MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsch | 2026-01-29 23:42:51+00:00
A human driver travelling at the same speed would have hit that child at exactly 17 mph, before their brain even registered that child was there. If that driver would also have been driving a large SUV that child would have been pushed on the ground and ran over, so probably a fatality. And also functionally nobody would have given a shit apart from some lame finger pointing at (probably) the kid’s parents.

And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either:

Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults. And honestly even for adults stepping out a bit from behind an obstacle in the path of a car is an easy mistake to make. Don’t forget that for children an SUV is well above head height so it isn’t even possible for them to totally avoid stepping out a bit before looking. (And I don’t think stepping out vs. running out changes the outcome a lot)

This is why low speed limits around schools exist.

So I would say the Waymo did pretty well here, it travelled at a speed where it was still able to avoid not only a fatality but also major injury.
by jdmoreira | 2026-01-29 23:44:16+00:00
Almost certainly these people know way way more than you and a lot of knowledge is tacit knowledge and cant be explained easily.

Also don't trust anything from college that are not hard provable facts. Just don’t. Trying to learn "best practices" in college is total BS.

For example, I was already quite experienced when I worked with a specific really good older engineer. I knew he was very good but I thought he was wrong about some things and I was right. We had some debates.
I kept thinking about those things for years. Now I know he was right about all those things. Yeah, he was right about everything I remember disagreeing with at the time. Took me years to figure it out.

So here is an advice to my younger self: Shut up and put in the thousands and thousands of hours first.
by godelski | 2026-01-29 23:44:16+00:00
People seem to be misunderstanding what's going on here. Running the particle accelerator generates a lot of heat and thus needs a pretty large scale cooling system. What this is saying is instead of dumping the heat into the atmosphere pump it towards homes.

Is this a good source of heating? I mean yeah, the heat is being generated anyways. Should you build a particle accelerator to heat homes? Fuck no. But if you already have one, why not?
by tobyjsullivan | 2026-01-29 23:44:37+00:00
Skills allow progressive disclosure of information. The theory is an agent will load the skill when it needs access to the specific information.

Skills are listed in the system prompt so an agent should, in theory, know which are available and when to use them.

The author is claiming the agent never loads the skill unless explicitly instructed to.

This somewhat matches my experience, though my agents do load skills at least some of the time. Just not nearly as often as I’d want.
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 23:44:50+00:00
>The human is accountable.

That's an orthodoxy. It holds for now (in theory and most of the time), but it's just an opinion, like a lot of other things.

Who is accountable when we have a recession or when people can't afford whatever we strongly believe should be affordable? The system, the government, the market, late stage capitalism or whatever. Not a person that actually goes to jail.

If the value proposition becomes attractive, we can choose to believe that the human is not in fact accountable here, but the electric shaitan is. We just didn't pray good enough, but did our best really. What else can we expect?
by WJW | 2026-01-29 23:44:54+00:00
First: Almost anything can be profitable if you have free inputs.

Second: Even solar and wind are not really "free" as the capital costs still depreciate over the lifetime of the plant. You might be getting the power for near-zero or even negative cost for a short while, but the power cost advantage will very quickly be competed away since it's so easy to spend a lot of energy. Even remelting recycled metals would need much less capital investment than even a previous-gen datacentre.

That leaves the GPUs. Even previous gen GPUs will still cost money if you want to buy them at scale, and those too depreciate over time even if you don't use them. So to get the maximum value out of them, you'd want to run them as much as possible, but that contradicts the business idea of utilizing low cost energy from intermittent sources.

Long story short: in might work in very specific circumstances if you can make the numbers work. But the odds are heavily stacked against you because typically energy costs are relatively minor compared to capital costs, especially if you intend to run only a small fraction of the time when electricity is cheap. Do your own math for your own situation of course. If you live in Iceland things might be completely different.
by bentocorp | 2026-01-29 23:45:10+00:00
I agree that it says that people are willing to pay more, more often, for a smartphone than they are willing to pay for laptop and desktop computers.

However, how you can then extend this to:

> The market has spoken and they love the locked down, walled garden approach.

The market hasn't been given the opportunity to choose a more open iPhone or a closed, locked-down iPhone.

When the market is presented with both options, at variable prices, we can then determine what, if any, people are willing to pay for one vs the other.
by sundarurfriend | 2026-01-29 23:45:19+00:00
Not extensively. The few interactions I've tried on it have been disappointing though. The Voice input is really bad, like significantly worse than any other major AI in the market. And I assumed search would be its strong suit and ran a search-and-compile type prompt (that I usually run on ChatGPT) on Gemini, and it was underwhelming at it. Not as bad as Grok (which was pretty much unusable for this), but noticeably worse than ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini has other strengths that I haven't come across yet, but on that one at least, it was

ChatGPT 5 ~= Claude > ChatGPT 5.2 > Gemini >> Grok
by aanet | 2026-01-29 23:45:24+00:00
> In your experience, where do we find a credible source of info? Do we need to wait for the government's investigation to finish?

Most likely, yes, the NHTSA investigation will be credible source of info for this case. HOWEVER, Waymo will likely fight it tooth-and-nail from letting it be public. They will likely cite "proprietary algorithms / design", etc. to protect it from being released publicly. So, net-net, I dunno... Will have to wait and see :shrug.gif:

But meanwhile, personally I would read reports from experts like Phil Koopman [1] and Missy Cummings [2] to see their take.

> Remember Tesla's blog posts?

You, Sir, cite two companies that are diametrically opposite on the safety spectrum, as far as good behavior is concerned. Admittedly, one would have less confidence in Waymo's own public postings about this (and I'd be mighty surprised if they actually made public their investigation data, which would be a welcome and an pioneering move).

On the other hand, the other company you mentioned, the less said the better.

[1] http://www.koopman.us/

[2] https://www.gmu.edu/profiles/cummings
by chmod775 | 2026-01-29 23:45:49+00:00
> I honestly cannot imagine a better outcome or handling of the situation.

It's the "best outcome" if you're trying to go as fast as possible without breaking any laws or ending up liable for any damage.

German perspective, but if I told people I've been going 30km/h next to a school with poor visibility as children are dropped off around me, I would be met with contempt for that kind of behavior. I'd also at least face some partial civil liability if I hit anyone.

There's certainly better handling of the situation possible, it's just that US traffic laws and attitudes around driving do not encourage it.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-29 23:46:26+00:00
> it is better to use that than to go it alone.

frankly I don't think in any even half modern country you can go at it alone. I struggle to imagine how someone would physically manage to evade public authorities here in Germany where schooling is mandatory and any kid not in the education system would sooner or later be caught. There's barely even a place so remote authorities or other citizens would notice you and report you. You couldn't go to the doctor or anywhere really without identification or insurance.

So I think it's less of a function of trust and more simply of modernity, you're not going to escape attention for too long unless you're a trained spy or something
by daxfohl | 2026-01-29 23:46:56+00:00
I think there's an argument that AI is helping the (non-AI) software job market. If tech companies are seen as laying off "too fast", then investors will penalize them for not retaining enough people to compete in AI. So companies have to do some layoffs, both to rebalance for the economic downturn and to claim "progress in AI", but not so much that it makes them look weak to investors. Whether they actually need the employees for anything is secondary.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-29 23:47:08+00:00
The key finding is that "compression" of doc pointers works.

It's barely readable to humans, but directly and efficiently relevant to LLM's (direct reference -> referent, without language verbiage).

This suggests some (compressed) index format that is always loaded into context will replace heuristics around agents.md/claude.md/skills.md.

So I would bet this year we get some normalization of both the indexes and the referenced documentation (esp. matching terms).

Possibly also a side issue: API's could repurpose their test suites as validation to compare LLM performance of code tasks.

LLM's create huge adoption waves. Libraries/API's will have to learn to surf them or be limited to usage by humans.
by reactordev | 2026-01-29 23:47:09+00:00
Have other games put together open world and mystery? Yes.

I have a feeling you haven’t played those games otherwise you’d see the similarities.

Yes, I am ABSOLUTELY looking at the mechanics of the game. I’m also looking for innovation. Take something someone tried (maybe it was a big part of their design) and make a full blown out version of it. Pushing the genre in either a new direction or opening one up. Outer wilds did neither. Not to say it wasn’t a good game. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying outside of those that played it, it will be forgotten. It changed nothing. It came, it endeared, it left.
by anticlickwise | 2026-01-29 23:47:29+00:00
I’ve seen plans fail that were technically solid. Clear goals, reasonable timelines, capable people and full agreement in the room.

Yet execution slowed weeks later. Not loudly. Quietly.

What I eventually realized was missing wasn’t alignment or process. It was confidence. People had agreed, but they didn’t fully believe the plan would work. After decisions are made, doubt rarely gets voiced. It feels late, political or unproductive. That doubt goes underground and shows up later as hesitation, delay or quiet disengagement.

I’m a solo maker and built a very small experiment to surface that signal early, essentially a lightweight confidence check before execution. I’m less interested in the tool itself and more curious about the practice.

How do you handle this? Do you explicitly check confidence before committing?

Or do you rely on signals that appear during execution?

Would appreciate perspectives from people who’ve lived this.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-29 23:48:03+00:00
I fly often and I think the airport hate is overblown.

Airports are designed to keep large groups of passengers moving as efficiently as possible, and as a result they need to make some tradeoffs. Airports aren't and shouldn't really be designed for sleeping - there's a thing called hotels for that. A lot of airports have capsule hotels paid per hour for exactly this purpose.

The root cause seems to be airlines aren't actually forced to provide enough compensation to cover a hotel. Regulation would be a much easier solution than redesigning airport to accommodate sleeping.

Only complaint I agree with is the "please do not leave your bags unattended" spam on the PA. Whoever came up with that idea deserves a couple years of solitary confinement with said PA in the cell, for increasing the danger due to alert fatigue and people completely tuning out the PA, making the channel completely worthless.
by imiric | 2026-01-29 23:48:31+00:00
That's quickly becoming difficult to determine.

The workflow of starting dozens or hundreds of "agents" that work autonomously is starting to gain traction. The goal of people who work like this is to completely automate software development. At some point they want to be able to give the tool an arbitrary task, presumably one that benefits them in some way, and have it build, deploy, and use software to complete it. When millions of people are doing this, and the layers of indirection grow in complexity, how do you trace the result back to a human? Can we say that a human was really responsible for it?

Maybe this seems simple today, but the challenges this technology forces on society are numerous, and we're far from ready for it.
by ghaff | 2026-01-29 23:48:46+00:00
NY to Philadelphia is relatively fast. There was a faster train on that route even before Acela (Metroliner). Boston to DC is a fairly long day by train and, while I've done it, no business person who is really on a schedule is going to vs. taking a pretty short flight. (And, if you're really going city to city, both cities have close-in airport options.)
by fragmede | 2026-01-29 23:49:04+00:00
> Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.
It's simple arithmetic.
It's a story problem.
If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?

> You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.

-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
by schmichael | 2026-01-29 23:49:04+00:00
I honestly never noticed memory pressure. I am not a heavy app user. Chat, browsing, and pictures of my kids are the vast majority of my phone usage. Not exactly intensive stuff.

The camera button on the 16 seems to have been perfectly engineered to be exactly where I grab my phone. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but in the mean time I have so many blurry photos of desktops and pants to enjoy.
by d3m0t3p | 2026-01-29 23:49:17+00:00
Yea but the goal it not to bloat the context space.
Here you "waste" context by providing non usefull information.
What they did instead is put an index of the documentation into the context, then the LLM can fetch the documentation. This is the same idea that skills but it apparently works better without the agentic part of the skills.
Furthermore instead of having a nice index pointing to the doc, They compressed it.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-01-29 23:49:30+00:00
It would be interesting to see if they have an updated version of a model that employs this training technique. According to the paper it scored well on release (65.8% on SWE bench), but by now it no longer scores competitively against the latest generation open coding models (e.g. Devstral Small 2).

I wonder whether other labs have implemented something similar to this approach. Perhaps code world modeling isn't actually necessary (relative to other simpler techniques) to achieve the kind of deep environment understanding that the paper touts as being important to improve agentic coding performance.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-01-29 23:49:33+00:00
Consider what the oath actually says.

> I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan. Similarly I will not give a pessary to a woman to cause abortion. But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art.

Now consider that Doctors in Canada and Europe are literally administering MAID as we speak. In other words, administering poison with intent to kill. Further, consider that doctors have participated in administering lethal injections, etc. I could go on all day.

But you'd invoke the Hippocratic Oath to deny people with fatal diseases access to potentially curative treatments, though admittedly experimental? That's a funny view of the oath you've got there, and either an uninformed or very funny take on medical ethics, as well.
by pwdisswordfishs | 2026-01-29 23:49:47+00:00
> The PlayStation 2’s library is easily among the best of any console ever released, and even if you were to narrow down the list of games to the very best, you’d be left with dozens (more like hundreds) of incredible titles. But the PS2 hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth

Besides the library, the PS2 is the most successful video game console of all time in terms of number of units shipped, stayed on the market for over ten years, featured a DVD drive, and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer with their own oficial PS2 Linux distribution.

In a more perfect world, this would have:

(a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two: a smidge better than the former, but not quite as exotic as the latter (with its Cell CPU or the weird form factor; whereas the PS2's physical profile in comparison was perfect, whether in the original form or the Slim version), which could have:

(b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and the market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units even if/when Sony discontinued it themselves, periodically revving the platform (doubling the amount of memory here, providing a way to tap into higher clock speeds there) all while maintaining backwards compatibility such that you would be able to go out today and buy a brand new, $30 bargain-bin "PS2 clone" that can do basic computing tasks on it (in other words, not including the ability to run a modern Web browser or Electron apps), can play physical media, and supports all the original games and any other new games that have/had explicitly targeted the same platform, or you could pay Steam Machine 2026 prices for the latest gen that retains native support for original titles for the very first platform revision but unlocks those for every intermediate rev, too.
by cxvwbvb | 2026-01-29 23:49:52+00:00
ermmm youre missing a bigger point.

MSFT, GOOG et al have an enormous army of engineers. And yet, they dont seem to be continually releasing one hit product after another. Why is that? Because writing lines of code is not the bottleneck of continually producing and bringing new products to market.

Its crazy to me how people are missing the point with all this.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-29 23:49:56+00:00
Glorified shopping malls to maul you in to insanity. Duty-free my arse.

My last trip was at xmas and I was waiting for the bus back to home. I decided to stretch my legs and went to the kids arcade. Put a quid in to a mechanical fortune teller machine which freaked on me and refused to tell me my fortune.

It ripped me off a quid and I missed the bus.
by JustinELRoberts | 2026-01-29 23:50:13+00:00
I once moved into a new apartment, built a new PC, but noticed that every 30 or so minutes while gaming my monitor would turn off. It was just frequent enough to make gaming intolerable. One day I was plugging something in and moved my DisplayPort cable slightly and my monitor turned off again. Turns out it was too close to the antennas for the WiFi card I had; it was inducing a current in the DisplayPort cable and the monitor’s firmware didn’t know what to do so it just crashed! I moved the cable slightly further away and it never happened again.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-29 23:50:55+00:00
I spent some time trying to understand what OpenCode.nvim gave me, could do for me. It felt mostly like ways to take nvim things and inject them into OpenCode. Which was fine I guess. I'm probably underselling it, but I was hoping for more, and it never really clicked.
https://github.com/nickjvandyke/opencode.nvim

I find myself spending much more time in OpenCode than in nvim these days. With mcp-neovim-server, it's super easy to keep vim open & ask OpenCode to show me, to open files, go to lines. This didn't require any nvim tweaking at all, it's just giving the LLM access to my nvim. It is absolutely wild how good glm-4.7 has been at opening friendly splits, at debugging really gnarly wild nvim configuration problems that have plagued me for years. It knows way way way more nvim than I do, and that somehow surprised me.
https://github.com/bigcodegen/mcp-neovim-server

Definitely interest in the ACP angle. I feel like we're in a weird spot where ACP is this protocol where the thing you do use talks to the headless thing you don't ever see. I'd love to know or see more than that. These connections feel 1:1, but I want to see human interaction in every agentic system, not for there to be this me -> ide -> ACP agent flow with the ide intermediating all, being the sole UI. It should be able to do that yes!! But I also want an expectation that there can be multiple forces "driving" an ACP service.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-29 23:50:56+00:00
> And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either: Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults.

I get what you are trying to say and I definitely agree in spirit, but I tell my kid (now 9) "it doesn't matter if it isn't your fault, you'll still get hurt or be dead." I spent a lot of time teaching him how to cross the street safely before I let him do it on his own, not to trust cars to do the right thing, not to trust them to see you, not to trust some idiot to not park right next to cross walk in a huge van that cars have no chance of seeing over.

If only we had a Dutch culture of pedistrian and road safety here.
by Helios999 | 2026-01-29 23:51:00+00:00
I'm a developer who realized my biggest bottleneck wasn't the code, but the distribution. I hate writing marketing copy. I built GitViral using Next.js and Groq (Llama 3.3) to automate my technical social posts.
It's tuned specifically for technical accuracy—no AI 'cringe' or excessive emojis. I'm currently in beta and giving 3 free credits to everyone to test the output quality. Would love to hear if the 'Technical X Thread' it generates is actually useful for your repos.
by pamcake | 2026-01-29 23:51:02+00:00
One key insight is that bundles are really sets of packages and that what we're doing when we bundle things is really just set join operations. Imagine the possibilities if we implement arbitrary set operations. So a bunch is defined as a set of bundles (which can themselves be down to a single package of course) and the declarations in the Aptbundlefile translates under the hood to references and set operations. This is not only declarative, it's also purely functional. Still working on if arbitrary set operations should be accessible by DSL in Aptbundlefile or if that should be left to tools building on top of intermediary API. So yeah, parallels to Nix for sure but it's still apt packages, not building the world from source.
by tracerbulletx | 2026-01-29 23:51:05+00:00
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phib.12268?u...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23663408/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/371/1708/201...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20068583/