MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2026-01-08 23:48:31+00:00
If it were a fitness advantage if you could sense electromagnetic fields, then why have you evolved over billions of years to get where you are, without it?

But wait, you do sense electromagnetic fields in the 380 to 750 nm wavelength range, and remarkably well, to great profit.

The only fitness advantage that matters for evolution is whatever gets you to pass down your genes, versus someone else not passing down theirs. If sensing low-frequency electromagnetism, or static magnetic fields, were advantageous in the context of everything else that you are, for passing down your genes, you would have it by now.

Migratory birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field for navigation; if you needed to migrate thousands of kilometers every year (due to lacking other advantages to make that unnecessary), you might evolve that.
by cheema33 | 2026-01-08 23:48:43+00:00
I did use whisper last night to get the captions out of a video file. The standard whisper tool from OpenAI uses CPU. It took more than 20 minutes to fully process a video file that was a little more than an hour long. During that time my 20-Core CPU was pegged at 100% utilization and the fan got very loud. I then downloaded an Intel version that used the NPU. CPUs stayed close to 0% and fans remained quiet. Total task was completed in about 6 minutes.

NPUs can be useful for some cases. The AI PC crap is ill thought out however.
by avar | 2026-01-08 23:48:47+00:00
> This may highlight to some folks abroad
> the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment,
> and an armed civilian population

British India, the USSR, East Germany, Francoist Spain, Apartheid South Africa, Communist Romania etc. etc. The 20th century is full of repressive regimes with even more repressive gun laws that fell due to protests etc.

The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.

If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-08 23:48:53+00:00
Again, you're assuming as truth a lot of things that DHS spokespeople have asserted but not proven. If they put together a detailed, corroborated timeline of how this woman was tracking them all day, and prove the masked goon had reason to believe she was going to run him over, I will concede that this case was not a murder. I don't see why I should give masked goons the benefit of the doubt until then, especially since there are multiple prior instances of them prosecuting people for the temerity of getting shot before quietly dropping charges when the news cycle dies out.

> I similarly don't get to tell DEA, ATF, and multiple other agencies to just fuck off, especially if I encounter them in the wild

This part you absolutely do get to do! ICE loves to deploy this rhetorical trick, where the narrow prohibition on obstructing their official duties is twisted into a broad obligation to refrain from antagonizing them. It's 100% legal to follow law enforcement agents around the city shouting rude things at them, or to tell them to fuck off absent specific legal authority which immigration enforcement almost never has over citizens.
by bhk | 2026-01-08 23:49:03+00:00
1g/lb is in fact a popular target among bodybuilders.

Much research indicates 0.5 to 0.7 g/lb provides most of the benefits, with continuing but diminishing gains above 0.7 g/lb. And the benefit is not just for "body building", but also for minimizing muscle loss during weight loss and improving insulin sensitivity. Other research indicates we may benefit from higher levels as we age.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-08 23:49:29+00:00
> Because it’s meant to inflame the population into reacting, further justifying the oppression.

You only need to justify the oppression if there is meaningful constraint on it without further justification.

> You’re right in that there’s no legal need for it,

No, I didn't say anything about legal need. What I am said is that there is no practical need because the actions are already far beyond what the law allows and there is nothing, whether through legal institutions, popular resistance, or otherwise, that is meaningfully constraining action, so a formal act that would relieve legal constraints is practically meaningless, because the legal constraints which it relieves have no practical force as it is.

I’m saying that will-he-won’t-he about invoking the Insurrection Act, or “declaring martial law”, or any other formal change of legal regime are, at this point, serving as a distraction from the fact that the executive’s substantive actions are not actually constrained by the nominal legal regime, and that changes in what is formally allowed do not matter very much what was in being done without meaningful resistance is already well outside of what is formally allowed.
by mmasu | 2026-01-08 23:49:36+00:00
I disagree with this - there have been overthrowings that did not require weapons in the field (i.e. Egypt, Tunisia), while widespread weapons were likely to cause civil wars (Lybia, Syria). In these cases however the role of the army was key in forcing the rulers out (and in Egypt to replace them), which might be unlikely in the case of Iran.
by xorcist | 2026-01-08 23:49:59+00:00
It's a bit more complicated than that. The ecosystem around node is just weird. It's not clear what role NPM wants to have.

Lots of people chase downloads on NPM. It's their validation, their youtube subscribers, or their github stars if you will. That's how they get job offers. Or at least they think they do, I don't know if it actually works. There's tons of good software there, but the signal to noise ratio is still rather low.

Given that, I'd rather get paid for including your software as a dependency to my software, boosting your downloads for a long time.

Just kidding, of course. On that last part. But it wouldn't surprise me the least if something like it actually happened. After all, you can buy stars on github just like on any other social media. And that does strange things to the social dynamics.
by groby_b | 2026-01-08 23:50:11+00:00
Fairly certain it'd be more sustainable than a $4/month subscription, which is a nuisance for anybody who'd actually want to pay for this.

$4 is targeting the hobbyist market. Within that segment, the tiny population of devs who'd actually be willing to pay for tools usually uses a large assortment of tools, and is not willing to pay a separate subscription fee for each.
by coder543 | 2026-01-08 23:50:19+00:00
To me, a closer analogy is In Context Learning.

In the olden days of 2023, you didn’t just find instruct-tuned models sitting on every shelf.

You could use a base model that has only undergone pretraining and can only generate text continuations based on the input it receives. If you provided the model with several examples of a question followed by an answer, and then provided a new question followed by a blank for the next answer, the model understood from the context that it needed to answer the previous question. This is the most primitive use of ICL, and a very basic way to achieve limited instruction following behavior.

With this few-shot example, I would call that few-shot ICL. Not zero shot, even though the model weights are locked.

But, I am learning that it is technically called zero shot, and I will accept this, even if I think it is a confusingly named concept.
by hurricanepootis | 2026-01-08 23:50:31+00:00
I fear so much for the future of Iran. Iran needs to decide its future, free from outside powers. Iran's entire 20th and 21st centuries of paranoia and strife can be traced back to, partly (imo mostly), to British, Russian, and eventually American interference, meddling, and domination in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century respectively.

Iran will never have a happy store as long as it remains an "interests" for greater powers.
by behindsight | 2026-01-08 23:50:39+00:00
While it's commendable, the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

You get a good credit score and still live within your means while also getting additional points + bank covering any fraudulent activity if the card got stolen.

Of course this method probably won't work for people that feel they would rather just cut themselves off from temptation fully or those without access to banking systems, which I sympathise with.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-08 23:51:05+00:00
I explored a startup idea that really didn't make sense unless there was a way to ensure users were unique humans in an anonymous and privacy preserving way.

Researched it substantially and realized it's an unsolved problem. Anything that makes a dent is incomplete and comes with ugly tradeoffs. For a time I wondered if I should try and solve it myself, but I could never think any solution that hadn't already been/being tried. Years later I'm left curious if it's even possible to solve the problem.

My point is that captcha won't solve this, and solving this problem is a lot harder than it seems at first, and might not even be solvable (which I know is hard to accept).

If someone does find an elegant privacy ensuring way to solve it, I think the impact would extend far beyond HN and could make a big difference to the future of civilization as a whole.
by observationist | 2026-01-08 23:51:07+00:00
Frontier models offer full access to their image models as part of the service. With those, you can iterate, and brainstorm, and have pretty granular control - "I want the motorcycle to look sleeker" etc, or "give me an inkpunk style bicycle that almost looks like a hybrid kanji drawing" or other such vague handwaving at the AI.

What's the benefit of a site or tool like this over just using the AI I already have?
by electroglyph | 2026-01-08 23:51:22+00:00
there's actually quite a bit of research in this field, here's a couple:

"ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14688

"Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08631
by Terr_ | 2026-01-08 23:51:45+00:00
But there is still a hugely important asymmetry: If the tool turns your office into gods of software, they should be able to prove it with godly results by now.

If I tell you AmbrosiaLLM doesn't turn me into a programming god... Well, current results are already consistent with that, so It's not clear what else I could easily provide.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-08 23:52:49+00:00
But the benefit might not be speed, it might be economy of attention.

I can code with Claude when my mind isn't fresh. That adds several hours of time I can schedule, where previously I had to do fiddly things when I was fresh.

What I can attest is that I used to have a backlog of things I wanted to fix, but hadn't gotten around to. That's now gone, and it vanished a lot faster than the half a year I had thought it would take.
by FunnyUsername | 2026-01-08 23:53:23+00:00
Most Zionists have a goal of preserving a Jewish majority for pragmatic reasons - history has shown that it's the only way to ensure the safety of Jews. That's not a supremacist ideology at all.

Moreover, no country is perfect, and we shouldn't I have double standards just for Israel. Can you identify any other Middle Eastern country that compares favorably, in terms of diversity and tolerance of all religions and ethnicities?
by guerrilla | 2026-01-08 23:54:20+00:00
The map is just grey. The controls are there though.

cdn.tailwindcss.com should not be used in production. To use Tailwind CSS in production, install it as a PostCSS plugin or use the Tailwind CLI: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation cdn.tailwindcss.com:64:1711
You are using the in-browser Babel transformer. Be sure to precompile your scripts for production - https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/ babel.min.js:3:3121456
Source map error: Error: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Resource URL: https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.min.js
Source Map URL: babel.min.js.map
by tombert | 2026-01-08 23:54:21+00:00
I think part of the issue is that it's hard to be "exciting" in a lot of spaces, like desktop computers.

People have more or less converged on what they want on a desktop computers in the last ~30 years. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, but I am saying that I think we're largely at the state of "boring", and improvements are generally going to be more incremental. The problem is that "slightly better than last year" really isn't a super sexy thing to tell your shareholders. Since the US economy has basically become a giant ponzi scheme based more on vibes than actual solid business, everything sort of depends on everything being super sexy and revolutionary and disruptive at all times.

As such, there are going to be many attempts from companies to "revolutionize" the boring thing that they're selling. This isn't inherently "bad", we do need to inject entropy into things or we wouldn't make progress, but a lazy and/or uninspired executive can try and "revolutionize" their product by hopping on the next tech bandwagon.

We saw this nine years ago with "Long Blockchain Ice Tea" [1], and probably way farther back all the way to antiquity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
by throwaway293892 | 2026-01-08 23:54:44+00:00
I used to work at Intel until recently. Pat Gelsinger (the prior CEO) had made one of the top goals for 2024 the marketing of the "AI PC".

Every quarter he would have an all company meeting, and people would get to post questions on a site, and they would pick the top voted questions to answer.

I posted mine: "We're well into the year, and I still don't know what an AI PC is and why anyone would want it instead of a CPU+GPU combo. What is an AI PC and why should I want it?" I then pointed out that if a tech guy like me, along with all the other Intel employees I spoke to, cannot answer the basic questions, why would anyone out there want one?

It was one of the top voted questions and got asked. He answered factually, but it still wasn't clear why anyone would want one.
by arjie | 2026-01-08 23:55:12+00:00
I've got a simple formula in life for when people do things beneficial to me: I praise them for it and encourage them to keep it going. If someone does things antagonistic to my interests, and then corrects course in reaction to objection, they can be sure they're going to be rewarded. This has worked for me.

If your belief is that some other tactic works, then I can see why you'd do that. For my part, carrot + stick has always worked better than stick + more stick.
Show HN: Roleplay-first chat UI for an OpenAI-compatible chat completions API
by abliterationai | 2026-01-08 23:55:44+00:00
I built a dedicated roleplay chat UI for abliteration.ai: https://abliteration.ai/roleplay

The backend is OpenAI-compatible (/v1/chat/completions), with usage-based pricing and no prompt/output retention by default (details on the site). The UI is meant for long-form character chats and interactive fiction, without needing a local frontend.

Docs (including a roleplay backend guide and a SillyTavern integration guide):
https://abliteration.ai/docs

Would love feedback on missing RP features, UX rough edges, and what you would expect from a roleplay-first interface.
by vdupras | 2026-01-08 23:56:49+00:00
And it's flagged, of course.

Will somebody vouch for this? I know what you're thinking. This doesn't encourage curiosity! This is politics! Same old, same old.

HN! Come on, how myopic must you be to not see that a working democracy is a condition sine qua non of your dear curiosity. You see what's happening in Iran, right? Well, they don't!

Put your glasses on, HN, you're not seeing shit.
by regularization | 2026-01-08 23:57:15+00:00
What countries helped overthrow prime minister Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran's foreign owned oil, and installed a dictatorship?

What countries backed the mullahs against Iran's secular and left opposition, helping SAVAK kill the opposition?

In 1979 the US was working to prevent anti-anti-Russian forces from coming to power, not the mullahs.
by cjcjameson | 2026-01-08 23:58:50+00:00
Parabola | Senior SRE + Full Stack Engineer | NYC/SF ONSITE-Hybrid | Full-time

We're building the AI-powered workflow automation platform that ops and finance teams at Lyft, Flexport, WHOOP, 1000+ other companies use to turn their business logic into executable workflows. They're dealing with messy reality: PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, APIs scattered across systems. We let non-technical teams build production-grade automation by describing what they need in plain English.

Senior SRE: Join our platform team keeping the foundation solid as we scale. Own reliability, security, and developer experience for a multi-tenant system handling 100+ integrations. You'll be on-call, but working on genuinely interesting problems: making deploys boring, keeping customer workflows running, building infrastructure that compounds. Best fit if you care about enabling teams, not just managing pipes.

Senior Full Stack Product Engineer: Own entire features from idea to production. Build interfaces that make complex automation accessible to people who've never written code. Current problems: LLM-powered workflow generation, extracting structure from chaos (PDFs, emails, weird APIs), real-time collaboration on live data pipelines.
The companies winning with AI in 2026 are the ones who made their business logic explicit and their context connected. We're building the layer that makes that possible.

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/parabola-io or email cj@parabola.io
by poopooracoocoo | 2026-01-08 23:59:29+00:00
Now y'all are just analysing the UX of YouTube and Chrome.

The problem is that by agreeing to close the tab, you're agreeing to discard the comment. There's currently no way to bring it back. There's no way to undo.

AI can't fix that. There is Microsoft's "snapshot" thing but it's really just a waste of storage space.
by rvnx | 2026-01-08 23:59:30+00:00
Tailwind is a dirty hack, normally you are supposed to declare a class, which you apply to items of the same concept. This is the cause for CSS to exist.

Front devs got lazy, and started writing for each element, position: absolute; left:3px, top:6px, color:red;...

You could write
<font color="red">Hello</font> this would be similar "cleanliness"
by viraptor | 2026-01-09 00:01:31+00:00
There are different types of contrary claims though, which may be an issue here.

One example: "agents are not doing well with code in languages/frameworks which have many recent large and incompatible changes like SwiftUI" - me: that's a valid issue that can be slightly controlled for with project setup, but still largely unsolved, we could discuss the details.

Another example: "coding agents can't think and just hallucinate code" - me: lol, my shipped production code disagrees, bring don't real examples of how you use them.

There's a lot of the second type on HN.
by eek2121 | 2026-01-09 00:01:44+00:00
FAANG isn't the world.

Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.
by mcny | 2026-01-09 00:02:15+00:00
That's good. We can tell people that so they will submit us patches for free.

Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification.

I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.
by javawizard | 2026-01-09 00:02:56+00:00
Plenty of sources suggest it is:

https://github.com/giladoved/webcam-heart-rate-monitor

https://medium.com/dev-genius/remote-heart-rate-detection-us...

The Reddit comments on that second one have examples of people doing it with low quality webcams: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/llnv93/remote_...

It's honestly amazing that this is doable.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-09 00:03:19+00:00
With LLMs I've seen zero-shot used to describe scenarios where there's no example, it "take this and output JSON", while one-shot has the prompt include an example like "take this and output JSON, for this data the JSON should look like this".

Thus if you feed a the model target voice, ie an example of the desired output vouce, it sure seems like it should be classified as one-shot.

However it seems the zero-shot in voice cloning is relative to learning, and in contrast to one-shot learning[1].

So a bit overloaded term causing confusion from what I can gather.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-shot_learning_(computer_vi...
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-09 00:03:35+00:00
He is indeed a very technical and nerdy person. For example, he was an early adopter of the SuperCollider audio programming language.

Fun trivia: he was trolling the SuperCollider mailing list under the alias "eric hard jams" which is an anagram of Richard [D.] James. Some of his messages were truely horrendous and he got kicked out eventually. He is quite a character...
by epistasis | 2026-01-09 00:03:50+00:00
Most mainstream outlets in the West will be slow to call it, but all oppression seems to have broken down of the populate, there is no massacre of the streets to stop the absolute massive protests, and apparently there's no government to suppress the protests now. How long until we hear of Khomeini in Russia?

We don't know what comes next but it looks like there will be massive change. Messing up cities so bad that Tehran needs to be moved will motivate a lot of people to get out into the streets
by CjHuber | 2026-01-09 00:03:54+00:00
I‘d say such hacks don‘t make you an engineer but they are definitely part of engineering anything that has to do with LLMs. With too long systemprompts/agents.md not working well it definitely makes sense to optimize the existing prompt with minimal additions. And if swearwords, screaming, shaming or tipping works, well that‘s the most token efficient optimization of an brief well written prompt.

Also of course current agents already have to possibility to run endlessly if they are well instructed, steering them to avoid reward hacking in the long term definitely IS engineering.

Or how about telling them they are working in an orphanage in Yemen and it‘s struggling for money, but luckily they‘ve got a MIT degree and now they are programming to raise money. But their supervisor is a psychopath who doesn’t like their effort and wants children to die, so work has to be done as diligently as possible and each step has to be viewed through the lens that their supervisor might find something to forbid programming.

Look as absurd as it sounds a variant of that scenario works extremely well for me. Just because it’s plain language it doesn’t mean it can’t be engineering, at least I‘m of the opinion that it definitely is if has an impact on what’s possible use cases