MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What happened to self-hosted models?
by curiousaboutml | 2026-01-10 13:19:55+00:00
Hi HN, sorry for using a burner account.

It seems to me that up until the beginning of the last year, we saw a couple of new "open" model release announcements almost every week. They'd set a new state of the art for what an enthusiast could run on their laptop or home server.

Meta, Deepseek, Mistral, Qwen, even Google etc. were publishing new models left and right. There were new formats, quantizations, inference engines etc. and most importantly - a lot of discourse and excitement around them.

Quietly and suddenly, this changed. After the release of gpt-oss (August 2025), the discourse has been heavily dominated around hosted models now. I don't think I've seen any mention of Ollama in any discussion that reached HN's front page in the last 6 months.

What gives? Is this a proxy signal that we've hit a barrier in LLM efficiency?
by silvestrov | 2026-01-10 13:20:16+00:00
Yep.

You can take it one step further: imagine you live in a smallish country (10 million people).

If your market share is 10% of the population and they make 1 request per day, that is just 10 requests per second.

10% is a large market share for everyday use. So you can use 1% market share and 10 requests and it will still be just 10 reqs/sec.

In fact, 1% market share of 10 million people and you can use the number of requests each user makes as the number of requests that your server will get (on average) per second.

There is a lot of business in small countries that never need to scale (or business in narrow sectors, e.g. a lot of B2B).
by KronisLV | 2026-01-10 13:20:18+00:00
I've seen people who prefer HTML for user-submitted messages and other stuff that might need some formatting - "But what if we need to add colors to the text? Markdown isn't even one coherent standard, there's multiple ways to render it! What about justifying text? What about..." all while fighting increasing amounts of XSS issues and also the HTML style classes (because ofc JS editors add those, instead of even inline styles if you care about portability so much or semantic HTML where possible), as well as inconsistent looks after storing the data in a relational DB and doing various transformations to it over the years.

If you ever hear any of that, don't listen to it. Just use Markdown. If you're building a messaging system or an announcement system instead of a fully fledged CMS - YAGNI/KISS. Or pick anything other than HTML, even BBCode.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-10 13:20:19+00:00
without comment: https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/e13-7...

I think my favourite so far for 川-ification would be: https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/e39-1... (昨日真人秀明星，今日制造业专家)

or maybe https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/images/e37-16... ?

it's funny how conservative iconography is; as late as 1993 the outer door gods are still riding horses!
by al_borland | 2026-01-10 13:20:48+00:00
I don’t want playing sys admin on night and weekends to be a hobby. I also wouldn’t want my hobby to be managing something that has become fairly mission critical in modern life. I want to be able to do my hobbies when I want, not have them demand anything of me, because they break and getting it working again is an emergency.

I know people who run their own email. They don’t self-host, but have a domain and setup email through whatever host they are with. Over the years I’ve seen them run into issues with deliverability, host migrations, spam, hackers, and other such things. It all seems very annoying. Self-hosting would add another layer to that. I simply can’t be bothered.

I like the idea of it, but would hate the reality of it.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-10 13:20:50+00:00
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.

1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.

2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.

3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.

The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-10 13:21:14+00:00
Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.
by diego_moita | 2026-01-10 13:21:17+00:00
And both of them failed.

Both the machines and "the system" are alive and well. Did it occurred to you that you're using machines (computers, internet, HN) created by the system to complain about the system?

The bitter truth is that we don't have any good alternative for both the machines and "the system".

For Luddites' and Marxists' chagrin, manual weaving was indeed a crappy job and "the system" brought what they'd call "advance in the means of production".
by randallsquared | 2026-01-10 13:22:01+00:00
For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".

But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.

It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
by frozenseven | 2026-01-10 13:22:12+00:00
If you squint hard enough, every new thing is an example of "answer-from-search / answer-from-remix". Solving any Erdős problem in this manner was largely seen as unthinkable just a year ago.

>the problem does not matter.

Really? All of the other Erdős problems? Millennium Problems? Anything at all? This gets us directly into the territory of "nothing can convince us otherwise".
by jijijijij | 2026-01-10 13:22:52+00:00
You can't be a billionaire without pathology. The power, unlimited access to every resource, the inherent isolation, security implications, factual immunity to most consequences, morbidly twisted self-efficacy, the ethical dissonance of having it all while others starve... the human brain evolved adapted to scarcity and existential group boundaries to check on social pathology. These guys are holistically unchecked, inherently dysregulated on every axis. Their brain is constantly in an extraordinary, extreme state, trying to reach homeostasis for a life that couldn't be more distant, trying to find a model of reality which explains the abnormal signals it is getting.
by vidarh | 2026-01-10 13:22:54+00:00
I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"

There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.

The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-10 13:23:18+00:00
Because freedom of speech was always a misguided creed at best.

The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert and they shouldn't be given the same treatment, lest you want psychological warfare waged on your nation.

American free speech extremists like these tech CEOs are either willing patsies or useful idiots in the hybrid warfare against Europe.
by Lio | 2026-01-10 13:23:32+00:00
Same I still have my original Core Duo Macbook Pro somewhere.

I really loved that machine and it was definitely a gateway drug the Mac world.
I used it mainly for development work but also for DJing and I have some really fond memories of learning Ableton on it.

I've been using Macs ever since (with a few Linux laptops along the way).
by awesan | 2026-01-10 13:24:04+00:00
It happened a bit differently; Atwood and friends simply came out with a standard document and called it "standard markdown", which Gruber then refused to endorse. Eventually after the series of blog posts and some back and forth they renamed the project "CommonMark", which it is still called today.

I am not sure (of course), but I think Atwood simply thought standardizing this format was so obviously valuable that he didn't consider Gruber might not want to work with him. In retrospect it's kind of nice that it didn't happen, it really keeps everyone incentivized to keep the format simple.
by yostrovs | 2026-01-10 13:24:05+00:00
- Sitting president controls all branches of the government including the supreme court

He doesn't. The supreme Court has voted against his interests. Republican controls Congress always works closely with a Republican president.

- State-controlled TV media and propaganda channels through state-controlled social media

This is just nonsense you made up.

- US rubbing shoulders with other autocrats & dictators, and now part of the UN voting block with north korea / syria / eritrea / russia / etc

More nonsense. What does rubbing shoulders mean anyways?

- President threatening members of the opposing parties of arrest under treason charges

The other party actually charges him with actual charges repeatedly. He's just a big mouth.

- USA kidnapped another country's leader, because of their oil (ZERO pretense)

The US has been trying to put an end to that regime for many years.

- USA currently threatening to seize land from a sovereign EU nation with pro-MAGAs justifying it at every step

You seem to overstate the importance of words. Try judging by deeds instead.

- Did you already forget that your sitting president attempted a coup or what?

More nonsense. There was a riot. That's what it was. Even if they took over Congress, would that need they would be the new Congress? You really believe that?
by fpsvogel | 2026-01-10 13:24:06+00:00
One way to get usable and consistent categories for a Wikipedia article is Lift Wing: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/LiftWin...

I once used it to create a "Wikipedia StumbleUpon": https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble#demo

Here is the code related to Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...

Mentioning this in case you're looking for something as a basis for tags.

EDIT: Here is a list of all the categories from Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...
by falcor84 | 2026-01-10 13:24:46+00:00
Yes, absolutely willing to commit. I can't find a single reliable source, but from what I gather, over 70% of people in the West do "pure knowledge work", which doesn't include any embodied actuvities. I am happy to put my money that these jobs will start being fully taken over by AI rapidly soon (if they aren't already), and that by 2035, less than 50% of us will have a job that doesn't require "being there".

And regarding your example of an insurance company, I'm not sure about that industry, but seeing the transformation of banking over the last decade to fully digital providers like Revolut, I would expect similar disruption there.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-10 13:27:01+00:00
No, actually, through a campaign of propaganda that wasn't stopped.

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

Goebbels himself remarked how stupid the institutions were for granting them freedom of speech:

> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!

-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
by perihelions | 2026-01-10 13:27:25+00:00
How they exfiltrated footage of the 1989 massacre is an interesting story in its own right. The AP photojournalist who captured (among others) Tank Man couldn't safely walk the streets, so he recruited a random tourist to smuggle his film rolls, in his underwear, from the hotel to the AP's press office.

> [Jeff Widener] "I had earlier accomplished my mission of photographing the occupied Tiananmen Square so I gave all my rolls of film to Kurt/Kirk who smuggled it back to the A.P. office in his underwear. The long-haired college kid was wearing a dirty Rambo T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Security would never suspect him of being a journalist."

https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/0...

From the AP office, it was scanned (?) and exfiltrated with a dial-up modem, over copper telephone landlines (unsure of the technology. 1980's gadgets).
by shivam-myv | 2026-01-10 13:28:33+00:00
I agree that reels often just inspire an overall destination—but as a traveler, you want full control over your itinerary. We do take care of this in Map Your Voyage.

When you DM your reels, we automatically detect all locations in them. Then, during trip planning, you decide exactly what to include:

- Specific spots, like only Location 1 and Location 5 from Reel 1.

- Just Location 3 from Reel 2.

- Your own additions via the Google search bar.

- Locations from a blog post or YouTube video, with easy deselection based on your preferences.

If reels aren't your thing, skip them entirely and build your list manually using the search bar. The magic happens when you shortlist locations from any source—then we generate a day-by-day itinerary using only what you've selected (with an option to disable AI suggestions entirely).

Reels are just one starting point; you stay in the driver's seat.

In the demo video, we have shown this briefly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk9rmTndjnQ&t=222s
by CubsFan1060 | 2026-01-10 13:28:47+00:00
It's almost always locking some features behind subscription.

Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.

Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.

It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.
by skizm | 2026-01-10 13:29:21+00:00
> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.

We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-01-10 13:29:39+00:00
I have been using P2415Qs for over 10 years by now. Replaced some, bought second hand, had to ship to Dell at one point because of the wake issues (pointless: they never really fixed them), so I know the drill. There are actually 4 versions.

The last new one I bought in 2018 I actually paid the same price for it than when I bought my first one in 2015, so it is one of those few computer accessories that significantly increased in price over its course rather than decrease.

If you cannot see the P2415Q degrading and/or being generally crap in any metric (EXCEPT DPI) when compared to even the non-IPS black Dell monitors from this decade, you are simply blind. They are early HiDPI-revival-era panels, and it shows.

Some of the newer IPS black panels are so good that it is tempting to just take the DPI hit and go 27''... albeit with care as it seems Dell has decided this last year to put some filter that further increases blurriness.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-10 13:29:48+00:00
Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.

But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”

1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.

2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-01-10 13:30:01+00:00
The Wright Brothers memorial in North Carolina is a very special place. They've renovated it somewhat recently and it now conveys a lot more of the struggle that they went through.

So much debugging of prototypes, crashes, redesigns and high stakes testing.

There's also something undeniably cool about standing right where other humans did something for the first time did something and walking the distance of their flights on the field.

https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/index.htm
by neomantra | 2026-01-10 13:30:42+00:00
Very cool, thank you for creating and sharing. Literally yesterday YouTube searched (for the first time in a long time) for "D blues backing for Harmonica". I am interested now in exploring LLM paths for that.

You did a great job on the visualizations!!

I couldn't get sound to work on OSX yet, but will keep trying. We uke here, so will make an issue for that ;)

I work on NTCharts and also just yesterday had an LLM fix a visual bug using world understanding, one that I had thought about multiple times prior. In the end, the solution was obvious once revealed and I had overthought the problem.

Video in OP Miditui project is amazing, I missed it on first skim.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-10 13:30:43+00:00
I feel the same way as this person, but I’m leaning even more into open-source. I’m building an open-source SaaS for every vertical and even though it’s open-source, we offer cloud hosting, yet most users deploy on their servers. Our cloud hosting is just one source of monetization, our main monetization is a decentralized marketplace around these SaaS.

My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.
by rendx | 2026-01-10 13:31:12+00:00
I guess you're getting downvoted since the claim that "FFmpeg is now somewhat broken" remains unsubstantiated. You're relying on information from LLMs which by definition are closer to random guesses than anything else. Effectively, what you're saying is that you cannot be bothered to learn the actual, albeit complex, syntax of FFmpeg to solve your problem, which is totally fine and up to you, but your conclusion that the tool is broken is like saying "this car is broken" when you don't know how to operate it and drive.
by coldpie | 2026-01-10 13:32:06+00:00
> You have to fund it from selling a product.

Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.

This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.

I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.
by vidarh | 2026-01-10 13:32:14+00:00
It also seems like a weird prediction when agents make reproducing the API from a spec easier and easier. If an API is accessible, you can point your coding agent at it to refine a spec and local test suite.

You'd expect libraries-as-API (libraries that's previously be offered in code form but where people try to limit code access by offering it only as an API, as opposed to SaaS's where the API provided access to a larger system, gatekept data, or running infrastructure) to get incredibly hard to monetize too, unless they're extremely complex.
by kasey_junk | 2026-01-10 13:32:15+00:00
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.

The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
by winshaurya9 | 2026-01-10 13:32:32+00:00
searching job myself , how can i stand out different from the ultra showy candidates launching b2b vertical saas , when i have simpler project that solved problem for a smaller group of people that i build from scratch , every controller , every api , every fallback , making everything serverless for free deployment and decrease server load and have real interest to solve problem and giving hours into my art , without internal reach it seems hard to break into the industry , mind you i am still in college and confused that will i even stand a chance
by kibwen | 2026-01-10 13:32:33+00:00
I confess I don't really get this. Fish and Bash are different languages in the same way that Ruby and Perl are different languages. And if I want to run a Perl script, I don't try to run it in a Ruby interpreter, and I don't get grumpy at Ruby for not being source-compatible with Perl.

Which is to say, if you need to run a Bash script, run it via `bash foo.sh` rather than `./foo.sh`. There's no need to limit yourself to a worse shell just because there exist some scripts out there written in that shell's language.
by al_borland | 2026-01-10 13:32:35+00:00
I still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view.

This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.
by dnalang | 2026-01-10 13:33:12+00:00
You're spot on about 3D lattices. My goal with the Star Topology was to achieve maximal error suppression on existing planar (2D) hardware available to the public today. I'm essentially trying to squeeze utility-scale stability out of NISQ-era 'flat' chips. Moving this consensus mechanism into 3D via-layers is exactly the right path for the next leap in fault tolerance