MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psb217 | 2026-01-08 10:48:34+00:00
Per your point 4, some current hyped work is pushing hard in this direction [1, 2, 3]. The basic idea is to think of attention as a way of implementing an associative memory. Variants like SDPA or gated linear attention can then be derived as methods for optimizing this memory online such that a particular query will return a particular value. Different attention variants correspond to different ways of defining how the memory produces a value in response to a query, and how we measure how well the produced value matches the desired value.

Some of the attention-like ops proposed in this new work are most simply described as implementing the associative memory with a hypernetwork that maps keys to values with weights that are optimized at test time to minimize value retrieval error. Like you suggest, designing these hypernetworks to permit efficient implementations is tricky.

It's a more constrained interpretation of attention than you're advocating for, since it follows the "attention as associative memory" perspective, but the general idea of test-time optimization could be applied to other mechanisms for letting information interact non-linearly across arbitrary nodes in the compute graph.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00663

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13173

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23735
by f1shy | 2026-01-08 10:49:00+00:00
That the relations between EU and USA are not in an historical maximum, no discussion... but enemy? The hyperbole is a little big too far fetched.

> I hope EU companies will stop manufacturing US airplanes and other things.

Independent of how little we may like current US politics: a) it will probably change, more sooner than later. And b) starting a trade war with the US is not very good idea. We like it or not, there are many things that we need desperately to be able to produce. Starting with computers and SW. And please don't start with "OOS SW" as much as I like the idea, and I constantly advocate for it, even if we start yesterday, it will take decades to build everything again.
by samiv | 2026-01-08 10:49:14+00:00
I really take issue with studies like this that put meat and meat products together.

Unprocessed meat is what humans what have been eating for hundreds of thousand of years.

Meat products are commercial new inventions and contain stuff like preservatives, volume expanders, flavor enhancers and coloring agents. They also typically contain added sugars, sodium, malto dextrin, corn syrup.

One can't seriously put these together and call them the same, make a study where participants might be eating SPAM and then conclude that "red meat is bad".

Given the choice between "Domino's vegetarian pizza", "IKEAs meatballs" and "steak that is fried,salted and peppered" which one do you think will be the healthiest option?
by BoxOfRain | 2026-01-08 10:49:15+00:00
Personally I'm not a fan of terse writing; if something's worth saying at all it's worth using suitably expressive language to describe it, and being short and cold with people isn't a good form of interpersonal communication in my view. Pleasantries are important for establishing mutual respect, if they're considered the baseline of politeness in a particular culture then it's overtly disrespectful to forgo them with strangers. Terseness is efficient for the writer certainly, but it's not necessarily for the reader.
by heraldgeezer | 2026-01-08 10:51:01+00:00
>and I got chills from thinking how deeply intertwined US companies and the US government are.

Okay and you would rather have... china? (Huwaei) or EU (Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel)

Like pick a solution.

Complaining is easy.

I am EU btw and would pick USA over China. There.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-08 10:51:20+00:00
Same here. It’s a double-edged sword, though. I know some people who work in health care, including some doctors. They deal with a lot of hypochondriacs — people who imagine they have all sorts of issues and then try to MacGyver themselves to better health. You can’t read an HN thread on health care issues without dozens of those coming out of the woodwork to share their magical, special way of beating the system. Silicon Valley has a long history of people that did all sorts of weird crap. There's a great anecdote about Steve Jobs turning orange when he was restricting himself to a diet of carrots because he believed god knows what. In the end he died young of pancreatic cancer. Probably not connected but smart person that did some wacky stuff that probably wasn't that good for him.

I'm on statins that have side effects that I'm experiencing. That's a common thing. ChatGPT was useful for me to figure out some of that. I've had other minor issues where even just trying to understand what the medication I'm being prescribed is supposed to do can be helpful. Doctors aren't great at explaining their decisions. "Just take pill x, you'll be fine".

Doctors have to diagnose patients in a way that isn't that different from how I would diagnose a technical issue. Except they are starved for information and have to get all their information out of a 10-15 minute consult with a patient that is only talking about vague symptoms. It's easy to see how that goes wrong sometimes or how they would miss critical things. And they get to deal with all the hypochondriacs as well. So they have to poke through that as well and can't assume the patient is actually being truthful/honest.

LLMs are useful tools if you know how to use them. But they can also lead to a lot of confirmation bias. The best doctors tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. So, tools like this are great and now a reality that doctors need to deal with whether they like it or not.

Some of the Covid crisis intersected with early ChatGPT usage. It wasn't pretty. People bought into a lot of nonsense that they came up with while doom scrolling Reddit, or using early versions of LLMs. But things have improved since then. LLMs are better and less likely to go completely off the rails.

I try to look at this a bit rationally: I know I don't get the best care possible all the time because doctors have to limit time they spend on me and I'm publicly insured in Germany so subject to cost savings. I can help myself to some extent by doing my homework. But in the end, I have to trust my doctor to confirm things. My mode is that I use ChatGPT to understand what's going on and then try to give my doctor a complete picture so he has all the information needed to help me.
by tomhow | 2026-01-08 10:51:28+00:00
Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.
Show HN: Prompt Pilot – Grammarly-style extension for AI prompts
by ajashari | 2026-01-08 10:51:28+00:00
I built Prompt Pilot, a browser extension that enhances your prompts with one click. It works like Grammarly but for AI prompts - adds context, structure, and clarity so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. understand what you need.

Key features:
- Works on any AI platform (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity)
- XML/JSON output modes for structured prompts
- Privacy-first: prompts enhanced but not stored
- Free tier: 3 enhancements/day

Available for Chrome and Firefox. Would love feedback from the HN community!
by sokoloff | 2026-01-08 10:51:53+00:00
It can be simultaneously true that 5% of educators are great, 20% very good, 60% are good, 13% are adequate, and 2% should have fired 5 years or more ago.

If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.
by throwaway239845 | 2026-01-08 10:52:34+00:00
> Why not simply say “Somali piracy”

The audio is referencing geographical locations, so saying “Somali piracy” alone doesn’t provide a geographical location (since Somali piracy could take place anywhere).

So the quote would need to change to something like:

“[…] to the relative quiet of Somali piracy in Somalia’s waters”

…which is extremely clunky.

Can you suggest an acceptable version, that still does the job of referencing the geographical location?
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-08 10:53:25+00:00
They are a pain in the arse to set up properly and you really need a (edit: very patient, thank you for putting up with all my sine tones, Tommy) deaf person with a suitable hearing aid to help you set it up. If the loop is the wrong length and has the wrong impedance you'll never get the amp balanced up properly, and you can't just take the installer's word for it.

Beyond that I have very little experience of them.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-08 10:53:36+00:00
It's crazy that it seems like we're just going in loops every decade or so. New people enter tech, mostly focus on their own stuff, after a while, it becomes very clear how "deeply intertwined US companies and the US government are", and these people now lose their trust. Eventually, things been going well for some years, so new people enter the industry, with the same naive outlook, thinking "This couldn't be true of the government we have today" yet eventually, even they realize what's going on. Rinse and repeat every last 3 decades, and that's just what I remember, I'm sure others remember even further.
by directevolve | 2026-01-08 10:54:16+00:00
Police were shouting contradictory instructions at her, including to move her car. Her car had hardly starting to move when the cop walked around the front of the car and leaned in the window to shoot her in the face. Her corpse’s foot was on the gas, so the car then accelerated, crashing further down the road. That cop looks like a murderer to me from the footage. Hopefully, he will face accountability in a fair trial.
by m4ck_ | 2026-01-08 10:54:42+00:00
Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
by SamInTheShell | 2026-01-08 10:54:56+00:00
It is only funny until that vibe coder is building the data warehouse that holds your data and doesn’t catch the vulnerability that leads to your data leaking.

Perhaps I can laugh at the next Equifax of the world as my credit score gets torched and some dude from {insert location} uses my details to defraud some other party. Of which I don’t find out about until some debt collector shows up months later.
by urbandw311er | 2026-01-08 10:55:38+00:00
> And yet, here you are...

I'm pretty sure you know what the parent poster meant, and you should take it as a compliment to you and our HN community that they didn't intend you, or us, to be included in that definition of 'anything US-based'.

Stirring the pot like that isn't helpful to you, to HN itself, or any of our community.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-08 10:55:53+00:00
Okay, but would you rather be assassinated by a shot in the head, or a shot in the heart???

Not sure why people need to chose between the US or China, and especially why you started thinking about this when someone seems to just want to share their feeling that they've lost their trust in their government. So what if they trust China more/less, what is that supposed to mean with their relationship with US government? Suddenly they shouldn't actually have a lost it, because some people prefer US over China?

I just don't understand this train of thought, and how it's even relevant here.
by howardshaw | 2026-01-08 10:56:33+00:00
OP here. A bit more context: I built this mainly for packaging cross-platform release artifacts where ISO compatibility gets tricky (Unicode filenames, files >4GB, and preserving UNIX permissions).

The app can create new images and also modify existing ISOs (add/replace/delete files, then rebuild). It supports ISO9660/Joliet/UDF/Rock Ridge so you can pick a compatibility set that matches your audience.

I’d love feedback on real-world edge cases to test: mounting behavior across OSes, Unicode normalization, deep paths/long filenames, large directory trees, etc.
Show HN: Twisted Logic – an experiment in AI-driven moral paradox stories
by anefiox | 2026-01-08 10:57:09+00:00
Hi all,

Over the weekend I felt nostalgic for classic anthology-style storytelling and wanted to see if I could create something new in that format. Rather than trying to imitate any specific show, I was interested in the broader idea of short speculative stories built around irony, choice, and unintended consequences.

I decided to experiment with AI as a storytelling tool. Going in, I expected the results to be fairly mediocre, but I was genuinely surprised by the output. Some of the stories — and even the generated images — were better than I anticipated and made me want to explore the idea further.

The result is Twisted Logic, a small choose-your-own-path anthology story generator. It can use Google’s Gemini models if you provide an API key, but I’ve also been working to make it function with free alternatives and allow people running local LLMs to point the project at their own models. By default it uses free generators and the browser’s built-in voice (which can be turned off).

The project is free to use and open source (https://github.com/anefiox/TwistedLogic). I mainly built it as a hobby experiment and a way to explore generative storytelling and interactive narrative design. If anybody wants some links to the some stories generated as ebups please let me know.
by viikka | 2026-01-08 10:57:14+00:00
I built a small Chrome extension that lets you save products from any website directly into Google Tasks. While browsing, it captures the product name, link, and price, and adds it to a selected Google Tasks list.

The goal was to avoid keeping dozens of tabs open or copying links into notes. Since it uses Google Tasks, the list syncs automatically across devices and is available on mobile when shopping later.

It’s lightweight, requires no separate account, and works with existing Google Tasks lists.

Feedback welcome.
by themafia | 2026-01-08 10:58:31+00:00
The presumption is that the contents being secured are /so/ valuable that locking my device is preferable to any leak of them whatsoever.

This is military level security and just isn't appropriate for most consumers. Particularly around something so rarely exercised and utilized by users as the boot process. A simple warning with a long timeout would have sufficed.

Aside from that you have a hardware vendor, sourced into an integrated product from another vendor, sold to a user, with various third party software interacting with it. This was always going to result in questionable experiences for end users.
by tracyspacy | 2026-01-08 10:58:53+00:00
I've been building a bytecode VM in Rust and recently implemented NaN boxing for value representation. Sharing here for anyone interested.

I needed all VM values (booleans, integers, string pool indices, bytecode references) to fit in 64 bits (stack is Vec<u64>).
My implementation encodes 5 distinct types using a 3-bit tag and 32-bit payload, all within a single u64. It also has 15 unused bits, they may be used later for types expansion.

I'm using a 64-bit layout:
- Bits 63-51: Quiet NaN signature (0x7FFC...)
- Bits 50-18: 32-bit payload (integers, string pool indices, etc.)
- Bits 17-3: Unused/ (15 bits)
- Bits 2-0: 3-bit type tag
by heraldgeezer | 2026-01-08 10:58:59+00:00
>someone seems to just want to share their feeling that they've lost their trust in their government

?? I interfered it as someone outside the USA.

Why? Because I hear that sentiment a lot here. USA bad. Okay, now what. They are the most important trade and resource partner.

oh no the feelings

Do something.

Solve something.

Realpolitik.

>Not sure why people need to chose between the US or China

Because the EU needs outside trade partners.
by srinivaskumarr | 2026-01-08 10:59:08+00:00
*What My Project Does:*

llm-feat is a Python library that uses OpenAI LLMs (like GPT-4) to automatically generate feature engineering code for pandas DataFrames. You provide your DataFrame and metadata describing what each column means, and the LLM generates context-aware feature engineering code that actually makes sense for your domain.

The library works directly in Jupyter notebooks - when you call the function, the generated code automatically appears in the next cell. You can also get detailed reports explaining the rationale behind each feature, which helps you understand what the LLM is thinking and why certain features were created.

Under the hood, it uses GPT-4's understanding of domain context to generate features that are specific to your problem. For example, when tested on a medical dataset, it generated clinically relevant features like lipid ratios (LDL/HDL) and BMI interactions that a generic rule-based library wouldn't know to create.

*Target Audience:*

This library is designed for:

- Data Scientists and ML Engineers building predictive models who want to speed up the feature engineering process without sacrificing domain relevance.

- ML Practitioners working on real projects who need production-ready tools (I've been using it in my own work), especially useful during the exploratory phase when you're trying to figure out what features might work.

- Anyone tired of manually engineering features and wants an intelligent assistant that understands context rather than just applying generic transformations.

*Comparison:*

vs. Rule-based libraries (featuretools, tsfresh): These libraries use predefined transformation rules that work across all domains but don't understand context. llm-feat uses LLMs to understand your specific domain and generate features that are relevant to your problem. For example, on a medical dataset, it generated lipid ratios and composite risk scores that a generic library wouldn't create.

vs. AutoML tools (AutoGluon, H2O AutoML): AutoML tools are black boxes that handle the entire ML pipeline. llm-feat gives you the actual code to review, modify, and understand. You maintain full control over your feature engineering process while getting intelligent suggestions.

vs. Manual feature engineering: Obviously much faster - what would take hours of domain research and coding happens in seconds. Plus, the LLM often suggests features you might not have thought of.

*Results:*

Tested on the Diabetes dataset:
- Baseline: RMSE 54.33 with 10 original features
- With LLM features: RMSE 53.53 with 20 features (10 original + 10 generated)
- Improvement: 1.47% RMSE reduction, R² improved from 0.44 to 0.46

The generated features included lipid ratios, BMI interactions, and composite risk scores that were clinically relevant and improved model performance.

*Links & Source:*

GitHub: https://github.com/codeastra2/llm-feat

PyPI: pip install llm-feat

I would love feedback on the API design or suggestions for improvements!
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-08 11:00:57+00:00
You've argued that grain is fed to cattle; which was not in question.

The parent questioned whether the use of grain for finishing was down to a demand based on consumer taste preference.

You've done nothing that would move them from their position of questioning the evidence here.

The detail you do provide shows grain feeding increases yield for farmers, which would be an indicator that it is financial benefit to herd owners that drives the use of grain; potentially moving away from your assertion.

Angus beef is very popular in UK, I'm relatively sure it's grass fed?
by MORPHOICES | 2026-01-08 11:01:24+00:00
Treating documentation like an interface, not a manual As of late, I’ve reviewed documentation less as “instructions” and more like an interface. ~

Users find it hard to use documentation just as they find it hard to use a product with a bad interface.

It changed the way I write, for example: Headings are like boundaries to an API. I prioritize example before explanation. If it lowers cognitive load, repetition is warranted. I made the following changes: Even if it may feel like it has been too short, I hope you will not mind the sections. Even better, try to remove everything except for one idea per page.

Try not to write for the expert, write for the most confused reader. I’ll ask you the following: Do you see docs as some sort of ux too? How do you test docs, without watching someone live?
by zmgsabst | 2026-01-08 11:01:30+00:00
Yes.

A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.

Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-08 11:02:24+00:00
I really like that one, but look at it in reverse - when faced with a task and wondering whether to do it now or postpone it to tomorrow, ask yourself "When faced with it tomorrow, am I as likely to postpone it again?" if so, I strive to explicitly choose one of the following:

1. Accept that it's just not important to me and consciously abandon it (perhaps with a quick WONTFIX update/handling, if needed).

2. Accepting that it is important and I'm as likely to keep postponing it, roll up my sleeves and do it now.

3. Accepting that it is important, but now is not a good time to tackle it, postpone it, but try to set things up such that I won't postpone it again. This includes blocking off dedicated time in my calendar for the new time, making sure I have the tools/prerequisites I'd need then, and if possible figuring out a motivational hack to prevent myself from postponing it again.

It's still hard, and I'm constantly learning what works for me and what doesn't, but I like that I'm making these choices more mindfully.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-08 11:02:29+00:00
I'm still reading Infinite Jest. Started back in 2020, one hundred pages left. I doubt I will ever read it again if and when I finish it. I liked Wallace's shorter works and thought Infinite Jest would give me something to do over lockdown. I get some of the themes in it, like entertainment being a sedative, but some parts just don't grip me, like the Eschaton (which I feel should) or radioactive hamsters wandering through wastelands.
by latexr | 2026-01-08 11:02:42+00:00
All of that has been said before, too.

> Not everyone is using them yet, but they will. There’s zero doubt about it anymore.

That’s not true. On HN and elsewhere you’ll find no shortage of folks who don’t use those tools because they don’t want to. People who find enjoyment in doing the thinking and programming themselves, for whom doing it is the goal. For others there are legal and moral considerations. It’s unrealistic to think everyone will be using LLMs for coding, they won’t. Not everyone thinks alike, but for some reason proponents seem incapable of understanding that. All it takes is a bit of empathy and listening to your fellow humans.
by roryirvine | 2026-01-08 11:04:20+00:00
In the UK, "gee es em" was the usual term I heard at the local paper merchants when I was a regular customer in the late 90s - early 2000s.

Of the four reams of paper/card I have at home, two are labelled in "gsm", one is "g.m⁻²", and one uses both "g/m²" and "gsm" in different places. Weirdly, it seems that the specialist stuff is more likely to use "gsm" than the everyday 80 g/m² A4.
by aziaziazi | 2026-01-08 11:04:46+00:00
Cellulose is one of the main constituant of plants and as a fiber, great for your gut:

> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.

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

Workshop sawdust would be a bad idea though.