MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulnpace | 2026-01-29 13:25:06+00:00
While the surpassing is true, something I've found interesting is that across very different industries that have nothing to do with one another, and including publicly traded and private (though still huge) companies, I have heard directly from buyers that top management has given them a directive to find new suppliers in China.

From a supply chain management perspective, this does not make sense. The directive should be something like "find the best suppliers on the planet."
by rozenmd | 2026-01-29 13:25:09+00:00
I always saw it as bimodal (even before LLMs) - you have folks working in regular shops making average comp, and you have the big tech elites earning high base + equity comp.

The Pragmatic Engineer argues it's actually trimodal (at least in Europe): https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
by arghwhat | 2026-01-29 13:25:28+00:00
For reference, golang's mutex also spins by up to 4 times before parking the goroutine on a semaphore. A lot less than the 40 times in the webkit blogpost, but I would definitely consider spinning an appropriate amount before sleeping to be common and/or best practice for a generic lock.

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...
by gilrain | 2026-01-29 13:25:53+00:00
This is like claiming everyone is making coffee wrong and then describing how to make a cappucino with city roast Nigerian dry-process beans.

Yep, cool. That’s a recipe. For one type of preparation. With one type of bean. And one style of roast.

The ignorance of global tea culture in the west, including Britain, is very cringe.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-29 13:26:03+00:00
This isn't betamax vs VHS. It's VHS vs a clone of VHS. The long view necessarily has to account for R&D, long term business partners, and lots of other externalities. The fact that both manufacturers will have a new model of VCR out next month, and yet another the month after that, really has nothing to do with the conundrum I gave voice to.

I'll also note that there's zero vendor lock-in in either scenario. It's a simple question about the tradeoffs of indirect parasitism within the market. I'm not even taking a side on it. I don't even know for certain that any given open weights Chinese model was trained against US frontier models. Some people on HN have made accusations but I haven't seen anything particularly credible to back it up.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-29 13:26:18+00:00
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI

Microsoft's early mover advantage in AI has run its course, and its shares have fallen by about 11% since their peak last October.

The company's quarterly results were disappointing, with capital expenditures coming in higher than expected, which led to a decline in shares in after-hours trading.

Microsoft is facing pressure to show a return on investment in AI, and its advantages in the industry are dwindling, with other companies like Google and Anthropic making significant progress.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-29 13:26:21+00:00
> It’s incredible how some engineers assume they understand economics, then proceed to fail on some of its most basic premises. This tends to happen when engineering-style certainty is applied to systems that are driven by incentives and uncertainty.

Dunning Kruger effect, am I right?

We consider we are smart because we can make computers go beep boop so we know about the economy too. I mean, I am part of this too even though I (or we all) know the effect but I guess my point is that there should be an humility if we are wrong.

I can be wrong, I usually am. If someone corrects me, I would try to hopefully learn from that. But let's see how the author of this post responds to the GP's (valid, from what I can tell) critique.

Edit: Looks like they have already responded (before I wrote it but I forgot to see their comment where they said that its not at the scale or frequency we see in tech)
by Friedduck | 2026-01-29 13:26:25+00:00
I had two friends (both PHDs, both worked for the CDC) leave the US this week.

In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.

Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.

I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.
by sebastianmestre | 2026-01-29 13:26:28+00:00
I used to love Pomodoro until I found out that it goes against my own interests.

I was a teenager with focus issues when a teacher introduced me to Pomodoro. It was great because I was finally able to get my schoolwork done (I would regularly fail 3-4 classes every year before this). The general structure he gave was as follows:

- You split time into work/rest intervals

- At the start of each work interval, you set a 15-minute timer and plan out what you are going to do in the interval

- When the timer goes off you HAVE to stop

- Then you set a 5-minute timer and rest until it goes off

- Repeat until you are done

Back then, the "planning every interval" part was hard for me but just forcing me to rest was enough to do what I needed to do. In reality, 90 minutes of homework wasn't enough to make me tired (I would go on 10-hour long programming sessions with no breaks on the regular), just emotionally tired, bored, or frustrated. The breaks solved that.

I think the timings he suggested are adjusted for younger people (15 work minutes instead of the more common 25, and no long break after N cycles). As I grew up, I slowly lengthened the work and rest periods up to 25min work and 7min rest.

The benefits of Pomodoro are Three-fold as far as I can tell:

- You plan out your work, so you spend a higher % of work time doing stuff that matters.

- You rest regularly, so you are able to keep working for longer.

- You limit rest time, so you spend a higher % of time working.

Recently, after I mentioned I use Pomodoro, one of my mentors made the observation that the interest of a paid worker is not to work as long as possible during your work hours. Instead, it's to get your work done as easily and effectively as possible, get paid (hopefully make your boss and coworkers happy, get a raise and promotion every once in a while), and get out.

Doing the math, with my flavor of Pomodoro (25/7, no long breaks) you end up working 5:30-hours out of an 8-hour workday (it's roughly 5:10 with the technique taken straight from Wikipedia). I wonder if he meant that it's possible to be very effective while working significantly less than 5 hours a day. I wonder how much I could get done in just 2 or 3 hours of fully focused work, and how I would feel about it at the end of the day.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-01-29 13:28:04+00:00
Looking back on the history of Windows, one of the things that most stands out to me as a user is the utterly insane UX around the C++ redistributable. They really should've figured out a better solution than having every single application ship their own copy along with a separate installer, and then having the installer run always because the developer cannot be sure if it's installed correctly. As I understand it, this might still be a problem with the latest version? If someone like Steve Jobs had been responsible for Windows he would've fought with managers, lawyers, and engineers until the problem was resolved.
by buran77 | 2026-01-29 13:28:36+00:00
> It is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist

Just here to point out that from a legal perspective, fraud is deliberate deception.

In this case a tourist agency outsourced the creation of their marketing material to a company who used AI to produce it, with hallucinations. From the article it doesn't look like either of the two companies advertised the details knowing they're wrong, or had the intent to deceive.

Posting wrong details on a blog out of carelessness and without deliberate ill intention is not fraud more than using a wrong definition of fraud is fraud.
by stego-tech | 2026-01-29 13:28:51+00:00
…bruh. Literally the very first line:

> I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT:

Subjective is doing the carrying, there. I am admitting up front that this is specific to me, my career, and the specific life experiences I’ve had with it thus far.

Like…I won’t even entertain the rest of your comment if you’re not even going to read the entirety of mine before vomiting out an “UhM aHkShUaLlY” retort.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-29 13:29:07+00:00
> The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective, but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists.

I don’t know how rampant that problem actually is, but I don’t think you should discount the impact of social stigma when it comes to mental health. It is only in the past 10 to 15 years, at least in the US, that mental health has entered public dialogue in any meaningful sense. Historically it has been a source of massive shame with people expressing embarrassment at their loved ones suffering from mental health crisis. And now we have a whole generation of influencers and politicians who are trying to tell people to pour out all their medications, reject doctors wholesale, take their specific brand of colloidal silver, and be free.

I just think this is a lot more complicated than “psychiatrists abuse the diagnosis.”
by pbronez | 2026-01-29 13:29:35+00:00
Several years ago I wanted to buy an electric car. I didn’t like Musk, so my plan was “anything but Tesla.” Chevy Bolt was unavailable due to the fire problem. Cadillac Lyriq and Hyundai Ioniq 5 weren’t out yet.

I drove everything available to buy in my area. My real options were the Mustang Mach-e, Volvo XC40 Recharge, Hyundai Kona, Polestar 2. I decided to test drive a Model Y for completeness.

And CRAP.

The Model Y was obviously the best car. So much more refined than the other options. Way better charging network. 7 seat option. The only real downside was the zany CEO.

Fine, I thought. I’ll live with it.

I bought a Model Y and love it.

But.

I’ll never buy another Tesla. I have a bumper sticker disavowing the CEO. I paid off its loan so nobody would make money from me owning a Tesla. I honk support at the No Kings protestors outside the local Tesla facility.

I think the only thing that can save Tesla is a crash/buyout/relaunch. Get Musk out of the picture. Reset the stock price to something sane. Ditch the distractions. Release a Model 2. Keep expanding the SuperCharger network.

That’s a long hard road. Nobody involved makes money in that scenario. It’ll only happen when there are no other options.

As for me, I’m driving my Model Y until the wheels fall off. With the bumper sticker.
by sznio | 2026-01-29 13:29:52+00:00
covid was a last gasp for zirp. the interest rates were growing since 2016 and would've remained high if not for the pandemic.
covid required a quick return to zirp to save the economy from a crash, then required a quick return to high interest to save the economy from inflation.

if not for covid, the zirp era would end more gently. covid overhiring was the last hurrah for companies to use the low interest. if not covid, there wouldn't be overhiring and subsequent firing

the market would be as bad as now (or dare i say, *normal*), but it would be stable bad, not whiplash.
by dassarin | 2026-01-29 13:29:54+00:00
The article even states that nothing here is written in certainty. It’s just pure speculation. No, fish oil and vitamin D do not have a larger effect than SSRIs for depression.

Not to say they don’t help, but it’s asinine to state that nutrients are a replacement for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, whose sole purpose is to help with depression, and has been designed by an army of scientists, researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists.
by cong-or | 2026-01-29 13:30:12+00:00
I built hud after getting burned by blocking in async Rust services during one too many 2am debugging sessions. Blocking on Tokio worker threads can quietly tank throughput and explode p99 latency, all without panics or anything obvious in the logs.

Most profiling tools technically work, but they expect you to reason clearly, correlate timelines, and keep a full mental model in your head. That’s fine at 2pm. At 2am, it’s hopeless. hud’s goal is to reduce cognitive load as much as possible: show something visual you can understand almost immediately.

The UI is modeled after a trans-Pacific night cockpit: dark, dense, and built to be readable when you’re exhausted.

Under the hood, hud uses eBPF to track scheduling latency—how long worker threads are runnable but not running. This correlates well with blocking (though it’s not a direct measurement). You can attach to a live process with no code changes and get a live TUI that highlights latency hotspots grouped by stack trace.

The usual suspects so far: std::fs, CPU-heavy crypto (bcrypt, argon2), compression (flate2, zstd), DNS via ToSocketAddrs, and mutexes held during expensive work.

Tokio-specific (worker threads identified by name). Linux 5.8+, root, and debug symbols required.

Very open to feedback—especially around false positives or flawed assumptions. Happy to answer questions.

https://github.com/cong-or/hud
by codingdave | 2026-01-29 13:30:26+00:00
I'm not sure I follow the correlations of cool startup/government as it relates to boring/meaningless. You can have both boring and interesting people in both startups and in governments. Likewise with meaning - there are startups and government jobs at both extremes.

Overall, I don't think boring people and meaningless work are correlated enough to force a choice between them. Why do you think this choice is something we will face?
by simondotau | 2026-01-29 13:30:33+00:00
I agree with stringent regulations with respect to apps other than interactive entertainment. I disagree about interactive entertainment because I don't think that moral arguments for marketplace regulation extends to video games. Especially when it comes to cross-platform games like Fortnite. Nobody is forced to make games for iOS. Epic Games were certainly not forced to do business with Apple any more than Bungie or Naughty Dog weren't.
by otherme123 | 2026-01-29 13:31:50+00:00
Tires are not mentioned here. You could rotate them every 10 miles and still have faulty brake disks and axle suspensions.

- Brake disks are not a regular maintenance piece. Brake pads are the pieces that need replacement every 30.000 kilometers, depending on how hard you use them. But brake disks can outlast the car.

- Axle suspension is also not regular maintenance piece. Damper, bushings and springs need supervision and get changed every 80.000 kilometers or so. But to change an axle suspension without a serious hit to the car is very weird.

Unless you are using brake disks and an axle suspension designed for a 1,000 kg lighter car. In that case, you might end with twisted or broken pieces after a few thousand kilometers.
by radpanda | 2026-01-29 13:31:54+00:00
I’m an American living in a state with no roadworthyness inspections so I don’t have any first hand experience with this. But in previous threads, people have mentioned that the typical thing to do is, at the vehicle service (oil change or whatever) prior to the inspection, you mention “hey, my car needs to get the roadworthyness inspection soon, can you look it over for that while it’s in the shop?”. And if something is wrong, it’ll be brought to your attention and fixed before the official inspection. Then you show up for the official inspection and oftentimes, it goes smoothly. The pro-Tesla theory is that BEVs require less service so people don’t catch these things prior to official inspection.

Seems like if that’s true of BEVs generally one could find similar trends with Nissan Leafs, etc.
by 0xC0ncord | 2026-01-29 13:32:01+00:00
>Scott Hennessey, the owner of the New South Wales-based Australian Tours and Cruises, which operates Tasmania Tours, told the Australian Broadcasting Network (ABC) earlier this month that “our AI has messed up completely.”

To me this is the real takeaway for a lot of these uses of AI. You can put in practically zero effort and get a product. Then, when that product flops or even actively screws over your customers, just blame the AI!

No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame. Companies have been doing this ever since they went digital. Ever heard of "a glitch in the system"? Well, now with AI you can have as many of those as you want, STILL never accept responsibility, and if you look to your left and right, everyone is doing it, and no one is paying the price.
by servo_sausage | 2026-01-29 13:32:12+00:00
The big wins I've seen with llm tools is in translation more than the actual code.

We have been able to move our "low cost" work out of India to eastern Europe, Vietnam and the Philippines; pay per worker more, but we need half as many (and can actually train them).

Although our business process was already tolerant of low cost regions producing a large amount of crap; seperate teams doing testing and documentation...

It's been more of a mixed bag in the "high skill" regions, we have been getting more pushback against training, people wanting to be on senior+ teams only, due to the llm code produced by juniors. This is completely new, as it's coming from people who used to see mentoring and teaching as a solid positive in their job.
by poizan42 | 2026-01-29 13:34:01+00:00
I can't make any assesment on the quality of the paper as that is far outside my expertise, but as far as I can tell from a quick skim it does indeed make the claim that recommendations for supplements should be significantly increased.

From the abstract:

> The safe upper limit for children can easily be
increased to 2,000 IU of vitamin D/day, and for adults, up
to 10,000 IU of vitamin D/day has been shown to be safe.
The goal of this chapter is to give a broad perspective about
vitamin D and to introduce the reader to the vitamin D
deficiency pandemic and its insidious consequences on
health that will be reviewed in more detail in the ensuing
chapters

The full article is available on researchgate[1]. Direct link to PDF [2].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226676251_Vitamin_D...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Holick/publicat...

EDIT: I just looked up the author, Michael F. Holick. Apparently he is one the people who identified calcitriol in 1971. I know appeal to authority doesn't prove anything, but it might be prudent to at least consider his findings.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-29 13:34:26+00:00
Tangent… but for sweaty feet, try a ski boot dryer!

You can get them for $50… they dry out my shoes which makes them last a lot longer before they get so smelly I have to throw them away. Plus, who doesn’t like warm shoes in the morning?

That, and there are some creams called Sweat Block or whatever you can rub on your feet which reduce sweating. Those work as well.
by vel0city | 2026-01-29 13:34:31+00:00
If the $10k robot only lasted 5 years that's a budget of $2k/yr. They have an expectation of someone cleaning most nights of the week. Cleaning services around me will typically charge ~$50/hr. Having someone come for ~2 hours 5x a week means $500/week. You'll blow your budget in four weeks. There are a lot more than four weeks in a year.

But let's be generous and suggest you'll actually get someone willing to come out for just one hour and work for half the pay of market rate. Sixteen weeks. Still far short of 52 weeks.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-29 13:34:40+00:00
> but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists

Well that but also they have poorly understood long term effects even after being discontinued (in some people, not others) and they don't work for everyone. The latter is probably most of the reason they get hated on. I don't recall the source but a given antidepressant only works for something like 1/3 or less of the population. So take a person not in a great place emotionally, who is also statistically not in a great place in life overall, subject them to an insufferable bureaucratic process, give them a drug that doesn't end up working for them, add in some pretty wild side effects, sprinkle on a few long term effects that persist after they discontinue the thing that didn't work to begin with, and of course you end up with a bad reputation.

The tl;dr is that our understanding of the brain and mood disorders kind of sucks.
by troupo | 2026-01-29 13:34:42+00:00
> I don’t know, actually look at your wheels and brakes every few thousand miles instead of let them ride for tens of thousands without service?

Let's read the text further and see the description for the winner, Mazda 2, emphasis mine

--- start quote ---

Mazda 2. Only 2.9 percent of these French-manufactured Japanese hybrid compacts turn up at their first periodic technical inspection with significant faults at an average mileage of 29,000 kilometers.

--- end quote ---

And then:

--- start quote ---

At the bottom of the table, the Tesla Model Y took over in last place from the Tesla Model 3 (17.3 percent). Second to bottom was the Ford Mondeo (14.3 percent), while the third from bottom was the Tesla Model 3 at 13.1 percent.

--- end quote ---

So, at regular inspection intervals (as proscribed by manufacturers and regulators) Teslas show significant faults.
by caminante | 2026-01-29 13:34:42+00:00
>some other event unrelated to the tariffs introduces

I appreciate your good faith approach to discussion.

IMHO, this has devolved into semantics and has fallen astray from the original discussion above.

Here's an example to demonstrate semantics:

1. Trump put tariffs.

2. USMCA (read: NAFTA 2.0) exemptions, pre-existing policy, started to get used more to avoid tariffs.

They are unrelated in that the policies are different. However, they are related because companies became more incentivized to use the exemptions as a result of the tariff. Nothing new (AFAIK) was "introduced" on just this combo alone.
by goalieca | 2026-01-29 13:34:46+00:00
That's such a poorly argumented and long-winded article that no human would ever write. It's also full of inflammatory language. None of the arguments are actually well constructed, it's random facts that are loosely strung together without addressing the main concerns that people have. The data is also not consistent with many sources i've found, seems to be cherry picking or taken out of context. There's mountains of words here and i do not wish to waste my day on such obvious slop.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 13:34:51+00:00
Not to mention, the code is quite obviously vibeslop...

Why are they building CLIs and tooling in this way? Don't they realize that shipping low quality code will eventually hurt them more than whatever UX benefits it gives developers? People will give up on using this quicker than the attention you get from launching it.

Just one example that shows how little they care, since the commit message is obviously written by an agent/LLM, the code surely is as well: https://github.com/microsoft/winappCli/commit/3dead8ed147917...
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-29 13:35:02+00:00
Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years?

A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
by b800h | 2026-01-29 13:35:08+00:00
I think some of the positive effects are very quick (better sleep) whereas others take longer to materialise. My wife commented after maybe 2-3 years that I had become much more organised. I think that happened because I came off caffeine and then adapted over time to having a different brain chemistry, so I learned techniques to organise myself that I wouldn't have stuck to had I carried on consuming caffeine.