 2026-01-23 07:35:33+00:00
It goes to show how future of SE will look like. Loose reviews (a big win for the industry) with each person capable of doing 10x more work, and basically orchestrating/overlooking the work done by the agents. The bottleneck eventually at some point, if not already, will become a fatigue caused by having to process/acknowledge/understand the sheer volume of code spitted out at speeds that we could never have imagined before.
by barthelomew | 2026-01-23 07:35:35+00:00
Predict your distributed LLM training time before you burn GPU hours.

We've open-sourced a tool (https://github.com/DebarghaG/estimate-train-time) that estimates wall-clock time for LLM training across multi-GPU setups with 3D parallelism (pipeline, tensor, and data).

This problem is extremely hard: you're modeling the interplay of thousands of GPU kernels, NCCL collectives across heterogeneous network topologies, pipeline bubbles, activation recomputation, and ZeRO optimizer communication all while these components interact in non-obvious ways at scale. Even off-by-2x estimates are useless for capacity planning.

Two years of painstaking work, ~$100k worth of cluster time, validated on real workloads at Perlmutter (NERSC) and Vista (TACC) some of the largest HPC clusters available for open science.

How it works:
1. Kernel-level profiling: We sample execution times for kernels like Flash Attention, fused GEMM (QKV/FFN projections), RMSNorm, embedding lookups, and cross-entropy loss across the (batch, seq_len, hidden_dim, num_heads, MP degree) parameter space.
2. Communication modeling: NCCL benchmarks capture ring all-reduce (tensor/data parallel sync), all-gather (ZeRO-1 parameter collection), and P2P send/recv (pipeline stage activation transfers) across intra-node NVLink and inter-node InfiniBand topologies.
3. Analytical composition: Operator predictions feed into a pipeline scheduling model (AF-AB / 1F1B) that accounts for bubble overhead: (PP - 1) / (num_microbatches + PP - 1) idle fraction, layer distribution across head/middle/tail stages, and overlapped DP gradient sync.
4. Runs on CPU (post-sampling) no GPU access needed for inference of training time.

This is highly extensible as a recipe. You may profile your own hardware with bundled kernel-sampling and NCCL-benchmarking scripts. You can add custom operators by implementing the regressor interface.

This work builds on our HiPC 2025 paper on fine-grained GPU performance modeling. Earlier code to reproduce results in paper: https://github.com/ICICLE-ai/distributed_training_estimator_...

Looking for early adopters and feedback especially teams doing parallelism strategy search or capacity planning at scale.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-23 07:35:40+00:00
So then the follow-up question to that is:

How can we make sure that fundamental pieces of open source software that power the Internet can have funding, and that the people who write them can have comfortable lives working on the piece of software they love that so many people use?

I think you've described a real problem. But people turn to VC because there are few other ways to make funding happen.