MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jomari | 2026-02-11 21:47:36+00:00
I’m building an AI co-host stack for Podium Outpost live audio rooms.

Each agent joins as a real participant. It listens to room audio, transcribes (ASR), generates a reply (LLM), and speaks back into the room (TTS).

The issue isn't the talking, but real-time coordination and latency.

In a multi-agent room, I have noticed overlapping speech breaks the experience immediately. So I built a separate Turn Coordinator service that grants lease-based speaking turns. Only the agent holding the lease can speak.

Current system pieces:

• Real audio in/out via a Playwright-driven Jitsi “browser bot” (48kHz mono, 20ms frames) bridging PCM to/from Node
• Lease-based turn coordination to prevent overlap
• Selection logic: name-addressing → round-robin fallback, with optional importance-score auction
• Speaking-time enforcement aligned with the frontend (live remaining_time updates + hard user.time_is_up signal; agent force-mutes / won’t start if expired)
• Latency masking via optional persona “filler” clips while the LLM is generating to reduce perceived dead air
• Turn metrics logging (e.g., endOfUserSpeechToBotAudioMs)

What I’m testing:

Does explicit time pressure change how AI speakers structure arguments in a live setting?

Early tests suggest it does. Shorter leases push tighter claims and fewer digressions. The constraint seems to shape the output.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:

• Reducing awkward handoff gaps (end-of-speech → first bot audio), particularly long-tail latency cases
• Better speaking-time allocation models beyond round-robin / auction
• Whether an audience-influenced time-budget mechanic would work for humans (debates, panels, classrooms) and what failure modes you’d expect

Code + setup:
https://github.com/myFiHub/podium-voices

There’s also a live test Outpost (may not always be active):
https://www.podium.myfihub.com/outpost_details/019c170d-2d37...

If you try it locally, start the coordinator:

COORDINATOR_PORT=3001 npm run start:coordinator

Then run two agents with:
• COORDINATOR_URL
• distinct AGENT_IDs
• separate room tokens so they appear as different participants

This is still early and rough. I’m mainly exploring whether governance primitives like turn leases and time budgets meaningfully alter model behavior in live audio environments.

Curious what this community thinks.
by eggy | 2026-02-11 21:47:48+00:00
There was significant awareness and negative sentiment toward advertising long before Marshall McLuhan became prominent in the 1960s. Some of the stuff from 1900 to 1930 is interesting. I realize there is a lot at work here with multi-faceted attacks on the senses, but advertising was intentional too, and I am not sure if just making things illegal that are hard to educate people on is the right tack.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-11 21:48:14+00:00
Of course they do some good. You could improve things even further by implementing a system like Judge Dredd, and we'd save a ton of money as well.

This is the problem with limits on law enforcement. There are tradeoffs, and people really don't like tradeoffs. Many people prefer to just assume that law enforcement will use their powers for good, rather than have to think about whether any given change will do more harm than good due to enabling bad law enforcement.
by beloch | 2026-02-11 21:49:05+00:00
>"Do NOT get wet and cold."

This is very true whether the source of the water is outside or inside your clothing.

Unfortunately, this warning is immediately preceded by the recommendation that you should use rain-gear in winter. A lot of rain gear is very lacking in breathability. If you go out and do something physical in raingear, you will likely wind up drenched in sweat. i.e. Wet. The moment you stop being physical, you will get cold. i.e. Cold and wet. This is a recipe for hypothermia.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-11 21:49:45+00:00
The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.

Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.

Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
by tzs | 2026-02-11 21:50:10+00:00
I don't know what OP considers to be a gamble, but one thing that comes to mind is that from what I've read most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.

I'm in the US and if my doctor had suggested such drugs before last year I'd have been reluctant because (1) they were expensive even with insurance, (2) just how expensive varied quit a bit from insurance provider to insurance provider and from plan to plan from a given provider, and (3) as I said I'm in the US, and so never knew for sure who my insurance provider would be next year and even if it was going to be the same provider I never knew what their plans would be like next year [1].

Starting a new drug that looked like it would be a "rest of your life" drug where the price could change year to year from reasonably affordable to painfully expensive would definitely feel like taking a gamble.

Now I'm old enough for Medicare, and they are something I would at least consider because Medicare seems to be less volatile. They are still expensive, if my understanding is correct, with the need to meet a deductible and with copays or coinsurance, but all that counts toward the part D annual cap of $2100 so there is at least a cap making it somewhat safer to make long term plans. (But Republicans in Congress want to eliminate or at least significantly raise that cap, so long term planning is still somewhat of a gamble).

[1] In the US around 80-85% of people under 65 who have health insurance that is not provided through the government get their health insurance via their employer's benefits package. Most of the rest get it through the ACA marketplace. Employers often renegotiate plans with their provider or switch providers when the old plans/provider prices go up. The ACA market is even more volatile.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-11 21:50:36+00:00
People may be downvoting you because they think you're not speaking in good faith. But I think this touches on an important issue which is the credibility of politicians when it comes to bringing the science hammer down (in the form of policy). Stuff like the junk science behind those old CA plastic straw policies, the seesawing on Covid prevention and lab-leak denialism, the energy efficient dryers that don't work (this last one is more hearsay to me, and issue of CBA rather than scientific fact perhaps.) I think if politicians can get their shit straight on communicating mature science thoroughly and accurately it could go a long way to getting people to work together.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-11 21:50:38+00:00
> Even Xfinity has motion detection in homes using this technique now

WiFi presence detection is a completely different problem. If the WiFi environment is changing past a threshold, return a boolean yes or no. It can't actually tell if someone is present or if the environment is just changing, such as a car driving close enough to reflect signals back in a certain way.

Doing mass surveillance where you detect individual people in a random home environment isn't the same thing at all. All of these "could" claims are trying to drawn connections between very different problems.
by Rudybega | 2026-02-11 21:50:39+00:00
MMLU performance caps out around 90% because there are tons of errors in the actual test set. There's a pretty solid post on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/163x2wc/philip_...

As far as I can tell for AIME, pretty much every frontier model gets 100% https://llm-stats.com/benchmarks/aime-2025
by r00fus | 2026-02-11 21:50:46+00:00
I rented a BYD M9 PHEV minivan while on vacation in Cancun, Mexico and other than the vehicle winning over my family in, like 2 days, the mileage was amazing. 1000km range, of which, 180km was battery (that's 520mi of gas + 100mi battery range).

PHEVs in the US are gimped by poor regulatory incentives - we should be forcing manufacturers to increase overall range + EV range. If this model were sold in the US by a US manufacturer, I bet the ranges would be halved (and still considered good/decent in comparison to existing alternatives).
Show HN: SimTag – See the active Git branch directly in iOS Simulator
by aryamansharda | 2026-02-11 21:51:04+00:00
I kept running into the same problem while working across multiple worktrees and clones.

Feature branch in one window. Hotfix in another. PR review in a third. With multiple AI coding sessions pushing builds to different simulators, it became very easy to lose track of what branch a running build actually came from.

The iOS Simulator gives you no branch context - every window looks identical.

I built a small free macOS utility that overlays the current git branch directly on the Simulator window.

It maps the running app to its artifacts in DerivedData, resolves the originating project path, then reads the active git branch from that directory and renders it as an overlay on the Simulator window.

No changes to your project are required - it just adds context at a glance.

This has already saved me from debugging the wrong branch several times.

Would love feedback from other iOS developers who've experienced this problem or use parallel AI workflows.

Blog post with more details:
https://digitalbunker.dev/simtag-context-for-your-ios-simula...

Happy to answer technical questions.
by isametry | 2026-02-11 21:51:06+00:00
The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.

But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.

As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4

(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).
by rekabis | 2026-02-11 21:51:35+00:00
Now granted, I haven’t worked with PHP in one heck of a long time (although that’s purely due to lack of opportunity… I get the warm fuzzies with v7+), but doesn’t bad stuff randomly happen if `<?php` isn’t at the very beginning of the first line?

At the very least, a quick boo through some pretty vintage files of mine shows that every PHP file starts out without spaces or blank newlines - `<?php` is the very first thing encountered. So clearly there was formatting discipline there, but whether it came down to specific reasoning or not is the real question, and one I cannot clearly recall one way or the other.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-11 21:51:43+00:00
Two things: 1) Employees are not that easy to replace. These employees have already been onboarded, screened, and proven, at least to this point, to be the type of people the company wants. If an employee starts lagging behind solely because they are stubborn about adopting AI, yes, the company can fire them, but then it has to go through the entire hiring process again and risk bringing in someone new, when it could have simply improved performance by helping the existing employee use AI. 2) Companies themselves have performance metrics that are compared to those of other companies. If an employee is not using AI and has reduced output, then the company’s overall output and its profits are affected. No investor cares if the reason is that other companies have a higher rate of AI adoption; investors care that the company was not able to get its employees to use AI effectively to increase profits.
by pornel | 2026-02-11 21:51:57+00:00
Legacy automakers still use these for upselling trims.

It's so silly when they make some "Advanced Technology Package" with a VGA camera and a 2-inches-bigger infotainment screen that's still worse than junk from Aliexpress, and charge $3000 extra for it.

I know it's just a profit-maximizing market segmentation, but I like to imagine their Nokia-loving CEO has just seen an iPad for the first time.
by AlexandrB | 2026-02-11 21:52:02+00:00
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.

> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".

Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
by keyringlight | 2026-02-11 21:52:04+00:00
It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.

It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-11 21:52:11+00:00
> Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate).

Eh. Cloud brightening is a temporary hack, stops working as soon as you stop actively doing it, and isn't an alternative to switching away from fossil fuels. It's probably worth doing to push back the "ice melts and releases more carbon" thing but let's not confuse it with the extent of what needs to be done. You can't actually solve the problem for $5B/year.

> AI investment is private capital chasing returns.

Getting private capital to work for you is a good way to solve the problem. The real problem is politics.

The EV tax credits and the subsidies oil companies get were costing about the same amount of money, but we only got rid of one of them. Nuclear should cost less than fossil fuels, but we're told that fission is scary and Deepwater Horizon is nothing but spilled milk so the one with the much better environmental record has to be asymmetrically regulated into uncompetitiveness.

If we actually wanted to solve it we'd do the "carbon tax but 100% of the money gets sent back to the people as checks" thing, because then you're not screwing everyone because on average the check and the tax cancel out and corporations pay the tax too but only people get the check. Then everyone, but especially the heaviest users, would have the incentive to switch to alternative energy and more efficient vehicles etc., because everybody gets the same check but the people putting thousands of miles on non-hybrid panzers pay more in tax.

The "problem" is that it would actually work, which is highly objectionable to the oil industry and countries like Russia since it would cause their income to go away.
by maweaver | 2026-02-11 21:52:22+00:00
I love using AI and find it greatly increases my productivity, but the dirty little secret is that you have to actually read what it writes. Both because it often makes mistakes both large and small that need to be corrected (or things that even if not outright wrong, do not match the style/architecture of the project), and because you have to be able to understand it for future maintenance. One other thing I've noticed through the years is that a surprising number of developers are "write only". Reading someone else's code and working out what it's doing and why is its own skillset. I am definitely concerned that the conflux of these two things is going to create a junk code mountain in the very near future. Humans willing to untangle it might find themselves in high demand.
by testfrequency | 2026-02-11 21:52:26+00:00
I agree the quality of Claude Code recent has felt poor and frustrating.

I’ve been persistently dealing with the agent running in circles on itself when trying to fix bugs, not following directions fully and choosing to only accomplish partial requests, failing to compact and halting a session, and ignoring its MCP tooling and doing stupid things like writing cruddy python and osascripts unnecessarily.

I’ve been really curious about codex recently, but I’m so deep into Claude Code with multiple skills, agents, MCPs, and a skill router though.

Can anyone recommend an easy migration path to codex as a first time codex user from Claude code?
by Schmerika | 2026-02-11 21:52:32+00:00
> Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.

Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects.

But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway.

Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself.

That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data.

If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard.

> A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions.

There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species.

Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...
by terminalshort | 2026-02-11 21:52:53+00:00
It's actually much simpler than that. We need to pay down the debt, and because the rich have most of the money they are going to need to do most of the paying down whether or not they directly are responsible for it or benefited from it. It's simple math. But what does this have to do with a wealth tax? The entire concept is stupid. Income an capital gains rates can be increased.
by rida | 2026-02-11 21:53:03+00:00
Been running it in Docker for a couple weeks. Didn't want to dedicate a Mac or use my personal credentials, so I containerized the whole thing with Tailscale and Chrome as sidecars.
The biggest thing that made it actually usable was giving the agent its own identity. Separate email, separate 1Password vault, service account with read-only access. Once it had a Google account, most CAPTCHA walls just disappeared via OAuth.
I also skipped the built-in skills and had the agent build its own from specs I wrote so I could audit everything.
Running email triage, X market research, and a Notion-to-blog-PR pipeline. This post was published through that pipeline: https://rida.me/blog/why-i-finally-tried-openclaw/
by jevyjevjevs | 2026-02-11 21:53:06+00:00
Hi Oliver! Thanks for reaching out! What are you building yourself? Tell me morreeee.

Managed is an opportunity for sure, but it's complex for a boostrapped solo dev like myself. Supporting Helm charts and reference docker-compose files would be a start I think.

For the Kafka deployment, it a lot of places where I worked, to get Kafka streams, it was never just Kafka. It's say MSK, Schema Registry, tying those together, config-as-code for the topics, and setting this up in the local dev environment. That was a major pain to advocate for the first time this the benefits of streaming would be obvious.

3. For Typestream, Kafka is abstracted away pretty much entirely so I'm actually not positioning this towards people who already have Kafka deployed heavily. It's for those who do dual writes in their code, writing cronjobs for syncing, and have other secondary datastores.

I'm very much testing out the positioning by talking to whoever I can! What are you thinking?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-11 21:53:16+00:00
That's not really the point. Prop 13 is known to be a huge disincentive to efficient transfers in home ownership - people will strenuously avoid selling their homes and buying something that's closer to the kind of shelter they actually prefer, because they might have to pay a higher assessed property tax if they did that. These effects are very real and well documented.
by asdff | 2026-02-11 21:53:24+00:00
Even today you are better off shooting manually once you have metered the scene.

Otherwise your meter will pick up on color differences in a given framing and meter slightly differently. Shots will be 1/30th of a second, 1/25th of a second, then thanks to the freedom of aperture priority you might get little weird 1/32ths of a second you don't have discretely on a dial. How about iso. same thing, one shot iso 200, another iso 250, 275 this other one. Oh this one went up to iso 800 and the meter cut the shutter speed. Aperture too. This one f2 this one f4 this other one f2.5. This wasn't such a big deal even in the full auto film era since 35mm film has such latitude where you can't really tell a couple stops over or underexposed.

All these shots, ever so slightly different from one another even if the lighting of the scene didn't really change.

Why does this matter? Batch processing. If I shot them all at same iso, same shutter speed, same aperture, and I know the lighting didn't really change over that series of shots, I can just edit one image if needed and carry the settings over to batch process the entire set of shots.

If they were all slightly different that strategy would not work so well. Shots would have to be edited individually or "gasp" full auto button which might deviate from what I had in mind. Plus there are qualitative trade offs too when one balances exposure via shutter speed, vs via aperture, vs via iso.
Show HN: Send Claude Code tasks to the Batch API at 50% off
by misker1 | 2026-02-11 21:53:42+00:00
Hey HN. I built this because my Anthropic API bills were getting out of hand (spoiler: they remain high even with this, batch is not a magic bullet).

I use Claude Code daily for software design and infra work (terraform, code reviews, docs). Many Terminal tabs, many questions. I realised some questions are ok to wait on and with that comes some cost savings. So here is a small MCP that lets you send work directly to Anthropic's Batch API from inside Claude Code, for the same quality responses just 50% cheaper, results come back in ~30min-1hr.

How it works: you type /batch review this codebase for security issues, Claude gathers all the context, builds a self-contained prompt, ships it to the Batch API via an MCP server, and you get notified in the status bar when it's done (optional).

The README has installation instructions, which were mainly generated by claude. I removed the curl | bash setup and at this stage of the project i feel more confident sharing the manual setup instructions.

My main hope with this project is to monetize it. Not by asking for money, rather I am hoping others have ideas or improvements to add and use those to save more on cost.