MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AslanMammadli | 2026-01-18 05:05:45+00:00
DeepSeek-R1-FineTuned-AdaptiveQGen is a fine-tuned version of the DeepSeek R1 (Reasoning Model) specifically designed for adaptive question generation in English language learning. The model has been fine-tuned on a custom Chain-of-Thought (CoT) dataset to generate context-aware, adaptive follow-up questions tailored to a student's proficiency level, learning goals, interests, and common errors. for more information https://enverson.com
by mslate | 2026-01-18 05:06:57+00:00
Your analogy about drunk drivers actually makes my point: we don't just tell parents "be vigilant". We have DUI laws, road design standards, and enforcement--systemic solutions, not just individual responsibility.

With tech, we've largely abdicated that, placing the entire burden on parents to defend against industrial-scale manipulation.

Expecting individual parents to successfully counter industrial-scale behavioral engineering is a systems failure, not a parenting failure.
by dartharva | 2026-01-18 05:07:17+00:00
I don't understand why Anna's Archive has such a convoluted donation system. At first glance it looks like it's trying to push a subscription on you, which is ironic considering aversion to subscriptions is exactly what's driving people to AA in the first place. I found no convenient single-link crypto donate button where I could just send some money whenever I want.
by karanveer | 2026-01-18 05:07:41+00:00
the beauty of this game was that it was developed in Assembly Code and on top of that by majorly one person.

I've been trying to locate the dev of this game since a long time, so I can thank them for an amazing experience.

If anyone knows their social or anything, please do share, including OP.

Also, nice work on CC in this. May actually be interested in Claude Code now.
by radioactivist | 2026-01-18 05:08:48+00:00
Seems like the someone dug something up from the literature on this problem (see top comment on the erdosproblems.com thread)

"On following the references, it seems that the result in fact follows (after applying Rogers' theorem) from a 1936 paper of Davenport and Erdos (!), which proves the second result you mention. ... In the meantime, I am moving this problem to Section 2 on the wiki (though the new proof is still rather different from the literature proof)."
by stego-tech | 2026-01-18 05:09:16+00:00
One thing I'm not seeing much of in the comments, that I think is worthwhile to highlight:

Every single one of these icons should be available to choose by the user.

Some folks make good icons; others do not. Taste is highly subjective, and this applies to user interfaces moreso than user experience.

Interfaces should always be customizable; experiences should always be consistent.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-18 05:09:18+00:00
What I've seen is that the productive developers are the ones who understand what problem they are solving. They either take the time to think it through or just have an seemingly uncanny ability to see right to the heart of the problem. No false starts, no playing with different implementations. They write the code, it's efficient, and it works.

The slow developers have false starts, have to rework their code as they discover edge cases they didn't think about before, or get all the way through and realize they've solved the wrong problem altogether, or it's too slow at production scale.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-18 05:12:19+00:00
Why Truncate quotes to to make it sound like I was responding to something other than what I did? The post are right on top of eachother.

It might be good for Europe/the world, but it is not 'America first' or good for America.

Why would we want to inflict MORE competition on ourselves? We can easily create competition within our own country if that is a desirable outcome. To beat my analogy to death if a class is graded on a curve, I'm not recruiting the smartest people I know into it just because 'that will make me try/work harder'.
by rendaw | 2026-01-18 05:12:21+00:00
I think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse.

As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc.

Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut.

I think it's a mental trap.

Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
by doctoboggan | 2026-01-18 05:14:31+00:00
Can anyone give a little more color on the nature of Erdos problems? Are these problems that many mathematicians have spend years tackling with no result? Or do some of the problems evade scrutiny and go un-attempted for most of the time?

EDIT:
After reading a link someone else posted to Terrance Tao's wiki page, he has a paragraph that somewhat answers this question:

> Erdős problems vary widely in difficulty (by several orders of magnitude), with a core of very interesting, but extremely difficult problems at one end of the spectrum, and a "long tail" of under-explored problems at the other, many of which are "low hanging fruit" that are very suitable for being attacked by current AI tools. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell in advance which category a given problem falls into, short of an expert literature review. (However, if an Erdős problem is only stated once in the literature, and there is scant record of any followup work on the problem, this suggests that the problem may be of the second category.)

from here: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
by fsckboy | 2026-01-18 05:14:31+00:00
well, "linux is just the kernel" eyeroll.emoji so no, you don't, but it's easiest to use a distro, and among distros it's easiest not to use an obscure distro so you can use the package managers to install a variety of apps and tools, but the longterm mainstream distros seem to all be infected, even devuan which is barely mainstream. most "alternate" distros seem to be dedicated to even goofier ideas than the old school that i prefer.

i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.
by shimman | 2026-01-18 05:14:48+00:00
If these agent are so great was isn't ChatBotKit a highly successfully public company worth hundreds of billions and not just a glorified chatgpt wrapper? If you're able to do so much with so little why isn't that actually bearing out in becoming a profitable company? What's the excuse?

Do people really need to know that a bunch of code at a company that won't exist in 10 years is something worth caring about?
by xeeeeeeeeeeenu | 2026-01-18 05:15:14+00:00
> no prior solutions found.

This is no longer true, a prior solution has just been found[1], so the LLM proof has been moved to the Section 2 of Terence Tao's wiki[2].

[1] - https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281#post-3325

[2] - https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-18 05:16:16+00:00
Not to be a luddite, but large language models are fundamentally not meant for tasks of this nature. And listen to this:

> Most notably, it provides confidence levels in its findings, which Cheeseman emphasizes is crucial.

These 'confidence levels' are suspect. You can ask Claude today, "What is your confidence in __" and it will, unsurprisingly, give a 'confidence interval'. I'd like to better understand the system implemented by Cheeseman. Otherwise I find the whole thing, heh, cheesy!
by dvrp | 2026-01-18 05:16:21+00:00
Dang, you should change it to "Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­karabo­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon" via your admin superpowers!
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-18 05:18:34+00:00
There's some nuance. IQ tests measure pattern matching and, in an underlying way, other facets of intelligence - memory, for example. How well can an LLM 'remember' a thing? Sometimes Claude will perform compaction when its context window reaches 200k "tokens" then it seems a little colder to me, but maybe that's just my imagination. I'm kind of a "power user".
by maxloh | 2026-01-18 05:19:38+00:00
Even after migrating to ES modules, jQuery is still somewhat bloated. It is 27 kB (minified + gzipped) [0]. In comparison, Preact is only 4.7 kB [1].

[0]: https://bundlephobia.com/package/jquery@4.0.0

[1]: https://bundlephobia.com/package/preact@10.28.2
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-18 05:19:57+00:00
I run a small podcast startup. I've been doing it ten years.

Podcasting is drying up because the money left. Everyone went all in on podcasts on 2020. Spotify bet the farm on podcasts. Money poured in. Marketing bros realized there's only so many mattresses and underwear you can sell through the format and left.

You really can't serve personalized ads through podcasts. The relevance of what you advertise can be about the topic of the show (that is, marketing to the type of people who would listen) or the location of the listener. Pretty much every other signal gives you nothing interesting you'd be about to decide "yeah they're a potential good customer". Spray and pray.

The money left. People realized they couldn't justify the time and money they pour into podcasting. It turns out, even if you weren't expecting to make money, you really hoped people would listen. Not enough, because podcasts faded and people discovered TikTok. No more waiting for your favorite show to drop: everything is your favorite show. If you get bored just scroll up.

Lots of folks are still making it work. But a lot more people are going into podcasting with a more deliberate approach. People are doing it because they think it's important, not because they think people will listen or because they want to get rich. I'd argue that some of the best podcasts ever made have come out in the past 2-3 years, but if you're not giving the median listener the thrill of the first season of Serial, they don't listen past the first episode or two.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-18 05:20:13+00:00
Did the UK stop people from just picking up a cheap SIM at the Airport? I always like a local number when traveling. Anyway, Indian Roaming plans are so cheap these days that it's much easier and cheaper to just subscribe to them as part of the plan. These days, I don’t even need to add/activate it or anything, the providers turn it ON when I start my phone outside India and turn it off when I re-activate back in India.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-18 05:20:28+00:00
The way I would approach writing specs and requirements as code would be to write a set of unit-tests against a set of abstract classes used as arguments of such unit-tests. Then let someone else maybe AI write the implementation as a set of concrete classes and then verify that those unit-tests pass.

I'm not sure how well that would work in practice, nor why such an approach is not used more often than it is. But yes the point is that then some humans would have to write such tests as code to pass to the AI to implement. So we would still need human coders to write those unit-tests/specs. Only humans can tell AI what humans want it to do.
by amluto | 2026-01-18 05:21:07+00:00
I find it interesting that, as someone utterly unfamiliar with ergodic theory, Dini’s theorem, etc, I find Deepseek’s proof somewhat comprehensible, whereas I do not find GPT-5.2’s proof comprehensible at all. I suspect that I’d need to delve into the terminology in the GPT proof if I tried to verify Deepseek’s, so maybe GPT’s is being more straightforward about the underlying theory it relies on?
by martin-t | 2026-01-18 05:21:20+00:00
> Our values are irrelevant to the wider population.

This is the saddest part. Things are getting worse for everyone and most people just don't care. They are either ignorant or accept it as inevitable.

I see 2 issues:

1) People don't have real power. There's too many steps between an issue you care about and a solution which requires changing laws. I don't see a solution other than people voting on laws directly and possibly votes weighted by how much they actually know about the stuff. How to implement it at reasonable cost is a very difficult question.

2) You can't make people care. People only start caring once they personally get hurt. Theoretical downsides don't interest most of the population. Freedom of speech is something they've learned at school about and they know they are supposed to cheer for it but when a platform requires spelling fuck as f*ck, that's OK with them - it might be the canary in the coal mine before more sophisticated censorship (analysis of sentiment/meaning, shadow bans) is rolled out but that's a theoretical concern, if they are able to comprehend it at all. And even when they get hurt, they often don't learn from it. I've seen plenty of people lose accounts on various platforms but all they do is switch to another proprietary platform, without looking for real alternatives.
by Travis_Cole | 2026-01-18 05:21:53+00:00
I've been using Claude Code heavily for months. It's great for velocity, but I kept hitting the same problems:

- Agent hallucinates file paths that don't exist
- Claims "tests pass" without running them
- Same errors recurring across sessions
- No way to catch failures that aren't crashes

The tools exist to catch crashes. Nothing exists to catch semantic failures - when the agent confidently gives wrong answers.

So I built Task Orchestrator - an MCP server that adds an "immune system" to Claude Code:

1. Semantic failure detection - catches hallucinations, not just crashes
2. ML-powered learning - remembers failure patterns, warns before similar prompts
3. Human-in-the-loop - queues high-risk operations for approval
4. Cost tracking - see exactly what you're spending
5. Self-healing circuit breakers

The math problem: at 95% per-step reliability, a 20-step workflow has only 36% success rate. That's not a bug - it's compound probability.

Technical details:
- 680+ tests
- Provider-agnostic (works with any LLM)
- MCP native for Claude Code
- MIT licensed

What features would you want to see that would improve your AI agent workflows?
Show HN: vr.dev – simple 3D/VR/XR portfolio and links (Meta hit hard this week)
by vrdev | 2026-01-18 05:21:53+00:00
Hey HN,

I built vr.dev - think Linktree but with an inline 3D model viewer and WebXR support. Clean landing page at vr.dev/yourname with your projects, links, and a showcase of your 3D work.

Originally I over-engineered this into a "LinkedIn for VR" with job matching, skill taxonomies, profiler analysis tools - classic feature creep. 30 people signed up and nobody used it because it was overwhelming.

Stripped it back to the basics: upload a .glb file, add some links, share one URL. That's it.

With Meta laying off 10% of Reality Labs this week, figured now's a good time to actually put this out there. If you're a VR/XR dev suddenly updating your portfolio, this takes 5 minutes and it's free.

It's early and simple, but I'd love feedback on:
- Is the "3D viewer on your profile" useful, do you have alternatives, or is this just a gimmick?
- What would make you actually use this vs. a GitHub README or personal site?
- Who's out there doubling down on the VR/XR space despite the macro changes?

Live example: vr.dev/erik
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-18 05:22:24+00:00
We should reset the podcasting world because the top podcast lists are full of topical stuff someone doesn't care about? A top podcast list full of fluff means that we've run out of things to say, seriously?

I have the exact opposite problem with podcasts that the author details: I have too many that I want to listen to and not enough time. There are so many people whose opinions and perspectives I value that I will never be able to consume them all consistently. From deep dives into Roman history, miniseries on foreign policy, sports, politics, film music, there are so many people sharing their passion with the world and I want to hear it all.

But finding those people takes work. Yeah, there are a ton of losers out there with nothing to say who put out popular content, but that's not unique to podcasting. YouTube, Reddit, hell the entire internet has that problem.

Stuff like this reads to me like someone wants the internet to be happy fun time that only ever gives me an endless supply of good things to consume and filters out all the bad.
by cr8oscloud | 2026-01-18 05:22:37+00:00
QNS Protocol Specification
Quantum Name Service (QNS) — A decentralized, quantum-secured domain system for Web 5. check it out at my.quantumcloud.one

Overview
QNS resolves .q domains to Content-Identified Pointers (CIPs) through a globally distributed network of 200+ Points of Presence. Unlike traditional DNS, QNS provides:

Instant propagation — Seconds, not 24-48 hours
Quantum-secure — Post-quantum cryptography via ACL 3.0
Censorship-resistant — No central authority
Developer-friendly pricing — From $9.99/year
Documentation
Document Description
SPECIFICATION.md Full protocol specification
QNS-Protocol-Specification-v1.0.pdf PDF version for distribution
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-18 05:23:09+00:00
HN will be the last place to admit it; people here seem to be holding out with the vague 'I tried it and it came up with crap'. While many of us are shipping software without touching (much) code anymore. I have written code for over 40 years and this is nothing like no-code or whatever 'replacing programmers' before, this is clearly different judging from the people who cannot code with a gun to their heads but still are shipping apps: it does not really matter if anyone believes me or not. I am making more money than ever with fewer people than ever delivering more than ever.

We are very close.

(by the way; I like writing code and I still do for fun)
by fragmede | 2026-01-18 05:24:19+00:00
The counter isn't that some hypothetical AI will come along and solve three problems with the current generation. That argument, and the response, is tired as dirt. No, the counter here is to point out that the prototype is fine for small values of production. I wouldn't take something Ai generated and serve it on the web, and have the world try and hack the site, but some small app that isn't exposed to the world? We can throw around claims of security and scalability, but Amy's (local) personal cookbook app doesn't care about either of those.
by saghm | 2026-01-18 05:25:17+00:00
> Eliminating per-element object overhead — This is the biggest win (~5-6x)

I feel like this phrasing might be easy to misinterpret. Without carefully considering the context, it seems like it's implying that objects have higher overhead than arrays, and my intuition is that this is true, but I'd argue that there's a potentially more relevant way of looking at things.

In the "object of arrays" layout, you have one object and three arrays, but in the "array of objects" layout, you have one array and N objects, where N is the size of the array. Even if the overhead of objects was the same as can array, you'd be looking at more overhead as soon as you went past three elements. In fact, even if the overhead of an object was lower than the overhead of an array, you'd still reach more overhead with the "array of objects" layout if you have enough elements to make up for the difference. With a TypedArray (or an array of a single type that's optimized by the runtime in the way described fairly early on in the article), you're not looking at an extra level of indirection per element like you would with an object.

I'd be curious to see what the results would be if they repeated the "array of objects" benchmark with an "array of arrays", where each element is an array of size 3. I could imagine them being quite similar, but I'm also not sure if there's even more nuance that I'm falling to account for (e.g. maybe the runtime would recognize that an array of N/3 elements each being an array of 3 numbers could be "flattened" to an underlying representation of array of size N in memory and perform the same optimizations.

I think the meta lesson here may be that intuition about performance of arrays in JavaScript might be pretty tricky. At least in terms of external semantics, they're supposed to be roughly equivalent to objects with numbers as keys, but in practice there are probably enough optimizations being done (like the implicit recognition of an array of numbers as described in the article) that I suspect that intuition might be a bit naive in a lot of cases, and it's probably better to verify what's actually happening at runtime rather than trying to guess. (The meta meta lesson is that this is true for a lot of things in pretty much every language, and it's sometimes going to be necessary to verify your assumptions about what performance will be, but I think that's something easy to fail to do even when you're aware of it being an easy trap, so having some general things to look out for like arrays potentially not being intuitive can still be helpful).
by Zak | 2026-01-18 05:27:26+00:00
The fundamental mechanism seems to be that light mode causes pupils to contract by exposing the eye to more light. This decreases spherical aberration and increases depth of field just as using as smaller aperture on a camera lens does.

Staring into a light source that contrasts enough with the ambient light to contract my pupils is uncomfortable. I don't want to do that even if it makes me read faster.
by subdavis | 2026-01-18 05:28:43+00:00
> scholarly dark matter that exists to pad CVs and satisfy bureaucratic metrics, but which no one actually reads or relies upon.

Is it cynical to believe this is already true and has been forever?

Is it naive to hope that when AI can do this work, we will all admit that much of the work was never worth doing in the first place, our academic institutions are broken, and new incentives are sorely needed?

I’m reminded of a chapter in Abundance where Ezra Klein notes how successful (NIH?) grant awardees are getting older over time, nobody will take risks on young scientists, and everyone is spending more of their time churning out bureaucratic compliance than doing science.
by michaelhoney | 2026-01-18 05:29:26+00:00
>My watch takes walking, cycling and running seriously — especially outside rather than on a treadmill — but a hard session at the gym barely registers. It will count my steps for me, but I have to count my own pull-ups

The Strava of weight training (not _counting_ the pull-ups for you, but recording them, helping you build workouts, track progress, social sharing) is the well-named Hevy: https://www.hevyapp.com
by csomar | 2026-01-18 05:31:27+00:00
The closest show/cartoon for this I can think of is Rick and Morty Season 7, Episode 10 - "Fear No Mort." In that episode, Morty gets trapped in a fear-based "hole" where he's forced to confront all his deepest anxieties and insecurities. The whole point is that he can't escape by running away or pretending to be someone he's not. He has to face his fears directly and accept his true self, flaws and all. It's only when he does and accepts himself as he actually is, that he's able to break free.

That episode really got to me. Every time the screen goes dark and transitions to Morty realizing he's still trapped in the hole, something inside me freaks out too. It's like the show is forcing me to realize I'm not actually confronting these truths in my own life. I'm probably still in the hole, aren't I?