MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-29 19:55:12+00:00
Same pattern in software. The best tools for specific professions usually come from someone who worked in that profession first, got frustrated with generic solutions, then built exactly what they needed.

General-purpose tools try to serve everyone and end up with features that kinda work for most cases. Someone deep in a niche builds for the edge cases they actually encounter, and it turns out those edge cases are universal within that niche - they just weren't visible to outsiders.
by NorwegianDude | 2026-01-29 19:55:17+00:00
To be fair, he's completely right. I have a lot of experience with IE6 and safari on iOS, and while IE6 was bad and did weird shit, Safari is much worse. It's amazing that things can work in any browser, without ever even thinking about it, but then on Safari you get weird behaviour, straight up rendering bugs because of some weird race conditions with the engine or even crashes.

The latest issue that I've noticed yesterday is the button nav bar on the screen when running PWAs. The button is over the bottom navbar of the PWA, and despite apple themselves coming up with the API to inform the browser about safe display areas, it doesn't work in PWAs on iOS. PWA mode on iOS != non PWA on iOS. They often behave completely different and you often have to use JS for basic things to work, like clicking a link(yup, this was a thing for years).
by 9rx | 2026-01-29 19:55:20+00:00
In a networked environment, which includes the web, it is typical to expose your database over the network. In the olden days clients started speaking SQL over the network, but there are a number of pitfalls to this approach. SQL was designed for use on mainframes, which, understandably, does not translate to the constraints of the network very well.

To alleviate the pressure of those pitfalls, we started adding middle databases (oft called web apps, API services, REST services, etc.) that proxied the database through protocols that are more ideal to the realities and limitations of the network. Clients were then updated to use the middle database, seeing the hacks required to make SQL usable over the network to be centralized in one spot, greatly reducing the management burden.

But having two database servers is pretty silly when you think about it. Especially when the "backend" database's protocol isn't suitable for the network[1]. Enter the realization that if you use something like SQLite, you don't need another, separate database server. You can have one database server[1] that speaks a network friendly API. Except SQLite itself has a number of limitations that doesn't make it well suited to being the backing engine of your network-first DBMS.

That is what the article is about — Pointing out those limitations, and how Turso plans to overcome them. If your use case isn't "web app", SQLite is already going to do the job just fine.

[1] After all, if it were suited for networks, you wouldn't need the middle service. Clients would already be talking to that database directly instead.

[2] As in one logical database server. In practice, you may use a cluster of servers to provide that logical representation.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 19:55:23+00:00
>Also, prevention.

Prevention is one of those things that when we actually attempt to fix it would have to completely change the world you live in.

Humans are social creatures and a huge part of our mental health is dependant on the society around us. If the actual problem is "wow capitalism is really broken and showing us ads 24/7 that say were not good enough is killing us", then taking a pill is a valid solution because changing the system will take generations or very violent wars.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-29 19:55:37+00:00
Drafting is already a limited resource, the step limit feels like a hat-on-a-hat. The early game could limit on available draft pulls without the step limit.

But also, I am one of the people that the drafting mechanic directly conflicted with my interest in progressing the game. That lack of being able to focus on a particular thread of my choice affected my interest in the game. I didn't want to juggle every thread all at once, especially without knowing which threads are the most interesting to pull ahead of time.
by stickfigure | 2026-01-29 19:56:34+00:00
Bipedal robots are dumb.

A robot that can only walk around my house is still useless. A robot that can wheel or track or even park in front of my dryer and fold laundry would be incredible. Yet every demo is Robot Jumps And Dances, not Robot Does Something Useful.

My theory is that bipedal motion is the "easy" problem, and fine motor control is the hard problem. That makes me bearish on Optimus: A car with questionable full self driving is still a useful car. A robot with questionable fine motor control is going to break every dish in the house.
by svara | 2026-01-29 19:56:41+00:00
> They're from a major peer-reviewed study published in Nature, the highest-impact journal.

No, the domain name is nature.com because it's in a Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports, which is their least prestigious journal.

It's a common mistake, and they do that on purpose, of course, to leverage the Nature brand.

It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-01-29 19:56:59+00:00
Scala’s downfall is the culture of writing libraries with the most esoteric syntax imaginable. It’s the opposite of Ruby’s “program with pleasure”—-it is “program with maximum cleverness” and “if it doesn’t look like an obscure math equation or symbol soup, it’s probably not idiomatic Scala.” Java’s designers were opposed to operator overloading due to potential for abuse, and did Scala deliver living proof/nightmare scenario of that.

Now I still want operator overloading, because I favor enabling instead of disabling approaches, and I want, for example, new numeric types to have natural syntax that blends in with built-ins, or an equality operator that works consistently. I’ll even settle for += append to strings and collections.

But even Scala standard libraries take operator use to wild extremes. Apparently it’s not enough to use + to append collections, you must use ++. Except Vec you can add with +. There’s ++= and ++=:, and /: and :: and ::: and ?^ and ?^.

Spark Scala interface introduces =!= for inequality comparison. There’s |@| from Cons library. Don’t get me started on Akka. SBT introduces <++=

Surprisingly you can’t override ==, so Spark implements ===. And specs2 testing library implements ====.
by jsheard | 2026-01-29 19:57:12+00:00
Google has made it clear that Genie doesn't maintain an explicit 3D scene representation, so I don't think hooking in "assists" like that is on the table. Even if it were, engines like PhysX still need coherent inputs to produce coherent outputs, which means the AI layer would have to guess parameters like object weight or friction... again based on vibes.
by mrsilencedogood | 2026-01-29 19:57:36+00:00
Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The economics are just too good. The profit margins are just inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else. Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream.

It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism.

Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?
by godelski | 2026-01-29 19:57:46+00:00
Here's something also useful that's portable

declare GRN='\e[1;32m'
declare RED='\e[1;31m'
declare YLW='\e[1;33m'
declare CYN='\e[1;36m'

write_log() {
echo -e "[$( date +'%c' )] : ${1}\e[0m" | tee -a ${logfile}
}

write_log "${RED}I'm an ERROR"
by JoblessWonder | 2026-01-29 19:57:50+00:00
I wish they would give a real-world cost estimate of what this would look like. They have a section of it "in action" [1] and I wish they would be like, "with this setup, the invoice is going to look like this, include these products, and with similar daily usage be about $XXX.00 per month."

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/...
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-01-29 19:57:58+00:00
Maybe he wants to go down in history as the first trillionaire. His wealth exploded during the pandemic, from about $25 billion to over $700 billion today. The trillion-dollar mark is in sight. He might be willing to sacrifice some long-term wealth if it means juicing the number now, so he has what seems like a permanent place in history.
by neelc | 2026-01-29 19:58:20+00:00
I previously ran another VPS host who did the same exact thing (before OVH did it?).

Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000 servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers.

I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.
by joquarky | 2026-01-29 19:58:33+00:00
> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.

> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.

> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”

> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines

- Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
by renewiltord | 2026-01-29 19:58:38+00:00
Access trumps everything else. A doctor is fine with you dying while you wait on his backlog. The machine will give you some wrong answers. The mother in the story seems to be balancing the concerns. She has become the agent of her own life empowered by a supernatural machine.

> She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority. She had stopped eating the lotus seed starch it had recommended.

The “there’s wrong stuff there” fear has existed for the Internet, Google, StackOverflow. Each time people adapted. They will adapt again. Human beings have remarkable ability to use tools.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 19:58:42+00:00
>people want easy fixes that do not require any change in habits

Because it's easy to say change your habits when the problems are systematic as you say. Cutting yourself off social media, or stopping watching the news isn't easy. Being bullied/stressed about work and not having other work options isn't easily dealt with. Being bombarded with advertising telling you that you suck is not something you can personally deal with.

The US especially has this idea that we're all rugged individualists and any problem we have is our own and not one created by the larger society around us and therefor communal solutions are bad, and you should toughen up.
by bojan | 2026-01-29 19:59:04+00:00
> In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure

I can understand working on it feeling pure, but driving it certainly isn't, considering how lower the emissions now, even for ICE cars. One of the worst driving experiences of my life was riding in my friends' Citroen 2CV. The restoration of that car was a labour of love that he did together with his dad. For me as a passenger, I was surprised just how loud it is, and how you can smell oil and gasoline in the cabin.
by account266928 | 2026-01-29 19:59:29+00:00
Please try to make this statistically rigorous. There's lots of advice in this thread (intraday variation, etc) but if Im reading this right it looks like the CI includes the baseline value yet you still label this as failing.

Wouldn't this just be "our test isn't powerful enough to find a signal if there were one here?"

People will see this and derive strong conclusions that the data don't support and you, `qwesr123`, or "JB" from your blogs, will be responsible.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-29 19:59:30+00:00
> AFAIK this is not illegal, just annoying.

This is illegal in my state.

> What's HNers feelings on this.

My feeling is that the operator of the fleet is responsible for what the cars in the fleet do. If a Waymo car is violating traffic/parking laws, then Waymo should get a ticket for that. Accumulating enough of those tickets should result in the same consequences as if a human had accumulated them.
by in-silico | 2026-01-29 19:59:34+00:00
The current robotics industry is $88B. You have to take into account the potential future industry of general purpose robots that replace a big chunk of blue-collar work.

Robots is also just one example. A hypothetically powerful AI agent (which might also use a world model) that controls a mouse and keyboard could replace a big chunk of white-collar work too.

Those are worth 10's of trillions of dollars. You can argue about whether they are actually possible, but the people backing this tech think they are.
by Calavar | 2026-01-29 19:59:47+00:00
Talk on market cap for meme stocks reminds me of that old XKCD comment on extrapolation. Market cap is what you get when you extrapolate the fair market value for .1% of a company out three orders of magnitude to 100%. The numbers just dont work that way - they don't (or at least only very rarely) scale linearly.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 20:00:04+00:00
Small subtle errors that are only exposed at certain execution parts could be one. You might place things differently onto the GPU depending on how large the batch is, if you've found one way to be faster batch_size<1024, but another when batch_size>1024. As number of concurrent incoming requests goes up, you increase batch_size. Just one possibility, guess there could be a multitude of reasons, as it's really hard to reason about until you sit with the data in front of you. vLLM has had bugs with these sort of thing too, so wouldn't surprise me.
by asadotzler | 2026-01-29 20:00:25+00:00
No one was buying boxed software in 2008. The second we had broadband, call it 2002-ish, everyone was downloading everything. For many of us that began in the 90s before we had broadband. Overnight downloads over 56K phone modems was already overtaking boxed purchases. More people downloaded Netscape in 1995 than bought it boxed.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-29 20:00:26+00:00
What the hell? There are plenty of reasons to pop your hood that literally anyone competent to drive should be able to do perfectly safely. Swapping your own battery. Pulling a fuse. Checking your oil, topping up your oil. Adding windshield wiper fluid. Jump starting a car. Replacing parts that are immediately available.

Not requiring one to pop the hood, but since I've almost finished the list of "things every driver should be able to do to their car": Place and operate a jack, change a tire, replace your windshield wiper blades, add air to tires (to appropriate pressure), and put gas in the damned thing.

These are basic skills that I can absolutely expect a competent, driving adult to be able to do (perhaps with a guide).
by salawat | 2026-01-29 20:00:31+00:00
Except for the fact that that very accountability sink is relied on by senior management/CxO's the world over. The only difference is that before AI, it was the middle manager's fault. We didn't tell anyone to break the law. We just put in place incentive structures that require it, and play coy, then let anticipatory obedience do the rest. Bingo. Accountability severed. You can't prove I said it in a court of law, and skeevy shit gets done because some poor bloke down the ladder is afraid of getting fired if he doesn't pull out all the stops to meet productivity quotas.

AI is just better because no one can actually explain why the thing does what it does. Perfect management scapegoat without strict liability being made explicit in law.
by echelon | 2026-01-29 20:00:42+00:00
> It's not really as much of a boon as you'd think though

It is for filmmaking! They're perfect for constructing consistent sets and blocking out how your actors and props are positioned. You can freely position the camera, control the depth of field, and then storyboard your entire scene I2V.

Example of doing this with Marble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJCJYdGdpHg
by qsort | 2026-01-29 20:00:43+00:00
Very, very good stuff here. I think a possible missing piece is how to explain how the results were computed. Here it seems they're relying on the fact that users are somewhat technical (that's great for OpenAI -- it's an internal agent after all) and can at least read SQL, but it's an interesting design problem how you would structure the interaction with nontechnical users.

When working on data systems you quickly realize that often how the question was answered (how the metric is defined, what data was taken into account and so on) is just as important as the answer.
by niyikiza | 2026-01-29 20:01:07+00:00
You're right, they should be responsible. The problem is proving it.
"I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to refute with current architectures.

And when sub-agents or third-party tools are involved, liability gets even murkier. Who's accountable when the action executed three hops away from the human?
The article argues for receipts that make "I didn't authorize that" a verifiable claim
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 20:01:54+00:00
>The "hate" is not based in science

The lingering roots of Calvinism in the US cause us all kinds of problems.

"You were born broken because god made you that way, don't make yourself better, and hurry up and die" permeates huge parts of our culture. It's why lots of other cultures look at us and what we do with relative confusion.
by tillvz | 2026-01-29 20:02:09+00:00
Trust & explainability is the biggest issue here.

We've been building natural language analytics at Veezoo (https://www.veezoo.com/) for 10 years, and what we find is that straight Text-to-SQL doesn't scale. If AI writes SQL directly, you're building on a probabilistic foundation.
When a CFO asks for revenue the number can't just be correct 99% of times. Also you can't get the CFO to read SQL to verify.

We're solving that with an abstraction layer (Knowledge Graph) in between. AI translates natural language to a semantic query language, which then compiles to SQL deterministically.

At the same time you can translate the semantic query deterministically back into an explanation for the business user, so they can easily verify if the result matches their intent.

Business logic lives in the Knowledge Graph and the compiler ensures every query adheres to it 100%, every time. No AI is involved in that step.

Veezoo Architecture: https://docs.veezoo.com/veezoo/architecture-overview
by ollin | 2026-01-29 20:02:54+00:00
Yup, similar concepts! Just at two opposite extremes of the compute/scaling spectrum.

- That forest trail world is ~5 million parameters, trained on 15 minutes of video, scoped to run on a five-year-old iPhone through a twenty-year old API (WebGL GPGPU, i.e OpenGL fragment shaders). It's the smallest '3D' world model I'm aware of.

- Genie 3 is (most likely) ~100 billion parameters trained on millions of hours of video and running across multiple TPUs. I would be shocked if it's not the largest-scale world model available to the public.

There are lots of neat intermediate-scale world models being developed as well (e.g. LingBot-World https://github.com/robbyant/lingbot-world, Waypoint 1 https://huggingface.co/blog/waypoint-1) so I expect we'll be able to play something of Genie quality locally on gaming GPUs within a year or two.
by georgeecollins | 2026-01-29 20:02:58+00:00
But they don't have all the same owners. If I own company 2/3 of company A and it is worth $0, and I own 2/3 of company B I can't force company B to buy company A for $1. The company B shareholders will be upset and could sue.

Maybe this is a good deal for shareholders of SpaceX and xAI. But then maybe it isn't a good deal for one set of shareholders. I have no idea, but I would love to be a shareholder in SpaceX and would not want to be a shareholer in xAI. Totally depends on the price of course.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-29 20:03:09+00:00
Are these the same people who say it doesn't work well? I've been experimenting with writing what I actually mean by that (with the help of an LLM, funny enough), and it seems to be giving me much better code than the typical AI soup. e.g.

- functional core, imperative shell. prefer pure helpers.
- avoid methods when a standalone function suffices
- use typed errors. avoid stringly errors.
- when writing functions, create a "spine" for orchestration
- spine rules: one dominant narrative, one concept per line, named values.
- orchestration states what happens and in what order
- implementation handles branching, retries, parsing, loops, concurrency, etc.
- apply recursively: each function stays at one abstraction level
- names describe why something exists, not how it is computed

etc.

This is no different from writing a style guide for your team/org. You don't just say "write clean code" and expect that you'll get something you like.
by kypro | 2026-01-29 20:03:10+00:00
I don't strongly disagree, but also don't really see why they would keep manufacturing X and S if the design is old and the car needs a refresh to be competitive? I guess the argument is that it would have been worthwhile refreshing it?

I mean that may be the case, but I get the sense that Tesla's primary goal at the moment is creating cheap robotaxi ready vehicles, and S and X don't really fit well with that. Partly because of cost, but also because I suspect it's harder to build FSD for multiple different vehicles so both models are just a distraction right now.

I'm not saying this article is wrong, but it seems like it may make sense that they focus on Y, 3, robotaxis and future projects like optimus.

I don't have strong opinions either way on Musk, but his ability to see future tech trends before others has historically been quite impressive. Personally I think the idea that Tesla would be better off behaving like every other car company betting on small iterative improvements to the current line up is really quite silly. It's going to be extremely difficult to compete with China without protectionist policies. Tesla probably should be looking to the next thing if they want to survive.