MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rock_artist | 2026-01-17 10:16:08+00:00
It's related to the entire security balance which is bad (imho).
Until that separation, in the PowerPC/Intel supported days you had the option to remove one from the fat binary (Universal Binary 1).

This carried and I can still do that. But not on System apps. So now any system app is twice without ability to easily 'diet' it:

file /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
/System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit (for architecture arm64e): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e

It won't be marketing wonder when new macOS dropping Intel will be it's 25% smaller (I guess they'll take the extra size for on-device models are other feature you won't be able to remove :) )
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-17 10:16:45+00:00
Likewise... coloured surprised!

Enough to make a new submit:

The Mind as a City: A Systems View of Consciousness, by Ian Reppel (berggruen.org)
1 point by adityaathalye 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643380

> I'm feeling a rather "HN moment"... I found out, because I'd submitted an essay for the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay competition too (aiming for last place --- no delusions of grandeur here, no siree). They just announced the results, and I'd noticed "Reppel" last night on hnpwd. I'd also submitted my site for hnpwd. And here we are.

Least I can do --- terrific essay!

(And, mine's here: https://www.evalapply.org/posts - "A Consciousness is A Dedekind Cut" ... flight of fancy, but it was a lot of fun researching / thinking / writing.)

(edit: add context, fix link)
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 10:17:19+00:00
> Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West.

Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like. That is why we stopped doing things that way.

Nevertheless mass market handicrafts are still a theoretical option. It hasn't become a worse option over time, it is in fact a better option now than it ever was in the past. Today is the best day in history to be a weaver, even for those that do it by hand. A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates. They would say things like "wow, I can afford a much better life than in the 1700s with my weaving skills", "what just happened to me? What was that time portal?" and "maybe I should learn to code, they earn even more money than I do".
by geysersam | 2026-01-17 10:18:18+00:00
What file formats are the existing datasets you have? I also work on data processing in a scientific domain where HDF5 is a common format. Unfortunately Duckdb doesn't support HDF5 out of the box, and the existing hdf5 extension wasn't fast enough and didn't have the features needed, so I made a new one based on the c++ extension template. I'd love to collaborate on it if anyone is interested.
by pram | 2026-01-17 10:18:19+00:00
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.

Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!

If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
by Chance-Device | 2026-01-17 10:18:26+00:00
Of course, and distribution and ownership of benefits is the real issue here, but I think I’ve addressed that.

Let me be clearer: I said “companies must commit to” where the stronger phrasing is “companies are forced to by legislation”. But to begin with this might be voluntarily done by some number of companies.

Also, in this vision of society the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, google etc) are taxed heavily. The taxation is redistributed, there is UBI for some fraction of the population, maybe the majority. Others still work in companies mandated to keep employees as I outlined above.

Importantly, we as a society specifically aim to bring about these benefits of AI by using the redistributed funds in part to invest in them.

Part of this is the free market, part is planned government investment. If one fails, maybe the other succeeds. Either way, we try to spread the benefits and importantly to ensure the benefits are actually there in the first place.
by trio8453 | 2026-01-17 10:20:31+00:00
Makes sense for the free tier, sucks to include ads in a paid tier though. Not sure who the target audience for the Go subscription is anyway, they might be better off removing it purely from a product point of view.

> What matters most:

> - Responses in ChatGPT will not be influenced by ads.

> - Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.

> - Your conversations are private from advertisers.

The part that's left out is that you'll obviously be profiled as an user and get targeted ads based on your chat history.
by el_pa_b | 2026-01-17 10:20:44+00:00
Thanks! Indeed, digital pathology, satellite imaging and geospatial data share a lot of computational problems: efficient storage, fast spatial retrieval/indexing. I think this could be doable.

As for digital pathology, the field is very much tied to scanner-vendor proprietary formats (SVS, NDPI, MRXS, etc).
Show HN: I made a TIDAL client that runs in the terminal
by a2nb | 2026-01-17 10:22:16+00:00
I spend a lot of time in the terminal and wanted a simple way to listen to TIDAL without switching contexts, so I built ttydal. It’s a terminal-based TIDAL client written in Python that uses MPV for playback.

The project was inspired by sqlit (https://github.com/Maxteabag/sqlit). ttydal supports browsing, fuzzy search, and basic playback controls.

This is also my first real Python project, so it’s still small and a bit rough around the edges, but it’s open source and easy to experiment with. I’d really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or criticism.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-17 10:23:09+00:00
The spectacular success of nuclear power where it's been tried combined with equally spectacular failures to rebase first world power grids on renewables should have prompted you to question your assumptions by now.

One must conclude the problem lies not in splitting the atom, but educating physicists.

You're a scientist, right? Can you think of any evidence that even in principle might prompt you to change your mind on nuclear?
by lxgr | 2026-01-17 10:25:09+00:00
For speakerphone-appropriate situations (e.g. being alone or with people that all want to participate in a call), yes, that would be great.

For everything else, the solution is to STFU. People blasting reels or having rambling non-essential phone calls in public transport is detrimental to everybody's stress level and by extension mental and physical health. I'd love to see it banned and the ban actually enforced.

Shout out to the GGT 101 bus driver that made the annoying passenger on some endless legal/business call actually shut up with a polite but firm "Sir, this is a bus, not a call center". Best trip across the Golden Gate Bridge I've ever had.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-17 10:25:18+00:00
> Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem.

Not quite. The path to high level always involves abstractions that fit the problem. There is still room for a decision to replace high-level with low-level in some very specific bits of a hot path, but that decision also takes into consideration the tradeoffs of foregoing straight-forward high-level solutions with low-level versions that are harder to maintain. The sales pitch to push code that is harder to maintain requires a case that goes way beyond performance arguments.
by majewsky | 2026-01-17 10:27:00+00:00
> How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise?

Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.
Show HN: PolyMCP – structured skills from MCP tools for efficient agent usage
by justvugg | 2026-01-17 10:27:46+00:00
Hi everyone,

I added skills to PolyMCP to handle a common problem with MCP servers: once the number of tools grows, feeding raw schemas to agents becomes messy and inefficient.

Challenges we faced:
• Agents consume too much context/tokens loading raw schemas.
• Tool discovery becomes noisy and hard to manage.
• Different agents need different subsets of tools.
• Orchestration logic leaks into prompts.

PolyMCP introduces skills — curated, structured sets of tools with documentation, organized so agents can consume only what’s relevant.

PolyMCP handles tool organization, letting agents with Ollama,OpenAI and more to focus on execution.

Example: generate skills from a Playwright MCP server in one command:

polymcp skills generate --servers "npx @playwright/mcp@latest"

Benefits of skills:
• Reuse capabilities across multiple agents.
• Keep agent context small while scaling the number of tools.
• Control what each agent can access without modifying the agent itself.

Repo: https://github.com/poly-mcp/Polymcp

Would love feedback on approaches for tool organization and minimizing context/token usage in multi-agent setups.
by uecker | 2026-01-17 10:28:54+00:00
Germany started out with a high amount of coal and lignite (as a domestic source of energy with many jobs depending on it). The carbon footprint dropped with the rollout of renewables according and will be very low once the transition to renewables is completed. It makes no sense to compare it to France, which switched to a nuclear a long time ago. This is relatively easy to understand in my opinion.
by nindalf | 2026-01-17 10:29:02+00:00
> I do want to briefly note that the JS VM is custom and not QuickJS

It's hard to verify because your project didn't actually compile. But now that you've fixed the compilation manually, can you demonstrate the javascript actually executing? Some of the people who got the slop compiling claimed credibly that it isn't executing any JavaScript.

You merely have to compile your code, run the binary and open this page - http://acid3.acidtests.org. Feel free to post a video of yourself doing this. Try to avoid the embellishment that has characterised this effort so far.
by apelapan | 2026-01-17 10:29:45+00:00
That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build.

As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards.

Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high regard.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-17 10:31:14+00:00
Does anyone else think that the biggest reason for ICE and the National Guard deployments is to normalise such situations?

It seems most likely to me this is being done in preparation for the ending of democracy. If the midterms become mired in controversy, for example, there will be protests on the streets. And these deployments will be ready to crush dissent. This is why deployments are mostly focused on the likely flashpoints.
by uecker | 2026-01-17 10:31:22+00:00
There is no spectacular success of nuclear power. It provides an irrelevant fraction of overall power in the world and time and money needed to scale it up would be immense. The France's nuclear industry is an economic disaster and the EDF has been fully re-nationalized (and during the time it was semi-private there was plan to close 17 plants by 2025). The rollout of renewables works very nicely in Europe, there is no "grid failure". I am a physicist, I draw my information from looking at the underlying data, not the press.
by tim333 | 2026-01-17 10:33:44+00:00
I'm not sure any countries really shoot down light aircraft unless it's an active war zone. They are not much of a threat and it's also hard to tell if they are there legally or not.

You're more likely to get hassled when you land like the Ethan Guo guy (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04rql923kdo)
by ogoffart | 2026-01-17 10:34:31+00:00
> someone has to make a native cross-platform desktop UI framework that doesn't suck

This is exactly what we're trying to do with Slint (https://github.com/slint-ui/slint
).
It’s a native, cross-platform UI framework for desktop and embedded (Rust/C++/Python/JS), with no browser runtime
by Epa095 | 2026-01-17 10:35:14+00:00
Thanks for posting the article, it's really well written and worth reading! I think he raises some important points in the `“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”` section.

His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says

"The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!".

This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph.

I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour.

It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
by DavidPiper | 2026-01-17 10:36:07+00:00
You're being downvoted, but I tend to agree that communication is not the part of science you want to "innovate" on. The purpose of (scientific) communication is to be understood, not to be novel.

The science you're writing about is hopefully extremely novel of course.

In general I've found "innovating on the wrong thing" is surprisingly common, especially from people who are bored and/or hungry for promotions, etc.
by niemandhier | 2026-01-17 10:36:12+00:00
As long as the country is very wealthy at least compared to its neighbors it might work.

Lichtenstein and Singapur found their niches, which do not scale to larger countries, Dubai was just lucky.

Happy slaves don’t dream of freedom.

I wonder what would happen to Lichtenstein if the EU would pull a Trump on them and block trade and airspace until the adjust their tax policies…

Not that this would ever happen.
by teiferer | 2026-01-17 10:37:27+00:00
> a gigantic manual that lists every property of the system in excruciating detail, which is totally worthless for learning and barely usable as reference.

It's the only usable form of reference! I want all the details to be presented in a reference. Where else?

> low-level tools are terrible too

It seems to me the author is confusing lack of familiarity with lack of existence. There are lots of fantastic tools out there, you just need to learn them. They don't know them, so conclude they don't exist.

> We could have editor plugins and language servers to help beginners along

We already have all that.
by uecker | 2026-01-17 10:37:28+00:00
Again, this is a misleading argument. The low carbon footprint in France is the result form investments of the past, while Germany relied on coal and lignite for a long time and only started to transition to carbon-neutral renewables much latter. The result was substantial drop of CO2 emissions form the grid which will continue. You can see it over time here: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/co2_emissions/chart.ht...
by tomjen3 | 2026-01-17 10:37:37+00:00
Anyone on HN can write a Swift alternative protocol in a few days. XML documents signed with public keys is a good start. The trick is to get the banks to use them and to integrate them in their systems, but the EU is capable of writing banking regulations.

Operating systems are even easier - pick your flavour of Linux - devices are all made in China anyway.

Its the cloud and software part that sucks. VPSes aside, almost any managed service is US based.

AI has made this even worse.
by smarx007 | 2026-01-17 10:38:22+00:00
> why do we invent these formal languages except to be more semantically precise than natural language

To be... more precise?

On a more serious note, cannot recommend enough "Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" by Winchester. While the book talks mostly about the precision in mechanical engineering, it made me appreciate _precision_ itself to a greater degree.
by jakkos | 2026-01-17 10:40:31+00:00
> hardware

Sure x86 is an absolute mess, but I don't think it's a primary bottleneck. High end x86 cpus still beat high end ARM cpus by a significant margin on raw performance. Even supposing x86/ARM are bottlenecks... yeah a bottleneck at double digit billion ops per second.

> Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine.

C# and Go are already really fast (https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages) languages for the masses and at this point you can compile most things to WASM to get them run in the browser.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-17 10:40:37+00:00
Looks pretty successful to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...

If over half a country's electricity production is "irrelevant", I'm not sure what would be relevant.

Call it a disaster if you'd like. Lights turn on. Meltdowns aren't happening. The French pay 50% less than Germans per kWh.

You do you, but don't sit there and claim you're looking at the data. You can either interface with the real world or live in a fantasy universe and fail. Up to you.
by benban | 2026-01-17 10:42:45+00:00
nice work. the idea of breaking agents into short-lived executors with explicit inputs/outputs makes a lot of sense - most failures i've seen come from agents staying alive too long and leaking assumptions across steps.

curious how you're handling context lifetimes when agents call other agents. do you drop context between calls or is there a way to bound it? that's been the trickiest part for us.
by dandelionv1bes | 2026-01-17 10:44:45+00:00
I do understand why it’s a product - it feels a bit like what databricks has with model artifacts. Ie having a repo of prompts so you can track performance changes against is good. Especially if say you have users other than engineers touching them (ie product manager wants to AB).

Having said that, I struggled a lot with actually implementing langfuse due to numerous bugs/confusing AI driven documentation. So I’m amazed that it’s being bought to be really frank. I was just on the free version in order to look at it and make a broader recommendation, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Mileage may vary though, perhaps it’s a me issue.
by benban | 2026-01-17 10:44:46+00:00
the point about this being an os problem not an ai problem resonates. letting untrusted agents drive your browser smells like a problem to me.

in practice we've had better luck running agents in lightweight sandboxes with explicit capability handles. curious if anyone's tried capability-based systems like sel4 for hosting agents, feels like mainstream oses have a long way to go here.
Is Groove (by OpenAI) a scam that no one talks about?
by ainthusiast | 2026-01-17 10:45:09+00:00
Second cohort, yet not a single evidence of first cohort actually happening. Plus for cohort 2 apps closed on 12th, cohort start on 22nd - 10 days while doable is unrealistic, and now five days until the start I can't find single mention of someone being contacted. If this is idea farming and scam - there should be more chatter about it...
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-17 10:45:15+00:00
> That's a totally separate thing from LLMs. We are constantly told that if we learn the magic way to use LLMs, we can spit out functioning code a lot faster. But in reality, people are just generating code faster than they can verify it.

I don't see it as it is. LLMs are not magically gonna make you be able to produce high-quality software, just like Ableton isn't gonna magically gonna make you be able to produce high-quality music. But if you learn the tool, it gets a lot easier to use effectively. And the better you are at "producing high quality music/code", probably the more use you can make of Ableton/LLMs, compared to someone who aren't good at those things already.

Again, what you're being told by other people, I don't know, and frankly don't really care. OpenAI sold Codex to me as a tool that can help me, a programmer, do programming, and that's exactly what that tool gives me.

Cursor in their article tried to sell their tool as something that can "Hundreds of agents can work together on a single codebase for weeks, making real progress on ambitious projects" which I claim in TFA, doesn't seem to be true.
by ogoffart | 2026-01-17 10:45:33+00:00
There are some desktop apps made with Slint. For example:

- WesAudio has a VST plugin for audio applications: https://slint.dev/success/wesaudio-daw

- LibrePCB 2.0, is migrating their code from Qt to Slint and should soon be released. https://librepcb.org/blog/2025-09-12_preview_of_next_gen_ui/

- krokiet: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/blob/master/krokiet/README...
by crvdgc | 2026-01-17 10:45:37+00:00
Some valid points, but I hope the authors had developed them more.

On the semantic gap between the original software and its representation in the ITP, program extraction like in Rocq probably deserves some discussion, where the software is written natively in the ITP and you have to prove the extraction itself sound. For example, Meta Rocq did this for Rocq.

For the how far down the stack problem, there are some efforts from https://deepspec.org/, but it's inherently a difficult problem and often gets less love than the lab environment projects.
by defrost | 2026-01-17 10:45:48+00:00
And yet he put himself in front of a vehicle that had a driver and a running engine, and partnered up with other agents who acted as a group with zero cohesion, issuing conflicting instructions, escalating the tension of a traffic infringement they had no actual legal authority to engage with.

Every trained professional I've communicated with in regard to this incident has effectively shaken their head and referred to it as a clown show of epic proportions, a textbook example of how not to engage with the public, an example of how authoritarian states deal with people they have no regard for.

Let's be honest, a great many US enforcement types come to firearms use with an any excuse approach coupled with an absence of ability to de-escalate situations. They act like walking cans of petrol looking for a tinder to throw themselves on.
by cpursley | 2026-01-17 10:45:52+00:00
That's not what happened. They already had been working on MIR for a while. Then Visa/Mastercard pulled out due to sanctions over the war. The retailers actually prefer MIR now as it's newer/better tech plus lower fees and government likes it because they can track every little detail (when they were a bit in the dark before). Consumers seem to prefer the payment systems - faster transfers, QR code payments and scan face to pay terminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(payment_system)