MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by District5524 | 2026-01-30 13:22:02+00:00
I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

I don't think people are afraid of doctors using imperfect tools. That is the easier part. But that will not solve the problem of too many patients for a single doctor and what leads to the lack of empathy. This was a problem even before AI. It seems society does not have empathy for these kind of "professional problems". Offering tools instead of humans is an even riskier approach, not for that particular individual, but for how society tends to build trust and empathy.
We tend to see everything now as a problem with a technical solution because we only have confidence in solving technical problems.
by rizzo94 | 2026-01-30 13:22:03+00:00
I had a similar journey with Moltbot/OpenClaw. I spent a lot of time self-hosting and wiring things together reverse proxies, gateways, credentials, hardware decisions (Mac mini vs VPS vs mini-PC), and honestly the operational surface area gets large very quickly.

While researching ways to reduce that complexity, I came across PAIO. What stood out to me wasn’t just the convenience, but the architecture choices. The integration was basically one-click compared to the multi-step setup I had before, but the bigger win was BYOK and the privacy-first approach.

With self-hosted assistants, the tooling is powerful but the security model is often an afterthought, and it’s easy to accidentally expose something (as people in this thread pointed out with Shodan results). A managed layer that still keeps keys and data under your control feels like a reasonable middle ground between full DIY and full SaaS.

I still like self-hosting for learning and control, but for day-to-day reliability and security, having a platform that bakes in isolation and privacy primitives saves a lot of operational burden.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-30 13:22:38+00:00
It's true. They're not useful for anything not hooked up to mains.

I was meaning to add footstep-activated lights to my stairs using vibration sensors and 555 timers, but then I learned that if I tried to operate them from a battery, the 555 would drain it in hours, while a much more sophisticated ESP32-c3, would last a month in sleep mode on two coin batteries or one li-ion in the same form factor all while being part of a development board that greatly increases idle current.
by afishhh | 2026-01-30 13:23:02+00:00
I'm going to fucking crash out if another person says they're making a browser and their inline layout does this shit[1] I swear to god.

I held off on commenting on the last AI browser post because the author said "it's not even good" so they recognized it's trash (it was).

Please educate yourself on how inline layout is supposed to work[2] first. (no, you cannot lay out text span-by-span[3] either...)

[1] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser/blob/df6f4a265a...

[2] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline-3/

[3] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#boundary-shaping
by nojs | 2026-01-30 13:23:11+00:00
I am genuinely curious - what do you see as the difference between "agent-friendly payments" and simply removing KYC/fraud checks?

Like basically what an agent needs is access to PayPal or Stripe without all the pesky anti-bot and KYC stuff. But this is there explicitly because the company has decided it's in their interests to not allow bots.

The agentic email services are similar. Isn't it just GSuite, or SES, or ... but without the anti-spam checks? Which is fine, but presumably the reason every provider converges on aggressive KYC and anti-bot measures is because there are very strong commercial and compliance incentives to do this.

If "X for agents" becomes a real industry, then the existing "X for humans" can just rip out the KYC, unlock their APIs, and suddenly the "X for agents" have no advantage.
by cartoonworld | 2026-01-30 13:23:45+00:00
Cool!

I just popped in to add that NASA employee Charles White, a scientist involved with the Mars Rover project, also helped make a Burning Man Mars Rover Car (back before Playa Burning Man was completely and utterly torched twice over by Military Industrial Complex Vacationers and Billionaires) and you can hear an interview with him here on Charles White's yt channel: https://youtu.be/BKGROOedAgI (
Mars Rover Art Car interview with Ray Cirino and Charles White )

Charles White is a pretty good guy in my opinion, we play the same video game (EvE: Online) Where Charles White is a very, very well known community member who is known as "The Space Pope". He officiates weddings at our Iceland Fanfest gathering and also runs a Suicide Prevention Outreach group in EvE: Online, as well as teaching leadership skills.

Here's Charles White giving a presentation as an Official NASA employee about Space and our solar system at EvE Fanfest 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atm6Y_JYPEU

Heres a interview about EvE: Online with the Space Pope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWuj7LfyN4U

anyhow sorry to hijack this about EvE: Online but we have lots of cool people like Scott Manley playing, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huZlA0eg12U
by FitchApps | 2026-01-30 13:23:55+00:00
This is all wonderful and all but what happens when these tools aren't available - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits. How would someone support their business / software / livelihood? First, the agents would take our software writing tasks then they encroach on CI/CD and release process and take over from there...

Now, imagine a scenario of a typical SWE in todays or maybe not-so-distant future: the agents build your software, you simply a gate-keeper/prompt engineer, all tests pass, you're now doing a production deployment at 12am and something happens but your agents are down. At that point, what do you do if you haven't build or even deployed the system? You're like a L1 support at this point, pretty useless and clueless when it comes to fully understanding and supporting the application .
by pjerem | 2026-01-30 13:24:41+00:00
Except most of those games aren't "retro" because, unlike real retro games, they are mostly still updated and they work on any recent computer/console.

So for me, even for the oldest ones, they are still part of the same "era". What I mean by that is that if you buy any of the items in this list in 2026, it will not feel like it's an "old" game.
by rizzo94 | 2026-01-30 13:24:43+00:00
Same here. Most of the Clawdbot hype feels like influencer-driven tinkering rather than practical value for typical workflows. Running local agents introduces a lot of security and ops complexity for marginal gains.

I experimented with PAIO mainly because it abstracts that complexity while keeping credentials user-controlled (BYOK). Even then, I’m not convinced agentic AI is production-ready for everyday tasks yet.
by Kaibeezy | 2026-01-30 13:25:09+00:00
Call me a birkie, but I do skip the stomach stuffed with pluck (aka liver, heart and lights (aka lungs)) in favor of a simple loose saute of a nice lamb and/or beef and/or venison mince with oats, onions and proper spice; plus carrot and parsnip puree instead of neeps; plus a nice chianti.
by macshome | 2026-01-30 13:25:32+00:00
This also reminds me of the situation with my TV antenna. I made an antenna years ago and put it in my attic. Using the old antennaweb service I aligned it with the stations we cared about and then never touched it again.

I installed the antenna in the winter. Everything worked great. In the summer, we lost a few channels. Rain in the summer and hardly anything would come in. The answer I realized, like in the article, is trees. Leaves are already full of water so they are good at attenuating signals. Leaves that are also soaked in rain doubly so.
by ge96 | 2026-01-30 13:25:51+00:00
What about code verbosity and vulnerabilities, I guess make smaller change sets.

Still I do like the process of typing things out, vs being like a checker of check boxes, looks good check, looks good check, kind of deal.

I don't mean typing as in typing a story but feel that I'm actively building it.

What's bad is I'm not 100% into it, I work in this field but I'm also skeptical of it at the same time. I'm not like "hell yeah Agents!" But also I work with them and it's the current hotness for high paying jobs.
by rizzo94 | 2026-01-30 13:26:35+00:00
I’ve been in a similar spot—spent a lot of time trying to get Moltbot (Clawdbot) running 24/7 on my own hardware. The troubleshooting, permissions, and skill integrations can easily take hours, and even small configuration mistakes break the whole setup.

While exploring ways to reduce that friction, I came across PAIO. The setup was essentially one click, but it still gives control over credentials with BYOK and a privacy-first approach. For me, it highlighted how much overhead self-hosting introduces versus a managed, secure personal AI—though I still see the value in projects like yours for learning and experimenting with local-first AI.

It might be worth adding a section comparing “full DIY vs managed but privacy-preserving AI” workflows—could help newcomers decide which path fits their goals.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-01-30 13:26:38+00:00
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.

Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.

Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.

Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
by crote | 2026-01-30 13:26:44+00:00
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.

But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.

So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.

Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
by PleasureBot | 2026-01-30 13:26:54+00:00
If software engineer productivity basically doubled as is being claimed in this thread, I think you'd see companies scrambling to lay off everyone else in an effort to hire even more software engineers. They'd be by far the most valuable and productive employees at every tech company and you'd be foolish not to have as many as you can. I'm being a bit facetious but throughout history when a resource or profession takes a dramatic leap in efficiency, the demand for that thing rather than decreasing as is predicted here, only increases since it has become far more valuable & effective.
by Liftyee | 2026-01-30 13:27:06+00:00
Unfortunately, I think all these things are externalities - or at least, areas that don't impact revenue enough to get companies to change.

I too wish that software would be efficient, robust and long-lasting. But it seems that most people don't care about this enough (compared to other factors) to force change. (Alternatively, they are locked in to platforms they don't like to use.)
by coryrc | 2026-01-30 13:28:08+00:00
Human-piloted planes have altimeters and airspeed indicators; the failure of which have caused many accidents.

Tesla cars have speed sensors as well as GPS. (Altimeter and ILS not being relevant). I agree with Musk's claim they don't need LIDAR because human drivers don't; it's self-evidently true. But I think they _should_ have it because they can then be safer than humans; why settle for our current accident and death rate?
by spicyusername | 2026-01-30 13:28:19+00:00
Making new doctors takes decades, lots of policy changes with uncertain outcomes, and demographic shifts nobody controls.

Using ChatGPT takes... nothing, it's already here.

Not too surprising to see one and not the other.

Also, the kinds of changes that result in more doctors don't tend to get media coverage. That's that boring, keep the lights on, politics that modern rage-bait driven media abhors, so it may even still be true that the changes we need for more doctors are also already happening. We'll find out in another decade or two.
by andhuman | 2026-01-30 13:28:37+00:00
One of the more annoying software that does this is the copilot Office 365 on the web. Every time (!) I open it, it shows a popup on how to add files to the context. That itself would be annoying, but it also steals focus! So you would be typing something and suddenly you’re not typing anymore for M$ decided it’s time for a popup.
I finally learned to just wait for the pop up and then dismiss it with esc. Ugh!
by liveoneggs | 2026-01-30 13:29:35+00:00
I have also observed strong racial preference in american companies just as you describe -- indian, chinese, and korean management building almost exclusively same-race teams or outsourcing work to their home country, etc.

It's really gross but I'd never been in the position to be told explicitly to find a $whatever. That's illegal in the US but appears to be unenforced.
by bondarchuk | 2026-01-30 13:29:39+00:00
>Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

This is the point where it becomes important to distinguish two senses of "advanced", i.e. advanced in technological sense on the one hand and advanced in social/societal and especially large-group-long-time-horizon coordination terms on the other. In the former we are quite advanced, in the latter quite primitive and regressing by the day, it feels like. (But sorry to end on a doomer note, take it with a grain of salt.)
by _ph_ | 2026-01-30 13:29:52+00:00
As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation?

It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.
by aikompute-com | 2026-01-30 13:30:15+00:00
if there was a 3rd party provider selling claude sonnet and opus latest models, for half the price and double the rate limits... would you switch? or does it sound too good to be true? do you think if the models were nerfed... or just cheaper models claiming to be claude.... do you think you could just by using the models for a day? i mean, for anything involving code tasks, no one comes close to beating sonnet, honestly... much less opus 4.5 (ANYONE HITING THEIR CLAUDE CODE RATE LIMITS REGULARLY, CAN TELL WHEN THEYRE WORKING WITH OPUS, no cheaper substitute model can be convincing, not even close... I think with like 10 or 20 million token free trial, that should be enough to convince any justifiably skeptical user..... just a thought. am i onto to something or a dumbass who uses ... way too fuckin much.

oh and hi, I am new here. I found and joined just two days ago. nice to meet you all.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-30 13:30:21+00:00
>This will never happen because projects will just be forked.

There's a chasm of difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork. The entire point of EEE is relying on usefulness and convenience combined with network effects to make the entire system restricted and control it. Sure, you can go and fork anything you want - nobody stops you, technically. But you're getting the rug pulled from under your feet in any case.

You can witness the early stage of subversion with very useful software (without any hint of irony) made by people who "left" Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
by dsign | 2026-01-30 13:30:44+00:00
> Corollary: our brains are basically the dumbest possible solution evolution could find that can host general intelligence.

I agree. But there's a very strong incentive to not to; you can't simply erase hundreds of millennia of religion and culture (that sets humans in a singular place in the cosmic order) in the short few years after discovering something that approaches (maybe only a tiny bit) general intelligence. Hell, even the century from Darwin to now has barely made a dent :-( . Buy yeah, our intelligence is a question of scale and training, not some unreachable miracle.
by mbreese | 2026-01-30 13:30:54+00:00
The more I think about your comment on statistics, the more I change my mind.

At first, I think you’re right - these are (thankfully) rare events. And because of this, the accident rate is Poisson distributed. At this low of a rate, it’s really hard to know what the true average is, so we do really need more time to know how good/bad the Teslas are performing. I also suspect they are getting safer over time, but again… more data required. But, we do have the statistical models to work with these rare events.

But the I think about your comment about it only being 30 cars operating over 6 months. Which, makes sense, except for the fact that it’s not like having a fleet of individual drivers. These robotaxis should all be running the same software, so it’s statistically more like one person driving 500,000 miles. This is a lot of miles! I’ve been driving for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve driven that many miles. This should be enough data for a comparison.

If we are comparing the Tesla accident rate to people in a consistent manner (accident classification), it’s a valid comparison. So, I think the way this works out is: given an accident rate of 1/500000, we could expect a human to have 9 accidents over the same miles with a probability of ~ 1 x 10^-6. (Never do live math on the internet, but I think this is about right).

Hopefully they will get better.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-30 13:31:06+00:00
I don't think you are out of touch. I see this more as opportunistic behavior rather than the main thing. A side show. Some people buy/sell crypto. Most people at this point ignore the whole space and have turned their back on them.

All that's left is serial bullshitters generally not delivering anything real or tangible whatsoever. But of course, them affiliating themselves with whatever is fashionable is entirely in character. That's what serial bullshitters do.

As far as I can see there's little to no overlap in the Venn diagram of crypto tech bro types and AI optimists/utopians. Neither group produces much technology. They mostly just move hot air.

And then there's a rather large crowd of skeptical yet open minded people actually getting some early results using or building various AI tools.

Most AI stuff on HN breaks into the AI bears (it's all bull-shit and going to end in tears, any minute now) and bulls (AGI is imminent and we're all going to be unemployed and then our AI overlords will kill us). And a few occasional rational things in between.

I'm in camp rational. Some cool/useful tools out there. Getting some tangible results using those. Clear and quite rapid progress year on year. Worth keeping up with. I don't worry about employment. I'm quite busy currently. All this AI stuff is generating lots of work and new business potential. And the AIs are not picking up the slack so far. If anything, there's a growing gap between what's possible and what's being realized. That's what opportunity looks like. I see a lot of business potential currently for somebody reasonably handy with AI tools.
by bambax | 2026-01-30 13:32:27+00:00
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.

Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
by rpozarickij | 2026-01-30 13:33:10+00:00
Limiting animal fats (which are mostly saturated fats) has a very noticeable and measurable effect on how I'm feeling and doing overall. Primarily using olive/avocado oil and nuts/seeds as my fat sources significantly improved my energy levels, mental clarity, sleep, and stress/HRV (as measured by my Garmin watch). I've noticed this so many times that I don't think this is a placebo. I haven't checked any specific blood markers that might be affected by dietary fats though.

Saturated fats _are_ essential for humans but you should be getting enough of them from non-animal sources.

YMMV
by gruez | 2026-01-30 13:33:21+00:00
>I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla.

That just sounds like a cope. The OP's claim is that the article rests on shaky evidence, and you haven't really refuted that. Instead, you just retreated from the bailey of "Tesla's Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse ..." to the motte of "the burden of proof here on Tesla".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

More broadly I think the internet is going to be a better place if comments/articles with bad reasoning are rebuked from both sides, rather than getting a pass from one side because it's directionally correct, eg. "the evidence WMDs in Iraq is flimsy but that doesn't matter because Hussein was still a bad dictator".
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-30 13:33:25+00:00
I'm not sure electric trucks that run off of batteries is a practical solution. Given the size and weight of trucks and cargo they require 10-15 times larger battery to provide noticeably smaller range. Throw in refueling time and it's really not the best solution for CO2 reduction. I'd prefer to see hydrogen-powered trucks. Use all that extra energy to produce hydrogen.

Naturally this is relevant only for current battery tech and capacity.
by bartholemew1 | 2026-01-30 13:33:27+00:00
Okay let's say it is murder (regardless that there is broad disagreement and no charges)

What drives someone to feel emboldened to park their car in the middle of an ICE operation and then attempt to drive off after being told to stop?

What drives someone to run around spitting and kicking out lights on an ICE vehicle?

It's like I can understand why someone is a sports fan, despite not following sports myself. I can fully understand, although I don't support, why someone would join the Taliban or Tren De Aragua or whatever other group. I can understand those things. But I still struggle to understand the above.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-30 13:34:11+00:00
I would class porridge oats as what might be called 'rolled oats' if you were buying animal feed. They are not ground, but crushed under a rolling stone. I guess they have different terms for different markets. Never seen rolled wheat, but I have seen rolled barley and oats.. they looks like porridge oats. Or is it an Atlantic divide, but with the US foodie term crossing back in the food market