MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mickael-kerjean | 2026-01-16 10:42:10+00:00
Or the people who write wasm don't talk too much about it. My OSS work (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) has tons of it:

1. to create web versions of applications that are traditionally desktop only to render things like Parquet, PSD, TIFF, SQLite, EPS, ZIP, TGZ, and many more, where C libraries are often the reference implementations. There are almost a hundred supported file formats, most of which are supported through WASM

2. to create plugins that extend the backend and add your own endpoint or middleware as a way to enforce the code run in a constrained environment without the ability to send people's file out

3. in the workflow engine to enable people to run their own sandboxed scripts without giving those a blank check to go crazy
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-16 10:42:31+00:00
Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.

The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...

Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
by brailsafe | 2026-01-16 10:43:59+00:00
> But none of that is healthy for you and me.

I read that as it's not healthy to constantly follow the day one posts about every iteration of brand new technology in order to try and see how to incorporate it into your workflow in a rapidly evolving manner.

It's not an attack on your article or your habits, it's an accurate indictment of chronically consuming probably short-lived hype instead of practicing craft and the use of hardened tools, much like watching certain programmers on youtube to know about the latest frontend library instead of just working on something with versatile, generalizable, industry-relevant tools
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-16 10:44:00+00:00
Can you share a link?

I’m pretty sure no American airline had the same situation that the airlines with the crash had because they paid extra for the redundant AOA sensor.

The MCAS issue was a major issue, but the ultimate fundamental flaw was Boeing not including a redundant sensor (which is the one that was malfunctioning in the crashes) in the base package as they should have.

The inexplicably considered redundancy in this part an optional extra, and as far as I’m aware there were no US airlines that hadn’t taken the optional extra package.
by asim | 2026-01-16 10:44:17+00:00
I think this is quite an interesting question. Especially for the developer audience. If you're an engineer, then you likely have similar tendencies to a lot of other engineers. You want to spend time alone, but you also feel the need to combat this loneliness, isolation and depression that it leads to. You want to connect, but struggle to do so. The internet, software, reddit and other places became a safe haven, but then they perpetuated what was hindering you in the first place. I say these things because I'm that person. I lost decades to this sort of escapism that comes from an online world. Unfortunately the answers rarely work for us at the time we're going through this. It's rare for someone to just break out of the cycle. Something has to change, but it's a change that comes from deep within yourself.

Sometimes you have to reflect on the why. Why am I here, why am I in this situation. And often it's that deeper internal reflection that starts to motivate something, change something. Listen, I lost decades. And I still struggle. But no one else can solve this for you.

In terms of the loneliness epidemic itself. You have to split it into many separate categories. Isolation comes in many forms. For the online generation, who grew up with the internet, we are specific category. But I'll tell you, the path to fixing it has more to do with understanding why we are here than filling the time with arbitrary activities or socialising. Yes we need human connnection and yes we should explore, learn and grow. But fundamentally the first question we should be asking, why am I here, what is my purpose, now what should I do with that.

In my case, I did find talking to someone helped, but only after coming to the realisation that I needed to talk to someone and then proactively seeking it out. As much as we want to solve the problem for many people, they have to walk a path before they can see the truth. We can offer alternatives, but people will only find what they're looking for when they're ready.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-16 10:44:44+00:00
> > universities [...] empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

What a misleading quote you made there. Why?

Full quote:

> Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

I'd agree with that universities more often than not don't fall into the group of "Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability", but that's a different thing. There are more institutions than universities.
by kome | 2026-01-16 10:45:17+00:00
people are so fucked up by consumerism that they expect to be just consumers also in their sociality... like they expect that social relations to be like commodities.

in consumer societies people flee real freedom's anxiety by conforming to market ways, treating connections as consumption not production. lasting bonds need effort patience vulnerability, all anti-consumer virtues.

Fromm said that in market societies love and relations follow the commodity and labor market exchange pattern. they want low-effort replaceable humans. So they became low-effort replaceable humans.
by K0balt | 2026-01-16 10:46:56+00:00
We don’t have to go down that path, it’s the path we’re already on.

It’s not the way I think it -should be- but it is the way that it is. The incentive alignment keeps it at that local minima, and every attempt to move it to a new one so far has introduced so many perverse incentives that it ultimately causes the regression or even complete failure of the economies it is implemented in.

I don’t know what the answer is that maximises human happiness and minimises human misery, but I suspect it lies well outside of the paradigm of conventional market economics.
Show HN: VoGen – A web app for hyper-realistic voice generating and cloning
by leoyixing | 2026-01-16 10:47:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the creator of VoGen [https://vogen.app].

I’ve always been fascinated by how far AI technology has come, but I found that most existing tools with expressing emotions are gated behind expensive subscriptions. I built VoGen to explore how we can make AI voices more "human" and accessible.

What it does:

Voice Cloning: You can clone a voice using a 3-60 second sample. It works best with a clean, single-speaker recording.

Emotional TTS: Instead of a flat tone, you can choose between Happy, Angry, Sad, and etc.

Bilingual Support: It currently supports both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Privacy-First Tools: I also added a browser-based audio speed changer that processes files locally—no audio data ever leaves your machine for that specific tool.

The Tech Stack: The frontend is built with React.js, and it's deployed on Vercel. For the voice engine, I'm using a customized pipeline that focuses on low-latency inference while maintaining high fidelity.

Why is it free? Right now, VoGen is in its early stages (MVP). I want to see how people use it and what kind of voice quality the community expects before even thinking about monetization.

Privacy Note: I know how sensitive voice data is. We don’t use your uploaded cloning samples to train our base models.

I’d love to get some feedback from the HN community. Whether it’s about the latency, the naturalness of the emotions, or the UI/UX—I’m all ears.

What features would make this more useful for your workflow?
Show HN: WatchLLM – Debug AI agents step-by-step with cost attribution
by Kaadz | 2026-01-16 10:47:20+00:00
Hi HN! I built WatchLLM to solve two problems I kept hitting while building AI agents:

1. Debugging agents is painful - When your agent makes 20 tool calls and fails, good luck figuring out which decision was wrong. WatchLLM gives you a step-by-step timeline showing every decision, tool call, and model response with explanations for why the agent did what it did.

2. Agent costs spiral fast - Agents love getting stuck in loops or calling expensive tools repeatedly. WatchLLM tracks cost per step and flags anomalies like "loop detected - same action repeated 3x, wasted $0.012" or "high cost step - $0.08 exceeds threshold".

The core features:

Timeline view of every agent decision with cost breakdown
Anomaly detection (loops, repeated tools, high-cost steps)
Semantic caching that cuts 40-70% off your LLM bill as a bonus
Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq - just change your baseURL

It's built on ClickHouse for real-time telemetry and uses vector similarity for the caching layer. The agent debugger explains decisions using LLM-generated summaries of why each step happened.
Right now it's free for up to 50K requests/month. I'm looking for early users who are building agents and want better observability into what's actually happening (and what it's costing).
Try it: https://watchllm.dev
Would love feedback on what other debugging features would be useful. What do you wish you had when your agents misbehave?
by rasmus-kirk | 2026-01-16 10:48:00+00:00
You can create two Google accounts and parental control yourself. You can also use ublock or other browser addons, and of course, NewPipe. Youtube should have more settings for this, it's clearly going down the drain, but it's not like you can do nothing.

Honestly, it's one of the reasons I don't want to pay for Youtube Red, why would I pay for "no ads", when I still feel like I'm the product, because of my complete lack of control over the algorithm and user experience.
by rfv6723 | 2026-01-16 10:48:16+00:00
This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals.

Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.
by Underqualified | 2026-01-16 10:48:37+00:00
Many years ago I read the classic 'How to win friends and influence people' and I was just hit with, according to that book, how little people actually care about other people and how fundamentally lonely our existence is.

I don't think that was the message the book was trying to give, but that's what I got out of it.

So yes, people will wonder, subconsciously or not, what's in it for them. If you can give status or if you are naturally entertaining, this might all seem a little less obvious.
by salviati | 2026-01-16 10:49:13+00:00
There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.

They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.

This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.

I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
by bluegatty | 2026-01-16 10:50:03+00:00
When history is cached conversations tend not to be slower, because the LLM can 'continue' from a previous state.

So if there was already A + A1 + B + B1 + C + C1 and you asking 'D' ... well, [A->C1] is saved as state. It costs 10ms to prepare. Then, they add 'D' as your question and that will be done 'all tokens at once' in bulk - which is fast.

Then - they they generate D1 (the response) they have to do it one token at a time, which is slow. Each token has to be processed separately.

Also - even if they had to redo- all of [A->C1] 'from scratch' - its not that slow, because the entire block of tokens can be processed in one pass.

'prefill' (aka A->C1) is fast, which by the way is why it's 10x cheaper.

So prefill is 10x faster than generation, and cache is 10x cheaper than prefill as a very general rule of thumb.
Show HN: SnapCan – Get AI Photos of You "Anywhere" in the World (iOS)
by marsorange | 2026-01-16 10:50:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built SnapCan (https://snapcan.app), an iOS app that uses AI to realistically place your photo into any location on Earth.

To get your honest feedback, the first few photo generations are completely free (no payment needed).

I think it’s perfect for three simple things:

Recapture a Missed Memory: Forgot to take a good photo on your actual trip? Get the perfect shot retroactively.

Be Together, Even Apart: Create a realistic photo with a friend or loved one in the same place (like your old school), even if you’re miles apart.

Just for Fun: Create impossible or humorous “what if” photos for social media or your own laugh.

If you try it, I’d love to know:

Which use case above did you try, and did the result meet your expectation?

Was the process (upload, pick a place, generate) straightforward?

Any ideas on what would make you come back to use it again?

Direct free iOS link: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snapcan/id6756778727]

I’ll be here to answer all questions and discuss the feedback. Thanks!
by everyday7732 | 2026-01-16 10:52:45+00:00
It's not perfect, but I already have a setup for doing this on my phone. Add SherpaTTS and Librera Reader to your phone. (both available free on fdroid).

Set up SherpaTTS as the voice model for your phone (I like the en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium voice option, but there are several to choose from). Add a ebook to librera reader and open it. There's an icon with a little person wearing headphones, which lets you send the text continuously to your phone's tts, using just local processing on the phone. I don't have the latest phone but mine is able to process it faster than the audio is read, so the audio doesn't stop and start.

The voice isn't totally human sounding, but it's a lot better than the microsoft sam days, and once you get used to it the roboticness fades into the background and I can just listen to the story. You may get better results with kokoro (I couldn't get it running on my phone) or similar tts engines and a more powerful phone.

One thing I like about this setup is that if you want to swap back and forth between audio and text, you can. The reader scrolls automatically as it makes the audio, and you can pause it, read in silence for a while yourself and later set it going from a new point.
Ask HN: Need ArXiv endorsement for LLM inference paper
by logotype | 2026-01-16 10:54:08+00:00
I've written a paper on a novel approach to real-time LLM inference for streaming data. Looking for someone with arXiv endorsement privileges in cs.LG or cs.AI to help me submit.
Endorsement code: GBUUPW
Happy to share the paper draft if you'd like to review first. Reach me at victor@logotype.se
Thanks!
by phoe-krk | 2026-01-16 10:54:35+00:00
> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge

More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.
AI Agent Testing
by dinasorous | 2026-01-16 10:54:47+00:00
As I work on AI agents, I find myself constantly thinking about how to effectively test them.
As we integrate more knowledge sources and expand our agents' capabilities, testing becomes increasingly complex. As a standard practice, we use evals to ensure quality is maintained. But honestly, I feel like something is missing.
The issue I’m seeing is that we, as engineers, sometimes lack sufficient domain knowledge to assess an agent's response accurately. At the same time, current tooling limits the possibility of collaborating with domain experts to perform testing together. For example, current tooling gives priority to dashboards over the readability of actual outcomes
This has been my experience so far—I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
by alias_neo | 2026-01-16 10:55:14+00:00
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.

What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?

Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.

That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.

£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.

If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
by rand846633 | 2026-01-16 10:56:13+00:00
Yeah, that sentiment surely exist that PR and journalism is not the same. Some would even argue that journalism should try to find facts and that being particularly pleasant and nice with doing so is secondary to the goal of fact finding, it’s not PR after all. One could even go as far as to speculate that a journalist being “nice” is not genuine but just a method to gain information. I know I am biased here as this is how I want it to be.

The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.
by RugnirViking | 2026-01-16 10:56:21+00:00
Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about.

But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view
by lapcat | 2026-01-16 10:58:07+00:00
> Any differences are well documented.

LOL, I wish.

I would note that I'm a professional browser extension developer and have a great deal of experience with this.

> The only thing you need a Mac for is, again, distribution.

Or, you know, testing your software. Or are you in the habit of shipping software without any testing?

> If not for that it’s really not that different to developing a website that will open on Safari without access to an Apple device.

Also a bad idea.
by Havoc | 2026-01-16 10:59:49+00:00
I do think there is still a bit of an execution edge to be had in the brittleness or lack thereof

It’s very easy to vibe code a happy path. Getting it to do the same robustly is a step change in difficulty

I‘m not a programmer by profession and definitely notice that. Some concurrency gotcha or whatever that I didn’t know to look out for and the LLM doesn’t organically cover etc
by archievillain | 2026-01-16 11:00:46+00:00
This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).
by rfv6723 | 2026-01-16 11:02:20+00:00
The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge.

The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.

This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.
by fransje26 | 2026-01-16 11:02:29+00:00
> That does not however answer the question of whether they just got lucky, or were more skilled, though there are some indications that it may have been skill.

What a load of bullcrap. Full stop.

The crews of the two crashed 737Max were also well trained, skilled professionals.

That the US-based crews decided to re-engage the auto-pilot, and with that action, by shear luck, managed to bypass the fatal MCAS issues, shows you exactly what it was: shear luck.

These pilots reacted to a system malfunction of a system they hardly knew existed (thanks to Boeing's lies), that changed the aircraft subsystems behaviour in fundamental, undocumented ways compared to the previous generation of 737s, and that they were therefore not trained to handle. So skill differences did not enter the equation, luck did.

The choice was between doing the manual procedures they were trained to do to try to regain control, and the hail mary approach of re-engaging the autopilot with the hope the problem went away. With no time to do both. The crashed crews chose option 1, the US crews option 2.
by raincole | 2026-01-16 11:02:33+00:00
> Are they just misinformed?

Not all of them, but given the same questionable or outright false assumptions (e.g. AI companies are doing interference at a loss, the exaggerated water consumption number, etc) keeping getting repeated on YouTube, Reddit and even HN where the user base is far more tech-savvy than the population, I think misinformation is the primary reason.