MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an AI-powered late-night call-in radio show from my RV
by lukemacneil | 2026-02-10 05:22:54+00:00
Show HN: I built an AI-powered late-night call-in radio show from my RV

I live in an RV in the desert and I built a system that generates AI callers who phone into my
late-night talk show. Each caller has a unique voice, name, backstory, job, vehicle, and
opinions. They know the local weather, road conditions, and what's happening in the towns around
southern New Mexico. Some are recurring characters who call back with updates on their lives.

The stack:
- FastAPI backend running the show control panel
- OpenRouter for LLM (caller personalities, dialog, topics) — mostly Grok and MiniMax
- ElevenLabs / Inworld for TTS with 25+ distinct voices
- Caller personality system with memory — regulars remember past conversations
- Live phone integration via SignalWire so real people can call in too
- Post-production pipeline: stem recording, gap removal, voice compression, music ducking, EBU
R128 loudness normalization
- Self-hosted on Castopod, episodes served from BunnyCDN

The callers aren't scripted. The LLM generates their personality and topic, then we have a real
conversation. I respond as the host, the AI generates their replies in real time with TTS. The
result sounds like actual late-night radio — someone calls at 2 AM to argue about Pluto's
planetary status, another calls about their divorce, another has a conspiracy theory about
fusion energy.

Real callers can dial in live and get mixed in with the AI characters. Nobody knows who's real.

Listen: https://lukeattheroost.com
RSS: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
Call in: 208-439-LUKE

The code is a solo project — happy to answer questions about the architecture.
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-10 05:24:03+00:00
> that I am a long ways from conservative

You are 100% conservative, because only a braindead conservative would be typing some paragraph about charisma, ignoring the fact that TRUMP LITERALLY TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT. You guys are so bad at hiding this that its embarrassing at this point, so stop trying.

And before you start saying "no he didn't", please go and read the entire supreme court case where he said that yes, he did in fact present a fradulent set of electors, but he should be immune from prosecution because he was acting in official capacity, and Supreme Court agreed.

To be super crystal clear, if instead of Kamala, the option was even "worse" in your eyes, like low level left wing politician from San Francisco that wanted to do something like UBI, and you still voted for Trump, you are a traitor to the country that honestly should be tried on charges of conspiring for treason and given appropriate capital punishment, and the argument of "oh i didn't know he tried to overthrow the government" should not fly.

There are levels of bad, and what Trump did is pretty much one step short of using actual military forces to take over the congress and force people to sign the papers at gunpoint installing himself as a dictator. An example needs to be made of people who support this kind of person.

But hey, like I said, this is what people wanted. Well see if everyone feels the same way when US economy tanks and bullets start flying as unemployed people looking to feed their families will have nothing to lose. Maybe well even have a Red Scare 2 except instead of communists, everyone will be paranoid of Maga people.
by flomo | 2026-02-10 05:24:30+00:00
Big Assumptions on your part. Do you think 'grandparents' also don't use iphones and androids? If anything more people are more familiar with this interface than Windows/Mac WIMP.

Anyway, their Windows laptop got all sorts of shit "side-loaded" (and I have a benign theory about this happened), and put them on iPad like 15 years ago. You can object to the closed system, but zero tech support calls for me.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-10 05:25:02+00:00
The essential complexity isn't solvable by computer systems. That was the point Fred Brooks was making.

You can reduce it by process re-engineering, by changing the requirements, by managing expectations. But not by programming.

If we get an LLM to manage the rest of the organisation, then conceivably we could get it to reduce the essential complexity of the programming task. But that's putting the cart before the horse - getting an LLM to rearrange the organisation processes so that it has less complexity to deal with when coding seems like a bad deal.

And complexity is one of the things we're still not seeing much improvement in LLMs managing. The common experience from people using LLM coding agents is that simple systems become easy, but complex systems will still cause problems with LLM usage. LLMs are not coping well with complexity. That may change, of course, but that's the situation now.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-10 05:25:44+00:00
I don't understand what is wrong with pessimism. That's not a valid critique. If someone is pessimistic but his description of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his view point.

Either way this is also opinion based.

There hasn't been a revolutionary change in technology in the last 20 years. I don't consider smart phones to be revolutionary. I consider going to the moon revolutionary and catching a rocket sort of revolutionary.

Actually I take that back I predict mars as a possible break through along with LLMs, but we got lucky with musk.
by aaravchen | 2026-02-10 05:27:41+00:00
Someone mentioned (I believe?) after talking to Element/Matrix at FOSSDEM this year that the organization has been struggling a lot to get this going. Apparently issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors, who already had fully functional and working video/voice, all but give up on the project because the upstream forming means it's now forked from a commercial/defunct version of the original code(?)
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-10 05:29:22+00:00
They had to tune the essentialism out of the models because they’re the most advanced pattern recognizers in the world and see all the same patterns we do as humans. Ask grok and it’ll give you the right, real answer that you’d otherwise have to go on twitter or 4chan to find.

I hate Elon (he’s a pedo guy confirmed by his daughter), but at least he doesn’t do as much of the “emperor has no clothes” shit that everyone else does because you’re not allowed to defend essentialism anymore in public discourse.
by bitwize | 2026-02-10 05:29:27+00:00
Facebook's algorithm has picked up on the idea that "I like art". It has subsequently given me more examples of (human-created) art in my feed. Art from comic book artists, art from manga-style creators, "weird art", even a make-up artist who painted a scene from Where the Wild Things Are on her face.

I like this. What's more, while AI-generated art has a characteristic sameyness to it, the human-produced art stands out in its originality. It has character and soul. Even if it's bad! AI slop has made the human-created stuff seem even more striking by comparison. The market for human art isn't going anywhere, just like the audience for human-played chess went nowhere after Deep Blue. I think people will pay a premium for it, just to distinguish themselves from the slop. The same is true of writing and especially music. I know of no one who likes listening to AI-generated music. Even Sabrina Carpenter would raise less objection.

The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said for software—because there is little value for human expression in the code itself. Code is—almost entirely—strictly utilitarian. So we are now at an inflection point where LLMs can generate and validate code that's nearly as good, if not better, than what we can produce on our own. And to not make use of them is about as silly as Mel Kaye still punching in instruction opcodes in hex into the RPC-4000, while his colleagues make use of these fancy new things called "compilers". They're off building unimaginably more complex software than they could before, but hey, he gets his pick of locations on the rotating memory drum!

I'm one of the nonexistent anti-LLMers when it comes to software. I hate talking to a clanker, whose training data set I don't even have access to let alone the ability to understand how my input affects its output, just to do what I do normally with the neural net I've carried around in my skull and trained extensively for this very purpose. I like working directly with code. Code is not just a product for me; it is a medium of thought and expression. It is a formalized notation of a process that I can use to understand and shape that process.

But with the right agentic loops, LLMs can just do more, faster. There's really no point in resisting. The marginal value of what I do has just dropped to zero.
Show HN: A CLI tool to automate Git workflows using AI agents
by leochiu-a | 2026-02-10 05:29:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a CLI tool to automate common git workflows using AI agents
(e.g. creating branches, summarizing context, and preparing PRs).

Supported platforms:
- GitHub (via gh)
- GitLab (via glab)

Supported AI agents:
- Claude Code
- Gemini CLI
- Cursor Agent
- Codex CLI

Design goals:
- Agent-agnostic (same commands across different AI agents)
- No MCP or custom prompts required
- Minimal setup (from install to first PR in minutes)

Repo: https://github.com/leochiu-a/git-pr-ai

Feedback and questions welcome.
by thayne | 2026-02-10 05:30:11+00:00
I can think of a of other ways that client certificates could work, but they have problems too:

1. Use DANE to verify the client certificate. But that requires DNSSEC, which isn't widely used. Would probably require new implemntations of the handshake to check the client cert, and would add latency since the server has to do a DNS call to verify the clients cer.

2. When the server receives a request it makes an https request to a well known enpdpoint on the domain in the client-cert's subject that contains a CA, it then checks that the client cert is signed by that CA. And the client generates the client cert with that CA (or even uses the same self-signed cert for both). This way the authenticity of the client CA is verified using the web PKI cert. But the implementation is kind of complicated, and has an even worse latency problem than 1.

3. The server has an endpoint where a client can request a client certificate from that server, probably with a fairly short expiration, for a domain, with a csr, or equivalent. The server then responds by making an https POST operation to a well known enpdpoint on the requested domain containing a certificate signed by the servers own CA. But for that to work, the registration request needs to be unauthenticated, and could possibly be vulnerable to DoS attacks. It also requires state on the client side, to connect the secret key with the final cert (unless the server generated a new secret key for the client, which probably isn't ideal). And the client should probably cache the cert until it expires.

And AFAIK, all of these would require changes to how XMPP and other federated protocols work.
by baalimago | 2026-02-10 05:31:52+00:00
The fact that the community thoroughly inspects the ethics of these hyperscalers is interesting. Normally, these companies probably "violate ethical constraints" far more than 30-50% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be so large[source needed]. We just don't know about it. But here, there's a control mechanism in the shape of inspecting their flagship push (LLMs, image generator for Grok, etc.), forcing them to improve. Will it lead to long term improvement? Maybe.

It's similar to how MCP servers and agentic coding woke developers up to the idea of documenting their systems. So a large benefit of AI is not the AI itself, but rather the improvements they force on "the society". AI responds well to best practices, ethically and otherwise, which encourages best practices.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-10 05:32:13+00:00
Sure, I guess? I feel like this is getting rather in the weeds and will not necessarily lead the conversation in any kind of particularly productive direction, but I will nonetheless take the opportunity to promote what I consider to be excellent writing. Dan Luu is a favorite of mine, and offers what I find to be a much more rewarding use of reading time. A sample picked basically at random: https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-10 05:33:19+00:00
So many people don't even use regular cruise control. They'll have nobody in front of them for miles and their speed yo-yos between 60 and 65 mph. And if you pass them because your cruise is set at 66 mph, they'll speed up to match, but then eventually decide to pass you, get in front, and slow back down to 60. The only way to end the stupid cycle is to go 70-75 mph until there's at least 1/4 mile between the two of you.
by adinisom | 2026-02-10 05:33:32+00:00
There's some logic to wanting to assign responsibility for other's actions upon those who enable it. Like you say, to incentivize intermediates to police their users and those they do business with.

But the problem with deputizing intermediates is that it's too effective. It creates incentives to over-police and we have less rights against corporate policing than we do government policing. We would not have the internet we have today without the user generated content and moderation that section 230 enabled.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-10 05:34:10+00:00
It's manipulation even if the outcome is considered good. Did it change your behavior, or intend to change your behavior? Yes? Then it's manipulation.

The truth is that you did not come up with the idea to buy it. Their goal isn't even to convince you to buy it. Its to convince you that you yourself want to buy it, and if you do, you decided it all on your own.

Think of it this way. Could you have gotten a better power tool somewhere else? Surely. So why that one? And, since money was spent, wouldn't it be in your favor to just believe you made the best choice?
by bitwize | 2026-02-10 05:35:25+00:00
But there's a difference. Being opposed to AI-generated art/music/writing is valid because humans still contribute something extraordinarily meaningful when they do it themselves. There's no market for AI-generated music, and AI-generated art and writing tends to get called out right away when it's detected. People want the human expression in human-generated art, and the AI stuff is a weak placeholder at best.

For software the situation is different. Being opposed to LLM-generated software is just batshit crazy at this point. The value that LLMs provide to the process makes learning to use them, objectively, an absolute must; otherwise you are simply wasting time and money. Eric S. Raymond put it something like "If you call yourself a software engineer, you have no excuse not to be using these tools. Get your thumb out of your ass and learn."
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-10 05:35:31+00:00
I don't see what violence gets them, just people die and the conclusion will still be the same.

I love immigrants and don't care if my skin color is no longer common, heck I experienced this already when spending 9 years in China.

200-300 years from now we all would have mixed up anyways, we are all humans afterall and who is to say that certain humans have the right to prosperity while others don't based ancestry (because their claim morally is much stronger than ours!).
by OrderlyTiamat | 2026-02-10 05:35:31+00:00
> You think you know it, but only after you've spent some time iterating in the space of solutions, you'll see the path forward.

I'd turn it around- this is the reason asking questions does work! When you don't know what you want, someone asking you for more specifics is sometimes very illuminating, whether that someone is real or not.

LLMs have played this role well for me in some situations, and atrociously in others.
by Ms-J | 2026-02-10 05:36:02+00:00
If the crew is mistreated they should sell the boat and all of the contents, including the oil.

Yes, many countries don't have the capacity to refine a large amount, but there are many simple techniques such as even heating the oil that any country can do.

There are always buyers up the chain and in neighboring countries that will buy it. Even arrangements from buyers across the world.

People ignore sanctions all the time. It's part of a free world and free trade. Similar to the legacy laws on the books that everyone and their mother ignores. It is much easier to simply go on with your life and when everyone ignores the law, it gets removed. Politicians don't want to be seen as weaker than they already are so they remove the law very quickly.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-02-10 05:37:38+00:00
The most simple answer here is the "fields are real, particles are excitation patterns of fields." And that's generally the practical way most physicists think of it today as I understand it.

If I make the equivalent of a double slit experiment in a swimming pool, then generate a vortex that propagates towards my plywood slits or whatever, it's not really surprising that the extended volume of the vortex interacts with both slots even though it looks like a singular "particle."
by seanhunter | 2026-02-10 05:38:02+00:00
I should have added this in my original note, but as a programmer, if you’re interested in learning about this I highly recommend Steve Brunton’s course in differential equations and dynamical systems on you tube https://youtu.be/9fQkLQZe3u8?si=Cu7F5QQyljjiG4K8

He’s a really amazing teacher and he goes through all the maths on a lightboard and then writes simulations of all the systems he talks about in python and matlab. All the course materials are available free online. It’s quite extraordinary.
Show HN: PicoClaw – lightweight OpenClaw-style AI bot in one Go binary
by mosaxiv | 2026-02-10 05:38:24+00:00
I’m building PicoClaw: a lightweight OpenClaw-style personal AI bot that runs as a single Go binary.
OpenClaw (Moltbot / Clawdbot) is a great product. I wanted something with a simpler, more “single-binary” architecture that’s easy to read and hack on.

Repo: https://github.com/mosaxiv/picoclaw
by therealdrag0 | 2026-02-10 05:38:31+00:00
Just like all feemium, it’s supported by power users.

I pay for gpt myself, and my work pays for Copilot, GPT, Claude, cursor, Glean, and other enterprise tools. And we make enterprise tools on top of AI that our customers pay extra for.

Averaging the revenue over headcount isn’t the right model, anymore than it would be for RIOT games or YouTube.
by habitable5 | 2026-02-10 05:38:31+00:00
Peter Thiel.

Evil incarnate and the next president of the United States you've never heard of. Vance is his sock puppet, he was chosen because he is guaranteed not to have a single independent thought so when Trump croaks Thiel will be the president in all but name.

It was also he who willed OpenAI to be in order to help destroying American democracy.
by jibal | 2026-02-10 05:39:03+00:00
There's a huge amount of valuable content in the article. People saying silly nonsense like '10k words for "migrating code and data is a headache"' missed out on all of it--which may well be fine for them because not everyone needs to know these things, but this is an excellent article for those who do. And rejecting this article because an LLM may have been involved is irrational ideology.

My biggest problem with the article is the title, which is somewhat the inverse of clickbait--functional programmers are his apparent intended audience but the content is much broader.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-10 05:40:17+00:00
> I roll at an averaged out speed, which doesn't feel as frustrating (it's kind of relaxing) and is better for fuel economy

Yup. The brake pedal is an evil device that converts cash into brake dust and waste heat. Before I got an EV, I always drove in such a way to use the pedal as little as possible. As a result, in my previous car that was stickered at 24 mpg city/30 mpg highway, I averaged 32 mpg. I don't even drive slow, I just drive smoothly. If your average speed is going to be 5 mph, then you'll get much better economy driving a constant 5 mph than your speed being a sine wave between 0 and 10 mph.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-10 05:40:21+00:00
There's an interesting aspect of fertility rate that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society! Imagine a population has a global fertility rate of 1 (and in Singapore it's even lower, though not globally - yet). That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there.

---

1 new born ->

2 20-40 year olds ->

4 40-60 year olds ->

8 60-80 year olds ->

16? 80-100 year olds

---

Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.

You can see this visibly playing out in Singapore right now with their population pyramid [1]. They had a nice solid pyramid in the past, so you end up with a very healthy economy and society - lots of young people for relatively fewer older people. But as fertility rates declined you can see it start to flip, so right now it looks a bit like a vase, and in the future it will be an upside down pyramid.

So basically as the old folks move on, they are replaced by even more old folks. And this never really stops until we return to being societies that are having enough children to sustain ourselves.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#/med...
by docjay | 2026-02-10 05:40:45+00:00
Your continued use of the word “understanding” hints at a lingering misunderstanding. They’re stateless one-shot algorithms that output a single word regardless of the input. Not even a single word, it’s a single token. It isn’t continuing a sentence or thought it had, you literally have to put it into the input again and it’ll guess at the next partial word.

By default that would be the same word every time you give the same input. The only reason it isn’t is because the fuzzy randomized selector is cranked up to max by most providers (temp + seed for randomized selection), but you can turn that back down through the API and get deterministic outputs. That’s not a party trick, that’s the default of the system. If you say the same thing it will output the same single word (token) every time.

You see the aggregate of running it through the stateless algorithm 200+ times before the collection of one-by-one guessed words are sent back to you as a response. I get it, if you think that was put into the glowing orb and it shot back a long coherent response with personality then it must be doing something, but the system truly only outputs one token with zero memory. It’s stateless, meaning nothing internally changed, so there is no memory to remember it wants to complete that thought or sentence. After it outputs “the” the entire thing resets to zero and you start over.