MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Subject-based weight routing for LLMs (27 days before DeepSeek Engram)
by AutoJanitor | 2026-01-21 05:08:33+00:00
I run LLM inference on an IBM POWER8 S824 with 576GB RAM – a $700 eBay server from 2014. In December 2025, I built "RAM Coffers" – banking model weights
by subject domain with hot caching and resonance routing.

On January 12, 2026, DeepSeek published "Engram" (arXiv:2601.07372) describing the same core idea: route queries to cached weight banks based on subject
matter.

The concepts are similar because I built it first. YouTube video from December 17, 2025: https://youtu.be/T_o39s7r0iE

Terminal shows "RAM Coffers: ON | L2/L3 Resident: ON" – 26 days before their paper.

Core shared concept: Query comes in → classify subject → route to relevant weight bank → hot cache keeps it fast

What I added beyond the core:
• NUMA topology – weights placed on specific memory nodes. Engram doesn't address hardware topology.
• Neuromorphic mapping – brain regions to NUMA nodes
• Tetranary confidence – 4-state routing logic
• Vec_perm collapse – single-cycle attention on POWER8
• PowerLISP – LLMs that actually remember
• L2/L3 prefetch – 147 t/s vs 17 t/s stock (8.8x)

DOIs:
• RAM Coffers (Dec 16): doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31093429
• Neuromorphic: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18321905
• PowerLISP: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18322052

GitHub: github.com/Scottcjn/ram-coffers
by godelski | 2026-01-21 05:08:37+00:00
I'd think it's quite common to have "abusive friends" on Steam. It's not uncommon to get invites from people you've never met offline and were just in a game you played together.

In that setting I don't think there's much "trust" happening. Certainly an average user would not think they are sharing this information with that type of person and certainly the average user believes that setting themselves to be invisible means nobody can see when they're online or any of their activity.

Besides, why would it matter if it is common? At any given point in time Steam has 20m-45m active users. 0.01% is still 2k-4.5k people. Take every single person you know by name, this is probably 10x that. This is 10x-20x the number of friends the median facebook user has. It's a very small percentage but a very large number.

We work in computing... scaling means small percentages are still big numbers.
Show HN: Generate animated solar system timelapse videos for any date range
by SimonDorfman | 2026-01-21 05:08:55+00:00
A fork of Solar System Live that generates animated videos showing planetary
orbits over any date range. Tracks orbital statistics (how many times Earth
was lapped by Mercury/Venus, or lapped outer planets) and overlays dates/ages
on each frame.

Example: Einstein's lifetime (1879-1955) showing 76 years of solar system
evolution. Built with Python + Pillow + ffmpeg, runs locally with Lighttpd.

https://github.com/simondorfman/solar_system_live
by foltik | 2026-01-21 05:09:15+00:00
I wanted to believe, but wasn’t able to get most of my config working the same in zellij since it has fewer configuration knobs. Tried writing a plugin, but even those can’t touch much of the internal state. Particularly the keybinds I remember not being able to replicate (smart resizing, respecting vim, context sensitivity):

https://github.com/foltik/dots/blob/main/config/tmux.conf
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-21 05:10:30+00:00
China has an estimated number of 370 battle force ships to the US’s 296 (US has 11 aircraft carriers to China’s 3). China’s total fleet displacement is about half but their ship building capacity is significantly higher. They are generally ranked second today behind the US and have been there since the last 2010s when they overtook Russia. They’ve been number 3 since 1987.
by behnamoh | 2026-01-21 05:10:40+00:00
> The good news: we shipped our differential renderer to everyone today. We rewrote our rendering system from scratch[1] and only ~1/3 of sessions see at least a flicker. Very, very few sessions see flickers in rapid succession which was so annoying before. Those numbers will keep dropping as people update.

I'm using the latest version and see terrible flicker in tmux still. You guys should be ashamed tbh.
by simoncion | 2026-01-21 05:11:25+00:00
I got curious about what "passthrough" might be doing and found this assertion [0], which reminded me of the existence of '6relayd' [1]. So I assume that that mode relays the RAs & etc, but replaces the link-local address in the RA & etc with that of the relaying interface.

[0] <https://www.snbforums.com/threads/ipv6-passthrough-disadvant...>

[1] <https://github.com/Yamatohimemiya/6relayd>
by doubled112 | 2026-01-21 05:12:56+00:00
I'm also not sure how much it helps, but a friend and I were just talking about how big the numbers get today.

My ISP provides my house a /56 allocation. There are 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 addresses. I should have enough for a couple of years, at least.

I guess you could scan it. The IPs for most devices are chosen randomly within a /64 subnet, or they're based on MAC address, but they're not sequential by any means. A /64 is still 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible IPs.
by fourthrigbt | 2026-01-21 05:13:32+00:00
I’ve had a major conversion on this topic within the last month.

I’m not exactly a typical SWE at the moment. The role I’m in is a lot of meeting with customers, understand their issues, and whip up demos to show how they might apply my company’s products to their problem.

So I’m not writing production code, but I am writing code that I want to to be maintainable and changeable so I can stash a demo for a year and then spin it up quickly when someone wants to see if or update/adapt it as products/problems change. Most of my career has been spent writing aircraft SW so I am heavily biased toward code quality and assurance. The demos I am building are not trivial or common in the training data. They’re highly domain specific and pretty niche, performance is very important, and usually span low level systems code all the way up to a decent looking gui. As a made up example, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to have a project to write a medical imaging pipeline from scratch that employs modern techniques from recent papers, etc.

Up until very recently, I only thought coding agents were useful for basic crud apps, etc. I said the same things a lot of people on this thread are saying, eg. people on twitter are all hype, their experience doesn’t match mine, they must be working on easy problems or be really bad at writing code

I recently decided to give into the hype and really try to use the tooling and… it’s kind of blown my mind.

Cursor + opus 4.5 high are my main tools and their ability to one shot major changes across many files and hundreds of lines of code, encompassing low level systems stuff, GOU accelerated stuff, networking, etc.

It’s seriously altering my perception of what software engineering is and will be and frankly I’m still kind of recoiling from it.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe it fundamentally eliminates the need for SWEs, it still takes a lot of work on my part to come up with a spec (though I do have it help me with that part), correct things that I don’t like in its planning or catch it doing the wrong thing in real time in and re direct it. And it will make strange choices that I need to correct on the back end sometimes. But it has legitimately allowed me to build 10x faster than I probably could on my own.

Maybe the most important thing about it is what it enables you to build that would have been not worth the trouble before, Stuff like wrapping tools in really nice flexible TUIs, creating visualizations/dashboards/benchmark, slightly altering how an application works to cover a use case you hadn’t thought of before, wrapping an interface so it’s easy to swap libs/APIs later, etc.

If you are still skeptical, I would highly encourage you to immerse yourself in the SOTS tools right now and just give in to the hype for a bit, because I do think we’re rapidly going to reach a point here where if you aren’t using these
tools you won’t be employable.
by miki_oomiri | 2026-01-21 05:13:45+00:00
Not gonna argue with "who said what".

All I can tell you with certainty is that the people who designed and funded webgl/asmjs/llvm efforts at Mozilla (Alon, Vlad, Brendan, …) clearly understood that wasm was a needed companion alongside JS (and its DOM&co bindings). Not a replacement. I was part of these conversations.

I understand why people would think it was a JS killer, but that's a naive way of looking at it.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-21 05:14:00+00:00
If you have a solar panels, a battery, and generator, it would be good idea to figure out how to hook them all together. Using the generator near its full output, to charge the battery, will use far less fuel than idling it all day.

Even if things are bad enough for iodine pills, they are only really needed for children. Once you hit your mid teens, your thyroid is fully developed and not pulling in enough iodine to worry about radioactive isotopes.
by akst | 2026-01-21 05:15:33+00:00
In case you’ve forgotten this is a thread on an article about web components.

If the underlying premise of your point was entirely independent of web components you’ve done pretty poor job of communicating it.

So you actually do that? Use custom elements without web components instead of using classes? Are you using in something like react with custom elements foregoing type safety to avoid a div element? Or is this just in plain HTML? How many custom elements does your typical web project have?

Or are you fixating on an irrelevant technicality to make an irrelevant point?
by SequoiaHope | 2026-01-21 05:15:39+00:00
Run out of training data? They’re going to put these things in humanoids (they are weirdly cheap now) and record high resolution video and other sensor data of real world tasks and train huge multimodal Vision Language Action models etc.

The world is more than just text. We can never run out of pixels if we point cameras at the real world and move them around.

I work in robotics and I don’t think people talking about this stuff appreciate that text and internet pictures is just the beginning. Robotics is poised to generate and consume TONS of data from the real world, not just the internet.
Show HN: Knowbotic – Upload notes. Get quizzes. Master anything
by DannyHeng | 2026-01-21 05:15:39+00:00
Hey HN! We're excited to share Knowbotic, something we built after failing way too many exams despite "studying" for hours.
Our problem: We'd spend entire weekends highlighting textbooks and re-reading notes, then bomb the test on Monday. Turns out we weren't actually learning—just moving our eyes across pages and feeling productive.
What changed everything: We discovered that testing yourself (active recall) is 8x more effective than passive reading. But creating practice questions manually? Soul-crushingly tedious.
So we built Knowbotic. Snap a photo of your textbook page, upload lecture PDFs, or paste any text. The AI reads it and instantly generates practice questions. Then it quizzes you, adapts to what you're struggling with, and uses spaced repetition to cement things in long-term memory.
Works on literally any topic: Medical school anatomy, bar exam prep, learning Mandarin, CFA certifications, high school chemistry, random Wikipedia rabbit holes—if you can study it, Knowbotic can quiz you on it.
It's completely free for learners. No trials, no paywalls, no "unlock premium features" nonsense.
Cool stuff it does:

Generates questions from messy handwritten notes (our handwriting is terrible, still works)
Creates personalized study schedules based on your available time
Builds study communities where you can share quizzes and challenge friends
Tracks exactly which concepts you're weak on instead of wasting time on what you already know

We launched 3 weeks ago and we've already hit 100+ users—all found organically. People are using it for everything from USMLE prep to learning guitar theory, which has been incredibly motivating to see.
We've been using it ourselves and actually retained information for the first time in our lives. Now we want to see if it helps others.
We'd love your brutal feedback: What would make you actually use this? What's missing? How do you currently study new material without falling asleep?
Try it: https://knowbotic.app
by throwup238 | 2026-01-21 05:16:36+00:00
Another important thing to do is to instruct the agent to keep a <plan-name>-NOTES.md file where it tracks its progress and keeps implementation notes. The notes are usually short with Opus 4.5 but very helpful, especially when you need to reset mid-phase and restart it with a fresh context.

If you keep the notes around in repo, you can instruct future plan writers to review implementation notes from relevant plans to keep continuity.
by avaer | 2026-01-21 05:17:03+00:00
It's pretty interesting how close this assignment looks to demoscene [1] golf [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf

It even uses Chrome tracing tools for profiling, which is pretty cool: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/...
by da_chicken | 2026-01-21 05:18:10+00:00
I'm not sure why you'd expect partial updates of a single statement in the first place. I mean, if I run `UPDATE Account SET Status = 'Closed' WHERE LastAccess < NOW() - INTERVAL '90 days';`, I'm not going to be happy if there's 50 records that match, the DB updates 30 successfully, and then error on 20. Atomic isn't just about rows. Do all the work or none of it.

If you're experiencing things that smell like TOCTOU, first you need to be sure you don't have oddball many-to-one issues going on (i.e., a cardinality violation error), and then you're going to have to increase your transaction isolation level to eliminate non-repeatable reads and phantom reads.

Like, the alternative to a MERGE is writing a few UPDATE statements followed by an INSERT and wrapping the entire batch in a transaction. And you should likely still wrap the whole thing in a transaction. If it breaks, you just replay the whole thing. Re-run the whole job.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-21 05:18:53+00:00
> The idea that allied nations don't maintain strategic autonomy with respect to each other is very modern.

No it's not. The point of making an alliance is that you're not stuck with strategic autonomy. You can tell other people that if they mess with you, they're also messing with whoever you're allied with. If you were autonomous, that wouldn't be true.
by potsandpans | 2026-01-21 05:19:53+00:00
i've not read the book, but i've thought about this on and off for a while.

the common trope of a mad max style wasteland where there are roaming barbarians and everyone is in a state of disorganized chaos is imo overstated. a hobbesian fantasy/wet dream.

humans tend to be self organizing and (mostly) altruistic in the face of disaster. we have plenty examples of this: fukishima, the boston bombing, ongoing ukrainian conflict, syrian conflict.

that's not to say that scoundrels do not exist. times of chaos create space for predators to take advantage of people. it happens more frequently at greater scale. there will be plenty of untethered folks with some form of military training.

similarly, the idea that you could simply ride out a long term disaster in a prepper cave is (again coached in an imho) mostly a fantasy. most people simply need community to survive.

fear of warlord run gangs shouldn't dissuade you from having a small stockpile of goods to survive. if they exist, and you meet they'll probably chop your head off regardless.

the most sensible thing to do is prepare within reason and build a community of people around you that can rely on you and vice verse.
by nomilk | 2026-01-21 05:19:56+00:00
This could have the unintended consequence of encouraging under-agers to ask more 'adult' questions in order to try to trick it into thinking they're an adult. Analogous to the city that wanted to get rid of rats, so offered a bounty for every dead rat, and to the surprise of nobody except policy makers, the city ended up with more rats, not less. (lesson: they thought they were incentivising less rats, but unintentionally incentivised more)

The padding in OpenAI's statement is easy to see through:

> The model looks at a combination of behavioral and account-level signals, including how long an account has existed, typical times of day when someone is active, usage patterns over time, and a user’s stated age.

(the only real signal here is 'usage patterns' - AKA the content of conversations - the other variables are obfuscation to soften the idea that OpenAI will be pouring over users' private conversations to figure out if they're over/under age.).

Worth also noting 'neutered' AI models tend to be less useful. Example: Older Stable Diffusion models were preferred over newer, neutered models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=1h16m
by alephnerd | 2026-01-21 05:20:20+00:00
This is the end result of multi-polarity. It turns the stag-hunt nature of foreign policy into a zero-sum game. Allison was warning about this back when I was still an undergrad almost 2 decades ago, but no one began taking him seriously until 2014.

Regional powers are starting to attempt to make their own multilateral arrangements, but they will inevitably end up relating to either the US or China.

Additonal multipolarity will arise when individual countries can hit around 40-50% of nominal GDP of either the US or China (using a rule of thumb Allison used to use back for US-China relations).

> America (and China) a decade ago were still trying to make the (or at least a) rules-based international order work

The US and China relationship also didn't transition into a competitive relationship until the early 2010s following Operation Aurora, the CIA purge, and the OPM breach.

> We didn’t hear such language a decade ago because it wasn’t yet true, and it wasn’t necessary—that was the point of the rules-based institutions

Depends where you were.

The China-Japan naval standoff (2011-12), the China-Vietnam-India naval standoff (2011-12), the China-SK standoff (2015-16), the Russian invasion of Abkhazia (2008), the Russian invasion of Crimea+Donbas (2014-), the Syrian+Libyan+Yemeni+Somali Civil Wars, and a couple other similar incidents in the 2010s led to a fraying of the rules-based order in much of Asia, Eastern Europe, and MENA.

The only difference between the truth and a lie is that a lie can become the truth if you believe enough.

(None of this absolves the US, but this was a long time coming)
by tabs_or_spaces | 2026-01-21 05:22:00+00:00
> I think somebody will have built a full web browser mostly using AI assistance, and it won’t even be surprising

> When I made my 2029 prediction this is more-or-less the quality of result I had in mind.

There seems to be a lot of compensation and leniency made by the author here.

So, it is seemingly impressive that someone was able to use agents to build a browser.

But they used trillions of tokens? This equates to millions of dollars of spend. Are we really happy with this?

The browser itself is not fully complete. There's rendering glitches stated in the article. So millions of dollars for something that has obvious bugs.

This is also pure agent code. Can a code base like this ever be maintained by a team of humans? Are you vendor locked into a specific model if you want to build more features? How will support work? How will releases work? The lack of reflection over the rest of the software lifecycle except building is shocking.

So I'm not sure after reflecting, whether any of this is impressive outside of "someone with unlimited tokens built a browser using ai agents". It's the same class of problem being solved over and over again. Nothing new is really being done here.

Maybe it's just me but there's much more to software than just building.
by onion2k | 2026-01-21 05:22:15+00:00
And before some smart aleck says you can be creative on these types of optimization problems: not in two hours, it’s far too risky vs regurgitating some standard set of tried and true algos.

You're both right and wrong. You're right in the sense that the sort of creativity the task is looking for isn't really possible in two hours. That's something that takes a lot of time and effort over years to be able to do. You're wrong because that's exactly the point. Being able to solve the problem takes experience. Literally. It's having tackled these sorts of problems over and over in the past until you can draw on that understanding and knowledge reasonably quickly. The test is meant to filter out people who can't do it.

I also think it's possible to interpret the README as saying humans can't do better than the optimizations that Claude does when Claude spends two hours of compute time, regardless of how long the human takes. It's not clear though. Maybe Claude didn't write the README.
by mgerdts | 2026-01-21 05:22:29+00:00
And if you don’t use a lot of data, at least US Mobile has a by the gig plan. My family has three phones on it for a total $30 per month. Those months that we go over, it automatically charges $2 for each extra GB, with data pooled between the lines.

It is easy to switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile as well. This was helpful for me as all three of the networks normally have one bar or less at my house. T-mobile WiFi calling works more reliably than Verizon.
by err4nt | 2026-01-21 05:23:48+00:00
When it says "arrays, which may be thought of as functions whose domains are isomorphic to contiguous subsets of the integers", is it saying that this:

const list = ['a', 'b', 'c']

is syntactic sugar for expressing something like this:

function list(index) {
switch (index) {
case 0: return 'a'
case 1: return 'b'
case 2: return 'c'
}
}
by trimethylpurine | 2026-01-21 05:24:10+00:00
Based on an English dictionary definition, I would expect an intelligence exhibits understanding, don't you? I would hope people are reading the dictionary before they market a multibillion dollar product set to reach the masses. It seems irresponsible not to.

The article you linked discussed reasoning. That's really cool. But, consider that we can say that a chess game computer opponent is reasoning. It's using a preprogrammed set of instructions to predict out to some number of possible moves ahead, and choosing the most reasonable. A calculator, essentially, it is in fact reasoning. But that doesn't have much to do with intelligence. As we read in the dictionary, intelligence implies understanding, and we certainly can't say that the Chess Masters opponent from the Super Nintendo literally understands me, right?

More to the point, I don't see that any LLM has thus far exhibited remotely any inkling of understanding, nor can it. It's a linear regression calculator. Much like a lot of TI84 graphing calculators running linear algebraic functions on a grand scale. It's impressive that basic math can achieve results across word archives that sound like a person, but it's still not understanding what it outputs, and really, not what it inputs beyond graphing it algebraically either.

It doesn't literally understand. So, it is not literally intelligent, and it will require some huge breakthroughs to change that. I very much doubt that such a discovery will happen in our lifetime.

It might be more likely that the marketers will succeed in revising the dictionary. We've seen often times that if you use words wrong enough, it becomes right. But so far at least, that hasn't happened with this word.