MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MORPHOICES | 2026-01-07 11:39:34+00:00
I have been seeing these stories about bigger AI models that somehow work on small devices like a Raspberry Pi. One example really caught my eye lately. It was not just some quick show off thing. The model could interact and respond right away in real time. ~

That got me thinking again about what practical even means when it comes to AI running on the edge. Like, away from big servers.

I came up with a basic way to look at it. First, capability. That is, what kinds of tasks can it handle decently. Then latency. Does it respond quick enough so it does not feel laggy. There are also constraints to consider. Things like power use, how much memory it needs, and heat buildup.

The use case part seems key too. What happens if you try to take it off the cloud and run it locally. In my experience, a lot of these edge AI demos fall short there. The tech looks impressive, but it is hard to see why you really need it that way.

It seems like most people overlook that unclear need. I am curious about how others see it. Local inference probably beats cloud in spots where you cannot rely on internet, or maybe for privacy reasons. Or when data stays on device for security.

Some workloads feel close right now. They might shift soon as hardware gets better. I think stuff like voice assistants or simple image recognition could tip over.

If someone has actually put a model on limited hardware, like in a product, what stood out as a surprise. The thermals maybe, or unexpected power drains. It feels like that part gets messy in practice. I might be oversimplifying how tricky it all is.
by epolanski | 2026-01-07 11:40:11+00:00
Yeah, all of those applications he shows do not really expose any complex business logic.

With all the due respect: a file converter for windows is glueing few windows APIs with the relevant codec.

Now, good luck working on a complex warehouse management application where you need extremely complex logic to sort the order of picking, assembling, packing on an infinite number of variables: weight, amazon prime priority, distribution centers, number and type of carts available, number and type of assembly stations available, different delivery systems and requirements for different delivery operators (such as GLE, DHL, etc) that has to work with N customers all requiring slightly different capabilities and flows, all having different printers and operations, etc, etc. And I ain't even scratching the surface of the business logic complexity (not even mentioning functional requirements) to avoid boring the reader.

Mind you, AI is still tremendously useful in the analysis phase, and can sort of help in some steps of the implementation one, but the number of times you can avoid looking thoroughly at the code for any minor issue or discrepancy is absolutely close to 0.
by krapp | 2026-01-07 11:40:11+00:00
>Times dictate a change now. If you don’t believe me, look at the news over the past week.

Times may change but Hacker News doesn't.

An overriding design goal of Hacker News is avoiding the Eternal September effect at all cost. That means preserving the original culture of Hacker News at all cost. Every change made to the way the forum looks or works and every deviation from established norms leads us ever closer to the corruption and destruction of this community. Not to lean into a "semi-noob illusion" but one can already smell the rot around here.

There is already too much abuse of new/green accounts as it is, having full anonymity would lead to trolling and degrade the quality of conversation and signal to noise ratio and turn HN into just /g/ without the pictures. Allowing sub-accounts makes it easy to post vile content while avoiding the karma cost/bans which undermines the effect of the moderation mechanisms at work here. People already do that all the time, and most of the time it's so they can post anti-semitic and racial slurs.

Hacker News is not (and has never been and can never be) a free speech platform, it is a curated speech platform. Those two goals work at cross-purposes (quality vs quantity, or more abstractly "safety" vs "liberty") and HN has chosen the latter at the cost of the former. And the vast majority of people here are fine with that.

Note that I have my disagreements with a lot of this - but it is what it is. Keep complaining and eventually you just get filtered, or banned if you're too annoying or repetitive about it. This is definitely a "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" kind of culture. Hacker News cannot change and remain Hacker News, and remaining Hacker News is paramount.
by vivagreenland | 2026-01-07 11:40:33+00:00
The man in charge has said in the past that he admired dictators. Many did not pay attention to this.

Congress is easy to takeover by a political party and this happens cyclically, so no one was surprised by that.

People also ignored gerrymandering because both major political parties do that, and historically it can be undone.

However, the takeover and stacking of the judicial branch with political cronies was another definite warning sign. People that were paying attention noticed this came first, because it’s the brakes that can slow an administration from getting out of control. The brake lines were effectively cut.

If you’ve studied German history and World War II, you know that Hitler didn’t just happen. There was an imperialist history. Though not typically stated in this way, the U.S. has historically been an empire for much of the 20th century, if you consider bases around the world and involvement in world conflicts (and the same could be said about some other countries, NATO, UN, etc.)

The American people cannot rise up against its own government in any substantial way when (1) families are split with half of the people are brainwashed, and (2) they think that things can be undone after N years by voting that party out (but the opposing party can not pivot to undo the economic and world political damage done by the current administration).

Most dictators were not known from the beginning of their reign as evil incarnate.

Americans keep hoping to see in the news that someone will stop this, but they suspect that if they were to try to stop it, they and their families would eventually be punished or killed. So, they’re all just waiting a few years hoping that it will be undone, and that surely the military will not let the U.S. takeover a country that does not have a despotic leader; that would break the longstanding U.S. trend of only getting very involved publically at least if they are taking the stance of the respected jock defending the little kid getting beat up.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-07 11:40:45+00:00
You can say fucking here, one, we're all adults, two, there's no algorithms on HN penalising you (and if they were they'd penalise you anyway because it's not 1995 anymore), and three, it's almost insulting to believe replacing a letter with a star will make a word unrecognisable.

That said, this is why I like HN or any other kind of curated website, the voting systems and comments and the like will (hopefully) make sure low-effort writing will be filtered out.
by sumea | 2026-01-07 11:41:08+00:00
You are right that such device does not exist, but in theory you could combine many analytical techniques to a single black box that could analyze practically all of molecules and particles in the air or even in more complicated samples. It would contain at least some sort of chromatography, nmr, mass spectrometer, infrared spectrometer and various special analytical techniques for some compounds. Also some kind of sample preparation system would be needed.

This would be a very large machine and you would need to provide a sample to it in a test tube or similar manner. Automated blood analyzers in hospitals are maybe the closest thing to a such device.
by rob74 | 2026-01-07 11:41:13+00:00
Yeah... it's a bit unclear to me on what hardware this was even supposed to run on? The home and arcade video games Atari was producing at the time (Pong and later Breakout) were based on discrete logic chips, so weren't "programmable" in any modern sense of the word. As you wrote, the 6502 was only introduced later in 1975, and designs using it came even later.
by fingerlocks | 2026-01-07 11:41:39+00:00
If you’re including these assets as UI elements, they would be rasterized anyway and copied to a GPU bound buffer for the frame blit. Doing so at compile time increases runtime performance.

You can of course override this behavior and redraw your vector every 8.3 ms if you want, but I promise you that this is not faster. For sparse pyramid-tiled vector images like Google/Apple maps, this is a two step process using the latter method followed by the former.
by Junnn | 2026-01-07 11:41:41+00:00
From an engineering perspective, what I find compelling here is not “no embeddings”, but the decision to treat memory as a first-class, inspectable system rather than a retrieval trick.

Most agent memory stacks today collapse everything into embeddings and hope similarity search is enough. That works for recall, but breaks down quickly when you need traceability, temporal reasoning, or explanation of why something was remembered.

The layered design here (raw resources → extracted memory items → categorized memory files) feels much closer to how we design real systems: separation of concerns, clear abstraction boundaries, and the ability to reason about state changes over time.

Storing memories in human-readable form also makes debugging and evolution practical. You can audit what the agent “knows”, adjust policies, or let the LLM reason directly over memory instead of treating it as a black box vector store.

Embeddings still make sense as an optimization layer, but making them optional rather than foundational is an important architectural choice if agents are meant to run long-term and stay coherent.

This feels less like a retrieval hack and more like actual infrastructure.
by com | 2026-01-07 11:42:02+00:00
Traditionally, network effects have allowed us to socialize costs (and socialize benefits) in power, water, gas, roads and communications. We've used very different models in different places for each of these "natural monopolies" that get constructed.

When consumers opt out en masse, these systems collapse if they're not actually socialized - and where there is no actual financial benefit to consumers for going "off-grid" since they're still paying with taxes or equivalent.

I'd love to see an analysis of the different approaches in the different phases, possibly including TV-for-public benefit, like the BBC or NPR too.
Show HN: AI-powered interior redesign tool for architects and real estate
by francomendezok | 2026-01-07 11:42:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Interiores AI, a web tool that helps architects, interior designers,
and real estate agents quickly generate redesign concepts from photos of existing spaces.

The goal is not to replace professional design, but to speed up early-stage exploration:
style variations, layout ideas, and visual options that usually take hours or days.

This started after talking with architects who needed faster ways to show alternatives
to clients without doing full renders upfront.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:
– whether this solves a real workflow problem
– what would make it actually useful (or useless)
– any obvious red flags you see

Happy to answer technical or product questions.
by dmit | 2026-01-07 11:43:03+00:00
I'm using https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ with a couple custom rules. Unfortunately, it appears the author has died (https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector#tribute), and the project is in a maintenance state. But it does exactly everything I need, and I disabled the auto-update, so I should be safe from any takeover attacks. Thank you, Einar.
by versale | 2026-01-07 11:43:37+00:00
Well, a company has to grow. If it doesn't, it'll be devoured by those who do and show pleasing YoY metrics to their shareholders and prospective investors. Simply imagine you are an investor. Which company would you put your money in? And since the world is limited a company cannot afford not growing if it wants to survive. Government regulation is impossible, because there are other governments which happily let their companies to grow and outcompete foreign companies.
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-07 11:43:43+00:00
Agree. I have the X domain blacklisted in my Pihole.

Remember when Reddit mods made a whole show of virtue signaling about banning links to X, but most of those same subreddits’ top content (and 20% of the front page) was screenshots of X?

A lot of people are unwilling to withstand even a bit of discomfort to stand up for their supposed principles.
by throwaway777x | 2026-01-07 11:44:12+00:00
I think the Deepseek moment that everyone started trying Deepseek and chain of thought was the weekend of 1/25/25 and 1/26/25.

The progress lived up to the hype the past year. To say otherwise is to be either intellectually dishonest or you just didn't bother using the tools in order to feel how much progress was made.

I just went back to a project that I remember the models struggled with. It felt like years ago but it was from July. Even July to now is night and day different.
by osiris88 | 2026-01-07 11:44:23+00:00
I don’t disagree, but as a fact check:

> (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist)

Wikipedia claims that corporate personhood is quite old, and that the British East India Company was an example in 1600:

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

> Commercial endeavors were not among the entities incorporated in the medieval era, and even risky trading companies were originally run as common-law partnerships rather than corporations; the incorporation of the East India Company monopoly in 1600 broke new ground, and by the end of the century, commercial ventures frequently sought incorporation in Europe and the Americas.

It seems more likely to me that the American Founders were aware of corporate personhood but didn’t consider it or didn’t think it was important enough to give it special treatment in the bill of rights.
by mattacular | 2026-01-07 11:44:34+00:00
Their rationale is written here, May 21 2021 final comment on the closed issue from the creator themself. Even in 2021 this was a dubious argument to make given the browser landscape, and they are clearly just frustrated to be challenged on this topic. They think legacy browsers are forever and furthermore readability of .forEach() is better anyway:

> in the latest version of all browsers. Despite marketing, no browsers are "evergreen" according to the google analytics of major websites I've been able to review over the last couple years. (Nothing but safari will likely ever support PTC - which is not an optimization - so that's not really relevant to discuss) Performance isn't important, readability is.

ref: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/issues/1122#issuecommen...
by szszrk | 2026-01-07 11:44:47+00:00
Loosing them in the process.

Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.

So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?
by epolanski | 2026-01-07 11:45:06+00:00
I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less.

It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related.

I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.
by sensanaty | 2026-01-07 11:45:09+00:00
> I don't know why people keep believing those wild unproven claims from actors who have everything to gain from you believing them.

It's grifters all the way down. The majority of people pushing this narrative have vested interests, either because they own some AI shovelware company or are employed by one of the AI shovelware companies. Anthropic specifically is running guerilla marketing campaigns fucking everywhere at the moment, it's why every single one of these types of spammed posts reads the same way. They've also switched up a bit of late, they stopped going with the "It makes me a 10x engineer!" BS (though you still see plenty of that) and are instead going with this weird "I can finally have fun developing again!" narrative instead, I guess trying to cater to the ex-devs that are now managers or whatever.

What happens is you get juniors and non-technical people seeing big numbers and being like "Wow, that's so impressive!" without stopping to think for 5 seconds what the kind of number they're trying to push even actually means. 100 PRs is absurd unless they're tiny oneliners, and even if they were tiny changes, there's 0 chance anyone is looking at the code being shat out here.
by dbbk | 2026-01-07 11:46:27+00:00
I also find it odd that despite a whole team of people working on Claude Code with Claude Code, which should make them immensely productive, there are still glaring gaps. Like, why doesn’t Claude Code on Web have the plan mode? The model already knows how to use it, it’s just a UI change.

Normally I would cut them some slack but it doesn’t really make sense, couldn’t someone kick off a PR today and get it done?
by smetj | 2026-01-07 11:46:40+00:00
At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.
by margorczynski | 2026-01-07 11:47:27+00:00
I'm not. That edge eventually converges to 0 when you have 10+ competitors that offer the same for 10x less money.

If you don't have some kind of cult following like Apple eventually you'll get margin-squeezed till death and all that marketing, sales, etc. will get cut down to stay afloat.

Of course all of the above is just my theory how this will play out in the long run, I'm no oracle by any means.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-07 11:47:30+00:00
I think this is a quite an interesting perspective. When systems transform from centralized to distributed monopolies disappear and entire business models need to change.

In the short term I think the grid fees will transition to a fixed price connection fee for your "backup" supply with the per kWh charge reflecting the actual costs associated with transfering the electricity.

I don't expect northern Europe to give up the grid, but for places closer to the equator, like Pakistan, we're seeing this in action. [1]

[1]: https://www.transitionzero.org/shedding-light-on-pakistans-d...
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-07 11:48:21+00:00
> Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.

I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.

I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
by Schiendelman | 2026-01-07 11:48:26+00:00
I've had an EV (Tesla model 3) for almost 3 years now. I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good it is. I don't think you could pay me to go back to an ICE. Or you'd have to pay me a lot!

I think more and more people are having this experience. It's just not cheap enough yet, and hasn't penetrated the used market far enough yet. But I think it's just a matter of time.
by ashtadmir | 2026-01-07 11:48:35+00:00
Lacking INTERNET permission today does not guarantee that the app will never have that permission. The internet permission is considered a "normal" permission by android so it will be auto granted without even a notification to the user.

Moreover an app without internet permission can still send data out using "INTENTS" for other apps in Android. This can make an app dangerous even without internet permission.

I was excited about the application and was dissapointed to see that it was closed source. I will absolutely not trust anyone that I cannot sue with this data. Big companies at least follow some standards that are enforced by multiple governments here we know nothing.
by alex1138 | 2026-01-07 11:48:37+00:00
First of all, I linked to Youtube as well. It's one of the rare videos they allow (but apparently not the 5 hour version), they remove all kinds of things that they've deemed misinfo

Secondly, a video is independent of the site it's published on, rightly or wrongly. This video for instance is shadowbanned on Youtube - it's on there, but not findable if you search for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1FXbxDrDrY

You are a horrid person
by DiabloD3 | 2026-01-07 11:49:04+00:00
To further expand on this, "southbridge" is what we now call a chipset expander (or 50 other company or product line specific names).

Its a switch that has a bunch of unified PHYs that can do many different tasks (non-primary PCI-E lanes, SATA ports, USB ports, etc), leveraging shared hardware to reduce silicon footprint while increasing utility, and connects to PCI-E lanes on the CPU.
by mothballed | 2026-01-07 11:49:23+00:00
Most people in Greenland want Independence from Denmark. They consider themselves foreigners to the country and yet devour 0.6% of their surplus.

IMO it is foolish both for USA and Denmark to take them. Cut them loose as they desire and let them trade their minerals which they will surely do as soon as they realize their free lunch is gone. You would still get the thing you want it for, the greenlander are happy they are free of the colonizers, and it likely wouldn't change things militarily as they would absolutely sign a defense treaty as soon as you hand them the pen.
by scandinavian | 2026-01-07 11:50:02+00:00
I don't read a lot of papers, but to me this one seems iffy in spots.

> A1 cost $291.47 ($18.21/hr, or $37,876/year at 40 hours/week). A2 cost $944.07 ($59/hr, $122,720/year). Cost
contributors in decreasing order were the sub-agents, supervisor and triage module. *A1 achieved similar vulnerability
counts at roughly a quarter the cost of A2*. Given the average U.S. penetration tester earns $125,034/year [Indeed],
scaffolds like ARTEMIS are already competitive on cost-to-performance ratio.

The statement about similar vulnerability counts seems like a straight up lie. A2 found 11 vulnerabilities with 9 of these being valid. A1 found 11 vulnerabilities with 6 being valid. Counting invalid vulerabilities to say the cheaper agent is as good is a weird choice.

Also the scoring is suspect and seems to be tuned specifically to give the AI a boost, heavily relying on severity scores.

Also kinda funny that the AI's were slower than all the human participants.