MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone have dedicated, local, AI server?
by skwee357 | 2026-01-29 08:58:48+00:00
I'm toying with the idea of trying to run some local AI models for both agentic coding, as well as trying to get into developing products on top of AI models.

I'm not, yet, looking into training models, but more about inference, while staying relatively on a budget. I have about €2-3k to spend on hardware, for a server I can run at home. I know that one can rent an AI inference server, but from my research, they tend to cost around €200-300/mo, which means that my hardware will pay for itself in ~10 months.

However, I'm quiet confused with what hardware to chose. I saw recommendations for Ryzen AI Pro+ 395, in SFF PCs, but some people suggest instead to build a "regular" PC with Nvidia 3090 or 4090.

People who run small servers (as opposed to €10-15k beasts), what's your experience and recommendations?
by sonofhans | 2026-01-29 08:58:48+00:00
This is commonly said but trivially falsifiable — a blind human crosses the street better than a Tesla.

Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.

Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.
by yoz-y | 2026-01-29 08:59:48+00:00
When iPhone came out the sentiment was clearly opposite. The “sweet solution” was ridiculed and workarounds found. When web caught up, it was plagued with self inflicted performance issues. And eventually Apple decided to not invest in good PWA support.

I was an app advocate for a long time, now I made a PWA and it’s maybe 90% there. But you still get behaviors that you can not fix.

IMO the worst however is products that have a fully functional website, but refuse to let you use it (e.g.: Instagram)
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-29 09:00:01+00:00
It's common to all large organisations. Because large organisations get like this; if everyone does their own procurement then money gets misused, wasted, and becomes uncontrolled. So they centralise procurement, and that disconnects it from the people who understand what they're buying, so they have to control it through process, and the process bloats until we get to this point.

One of the many, many, arguments for not allowing organisations to get this big.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-29 09:00:59+00:00
> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?

Do you own a Roomba? I don't. It's a huge liability and doesn't do the cleaning I want out of it, even at a sub-$1000 price point. The humanoid robot is clunkier, more of a liability, and will still refuse to do certain tasks.
by 3rodents | 2026-01-29 09:01:07+00:00
"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"

That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
by tchalla | 2026-01-29 09:01:14+00:00
US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.

> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
by Penligentai | 2026-01-29 09:01:53+00:00
I'm thinking about building a localized, private hacking station. The setup: Use the M4 Mac Mini’s unified memory for local inference, Kimi k2.5 as the reasoning "brain" for its long-context logic, and Penligent.ai for the automated execution.

The goal is a closed-loop pentesting rig that handles everything from discovery to exploit without hitting the cloud. It’s a powerful privacy-first setup, but I’m still weighing the M4 hardware cost vs. the power efficiency. Anyone tried a similar agentic stack on Apple Silicon?
by throwaw12 | 2026-01-29 09:02:06+00:00
For different people, its in different stages.

What's cool about this is that, every time new engineer joins this wave, there are more interesting ideas coming and shaping the "vibers" industry.

In my day to day job, now I am worried, it will be very difficult to get a new job, because I vibe so much that I almost forgot to write code from scratch.

Examples:

* Hey Claude, increase mem usage from 500Mb to 1500Mb in production - fire and forget

* Plan mode: What kind of custom metrics can we add to Xyz query processor? Edit mode: add only 3,4 and 9. Later we will discuss 8

* Any other small changes I have...

I primarily became a manager of bunch of AI agents running in parallel. If you interview me and ask me to write some concurrent code, there is a high probability that I will fail it without my AI babies
by cubefox | 2026-01-29 09:03:57+00:00
> remember that initially the 3DS was such a flop at launch that Nintendo needed to pull a Hail Mary

I agree people weren't very excited about it, but the lack of interest affected the PS Vita (direct competitor without stereoscopic 3D) even worse.

I'm pretty sure the fact that 3DS/PSVita were much less successful than DS/PSP was caused by the rise of smartphones and app stores, which led to a flood of highly successful cheap mobile games that didn't require buying a separate handheld console.
by alterom | 2026-01-29 09:05:04+00:00
>I'd just like to invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

To say that it doesn't apply here, I hope?

Spoiler: the "celebrated researcher" in the title was discovered to commit fraud on a massive scale, was stripped of his physician license, and had multiple articles recalled.

He absolutely did obscure a baby's poisoning.

But that's not the main point of the article, nor is the story.
by hapless | 2026-01-29 09:06:33+00:00
It's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible

now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS
Show HN: I built a vibe coding app for websites
by heyarviind2 | 2026-01-29 09:06:34+00:00
Hey everyone

I’ve been building an iOS app that lets you create and edit a full business website just by describing what you want. No agencies, no Webflow, no fiddling with layouts just vibe-code it straight from your phone.

You can ask it to build pages, tweak sections, add or remove content, and iterate on the site entirely from your pocket.

If your site includes a form, submissions land directly inside the app, and you also get basic analytics to see how your site is performing.

I built this mainly for founders and solo builders who want something fast and flexible without the usual setup pain.

Happy to answer questions or get feedback

Here is the app link : https://apps.apple.com/in/app/pocket-site/id6757796769
by globular-toast | 2026-01-29 09:06:46+00:00
You do have to know what you're doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.

Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-29 09:06:55+00:00
I've found LLMs are quite good for tailored game hints where you don't want more of the story or puzzle ruined. Rather than looking up walkthroughs and hoping you don't accidentally digest something you didn't mean to, you can ask the LLM very specific questions and ask it to only answer with very specific answers.

I'm not someone who uses LLMs heavily, but I've found this kind of usecase suited my needs very nicely.
by martinald | 2026-01-29 09:08:10+00:00
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).

Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.

In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.

It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.

The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-29 09:09:26+00:00
While you're correct on the one hand, Tesla made EVs feasible and mainstream, did the investments and caused a rolling effect of worldwide investments in e.g. batteries and EVs, and government subsidies that also made investing in EVs more attractive to competitors.

Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.

(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)
by danielbarla | 2026-01-29 09:09:30+00:00
I completely agree, it's fantastic both for general fitness, and as a way of exploring. I do this on a smaller scale on a daily basis, walking the 8-10 km route to or from my work (when we have office days). This is walkable in about 1.5 hours, public transport would get me home in around 45 minutes, so I am not really investing much extra time. Varying the route slightly keeps things interesting, and you get a surprising variety with small (1 to 2 street) changes.

Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.
by LowLevelMahn | 2026-01-29 09:10:52+00:00
the developer Alberto Marnetto is responsible for creating this crazy mod extending the sight of view in Stunts making it look like a different game

Blog: https://marnetto.net/2026/01/27/camel

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3stJfcK8A

Forum-Announcement: https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4404.msg100046#msg10...

former SuperSight Blogs:

Part 1: https://marnetto.net/2025/02/20/broderbund-stunts-1.html

Part 2: https://marnetto.net/2025/08/08/broderbund-stunts-2.html

Part 3: https://marnetto.net/2025/08/13/broderbund-stunts-3.html
by raincole | 2026-01-29 09:10:55+00:00
> Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again?

If you equal Elon to Tesla then there are plenty of - SpaceX dominates near-earth orbit payload launches. A private company competing against and replacing NASA would have been a laughingstock idea 30 years ago. xAI made competitive SOTA models despite a very, very late start.

Of course Elon isn't Tesla. I think the biggest risk of Tesla now is the investors realizing he's more into AI and politics and will siphon resources from Tesla to his other companies.
by Lucy_Bai | 2026-01-29 09:11:25+00:00
This resonates a lot.

I’ve seen teams handle this exactly the same way — snapshots, SELECT first, second pair of eyes, manual checks.

Out of curiosity:
at what point did this stop feeling “rare but scary” and start feeling like “this is happening often enough that the process itself becomes the bottleneck”?

Was it:
– number of production systems
– frequency of fixes
– or cross-team coordination cost?

I’m trying to understand where that line actually is in practice.
by hapless | 2026-01-29 09:12:22+00:00
The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.
by ben_w | 2026-01-29 09:13:11+00:00
Oh, Optimus is much worse than ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, for all its flaws, does actually exist and definitely isn't just a remote-control-based illusion, and some people even pay for it.

Optimus, the only thing we can be sure is real is the hardware, which is the least interesting part. But even if they really are running just on software without remote control, the one and only thing they've shown in any public demo that would actually be impressive, was voice comprehension in a noisy environment.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-29 09:13:13+00:00
> Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.

The actual sales figures show otherwise, but sure, there's still a lot of uncertainty with regards to batteries / range, I can imagine even moreso in the US. Traveled to Austria a while ago in an EV (~1000 kilometers), we had to stop 3x on the way, but the battery was good for another 2.5 hours of driving after a coffee. I keep hearing that "solid state batteries are around the corner" and they will solve all problems with capacity and safety / fire risk, apparently. I'll just sit and wait patiently, it'll take years before their production capacity is on par with current battery tech.
by julian_t | 2026-01-29 09:13:37+00:00
Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.
by anhner | 2026-01-29 09:15:00+00:00
It offers a GUI for easier configuration and management of models, and it allows you to store/load models as .gguf something ollama doesn't do (it stores the models across multiple files - and yes, I know you can load a .gguf in ollama but it still makes a copy in its weird format so now I need to either have a duplicate on my drive or delete my original .gguf)
by dabinat | 2026-01-29 09:16:09+00:00
Before Tesla came along there were a small number of EVs but they were all pretty bad because their only purpose was to serve as “compliance cars” in states like California so automakers could sell more gas cars. (See the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? for more on this.)

So Tesla deserves credit for building the first electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. They also deserve credit for building the largest and most reliable charging network - a key factor in making electric car ownership more feasible.

But they’ve made a lot of poor decisions recently and all the money and power went to Elon’s head. I think it was beneficial to the world for Tesla to exist and do that important work early on, and now it’s beneficial to the world for the company to die.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-29 09:17:19+00:00
I think I first need to reflect and refine my models of IP/UC/sociopath, as they aren't as aligned as I had naively ascribed.

IP vs OP - head vs hands, but still ideological
UC vs MC - being vs doing, no longer necessarily ideological
sociopath vs clueless - transactional vs company good, no longer ideological

(does IngSoc even have an Upper Class? Goldstein doesn't think so, but maybe that's part of Orwell's model: an oligarchy is only open to failure if a significant fraction of them has stopped {believing in themselves, getting high on their own supply}? It can certainly have sociopaths —indeed, O'Brien is presented as such— but they must outwardly toe the line ... a situation perhaps made easier because they create the line, and therefore its exceptions: "but some animals are more equal than others")

What specifically about the history of the salaryman? (frex it does seem to slightly predate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Managerial_Revolution )
by cmkr | 2026-01-29 09:17:41+00:00
Hey wink ()

true. some socialmedia was too aggressive - should be resolved.

for yt: i tried to fix the lazy-loaded YouTube detection. Tool now catches:
- iframes with data-src
- web components: <lite-youtube>, <lite-youtube-embed>, <youtube-video>, <lite-vimeo>, <lite-vimeo-embed>, <vimeo-video>

One thing I stumbled over: if YT-URL only lives inside a JS variable and gets injected on click with no trace in the HTML. That's a static analysis limitation.

And:
React facades that load a YouTube thumbnail → already detected. React facades that use a local/self-hosted placeholder image with only a video ID in a data attribute → not detected.

You mind sharing a URL so I can verify it works against your site?

Thanks for helping already!
by drorco | 2026-01-29 09:17:52+00:00
Or in the absence of other competing systems which can be shown to be more efficient, we could say OK seems like billionaires are part of this ecosystem. If you'd like, similar to how we don't like mosquitos but they are nevertheless an important part of the current ecosystem, whether we like it or not. Though if we ever find a better alternative, they'd definitely be in a hard spot.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-29 09:18:25+00:00
>Did you have a point to make or was this just a bunch of wanking?

The way you "debate" is exactly a patt of the problem. You come in deflecting and attacking instead of understanding and clarifying.

You didn't even give me a point to respond to that doesn't derail go way off topic. If you can't see it then I hope someone with more patience can help you out. But no point having a conversation with someone who approaches it like this (against site guidelines Good luck out there.
by mcny | 2026-01-29 09:18:58+00:00
> If I subconsciously detect that you spent 12 seconds creating this, why should I invest five minutes reading it?

The problem is it isn't easy to detect it and I'm sure the people who work on generated stuff will work hard to make detection even harder.

I have difficulty detecting even fake videos. How can I possibly I detect generated text in plain text accurately? I mean I will make plenty of false positive mistakes, accusing people of using generated text when they wrote it themselves. This will cause unnecessary friction which I don't know how to prevent.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-29 09:19:05+00:00
To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.

Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.
by avadodin | 2026-01-29 09:19:08+00:00
In ye olden days, TV stations broadcasted again what they already had once.

We called this phenomenon the "rerun".

I would place the poster of the comment that I am replying as a 38+, so deep into Dumbo rerun territory but, perhaps I am wrong and it was a 21yo zoomer growing up in a compound.
by figoshi94 | 2026-01-29 09:19:30+00:00
Over the last couple of years, I kept seeing the same thing over and over again:
Sales gurus everywhere selling courses, bootcamps, playbooks, and “how to break into tech sales” programs.
What I didn’t see was the obvious next step.
Actual job placements.
It felt strange. If all these people are teaching sales, that means there must be (or soon will be) a lot of people who want to become salespeople. And realistically, most of them aren’t starting as Account Executives.
They’re starting as SDRs / BDRs.
So I asked myself:
If I were brand new to sales today, what would I actually be searching for?
Not another course.
Not another LinkedIn thread.
A real, entry-level SDR/BDR job — preferably remote.
That’s why I started a remote SDR/BDR job board focused purely on sales development roles. No courses. No upsells. Just jobs.
I scrape and curate remote sales roles daily, mostly from startups that actually need outbound or inbound reps, and tag them so beginners can find what fits them (industry, region, experience level, tools, etc.).
by beAbU | 2026-01-29 09:19:47+00:00
And the Renault 4, the Hyundai Inster, and the Dacia Spring, and the Citroën C3, Fiat 500e, Kia EV3, Leapmotor T03.

There are heaps of small/subcompact EVs on the European market now, all with very competitive prices. The newer ones seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper.

Honestly I reckon a Tesla M2 will have a hard time succeeding in this market.
by hapless | 2026-01-29 09:19:49+00:00
motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`
by Orygin | 2026-01-29 09:20:10+00:00
I mean, most apps I use daily, no matter the OS, have CSD. Teams, Spotify, Slack, Firefox, Postman, IntelliJ etc...

Doesn't matter which OS they all have different styles. I can understand it's not liked by everyone, but that ship has sailed and no "big" app will use SSD anymore.
by afro88 | 2026-01-29 09:20:14+00:00
To me, the diagrams have an uglier default design. A crazy amount of dropdown shadow (in the examples), stretched fonts (front page example). It doesn't matter how many diagram types you support if the generated diagrams aren't good quality.

Mermaids defaults are good enough. They're not amazing, but I'm also not embarrassed to show them to other engineers, stakeholders etc

Edit: KeenWrite looks excellent btw