MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-13 21:05:29+00:00
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.

When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"

Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
by violetthrift | 2026-01-13 21:05:37+00:00
For what it's worth, banter on social media with someone you're not familiar with is almost always playing with fire. It's really easy for something to come across wrong or just be kind of exhausting, and this effect is magnified the more of a spotlight that person has. You're just one of thousands of interactions they've had that day/week/month, and so unless you know they enjoy that kind of playfulness, I find it's worth assuming they don't. This is, ironically, especially true with people who publicly post in that tone, because they get it coming back at them all the more frequently.
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 21:05:39+00:00
> but instead to say I know you reach a certain baseline level of skill in critical thinking. Given that, I am genuinely not sure why you would choose to defend the actions of the agents.

Because an application of critical thinking to the available evidence clearly exonerates the agents in this specific case.

> I wouldn't be murdered because I would comply with all of the agent's unreasonable demands.

As an objective matter of fact, the demand to exit the vehicle was reasonable and legally justified, and she was legally required to comply with it. I have already repeatedly explained why, and given appropriate citations.

The evidence does not support the use of the term "murder" to describe this killing.

> I will spare you an attempt to explain either the clear lack of reason in the agent's demands or the folly of this reasoning.

Your claim of "clear lack of reason" is contradictory to evidence and you have not even attempted to make a case for it beyond bald assertion.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-13 21:06:20+00:00
Are you suggesting people shouldn't develop AI because it's basically just produces unemployment and scams? Like that they should just be good people and stop, or government should ban the development of AI?

I mean you are clearly equivocating AI with unemployment and scams, which I think is a very incomplete picture. What do you think should be done in light of that?
by boxqr | 2026-01-13 21:06:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BoxQR because I kept opening the wrong storage boxes in my basement. Labels were vague, spreadsheets got outdated, and nothing worked when I needed something fast.

BoxQR lets you generate a QR code for each box, attach it physically, and keep a searchable list of what’s inside. Scanning the code shows the contents instantly.

This started as a personal project and turned into a small SaaS. I’m still early and mostly interested in feedback on whether this solves a real problem for others, or what you’d improve.

Happy to answer any questions.
by dnautics | 2026-01-13 21:06:43+00:00
arguably the O-1B is more necessary than the O-1A. If you didn't have an O-1B you couldn't have a bjork come and give a concert in the US and get paid for it, you couldn't have an emma thompson come and shoot for a hollywood film and get paid for it, you couldn't hold ANY major international sporting events, etc.
by gspr | 2026-01-13 21:06:46+00:00
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
by tehjoker | 2026-01-13 21:06:58+00:00
RobertoG's comment is a good one, but I will add that the definition of genocide is defined in the genocide convention as:

Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[9]

I was sloppy in saying "partial genocide" as a colloquialism, because "partial genocide" is the crime of genocide full stop.
Show HN: ThreadPatrol ends messy Slack workspaces by gently enforcing threads
by raianpollock | 2026-01-13 21:07:02+00:00
I built this app because Slack's endless notification spam is the modern day cancer of workspaces, and I had this challenge on literally every single job I've ever had.

ThreadPatrol scans incoming messages, determines if it should've been a threaded response instead and if so, discretely messages the author in-thread about it. it gently enforces threading culture without being the bad guy. the result is dramatically less notification spam in Slack.

now that Teams also has a threading feature, we're considering whether to add it.

would love to hear the community's thoughts.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-13 21:07:07+00:00
Find an electrician who will inspect and sign off on your work. It's not illegal as licensed master electricians have mechanics do all the grunt work who are unlicensed. The electrician vouches for his employees work which legitimizes it. No different than you doing the work and having the electrician inspect, call out issues to fix, and inspect again until no issues are found and sign off.
by clnhlzmn | 2026-01-13 21:07:07+00:00
So instead of carrying a slightly larger but perfectly useful computer (a laptop) I have to carry a smaller but useless keyboard and mouse for the benefit of not having a keyboard and mouse sitting on a desk when the desk isn't being used? I still don't get it.

I could see the benefit if this thing dropped the keyboard entirely to make it as small as possible but still I'd rather just carry a small laptop.
by labcomputer | 2026-01-13 21:07:10+00:00
They didn’t fake the demo, but the legislature quickly rewrote the law because it was intended to give Toyota ZEV credits for hydrogen cars.

Tesla did briefly operate a swap station at the site of the Harris Ranch Supercharger until California changed the rules.

There are several reports from people who used it on teslamotorsclub.com, and I saw it with my own eyes.

Hilarious that your source is Ed Neidermeyer. Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Elon’s lies about the state of self driving are Ed’s lies about how Tesla is going bankrupt Any Day Now.

It’s ok though, Ed’s stock manipulation antics enabled me to stuff my IRA with Tesla shares (since sold, when Elon went nuts) and make a nice little headway on my retirement savings.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-13 21:07:11+00:00
> you are a broken person

On the contrary, I think folks that always try to find some sort of hypocrisy in how folks choose to not spend their money are broken.

It seems too cynical by half, and completely discards any sort of relative morality to one's purchasing decisions. I have also long suspected that there is a selfish motivation to it - as if to assuage your (again, the royal your) own morality about how you choose to spend your own money, you need to tear down other people's choices.
by Intralexical | 2026-01-13 21:07:17+00:00
Externalities, coordination failure...

It's simultaneously worth vastly more to the community as a whole than the cost of producing it, and yet, to any single individual, the marginal benefit of having it is not enough to justify paying for it.

The naïve solution might be to collectively subsidize it, but then that creates its own moral hazards and perverse incentives.

...It's a bit scary how much of democracy relies on institutions that were only able to form because we lucked into social conditions making them sustainable.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-13 21:07:35+00:00
> > It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.

I'd say that as far as the extraction of brain juices they become exactly the same after a while and maybe the only difference is a smirk when asked about and replying "it beats working" or "it's a tough job but someone has to do it"
by foxfired | 2026-01-13 21:07:39+00:00
The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]

My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about
by strangecasts | 2026-01-13 21:07:44+00:00
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-13 21:07:56+00:00
I 100% believe that he was told this by at least one higher-level White male manager in corporate America in the 1980s who would rather his anger at being passed over were directed at women, minorities, and an amorphous conspiracy than the individual decision-maker making the decision to pass him over, and who knew him well enough to know that he would both uncritically accept the description of a bright-line violation of his legal rights that fit his existing biases while also not taking any action to vindicate those same rights.
by bubblethink | 2026-01-13 21:07:59+00:00
People are getting hung up on definitions of extraordinary. The thing you need to understand is that US immigration is a political blackhole. The main pathways to immigrate to the US are family, misery (asylum, refugee, tps), or luck (diversity). Employment or economic immigration is frowned upon and visas like H-1B are limited and exploitative and still ultimately politically unpopular as the masses don't want to compete. So, that leaves O-1 as an escape hatch for a basic economic immigration visa that won't rile up the masses. Afterall, a chud does not reasonably believe that an influencer or a pornstar is stealing his job. So it goes.
by sanity | 2026-01-13 21:08:08+00:00
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.

He has plenty of fans right up to the end, it's amazing how people think someone went "off the rails" just because he has a different political opinion.
by throwaway35636 | 2026-01-13 21:08:14+00:00
Interestingly the confer image on GitHub doesn’t seem to include in the attestation the model weights (they seem loaded from a mounted ext4 disk without dm-verity). Probably this doesn’t compromise the privacy of the communication (as long as the model format is not containing any executable part) but it exposes users to a “model swapping” attack, where the confer operator makes a user talk to an “evil” model without they can notice it. Such evil model may be fine tuned to provide some specifically crafted output to the user. Authenticating the model seems important, maybe it is done at another level of the stack?
by 19-84 | 2026-01-13 21:09:35+00:00
thank you for your comment, some example dot files were not copied in my original repo, they have now been added.

https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver/commit/0bb103952195ae...

the docs have been updated with mkdir steps

https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver/commit/c3754ea3a0238f...
by codexon | 2026-01-13 21:09:55+00:00
AI music from suno sounds indistinguishable to non-ai generated music to me.

In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-13 21:10:22+00:00
> BUT, notice the absolutely opposite approach to AI and Web3 on HN. Things that highlight Web3 scams are upvoted and celebrated. But AI deepfakes and scams at scale are always downvoted, flagged and minimized…

It took a few years for that to happen.

Plenty of folks here were all-in on NFTs.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-13 21:10:29+00:00
Fair question.

The benchmarks, logs, scripts, and recovery scenarios are all real and hand-run
that’s the part I care most about being correct.

For the README text itself: I did iterate on wording and structure (including tooling),
but the system, measurements, and tradeoffs are mine.

If any part reads unclear or misleading, I’m very open to tightening it up.
Happy to clarify specifics.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-13 21:10:31+00:00
My town as two newspapers and two TV new stations. They employ more than a dozen journalists, including an old friend of mine.

If you want any actual important news, you go to Facebook and make sure that you’re following the right people and you’re in the right groups, because that’s where the news about local governance and politics actually comes out. The papers and TV stations almost always run bland human interest stories, business propaganda, press release reprints, a huge selection of national and sports news, etc. a few years ago, both papers announced they wouldn’t report most local crimes anymore unless they were particularly notorious.

After a few months or sometimes years if a local story has become big enough, they’ll deign to cover it, usually without crediting the people who actually broke the story to everyone paying attention.

When local professional journalism is this bad, it’s nobody’s fault but them whe nobody wants to pay for it.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-13 21:10:47+00:00
Funny defense to use for a crowd that spent all their time regularly, hatefully dehumanizing people. The front page was routinely plastered with shit like "Why interracial children are an abomination," Hitler-did-nothing-wrong propaganda, usernames that echoed Nazi slogans and fantasized about mass-murdering non-white people, etc. It was an utter cesspool, and preserving and perpetuating that is a really weird use of dev time and effort.
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-13 21:10:48+00:00
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-13 21:10:50+00:00
I think what parent-poster means is humans dream of something at least like, say, ship's computer from Star Trek, which accepts some degree of fuzzy input for known categories of tasks and asks clarifying questions when needed.

Albeit with fewer features involving auto-destruct sequences... Or rogue holodeck characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fO_pPB8-S4&t=4m42s
by pdpi | 2026-01-13 21:11:06+00:00
> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.

There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
by dessimus | 2026-01-13 21:11:07+00:00
While possible to be for physical sex work, I think the previous commenter meant by meeting fans, would be like at a meet-and-greet at a Con, so they can further increase the parasocial relationship with the people giving them subscriptions, signing autographs. Also, they may be doing collabs with other content creators, just as comedians and actors will be on each others podcasts.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-13 21:11:09+00:00
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.

This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.

Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
by Multicomp | 2026-01-13 21:11:22+00:00
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.

It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.

So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.

How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?

No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
by quacker | 2026-01-13 21:11:30+00:00
Right, but they are referring to configuration on a GitHub repository that can make squash merge automatic for all pull request merges.

e.g. When clicking the big green "Merge pull request" button, it will automatically squash and merge the PR branch in.

So then I don't need to remind or wait for contributors to do a squash merge before merging in their changes. (Or worse, forget to squash merge and then I need to fix up main).
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-13 21:11:31+00:00
> What is the benefit to the person, or to the US?

Not that I encourage it but... Obviously an OF model moving to the US means US users viewing that person now stop sending money abroad. And people from all over the world watching that model now send money to the US.

It's not just tax revenues: it's shifting the balance of money in the US's favor. If an OF model makes $10m a year and pays $2m in taxes, it's not just $2m in tax revenues for the US: it's also in addition to that $8m that are now spent/staying in the US.
by nuancebydefault | 2026-01-13 21:12:01+00:00
Sorry to read about your wife's illness. It's such a pity that "having to work to maintain quality of life" has taken away the joy of work, even when your colleagues are comrades.

As for me, the principal reason for working is that camaraderie. I find 'establishing things together' more valuable and rewarding than the progress or productivity on itself. The for knowledge workers above-average paycheck feels like a luxury.
by convolvatron | 2026-01-13 21:12:23+00:00
we're in the minority I think. I always find it easier to just debug a problem from first principles instead of assuming that it worked at some point and then someone broke it. often times that assumption is wrong, and often times the search for bad commit is more lengthy and less informative than doing the normal experimental process. I certainly admit that there are ases where the test is easily reproducible and bisect just spits out the answer, but that a seductive win. I certainly wouldn't start by reading the commit log and rewinding history until I at least had a general idea of the source of the problem, and it wasn't immediately obvious what to try next to get more information.

if you look at it as in investment in understanding the code base more than just closing the ticket as soon as possible, then the 'lets see what really going on here' approach makes more sense.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-13 21:12:52+00:00
That sounds neat, but I wonder how they pay their bills.

I guess it depends on the depth of analysis and quantity of reporting. It's one thing to write a summary of the school board or town council meeting. That probably isn't a full time job. If there's more detailed reporting, fact checking, etc, involved I begin to worry about the implicit bias that creeps in when only certain people can afford to do it.
by falloutx | 2026-01-13 21:13:07+00:00
>I mean you are clearly equivocating AI with unemployment and scams, which I think is a very incomplete picture.

What else, let me guess, slop in software, ai psychosis, environmental concerns, growing wealth inequality. And yes may be we can write some crappy software faster. That should cover it.

I have no suggestions to on how to solve it. Only way is to watch openAI/Claude lose more money and then hopefully models are cheaper or completely useless.
by achierius | 2026-01-13 21:13:29+00:00
> For a lot of people, social media is the internet. They don't discover things on search engines, they are guided to them by engagement engines in walled gardens.

Sure, this is true -- but there are also many (though nowhere near as many) for whom the opposite is true. I think it's important to remember that there's value in speaking to a community like that even if it's not the whole world listening.
by wojciii | 2026-01-13 21:13:30+00:00
I wouldn't know why they are burning things. I suppose they burn the religion of peace symbols of their oppressors.

I imagine that Israel supports a regime change in Iran, but I don't think that they can run this on their own. They probably support whatever goes on with covert agents.

Since little gets out of Iran let's not speculate any more. :)