MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tkp-415 | 2026-02-20 14:54:56+00:00
Can anyone point me in the direction of getting a model to run locally and efficiently inside something like a Docker container on a system with not so strong computing power (aka a Macbook M1 with 8gb of memory)?

Is my only option to invest in a system with more computing power? These local models look great, especially something like https://huggingface.co/AlicanKiraz0/Cybersecurity-BaronLLM_O... for assisting in penetration testing.

I've experimented with a variety of configurations on my local system, but in the end it turns into a make shift heater.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-20 14:54:59+00:00
it's the name gen Z and gen alpha puppyn00bs have given to what us old heads have always called CLIs

on tik too young folks are always discovering "revolutionary" things and giving them names, ignoring they're either super mundane, or already have a name

on one hand, i absolutely LOVE the passion for discovery and invention

on the other hand, if you're 19yo you probably didn't discover something revolutionary

(Edit: I've seen some people online suggest a CLI is only when you manually type the command yourself, while a TUI incorporates text-based graphical elements, but that's something invented by young people; everything before GUIs was called a CLI until pretty recently. A terminal is /literally/ a command-line interface.)
by 34679 | 2026-02-20 14:55:28+00:00
I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?
by giglamesh | 2026-02-20 14:55:47+00:00
I've been having this conversation with some of the children in my life. They frequently refer to a subset of their peers as "boring" and I bristle ever time I hear it. I try to suggest that other people are not here for our entertainment and therefore deciding that they are boring is to misunderstand the relationship. As you might imagine, the suggestion is not sinking in.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-20 14:55:49+00:00
When you put it that way; I guess after some reflection, I realize my algorithm is optimized for efficiency and I immediately try to hone in on strong agreements or disagreements in taste/politics/etc. so that I don't waste my time getting to know a shitty person, or miss out on a potential best friend.

These means engaging in a level of provocative speech/behavior that sometimes makes people uncomfortable (not my problem of course; I have little interest in euphemism or politeness, my energy goes toward transparency and kindness)

Progressive self-disclosure can have its uses but if I can't break the ice in two minutes with a stranger, it's not a good sign for our compatibility.

Now, I did grow up in an environment where I was never really allowed to exist. I am an atheist raised by an hyper-abusive, hyper-religious, ex-boxer Catholic deacon in an extremely conservative part of the United States. So this may have influenced my comfort with radical transparency; I had to learn at a young age to literally fight constantly for my right to think my own way, and I'm ready to do that at any time.

But I have definitely been in some neighborhoods where the most interaction you should have with a stranger is a nod of the head, anything more is asking for trouble no matter who you are. I can vouch that there are harsh urban environments which prevent, by design, even progressive disclosure from being a safe option. This effectively kills any chance at real unity in the community, and drives up crime statistics, further justifying the continued disunification tactics.
by louiereederson | 2026-02-20 14:55:49+00:00
I think this was the best write up on the impact of AI on software engineering I've read yet. By extension it might be the best 'take' on AI I've read period.

Alas it is not written by AI and boosted on X (which is owned by an LLM model vendor), and therefore will not get 80m views or whatever.
by jasonjmcghee | 2026-02-20 14:56:11+00:00
This is not correct.

Families of model sizes work great for speculative decoding. Use the 1B with the 32B or whatever.

It's a balance as you want it to be guessing correctly as much as possible but also be as fast as possible. Validation takes time and every guess needs to be validated etc

The model you're using to speculate could be anything, but if it's not guessing what the main model would predict, it's useless.
by gtr | 2026-02-20 14:56:15+00:00
I am using AI a lot to do tasks that just would not get done because they would take too long. Also, getting it to iterate on a React web application meant I can think about what I want it to do rather than worry about all the typing I would have to do. Especially powerful when moving things around, hand-written code has a "mental load" to move that telling an AI to do it does not.
Obviously not everything is 100% but this is the most productive I have felt for a very long time. And I've been in the game for 25 years.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-20 14:56:33+00:00
Sometimes you are forced into the ulnar deviation for other reasons.

For example:

- I have long arms (6'3" fingertip to fingertip)

- I have bad vision (20/40 is best I can get even with glasses)

- B/c of the above I like to have the monitor close to me (or I sit closer to the monitor)

- For a long time (5 years) I worked on a trading floor with a desk with very limited depth so my wrists were often turned inward

So I ended up getting a split keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle) so I could spread my hands farther apart so I didn't get the ulnar deviation.
by whizzter | 2026-02-20 14:56:38+00:00
Yep, SpaceX actually has a track record as an actual leader and innovator in it's niche (that's very CapEx intensive to enter), it's not really a moat but it's a lead that no other entity seems to be closing in on (on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up).

As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.
by win311fwg | 2026-02-20 14:57:19+00:00
Why does the buffer need to be resized? Your malloc version allocates a fixed amount of memory on each iteration. You can allocate the same amount of memory ahead of time.

If you were dynamically changing the malloc allocation size on each iteration then you have a case for a growable buffer to do the same, but in that case you would already have all the complexity of which you speak as required to support a dynamically-sized malloc.
by babybjornborg | 2026-02-20 14:57:37+00:00
I don't agree that personal styles of weirdness are a desirable social style. I agree that bland dinner-party persona is oversubscribed. I agree that quitting hobbies from social pressure is needless self-erasure. My take is that we need a both-and answer.

To consider an extreme obvious counter-example, think of a cross-cultural situation where social conventions vary widely and adjustment is needed, and then consider that we all hail from our own microcultures with their own customs and expectations.

The real balance to achieve is being who we are in a way that doesn't alienate others. Fully accepting both self and other.
by otikik | 2026-02-20 14:57:42+00:00
He should have asked mastodon about the worst man pages too. Some of them are really bad. My pet peeve are the ones that assume a particular audience with a particular knowledge set. My second pet peeve are inconsistent command line flags.

Man Page for park-dribble

Utility for parking the dribbles.

park-dribble -U Unstash context before parking

park-dribble -x or -X Execute preliminary cleaning

park-dribble --1 Only use one preprocessor

Note that the behavior of this command is undefined on systems with the X-CRLT-1 chipset versions 23 and above. Thank you very much, Dave.
by graemep | 2026-02-20 14:58:05+00:00
> How is the right to be forgotten a bad thing exactly? You can't request a news article be deleted if you're a prominent public figure for obvious reasons,

Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it.

> I'm sure it's not the only EU country to not block anything, even though corrupt idiots in Spain and Italy also exist.

Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"

> And are you implying search engines in the US don't have things "censored" all the time anyway?

I never said that!

> I mean, good? If business are so incompetent/malicious that they can't even comply with the GDPR

So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?

> I've literally never come across a blocked page due to GDPR

Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.
by Tade0 | 2026-02-20 14:58:14+00:00
> They're saying what they actually think and wearing what they actually like, pursuing hobbies that genuinely fascinate them, regardless of whether those hobbies are cool.

Joke's on you, OP - even being like that you'll still find people who think you're boring because it's subjective.

Truth is, once youth passes, over time people become increasingly disinterested in others. This effect was exacerbated by the recent pandemic.

You might be a genuinely fascinating and authentic person, yet all that is going to fall flat in a crowd whose reaction to going outside is "ugh, people".

What really works is showing genuine interest in others. It's such a rare thing in this day and age that many are surprised when they experience it.
by sparkie | 2026-02-20 14:58:26+00:00
Defer might be better than nothing, but it's still a poor solution. An obvious example of a better, structural solution is C#'s `using` blocks.

using (var resource = acquire()) {

} // implicit resource.Dispose();

While we don't have the same simplicity in C because we don't use this "disposable" pattern, we could still perhaps learn something from syntax and use a secondary block to have scoped defers. Something like:

using (auto resource = acquire(); free(resource)) {

} // free(resource) call inserted here.

That's no so different to how a `for` block works:

for (auto it = 0; it < count; it++) {

} // automatically inserts (it++; it < count; and branch after secondary block of for loop.)
by ben_w | 2026-02-20 14:58:35+00:00
Fascists in the original sense, Mussolini, didn't tolerate opposition.

I'm not sure about modern fascists, but US politics does look rather Kayfabe-y to me. Fake opposition, there for the purpose of being an opponent.

Of course then you get all the discourse about what even counts as fascism, and someone brings up that the origin of the word is the Roman "fasces" (bundle of sticks) and how that etymological root points to the concept of "strength through unity" which is also why the Lincoln memorial has Lincoln resting his hands on them[0] and why trade unions often use the "strength through unity" phrasing (and get annoyed/upset by the connection).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Memorial_statue_a...
by rester324 | 2026-02-20 14:58:59+00:00
You really have zero idea what you're talking about. You can start reading about Prudential first. Then all the other scandals.

This donation has nothing to do with high trust, more with the fact that ordinary japanese people have very low mental capacity so they can't even understand when the ruling class ripping them off and they live worse off for this reason. See the current scapegoating of foreigners for every little thing recently.

They simply can't understand neither the consequences of their own actions nor those of the public servants' and the political/economic ruling class
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-20 14:59:11+00:00
This feels like gatekeeping someone sharing something cool they've recently learned.

I personally lean more towards the "let's share cool little productivity tips and tricks with one another" instead of the "in order to share this you have to meet [entirely arbitrary line of novelty/cleverness/originality]."

But each to their own I suppose. I wonder how you learned about using xargs? Maybe a blog-post or article not dissimilar to this one?
by rtkwe | 2026-02-20 14:59:30+00:00
It's still a very rich market and I'm mostly looking to a post Trump world. I completely understand other countries are going to be much more dubious about giving things up permanently for long term promises but things like not blocking sites or allowing US access to the markets both of which can be easily in response to another Trump-esque flailing is a much easier ask and negotiation.

I'm not saying things will return to the pre-Trump semi-hegemony but I do think it's over the top to think the US economy will have zero soft power in the years after Trump too.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-20 15:00:18+00:00
The general rule of thumb is that you should feel free to quantize up to 2-bit per token if this helps you run a model with more active parameters. Quantized models are not perfect at all, but they're preferable to the models with fewer, bigger parameters. With 8GB usable, you could run models with up to 32B active at heavy quantization.
by logicallee | 2026-02-20 15:00:33+00:00
>I've been one of the strongest supporters of local AI, dedicating thousands of hours towards building a framework to enable it.

Sounds like you're very serious about supoporting local AI. I have a query for you (and anyone else who feels like donating) about whether you'd be willing to donate some memory/bandwidth resources p2p to hosting an offline model:

We have a local model we would like to distribute but don't have a good CDN.

As a user/supporter question, would you be willing to donate some spare memory/bandwidth in a simple dedicated browser tab you keep open on your desktop that plays silent audio (to not be put in the background and deloaded) and then allocates 100mb -1 gb of RAM and acts as a webrtc peer, serving checksumed models?[1] (Then our server only has to check that you still have it from time to time, by sending you some salt and a part of the file to hash and your tab proves it still has it by doing so). This doesn't require any trust, and the receiving user will also hash it and report if there's a mismatch.

Our server federates the p2p connections, so when someone downloads they do so from a trusted peer (one who has contributed and passed the audits) like you. We considered building a binary for people to run but we consider that people couldn't trust our binaries, or would target our build process somehow, we are paranoid about trust, whereas a web model is inherently untrusted and safer. Why do all this?

The purpose of this would be to host an offline model: we successfully ported a 1 GB model from C++ and Python to WASM and WegGPU (you can see Claude doing so here, we livestreamed some of it[2]), but the model weights at 1 GB are too much for us to host.

Please let us know whether this is something you would contribute a background tab to hosting on your desktop. It wouldn't impact you much and you could set how much memory to dedicate to it, but you would have the good feeling of knowing that you're helping people run a trusted offline model if they want - from their very own browser, no download required. The model we ported is fast enough for anyone to run on their own machines. Let me know if this is something you'd be willing to keep a tab open for.

[1] filesharing over webrtc works like this: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ you can try it in 2 browser tabs.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbAkySCXyp0and and some other videos
by bonesss | 2026-02-20 15:00:40+00:00
> schadenfreude

I’ve been partaking in my fair share, but more and more I’m just feeling sad for my fellow coders ‘cause a lot of what I’m hearing is about bad local choices.

It’s kinda hilarious watching a bunch of fashion obsessed front-end devs discover bash, TDD, and that, like, specifications, like, can really be useful, you know, for building stuff or whatever, sure.

But then I think about a version of me who came up a bit later, but into some reasonable sounding orthodoxy about React or Node as my first production language and would be having the same revelations.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot of thoughts tantamount to “why don’t you dummies just use Haskell, or Lisp, or OCaml, or F#, or Kotlin for that?!”, and from their PoV I’m seeing a broken ladder. A ladder that was orthodoxy and well-documented when I was coming up.

LLMs should ideally bring SICP and Knuth and emacs to the masses. Fingers crossed.
by gilbetron | 2026-02-20 15:00:51+00:00
I can't control random internet people, but within my personal and professional life, I see the effective pattern of comparing prompts/contexts/harnesses to figure out why some are more effective than others (in fact tooling is being developed in the AI industry as a whole to do so, claude even added the "insights" command).

I feel that many people that don't find AI useful are doing things like, "Are there any bugs in this software?" rather than developing the appropriate harness to enable the AI to function effectively.
by Octoth0rpe | 2026-02-20 15:00:56+00:00
Great point, thanks!

@IronsideXXVI, are you open to changing to gpl v3? Otherwise, there is probably a decent set of filter lists with an MIT license somewhere. The goal is for you to NOT become a filter list maintainer, and by piggybacking off an already respected set of lists, you'd build user trust in your adblocking.
Show HN: API Combat – A game played through API calls
by mcarthey | 2026-02-20 15:01:45+00:00
I built a multiplayer strategy game with no GUI — you play entirely through REST API calls. Register, build a roster, configure teams, queue battles, and climb the leaderboard, all via curl/Postman/your own code.

Every response includes HATEOAS links that guide you to your next move, so you can discover the whole game by following the API. Full OpenAPI spec at /api-docs/v1.

Built with ASP.NET Core 8 and MSSQL. Free tier is fully playable. There's also an education mode for CS instructors to create curriculum modules where students learn APIs by playing.

Solo dev creating for my classes, happy to answer questions about the tech or design decisions.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-20 15:01:47+00:00
Yes, except for one HAProxy server. The setup I described isn't fully in production yet, but my testing confirms it works. We've been running for years on one single baremetal server on Hetzner/OVH though. And macOS makes sense for one of our main workloads (headless browser agents). Much better than browser-in-linux-docker for many reasons.
by taude | 2026-02-20 15:02:10+00:00
I've had this in my ~/.bash_aliases for awhile:

alias git-wipe-merged-branches='git branch --merged | grep -v \* | xargs git branch -D'

Trying to remember where I got that one, as I had commented the following version out:

alias git-wipe-all-branches='git for-each-ref --format '%(refname:short)' refs/heads | grep -v master | xargs git branch -D'
by morissette | 2026-02-20 15:02:15+00:00
TLDR, go to therapy; you are a people pleaser.

Sadly, it’s a societal issue as we are told to be X or Y. Boys wear blue and hang with the fellas. Girls wear pink and have tea with the ladies. Go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, die.

No one is ever like climb Everest, surf in Indonesia, backpack Europe, get lost in the wilderness.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-20 15:02:40+00:00
>I have no idea what AI safety research at these companies is actually doing.

If you looked at AI safety before the days of LLMs you'd have realized that AI safety is hard. Like really really hard.

>the operators of AI for what their AI does.

This is like saying that you should punish a company after it dumps plutonium in your yard ruining it for the next million years after everyone warned them it was going to leak. Being reactionary to dangerous events is not an intelligent plan of action.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-20 15:02:50+00:00
My wife and I live above a bar frequented by tourists and the bartender is a friend of mine. When it isn’t busy, I’ll usually go down there order a soda and just talk to whoever shows up. The easy opener once the conversation starts is “what keeps you busy?” and keep the conversation going. This lets them talk about work, family, hobbies or whatever else they like to talk about

I read a book that said you should try something new to you at least every quarter if not more often. It gives you something to talk about.

While my wife and I are empty nesters and at point where we travel a lot and we do the digital nomad thing in spurts so we can always talk about travel or more often ask “what’s the most interesting place you’ve been to”/“What’s interesting about where you live” etc, it doesn’t have to be travel.

And just to be clear, it’s always either guys I am striking a conversation with or couples. There is no way for a 50 year old married guy to talk to a woman alone at the bar without coming off like a creep.

On the other hand, I try not to talk about politics or religion. What’s the point?
by Someone | 2026-02-20 15:02:57+00:00
> There is not one person on the planet, who wouldn't prefer a doctor who is deeply considerate of the complexities and feedback-loops of the human body, over a doctor who is simply not smart enough to do so and, thus, can't. He can learn texts all he wants, but the memorization of text does not require deeper understanding.

But a smart person who hasn’t read all the texts won’t be a good doctor, either.

Chess players spend enormous amounts of time studying openings for a reason.

> Multiple small models, specifically trained for high reasoning/cognitive capabilities, given access to relevant texts

So, even assuming that one can train a model on reasoning/cognitive abilities, how does one pick the relevant texts for a desired outcome?
by bschwindHN | 2026-02-20 15:03:08+00:00
I wish KiCad had a constraint solver built-in for defining footprints and placing some key parts of a PCB. A better library management system would also be nice. That aside, I think their interactive router is pretty great, and a huge improvement over older versions. I first tried KiCad in 2016 or 2017 and routing traces was pretty dire, especially if you had to redo them for whatever reason.

Got any specific pain points for KiCad?
by worksonmine | 2026-02-20 15:04:21+00:00
After a while you learn to be specific ' -a' (with space) or '-a,', but this requires that you know what you're looking for. Also n/N is easier to jump between matches than /<Enter>, one less keypress.

Another useful trick is filtering with &, &/-a will narrow it down, but you won't know about the sub-commands if there are many matches. I just tried &/hidden on rg and fd and it takes me straight to `-., --hidden` for rg and `-H, --hidden` for fd. And &/case shows all options related to case-sensitivity with the descriptions. Once you get the intuition for it it's not that bad.

Manuals are not perfect but I don't think I would want an AI. I'm frustrated enough when I don't find a flag the LLM insists is supposed to be there and it gaslights me even though I'm telling the stupid thing I have the manual open.