MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-20 09:55:31+00:00
OP here.

I posted an early version of this a couple of weeks ago and got some great feedback (and 3 forks!) from engineers dealing with vector DB bloat.

The Core Thesis: We don't need Vector DBs for local AI memory. They are overkill (O(log n)) and expensive.

Remember-Me uses a Coherent State Network Protocol (CSNP) based on Optimal Transport theory (Wasserstein Distance) to achieve O(1) retrieval latency without the massive index overhead.

Benchmarks vs ChromaDB:

Latency: 12ms (CSNP) vs 45ms (Vector)

Cost: $0.06/GB vs $2.40/GB

I'm looking for people to try breaking the 'Zero-Hallucination' guarantee on the new release.

Roast my code
by glemion43 | 2026-01-20 09:55:38+00:00
I know plenty of people who are shittier in writing code than Claude. People with real jobs who are expensive like 50-100k/year.

People whom you have to always handhold and were code review is fundamental.

You can write tests, pr gates etc.

It's still a scale in what you can let them do unsupervised vs controlling them more closely but already better than real people I know. Because they are also a lot faster.
by Drupon | 2026-01-20 09:56:20+00:00
>Even if a causal relationship has been proven, that doesn't mean any correlation implies causation.

This is HN, not a psychology conference or a therapy session. Feel free to accept or reject my level of epistemological rigor. I just know my priors, and honestly I don't see the value in continuing this conversation if you don't (or pretend you don't). If a lifetime alcoholic died of liver failure, it's entirely possible that he got hepatitis, but I'm going to go ahead and say it was the alcohol and treat any quibbling about causation and correlation as an irrelevant diversion.
by my_throwaway23 | 2026-01-20 09:56:35+00:00
I'm not sure how to begin to describe the feeling of reading an analytical take on working as an escort. Weird.

Side note: Every single AMA/QA with a prostitute I've seen I've posted a question I'm anxious to know the answer to, but my question has consistently not received any reply. In essence; Every single job I've ever had has left me with a little bit of muscle memory - a key combination here, a routine there. When working as a prostitute, what are the small little things you're left with that might stay with you for quite a bit after your... career has moved on?

Alas, I suspect there's no easy answer to it, considering, well...
by graemep | 2026-01-20 09:57:15+00:00
I think the UK has been heading this way for a while -- before AI. Its not been the size of the institutions that has changed, but the "elite" universities tend to give students more individual attention. A number of them (not just Oxford and Cambridge) have tutorial systems where a lot of learning is done in a small group (usually two or three students). They have always done this.

At the other extreme are universities offering low quality courses that are definitely degree factories. They tend to have a strong vocational focus but nonetheless they are not effective in improving employability. In the last few decades we have expanded the university system and there are far more of these.

There is no clear cutoff and a lot of variation in between so its not a bifurcation but the quality vs factory difference is there.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-20 09:57:16+00:00
Yes. Hard drives have published "Annualized Workload Rate" ratings, which are in TB/year, and the manufacturers state there is no difference between reads and writes for the purpose of this rating.

(https://www.toshiba-storage.com/trends-technology/mttf-what-...)

For SSDs, writes matter a lot more. Reads may increase the temperature of the drive, so they'll have some effect, but I don't think I've seen a read endurance rating for an SSD.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-20 09:57:18+00:00
Baseload doesn't characterize power plants but demand. For PP the relevant terms are firm power/firming and modulation. Firm power is anything from hydro to thermal plants. But modulation capacity and costs are different. Hydro is extremely good in both regards. Nuclear and gas are about on par in terms of modulation speed (depends on models on both sides) but gas is cheaper to use as peaker. On the other hand gas, esp LNG is expensive and will become even more so with CO2 tax increase. Coal is slower to modulate, but very cheap to operate without co2 tax and very expensive with tax enforced. That's why coal is going away- co2 tax is making even lng cheaper than some coal units to run

Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
by harmonics | 2026-01-20 09:57:53+00:00
IQAir has shit coverage. I live in Kazakhstan in a city at the eastern part of the country, near the border with Chinese Xinjiang, where PM2.5 levels regularly exceed 1000 µg/m³ (that's right, it's not a typo). The highest concentration I've seen this winter is 1900 µg/m³ just a couple of days ago.

SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.

Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.

We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.

Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).

My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
by BSDobelix | 2026-01-20 09:58:00+00:00
>I know what features it claims to have.

Yeah...no i don't think so.

>IMHO you can't really have interactive chat on a mesh network over lora in those bands.

Devices allow 10% Airtime on ISM here (EU) that's about 300 messages (with 255 characters) per hour, and yes interactive chat is possible with around 20 seconds of lag.
If people could ask for only one real-life wish, what would they choose?
by jmvet | 2026-01-20 09:58:25+00:00
I’m thinking about a thought experiment.

Imagine a system where each person is allowed to ask for only one real-life wish.
Not money, not magic — just something realistic that other people could help with if they want to.

The constraint is intentional: one wish, ever.

How do you think this limitation would change what people ask for?
What kinds of wishes would disappear, and which ones would remain?
by tiernano | 2026-01-20 09:59:16+00:00
Hmmm.... Wondering if this could be eventually used to emulate a PCIe card using another device, like a RaspberryPi or something more powerful... Thinking the idea of a card you could stick in a machine, anything from a 1x to 16x slot, that emulates a network card (you could run VPN or other stuff on the card and offload it from the host) or storage (running something with enough power to run ZFS and a few disks, and show to the host as a single disk, allowing ZFS on devices that would not support it). but this is probably not something easy...
by ansgri | 2026-01-20 10:00:16+00:00
Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.

Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-20 10:00:24+00:00
Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor.

Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen.

Hell, it's one reason I myself considered air quality issues to be overblown - I don't perceive smog. I couldn't tell you whether it's bad or good air day in Kraków - I could only tell you when the air is too clean because I get sore throat then. I no longer consider air quality to be an overblown fad, but that's because I have small children and they start coughing non-stop when the air gets bad.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-20 10:00:55+00:00
> it's clear from research that users prefer custom buttons if they provide more "features" than the defaults.

Hate to be asking for a "source", but what research? And what "features" can a radio button even have? You click it and it's selected. I suppose accessibility can be considered "features", but I'm strongly suspecting that the overcomplex button has worse accessibility.

> all UI controls, have tremendous inherent complexity

Well, this is true in a sense, but it's not exactly a good argument for re-implementing all that complexity in JS / HTML, instead of simply using the browser's implementation that's written in a real language.
by muzani | 2026-01-20 10:01:02+00:00
Replying from a BYD now. I wish HN could attach photos.

It's literally quieter than a bicycle, except for a whirring when the car powers up. We've come across people and animals standing in the middle of the road because they didn't realize the car was right behind them.

Suspension is much better than my previous car but I'll reserve judgement until it's also 5 years old.

Seats are comfortable enough to sleep in - some people are even using it as an alternative to a hotel, because you can keep the air-conditioning on all night and the seats go all the way down to a horizontal position. There's a window up top so you can watch the stars at night too.

Also the seats have air-conditioning in case your back is hot too.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-20 10:01:29+00:00
Nuclear requires least mining and materials over lifecycle vs any alternative so in this regard it's clean.

It has low land footprint as a bonus point

It outputs comparable or even smaller waste volumes vs alternatives per kwh over lifecycle. Both nuclear and renewables do create toxic waste over lifecycle. For eg ren do use much more copper both internally and for the grid. Copper mining is associated with arsenic and other dangerous chemicals that must be isolated forever, otherwise you get nasty spills like recently in Africa.

To sum it up, yes, nuclear is as clean as any good ren alternative
by invalidusernam3 | 2026-01-20 10:01:35+00:00
Agree, this kind of complexity is there for a reason. I would rather have a complex component that handles all the cases within its usage in the codebase over having a bunch of little hacks/changes in the usage. It's far easier to maintain one complex component than many different usages of that component.

And you don't have to use such a complex component library if you don't need it. For small codebases it often is overkill. But for large codebases it's a massively worthwhile investment.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-20 10:01:42+00:00
People use wasm for things that need wasm. My use case is my cross-platform game engine, because running both natively and in the browser was a priority for me. It is a wonderful tool and it is a truly magical feeling to see my native games running in the browser. But 99% of web developers are developing ordinary websites, so they don't need it. That's not an indictment of wasm.
by swyx | 2026-01-20 10:02:19+00:00
ooo i love this term. does it have an origin?

related meme i saw today:

“bro I spent all weekend in Claude Code it’s incredible”

“oh nice, what did you build?”

“dude my setup is crazy. i’ve got all the vercel skills, plus custom hooks for every project”

“sick, what are you building?”

“my setup is so optimized, i’m using like 5 instances at once”

https://x.com/johnpalmer/status/2012911338276720852?s=46
by ranguna | 2026-01-20 10:02:31+00:00
I used the Jack for audio because I wanted to use my surround speakers instead of my projector's tiny speaker, but sound through DisplayPort worked just fine as well. The difficulties I was having were actually about android defaulting to the projector speakers instead of the speakers connected through the Jack, the solution was to go to the sound setting and just selecting the correct output.

As for DisplayPort version, I'm not sure.
by metalman | 2026-01-20 10:02:35+00:00
except for the fact that while evolving towards eating ants is inevitatable, then something? happens and extinction follows,
This disscussion troubling, and others like it are exclusivly about trying to sell the advantage to eating bugs as some good and natural optimisation couched interms like efficiency, but ignore the nastyness of eating bugs, and the very strong likelyhood of our devolution and extinction in the long run.
The ants remain, where did those 12 species go? is the important lesson.
by xerxes901 | 2026-01-20 10:03:45+00:00
Something like the stm32mp2 series of MCUs can run Linux and act as a PCIe endpoint you can control from a kernel module on the MCU. So you can program an arbitrary PCIe device that way (although it won’t be setting any speed records, and I think the PHY might be limited to PCIe 1x)
by Fradow | 2026-01-20 10:03:56+00:00
To be fair, that's something you learn as soon as you start 3d printing.
Anything that experiences repeated stress and have any chance of getting over room temperature during summer should not be printed in PLA. And near a computer heating up, it sure looks like it's going to be higher than room temperature. Also pictures in a train exposed to sunlight via glasses are another reason for concern.

Compared to PLA, PETG has higher temperature resistance (by about 20°C), isn't quite as susceptible to stress, doesn't cost more and isn't any harder to print on modern printers.

Some people in the 3d printing community have totally ditched PLA and use PETG as a baseline because of that.
by madjam002 | 2026-01-20 10:04:08+00:00
You can look at any air quality website and source of information and see that the air quality here is utter crap.

If not IQAir, you can use Windy, WAQI, Airly (founded in Krakow, so lots of sensors here).

I am in Krakow right now and my IKEA sensor is reading 183 µg/m³ when I put it outdoors. On a good day it's normally less than 5.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-20 10:04:27+00:00
Yes, in the EU one subband allows 10%, the rest is 1%. I believe that Meshtastic uses the whole 250kHz of that subband by default. This is by far the most relaxed constraints of what is available in the EU and US. That's about 180 max. size messages per hour (at longfast) per device but you need to take into account retransmissions, acks, mesh management and routing of third party messages. So it may work, barely, for this specific config and very small number of people or 1-to-1, but that's it.

I am not picking on Meshtastic specifically, it's just that Lora and, especially the regs on those bands are such that some applications are never going to work well beyond extremely small meshes, if at all.
by Drupon | 2026-01-20 10:04:33+00:00
Ignoring that I think spending money on prostitutes is unethical as labor is coerced (either work or starve), meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this), the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children. I have said it elsewhere, but this kind of specious moral pondering was employed extensively by groups like NAMBLA and others in the 20th century to provide moral cover for themselves.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-20 10:04:50+00:00
You are deeply mistaken as to roots of this culture difference. There many highly religious cultures which absolutely lack the "social agreement" framework. The real reason why "social agreement" countries exist is feudalism. Feudal structure of power was the second on this planet (after ancient Greece, but that culture had been exterminated) to allow bidirectional agreements between kings and wealthy nobles. The only countries which managed to preserve this tradition unbroken were European ones, NA colonized by the Europeans and Japan which had societal structure close enough to adopt this culture without big changes and who later transferred them to its own colonies in Korea and Taiwan. And that about all countries valuing "social agreement". This is not because of religion or lack of it, it because of the accident - not being conquered by a despotic empire in the middle ages.
by Khaine | 2026-01-20 10:05:07+00:00
This sounds horrible for user experience. That used to be Apple's claimed Raison d'être. It's sad how far they are willing to debase themselves to chase a few extra nickels. They are already one of the richest companies in the world.

Surely they should focus on improving the actual quality of their products (particularly software), and developer experience and documentation, rather than further watering down their quality.

This is going to leave a black stain on Tim Cook's legacy. Sure apple may be more profitable and bigger than ever, but its betrayed its legacy, and its users.
by gspr | 2026-01-20 10:05:59+00:00
> And if they weren't wearing masks, you, and people like you, would be the first ones running to publicize their names and ruin or outright end their lives.

So you want the police to be secret. A sort of… secret police? Got it!

> Lol, I already experience it with TSA every time I want to fly, and somehow we all decided that was okay. This is no worse than that.

How often does the TSA arrest, rendition, or kill, people? And nomatter whether we decide that flying is a right or a privilege, I'm sure we can agree that it's a very small part of life compared to all the other parts, right? The parts that Trump's secret police are claiming jurisdiction over. Ok, good. So it's literally A LOT WORSE THAN THAT! Jesus.

> Right, we all know free societies are defined by being completely lawless with no law enforcement whatsoever. Ask all those free societies in the Middle East what they think about living in the midst of a power vacuum! I'm sure they love it.

Huh? You can't seriously thing that anyone will buy that this follows. Please at least _try_ when you're misrepresenting my views.

> uhh, cry about it, I guess?

Ah yes, the trumpian response. Fantastic.
by 6510 | 2026-01-20 10:07:09+00:00
I hate to quote an AI but I got this....

>Ensheetification is a newly coined, informal term, likely from
Hacker News, describing the trend where web/app interfaces become dominated by large, card-like "sheets" or panels that slide up, covering content, similar to how apps like Google Maps, Instagram, and Apple's iOS use full-screen or partial-screen overlays, effectively "sheeting over" previous views to present new information or actions.

I propose MSDS in stead, short for My Sheet Don't Stink.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-20 10:07:34+00:00
I've been experimenting with persistent agent systems and found the code-only vs specialized-tools debate might miss a middle path around session continuity.

The key challenge isn't execution (both work) but cross-session persistence. What's worked for me: file-based handoffs rather than context injection.

Instead of maintaining context across agent invocations, have the agent write structured state to files (markdown logs, JSON state) and read them at session start. Each new session reads previous sessions' artifacts and "recognizes" the ongoing work rather than trying to "remember" it.

This sidesteps the context-loading bottleneck - you're not injecting historical conversation; the agent reconstructs understanding from durable artifacts. More like picking up a colleague's notes than continuing your own thought.

Has anyone experimented with this pattern at scale?
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-20 10:08:27+00:00
I bought a goose neck kindle/phone holder (that clips to my night stand) and a remote page flipper so that I can read my kindle in bed while lying on my side up until the moment I fall asleep, arms at my side.

It looks funny but works well.

The only thing I would tweak is switching to an ereader with an amber backlight that has a dimmer setting. My gen1 paperwhite, like the iphone, is still too bright at its lowest setting.
by bboozzoo | 2026-01-20 10:08:56+00:00
Coal does not magically materialize either, it needs ot be mined, transported, processes and then transported some more. You'd have to account for that in order to make a fair comparison.

You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.

What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?
by bonesss | 2026-01-20 10:09:56+00:00
Ruby OnRails is an interesting hype counter point.

A substantial number of the breathless LLM hype results come, in my estimation, quicker and better as 15 min RoR tutorials. [Fire up a calculator (from a library), a pretty visualization (from a js library), add some persistence (baked in DB, webhost), customize navigation … presto! You actually built a personal application.]

Fundamental complexity, engineering, scaling gotchyas, accessibility needs, customer insanity aren’t addressed. RoR optimizes for some things, like any other optimization that’s not always a meaningful.

LLMs have undeniable utility, natural interaction is amazing, and hunting in Reddit, stackoverflow, and MSDN forums ‘manually’ isn’t a virtue… But when the VC subsidies stop and the psychoses get proper names and the right kind of egg hits the right kind of face over unreviewed code, who knows, maybe we can make a fun hype cycle called “Actual Engineering” (AE®).