MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hershkumar | 2026-01-14 05:36:32+00:00
Most of what I use day to day in research is either specialized to my subfield or can be found in Nielsen and Chuang, so I've actually never looked at any other textbooks specifically for quantum computation. If you're interested in more of the information theory aspect, I have heard that "The Theory of Quantum Information" by John Watrous is a good text, but I have not personally read any of it.

As for Modern Physics, if you have the math prerequisites and you want a broad overview, the series of textbooks by Landau and Lifshitz would be my go-to. However, the problems are quite challenging and the text is relatively terse. I think the only other textbook that I've used personally would be Halliday, Resnick, and Krane. I didn't read a great deal of the textbook, but I do recall finding it relatively well-written.
by gaygum102 | 2026-01-14 05:37:25+00:00
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More importantly, we are currently in a closed beta, so you can use our product for free or access our professional growth services at a low cost.

If you’re interested in Amplift, you can sign up via this website: https://amplift.ai/?utm_source=ycombinator&utm_campaign=post...
by reify | 2026-01-14 05:38:10+00:00
what the fuck have you been smoking?

Seriously! you need to get out more.

Do you have any quantitative statistical data to back up that claim

here is the METR study. And by the way, METR are huge AI coding fans

https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf

The devs said they’d worked 20% faster — but they’d actually been slowed down by 19%

If you’re not measuring, you’re just wasting everyone’s time spouting vibes.

courtesy of David Gerard
by serf | 2026-01-14 05:38:14+00:00
it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation.

I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.

My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.

I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
Show HN: Git-identity-switcher – a CLI to switch Git user identity per repo
by csawai | 2026-01-14 05:39:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this because I regularly switch between work, personal, and client GitHub accounts and kept committing with the wrong identity.

This is a small CLI that lets you define multiple Git identities and switch them per-repo without touching global config.

It doesn’t manage SSH keys — it focuses only on Git name/email to reduce mistakes.

Would love feedback or suggestions. Happy to answer questions.
by 112233 | 2026-01-14 05:39:15+00:00
Has anyone noticed how poorly tools like claude code (the main one I tried) themselves are working? You'd expect software from company with an infinite AI allowance to be unattainably excellent, instead it lags, hangs, flickers, and feels like unpleasant mvp mess.

I hear at every corner people telling, how they can 100x now, and if my AI use is not laying prime code it's my skill issue. But where is this excellent AI generated software? Do you maybe have some examples you can share?
Show HN: RAG Architecture for optimizing retrieval volume/relevancy tradeoff
by Gregoryy | 2026-01-14 05:39:58+00:00
We propose a RAG architecture that uses hierarchical semantic chunking and graph-based context exclusion to maximize relevant information while minimizing the total volume of retrieved context.

The system recursively splits documents into a hierarchical tree structure and dynamically selects the most optimally-sized chunk from each branch by identifying and excluding redundant ancestors and descendants during the search process.

This approach ensures a higher relevant-to-total information ratio by retrieving diverse segments from across the document without including overlapping or nested chunks
by protocolture | 2026-01-14 05:41:28+00:00
>the average person will never install a 3rd party firmware

Heres a kicker. I really dont care about the average person. I care about multimillion dollar stacks of hardware that have support rug pulled on them, leaving millions of customers stuck. I care about small businesses that invest in their communities and find themselves locked into a single vendor without the cost to overhaul their network to move to another one.

Throw your Dlink home router in the bin every 3 years. I literally dont care.

>Ideally we should just be designing products so they don't have external dependencies.

This is good too. But even then, I would apply this logic to stuff like Meraki, where major features go away if you dont buy the license. Lightbulbs are beneath my notice/contempt.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-14 05:44:31+00:00
Whatever it does (if the phenomenon is real) I'm sure it can be easily detected. If it is powerful enough to affect the human body, sensitive electronics will have no issue detecting it.

Edit: ah it's pulsed radio waves, so basically a radar (which itself is really a microwave oven without the door). Really easily detectable with as much as a diode. It could also cause weird effects in electronics. Like ccfl bars glowing on their own. They might have found a frequency or pulse form that the human body is exceptionally sensitive to.

I'm just a bit sceptical. We know radar can be dangerous at really high power but I'm sure this is the very first thing they would have checked for when this syndrome first came to light. I'd be surprised if the whole radio spectrum around embassies in sensitive parts of the world isn't monitored as part of standard counter surveillance.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-14 05:46:43+00:00
I've seen terrible things where it would overcomplicate and duplicate. But I've also seen it write really good code. I've been trying to get it to do the latter consistently. Detailed specs and heavy use of agents really helps with the code quality. The next step is editing the system prompts, to trim away any of the fat that's polluting the context.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-14 05:48:25+00:00
Not at all.

I watched the video from Ross's phone. At first, from that angle, it actually looks like he's lunging in front of Good's car, but then I remembered the other angle. He moved his phone from his right hand to his left hand so he could grab his gun. But the car is still traveling in reverse as this happens.

And when Good starts moving, the wheel is cranked to the right -- away from Ross. I notice something important: Ross did not back away when the car starting moving. He stood his ground. If Good was intending to run over him, all she would have needed to do was center the wheel, maybe even keep it slightly to the left. But no, she was cranked to the right, away from him. Ross didn't move at all, and didn't get run over.

From what I can see, Good hit reverse to execute a 2-point turn to leave, and Ross responded by moving his phone to his left hand so he could unholster his gun with his right.

But the fact is, Ross failed to properly act according to training. If you do believe someone is trying to run over you, the proper response is to get the hell out of the way, not stand your ground and shoot the driver. Cars aren't exactly known for stopping just because the driver is dead.
by fortedoesnthack | 2026-01-14 05:48:57+00:00
I think it was true for a long time, and home prices were a good deal. There is also a fair bit of distortion due to near zero interest rates, where banks are willing to loan higher multiples here with 0 down payment.

But house prices have exploded upwards since covid, and wages have not.

So it's an extremely similar situation to everywhere else in the world. And the underlying reason is the same: people buying because they think real estate will go up in value.

By the way, as a fun fact, the most common mortgage in Japan is a ARM. Last I checked, 70-80% of mortgages in Japan are variable rate. The BoJ is currently on a path of adjusting rates upwards. So we will see how this all shakes out. If a situation like the GFC happens, it will not be pretty.
by musicale | 2026-01-14 05:49:01+00:00
HN, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

HP (ink.) has followed Raspberry Pi by creating a riff on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other keyboard computer designs of the 1970s and 1980s.

But with a better keyboard and with 1000x (or more) the computing power of a comparable Sinclair system.

It's like a disaggregated laptop that you can plug any USB screen into (or go old-school and plug it into a TV with appropriate cable or adapter.)

This is a beautiful thing that should be encouraged. And I'm sure you can run Linux on it and boot directly into a C64 or Spectrum emulator.
by Earw0rm | 2026-01-14 05:49:18+00:00
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.

That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
by jason_oster | 2026-01-14 05:49:23+00:00
Quick napkin math time!

Steam reached a new peak of 42 million concurrent players today [1]. An average/mid-tier gaming PC uses 0.2 kWh per hour [2]. 42 million * 0.2 gives 8,400,000 kWh per hour, or 8,400 MWh per hour.

By contrast, training GPT3 was estimated to have used 1,300 MWh of energy [3].

This does not account for training costs of newer models, nor inference costs. But we know inference costs are extraordinarily inexpensive and energy efficient [2]. The lowest estimate of energy cost for 1 hour of Steam's peak concurrent player count uses 6.5x more energy than all of the energy that went into training GPT3.

[1]: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-has-already-set-a-ne...

[2]: https://jamescunliffe.co.uk/is-gen-ai-bad-for-the-environmen...

[3]: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watt...
by superhuang | 2026-01-14 05:51:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the creator of Agent Skills.

I've been using Claude Code heavily recently for my daily dev work. While the ecosystem for "Agent Skills" is growing fast, it feels very fragmented right now. I found myself constantly digging through random GitHub repos or Twitter threads to find compatible tools.

So I built this registry to solve that discovery problem.

What it does:
Aggregates skills from verified sources (community & official).
Parses the underlying repos to show you the code structure involved.
Generates the exact install command (CLI) you need to add the skill to your agent configuration.
Tech Stack: Built with Next.js 14 (App Router) and Sanity for the content lake. It uses some custom scripts to crawl and validate the SKILL.md / repo metadata from GitHub.
I'd love to hear your feedback—especially on what other metadata you'd like to see before installing a skill into your agent's environment?

Thanks!
by tombert | 2026-01-14 05:51:31+00:00
I remember playing with Alpaca a few years ago, and it was fun though I didn’t find the resulting code to significantly less error-prone than when I wrote regular Erlang. It’s inelegant, but I find that Erlang’s quasi-runtime-typing with pattern matching gets you pretty far and it falls into Erlang’s “let it crash” philosophy nicely.

Honestly, and I realize that this might get me a bit of flack here and that’s obviously fine, but I find type systems start losing utility with distributed applications. Ultimately everything being sent over the wire is just bits. The wire doesn’t care about monads or integers or characters or strings or functors, just 1’s and 0’s, and ultimately I feel like imposing a type system can often get in the way more than it helps. There’s so much weirdness and uncertainty associated with stuff going over the wire, and pretty types often don’t really capture that.

I haven’t tried Gleam yet, and I will give it a go, and it’s entirely possible it will change my opinion on this, so I am willing to have my mind changed.
by NoteyComplexity | 2026-01-14 05:54:24+00:00
I don’t think this is an AI issue, but the amount of effort, the thought process and the story telling about the track they made.

Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of:

> I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that.

Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect.

Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story.

AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows.

There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.
by CableNinja | 2026-01-14 05:54:55+00:00
That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.

The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.

We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
by mikodin | 2026-01-14 05:56:38+00:00
I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-14 05:56:52+00:00
I've taken it a step further and just operate on the notion that we weren't really meant to be "office drones". This lifestyle is new for humans.

We used to need people that were aware of their surroundings and able to create novel solutions to environmental challenges.

I leverage that as much as I can. Sometimes that means my "breaks" are actually rollerblading in the park while listening to music and weaving (very politely) between people.

Sometimes that means I workout and pretend I'm hunting or traversing some sort of chasm/river/etc.

It helps reduce the "death stench" that routine, monotonous work seems to give off.
by sfvisser | 2026-01-14 05:57:37+00:00
I don’t understand this comment, yes everything going over the wire is bits, but both endpoints need to know how to interpret this data, right? Types are a great tool to do this. They can even drive the exact wire protocol, verification of both data and protocol version.

So it’s hard to see how types get in the way instead of being the ultimate toolset for shaping distributed communication protocols.
by dannersy | 2026-01-14 05:57:55+00:00
Cared about anything other than their own upward movement, actively worked towards my professional development, made sure I had actual, not hand wavey, feedback, and made sure my compensation reflected my growing responsibility.

I am aware that all of those things may not be in their power to give, but some combination of that in any org that is somewhat functional would be motivating.
by bloppe | 2026-01-14 05:59:56+00:00
All petroleum products comes from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not decompose, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic.

Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.

I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_marine_...
by tombert | 2026-01-14 06:00:01+00:00
My neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere.

I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-14 06:01:14+00:00
Weed helped me for a moment, but I had to use the right kind. So much of it right now is do high in THC that it made things worse.

It had to be a good mix of THC and CBD and other terpines for the entourage effect.

I realized also that ingesting it as controlled oil drops was best. As I could get the same, consistent level.

For me, it just relaxed me enough that, though the engine was still running , I didn't feel like I HAD to redline it all the time. I could just chill and mellow out. And that it's okay to chill and mellow out sometimes.
by evolve-maz | 2026-01-14 06:01:14+00:00
FYI I had a similar problem to yours in terms of having jobs I wanted to run on a schedule. I also had an extra layer where I wanted to let users to define jobs with their own special parameters etc. Maybe what I did is helpful for you:

- Form submission in front-end admin panel for users, for "new scheduled job"

- Form allows defining a job name, job type (while I let users define jobs, I limit it to a subset of python functions that I trust but are still general enough), job parameters (just a json blob for kwargs for the python func), frequency, and timeout.

- The backend (fastAPI) saves the details in a DB and creates a CRON file for the job, to add to the crontab. I basically have a template bash statement with the timeout built in and logging hooked up to it. And when python functions are called I have a helper which grabs the JSON kwargs from the DB or a filecache (if remote DB and I don't want to hit it every minute or something) to avoid cmd line injection.

- Also have an "edit scheduled job" which opens the same form view but with items pre-populated, and the submit going to a patch endpoint instead of a post.

It's stupid simple but lets users define a range of jobs. Things like having daily backups, where to send the backups, pulling things from / pushing things to an API frequently, etc.
by sllabres | 2026-01-14 06:01:22+00:00
Yes, they are made with: http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html and

https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph

Useful site if you are on to perf/eBPF/performance things with many examples and descriptions even for other uses as e.g. memory usage, disk usage (prefer heatmaps here but they are nice if you want to send someone a interactive view of their directory tree ...).
by jakelazaroff | 2026-01-14 06:01:32+00:00
Interesting! I don't share that view at all — I mean, everything running locally is just bits too, right? Your CPU doesn't care about monads or integers or characters or strings or functors either. But ultimately your higher level code does expect data to conform to some invariants, whether you explicitly model them or not.

IMO the right approach is just to parse everything into a known type at the point of ingress, and from there you can just deal with your language's native data structures.
by rainonmoon | 2026-01-14 06:02:43+00:00
A lot of good information for infra teams to internalise, although I worry that it gets a bit lost in the structure of the piece (there's kind of like 3-5 separate essays here but nothing a good edit couldn't fix.) One thing I'll add (or at least crystallise because I think the pieces are there) is that attack surface management is critical. A lot of the issues here are relevant in exactly the same scenario as exposing web applications. I have reported vulnerabilities in a lot of AI applications in prod and the issues aren't magic or even novel. They're typically the same authorisation and injection issues people have been talking about for decades. The methods of securing them are the same. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for companies to get compromised via a good old fashioned REST API on an exposed dev domain, but I probably wouldn't go so far as to say "REST APIs will compromise your cybersecurity posture." I would just say companies have found another tool to flex their indifference towards protecting user and company data.
by jbgt | 2026-01-14 06:03:05+00:00
Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged.

I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting.

If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-14 06:05:37+00:00
Oof. I feel this.

Especially the "easy things" bit. What an absolute waste of my time and focus to waste on trivial things that will just be measured against some standard, stale rubric.

Busy work for myself and the person receiving it.

But then, I tend to blow the scope of things I have to do in order to make it seem more important. And that means I extend "deadlines" or take longer to complete things. Oh well.

Part of accepting my ADHD is accepting that there is some truth to the feelings, that is, the notion of deadlines and urgency is usually so phony and unnecessary. My brain, my soul knows that something due at 5pm can absolutely be turned in the next day at 8am and nothing in the world will change.