MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A trainable, modular electronic nose for industrial use
by kwitczak | 2026-03-03 16:34:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m part of the team building Sniphi.

Sniphi is a modular digital nose that uses gas sensors and machine-learning models to convert volatile organic compound (VOC) data into a machine-readable signal that can be integrated into existing QA, monitoring, or automation systems. The system is currently in an R&D phase, but already exists as working hardware and software and is being tested in real environments.

The project grew out of earlier collaborations with university researchers on gas sensors and odor classification. What we kept running into was a gap between promising lab results and systems that could actually be deployed, integrated, and maintained in real production environments.

One of our core goals was to avoid building a single-purpose device. The same hardware and software stack can be trained for different use cases by changing the training data and models, rather than the physical setup. In that sense, we think of it as a “universal” electronic nose: one platform, multiple smell-based tasks.

Some design principles we optimized for:
- Composable architecture: sensor ingestion, ML inference, and analytics are decoupled and exposed via APIs/events
- Deployment-first thinking: designed for rollout in factories and warehouses, not just controlled lab setups
- Cloud-backed operations: model management, monitoring, updates run on Azure, which makes it easier to integrate with existing industrial IT setups
- Trainable across use cases: the same platform can be retrained for different classification or monitoring tasks without redesigning the hardware

One public demo we show is classifying different coffee aromas, but that’s just a convenient example. In practice, we’re exploring use cases such as:
- Quality control and process monitoring
- Early detection of contamination or spoilage
- Continuous monitoring in large storage environments (e.g. detecting parasite-related grain contamination in warehouses)

Because this is a hardware system, there’s no simple way to try it over the internet. To make it concrete, we’ve shared:
- A short end-to-end demo video showing the system in action (YouTube)
- A technical overview of the architecture and deployment model: https://sniphi.com/

At this stage, we’re especially interested in feedback and conversations with people who:
- Have deployed physical sensors at scale
- Have run into problems that smell data might help with
- Are curious about piloting or testing something like this in practice

We’re not fundraising here. We’re mainly trying to learn where this kind of sensing is genuinely useful and where it isn’t.

Happy to answer technical questions.
by 7777777phil | 2026-03-03 16:34:28+00:00
The "biggest model that fits" instinct is just wrong now. Compact models routinely beat massive predecessors from 12 months ago. Scaling laws only reliably predict pre-training loss anyway, not how the model actually performs on your task. Dug into the research behind this: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumptio...
by troupo | 2026-03-03 16:34:48+00:00
> Make sure your dock, dongle, and/or cables aren’t bottlenecks.

I've switched docks, dongles, cables, to no avail.

Support also varies a lot between M chips, and Thunderbolt often doesn't support high refresh rates https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571

I can't remember now the actual setup I had, sadly
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-03 16:34:50+00:00
True, it's all abstracted away and you don't even get access, but that's part of the problem. We (the industry) are teaching people that proprietary formats inside of app silos are the only way to store your data, making the default state being no control over your own stuff.

Note taking apps are a prime example of this, using a proprietary localdb for notes, inside of app storage you can't access, forcing you to transact with your own data exclusively through the app (and whatever subscriptions or upcharges that come with it). We've trained out the idea that these could just be local text files in a directory you can access and do with what you want.

I've watched discussions around open file formats fade away into obscurity along with the rise of mobile, and now we have to fight on whether we should be so graciously allowed to install software on the devices we own or not.

Not everyone needs to be a computer science student, but some basic level of curiosity or education around how tech works should be required in school, at the very least a warning message of "Your data isn't safe if it's not under your control."
by pklausler | 2026-03-03 16:35:01+00:00
I started writing the new "f18" Fortran front-end at NVIDIA in the summer of '17, and it was added to LLVM as "flang" in June 2020. There were already at least three other "flang"s at the time, one of which was our open-sourced llvm-targeting pgifortran compiler.

I still call this latest one "flang-new" myself just because that's the only unambiguous name for it. The name confusion is not my fault, I promise.
by pentamassiv | 2026-03-03 16:35:05+00:00
Hi,
I'm part of the team that built Sai. If you are curious about the tech, feel free to ask.

We are still limiting signups to keep our costs under control, but you can use the code "SIMULAR" to register. The first 1,000 users get access to Sai for $20/month (regular $200/month).
by 7777777phil | 2026-03-03 16:35:06+00:00
You write GPL code so improvements flow back, then AWS wraps it in a managed service and the license never fires because nothing is distributed. Worked exactly as designed and still failed. Fontana's right that static permissions can't solve dynamic power problems. I'm less sure about his "capacities" framework though, it would need governance structures most projects can barely imagine.
by dehrmann | 2026-03-03 16:35:35+00:00
> I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly

I'm surprised this was a problem. Back in the day, there were things like making sure your two very similar AT power connectors had the black wires next to each other, not forcing in a molex connector upside down, or the same for ribbon cables. These days? The connectors are standardized and keyed, as long as your modular PSU vendor didn't get lazy on their keying.
by digitalPhonix | 2026-03-03 16:36:16+00:00
> Setting AI aside for a moment, this reflects a broader issue in India and elsewhere. When institutions respond to new technologies with anger or threats rather than systemic thinking, it signals a deeper problem.

No, especially in this case when the first appeal to the high court resulted in the high court brushing it off as if nothing happened.

It was a reprimand two to institutes (the trial court and the high court) they have a job to do and they can't shirk that responsibility.
by NGRhodes | 2026-03-03 16:36:23+00:00
One thing people underestimate is how brittle digital identity actually is in the UK.

There isnt a single identity. Theres a loose federation of databases (banks, CRAs, telecoms, electoral roll, etc.).

There are multiple operational definitions of "name": legal name, common name, known-as name, card name, account display name. None is universally canonical. Theres no statutory hierarchy that forces institutions to agree on precedence.

In the absence of a mandatory national ID, identification relies on matching across name, date of birth, and address history, which are inconsistently collected. Fuzziness is necessary for coverage, but it introduces brittleness. If a variant isnt explicitly linked as an alias, automated online checks can fail because the matching rules dont explore every permutation.

Even within a single dataset the problem doesnt disappear. Large systems such as the NHS have documented identification errors involving patients with identical names, twins at the same address, or demographic overlaps. Unique identifiers help, but operational workflows still depend on humans entering and reconciling imperfect data.

https://digital.nhs.uk/services/personal-demographics-servic...
by amluto | 2026-03-03 16:36:46+00:00
> They grew up using Chromebooks … in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems

While it is possible to interact with the local file system on a school Chromebook, it’s certainly not the default. School interactions with Chromebooks seem to consist of logging with highly secure passwords like “strawberry” and using Google Docs. And playing games with heavy PvP components and paid DLC (paid by parents whose kids beg for it, not by schools) that call themselves “educational” because they interject math problems needed to use those juicy spells, make no effort whatsoever to teach anything, but produce a nicely formatted report correlating scores to numbered elements of the Common Core standards.
by testbjjl | 2026-03-03 16:37:00+00:00
> Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.

So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
by SamBam | 2026-03-03 16:37:05+00:00
Some reason you're allowed to gift your gold watch to someone, or sell your car.

Both of them do potentially deprive the creator of a sale, but they keep the same total number of things in circulation.

Sure, you can argue that philosophically it comes to the same thing, but the problem is that, if you win that argument, the powers that be are more likely to ban giving away things you own than they are to allow piracy...
by smakt | 2026-03-03 16:37:17+00:00
I also don't understand any of this kerfuffle. I think it mostly stems from third world countries, like the USA, where no one has a real ID; for those luddites it's "driver's license", or "electricity bill", or "birth certificate" or something to that effect.

Functioning countries have cryptographically secure government-issued ids. Those cards have a cryptographic computer chip. A crazy innovation that makes your nose bleed if you look at it funny. You stick the ID card with a secure chip in a card reader and open bank accounts, sign any document as if in person, even vote. It's free, by the way. It's a pact with the devil, really, or unadulterated communism. In the banana republic of the USA you go around showing your driver's license or uploading selfies to fakebook. So modern. So untraceable. So unspoofable. Go team USA. It's like the rest of us are here sitting by the track while the handicapped team is still three laps away, still figuring out where the finish line is. All in the name of Freedom(TM) of course.

Verifying age: 1- use ID card in reader, challenge is received from website, challenge answered, the website checks with the ID database about that particular challenge/response pair. The website gets a positive match, they don't know anything about you, not even your age. Done. Don't forget to drown three rabbits in goat blood or the authentication will not work.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-03 16:37:22+00:00
> But I don't think the intention was to compare with junior devs

Junior was said specifically.

A better analogy would be if one of your staff engineers decided to connect OpenClaw to his workspace and it found a way to delete the production DB.

The author was an AI reporter. You can’t argue that he didn’t know what he was doing when he made these choices. Any comparisons involved junior devs are just dishonest.
by logicprog | 2026-03-03 16:37:24+00:00
> with careful human guidance,

I think this is pretty clearly an overstatement of what was done. As Knuth says,

"Filip told me that the explorations reported above, though ultimately successful, weren’t really smooth.
He had to do some restarts when Claude stopped on random errors; then some of the previous search results
were lost. After every two or three test programs were run, he had to remind Claude again and again that
it was supposed to document its progress carefully. "

That doesn't look like careful human guidance, especially not the kind that would actually guide the AI toward the solution at all, let alone implicitly give it the solution — that looks like a manager occasionally checking in to prod it to keep working.
Ask HN: How is Claude agent experience in Xcode 26.3?
by malshe | 2026-03-03 16:37:32+00:00
I've been vibe coding an iPhone app for educational purposes. The process has been painful because I have to go back and forth between Xcode and Claude Code running in the terminal. I recently learned that Xcode 26.3 natively supports Claude Code and Codex. Has anyone tried it? If yes, please share your experience. I am asking because this means moving to macOS Tahoe which I want to avoid as much as possible.
by bfmalky | 2026-03-03 16:37:35+00:00
You are very lucky to have a strong circadian rhythm that doesn't require light in the morning then. Not all of us work that way. If there is no light in the morning I find it very hard to get up and function. Where I live, if we adopted permanent summer time the sun wouldn't rise until 9:45 in the dead of winter. I couldn't handle that many hours of complete darkness at the start of the day.
by graemefawcett | 2026-03-03 16:37:36+00:00
Connecting them is easy, one is the math of the exchange and one of the state machine.

A better question might be why no one is paying more attention to Barandes at Harvard. He's been publishing the answer to that question for a while, if you stop trying to smuggle a Markovian embedding in a non-Markovian process you stop getting weird things like infinities at boundaries that can't be worked out from current position alone.

But you could just dump a prompt into an LLM and pull the handle a few dozen times and see what pops out too. Maybe whip up a Claw skill or two

Unconstrained solution space exploration is surely the way to solve the hard problems

Ask those Millenium Prize guys how well that's working out :)

Constraint engineering is all software development has ever been, or did we forget how entropy works? Someone should remind the folk chasing P=NP that the observer might need a pen to write down his answers, or are we smuggling more things for free that change the entire game? As soon as the locations of the witness cost, our poor little guy can't keep walking that hypercube forever. Can he?

Maybe 6 months and a few data centers will do it ;)
by jstanley | 2026-03-03 16:37:44+00:00
We do sort of have that with the capabilities stuff (although I admit hardly anyone knows how to use it).

But the tricky part is that "reading files" is done all the time in ways you might not think of as "reading files". For example loading dynamic libraries involves reading files. Making network connections involves reading files (resolv.conf, hosts). Formatting text for a specific locale involves reading files. Working out the timezone involves reading files.

Even just echoing "hello" to the terminal involves reading files:

$ strace echo hello 2>&1 | grep ^open
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-8.so.0", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/filesystems", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/self/maps", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib/cargo/bin/coreutils/echo/en-US.ftl", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)
by wincy | 2026-03-03 16:37:58+00:00
One of the nicest things anyone ever did for me was the day after she was born, when I had just started at a new job, an older dev asked if he could talk to me and pulled me into a meeting room. I didn’t know anyone there and was confused. He’d overheard me talking about my daughter just being born, and said “I’m nearly 60, I have spina bifida, and I want you to know it’s going to be alright.” He stressed how important doing a regular catheter routine is, as the most likely thing to kill him in the next 10 years is kidney failure due to bad catheter habits as a kid and young adult. Also, overnight foley catheters with a bag has been a lifesaver, and gave us our sleep back. The doctors often just won’t mention these things, and the quality of care can vary greatly depending on your care team, as I’m sure you’re well aware. At least the doctors seem to have some respect for us as caregivers to a medically complicated child and they often trust our judgment.

Hopefully it’ll make you feel better, but the shunt revisions became far less common for us as her growth slowed down. She had one around a year old, but they put a good amount of tubing in there, and they haven’t had to go do a revision in the past 6 years.
by areoform | 2026-03-03 16:38:02+00:00
Do you truly believe that ID "verification" will do anything in a world where IDs are leaked by the tens of thousands to the millions?

You are shifting the onus on to the platforms, when the problem is pretty simple; with a few exceptions, we've failed as a species to learn how to think.

Also do you think that the TLAs don't know who the bots most likely are with all the surveillance data they're gathering? That the NSA doesn't have detailed telemetry of the surveillance ops??

Let me ask you the question, what have they done about it? And why not?
by mattiasgunneras | 2026-03-03 16:38:03+00:00
BREAKFAST | Senior Software Engineer | Brooklyn, NY | ONSITE | Full-time | $170 - $220k + profit share

We build kinetic sculptures that shouldn’t exist. A small team of designers and engineers, creating massive, data-driven installations that live in the world’s most iconic spaces.

This is for someone who’s looking for a totally different job. You want to work on seriously hard problems along a talented multidisciplinary team. Ready to jump both feet into new problem domains, figure out what needs to be done - and do it.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes of a large piece we did: https://youtu.be/Y-X82D1dBLc?si=Dj-5casrqoXP9wVy&t=228

The Tech & The Role:

You’ll be a senior voice on a tight team, touching every layer of the stack

- Systems/Backend: Managing Linux-based distributed systems that coordinate massive arrays of sensors and actuators.
- Embedded/Firmware: Writing C/C++ for custom PCBs and motor controllers.
- Languages: Primarily Python, JS, C, and C++.
- Hard Problems: Real-time constraints, custom networking protocols, and high-reliability systems that have to run 24/7 in public spaces.

We're looking for:

- 10+ years of experience. We need a "tinkerer" who understands math/physics and isn't afraid to poke at hardware.
- Someone who thrives on "mission-critical" pressure. When a sculpture goes up in a public plaza, it has to work.
- Mentorship-minded. You’ll help shape the software culture as we grow.

We aren't a typical art studio, our tech is state-of-the-art. You’ll work alongside ME's and EE's in our Brooklyn studio to build things experienced by millions. The role is primarily onsite in Brooklyn, but some flexibility can be discussed.

Studio: https://breakfaststudio.com/

Apply: jobs+swe2026@breakfaststudio.com
Include letter about you, a cv or resume and perhaps some project you'd like to share. Thanks!
by toast0 | 2026-03-03 16:38:10+00:00
I'm sure there's GenAI cheating from most communities. But the amount may vary based on the culture of learning.

Some people have the perspective that you're attending school in order to learn stuff, and the degree demonstrates you learned the stuff; some people have the perspective that you're attending school in order to get the degree and it doesn't matter so much how you check the boxes to get the degree.

This difference in perspective certainly didn't start with AI; it's been around for a long time. Some education cultures push more rote learning and some push more mastery of the subject. There's pros and cons, and pursing rote learning doesn't preclude mastery, and mastery often involves requires some amount of rote learning.

When you transplant a contingent of students between philosophies, you get conflict where there's differences.
by Henchman21 | 2026-03-03 16:38:16+00:00
I think this is a good thing, and a natural evolution of the tech.

The LLMs will aggregate knowledge until that knowledge becomes useless to us. Then the LLMs will become near to useless for us because they lack that new info. Then the traffic generally on the internet will wane and this multi-decade distraction will pass into history to be replace and/or augmented to create something new that serves our purposes at that time.

The need for communication doesn't go away. The need for this particular iteration of networked telecommunications + dark-pattern-laden social media doesn't even exist in the first place, except to the social network owners. It too shall pass.
by rozap | 2026-03-03 16:38:27+00:00
Some people think so. I interviewed someone who, on a screenshare, would just type every question I said, verbatim, into antigravity. Then he'd look at the output for a second and say "Hm this looks good" (it was not) and then run the code and paste the error back into the prompt. It was a surreal experience. I didn't end the interview early because it was so incredibly wild I couldn't even believe it. I don't think he had a single thought the entire time that wasn't motivated by the LLM output.
by compounding_it | 2026-03-03 16:38:27+00:00
yes pretty much this. make useless features use up resources and make basic scrolling slow.

the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years ago on a fresh install.
by fragmede | 2026-03-03 16:38:29+00:00
No you don't. Not as a sticky mushy human with emotions watching tokens drip in. There's a lot of feeling and emotion not backed by hard facts and data going around, and most people would rather see something happening even if it takes longer overall. Hence spinner.gif, that doesn't actually remotely do a damned thing, but it gives users reassurance that they're waiting for something good. So human psychology makes time to first token an important metric to look at, although it's not the only one.
by gus_massa | 2026-03-03 16:38:52+00:00
Not using AI, but I guess the hidden problem is the specification. I usually don't have a complete specification in my mind, so it would be hard to explain it tot the AI.

And also, I like to think with the fingers, that means to write a prototype and get surprised by the technical surprising problems that appear after I wrote half of it.

When all of that fails, I turn on the brain and use pen and paper :)
by airstrike | 2026-03-03 16:39:22+00:00
I'm worried about my browsing to be tracked across the entire internet for the purposes of marketers to "enrich" my profile... just to sell me more and to sell that data to third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot.

there's a reason I don't walk around naked either. it wouldn't hurt me, but I don't need that kind of exposure for no upside
by beej71 | 2026-03-03 16:39:30+00:00
From my naive standpoint, LLMs like this seem to have some big strengths. One: possession of a superhuman expanse of knowledge. Two: making connections. Three: tireless trial and error.

If you put those three things together, you end up with some cool stuff from time to time. Perhaps the proof of P!=NP is tied to an obscure connection that humans don't easily see due to individual lack of knowledge or predisposition of bias.