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An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller

https://github.com/lowobservable/oec
1•bri3d•1m ago•0 comments

The P in PGP isn't for pain: encrypting emails in the browser

https://ckardaris.github.io/blog/2026/02/07/encrypted-email.html
1•ckardaris•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Mirror Parliament where users vote on top of politicians and draft laws

https://github.com/fokdelafons/lustra
1•fokdelafons•3m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Opus 4.6 ignoring instructions, how to use 4.5 in Claude Code instead?

1•Chance-Device•5m ago•0 comments

We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
1•ColinWright•7m ago•0 comments

Jim Fan calls pixels the ultimate motor controller

https://robotsandstartups.substack.com/p/humanoids-platform-urdf-kitchen-nvidias
1•robotlaunch•11m ago•0 comments

Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck with My Dad

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/exploring-a-modern-smpte-2110-broadcast-truck-with-my-dad/
1•HotGarbage•11m ago•0 comments

AI UX Playground: Real-world examples of AI interaction design

https://www.aiuxplayground.com/
1•javiercr•12m ago•0 comments

The Field Guide to Design Futures

https://designfutures.guide/
1•andyjohnson0•12m ago•0 comments

The Other Leverage in Software and AI

https://tomtunguz.com/the-other-leverage-in-software-and-ai/
1•gmays•14m ago•0 comments

AUR malware scanner written in Rust

https://github.com/Sohimaster/traur
3•sohimaster•17m ago•1 comments

Free FFmpeg API [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RAuSVa4MLI
3•harshalone•17m ago•1 comments

Are AI agents ready for the workplace? A new benchmark raises doubts

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/are-ai-agents-ready-for-the-workplace-a-new-benchmark-raises-do...
2•PaulHoule•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Watermark and Stego Scanner

https://ulrischa.github.io/AIWatermarkDetector/
1•ulrischa•22m ago•0 comments

Clarity vs. complexity: the invisible work of subtraction

https://www.alexscamp.com/p/clarity-vs-complexity-the-invisible
1•dovhyi•23m ago•0 comments

Solid-State Freezer Needs No Refrigerants

https://spectrum.ieee.org/subzero-elastocaloric-cooling
2•Brajeshwar•23m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will LLMs/AI Decrease Human Intelligence and Make Expertise a Commodity?

1•mc-0•25m ago•1 comments

From Zero to Hero: A Brief Introduction to Spring Boot

https://jcob-sikorski.github.io/me/writing/from-zero-to-hello-world-spring-boot
1•jcob_sikorski•25m ago•1 comments

NSA detected phone call between foreign intelligence and person close to Trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/07/nsa-foreign-intelligence-trump-whistleblower
9•c420•26m ago•1 comments

How to Fake a Robotics Result

https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/how-to-fake-a-robotics-result
1•ai_critic•26m ago•0 comments

It's time for the world to boycott the US

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/2/5/its-time-for-the-world-to-boycott-the-us
3•HotGarbage•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Semantic Search for terminal commands in the Browser (No Back end)

https://jslambda.github.io/tldr-vsearch/
1•jslambda•26m ago•1 comments

The AI CEO Experiment

https://yukicapital.com/blog/the-ai-ceo-experiment/
2•romainsimon•28m ago•0 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
5•surprisetalk•32m ago•1 comments

MS-DOS game copy protection and cracks

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/game_cracks.php
4•TheCraiggers•33m ago•0 comments

Updates on GNU/Hurd progress [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_...
2•birdculture•33m ago•0 comments

Epstein took a photo of his 2015 dinner with Zuckerberg and Musk

https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&q=davenewworld_2%2Fstatus%2F2020128223850316274
14•doener•34m ago•2 comments

MyFlames: View MySQL execution plans as interactive FlameGraphs and BarCharts

https://github.com/vgrippa/myflames
1•tanelpoder•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LLM of Babel

https://clairefro.github.io/llm-of-babel/
1•marjipan200•35m ago•0 comments

A modern iperf3 alternative with a live TUI, multi-client server, QUIC support

https://github.com/lance0/xfr
3•tanelpoder•36m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Why don't programming language foundations offer "smol" models?

1•xrd•3mo ago
I'm using claude code A LOT. And, I'm using gemini cli A LOT. Definitely getting a ton of value as a developer from those tools. Not sure I can go back to the old way of developing.

And, I'm getting worried that someday Anthropic will say "Hey, yeah, about that Max plan which is $100/mo. Sorry, we decided we need to charge you $5000/mo. Oh, and LOL, btws, that's if you commit to an annual plan."

Or, a Google rep will email me saying "Sundar (it wasn't me!) says you were too critical of Google on HN that one time four years ago (Sundar verified it isn't a gemini hallucination, but I can't really question it). So, your gemini cli is cut off immediately."

Then, I'll be stuck and no more software engineering work because my brain rotted away.

For this reason, I want to run LLMs locally, using llama.cpp/ollama and use tools like Aider. But, running a "big" model with my hardware is tough. The quality of output and all the things that make claude and gemini so powerful are not there the combination of local LLMs and tool like aider, at least when things run locally. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?

I wonder why I can't find a model that only does Python and is good only at that, and run that locally. When I need to do zig, I can switch to a zig model, and unload the python one from memory. If it only does a single language, and it does not need to know about US presidential elections, couldn't it be very small and something I could run on my MacOS M1 laptop with 16GB of ram?

I feel like models get big when they get generalized. I am never working on a codebase that has Rails and FastAPI and Elixir and React and Svelte and Go and Rust and COBOL. I might work on a repo with typescript and python, but never more than one, and I'm usually focused on either the frontend or backend.

If this is the solution, are language foundations building their own models? Is this already happening on huggingface or somewhere else?

This seems like an approach where a language foundation could train and certify their own model and it would be safe and "open source" and "open weights."

Is there a big stupid assumption I'm making here that makes this idea impossible?

Comments

ben_w•3mo ago
> I wonder why I can't find a model that only does Python and is good only at that, and run that locally. When I need to do zig, I can switch to a zig model, and unload the python one from memory. If it only does a single language, and it does not need to know about US presidential elections, couldn't it be very small and something I could run on my MacOS M1 laptop with 16GB of ram?

I also wonder this.

My suspicion — based on what I experienced with local image generating models, but otherwise poorly educated — is that they need all of the other stuff besides programming languages just to understand what your plain English prompt means in the first place, and they need to be quite bulky models to have any kind of coherency over token horizons longer than one single function.

Of interest: Apple does ship a coding LLM in Xcode that's (IIRC) 2 GB and it really just does feel like fancy Swift-only autocomplete.

zahlman•3mo ago
> I wonder why I can't find a model that only does Python and is good only at that, and run that locally.

Because if you want to prompt it in English, it has to be good at English as well. And it gets good at English by reading extreme quantities of it. Which incidentally is written on a wide variety of topics.