MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjk166 | 2026-01-30 02:42:24+00:00
> Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project

Yeah, a one off research project that used different methods from every year before or since got totally different results. That was the point I was trying to make.

> No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:

That's what revised means. They updated it prior to publication in July 2023.

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/fix-we-still-r...

> As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.

The report was leaked several months prior to publication. You'll note that every source claiming it was leaked was from early december 2022. You are engaging in exactly the same baseless speculation based on incomplete information that the article is.

> The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques.

They are trying to maximize accuracy using well accepted best practices. They adopt different numbers from either PNG's government or the UN. They are starting with the same data and doing their own analysis to reach an independent conclusion. If they knew the official data was highly skewed , they would account for it. Likewise there have been many other independent estimates, and an entire new census in 2024, all of which are nowhere near the 17 million estimate. Not utilizing a new technique that yields a radically different result from many different independent estimates and which is viewed with skepticism by experts is to be expected.

https://islandsbusiness.com/news-break/png-head-count-begins...

It's still possible that the one UN study was right and everyone else was wrong, but that claim can't be taken as a given, and it's certainly not supported in any way by the article.

> But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find.

How is every other independent estimate disagreeing with the 17 million figure not a clear contradiction of the article's implicit claim that the 17 million estimate is more accurate?

But even if you don't feel I've contradicted the article, again, I don't need to contradict the article. The article is the one making the claim, it has to prove it true.

> But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.

Everything I've said is backed up by sources. I'm not an expert, the sources could be wrong, but I'm going to go with all of them over a random article which makes incredible claims with no evidence.
by anitil | 2026-01-30 02:42:39+00:00
That's me! I found I was treated much better in software, the timelines were much more reasonable and your input was valued. When doing firmware, typically everyone's timelines would slip but the delivery date wouldn't which meant your time with a fully functional device (if you even get one at all) would reduce. Half the time you're developing on a half-broken version of the real device
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-30 02:43:08+00:00
I feel like the OP was so close to the epiphany that meaning and utility are orthogonal values, but then they retreated back to the safe ground of avoid-efficiency-if-you-want-meaning.

They talked about it with knitting: obviously, buying yarn is a time-saving efficiency compared to spinning your own, but that didn't destroy the meaning of the gift. Nevertheless, if I spent time spinning my own yarn and gifting it to my mother, I bet she would find it meaningful.

Similarly, they talk about how they could use a mechanical knitter to save time, but that would reduce the meaning. I think that depends. If I designed a beautiful pattern and then used a mechanical knitter to create a blanket, I bet my mom would find it meaningful.

The epiphany is that meaning doesn't come from how hard I work. It comes from personal relationship and how my actions interact with that relationship. If I knew my mom was looking for a specific, somewhat rare purse, and one day I happened to find it at a yard sale and give it to her, that would be a meaningful gift, regardless of how much effort it took me.

Meaning is not an intrinsic quality of objects. It is not an arrangement of atoms or a quantum field. You can't see meaning in a microscope. Meaning is only in our heads. And because it is only in our heads, AI can't destroy it.

AI is just a tool, like a mechanical knitter or a jackhammer. Sure, maybe not all tools are equally useful for creating meaning, but no one every worried that meaning was under threat because jackhammers got invented. AI is no different.
by userbinator | 2026-01-30 02:43:35+00:00
My first thought was atmospheric effects, i.e. along the lines of "The radio only works at night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear-channel_station

Also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation

I must say, the AI-generated "stock image" doesn't add that much to the article and could be done without, especially when its alt-text contains the prompt.
by ajross | 2026-01-30 02:45:01+00:00
So... the thing is it's really not. They're behind on schedule, having just launched in public. But FSD has been showing capabilities in regular use (highway navigation, unprotected left turns in traffic, non-geofenced operation areas based solely on road markings) that Waymo hasn't even tried to deploy yet.

It's much more of a competition than I suspect a lot of people realize.
by torginus | 2026-01-30 02:46:10+00:00
2 well identifiable classes in western societies are landlords vs renters, where the latter is paying a huge chunk of their income to be able to use an appreciating asset of the former.

This class thing is especially identifiable in Europe, where assets such as real estate generally are not cheaper than in the US (with the exception of a few super expensive places), yet salaries are much lower.

Taxes tend to be super high on wages but not on assets. One can very easily find themselves in a situation where even owning a modest amount of wealth, their asset appreciation outdoes what they can get as labor income.
by strange_quark | 2026-01-30 02:46:53+00:00
Kudos to them for publishing this. Yes, yes, all the usual caveats of these were juniors, small sample size, etc, etc. But this is result is hardly surprising. It's just funny the juxtaposition of their CEO at Davos saying software engineering as a career might be over in a year, then they publish a study that shows worse understanding and doesn't even show a speedup.
by ajross | 2026-01-30 02:47:19+00:00
Emergency braking in non-camera/non-LIDAR cars requires a significant radar signal which you're only going to get from another vehicle (and even then it's noisy and tends to produce frustrating false positives, leading to later-than-you-want stops). It very likely won't detect a child or a dog, I'm not aware of a single instance of an EBS claiming to have done so in practice (and kids and dogs get hit every day!).
by abcde666777 | 2026-01-30 02:47:45+00:00
Let's cut through some of the noise here. We only talk about these things behause we fear becoming obsolete and losing our livelihoods.

Using the scarf example - nobody's paying you to knit it. Knitting it probably won't put food on your table. Maybe for tribal humans that kind of thing did, hence the psychological reward wiring, but not now.

Here's a reality: we do all become obsolete. It's called aging. I don't know how exactly to fit that into that puzzle, but my brain told me it's a relevant reference point, somehow.

A hiring company just wants you to make the thing with an optimal balance between quality and efficiency.

As I see it, one has a few options. A common one is just hoping everything will be okay. Often that turns out to be the case.

Another one is to proactively 'adapt or die'. Master the new way of making the thing even if it tastes bitter. Harder to do with age, but in some sense the obvious choice if you want to be competitive.

Speaking of, I think we often forget that - the world is one big competition for resources and survival. Happiness is a luxury, but we've converted it into a requirement.

I'm not saying I like any of this - I want to be secure for life following the same old patterns I've already learned as well.

But I consider that thought a comforting fantasy to be eyed with suspicion.

That said, thankfully, AI is still pretty good at enshittifying things, so I have a suspicion that one may not need to always adapt that enormously. I work with a lot of legacy software, and have seen that a lot of companies are full of old school tech debt for which hands on programming is still a must have.

Claude code or what have you is a little limited when you're writing code for obscure software packages which nobody knows the name of anymore, but on which some companies still depend for their core business logic.

Will it all dry up eventually? Sure. But slower than we expect methinks.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-30 02:49:18+00:00
While my instinctual reaction is the same, that's only because I've been hurt by losing work the same way presumable everybody else has. But that's all because Windows hasn't elected to solve this problem.

Macs (largely) don't have this problem, so it's clearly solvable. There isn't any inherent law of computing or the universe that says it should be this way.

I still press CMD+S on Macs every time I'm done typing in something, but that's only because I've been hurt and live with the trauma, so to speak. There's no reason to hurt others to learn a lesson that doesn't actually have any value.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-30 02:49:27+00:00
Leave your phone on silent permanently, setup your emergency contacts like partner and kids to ring on silent, and turn off all notifications except email and SMS/WhatsApp. That’s the key to a simple life. You won’t miss anything important and that realization is the most freeing.

And yes to your PPPS. My plan is to live out my favorite childhood book The Alchemist in New Zealand while retracing the LOTR filming sites with a herd of sheep and a shepherds crook. One of the sheep will be fitted with solar panels and Starlink though, cause I just gotta have my Love After Lockup.
by dd8601fn | 2026-01-30 02:50:14+00:00
> At a certain point, it makes a lot more sense to roll your own, maintain your own, and not let some company bleed you dry.

Everyone has this thought, at some point, about any serious software. Then they try rolling their own and realize they were relying on a LOT more than they thought they were, and every change someone asks for WOULD have been checking a checkbox in what they already had.

Also, now you traded your "specialized" people for only one or two people on earth who are familiar with a bespoke application.

It's closely related to the, "just make it work like Excel" problem in software development... seems like a simple 80/20 thing until someone is literally trying to remake excel from scratch inside every bullshit little application.
by vibrio | 2026-01-30 02:50:42+00:00
Knowing whether drugs work isn’t trivial. Patients are typically very heterogeneous in their responses to drugs. For example, pembrolizumab (the most successful cancer drug ever) typically only works in, say 30% of patients depending of the cancer type. Just throwing therapeutic ideas out there and letting physicians sort out how to use them and in which patients, isn’t a panacea. Looking at clinical data can be like star gazing even in planned studies. Structured, statistically powered studies, and costly rigorous assays on biomarkers and correlative studies are essential for understanding how and in what patients drugs are working. I’m all for expanding access to drugs, and there is abundant waste and greed in big Pharma and venture, but there are also people doing hard expensive science, medicine and manufacturing. Im not sure I have the answer. A “yelp for medicine” won’t improve immediate outcomes, nor longer term understanding and progress. A great and excruciating read about the tension there is a real-time blog (the story’s story) that was written by Jake Seliger unt he passed in 2023.
by treebeard901 | 2026-01-30 02:52:02+00:00
This can happen just being under investigation. Or worse, no arrest, conviction or investigation. Just word of mouth kind of stuff can do it.

Employers also have a convenient privilege to maintain these narratives about a former employee. This is employer to employer confidentiality where they can say almost anything about you to another potential employer and you never have the chance to hear it or correct it.

Everyone should support the ability of even a person with a conviction to continue working and contributing to society. It's kind of a civil death that leads to bad outcomes for those targeted.
by kulahan | 2026-01-30 02:53:07+00:00
Term life insurance really isn't expensive, and it's meant to take care of those you leave behind in an unfortunate event. Pay off some big bills so your partner isn't grieving AND homeless. Most of the people on this site are pretty well-off, and can/should afford an expense like this.

If you've got a 95% chance of death, take the pain pills and enjoy your final days. Don't bankrupt yourself and spend more time miserable, dying anyways.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-30 02:54:50+00:00
The reason attentive humans don't equal the Waymo here is reaction time. When a thing happens the human takes a moment to process what it means, and choose a reaction. It's not, by our standards, a long time but it's way longer than it takes the Waymo.

Going early means you slow early, which means you also take longer to reach the child, but you're braking for all of that extra time, so you're slowing down even more.
by torginus | 2026-01-30 02:56:37+00:00
I just wanna make the point that I've grown to dislike the term 'CRUD' especially as a disparaging remark against some software. Every web application I've worked on featured a database, that you could usually query or change through a web interface, but that was an easy and small part of the whole thing it did.

Is a webshop a CRUD app? Is an employee shift tracking site? I could go on, but I feel 'CRUD' app is about as meaningful a moniker as 'desktop app'
by deaddodo | 2026-01-30 02:57:55+00:00
The Dragon Quest series, while beloved, is hardly the epitome of peak SNES gaming. It’s always been (purposefully) extremely conservative and dated in its design.

If you’re gonna go for quality SNES RPGs that show the console shining, you’d be better off with Terranigma, the Final Fantasy series, Tales of Phantasia, Chrono Trigger, etc, etc.
by EvansWilson | 2026-01-30 02:58:10+00:00
If you want to know where the smart money is moving, you don't look at Twitter (or X) hype—you look at the filings. Specifically, the MSFT 13F reports.

As we roll into early 2026, Microsoft is at a fascinating crossroads. They just dropped a massive earnings report with record-breaking cloud revenue, but the market's reaction was... complicated. While Azure is pumping, the bills for all those AI data centers are starting to pile up.

So, are institutional giants like Vanguard and BlackRock doubling down on Satya Nadella’s vision, or are they quietly heading for the exits? Let’s look at what the latest paper trail tells us.

Decoding the MSFT 13F: Institutional Sentiment in 2026

Institutional investors own roughly 71% to 76% of Microsoft’s total float. That’s a huge "floor" for the stock, but it also means that when these big ships turn, they create massive waves.

The most recent MSFT 13F filings show a tug-of-war between two types of investors. On one side, you have the "Growth Believers" like Northern Trust Corp, which recently added over 11 million shares to its position. On the other, you have cautious trimmers like Webster Bank and Generali Investments, who shaved their stakes by a few percentage points this quarter.

The Top 3 Heavyweights

According to the latest 2026 data, the hierarchy at the top remains steady, but the conviction levels are shifting:

Vanguard Group: Still the king of the hill, holding over 9% of the company.

BlackRock: Close behind with roughly 7.8%. For these guys, MSFT isn't just a stock; it's a permanent fixture of the global economy.

State Street: Holds around 4%, acting as the third pillar of institutional stability.

The AI Reality Check: CAPEX vs. Cloud

Why the mixed signals in the MSFT 13F data? It boils down to one word: Spending.

Microsoft’s Q2 2026 results showed that while they are making a killing in the cloud (Azure grew a staggering 39%), they are also spending record amounts on AI hardware and infrastructure. Some active managers are worried that this massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) will eat into profit margins in the short term.

However, the "Buy the Dip" crowd is pointing to the $7.6 billion gain tied to their OpenAI investment as proof that the gamble is already paying off.

What Should You Do?

The takeaway from the latest MSFT 13F filings isn't that the "smart money" is scared—it’s that they are becoming more selective. While passive index funds have to hold MSFT, active managers are watching the 200-day moving average like hawks.

If you’re a long-term bull, the heavy institutional ownership is your best friend; it provides a technical floor that meme stocks could only dream of. Just be prepared for some "dead money" periods while the market waits for those billion-dollar AI investments to turn into bottom-line profits.
by oneplane | 2026-01-30 02:58:28+00:00
Don't enable anything you don't need. Use the OS-native priority modes; i.e. no Slack messages after 18:00, no general message notifications unless from specific contacts, disable web browser notifications universally etc. no notifications for unknown sources (seems to be an issue in some countries).

It also really depends on how you perceive the alerts on a device; some people have lots of feelings when they see a dot or a number on an icon, others might not care or give it any attention. If such things are a distraction for you, turn them off. Unless they give you value or have an important meaning, they are not worth your attention.

Depending on your hardware/software vendor, it might be capable of synchronisation between multiple devices so you don't end up getting notifications anyway, and it might have multiple profiles with time boxes, or location-aware or event-aware profiles. Some of them are self-learning (to various degrees of usefulness), but either way, reduce the device to what you need it for.
Show HN: I Built a Multiplayer Game in 4 Days Without Writing Code
by fcavalcantirj | 2026-01-30 02:58:29+00:00
I ran Claude Code in a loop for 4 days. It built a multiplayer strategy game autonomously. I only touched the code at the end for polish (~5%).

How it worked:

1. Asked Claude to interview me about the game design
2. From that conversation, it generated ~248 structured tasks as JSON
3. Created a simple loop: Claude picks a task, implements, tests, commits, repeats
4. Throttled to 3 tasks, 15min pause, to not kill my API quota
The script:
claude --permission-mode acceptEdits "@specs/prd-v1.json \
1. Read PRD. Pick highest-priority task. \
2. Implement. Run tests. \
3. Update progress. Commit. Push. \
ONLY ONE TASK AT A TIME."
Result: https://jarls-production.up.railway.app
Code: https://github.com/fcavalcantirj/jarls
The loop concept: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-harnesses-fo...

Not perfect — had bugs, ugly screens. But 95% was autonomous.

The bottleneck isn't coding anymore. It's thinking clearly upfront.
by stevefan1999 | 2026-01-30 02:59:34+00:00
Right now I'm running a setup with Fedora on my work machine, CachyOS on my laptop, Windows on my home battlestation gaming rig and a Mac Mini M4 I bought for a educational discount. I basically run 3 different kernels, and I feel the same with the author here.

Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.

Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.

I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)

But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-30 03:00:15+00:00
Nope. They followed the process, they bought from an approved, respected, supplier. The site meets the specification they drew up. There will be meeting notes from a few hundred meetings to document that everyone did their job properly.

For us techies who know the tech (or even the law, in this case) this is a disaster. But for the folks in those meetings this is what they understood to be the brief.

If enough of the public gets ahold of the story so that a politician has to get up on their hind legs and issue a statement, then harsh words might be had. But otherwise, this is business as usual.
by bombcar | 2026-01-30 03:01:01+00:00
Utilizing lounges well is an art in itself, and some planning is required - depending on the airport and the airline there may be multiple lounges and options.

But the cost (unless free) often ends up being somewhat similar to just parking at the bar anyway.

I prefer to not arrive THAT early. Maybe if I had more layovers I’d care more about it.
by stouset | 2026-01-30 03:02:10+00:00
> the human driver would usually drive more closely to the centerline of such a residential road

I certainly do this. But asserting that most humans would usually do this? Have you ever actually seen humans drive cars? This is absolutely not what they do. On top of that, they run stop signs, routinely miss pedestrians in blind spots, respond to texts on their phone, or scroll around on their display to find the next song they want to put on.
by mathrawka | 2026-01-30 03:02:28+00:00
You are funny. Anthropic refuses to issue refunds, even when they break things.

I had an API token set via an env var on my shell, and claude code changed to read that env var. I had a $10 limit set on it, so found out it was using the API, instead of my subscription, when it stopped working.

I filed a ticket and they refused to refund me, even though it was a breaking change with claude code.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-30 03:03:11+00:00
I was wondering how much convenience is worth one kid's life. This thread reminded me of some interesting terms like "value of statistical life." It appears that all those annoying low speed limits and purposeful obstructions in residential areas really do save lives.

> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced

https://www.rospa.com/siteassets/images/road-safety/road-saf...

The "Vision Zero" program was started in Sweden, and is becoming more widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-30 03:04:26+00:00
There is indeed a very strong and deep library of JRPGs to recommend, but I strongly disagree that DQ is not among the best. I recently replayed two of them in the past two years and both were still 10/10 experiences for me. They are conservative, sure, but that's not a bad thing. One of the points I was making about limited hardware is that polished simplicity can trump overeager complexity, and I think the DQ games are a shining example of that.