MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
General Trajectory (YC W25) – Foundation model for dexterous manipulation
by whatentropy | 2026-01-06 17:18:41+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Joshua (solo founder) at General Trajectory (YC W25). We trained a foundation model for humanoid robots that can pick up unseen objects and do real-world work.

Short video:
https://youtu.be/iIdum8FrMIw

Website:
https://generaltrajectory.com

What we’re working on:
Humanoid robots can do backflips and kung fu, but still struggle with economically useful work. Dexterous manipulation (human-level grasping and handling of everyday, novel objects in messy scenes) is the bottleneck to useful physical labor.

Why this matters:
A lot of “robot demos” happen in tightly-controlled settings. Once you move into real environments, the distribution shifts immediately: clutter, lighting changes, partial occlusions, novel objects, weird geometries, slippery materials, etc. For many of these “difficult” objects, prior SoTA systems can collapse to 0% success.

Our approach:
We combine a small, efficient set of human demonstrations with reward-guided training to improve the base policy’s grasps.

Concretely:

- Collect an efficient dataset of demonstrations (teleop)

- Train a reward model

- Use that reward to improve grasping behavior beyond pure imitation

Results so far:
We see strong generalization to novel objects and scenes, including cases where strong baselines hit 0%. On the hardest objects, we get up to 63% gains, while maintaining near-perfect performance on standard objects.

Full details (technical write-up):
https://www.generaltrajectory.com/technical-update

Deployment:
We use our policy as an action expert inside a Vision-Language Action (VLA) model: a 2B VLM (Qwen3-VL) handles high-level reasoning/planning (“what/when”), and our 12-DoF dexterous policy executes the “how” (grasp/manipulate) on unseen objects.

We show autonomous real-world rollouts for:

- Box packing + folding (end-to-end with unseen items)

- Delivery fulfillment (picking unseen food items into DoorDash delivery bags)

We also open-sourced our teleop stack:
https://github.com/GeneralTrajectory/dex-teleop

It uses vision + wrist trackers instead of data gloves → about $500 in hardware vs. ~$5,000.

The physical world represents 80% of global GDP. We believe this research represents progress toward a future in which AI systems are not limited to computer work and can contribute directly to the physical world.

If you’re interested in AI for the physical world (scientific R&D automation, defense, etc.), I’d love to hear your thoughts!
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-06 17:18:56+00:00
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
by gruez | 2026-01-06 17:19:01+00:00
>We’re discussing a post about DMCA in this thread which is a policy pushed by the UN and adopted by the US as DMCA. Not sure what your point is.

So far as I can tell there's nothing to do with takedowns? From wikipedia:

>The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM). It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-06 17:19:09+00:00
I had a rough time with Jellyfin like 6-7 years ago, with media not populating/playing properly, and metadata being lost on upgrade, etc.

Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-06 17:19:17+00:00
If you're running an LLM there's a benefit in shifting prompt pre-processing to the NPU. More generally, anything that's memory-throughput limited should stay on the GPU, while the NPU can aid compute-limited tasks to at least some extent.

The general problem with NPUs for memory-limited tasks is either that the throughput available to them is too low to begin with, or that they're usually constrained to formats that will require wasteful padding/dequantizing when read (at least for newer models) whereas a GPU just does that in local registers.
by dang | 2026-01-06 17:19:52+00:00
I'm late to this, but I'm doubtful that that perception is correct. It's true there are fluctuations, as with anything on HN, but the baseline is pretty stable. But the perception that HN has gotten-more-political-lately is about as old as the site itself. In fact, it's so common that about 8 years ago I took a couple hours to track down the history of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
by ethagnawl | 2026-01-06 17:19:55+00:00
I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was. I can't think of any device, appliance, etc. I own whose UX is _better_ for not having physical, dedicated buttons or switches and instead having a touch interface or buttons which require a complex series of presses or chords. It's almost like there was _no_ UX research to back any of these "features" up and people just went ahead and made these changes because they could, it was fun and they look cool.

To give a very concrete and potentially hazardous example: I have an induction range which has no physical controls but has a touch interface which requires various combinations of tapping, holding and sliding fingers. To say nothing of the fact that this is useless for people who have significant visual impairments, how am I supposed to turn it off if there's an electrical fire because a pot boils over or something? Is the expectation that I reach into boiling water that potentially has current running through it and hope to tap my fingers in the right place? Am I supposed to try to yank the power? Or is the expectation that I just walk outside and call the fire department?
by hmry | 2026-01-06 17:20:07+00:00
That's really not the point they were making.

You are much more likely to be repressed/harrassed/arrested by your local government than a foreign government. So a local government knowing your behavior is more likely to lead to bad consequences than a foreign government knowing.

Of course, that might change in the future. Hypothetical example, the US government bans you from using any US cloud services because of what you did in private.

Though that's not exactly exclusive to governments either, Google banning you from GMail and Google Docs because of your YouTube uploads is already a thing.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-06 17:20:17+00:00
I'd have no problem with it. It's a factual statement, it is their duty to refuse unlawful orders. Now, if they said to disobey specific orders that were in fact lawful that would be another matter, but that didn't happen with the video in question.

> Be honest with yourself.

So far you're the one pushing into dishonesty here, or at least disingenuity. The video did not amount to sedition, even though you suggest it did. You can't point out any actual sedition, only hint at the possibility of it and throw out some whataboutism bullshit. Your comments don't speak well of your character.
by estearum | 2026-01-06 17:20:24+00:00
A practical concern is that capitalism (at its most ideal) is a mechanism to signal what people want/need, and as more capital accrues to fewer and fewer people, they become the only people whose wants/needs are important for the market to satisfy, which then breaks the central desirable trait of capitalism.

We should want enough variation in incomes to produce incentive for outsized value creation, but not so much that the market has relatively zero incentive to meet the needs of anyone who's not in the 1%.
by scoofy | 2026-01-06 17:21:02+00:00
> It's not responding to my comment though which is saying that if we have prediction markets, the goal should be for them to reveal facts about the world.

My point is you can’t have this without creating a massive incentive for people to create events, and it’s inherently easier to create disorder, which hurts everyone in a free society.

> pointing to one possible case of misuse and then leaping to "inherently problematic" is pretty weak IMO.

This is like saying nuclear weapons are “one possible case of misuse of nuclear technology. Yes, obviously, but it’s serious enough to justify massive regulation of nuclear technology.

I’m not saying prediction markets should be illegal. I’m saying that they should have a very small maximum wager, require public disclosure of who is taking which bets, and it should not pay out if the actor has any connection to agents that create the change in the world.

Sports gambler have know about how problematic this concern is forever. Organized crime used predictions markets they could influence (sports betting) as a major source of revenue throughout history.
by opo | 2026-01-06 17:21:15+00:00
I have not seen any indication that Mamdani has advocated for violence to achieve his goal, so calling him a communist seems unfair, but I think he would also agree it is unfair to simply say he is "left of the center-right".

Mamdani seems very proud to be a socialist and you get a taste of it where he says "...the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment" and "..we have to continue to elect more socialists and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism", etc. He is very clear about his beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K7HDuoJ0MQ
by mothballed | 2026-01-06 17:21:18+00:00
In my case I was glad someone else got it out because it was in regards to a civil rights leader being imprisoned. I used "steal" in quotes for a reason, but of course, I will admit, I am a lowly ape. When I see other ape get huge points for same action I wonder what I did wrong, even though I happy for other ape, the best simple word I can come up for it is "steal" as lowly ape brain understand and convey this easily.

Brian is much higher ape, free from these low-level ape impulses so long as he writes them out. I hope to be higher ape someday. Ape work harder to get higher thought like Brian.
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-06 17:21:34+00:00
There's no mechanism for the people to remove the president.

You can't have a loss of confidence vote that every eligible voter can partake in. There's no coalition system where one part can pull out and essentially dissolve the sitting coalition. No snap election.

By now it should be clear to anyone that the only way to remove the president, by lawful means, is to impeach and remove him. But with politicians choosing party over people, that will likely not happen anytime soon.

The median senator and congressman in the US has a net worth close to a million dollars. Other than in the very unlikely event that the US invaded, they will really never feel the effects of bad presidents.

At worst they will live under the threat of being primaried.

US politics is very much a case of "you've made your bed, now lie in it" for minimum the next 4 years.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-06 17:21:46+00:00
it's not about climate change, it's about providing a better service at lower cost and better longevity: no aging above ground or underground wires, no massive distribution centers, decentralized grid at time of war (ukraine is switching to solar), benefits are astonishing the further you dive into it.

several apartment buildings can also be linked together to handle maintenance and share peak power capability as well.
by chung8123 | 2026-01-06 17:22:01+00:00
It is hard to beat the polish that Plex has. I setup Jellyfin to try it out and I couldn't find a client that was smooth or had the polish of the Plex apps. The AppleTV app was close but then I go down the rabbit hole of codec support. Wanted to like Jellyfin but without a nice looking front end it was a non-starter for me. Good news is you can have the side by side and if a time comes it gets parity with Plex I will be happy to change over.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-06 17:22:02+00:00
> Your only point is to defend Elon Musk

Huh?

I'm just an interested party because my family has nearly all girls for an entire generation, so I have paid attention to research that shows how this happens.

You seem to think it disagrees with a conspiracy theory. I don't care about that, I was just adding a bit of accuracy to the discussion. Carry on.
by jaffa2 | 2026-01-06 17:22:13+00:00
interesting take. I don't buy it though. But I guess we need to wait and see.

Apple has long been rumoured to be on the path to merging IOS and mac OS (whatever that means) . MS already tried it and failed.

I for one, usually avoid using phone apps and tend to use websites (for example) instead since the phone apps usually have arbitrary limitations enforced by piss poor UI.

The most obvious and egregious example is the number of apps that don't let you open more than one view - e.g. Amazon. I can't look at 2 products in amazon app at the same time. It's just horrendous.

The next obvious one is Youtube -- The app is just terrible. Using a browser is a better experience in every way.
by edude03 | 2026-01-06 17:22:23+00:00
Sounds like you're using LLMs to replace human connection.

For example instead of:
Duolingo - I practice with my friends
Calorie tracking - I have planned meals from my dietitian
Workout tracking - I have WhatsApp with my PT, who adjusts my next workouts from our conversations
Reminders - A combo of Siri + Fantastical + My Wife

I'm sure my way is more expensive but I don't know, there is also a non tangible cost of not having friends/personal connections as well.
by nindalf | 2026-01-06 17:22:46+00:00
Sqlite's test suite is closed source, so no one other than the Sqlite authors can attempt that. That said, you may be interested in this attempt by Turso to rewrite Sqlite in Rust (https://turso.tech/blog/we-will-rewrite-sqlite-and-we-are-go...). They're not using AI, but they are using some novel ways to test their code.
by hamdingers | 2026-01-06 17:22:46+00:00
Your link only shows past 5 years, so you're missing the hayday of music piracy, was this intentional?

Try this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

Try with any music piracy (or hell, piracy in general) related search terms and you'll see a similar trend.
by nycticorax | 2026-01-06 17:22:49+00:00
Middle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard behavior on Linux since the 1990s. This just seems to me like more of GNOME's "simplicity at all costs" run amok. I'm a power user. I want poser user features. So I use KDE, a project run by people who care about power users and their needs. I'm happy for you if GNOME meets your needs.
by f1shy | 2026-01-06 17:22:54+00:00
> Where I disagree is on encapsulation being the “good” part of OOP.
Encapsulation, as a general idea, is positive. Controlling boundaries, hiding representation, and enforcing invariants are all valuable. But encapsulation as realized through objects is where the deeper problem lies. Objects themselves are not modular, and the act of encapsulating a concept into an object breaks modularity at the moment the boundary is drawn.

I’m personally with you here. Just in my circle they see it positively. But I agree with you: as long as it helps modularity, great, but also have many downsides that you describe very well.

Your last paragraph also perfectly aligned with my views. I think you are coming from a functional PoV, which luckily seems to have some more traction in the last decade or two. Sadly, before you say it, often are underline the parts of functional programming that are not the most useful you address here… but maybe, some day…
by Tiktaalik | 2026-01-06 17:22:57+00:00
The ideology of Democratic Socialism has always been focused on helping low income and working poor people live better lives, and that manifests in action to put more money in their pocket. I suppose you more often hear about more indirect ways to do this (eg. trying to lower rent, create more subsidized low cost housing) but lowering fees puts more money in people's pocket and that is directly in the wheel house of Democratic Socialism.

So if this seems like Mamdani is doing something weird here, I think it's more that the twisted media framing of the left has pushed people to have a vision of it that is dissonant from its real ideology and goals.
by fred_is_fred | 2026-01-06 17:23:25+00:00
Freight recession has been going on 3 years now:
https://tanktransport.com/2025/08/great-freight-recession-20...

and Bankruptcies:
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/trucking-industry-hit-with-...

https://equipmentfinancenews.com/news/transportation/6-more-...

If you want to claim big increase in demand and higher wages, we will need to see a citation.
by stewones | 2026-01-06 17:23:27+00:00
Hey HN, I built this for my own workflow and figured others might find it useful.

The script uses native macOS Folder Actions - no daemon, no background process. When Lightroom exports to a watched folder, it triggers and opens the files in Statuz (a free macOS app I made for posting to social media).

Full source is on GitHub if you want to adapt it for other apps: https://github.com/statuz-app/examples

Curious if anyone else has automated their creative publishing pipeline. Would love to hear other approaches.
by simonw | 2026-01-06 17:23:33+00:00
Thanks, that thread is great!

They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail

130MB is localization data.

This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706

> There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
by elbci | 2026-01-06 17:23:47+00:00
Got it, 800 dead at a rave party on stolen land is genocide but an entire population erased, bombed, starved is just self-defense war that also happens to be more land grab, yeap...
I see you're doing fine with the hasbara spewing but didn't yet earned you shekels for calling me Hitler, here's a helping hand:
In their rabid zealotry IDF sacrifice their own reservists by placing them as human shields on stolen Palestinian land. Palestinians while reclaiming their rightful land were forced to retreat but still managed to rescue some 200 of the human shields and took them under protection in Gaza.
by srean | 2026-01-06 17:24:08+00:00
Any chemists or crystallographers out here?

I recently got curious about whether nature solves the Bayer pattern problem and if so, how.

Are there any 3 element crystalline compounds with the formula A_2BC with roughly same sized atoms for A, B and C ?

If they have a 2D tiling that would nature's Bayer pattern.
by shaftway | 2026-01-06 17:24:36+00:00
I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.

It'll probably be a win for them.
by fractallyte | 2026-01-06 17:24:45+00:00
"Russia then occupied and annexed Crimea, and in August 2014 Russia's military invaded eastern Ukraine to support its separatist proxies. Because of this, in December 2014 Ukraine's parliament voted to seek NATO membership, and in 2018 it voted to enshrine this goal in its constitution." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations)

A full ten months elapsed before Ukraine finally decided to change its constitution. That rather destroys your argument.
by rchaud | 2026-01-06 17:24:48+00:00
> However, 95% of the sites there haven't been updated in 15+ years.

You just explained why those sites are amazing. The pressure to update sites is what starts the slow descent into personal op-ed oblivion. These are sites, not blogs. The bloggification of the web is what made sites suck.

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
by codebyaditya | 2026-01-06 17:25:03+00:00
Exactly. We call this the 'Innovation Tax.' By legally tying workers to a single employer, the system prevents them from becoming employers themselves.

Our data showed 62% of H-1B filings use generic job titles like 'Analyst'—suggesting that even highly specialized founders are forced into 'cogs in the machine' roles. This isn't just a wage loss for the worker; it's a job-creation loss for the U.S. economy. No taking any side, but based on real data analysis quoting this.
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-06 17:25:03+00:00
BT is one of my least favorite techs that took over. Every damn little thing now has a BT antenna that constantly wants to advertise and connect to something. I'd be willing to use corded headphones again to be rid of it. Might even plug my phone directly into my car... Life would be really hard, but at least we would be free from BT.
by jdthedisciple | 2026-01-06 17:25:15+00:00
In a way it makes justifiable sense:

Consider that purely positive but otherwise unconstructive comments like "wow great project! clap" are – for good reason – not what the HN comment feature is intended for and are reliably downvoted to oblivion.

Contentious, challenging, or even slightly provocative reactions however – which are inherently somewhat negative in a wider sense – usually kick off fruitful debates and knowledge-proliferation.

And I probably speak for at least about ~65% of fellow HN's when I say that the latter is what I come here for.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-06 17:25:16+00:00
I personally like descriptive regulation over prescriptive regulation.

Instead of prescribing exactly what you should do, describe the outcomes you want, and let case law fill in the rest of the owl. That's the only way to prevent violations like this.

To be fair, the main disadvantage of this approach is that law is much harder to understand. You can't just read the law as it is written, you also have to familiarize yourself with all the rulings that tell you how that law should actually be interpreted.