MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swid | 2026-01-15 04:47:52+00:00
This is a tired argument that is not worthy of all the long written articles about the impossibility of creating conscious machines. The universe itself appears to me to be some type of computer in a way. Physics cannot explain consciousness, and never will be able to. Particles, energy, whatever works in certain ways according to certain rules. The universe is not conscious, but yet it contains us, who are. I see no reason a sufficiently complex simulation cannot model the universe and contain consciousness within it. The argument that the brain is not a computer is immaterial; the universe is the computer; the brain is the data.

I'd be speaking out of my depth, but I think consciousness is experienced on a sort of information level, and that where ever it is found, some complex network will be found powering it. But that network could be virtual or physical.

I don't think the way we are currently producing LLMs creates consciousness; I just take a very dim view on the argument that computers are incapable of producing a simulation of consciousness; and further propose that such a simulation actually does produce consciousness in a very real sense.
by GrowingSideways | 2026-01-15 04:47:54+00:00
> Apple believes the Vision Pro is an iPad Minus

Well you don't have to use the touchscreen, which was always rather awkward for many tasks, particularly anything productivity oriented. Even on my laptop i basically never use windows, but I still find the ipad to be unusable for anything but browsing and reading books and scrolling.

I'm sure they can do more. I'm just not sure "more" has anything to do with dragging windows around.

But maybe it's just me; I think it's easier to command-tab (or opt-tab) around than use my eyes. Unless I need to drag something between windows, which only happens about once a month or so.
by jmb99 | 2026-01-15 04:48:56+00:00
Late reply I know, but I wanted to clear up that I don’t want to normalize a 2.5kW homelab. Usually when talking to people about it I refer to it as “insane.” But, having an absolutely insane amount of computer and RAM is fun (and I personally find it genuinely useful for learning, in particular in terms of engineering for massive concurrency) and I can afford the hydro, so whatever. To match the raw compute and RAM with current gen hardware, you only need maybe 500W - you’ll just be spending a shitload of money up front, instead of over time on hydro. (To match my current lab’s utilized performance, I’d need at least 2 servers, one of which with a ~threadripper 7955WX and 256GB of DDR5, and another with an Epyc 9475F and 1TB of DDR5. That would put me somewhere in the neighborhood of $35k? Ish? Costs me about $115/month to run the rack right now (cheaper than my hot tub) and cooling is free in the winter (6~7 months of the year) so the break even is loooooong term. And realistically, $100ish a month isn’t crazy, considering I self host basically everything - the only services I pay for are my VPS to run my mail server, and AWS for glacier S3 for backup-of-last-resort.

Again, not trying to normalize 2500W, most people don’t need that (and I don’t really either), but I do make good use of it.

As for “rewiring the house for 240V”, every house* in Canada and the US is delivered “split-phase” 240V (i.e. 240V with a centre tapped neutral, providing 120V between either end of the 240V phase and neutral or 240V from phase to phase), and many appliances are 240V (dryers, water heaters, stove/ranges/ovens, air conditioners). If you have a space free in your breaker panel, adding a 240V 30A circuit should cost less than $1k if you pay an electrician, and can be DIY’d for like $150 max unless you have an ancient panel that requires rare/specialty breakers or the run is very long. It’s far from the most expensive part of a homelab unless you’re running literally just a raspberry pi or something.

*barring an incredibly small exceptional percentage
by sneilan1 | 2026-01-15 04:49:01+00:00
Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.
by Harsha_Jaya_13 | 2026-01-15 04:49:23+00:00
Yeah I accept it , because most of the new gen are actually trained to be ,copy and paste and that is where the actual capability of the critical thinking is lost and I would accept your words being a new dev, because it feels cool after using ai for our work to complete and then after it completes and If I just come back and see ,what I have really did is,it feels like am I really unproductive? Actually no,but it is a bit like yes, because when we are good at driving the car and then help with the auto pilot is so good ,but when we don't actually know ,how to drive the car and then it feels like ,we are in the control of the autopilot disguised as the automation,what most people won't admit and I wanted to say that,we must actually have some knowledge on what we are trying to produce because, without any prior knowledge on what we are trying to do,we are just using the autopilot not our brain for the brainstorming ideas,even though we can get and we can take the help of the ai to convert that ideas to execution, atleast we must learn what we have been going through
by helltone | 2026-01-15 04:50:01+00:00
I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.

I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
by flakes | 2026-01-15 04:50:05+00:00
I find it better to bubblewrap against a full sandbox directory. Using docker, you can export an image to a single tarball archive, flattening all layers. I use a compatible base image for my kernel/distro, and unpack the image archive into a directory.

With the unpack directory, you can now limit the host paths you expose, avoiding leaking in details from your host machine into the sandbox.

bwrap --ro-bind image/ / --bind src/ /src ...

Any tools you need in the container are installed in the image you unpack.

Some more tips: Use --unshare-all if you can. Make sure to add --proc and --dev options for a functional container. If you just need network, use both --unshare-all and --share-net together, keeping everything else separate. Make sure to drop any privileges with --cap-drop ALL
by josephg | 2026-01-15 04:50:35+00:00
Honestly I'm not quite sure what point you're making.

> If he needed his app to be 30% faster he would have made it so

Would he have? Improving performance by 30% usually isn't so easy. Especially not in a codebase which (according to Cantrill) was pretty well optimized already.

The performance boost came to him as a surprise. As I remember the story, he had already made the C code pretty fast and didn't realise his C hash table implementation could be improved that much. The fact rust gave him a better map implementation out of the box is great, because it means he didn't need to be clever enough to figure those optimizations out himself.

Its not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I don't think comparing the world's fastest C code to the world's fastest rust code is a good comparison either, since most programmers don't write code like that. Its usually incidental, low effort performance differences that make a programming language "fast" in the real world. Like a good btree implementation just shipping with the language.
by efskap | 2026-01-15 04:50:39+00:00
One everyday example is how when cooking rice in a pot, you don't scale water with the rice directly.
You know how people stick their finger in the pot, touching the rice, and add water up to some reference point like a knuckle?

Evaporation is more about the water surface area and not the total volume, so a fixed depth above the rice is used for estimation. HN discussion on the physics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24021195
by phs318u | 2026-01-15 04:51:21+00:00
It has occurred to me that one of the key drivers of the tensions around migration, stems from the undignified arbitrage of human beings resulting from the discrimination to free movement across borders.

Global corporations are permitted free movement[0].

Global capital is permitted free movement[0].

Global elites are permitted free movemen[0].

The overwhelming mass of humanity is constrained to very limited movement.

The ability of enterprises to benefit from pools of constrained humans without those benefits being similarly constrained to flow in that pool, but instead freely exfiltrate those benefits - is the source of most of the world's inequality, and consequently stokes the demand to migrate (legally or illegally).

[0] - not quite completely, but near enough as makes little difference.

EDITED to fix formatting.
by 9rx | 2026-01-15 04:51:34+00:00
Maybe not so much active efforts to save them, but the mass lamentation around the collapse of the industry that has been going on for several decades. What efforts there are to save them is merely an extension of that.

Much the same thing has happened here too (the local watering holes struggling and failing, that is), but that isn't even considered newsworthy at the local level, let alone a message that has spread far and wide. English pubs, for whatever reason, are the only ones that have consistently caught grander attention.

But there will always be someone living under a rock, as they say. It is impossible for an individual to know everything.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-15 04:53:28+00:00
> She had a blast and commented how many “brown girls like her” were there compared to her very WASPy, super-liberal Maryland school.

Does that have anything to do with Georgia or have anything to do with GT being a primarily engineering school with a very large international engineering student population?

To answer that question, try going to a football game in Athens next…
by mamcx | 2026-01-15 04:53:32+00:00
Yeah, this is a hard problem, in special because Standard SQL databases only partially implement the relational model, have not good recurse for deal with relations-in-relations and lack of ways to (in user space) build your own storage (all stuff that I dream to tackle).

I think the possible answer is to try to "compress" columns with custom datatypes, it could require to touch part of the innards of sql (like in postgreSQL you need to solve it with c) but is a viable option in many cases where you noted that what you could express in json, for example, is in fact a custom type that could be stored efficiently if there is a way to translate it to more primitive types, then solved that the indexes will work.

The second option is to hide part of the join complexity with views.
by lanyard-textile | 2026-01-15 04:53:41+00:00
I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.

Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.

She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.

I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.

She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
by kcplate | 2026-01-15 04:54:16+00:00
The numbers work against your idea in a huge way.

- There are only 57k people Greenland. A portion (6%) of which are already friendly to the idea of joining the US, the undecideds are 9%.

- How many converts to the deal would you get if you actually dangled a $100k per person lump sum (Literally this is a tenth of what the federal government claims it has saved closing USAID)? I assume a few. Maybe quite a few. Add to that an Alaska style ongoing PFD that paid out annually. That’s a tasty carrot.

No takers to the deal? Wild, ok though…so we fight instead of fattening the bank accounts. How many will be willing to pull a trigger and risk certain death if they do? Let’s be generous and call it a third of the population (basically half of the hardliners).

But…realize that only 65% of the population are between 13 and 65. So you are talking about maybe 12k people who might be willing and could effectively take up arms. Bear in mind due to disperse population centers…the largest single concentration of resistance would be about 5k people. Let’s go ahead and add in the entire Danish active duty military (17k people).

29k people with 40% of them being civilians with minimal training…against the might of the US military. That seems like terrible odds.

But what about NATO? NATO is pragmatic. It’s highly likely that every other NATO member would decide to just stay out of the conflict because they would rather have a NATO with the US and without Denmark than the other way around.
by wltr | 2026-01-15 04:54:26+00:00
Never had any nostalgia for Windows, and I’ve met plenty of full of themselves developers being ‘nah, Windows is good, you just incompetent’ with their vibes. I could write books about their technical decisions, but I’d just mention none of them knew even slightest bits of Linux. It’s just absurd to me, like man, you do that for work, and the things you were over engineering could be done within one day, if you care to learn something new, instead of applying things you learned 40 years ago. I see no point in even attempting to explain anything to those people. Yeah, nothing wrong with Windows. XP was good, 7 was good, 11 is also no problem. I feel the same, I just mostly never used them myself, with occasional horror of things I’ve seen with others. Like those in abuser relationships who keep telling it’s how things should be and nothing wrong.
by tptacek | 2026-01-15 04:54:41+00:00
People need to take the name Chicago out of their mouths. If a message board thread is a poker game, bet the bank when someone tries to make a political argument using "Chicago" that they've never set foot here. Someone who grew up in Brussels would be approximately as safe in Chicago as they would anywhere in the United States --- less safe than in Brussels, because of overall automobile and firearms deaths in America, but no less safe than in any major city.

(In fact, your life expectancy in Cook County is several years higher than in the rural south.)

The gun violence in Chicago is tightly constrained to places and populations unfamiliar to the median Belgian. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and structurally segregated by almost a century of redlining and "urban renewal" that created hyperconcentrated pockets of crime. It's a human tragedy and fully worth dunking on, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how safe a visitor would be to the city.

(Chicago is also not even in the top 10 in US cities by index crimes, but whatever).
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-15 04:54:42+00:00
I used to use it, but very rarely, since it's instant UB if you get it wrong. In tiny codebases which you can hold in your head it's probably practical to sprinkle it everywhere, but in anything bigger it's quite risky.

Nevertheless, I don't write normal everyday C code anymore since Rust has pretty much made it completely obsolete for the type of software I write.
Show HN: Tool that automates ML model deployment on mobile/edge devices
by AbdoulayeSeydi | 2026-01-15 04:54:43+00:00
Deploying ML models on-device is still a huge pain. Most teams default to cloud inference because:

Testing a model on different devices is manual and error-prone

Device constraints aren’t obvious from model exports

Rewriting deployment code for multiple platforms wastes days or weeks

I built Refactor AI, an infrastructure tool that:

Analyzes a trained ML model and flags ops that won’t run on the target device

Refactors the model where possible

Generates deployment-ready code for CoreML, ONNX Runtime, ONNX.js, and TFLite

This reduces deployment time from days to minutes, and lets teams run inference natively on-device, saving on cloud GPU costs.

Open to feedback, testing on real models, or ideas for improvement.
by grogenaut | 2026-01-15 04:56:39+00:00
Example:

I Write Sins Not Tragedies - Panic at the disco:

So you're a guest at a wedding and you're eavesdropping and passing judgement on people based on a snippet of conversation. Ruined.

Example:

Going the Distance - He's bad at racing and can't realize it. He's burning real relationships. I'd otherwise love this song.

Years ago my brother pointed out that lyrics are just a form of percussion.

I'm glad they add for you, they typically detract for me.

Not paying attention to the lyrics also les me deal with music as just grooves in a flow state as well.
by defrost | 2026-01-15 04:57:23+00:00
Today, and yesterday, I've been poking about the history of what was once the longest steam powered fresh water pipeline in the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme

I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.

The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.

The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.

It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-15 04:57:47+00:00
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I agree that technically this is an injection. What I don't think is accurate is to then compare it to sql injection and how we fixed that. Because in SQL world we had ways to separate control channels from data channels. In LLMs we don't. Until we do, I think it's better to think of the aftermath as phishing, and communicate that as the threat model. I guess what I'm saying is "we can't use the sql analogy until there's a architectural change in how LLMs work".

With LLMs, as soon as "external" data hits your context window, all bets are off. There are people in this thread adamant that "we have the tools to fix this". I don't think that we do, while keeping them useful (i.e. dynamically processing external data).
by lee1012 | 2026-01-15 04:58:21+00:00
lee101/gobed https://github.com/lee101/gobed static embedding models so they are embedded in milliseconds and on gpu search with a cagra style on gpu index with a few things for speed like int8 quantization on the embeddings and fused embedding and search in the same kernel as the embedding really is just a trained map of embeddings per token/averaging
by jmb99 | 2026-01-15 04:58:39+00:00
> though you've got a pretty deep pit yourself, if 240v and generator weren't part of the sump plans and the rack just got to ride along (that's how it worked for me)

Generator was a requirement for the sump pump. My house was basically built on a swamp, so an hour in spring without it means water in the basement. Now admittedly, I spent an extra couple hundred bucks to get a 240V generator with higher capacity than strictly necessary, but it was also roughly the minimum amount of money to spend to get one that can run on gasoline or propane, which was a requirement for me. 240V to the rack cost me $45, most of that cost being the breaker (rack is right next to the panel).

> What if someone else is hosting something important on there and my power is out? My concerns are elsewhere, but there's might not be.

I host roughly a dozen services that have around 25 users at the moment, but I charge $0 for them. I make it very clear: I have a petabyte of storage and oodles of compute, feel free to use your slice, and I’ll do my best to keep everything up and available - for my own sake (and I’ve maintained over 3 nines for 8 years!). But you as a user get no guarantee of uptime or availability, ever, and while I try very hard to backup important data (onsite, offsite split to multiple locations, and AWS S3 glacier), if I lose your data, sucks to suck. So far most people are pretty happy with this arrangement.

I couldn’t possibly fathom worrying about other people’s access to my homelab during a power outage. If I wanted to care, I’d charge for access, and I’d have a standby generator, multiple WANs, a more resilient remote KVM setup, etc. But then I’d be running a business - just a really shitty one that takes tons of my time and makes me little money. And is very illegal (for some of the services I make available, at least), instead of only slightly illegal.
by wmoxam | 2026-01-15 04:59:16+00:00
> It's a $60,000 four-door lifted luxobarge with leather interior and a short bed

It can be that but all the major manufacturers have a ton of trim levels and options. Personally I drive a f150 that doesn't even have power windows.

Most Cybertrucks I've seen in the wild are running at a low ground clearance, reminiscent of a 'coupe utility' vehicle like an El Camino.
by TheTaytay | 2026-01-15 05:01:09+00:00
I really like this idea!

I’d like to see this other browser plugin’s API be exposed via your same CLI, so I don’t have to only control a separate browser instance.
https://github.com/remorses/playwriter
(I haven’t investigated enough to know how feasible it is, but as I was reading about your tool, I immediately wanted to control existing tabs from my main browser, rather than “just” a debug-driven separate browser instance.)
by lee1012 | 2026-01-15 05:01:10+00:00
static embedding models im finding quite fast
lee101/gobed https://github.com/lee101/gobed is 1ms on gpu :) would need to be trained for code though the bigger code llm embeddings can be high quality too so its just yea about where is ideal on the pareto fronteir really , often yea though your right it tends to be bm25 or rg even for code but yea more complex solutions are kind of possible too if its really important the search is high quality
by networked | 2026-01-15 05:03:04+00:00
https://dbohdan.com/#meta is my personal wiki. Recently added pages include the first complete transcript of "The Dragon Speech" by game designer Chris Crawford and how I made Claude rework elegiac poems into Rupi Kaur-style "Instapoetry" using Gwern Branwen's technique.

http://dbohdan.sdf.org/ is my hobby site about the SDF Public Access Unix System, the Small Internet, and NetBSD.