MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2026-01-23 02:30:20+00:00
It's a loaded word by this point. The luddites smashed stocking frame
looms. At first those looms were human powered, and then water powered, and then steam engines came onto the scene. Steam engines where when people got wrecked. Those things were a menace! They'd crush limbs, amputate fingers, give you horrible RSI, fuck up your lungs with all the dirt in the air. The worst part is that children were better for it because they have little fingers which were better at fixing the machines. The late 16th Century didn't have the legal system in place that we have. OHSA, labor law, unions, liability, insurance. Those are all things that didn't exist back then but do now.

So these days, saying you're luddite doesn't mean you care about your professional and personal communities, it says you're anti-technology and anti-progress. If you want to say you care about your professional and personal communities, just say that.
by Tiberium | 2026-01-23 02:30:32+00:00
Great project! Just wanted to talk about the "/ The edit problem" section in the blog post - it's almost entirely false. Inpainting (when you provide a mask) has existed for years, and for good edit models (such as Nano Banana Pro) you can annotate the image, and it'll only edit one part, keeping the rest almost entirely consistent. The same goes for other top editing models like Flux 2, Seedream 4.5 and so on.

Transparency also exists, e.g. GPT Image does it, and Nano Banana Pro should have it supported soon as well.
by rmunn | 2026-01-23 02:32:51+00:00
I could be wrong about him meaning the Greek philosophers (since I don't remember the rest of the lecture), though since it was the intro to a Philosophy 101 class that's who I assumed he meant at the time.

As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.

But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-23 02:34:05+00:00
...so some people develop their sills using something like RAD* tooling which lets them develop skills quickly, and some don't and end up taking longer but getting better eventual results?

Also, the ungated part doesn't say how they're measure "top" high-school vs university students. It doesn't match what I've heard about the persistence and consistency of basically all standardized tests; are they using within-school rankings for this? If so, that would fit perfectly with students being sorted during university selection.

.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-23 02:34:45+00:00
Here is my personal observation. Humans start by default as “Askers,” but society shapes them into either the “Askers” or “Guessers.” Kids don’t guess, they ask.

I have also observed that Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”

Growing up as an introvert, I remember many times when my guardians (uncles, aunties, grandparents, and parents) would interpret things differently than I thought they were. “My friend’s mom told me to come, play, and eat at their place today.” “No, they don’t. You need to come back after a while, not spend the whole day there.”

I learnt a lot of Guesses in school and social settings: Yes, that meant No, and Nos that were weirdly Yes, etc.

When I started working in the early 2000s, I worked with almost all US (and some UK and Australians) Companies and customers, from teachers and physicians to founders and businesspeople. Things were straightforward, “cut to the chase”, “get to the point real fast”, and the like.

Eventually, I have also worked with many Indian companies and teams. We are mostly Guessers. My colleagues and bosses have called me aside to explain the interpretation of quite a few interactions, which I thought I was doing the right thing, but I should not have (even when the clients agreed). I’ve also worked with the Japanese, and they were all Guessers to a degree, and I would love to, hopefully, take the time and effort to learn the culture a lot more.
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 02:34:56+00:00
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.

of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.

women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.

you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.

not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
by zuoning | 2026-01-23 02:35:36+00:00
Kutt AI is a professional AI video generation platform that turns text prompts or images into cinematic videos in seconds. You can create lifelike speaking avatars, swap faces or bodies, and animate characters with action imitation, all in HD and ready to share. The platform bundles top models like Wan and Seedance, offers over 100 effects, fast rendering, and commercial-use rights, so creators and teams can produce social clips, promos, and short films without complex editing.
by nandomrumber | 2026-01-23 02:37:11+00:00
> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe.

Yes, the _!ONLY!_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change.

Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit.

No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.

Lithium ion batteries, or a solid state alternative aren’t it. Not without being some orders of magnitude more energy dense and lighter. And you still need to electrify those sectors to be able to charge the batteries.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-23 02:38:11+00:00
> automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you

Just FYI, most of us maintain blacklists of sellers who do that and would never give business to one again, even if it requires paying more. If I bought something from you, that is not permission to email me anything other than a tracking number. Ever. If i like it -- i'll review it mysef. If i dislike it -- i'll email you. Note the direction of comms here.

Making you click a button per-order was perhaps Amazon's way to add friction to this -- to avoid poor users being spammed with endless review requests. I am sad that someone automated the friction away. I hope that one day amazon starts charging sellers a nontrivial fee per such email sent.
by fragmede | 2026-01-23 02:38:13+00:00
Midwives were replaced by the male-dominated medical industry, which initially raised infant mortality, nevermind women losing autonomy over birth.

Night soil collectors were replaced by partial sewage systems, which resulted in cholera and typhoid outbreaks.

Local butchers were replaced by meat packing plants. The Jungle tells us why this didn't go so well either.

In all three of those cases, we rushed to an incomplete solution before it was fully ready. In this case though, no one's banning humans from driving cars anytime soon, so that part of it will go okay.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-23 02:38:14+00:00
The fees that fund those protections don’t exist on the debit card.

It’s also fundamentally different. There are protections, but they depend on you being aware of the activity to avoid impact. Basically, in the event of fraud with a credit card, Chase or AMEX have a problem. With a debit card you have a problem until the resolve it. In the meantime, your payments and checks may not clear or hit overdraft.

As long as you can control your spending, credit cards are a real superpower for consumers.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-23 02:38:14+00:00
That in itself is a failure of society, that someone who has spent X amount of time in a home they love, have lived life in, raised their children in etc. is implicit expected to sacrifice all that so younger people can take the space.

We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 02:38:52+00:00
You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.

more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
by aoasadflkjafl | 2026-01-23 02:39:22+00:00
Well, this is why the funniest and smartest way people commit fraud is faking studies that corroborate very careful collaborators' findings (who are collaborating with many people, to make sure their findings are replicated). That way, they get co-authorship on papers that check out, and nobody looks close enough to realize that they actually didn't do those studies and just photoshopped the figures to save time and money. Eliezer Masliah, btw. Ironically only works if you can be sure your collaborators are honest scientists, lol.
by joecool1029 | 2026-01-23 02:39:31+00:00
> And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail

Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication.

I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly.

Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing.

Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle.
by MillionOClock | 2026-01-23 02:39:41+00:00
I very recently (~ 1 week ago) subscribed to the Pro plan and was indeed surprised by how fast I reached my quota compared to say Codex with similar subscription tier. The UX is generally really cool with Claude Code, which left me with a bit of a bittersweet feeling of not even being able to truly explore all the possibilities since after just making basic planning and code changes I am already out of quota for experimenting with various ways of using subagents, testing background stuff etc.
by skrrtww | 2026-01-23 02:39:55+00:00
This is pretty great stuff, I knew about the raw interop features but had no idea what API Notes offered. Quite cool.

I can't help but feel that Swift will ultimately be the "slow and steady wins the race" safe language of the future. Swift steadily working "first" on both tooling and cohabitability with existing ecosystems is a huge boon for adoption. It understands what an ABI is! If I were doing a greenfield cross platform application I think Swift would be the first thing I reach for now.

The qualms I have with Swift are mostly some of the more recent complex language features that can make Swift code much harder to understand and read, as well as the brainpower required to use Swift concurrency. That and some performance concerns, though many of those seem like they may be solvable with optimizations in LLVM.
by EB66 | 2026-01-23 02:40:12+00:00
Sharding can be made mostly transparent, but it's not purely a DB-level concern in practice. Once data is split across nodes, join patterns, cross-shard transactions, global uniqueness, certain keys hit with a lot of traffic, etc matter a lot. Even if partitioning handles routing, the application's query patterns and its consistency/latency requirements can still force application-level changes.
by mwhite | 2026-01-23 02:42:47+00:00
No, but I have read a lot of apparently AI-generated material without successfully identifying it as such to anyone else I know.

Maybe we are seeing different versions of the page? I hear a very powerful entity may rewrite any page on the fly.

Not sure if advisable to say. A network infrastructure operator with a human-level AI can potentially rewrite any content on the Internet in a granular fashion. Was hoping to get on the inside.
by ookblah | 2026-01-23 02:43:30+00:00
when i graduated it was more or less expected that you had roommates to save more money, even did the whole flex thing in nyc when i moved there. always the risk of bad roommates and did have them as well (yes, they were actually bad). never felt like it was a huge "sacrifice", more like once you lived alone it was hard to go back to having roommates (maybe this is a new thing starting from dorms arrangements now?)

hate to be the older guy saying "back in my day" but part of it feels true. housing affordability is definitely an issue, and i'm not advocating purposely accepting lower standards, but it's pretty interesting to see all the comments and justifications about why living alone is necessary post-grad as if these arguments didn't exist before.
by fragmede | 2026-01-23 02:43:41+00:00
Not for me. Right now, Thursday, ~7pm. The given Waymo ride I'm looking at is going to cost me $30. Uber black is $42, UberX is $20, UberXL is $25. Uber wait & save is $17. Lyft priority is $23, Standard is $19, Wait and save is $17, Extra comfort is $26, Lyft Black is $46.

The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-23 02:43:45+00:00
You quote Marx about keeping arms while sitting on your ass doing fuck all about the corruption and tyranny surrounding us. Sounds like convenient excuses to do fuck all and pat yourself on the back as a patriot defender of America. People are being killed on the streets RIGHT NOW. But keep biding your time to act. I'm sure you will be decisive in unraveling the fascism taking over our country you brave keyboard warrior!
by kmajid2 | 2026-01-23 02:44:37+00:00
Primary inference runs ground-side (K8s/GovCloud) to aggregate global data for routing. We do see the need for something like a hybrid-edge approach for tactical, sub-5s mitigation. We would target FPGAs (like Xilinx Versal) for production flight hardware to meet strict SWaP and radiation-hardening requirements.
by yonaguska | 2026-01-23 02:44:57+00:00
I have a friend that got a call/notification that her card was being used suspiciously. It may not have been from the bank. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but then very shortly after, someone else got her newly issued debit card and then used it at an atm in her area. The bank didn't believe that she wasn't involved. And despite filing a police report and giving them all the information that she could, she was out 2.5 grand, which was a big deal for her. BofA if anyone is wondering.
by magnio | 2026-01-23 02:45:05+00:00
Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me.
It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
by pc86 | 2026-01-23 02:45:23+00:00
One thing I didn't truly appreciate until my wife and I consolidated our spending and had children - having nearly every expense flow through a credit card puts total spending into perspective without having to look through bank statements or keep up a spreadsheet. Getting a $10k bill when you're expecting $8k (or a $30k bill when you're expecting $20k) can be a pretty jarring event and is a built-in monthly touch point to review budgeting and spending.

It wouldn't be quite the same impact spread out over 5 cards paid out of multiple checking accounts with slightly different billing cycles.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-23 02:45:31+00:00
I enjoy going into a city building game and thinking out exactly what I’d like the city to look like beforehand. But, it doesn’t always work because the city will eventually outgrow the original design.

The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.

I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
by idopmstuff | 2026-01-23 02:46:36+00:00
Maybe, though you might be surprised - first Upwork guy I hired did insanely bad work that was obviously horribly wrong, and I ended up getting it all refunded.

But in any case, tremendous errors won't actually cause me big problems, because I'd catch them on my review of the P&L. Small errors I might miss (whether committed by human or LLM), but they're not going to be material anyway.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-23 02:46:55+00:00
Yeah, these are funny.

There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).

Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.

Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
by deaux | 2026-01-23 02:47:10+00:00
Codex: Three reasons. I've used all extensively, for multiple months.

Main one is that it's ~3 times slower. This is the real dealbreaker, not quality. I can guarantee that if tomorrow we woke up and gpt-5.2-codex became the same speed as 4.5-opus without a change in quality, a huge number of people - not HNers but everyone price sensitive - would switch to Codex because it's so much cheaper per usage.

The second one is that it's a little worse at using tools, though 5.2-codex is pretty good at it.

The third is that its knowledge cutoff is further in the past than both Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 that it's noticeable and annoying when you're working with more recent libraries. This is irrelevant if you're not using those.

For Gemini 3 Pro, it's the same first two reasons as Codex, though the tool calling gap is even much bigger.

Mistral is of course so far removed in quality that it's apples to oranges.
by esprehn | 2026-01-23 02:47:10+00:00
This is never an issue with number of engineers, it's an issue of business priorities.

Large tech companies have plenty of engineers to fix bugs, but most of them are on projects trying to 10X things instead of paying down debt.

Apple used to be unique in it's immunity to it, they even shipped an OS update claiming it was only big fixes and not features which is unthinkable these days. Over time there's much less focus on polish from them though.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-23 02:47:57+00:00
Not strictly what the author is talking about, but I once made a mediumly-impactful change by reducing a single character from a 6 to a 5. I worked on controllers for three phase motors, and we did something called “third harmonic injection” to use about 15% more of the bus voltage than a naive strategy would. Somebody had previously remembered incorrectly, and was trying to command 16% more voltage, which would cause a math error and suddenly make everything crash. At the time, this was somewhat mysterious. Changing the 16 to a 15 fixed it, lol.
by roenxi | 2026-01-23 02:48:04+00:00
One aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro.
by idopmstuff | 2026-01-23 02:48:42+00:00
Sure, and I do my own accounting in Google Sheets. Each brand that I own is pretty simple, so this isn't that hard (and it's important to me that I do it myself to maintain context on my businesses).

That's why an LLM is good for bookkeeping for me - I'm not actually using the books in any strategic capacity, and I know the numbers in the business well enough that I'll catch any obvious mistakes. The books are purely to give to my CPA to do my taxes at the end of the year.
by twwch | 2026-01-23 02:49:02+00:00
We don't try to keep everything in context. Instead, we maintain a lightweight "memory index" (summaries) that's always present, and use LLM-as-a-judge to decide when to reload full content. This mirrors how humans work: we remember the gist of documents, and go back to re-read when we need details.

This approach trades 1 extra LLM call (for recall detection) for significant context window savings while preserving the ability to access full details when needed.
by dburkland | 2026-01-23 02:50:44+00:00
Solid list. I’d like to add the following:

- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day.
- macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint.
- macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working
- macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
by FridayoLeary | 2026-01-23 02:50:59+00:00
What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in.

And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-23 02:52:33+00:00
(2010) Popular in:

2022 (355 points, 469 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163930

2020 (176 points, 265 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501

2011 (490 points, 80 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998

2010 (66 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557