MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-01-16 00:11:04+00:00
Are you reviewer 2?

Joking aside, I think you have too strict of a definition of novel. Unfortunately "novel" is a pretty vague word and is definitely not a binary one.

ALL models can produce "novel" data. I don't just mean ML (AI) models, but any mathematical model. The point of models is to make predictions about results that aren't in the training data. Doing interpolation between two datapoints does produce "novel" things. Thinking about the parent's comment, is "a blue tiger" novel? Probably? Are there any blue tigers in the training data? (there definitely is now thanks to K-Pop Demon Hunters) If not, then producing that fits the definition of novel. BUT I also agree that that result is not that novel. It is entirely unimpressive.

I'm saying this not because I disagree with what I believe you intend to say but because I think a major problem with these types of conversations is that many people are going to interpret you more literally and dismiss you because "it clearly produces novel things." It isn't just things being novel to the user, though that is also incredibly common and quite telling that people make such claims without also checking Google...

Speaking of that, I'm just going to leave this here... I'm still surprised this is a real and serious presentation... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3Yo7PULlPs&t=616s
by 0xfaded | 2026-01-16 00:11:15+00:00
I'll jump.

I've been meaning to set up a bi-weekly dinner for hacker types who live mid peninsula, specifically near San Mateo. I have a group of 4 or so in mind and have a good place to host, but would like a slightly larger group.

If anyone would be interested in helping to get something stood up, send electronic post to carl chatfield snail (mail run by g)
by p1necone | 2026-01-16 00:11:19+00:00
The high point is a toss up between XP and 7 for me, but imo Windows UX peaked then (although the 98 visual style is peak for nostalgia) and has either stayed the same or gotten worse ever since. Personally I just switched to using Linux full time as soon as gaming compatibility became basically the same as Windows but I totally understand why you'd want to maintain the ability to use older Windows versions.
by lovich | 2026-01-16 00:11:19+00:00
Yea, it’s anecdata, but I only replaced my 1080 ti about 1.5 years ago.

Graphical fidelity is at the point that unless some new technology comes out to take advantage of GPUs, I don’t see myself ever upgrading the part. Only replacing it whenever it dies.

And that 1080 ti isn’t dead either, I passed the rig onto someone who wanted to get into PC gaming and it’s still going strong. I mostly upgraded because I needed more ram and my motherboards empty slots were full of drywall dust.

The phone I’m more liable to upgrade solely due to battery life degradation.
by elchananHaas | 2026-01-16 00:11:21+00:00
I worked on a team deploying a service to European Sovereign Cloud (ESC). Disclaimer - I am a low level SDE and all opinions are my own.

AWS has set up proper boundaries between ESC and global AWS. Since I'm based out of the US I can't see anything going on in ECS even in the service we develop. To fix an issue there we have to play telephone with an engineer in ESC where they give us a summary of the issue or debug it on their own. All data is really 100% staying within ESC.

My guess is that ESC will be less reliable than other regions, at least for about a year. The isolation really slows down debugging issues. Problems that would be fixed in a day or two can take a month. The engineers in ESC don't have the same level of knowledge about systems as the teams owning them. The teething issues will eventually resolve, but new features will be delayed within the region.
by mixologic | 2026-01-16 00:12:04+00:00
They can offer a perk that literally no other tech job can offer: Someday have a statue of your likeness preserved in ceramic: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/internet-archive-headqua...

"Inside the church's main room, with its still-intact pews, there are more than 120 ceramic sculptures of the Internet Archive's current and former employees, created by artist Nuala Creed and inspired by the statues of the Xian warriors in China."
by Austizzle | 2026-01-16 00:12:15+00:00
I feel the same way. I recently installed Windows XP in a VM for nostalgia and it was shocking how much I realized windows has improved since then.

I'm not obsessed with windows 11, but I am the happiest using it than I've been with any other version (aside from the TPM 2.0 requirement, that's my #1 complaint)
by james_marks | 2026-01-16 00:12:19+00:00
LLMs can be incredible at cutting through misconceptions. I remember learning to code 20 years ago, and getting stuck building a mental model of a Hash. I remember being able to recite the definition verbatim, but I just couldn't put it into use until it eventually clicked after what felt like an eternity.

I think about how an LLM could have dramatically shorted that, like it did recently to teach me Bayes' theorem.
by eCa | 2026-01-16 00:13:00+00:00
> still under the jurisdiction of the US regime

Exactly, this seem pointless for people serious about staying away from US owned data stores. I know first hand of EU based businesses that left AWS (and all other US owned services) before 2020 due to customer (B2B) demand which in turn was due to the Cloud Act[1], and for whom it today would be completely untenable to return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
by Groxx | 2026-01-16 00:13:02+00:00
I'd say it happens pretty frequently, when in a medium-large corp or larger. The middle layers don't know what they're asking for, and don't listen to feedback, as a general statement.

The paycheck is a big motivation, as is "the rest of the work is enjoyable enough to overlook things I disagree with". Work is rarely 100% aligned with every employee's thoughts, so I think this is actually normal. Not ideal, obviously, but normal.

It's why a hierarchy actually does make some sense - alignment is rarely perfect, so choosing a single path and saying "everyone needs to get on board, that's why we pay you" can in fact be better for everyone, rather than bikeshedding everything to death. It can and very frequently does cause rather obvious severe problems, but it's capable of improving some things.
by daemonologist | 2026-01-16 00:13:05+00:00
Parakeet is not really more accurate than Whisper, but it's much faster - faster than realtime even on CPU: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 . You have to use Nemo though, or mess around with third-party conversions. (Also has a big brother Canary: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/canary-1b-v2. There's also the confusingly named/positioned Nemotron speech: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/nemotron-speech-streaming-en-0...)
Show HN: Gambit, an open-source agent harness for building reliable AI agents
by randall | 2026-01-16 00:13:25+00:00
Hey HN!

Wanted to show our open source agent harness called Gambit.

If you’re not familiar, agent harnesses are sort of like an operating system for an agent... they handle tool calling, planning, context window management, and don’t require as much developer orchestration.

Normally you might see an agent orchestration framework pipeline like:

compute -> compute -> compute -> LLM -> compute -> compute -> LLM

we invert this so with an agent harness, it’s more like:

LLM -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM

Essentially you describe each agent in either a self contained markdown file, or as a typescript program. Your root agent can bring in other agents as needed, and we create a typesafe way for you to define the interfaces between those agents. We call these decks.

Agents can call agents, and each agent can be designed with whatever model params make sense for your task.

Additionally, each step of the chain gets automatic evals, we call graders. A grader is another deck type… but it’s designed to evaluate and score conversations (or individual conversation turns).

We also have test agents you can define on a deck-by-deck basis, that are designed to mimic scenarios your agent would face and generate synthetic data for either humans or graders to grade.

Prior to Gambit, we had built an LLM based video editor, and we weren’t happy with the results, which is what brought us down this path of improving inference time LLM quality.

We know it’s missing some obvious parts, but we wanted to get this out there to see how it could help people or start conversations. We’re really happy with how it’s working with some of our early design partners, and we think it’s a way to implement a lot of interesting applications:

- Truly open source agents and assistants, where logic, code, and prompts can be easily shared with the community.
- Rubric based grading to guarantee you (for instance) don’t leak PII accidentally
- Spin up a usable bot in minutes and have Codex or Claude Code use our command line runner / graders to build a first version that is pretty good w/ very little human intervention.

We’ll be around if ya’ll have any questions or thoughts. Thanks for checking us out!

Walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/J_hQ2L_yy60
by alexfoo | 2026-01-16 00:13:32+00:00
Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?

(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).

Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.

How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”

As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.
by negzero7 | 2026-01-16 00:14:00+00:00
They did commit a crime by crossing the border illegally. Illegals are free to leave the country on their own and not deal with any of this, in fact they are paid to do so. The idea that removing people who entered America illegally and sending them back is the same as systematically exterminating an entire race of humans is so dangerous and makes any discussion with people who think like you such a waste of time. It's rhetoric like yours that encourage people like the Tyler Robinsons or that sniper who attacked the ice facility.
by andersjbe | 2026-01-16 00:15:07+00:00
I’ve always been someone who likes to go to local coffee shops, shops, and walks around the neighborhood. While I’ve met a few friendly employees who learn my name and say hi to me, in general I’ve found customers and people in general aren’t super approachable. They’re usually there as a part of an existing group of friends, or are focused on their work.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to meet people in this situation, but it is difficult to break the ice. Especially if your social skills are rusty.

On a larger scale, I think most people’s budget for anonymous social interaction is consumed through social media, where they scroll past strangers arguing and let’s be honest, mostly vitriolic comments. So in the real world, they don’t want to deal with anonymous strangers and intently focus on their own friendships.

Groups are a good way to bridge this gap, but the groups that are easier to host aren’t always accessible to everyone. And they require a lot of time and ideally strong social skills to run effectively.

I’ve thought about starting a campaign to make socializing with people in person more of a common practice again, but I’m honestly not sure how to convince enough people
by x86cherry | 2026-01-16 00:15:33+00:00
Critical infrastructure. The US has a history of forcing their way into many parts of it [1] and we know they use it for leverage whenever it's suitable. Furthermore, if you control the information flow of a system, then decision making based on that information becomes dependent on those who control it.

[1] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/guerre-economique-c...
by bawolff | 2026-01-16 00:15:44+00:00
> Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false

I'm claiming people, not necessarily wikipedia, have tried them. However many have been tried by Wikipedia too.

> just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?

The status quo is pretty good. Change for change sake is an anti-pattern.

Regardless, i think people who like these ideas should try them, on their own site. I suspect they will quickly find out why Wikipedia does not want to do them.

After all, martin luther didnt just whine that the pope wouldnt listen to him, he made his own thing.
by sega_sai | 2026-01-16 00:16:11+00:00
I was actually surprised to see this:
"As we make this change, we will continue to work as a blended team of EU residents and EU citizens, with all personnel working from EU locations, before gradually completing our transition to EU citizen operations for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud." This looks like a more serious attempt to make it independent of US meddling. It will not protect it fully, but still.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-16 00:16:15+00:00
Good points.

There really is an amazing untapped space of ideas on how to better navigate information.

Even in 2D interfaces, simple things: folders that looked fatter log-relative to how much they contain would add useful context and associative cues, and positive/subjective feelings of "real" recognizable locations vs. just a recursive "interface", when tap-tapping through folders.

An idea I implemented:

I hide a ".home" (zero byte) file in macOS folders I view as being at the top of a folder hierarchy. Then created a button in the finder toolbar that looks like a house. I can drill down a few folder layers, then pop right back to the hierarchy top by clicking the house button.

Just a simple thing. Ordinary users would understand the value of designating "home" folders. And once you have it you can't live without it.

For 3D:

I think traversable "Spaces" on screens were a great interface idea, done half way. and ripe for 3D extension. A space should be something that can be named, opened, closed, opened on another synced device, opened two years later. Duplicated or branched. I.e. a living persistent active project state of an open work state. With sub-spaces, for sub-projects, that can quickly be zoomed in and out of.

The latter would magnify the benefits of working on many different projects in a 3D environment, where having many things open and visible is really helpful, but laborious to continually reconfigure.

How nice to go into a rabbit hole on something important but not urgent, and be able to come back a year later to the same information still visibly organized where you left it. No context lost.

If there is an obvious "Minority Report" type power-user interface to be had, it would be that. Quickly navigating between presistent project/activity interface layouts with gestures. High value, high friction removal, with very low-bandwidth user direction needed.
by sipjca | 2026-01-16 00:16:41+00:00
Yeah like the other commenters mentioned, using Bluetooth devices does not work super well at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have a fix at some point. There’s just some time over bluetooth to negotiate the connection and everything, and the app doesn’t do a good job showing this at all right now

On a Mac I definitely recommend using the internal mic even if wearing airpods
by zackify | 2026-01-16 00:16:55+00:00
There's been so many of these lately.

I really need to share a blog post on doing this exact thing with a VPS, 2 commands to install and setup lxd.

And then client side bash function to just make and connect via tmux and delete when you're done.

Self hosting these services is too easy to do and you can have more control of your data and better specs.
by nomel | 2026-01-16 00:17:50+00:00
To me

> You shouldn’t ignore a problem when you’re in a position to help.

is incompatible with

> not put emotional investment into it

I'll only help because I care (maybe it's the person, the larger goal, etc). To me, everything behind the experience that I call "care" is an emotional one. If I don't care, then that means it doesn't matter to me, which literally means there's no emotional response/motivation to do it. Is this odd?
by JohnBooty | 2026-01-16 00:17:51+00:00
It's hard for me to believe they'll put 100% of their eggs into the AI basket, even if it's insanely more profitable than consumer GPUs at the moment.

AI is simultaneously a bubble and here to stay (a bit like the "Web 1.0" bubble IMO)

Also, importantly, consumer GPUs are still an important on-ramp for developers getting into nVidia's ecosystem via CUDA. Software is their real moat.

There are other ways to provide that on-ramp, and nVidia would rather rent you the hardware than sell it to you anyway, but.... I dunno. Part of me says the rumors are true, part of me says the rumors are not true...
by aforwardslash | 2026-01-16 00:18:31+00:00
Yes i offered a simplification, but reality is often nuanced. But, if you are in business, you accepted the terms and profited from them; Im not disputing how stupid or far-fetched the law is - Im just pointing out the child in the room.

If it is as the rant describes, every other company operating in the italian market has also to accomodate this; where is the rant from the other CEOs? From the telecom providers? From the VPN endpoints?
by pkreg01 | 2026-01-16 00:18:45+00:00
I agree. There's some faux confidence about ChatGPT, this emotionally draining, ruthlessly authoritative prose that is just exhausting to intellectually engage with. It started around o3, and I have no idea what OpenAI is doing to make their models sound like this. Claude and Gemini models have a much more human tone to them.
by Cyphase | 2026-01-16 00:19:25+00:00
Here's the change, which happened on December 5, 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...

Link to the section in question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...

Still there as of now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
by bigyabai | 2026-01-16 00:19:34+00:00
Genuine advice: supplement your Claude Code plan with a GLM Coding plan: https://z.ai/subscribe

GLM 4.7 is not a "Sonnet killer" but it will work just as well for sketching out easier projects, web design and terminal usage. After a while I cancelled my Claude Code plan because I simply didn't do anything that GLM couldn't hammer out equally as well.
by saghm | 2026-01-16 00:21:22+00:00
This seems like an example of what the parent comment was saying, which is that everyone learns best in different ways. Learning via book works better for them, but maybe not as well you you. It still isn't clear to me that an LLM would be more effective for everyone in the circumstance you described though, and I think that's the point they were trying to make; new learning techniques are mostly helpful because of the variance in how people learn, and in practice the best choice is likely going to depend at least as much on the individual as the circumstance and topic.
by frogperson | 2026-01-16 00:21:58+00:00
Im having alot of fun with my new RTL-SDR dongle and Baofeng radio. I pretty quickly found SDR++ which really deepend the rabbit hole and generated about 1000 new questions.

A few weeks ago I knew nothing about radio or ham, but im learning alot and having fun. Its been a good distraction from "stuff".
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-16 00:22:41+00:00
I agree, and I want to add that in the days before his suicide, this person also bought a gun.

You can feel whatever way you want about gun access in the United States. But I find it extremely weird that people are upset by how easy it was to get ChatGPT to write a "suicide lullaby", and not how easy it was to get the actual gun. If you're going to regulate dangerous technology, maybe don't start with the text generator.
by Groxx | 2026-01-16 00:22:54+00:00
>Replaying commits one-by-one is like a history quiz. It forces me to remember what was going on a week ago when I did commit #23 out of 45.

While I agree this is a rather severe downside of rebase... if you structure your commits into isolated goals, this can actually be a very good thing. Which is (unsurprisingly) what many rebasers recommend doing - make your history describe your changes as the story you want to tell, not how you got there.

You don't have to remember commit #23 out of 45 if your commit is "renamed X to Y and updated callers" - it's in the commit message. And your conflict set now only contains things that you have to rename, not all renames and reorders and everything else that might be nearby. `git merge` conflicts are only very rarely smaller than rebase conflicts.
by XenophileJKO | 2026-01-16 00:23:19+00:00
I don't know honestly, I think really the only big hole the current models have is if you have tokens that never get exposed enough to have a good learned embedding value. Those can blow the system out of the water because they cause activation problems in the low layers.

Other than that the model should be able to learn in context for most things based on the component concepts. Similar to how you learn in context.

There aren't a lot of limits in my experience. Rarely you'll hit patterns that are too powerful where it is hard for context to alter behavior, but those are pretty rare.

The models can mix and match concepts quite deeply. Certainly, if it is a completely novel concept that can't be described by a union or subtraction between similar concepts, than the model probably wouldn't handle it. In practice, a completely isolated concept is pretty rare.
by hu3 | 2026-01-16 00:23:21+00:00
non Apple consumers were already used to this clown fiesta since AMD processors had late access to SoTA nodes for the very same reason.

And possibly other types of hardware also had price bumped or used outdated chips because Apple has to build their iPhone/mac n+1.

That's why you see some folks actually mocking Apple about the situation. They were already affected.

If anything this might force a market-wide fix in the medium term.
by db48x | 2026-01-16 00:23:51+00:00
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.

Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
by Kwpolska | 2026-01-16 00:23:55+00:00
EC2 pricing: https://aws.eu/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

The prices for the only region in Germany are very similar to the prices in eu-west-1 (Frankfurt), except in € instead of $, so that’s basically a 16% markup by today's exchange rate. Also, AMD CPUs appear to be completely missing.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-16 00:25:08+00:00
Oh you haven't gone anywhere near far enough with this.

You'll get laid the most when you adamantly pretend like you're not interested in getting laid. You actively have to act like you are "too good" for them. Play "hard to get". Learn what "negging" means.

Never, ever, show desperation for anything ever for any reason. It is the ultimate ick. Buddhists will even tell you that desire is ontologically/spiritually evil and icky.