MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BoxOfRain | 2026-01-14 10:39:30+00:00
> nuclear-weapon-level-dangerous chatbots

I feel this framing in general says more about our attitudes to nuclear weapons than it does about chatbots. The 'Peace Dividend' era which is rapidly drawing to a close has made people careless when they talk about the magnitude of effects a nuclear war would have.

AI can be misused, but it can't be misused to the point an enormously depopulated humanity is forced back into subsistence agriculture to survive, spending centuries if not millennia to get back to where we are now.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-14 10:39:39+00:00
If Delta was going bankrupt it would likely be able to sell individual planes for the depreciated book value or close to it.

If a software company is going bankrupt, it’s very unlikely they will be able to sell code for individual apps and services they may have written for much at all, even if they might be able to sell the whole company for something.
by whacked_new | 2026-01-14 10:39:40+00:00
I'm happy more people are interested in this critique! And thanks for d12frosted for joining the discussion.

I was searching for what's the latest in emacs widgets developments because I was interested in using widgets. Emacs Customize for example, renders text-based widgets in an editable buffer, which is very uncommon nowadays. Emacs seems like the best candidate for this kind of interactivity. I'm sure it's possible in other editors, but with significantly more effort and significantly slower rendering. I also considered lem, but the barrier also seems much higher.

His post also led me to his vui.el project, but I ended up not trying it, since after understanding the tradeoffs, I pushed the widget code creation to an LLM. I still get frequent unbalanced parentheses errors so I still stay close to the defaults.

The PoC is about testing a method to render a widgets-based, json-schema-validated input form that you can embed dynamically into an emacs buffer, enter the data, then do something post-validation. If anyone's interested, here's the latest state of the LLM-generated and human-fixed code: https://gist.github.com/whacked/6875c5117b48528e619755e13e24...
by axegon_ | 2026-01-14 10:39:59+00:00
As many others pointed out, the released files are nearly nothing compared to the full dataset. Personally I've been fiddling a lot with OSINT and analytics over the publicly available Reddit data(a considerable amount of my spare time over the last year) and the one thing I can say is that LLMs are under-performing(huge understatement) - they are borderline useless compared to traditional ML techniques. But as far as LLMs go, the best performers are the open source uncensored models(the most uncensored and unhinged), while the worst performers are the proprietary and paid models, especially over the last 2-3 months: they have been nerfed into oblivion - to the extent where simple prompts like "who is eligible to vote in US presidential elections" is considered a controversial question. So in the unlikely event that the full files are released, I personally would look at the traditional NLP techniques long before investing any time into LLMs.
Show HN: Yapper – Offline macOS dictation. One-time purchase, no sub
by nikbar | 2026-01-14 10:40:31+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Yapper because I love the accuracy of Whisper, but I was frustrated that the best native macOS wrappers required monthly subscriptions.

The premise is simple: If the model runs locally on my hardware (Apple Silicon), I shouldn't have to pay rent on the software.

Yapper is a native macOS app that runs entirely offline. You press a hotkey, speak, and it types into any text field (VS Code, Slack, Notes, etc).

How it works: It’s built on WhisperKit and optimized for the Apple Neural Engine. Because it runs locally, your voice data never leaves your machine.

Features:

- 100% Offline: Zero latency issues, total privacy.

- No Subscription: A simple one-time purchase.

- Optional AI Polish: While transcription is offline, I added a "Bring Your Own Key" feature (supports Claude, OpenAI, Gemini). If enabled, it sends the text (not audio) to the LLM of your choice to fix grammar or restructure rambling before pasting it.

I’m launching this with a lifetime license for $24 (usually $49) to get early feedback. I tried to build the exact tool I wanted to use: fast, private, and paid for once.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the implementation or features you’d like to see next!
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-14 10:40:31+00:00
« Tonnerre de Brest ! »

AG's done Peremen as well; my favourite on this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpIzFRIX60E&t=910 , of which Silenzium would disapprove, but Cordwainer approve.

As to Zapad, I have to admit Igla has near-zapadern levels of violence/sex ratio... up until now I'd thought White Sun of the Desert was about as far as one ever got in union film.

Do you have any idea which came first, HOI or Polandball?
by jacob-s-son | 2026-01-14 10:41:13+00:00
Every author of the free software obviously has rights to full control of the scope of their project.

That being said, I regret that we have switched from good_job (https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job). The thing is - Basecamp is a MySQL shop and their policy is not to accept RDMS engine specific queries. You can see in their issues in Github that they try to stick "universal" SQL and are personally mostly concerned how it performs in MySQL(https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/issues/567#issuecomment... , https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/issues/508#issuecomment...). They also still have no support for batch jobs:
https://github.com/rails/solid_queue/pull/142 .
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-14 10:41:53+00:00
Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology.

The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.
by yetihehe | 2026-01-14 10:42:22+00:00
Well, if you didn't, you SHOULD try sleeping more. Like, do try to sleep for a whole day. No TV, no music, no mobile phone. Only go to bathroom and eat some quick to make meals, schedule away ALL chores. Everyone I know told me I should walk out more, be more active, but what REALLY helped me regain mental health when I had mental breakdown was a full day of sleeping.

Of course it won't help you just by itself, it's not the only trick you need, but please do try it.

> If someone neurotypical gives you advice, just smile and nod, and ignore it.

Neurotypicals gave me "do not sleep so much, go out in nature or do something". This advice is good for depression, not for ADHD.

> The reality is that there is no single thing that will help. You'll have to try shit and see what works for you. What one person swears "fixed" them might do nothing for you.

Yes, but you have to try different approaches. If you don't try all of them (including sleeping for a day) you won't know.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-14 10:43:00+00:00
I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...

Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon. Then the mosfets and charge circuit could be on the same die. It could be mounted COB (black blob).

They could probably use a single 'microphone' (pressure sensor) and determine which setting based on a photodiode.

The PCB's could be replaced with a flex PCB which integrates the heating elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C, whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while). Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the PCB inside the injection moulding machine for the cavities, eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks, and reducing part count
by falldrown | 2026-01-14 10:43:08+00:00
1) Same. I hate wasting time by ADHD walk mode.

2) Atomoxetine works for me. For managing thoughts, I recommend to just write markdown text every day by create new file every month like "diary.2026.01.md". Then you can track daily tasks and medium/long term goals. I get easily distracted when using TODO apps.

3) Sleep.
by sublinear | 2026-01-14 10:44:01+00:00
When I was kid thinking about this as a career, I knew what I was getting into. I had the internet (when it was a lot smaller). I had seen big tech flop hard. I saw companies like Apple for what they were before and after their iDevices. By the time I was wrapping up my CS degree I had seen social media destroy itself and legacy media, the rise of web 2.0, SaaS startups, mobile apps, etc.

I've been working professionally now for over a decade, but got started long before that as a child. Despite the endless negative things I could say about the modern era, I don't feel like any of it impacts my enjoyment of my work or gets in the way of my creativity.

I think this is because the closest I've ever been to truly being alone with the machine is writing programs for my TI calculators, but even then I still had ticalc.org. Some programs on there were brilliant, but most were awful. It was the perfect balance for people my age at the time. Despite what people believe today, especially with their LLMs, I don't think the landscape has changed much in that regard. There's still a lot of awful code with few brilliant examples. That leaves room for me to work on new interesting stuff or improve what's there without having too much help spoiling it.
by vintermann | 2026-01-14 10:44:14+00:00
Your "textbook definition" is BS. A theory that someone conspires is not enough to call something a conspiracy theory.

You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of "criminal conspiracy" a conspiracy theorist, even though they have a theory that someone is conspiring.

A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist.

Conspiracy theorists is something we call people who believe in a grand conspiracy, one which, had it been real, would have required superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy. That's the brush you for some mysterious reason want to tar critics of Spotify with.

And for the second time this week, someone demands "evidence" for expressions of distrust.
by kleene_op | 2026-01-14 10:44:50+00:00
Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes.
The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself.
Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.

It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
by defrost | 2026-01-14 10:44:58+00:00
> was anything verified before AIs.

Yes.

> With AI it is incompetence

or malice, or agenda. For example, in the linked article the West Midlands Police had an agenda to find evidence to support a ban, they asked an AI to find evidence to support a ban, and the AI obliged and "found' evidence to support a ban.
by room271 | 2026-01-14 10:45:07+00:00
I completely agree with criticism of expansion of government powers in some contexts but my original point was about gaining perspective and avoiding sensationalism, which I argue the article and many comments here fall into.

> Why does it matter if they are a anarchist organisation or not?

'Freedom' and government authority coexist to some extent (tax is an imposition for example, but funds a military which should ensure ongoing freedom, etc.). The article needs to be read on its own merits of course but the organisation who provide it adhere to a different value judgement about where the balance of authority and anarchy should lie in society than most would agree with. That's a helpful data point I think, even if only a small part of the story.

> I do care about the OSA, I do care about Digital ID, I do care about the expansion of government powers that I believe are unjustified.

You'll be relieved to see that the compulsory element of Digital ID (for work) has been removed at least (reported widely in press outlets yesterday evening).
by xandrovich | 2026-01-14 10:46:24+00:00
The issue is that when legislation comes in regarding "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.

The issue is that to the end user this is still tangibly the same product - and mostly gets treated in much the same way as the original "disposable" vapes.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-14 10:47:08+00:00
That's cool.

The only 1D game I'd seen before was this one, which I saw at the Exploratorium (a science museum in San Francisco): https://www.wobblylabs.com/line-wobbler

Someone made an open source clone: https://github.com/Critters/TWANG

I gave that code to Claude and asked it to make a web based version I could play on my phone. It's not as fun as the version with an LED strip, but it's actually playable (which surprised me): https://tools.encona.com/twang
by maccard | 2026-01-14 10:47:11+00:00
I was the person who said it can't copy from examples without making up APIs but.

> he'll never get that with LLMs, and that their inability to do so isn't a barrier to getting productive use out of them.

This is _exactly_ what the comment thread we're in said - and I agree with him.
> The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.

> If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right? Isn't the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a sign that you find them a net positive? Or is it being imposed on you?

You're putting words in my mouth here - I'm not saying that they're terrible, I'm saying they're way, way, way overhyped, their abilities are overblown, (look at this post and the replies of people saying they're writing 90% of code with claude and using AI tools to review it), but when we challenge that, we're wrong.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-14 10:47:30+00:00
Then you're living in one of the cheapest areas for electricity prices in Europe, the opposite of what you said.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Scroll a little down and you see a breakdown by country

E.g.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
by brazukadev | 2026-01-14 10:48:38+00:00
I'd say is necessarily harsh. It is not as if Simon's opinions on AI were really better than others here that are as technical as his.

He is prolific, and being at the top of every HN thread is what makes him look like a reference but there are other 50+ people talking interesting things about AI that are not getting the deserved attention because every top AI thread we are discussing a pelican riding a bike.
by mettamage | 2026-01-14 10:48:41+00:00
Thanks for commenting on it.

> I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.

Yea, me too. Holy shit. I have this too on certain things but not on alcohol.

> And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.

That's a good/harsh lesson for any addiction I think. Thanks for formulating that so clearly.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-14 10:49:01+00:00
> cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.

> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.

Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
by remus | 2026-01-14 10:49:19+00:00
The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!

Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.
by runarberg | 2026-01-14 10:49:41+00:00
> it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks.

I want to see some numbers before I believe this. So far my feelings is that the best case scenario is that it reduces the time it needs to do bureaucratic tasks, tasks that were not needed anyway and could have just been removed for an even grater boost in productivity. Maybe, it seems to be automating tasks from junior engineer, tasks which they need to perform in order to gain experience and develop their expertise. Although I need to see the numbers before I believe even that.

I have a suspicion that AI is not increasing productivity by any meaningful metric which couldn’t be increased by much much much cheaper and easier means.
by bondarchuk | 2026-01-14 10:50:43+00:00
>Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.

I think there's something cool here, seamless morphing between sounds was one of the things they were trying (and failing, obviously) to do at IRCAM way back when. Finally we might be able to morph in something approaching perceptual space.

(and glitch is always interesting too, of course)
by Anamon | 2026-01-14 10:51:28+00:00
> There have already been AI-created #1 hits.

It's an old story, but it was a fabricated one.

The only reason this sort of tracks is that a lot of people today don't listen to music, they just put it on as background noise to drown out the silence. It seems to pay off for some producers, but I don't think there's big money there, or a real threat of replacing artists.

By and large, the general public has shown that they notice the vapidness, blandness, and incongruity of GenAI music, and don't much care for it apart from seeing it as an interesting curiosity.
by refurb | 2026-01-14 10:51:53+00:00
It’s historically incorrect though.

After the 1911 Revolution imperial possessions were a few stripes of land in Shanghai.

It was mostly civil war after that until 1937, and KMT fighting the Japanese.

Then another civil war in 1945.

Mao could be viewed as unifying the country under one government, but fighting imperialism? The CCP played a small role.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 10:51:59+00:00
> Every repo is owned by a team. Access is only ever per-team.

This is indeed the working pattern, and applies not just to GitHub and organizing teams there, it's a useful pattern to use everywhere. Don't think "Give access to this user" but rather "Give access to this team, which this user is current a part of" and it solves a lot of bothersome issues.
by consp | 2026-01-14 10:52:03+00:00
> It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.

That's not how book printing works and I'd argue the monk can far more easy create new text and devise new interpretations. And they did in the sidelines of books. It takes a long time to prepare one print but nearly just as long as to print 100 which is where the good of the printing press comes from. It's not the ease of changing or making large sums of text, it's the ease of reproducing and since copy/paste exist it is a very poor analogue in my opinion.

I'd also argue the 10x is subject/observer bias since they are the same person. My experience at this point is that boilerplate is fine with LLMs, and if that's only what you do good for you, otherwise it will hardly speed up anything as the code is the easy part.
by xlii | 2026-01-14 10:52:09+00:00
That's true, but acceptance is still all or nothing.

When chaining commits it's possible to (for example) have a function that does THING and then have another PR that have a function that uses first one.

It's somewhat PITA when team has no-dead-code hard rule, but otherwise it's quite manageable and invites rich feedback. Reviewer and feedback can focus on atomic change (in example: function that does THING) and not on a grand picture.

But I also often use method of logical PRs and even written about it:
https://xlii.space/eng/pr_trick/
by latexr | 2026-01-14 10:52:22+00:00
Exactly. It’s like if someone claimed to be selling magical fruit that cures cancer, and they’re just regular apples. Then people like your parent commenter say “that’s not a con, I eat apples and they’re both healthy and tasty”. Yes, apples do have great things about them, but not the exaggerations they were being sold as. Being conned doesn’t mean you get nothing, it means you don’t get what was advertised.
by d12frosted | 2026-01-14 10:52:34+00:00
vui-table supports three :border variants at the moment - :ascii, :unicode and nil (i.e. none)

:ascii

+---------+--------+
| Summary | |
+---------+--------+
| RMS | 4.1620 |
| AVG | 3.9558 |
+---------+--------+

:unicode

┌─────────┬────────┐
│ Summary │ │
├─────────┼────────┤
│ RMS │ 4.1620 │
│ AVG │ 3.9558 │
└─────────┴────────┘

I think there is room for improvement (like use thicker lines for headers in unicode) and I also need to provide a way to override these.
Show HN: TLD – a minimal, self-hosted, Twitch live stream recorder
by naughtyfinch | 2026-01-14 10:52:45+00:00
I built a small self-hosted tool to record Twitch live streams automatically.

You give it one or more Twitch channel names, it monitors them, and when a channel goes live it records the stream to disk using Streamlink. It runs entirely in Docker, has a minimal web UI, and saves files locally — no twitch login required, no accounts, no cloud, no video player.

I built this mainly for personal use. The existing solutions I found were either heavy, cloud-based, or did not fulfill my requirements. This app is intentionally minimal and single-user by design.

It’s open source, Docker-first, and meant to be easy to run and forget about. Happy to hear feedback or suggestions.