MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thebruce87m | 2025-11-18 17:09:55+00:00
> Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.

Tesla seems to do dark mode on sun rise / sun set.

Doing it with the lights seems like a strange decision - sometimes I want my lights on when it’s bright - e.g. fog, rain or when the sun is low and I want others to see me.
by bityard | 2025-11-18 17:10:00+00:00
I have a recent-model Highlander and I hate the headlights on it. As you say, the sharp cut-off is terrible. Bendy roads I don't mind, but anyone driving anywhere that has even the smallest amount of hills is going to get this:

1) Approaching the top of the hill: cut-off is too high, blinding other drivers

2) Approaching the bottom of the hill: cut-off is too low, can't see far enough ahead, hope there's not a deer there

And of course the normal up/down motion of the car while driving makes the sharp cut-off line bounce around in the distance which literally gives me nausea. And I don't get nauseous easily.

It's like Toyota hired a team of interns who decided to redesign how headlights work from first principles and then forgot to test them out in the real world.

To make things worse, when we got the car, the headlights were adjusted far too high and the cut-off was pointed up in the trees. Every other car flashed their brights at me, even though the low beams were on. I took it to the dealership to have the headlights adjusted (not a small inconvenience at the time) and when I picked it up, they said they did nothing because the headlights were not adjustable. Got home, and the USER MANUAL showed exactly how to adjust the headlights. Because I don't have the required space or equipment to do it right, I took the car out at night and stopped every few miles to tweak the cut-off line until I got to a spot that was in between blinding other drivers and not being able to see the road MOST of the time.

To totally fix this, all they had to do was NOT make the cut-off so sharp. Like the last 100 years of cars have done.
Ask HN: Why does Y Combinator seem to be consistently funding AI slop?
by coldtrait | 2025-11-18 17:10:14+00:00
This is one of the recent ones that I came across - https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1988366241460089118

Of late it looks like I've been noticing more of such pointless businesses and I'm not alone. What do you think?
by everyone | 2025-11-18 17:10:25+00:00
My experience with GPT and Claude, is that they are fantastic for learning something brand new to me, as a kind of tutor..

But for writing code in some domain I am good in, they are pretty much useless.. I would spend a lot longer struggling to get something that barely functions from them VS writing it myself, and the one I write myself will be terse and maintainable + if it has bugs they will be like obvious ones, not insane ones that a human would never do.

Even just when getting them to write individual functions with very clear and small scopes.
by zem | 2025-11-18 17:11:03+00:00
if you just need to write a few hundred lines of code to automate something ad hoc, or play with an idea, or do something exploratory like reverse engineering a file format, ruby is a truly gorgeous language. it just hasn't added the affordances you need to maintain a large code base, which is sad because python has shown that you really don't need that many of them - type annotations and explicit exports that act as namespaces would go a long way.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-18 17:11:08+00:00
> I'm happy my Tesla

I'd never give my money to the mass-fire-people-at-DOGE billionaire.

What I did, however had, notice, is that people are a LOT more easily distracted these days. Smartphones play a big role, but I also think something changed in the brain. This may be better or worse, but it definitely is very different now from, say, the 1980s. It almost feels as if humans are now +100 years different from the people in the 1980s rather than +40 or +50.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-18 17:11:13+00:00
That kind of “get better at” doesn’t generalize. It will regurgitate its training data, which now includes the exact answer being looked for. It will get better at answering that exact problem.

But if you care about its fundamental reasoning and capability to solve new problems, or even just new instances of the same problem, then it is not obvious that publishing will improve this latter metric.

Problem solving ability is largely not from the pretraining data.
by pinko | 2025-11-18 17:11:37+00:00
Privacy through uniformity, operational security by routine, herd immunity for privacy, traffic normalization, "anonymity set expansion", "nothing to hide" paradox, etc.

I.e., if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone can be seen using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for detecting them trying to see/do something confidential and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-18 17:11:40+00:00
I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.

In the 1980s my dad had a Citroën GSA (and indeed I had one in the mid-2000s, when it was about 20 years old) which was a low-to-mid-spec family saloon. It had headlights about a foot wide and 5" high with a bog standard H4 type halogen bulb in. They put out huge amounts of light - far better than anything else on the road at the time - without being glarey.

Get rid of Angry Robot Face cars.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 17:12:02+00:00
You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft. You can ask an agent why something is breaking -- to hypothesize potential causes and test them for validity. If you don't understand how something is built, you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to explore more.

And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to human teams. They also let cruft develop, are confused by breakages, and don't understand the code because everyone on the original team has since left for another company.
by ethmarks | 2025-11-18 17:12:09+00:00
The point of prediction markets isn't to be fair. They are not the stock market. The point of prediction markets is to predict. They provide a monetary incentive for people who are good at predicting stuff. Whether that's due to luck, analysis, insider knowledge, or the ability to influence the result is irrelevant. If you don't want to participate in an unfair market, don't participate in prediction markets.
by scottlamb | 2025-11-18 17:12:25+00:00
I think the reasoning matters as much as the answer, and you had to make at least a couple strange turns to get the "right answer" that retries don't solve the problem:

* the 3rd-party component offering only 90% success—I've never actually seen a system that bad. 99.9% success SLA is kind of the minimum, and in practice any system that has acceptable mean and/or 99%/99.9% latency for a critical auth path also has >=99.99% success in good conditions (even if they don't promise refunds based on that).

* the whole "really reliable retry handler" thing—as mentioned in my first comment, I don't understand what you were getting at here.

I would go a whole other way with this section—more realistic, much shorter. Let's say you want to offer 99.999% success within 1 second, and the third-party component offers 99.9% success per try. Then two tries gives you 99.9999% success if the failures are all uncorrelated but retries do not help at all when the third-party system is down for minutes or hours at a time. [1] Thus, you need to involve an alternative that is believed to be independent of the faulty system—and the primary tool AWS gives you for that is regional independence. This sets up the talk about regional failover much more quickly and with less head-scratching. I probably would have made it through the whole article yesterday even in my feverish state.

[1] unless this request can be done asynchronously, arbitrarily later, in which case the whole chain of thought afterward goes a different way.
by mwcampbell | 2025-11-18 17:12:31+00:00
If you're allowed to say, are you referring to the Windows 10 ports of the iOS apps that were done via Osmeta in 2016, or the earlier WinRT-native version? If the former, that was a non-starter for me and my blind friends due to deep accessibility issues, probably having to do with the Osmeta port/reimplementation of UIKit. Edit to add: And we wanted something that was easier to use with a Windows screen reader than the desktop website, particularly for Facebook proper.
by adriand | 2025-11-18 17:12:42+00:00
The enterprise sales cycle is often quite long, though, and often includes a lot of hurdles around compliance, legal, etc. It would take a fairly sustained loss of edge before a lot of enterprises would switch once they're hooked into a given platform. It's interesting to me that Sonnet 4.5 still edges Gemini 3 on SWE bench. This seems to bode well for the trajectory that Anthropic is on.
by chis | 2025-11-18 17:13:33+00:00
Has anyone switched to Gemini CLI? It's so important but also exhausting keeping up with which model is the leading edge. Especially since every model has different idiosyncrasies you have to learn to work with it effectively.

Currently my ranking is

* Cursor composer: impressively fast and able but not tuned to be that agentic, so it's better for one-shot code changes than long-running tasks. Fantastic UI.

* Claude Code: Works great if you can set up a verifiable environment, a clear plan and set it loose to build something for an hour

* Grok: Similar to cursor composer but slower and more agentic. Not currently using.

* ChatGPT Codex, Gemini: Haven't tried yet.
by sunaookami | 2025-11-18 17:13:33+00:00
Gemini CLI crashes due to this bug: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/13050 and when applying the fix in the settings file I can't login with my Google account due to "The authentication did not complete successfully. The following products are not yet authorized to access your account" with useless links to completely different products (Code Assist).

Antigravity uses Open-VSX and can't be configured differently even though it says it right there (setting is missing). Gemini website still only lists 2.5 Pro. Guess I will just stick to Claude.
by echelon | 2025-11-18 17:13:41+00:00
Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.

They have the revenues to support all of this.

They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.

They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.

We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.

This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.

a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.

As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.

Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.

Call or email your legislators and ask for antitrust enforcement: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/

Demand a Google breakup.
by hugs | 2025-11-18 17:14:14+00:00
""Autonomously, an Antigravity Agent writes code for a new frontend feature, uses the terminal to launch localhost, and actuates the browser to test that the new feature works."

very interesting times; i'm glad to see browser automation becoming more mainstream as part of the ai-assisted dev loop for testing. (disclosure: started the selenium project, now working on something similar for a vibe coding context)
by imiric | 2025-11-18 17:14:37+00:00
It would be next to impossible for anyone without insider knowledge to prove that to be the case.

Secondly, benchmarks are public data, and these models are trained on such large amounts of it that it would be impractical to ensure that some benchmark data is not part of the training set. And even if it's not, it would be safe to assume that engineers building these models would test their performance on all kinds of benchmarks, and tweak them accordingly. This happens all the time in other industries as well.

So the pelican riding a bicycle test is interesting, but it's not a performance indicator at this point.
by achow | 2025-11-18 17:15:02+00:00
Op is right.

https://imgcdn.stablediffusionweb.com/2024/4/19/8e54925a-004...

For the above pic I asked "What is wrong with the image?"

Result: - It totally missed the most obvious one - six fingers.

Instead it said this:

Based on a close inspection of the image, here are the things that are "wrong" or anomalous, indicating that it is likely an AI-generated image:

- The Thumb Anatomy: This is the most obvious error. The digit in the thumb's position (far left) looks exactly like a long index finger. A natural human thumb has two segments (phalanges) and is shorter and thicker, opposing the other fingers. This digit appears to have three segments and is roughly the same length and shape as the other fingers, giving the hand the appearance of having five fingers and no thumb.

- Unnatural Skin Texture: The skin is unnaturally smooth, waxy, and free of normal human imperfections like distinct pores, fine wrinkles, or hair. It has a "plastic" or "airbrushed" look typical of generative AI.

- Palm Lines: The creases on the palm are vague and generic. They don't follow the distinct pattern of major flexion creases (like the heart, head, and life lines) found on a real human hand.

- Wrist Connection: The connection between the hand and the wrist looks slightly distorted, with tendons that appear too prominent and smooth for the pose.

[Edit: 3.0 is same as 2.5 - both answered almost identically]
by sangeeth96 | 2025-11-18 17:15:05+00:00
With all due to respect to the folks working on Antigravity, this feels like a vibe-coded VSCode fork to me. Font sizes, icon sizes, panel sizes are all over the place (why?). To top it all off, the first request just failed with overload/quota exceeded errors (understandable, but still).

Looks like I'll wait to see if Google cares about putting the polish into a VSCode fork that at least comes close to what Cursor did.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-18 17:15:51+00:00
PKD's VALIS, Transmigration, and Stigmata are the ones people usually propose for the postmodern canon. I honestly think stuff like this will probably age better than say, DFW's Infinite Jest. The Exegesis[1] is less known and difficult in a different way since he really lost his mind and isn't even aiming for a narrative.. pretty just much unedited journal entries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick
by jlarocco | 2025-11-18 17:15:54+00:00
As a cyclist and pedestrian, these new headlights and the cars with the "auto brights" are just terrible.

When you're in another car their car's sensors might detect your headlights and dim a little bit. But as a pedestrian? You basically just get blinded - from low light right to 10000 lumens straight in your eyes. It's overpowering.

Can't make them illegal fast enough, IMO.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-18 17:16:26+00:00
There's one near me that's set to 45 in a 55. Every time I drive past it it gets a little closer to going missing. It's a minimum effort install on a wood post and it's right near the road to enter a new bougie subdivision in an otherwise rural area so it's almost certainly a cheap attempt to make a complainer go away.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-18 17:16:54+00:00
It does if you want to fully use google play services. If you run google play services as a regular app, you cannot use banking apps, whatsapp (app works but no backups to gdrive) or uber for drivers. And you also cannot do purchases in the app store sadly. If you can live with this then fine.

It just seems odd to me, may as well install LineageOs if you just want an alternative android os really. You get more privacy controls than stock android. I just feel that the whole point of graphene is to be able to have a private phone and live outside big tech and you pay a price for that.

If you don't really care that much about privacy and are happy to let google apps run in the background then data about you can still reach the mothership but your smartphone experience is quite degraded imo
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-18 17:17:06+00:00
Interesting, yeah! Just tried "summarize this story and list the important figures from it" with Gemini 2.5 Pro and 3 and they both listed 10 names each, but without including Yudkowsky.

Asking the follow up "what are ALL the individuals mentioned in the story" results in both models listing ~40 names and both of those lists include Yudkowsky.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-18 17:17:12+00:00
> But when labs evaluate the models, they have to use a standard tool to make the comparisons apples-to-apples.

That'd be a bad idea, models are often trained for specific tools (like GPT Codex is trained for Codex, and Sonnet has been trained with Claude Code in mind), and also vice-versa that the tools are built with a specific model in mind, as they all work differently.

Forcing all the models to use the same tool for execution sounds like a surefire way of getting results that doesn't represent real usage, but instead arbitrarily measure how well a model works with the "standard harness", which if people start caring about, will start to become gamed instead.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-18 17:17:33+00:00
There was a mix of technologies. Up to about the early 80s, instruments were lit by an "unfiltered" incandescent lamp at the back of the instrument housing, that reflected off a band of white paint around the top of the housing and screened by the bezel, like old Smiths gauges. After about that point they moved over to edge-lit screen-printed perspex backings, and continued that way until the current trend for glarey and unpleasant LCDs everywhere.
by ajmurmann | 2025-11-18 17:17:36+00:00
There absolutely are options but we aren't using them because nobody cares enough about these downsides. bsky is up, with Mastodon you even have choice between tons of servers and setting up your own. Yet, nobody cares enough about the occasional outage to switch. It's such a minor inconvenience that it won't move the needle one bit. If people actually cared, businesses would lose customers and correct the issue.
by alistairSH | 2025-11-18 17:17:40+00:00
In theory, yes. But, it's state-by-state, enforcement at drive-time is next to zero (unless the cop just wants to hassle you), leaving it to either annual or time-of-sale inspections that are easily gamed (slip the mechanic a $20).

Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
by twodave | 2025-11-18 17:18:06+00:00
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Are you suggesting that if I can't feel empathy for everybody at once, or in every one of their circumstances, that I should not feel anything at all for anyone? That's not how anything works. Life (or, as I believe, God) brings us into contact with all kinds of people experiencing different levels of joy and pain. It's natural to empathize with the people you're around, whatever they're feeling. Don't over-complicate it.
by qart | 2025-11-18 17:18:14+00:00
There will be no course-correction in India. The usual mindset is "how can I be the bigger a-hole?" With accessories becoming more and more affordable, there has been a rise in super bright LEDs, and even flashing LEDs. In cities, the police sometimes imposes fines, but apparently, no one pays fines. We have louder horns too. And psychopaths openly displaying their psychopathy. Bangalore's police at least responds on Twitter (https://x.com/blrcitytraffic), but when I look around, it seems like their efforts are a drop in the ocean. The police of other cities are all completely ineffective. The only exception is Chandigarh, but no one wants to follow their example.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-11-18 17:19:07+00:00
> This might sound crazy as a software engineer, but I actually like the occasional "snow day" where everything goes down

As as software engineer, I get it. as a CTO, I spent this morning triaging with my devops ai(actual Indian) to find some workaround (we found one) while our CEO was doing damage control with customers (non technical field) who were angry that we were down and they were losing business by the minute.

sometimes I miss not having a direct stake in the success of the business.
by shit_game | 2025-11-18 17:19:11+00:00
>This is a change in behavior.

>I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.

The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done.

I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-11-18 17:19:23+00:00
I disagree. Short of wearing a blindfold and putting my fingers in my ears there are many opportunities for someone to influence me against my will every day. You have to be exposed to this sort of manipulation to exist in society.

This has gotten a little off-track into pedantry though, I agree.

The parent post's assertion that the author of this post is somehow using "tricks" and that it is unhealthy, is what I take issue with.

It's a bit of unfair framing to claim that people who naturally develop these "tricks" are somehow superior to those who have to learn them. By that reasoning people with poor social skills would be doomed to poor outcomes for the sake of some trick-free "pure" personality.

Or another way... if I take elocution and debate lessons to make my point better and use that to get what I want in life, is this "unhealthy"? I don't think most people would say so. In my eyes this is no different.