MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nojvek | 2026-01-12 21:30:38+00:00
A combination of cameras, lidar, ridar, ultrasonic fused together have a strong sense of perception since they fill in each other's gaps. (short, long, different spectrums of electro-magnetic spectrum / sound).

The good news is they're all commodity hardware prices now.

Tesla removing radar and parking ultrasonic sensors was a self own. Computer vision inference is pretty bad when all the camera sees is a while wall when backing up.

Fog - Radar will perceive the car. Multi car crash, long range radar picks it up.

Bright glare from sun, lidar picks it up. Lidar misses something, camera picks it up.

Waymo has the correct approach on perception. Jam with sensor so they have superhuman vision of environment around.
by alfalfasprout | 2026-01-12 21:30:44+00:00
> I'm a bit shocked to see so many negative comments here on HN. Yes, there are security risks and all but honestly this is the future. It's a great amplifier for hackers and people who want to get stuff done.

TBH this comment essentially reads as "other commenters are dumb, this is the future b/c I said so, get in line".

No, this doesn't need to be the future. There's major implications to using AI like this and many operations are high risk. Many operations benefit greatly from a human in the loop. There's massive security/privacy/legal/financial risks.
by al_borland | 2026-01-12 21:31:15+00:00
> it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection

I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple seemed to start this and other devs followed their example.

I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center of the select button, or just slightly move it back and forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with me.
by graemefawcett | 2026-01-12 21:31:21+00:00
We solve that problem in a different manner. Our knowledge system allows the user to define the AST token based pattern for the shape of the text to extract from the documents. This is applied on first read and creates a queryable side channel interface to the document that acts both as attention surface for understanding and as an output surface (COW, emits an edge layer over the source document on charge) for agency.

It's like a regex but applied to the structure of the document itself that generates its own control plane.

The LLM has full access to the document or to the control plane, in either mode so we can target specific meanings to focus context or let it explore to find new patterns
by willquack | 2026-01-12 21:31:36+00:00
> `seapie.breakpoint()` opens a working `>>>` REPL at the current execution state. Any changes to variables or function definitions persist. Debugger state is exposed via built-ins (e.g. `_magic_`), and stepping/frame control/etc is handled via small `!commands`.

This is largely what `pdb` does already, no? Example:

```

(Pdb) list

1 something = 100

2 import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

3 -> print(f"value is: {something}")

(Pdb) something = 1234

(Pdb) c

value is: 1234

```

I do like that you use `!<cmd>` to avoid the naming collision issue in pdb between commands and python code!!!
by jijijijij | 2026-01-12 21:32:01+00:00
Don't take it personal. This wasn't about you specifically, but the sentiment frequently observed. No one would have been blaming HP when we were talking Linux. The need for tinkering, or hardware considerations is frequently brought up against Linux; it's never brought up for macOS, on the contrary, on macOS everything "just works" - even when it doesn't. On Windows, for years, you had/have to search the web for obscure software and drivers, then download them from shady third-party websites, repeating the process for updates; on Linux you always were able to install and update almost everything signed and shipped from trusted sources through the package manager, long before app stores, but apparently adding a line to some config file is unbearable inconvenience. Somehow people are very ignorant about the limitations (sometimes unfixable) and troubleshooting in Windows and macOS, but hyper vigilant when it comes to Linux.

I am running this Fedora installation for a few years, now. No clean install in-between, just super stable and pleasant upgrades. Everything just works for me. Zero tinkering. If there is a bug, it's usually tracked and gone in a few weeks, at most the next release 6 months off. If a HP dock doesn't work, it's HP's fault for not using open standards, certainly not a problem of Linux.
by ksherlock | 2026-01-12 21:32:21+00:00
Certainly LLM AI is good for something but I don't think your shell script installer is the right place for it.

Imagine a world where you go to install some software and instead get goatse wall paper because 4chan poisoned the llm.

Imagine a world where you need a $200/month Claude XP Pro subscription to download and install a tarball.
by hinkley | 2026-01-12 21:32:30+00:00
I found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed.

Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-12 21:33:30+00:00
>doesn’t mean I have to accept your distinction

No, but not engaging with my argument supporting my position(about the emergency workers, though if your point is about this specific joke and not jokes about taboo topics in general I'll admit that that is moot), and setting up strawmen("about how the Holocaust wasn’t so bad?") means you're not arguing in good faith.

This isn't a discussion, you're just yelling your opinion at me over and over.
by nearbuy | 2026-01-12 21:33:32+00:00
That is an article by a psychologist, with no expertise in neuroscience, claiming without evidence that the "dominant cognitive neuroscience" is wrong. He offers no alternative explanation on how memories are stored and retrieved, but argues that large numbers of neurons across the brain are involved and he implies that neuroscientists think otherwise.

This is odd because the dominant view in neuroscience is that memories are stored by altering synaptic connection strength in a large number of neurons. So it's not clear what his disagreement is, and he just seems to be misrepresenting neuroscientists.

Interestingly, this is also how LLMs store memory during training: by altering the strength of connections between many artificial neurons.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-12 21:34:20+00:00
Yep on the terminal that would work... though I still think it should be the default.

On the other hand I'm not sure NOPASSWD would affect desktop environments - any desktop stuff goes via PolicyKit or whatever the latest systemd iteration is and I doubt it's smart enough to read Sudo's config (and there's an argument it shouldn't - if anything it should be the other way around, a system-wide generic "this is single-user machine, the only user is effectively root anyway" flag that both Sudo and Polkit should obey).

In both cases yes it's solvable, but I wish it became the default if there are no other interactive user accounts, or at least be easy to configure - if anything, by a simple "don't ask me again" on the permissions popup.
by 8note | 2026-01-12 21:34:21+00:00
this feels anti-trust-y to me.

when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model.

i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time
by arjie | 2026-01-12 21:34:23+00:00
When I use Claude to model I actually just speak to it in common English and it translates the concepts. For example, I might say something like this:

I'm building a mount for our baby monitor that I can attach to the side of the changing table. The pins are x mm in diameter and are y mm apart. [Image #1] of the mounting pins. So what needs to happen is that the pin head has to be large, and the body of the pin needs to be narrow. Also, add a little bit of a flare to the bottom and top so they don't just knocked off the rest of the mount.

And then I'll iterate.

We need a bit of slop in the measurements there because it's too tight.

And so on. I'll do little bits that I want and see if they look right before asking the LLM to union it to the main structure. It knows how to use OpenSCAD to generate preview PNGs and inspect it.

Amusingly, I did this just a couple of weeks ago and that's how I learned what a chamfer is: a flat angled transition. The adjustment I needed to make to my pins where they are flared (but at a constant angle) is a chamfer. Claude told me this as it edited the OpenSCAD file. And I can just ask it in-line for advice and so on.
by groznyj | 2026-01-12 21:34:24+00:00
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by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-12 21:34:31+00:00
The problem with all this is that we don't actually know what human cognition is doing either.

We know what our experience is - thinking about concepts and then translating that into language - but we really don't know with much confidence what is actually going on.

I lean strongly toward the idea that humans are doing something quite different than LLMs, particularly when reasoning. But I want to leave the door open to the idea that we've not understood human cognition, mostly because our primary evidence there comes from our own subjective experience, which may (or may not) provide a reliable guide to what is actually happening.
by neoden | 2026-01-12 21:34:53+00:00
> would you expect a model (assuming it had the same expertise in each language) to make more mistakes in ASM, C, Zig, or Rust?

"assuming it had the same expertise in each language" is the most important part here, because the expertise of AI with these languages is very different. And, honestly, I bet on C here because its code base is the largest, the language itself is the easiest to reason about and we have a lot of excellent tooling that helps mitigate where it falls short.

> I imagine most would agree that ASM/C would be likely to have the most mistakes simply because fewer constraints are enforced as you go closer to the metal.

We need these constraints because we can't reliably track all the necessary details. But AI might be much more capable (read — scalable) in that, so all the complexity that we need to accumulate in a programming language it might just know out of the way it's built.
by Storment33 | 2026-01-12 21:34:55+00:00
While I get some stuff you can't test locally, like 90%+ of complaints I see are for builds/tests. Which is really a failure of the engineers for not having a local feedback loop.

I am of the opinion you should be able to deploy from your machine, just you do not have the permissions to normally. So that if CI ever goes down and you need to push an emergency fix or something you can break glass if needed.
by foundarium | 2026-01-12 21:35:02+00:00
That "launch" was when they introduced a feature that made their service unusable.

I wonder if they had stuck with the unintrusive UI if they would have made it.

From the outside it looks like they would have benefitted from having Bill Hicks on their staff to answer whatever project manager was riding the designers to keep justifying their paychecks by adding more and more noisy features.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO-fq8Feqfo
by areoform | 2026-01-12 21:35:26+00:00
I have a SolidWorks Students License™©® and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used. Links to tutorials don't work. And when you do manage to get one, the tutorials are designed for older versions of solidworks and point to buttons that have been moved / don't exist where the tutorial tells you to look in the 2025 version.

The UI is the inverse of whatever intuitive is. It's built on convention after convention after convention. If you understand the shibboleths (and I'm guessing most people take a certified course by a trainer for it?), then it's great, but if you don't, it really sucks to be you (i.e. me).

I would LOVE to try out what you've built, but I am afraid that if the model misinterprets me or makes a mistake, it'll take me longer to debug / correct it than it would to just build it from scratch.

The kinds of things I want to make in solidworks are apparently hard to make in solidworks (arbitrarily / continuously + asymmetrically curved surfaces). I'm assuming that there won't be too many projects like this in the training dataset? How does the LLM handle something that's so out of pocket?
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-12 21:36:09+00:00
Ha, though not with AI Agents, with Docker Containers instead, I too have nuked my home directory a few times when using "rm -rf" which is why I now use "trash-cli" which sends stuff to the trash bin and allows me to restore back. It's just a matter of remembering not use "rm -rf". A tough habit to break :(
by zurfer | 2026-01-12 21:36:29+00:00
I certainly don't think people on HN are dumb, I'm surprised that the sentiment towards this is just talking so much about the downside and not the upside.

And look I do agree that humans should be the one responsible for the things they prompt and automate.

What I understand is that you let this lose in a folder and so backups and audits are possible.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-12 21:36:36+00:00
I think we can both admit there's a lot of rubes in this country.

>why does this earn Trump a vote when his opposition was also running on the status quo in this regard, especially the considering the historical US uniparty approach to foreign affairs?

To be frank, because we're applying logic to irrational actors. It shouldn't change anything, but Trump yelled it louder, looked more like the people who voted for him, and it's just one of the many ways they rationalize what they already wanted deep down (but need the not say out loud).

>You think that is a worthwhile tradeoff for Trump sending federal agents to gun down his political enemies (US citizens who hurt their feelings)?

Hard to say, I'm not a utilitarian. But I can see it from that lens. You'd save hundreds of thousands of lives, further constrain Russia on the global level if Ukraine can get into NATO, and even curb off other tensions like China vs Taiwan and Israel v. Palestine. That's a lot of good.

These aren't good directly reflected in the US economy nor jobs, though. That's the issue with utilitarianism in that it ignores the micro socio-economic situations, and those can build up into even worse timelines.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-12 21:37:04+00:00
A very large portion of the harassment via these images is very very obviously motivated by humiliating people.

The person telling grok to comment on a thread by a woman with an image of her with her clothes off, on all fours, and covered in what appears to be semen is to hurt her. It is an act of domination. She can either leave the platform or be forced to endure a process that repeatedly makes her into a literal sex object as she uses the platform. Discussing something related to your professional work? Doesn't matter. There's now an image in the thread of this shit.

This is rape culture. There is no other word for it.

Gender theorists have been studying this very question for decades. But you'll regularly find this community shitting on that entire field of study even though I'm not sure if it is has ever been more relevant than it is today.
by jervant | 2026-01-12 21:38:19+00:00
There are also things on eBay with a starting price of less than a dollar with free shipping that never get bids. I "won" two auctions like this the other week for brand new USB-C cables, each of them costing me 13 cents shipped.

I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.
by fgonzag | 2026-01-12 21:38:38+00:00
I see a ton of my peers driving around in 80k cars. I drive a 20k used one.

I'm planning a writing a ROCM inference engine anyways, or at least contributing to the rocm vllm or sglang implementations for my cards since I'm interested in the field. Funnily enough, I wouldn't consider myself bullish on AI, I just want to really learn the field so I can evaluate where it's heading.

I spent about 10k on the cards, though the upgrades were piece meal as I found them cheap. I still have to get custom water blocks for them since the original W7900s (which are cheap) are triple slot, so you can't fit 4 of them in any sort of workstation setup (I even looked at rack mount options).

Bought a used thread ripper pro wrx80 motherboard ($600), I bought the cheapest TR Pro CPU for the MB (3945wx, $150), I bought 3 128Gb DDR4-3200 sticks at 230 each before the craze, was planning on populating all 8 channels if prices went down a bit. Each stick is now 900, more than I paid for all 3 combined (730 with S&H and taxes). So the system is staying as is until prices come down a bit.

For AI assisted programming, the best value prop by far is Gemini (free) as the orchestrator + open code using either free models or grok / minimax / glm through their very cheap plans (for minimax or glm) or open router which is very cheap. You can also find some interest providers like Cerebras, who get silly fast token generation, which enables interesting cases.
by xracy | 2026-01-12 21:38:42+00:00
I think whether or not you can still actively do this, there should likely be a consequence for the fact that you could ever do this. And pulling from the store for a proportional amount of time seems like a fair way to enforce that.

I don't think this explains why you would pull the article. The fact that it was ever correct is sufficient even if it's not currently point in time correct.
by supertrope | 2026-01-12 21:38:53+00:00
Leaders see the cost of a raised right of way or even just a dedicated lane and balk. Which is really dumb because after spending all the money on rail you screw up the last 1/10 by having a tram get stuck behind single occupancy cars. One person illegally parking can hold up dozens of riders. But our politicians still can exploit our bias of rail = good, bus = bad and show up for the ribbon cutting ceremony.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-12 21:38:59+00:00
> It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source.

It's something we as techies like to believe due to solidarity or belief in the greater good, but I'm not sure it's actually justified? It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.

If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source). If you're anonymous there is little actual downside of detection, you can just try again under a different project.

Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
by 1123581321 | 2026-01-12 21:40:02+00:00
True. Population density differs by about 2.5x, and the US has some truly depopulated areas that essentially don't exist on the European contintent.

Although, rural Americans are also used to driving longer distances than rural Germans. I would venture that a 30-40 minute trip is not thought of as significant, especially if only done 1-2 times per week.

Rural grocery shopping (real food, not snacks), is typically done at Walmart or a smaller grocery brand or independent. For quick errands, DG does get a lot of it. You're starting to see grocery store logistics push in to what were traditionally gas-and-convenience-store corners, including Aldi, so the commutes for groceries are getting shorter.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the US with the price war over GLP-1 weight loss pills. Unlike Ozempic injections, they're going to penetrate into low income and rural households.
by krm01 | 2026-01-12 21:40:43+00:00
I’ve tried just about every system for keeping my desktop tidy: folders, naming schemes, “I’ll clean it on Fridays,” you name it. They all fail for the same reason: the desktop is where creative work wants to spill out. It’s fast, visual, and forgiving. Cleaning it is slow, boring, and feels like admin.

Claude Cleaner, I mean Cowork will be sweeping my desktop every Friday.

Im sure itll be useful for more stuff but man…
by IAmGraydon | 2026-01-12 21:41:05+00:00
I've spent a lot of time thinking about that - what if the realization that we need is not that LLMs are intelligent, but that our own brains work in the same way as the LLMs. There is certainly a cognitive bias to believe that humans are somehow special and that our brains are not simply machinery.

The difference, to me, is that an LLM can very efficiently recall information, or more accurately, a statistical model of information. However, they seem to be unable to actually extrapolate from it or rationalize about it (they can create the illusion of rationalization be knowing what the rationalization would look like). A human would never be able to ingest and remember the amount of information that an LLM can, but we seem to have the incredible ability of extrapolation - to reach new conclusions by deeply reasoning about old ones.

This is much like the difference in being "book smart" and "actually smart" that some people use to describe students. Some students can memorize vast amounts of information, pass all tests with straight A's, only to fail when they're tasked with thinking on their own. Others perform terribly on memorization tasks, but naturally are gifted at understanding things in a more intuitive sense.

I have seen heaps of evidence that LLMs have zero ability to reason, so I believe that there's something very fundamental missing. Perhaps the LLM is a small part of the puzzle, but there doesn't seem to be any breakthroughs that seem like we might be moving towards actual reasoning. I do think that the human brain can very likely be emulated if we cracked the technology. I just don't believe we're close.