MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apercu | 2026-01-12 17:18:03+00:00
I dunno, my take is that Apple isn’t outsourcing intelligence rather it’s outsourcing the most expensive, least defensible layer.

Down the road Apple has an advantage here in a super large training data set that includes messages, mail, photos, calendar, health, app usage, location, purchases, voice, biometrics, and you behaviour over YEARS.

Let's check back in 5 years and see if Apple is still using Gemini or if Apple distills, trains and specializes until they have completed building a model-agnostic intelligence substrate.
by bluGill | 2026-01-12 17:18:35+00:00
I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).

who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
by observationist | 2026-01-12 17:18:35+00:00
I'd guess a majority of people could save more than enough in groceries just by planning meals and making an effort to budget instead of going on autopilot to afford GLP-1 drugs. Heck, I'd bet a majority of households eat way too much fast food and restaurant meals, and just doing things on purpose would mean hundreds of dollars a month per person in savings.

"Doctors recommend this one simple life hack to revolutionize your grocery budget!" Or something like that.

GLP1 confounds things with the psychological impact as well; it apparently allows for more executive agency, disrupts the impulsive behaviors and cycles people get into, and might allow for some high discipline strategies that the simple calories difference in groceries don't account for.

It's not that there's no interesting questions to be asked, this paper is just awful. Everything about it is bad.
Show HN: Sidecar – AI Social Manager (Analyzes past hits to write new posts)
by ecotto123 | 2026-01-12 17:18:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Sidecar (https://sidecar.bz) because I was having issues maintaining a social media presence for my last startup. I would spend a lot of time trying to create content, but I often froze up or burned out, and the marketing died.

How it works: Instead of guessing what to write, Sidecar connects to your existing accounts (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram) and analyzes your past posts to see what actually worked.

It uses that data to generate weeks of new, text-based content that mimics your successful posts, which you can then bulk schedule in one go.

I’d love to hear what you think of Sidecar. You can use code HNLAUNCH for a free month if you want to test the ai features.
by redwall_hp | 2026-01-12 17:19:02+00:00
For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination and such with as little friction as possible.

Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify, Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop generator.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-12 17:19:04+00:00
Your conclusion is correct but the average weight gain is rather misleading. If people were actually gaining weight at that rate, then obesity would take decades to develop. In reality it's really more of an S curve where people quickly put on a lot of weight and then it levels off afterwards. So the overwhelming majority have stable weight, but a small fraction have very quickly increasing rates at any given time, leading to a small positive average.
Show HN: I made a zero-knowledge tool to request clients' secrets
by logicalsam | 2026-01-12 17:19:04+00:00
I found that many people like myself who run tech companies, agencies, or other types of businesses will often need to ask their clients for various secrets (env files, passwords, access codes, fried chicken recipes...), and there was no tool out there that felt like it was made for that job.

I explored password managers, "one-time link"-type sites, self-hosted, SaaS... none of them had the simplicity I was looking for, for myself and for my clients.

So, I spent my Christmas annual leave building this. keyhold.io is a zero-knowledge custody of secrets platform with a fixed monthly rate, designed not to compete with password managers, but to have alongside a traditional password manager exclusively for client-owned secrets.

Clients can submit secrets into your team's Hold, fully end-to-end encrypted, and they can auto-expire or be deleted on-demand by your client.

This is my first proper go at being a business man/founder/techbro, so I'd love any and all feedback (even if it rips me to shreds). I'm sure I've got a lot of lessons to learn!
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-12 17:19:07+00:00
I think Apple disagrees on thin clients, judging by how they continue to add massive compute resources to their devices. On AI for example they seem to be including the resources for quite a lot of inference to happen on-device.

So what is on the network? Copyrighted content: easier to stream that, and easier rights control. Connection: it’s not like your friends and family can be “on device.” Cold storage AKA backups. Geo data. Live data.
by pixelpoet | 2026-01-12 17:19:18+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the "just generate it" perspective. If you want to generate a much higher sampling rate signal that has a common multiple of your input and output sampling rate, "just generating it" is going to involve some kind of interpolation, no? Because you're trying to make data that isn't there.

If you want to change the number of slices of pizza, you can't simply just make 160x more pizza out of thin air.

Personally I'd just do a cubic resample if absolutely required (ideally you don't resample ofc); it's fast and straightforward.

Edit: serves me right for posting, I gotta get off this site.
by ecotto123 | 2026-01-12 17:19:39+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Edgar.

For the last few years, I was working on a group travel app called Hoku. The tech was fun to build, but I struggled hard with the marketing side. I ended up building internal tools to help me generate content and keep my social feeds alive while I was coding.

In the end, Hoku didn't get the traction I hoped for, so I decided to shut it down in December. But I realized the marketing tool I built for myself was actually more useful than the travel app.

So I polished it up, packaged it, and that’s what Sidecar is.

It’s basically the tool I wish I had when I started—something to take a raw idea and turn it into a full content calendar so I could get back to building.

Happy to answer questions
by chrisjj | 2026-01-12 17:19:54+00:00
Many tech companies want to and are acting responsibly, but where they do not, we must and we will act. Innovation should serve humanity, not degrade it.

So we’ll leave no stone unturned in our determination to stamp out these demeaning, degrading and illegal images.

If that means strengthening the existing laws, we are prepared to do so because this government stands on the side of decency.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-12 17:19:58+00:00
My point is: I don't think there will be way more jobs for "AI developers", I think there will be plenty of jobs for people who are employed in an industry and adept with using AI tools to be effective at their job. These people would not be differentiating themselves from other "AI developers", but from other people who do their role in whatever industry they are in, but who aren't as adept with these tools.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-12 17:20:08+00:00
Yeah I was on the team that had yubikey working. It was kind of a pain because we had to support some ancient IE versions and Yubikey basically only worked on Chrome at the time IIRC.

> I’ve also had other banks do the same. They provided me with a debit card that supports international transactions but they did not allow logging in from most Asian countries. So I would log in from Asia, be blocked, turn on my VPN and log in from the U.S. to check the balance on my card.

Yeah it was kind of complicated. We blocked high fraud countries to just get rid of this low level fraud and port scanning. But if someone was actually a customer, then that was fine, it was just assumed they would know how to use a VPN and they're going to get everything verified. There's also some KYC rules that I am not too familiar with that it just became considered okay at that point.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-12 17:20:19+00:00
> He was impeached years ago…

"was impeached" means different things in context.

Sometimes it means "articles of impeachment were brought against an official". (1) i.e. that the process starts.

Sometimes it means a later stage in the process, such as those article not being voted down, and a trial proceeding.

In the strictest sense, it means that the process completes - "the official is found guilty, removed from office, and may never hold office again".

Parent comment seems to be using the strictest sense, due to "and would have never managed to get a second chance". You're not helping by using a confusing different meaning.

https://www.usa.gov/impeachment
by sneak | 2026-01-12 17:20:41+00:00
CDs used 44.1, DAT and DVDs used 48. That’s it.

Most stuff on the internet ripped from CD is 44.1. 48 is getting more common. We’re like smack in the middle of the 75 year transition period to 48kHz.

For new projects, I use 48, because my mics are 32bit (float!)/48kHz.
by hilbert42 | 2026-01-12 17:20:52+00:00
Could be wrong but I heard phosphoric acid is in similar amounts in all of them for the unusual reason that this inorganic acid actually enhances (brings out) the cola flavor. Seems this doesn't happen with normal carboxylic food acids, malic, citric, tartaric, etc.

It's an odd combination, I think colas are the only instance where a mineral acid is used synergistically with another ingredient to enhance flavor.

Someone with greater knowledge may wish to expand on this.
by pron | 2026-01-12 17:21:18+00:00
"modern: relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past". I agree it's not a useful concept here but I didn't bring it up. Specifically, I don't think there's any consideration that had gone into the design of D, C#, or Rust that escaped Zig's designer. He just consciously made different choices based on the data available and his own judgment.
by skissane | 2026-01-12 17:21:20+00:00
> I've seen many futurists claim that human innovation is dead and all future discoveries will be the results of AI.

I think there's a big difference between discoveries through AI-human synergy and discoveries through AI working in isolation.

It probably will be true soon (if it isn't already) that most innovation features some degree of AI input, but still with a human to steer the AI in the right direction.

I think an AI being able to discover something genuinely new all by itself, without any human steering, is a lot further off.

If AIs start producing significant quantities of genuine and useful innovation with minimal human input, maybe the singularitarians are about to be proven right.
by mikeyouse | 2026-01-12 17:21:29+00:00
I get the frustration of not seeing eg the next laser or transistor from a modern Bell Labs - but for a few hundred dollars an Indian teenager can build an app which could be used by a billion people using only free and open source technologies. There are so many little inventions and contributions that needed to happen for that (and many other miracles) to be possible. The physical hardware frontier has definitely matured since Bell was at their peak but we continue to make rapid progress on the software/digital front.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-12 17:21:36+00:00
> are taking popular benchmark solutions into their training data

That happened in the past, and the "naive" way of doing it is usually easy to spot. There are, however, many ways in which testing data can leak into models, even without data contamination. However this doesn't matter much, as any model that only does well in benchmarks but is bad in real-world usage will be quickly sussed out by people actually using them. There are also lots and lots of weird, not very popular benchmarks out there, and the outliers are quickly identified.

> perform on SWE-bench if trained only on data prior to 2024.

There's a benchmark called swe-REbench, that takes issues from real-world repos, published ~ monthly. They perform tests and you can select the period and check their performance. This is fool-proof for open models, but a bit unknown for API-based models.
by acoustics | 2026-01-12 17:21:52+00:00
I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.

In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.

In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.

Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.
by miroljub | 2026-01-12 17:21:57+00:00
> Or to be blunt: correctness should not be opt-in. It should be opt-out.

One can perfectly fine write correct programs using mutable variables. It's not a security feature, it's a design decision.

That being said, I agree with you that the author should decide if Zen-C should be either mutable or immutable by default, with special syntax for the other case. As it is now, it's confusing when reading code.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-12 17:22:14+00:00
Is this not the job of the operating system or its supporting parts, to deal with audio from various sources? It should not be necessary to inspect the state of the OS your game is running on, to know what kind of audio you can playback. In fact, that could even be considered spying on things you shouldn't. Maybe the OS or its sound system does not abstract that from you and I am wrong about the state of OS in reality, but this seems to me like a pretty big oversight, if true. If I extrapolate from your use-case, then that would mean any application performing any playback of sound, needs to inspect whether something else is running on the system. That seems like a pretty big overreach.

As an example, lets say I change frequency in Audacity and press the play button. Does Audacity now go and inspect, whether anything else on my system is making any sound?
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-12 17:22:17+00:00
It's interesting that it's trained off only historic text.

Back in the pre-LLM days, someone trained a Markov chain off the King James Bible and a programming book: https://www.tumblr.com/kingjamesprogramming

I'd love to see an LLM equivalent, but I don't think that's enough data to train from scratch. Could a LoRA or similar be used in a way to get speech style to strictly follow a few megabytes worth of training data?
by sneak | 2026-01-12 17:22:24+00:00
44.1kHz sampling is sufficient to perfectly describe all analog waves with no frequency component above 22050Hz, which is substantially above human hearing. You can then upsample this band limited signal (0-22050Hz) to any sampling rate you wish, perfectly, because the 44.1kHz sampling is lossless with respect to the analog waveform. (The 16 bits per sample is not, though for the purposes of human hearing it is sufficient for 99% of use cases.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
by zahlman | 2026-01-12 17:22:55+00:00
> calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods

I hear this a lot but I really don't see good evidence for it. And people keep peddling stereotypes about "fast food" consumption after QSRs saw much larger price increases than grocery stores. For that matter, the UPFs are where I see people most commonly reach for overpriced name brands over the generics.
by malshe | 2026-01-12 17:23:00+00:00
I remember watching a clip from Jimmy Kimmel on YouTube where they asked people on the street in LA whether they planned to vote in the 2024 presidential election. The twist was that they were doing this one day AFTER the election. It was so disappointing to see that many young people had no idea that the election was over and yet they said they planned to vote. One guy even asked who was running.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-12 17:23:02+00:00
I suspect we'll see that; but Siri is in such a bad state of disrepair that Apple really needs something now while they continue to look for micro-scale LLM models that can run well-enough locally. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

The biggest thing Apple has to do is get a generic pipeline up and running, that can support both cloud and non-cloud models down the road, and integrate with a bunch of local tools for agent-style workloads (e.g. "restart", "audio volume", "take screenshot" as tools that agents via different cloud/local models can call on-device).
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-12 17:23:09+00:00
I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.

Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.

(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-01-12 17:24:31+00:00
There is some ability for it to make novel connections but it's pretty small. You can see this yourself having it build novel systems.

It largely cannot imaginr anything beyond the usual but there is a small part that it can. This is similar to in context learning, it's weak but it is there.

It would be incredible if meta learning/continual learning found a way to train exactly for novel learning path. But that's literally AGI so maybe 20yrs from now? Or never..

You can see this on CL benchmarks. There is SOME signal but it's crazy low. When I was traing CL models i found that signal was in the single % points. Some could easily argue it was zero but I really do believe there is a very small amount in there.

This is also why any novel work or findings is done via MASSIVE compute budgets. They find RL enviroments that can extract that small amount out. Is it random chance? Maybe, hard to say.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2026-01-12 17:24:43+00:00
My favorite thing about jj is that it takes the mental model of Git that makes sense (it's a DAG of commits, with references to some commits for metadata like tags & branch names) and just uses that. Instead of the actual full data model of Git which has several unnecessary complications like the index & mandatory branch names. It's much easier to reason about.
by kravossedonna | 2026-01-12 17:24:43+00:00
I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a year ago at the age of 67. For several months I had noticed tremors in my right hand and the shaking of my right foot when I was sitting. My normally beautiful cursive writing was now small, cramped printing. And I tended to lose my balance. The neurologist had me walk down the hall and said I didn't swing my right arm. I had never noticed! I was in denial for a while, as there is no history in my family of parents and five older siblings, but I had to accept I had classic symptoms. I was taking amantadine and carbidopa/levodopa and was about to start physical therapy to strengthen muscles. I used different supplements that didn't work, so last July, I tried the PD-5 protocol—the best decision ever! My tremors eased, my energy returned, and I sleep soundly. I feel like a new woman, and I can walk and exercise again. I got the PD-5 from limitlesshealthcenter. com
by jimmytucson | 2026-01-12 17:24:53+00:00
Fascinating idea. There was another "time-locked" LLM project that popped up on HN recently[1]. Their model output is really polished but the team is trying to figure out how to avoid abuse and misrepresentation of their goals. We think it would be cool to talk to someone from 100+ years ago but haven't seriously considered the many ways in which it would be uncool. Interesting times!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-12 17:24:59+00:00
You're right I seem to be referencing bad data, and the excess is probably more like 10-50 cals/day.

Whatever the figures are, what's interesting to me is the growing secular impact on an entire sector of the economy (the most stable and inelastic sector). If eating right means spending 5% less, extrapolating that across the entire sector, not just for the 16% using GLPs today, could be catastrophic

I suspect ultimately though supply will meet demand and prices may even rise for the food people are still eating
by tshaddox | 2026-01-12 17:25:14+00:00
It's perfectly reasonable to default seconds, minutes, hours, etc. to zero in the Duration constructor. But for Instant, it doesn't make sense to default those to zero unless you specify time zone offset.

And indeed, the static method Instant.from does accept an RFC 9557 string, which requires a 2-digit hour and a time zone offset, but can omit minutes and seconds:

Temporal.Instant.from("2026-01-12T00+08:00")
by brabel | 2026-01-12 17:25:17+00:00
You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that caused such collapse in the US , which seems to be the result of prioritizing profit and greed above everything else, including people wellbeing.
by concinds | 2026-01-12 17:25:21+00:00
> It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties

No. Launchpad is just the iOS springboard brought to Mac, with big icons and folders and pages. When it was added people complained of "iOS-ification".

This time they made a proper, unique Mac equivalent, integrated in Spotlight and built around the keyboard. It's not as good, the window was too small in 26.0, doesn't support uninstallation like Launchpad, but it's definitely less iOS-like.
by palata | 2026-01-12 17:25:25+00:00
I would like to know which fraction of CEOs are not toxic assholes. Honestly it seems like a requirement for the job is: "you're the kind of person who needs power to have friends".

When you lose 80% of your staff, you failed as a CEO. And when you do it like this... you deserve to be absolutely disrespected by your staff (old and new).

What would have happened had they not fired them? Maybe some loss of profitability (and importantly, maybe, or probably not), but probably not to the point where 80% of the staff would have had to be fired. Also it has evolved a lot between 2023 and now, and employees who were skeptical back then may have started adopted LLMs where it made sense.