MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ecshafer | 2026-01-29 15:13:51+00:00
I had a coworker who had lived in Nigeria, working for the oil companies, with some pretty crazy stories. Duffle bags full of money guarded by squads of guys with machine guns being a normal day to day practice in some parts of the business. Extreme poverty right next to country clubs for the oil company staff. It wouldn't surprise me that they are up or town tens of millions of people.
by BoppreH | 2026-01-29 15:13:58+00:00
Yeah, I noticed the engineering issues. One of the few PlayStation games I've played where crashing was a regular occurrence, which made the lack of saves even more infuriating.

I wouldn't suggest removing steps entirely, but maybe something softer than abruptly ending the day. After exhausting my steps, let me walk around without drafting rooms and picking up items, for example.

And the late game puzzle quality was very hit-and-miss for me. I loved the sigils, for example, and appreciated the permanent upgrades/changes. Other puzzles required putting disparate items/ideas together, but by then the game had expanded too much and it was unclear what paths were exhausted, still useful, or simply fluff, and the randomness made every check time-consuming.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-29 15:14:02+00:00
The whole battery thing is a massive misunderstanding of how EVs work vs gas vehicles.

For an EV with a range of 250 miles (400km) you can drive 400mi (645km) with one (1) thirty minute stop.

That's pretty much, drive 3 hours, stop for 30 minute lunch, drive 3 hours.

The confusion stems from the fact that gas cars don't fill up themselves before you depart, and they don't fill up themselves when you arrive. There are rather large differences between gas and electric cars, but people still treat EVs like gas cars, and demand EVs be more like gas cars.
by mcurial | 2026-01-29 15:14:10+00:00
That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.
by yojo | 2026-01-29 15:14:26+00:00
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.

> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”

> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”

This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.

Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
by geminigemino | 2026-01-29 15:14:32+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. There are some O(n²) components (mate finding, pathogen spread, proximity), but they’re mitigated with zone-based spatial hashing and throttling, so it’s not naive all-vs-all.

One big recent win was actually on the rendering side: I was rebuilding complex morphology geometry every frame for large organisms. I’ve added caching for that, which significantly reduced spikes during population blooms.

At very high populations the sim tick itself becomes the bottleneck, even for mostly O(n) logic per organism. When populations crash (which they usually do ecologically), performance recovers.

Quad trees / more adaptive structures are on my radar, but I’m trying to balance complexity vs predictability for now.
by data_ders | 2026-01-29 15:14:35+00:00
I'm a big SQL stan here and I love the concept and if you ever wanna chat about how it might integrate with dbt let me know :)

conceptual questions:

1) why did you pick SQL?
to increase the Total Addressable Userbase with the thinking that a SQL API means more people can use it than those who know Python or Typescript?

2) What isn't or will never be supported by this relational model?
what are the constraints? Clickhouse comes to mind w/ it's intentionally imposed limitations on JOINs

3) databases are historically the stickiest products, but even today SQL dialects are sticky because of how closely tied they are to the query engine. why do you think users will adopt not only a new dialect but a new engine? Especially given that the major DWH vendors have been relentlessly competing to add AI search vector functionality into their products?

4) mindsdb comes to mind as something similar that's been in the market for a while but I don't hear it come up often. what makes you different?

playground feedback:
1) why are there no examples that:
a) use `JOIN` (that `,` is unhinged syntax imho for an implicit join)
b) don't use `*` (it's cool that there's actual numbers!)

2) i kinda get why the search results defaults to a UI, but as a SQL person I first wanted to know what columns exist. I was happy to see "raw table" was available but it took me a while to find it. might be have raw table and UI output visible at the same time with clear instructions on what columns the query requires to populate the UI
by jmyeet | 2026-01-29 15:15:03+00:00
> Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.

It's a study in many things.

Tesla only exists because of the transfer of wealth from the government. DOE loans, EV tax credits and other incentives are the difference between existing and not existing.

That's not necessarily bad. The problem is the government really gets nothing for their money. Look at how China incubates their businesses.

As an example, imagine where we'd be if the government had insisted on standardized charging infrastructure instead of Tesla's originally proprietary Supercharger network.

> If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B.

I could see it as high as $100B but not $1.5T. Not even close.

And I, too, would never bet against it. Nothing fundamental is behind Tesla's valuation. It's just gambling.
by varjag | 2026-01-29 15:15:10+00:00
Poor methodology or even some bug in an Excel macro at the UN headquarters could well be a reason behind the sudden, synchronous decline of population in all cultures and political systems of this planet.

And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse" of 1990s.
by mrjay42 | 2026-01-29 15:15:12+00:00
Just for info: in France, wearing a gas mask or anything covering your face during a legal and authorized protest is illegal. (law n°2010-1192 of 11 October 2010)

This is my way to say: you can choose to protect yourself, sure.

But laws can be changed, fast and easy. Particularly and actually always, when it serves the people in power and the system globally.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-29 15:15:17+00:00
> This just goes to show that for me, they're extremely effective.

I am not so convinced. Perhaps your case was simpler, but people can feel chronic depression. They may take some drugs to modify that, but what if the external factors won't change? You can see this issue for some people who have a disease that only gets progressively worse. I think we can not unify all this as "dislike on antidepressants" as a one-size-fits-all formula.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 15:15:24+00:00
There is a particular problem that comes with your line of thinking and why AI will never be able to solve it. In fact it's not a solved human problem either.

And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.

To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.
by ghaff | 2026-01-29 15:15:29+00:00
It's a pretty extensive system and the pretty new Elizabeth Line is great. But if you take something like the Piccadilly Line in from the airport, you probably shouldn't have a lot of luggage because a lot of stations just have stairs and platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars. (The double decker busses also work pretty well although they're not generally my default.)
by somenameforme | 2026-01-29 15:16:10+00:00
Brevity is a skill. Like Mark Twain wrote - I apologize for such a lengthy letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one!

In general I agree with you on both fronts - our disagreement is mostly going to be in the details and forecasts. For instance the impacts of climate change are already happening. Sea levels in parts of Florida have already risen more than 8 inches since the 50s. Yet beach front property is still selling for a premium. The point is that I expect it's going to be gradual enough that society will have time to adapt, even if the change over an extended period of time may be quite significant.

And I also completely agree that the healthcare systems pretty much anywhere in the world, government or privately operated, are dramatically more efficient than the US private system. But I don't think you can expect that to change if the government starts operating it. Medicaid's savings requires studies to measure since it's nominally more expensive/person than private healthcare. What savings there are, after a bunch of adjustments and assumptions, seem mostly explained by paying healthcare providers less per service, which is why a sizable chunk of places don't accept it. It doesn't really scream 'yeah, let's make this global and mandated' to me.

That said, I had a Norwegian friend visiting me over here in the other side of the world. He ended up getting an ear infection and went to the most premium local hospital to get it sorted out. Final charge to him = $0, even internationally. Enough to make anybody absolutely jealous, but I'm going to have a hard time believing America might be able to land on this Moon. Cheap and efficient just isn't the American way.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-29 15:16:18+00:00
It isn't good enough. There's far too much ambiguity and imprecision inherent in the language. Just look at how often it is that native English speakers misunderstand each other.

To make English (or any human language) suitable for use as a programming language means you need to very tightly constrain the language -- which would make it less suitable for human communications.
by ofirpress | 2026-01-29 15:16:21+00:00
[SWE-bench co-author here]
It seems like they run this test on a subset of 50 tasks, and that they only run the test once per day. So a lot of the movement in accuracy could be attributed to that.
I would run on 300 tasks and I'd run the test suite 5 or 10 times per day and average that score. Lots of variance in the score can come from random stuff like even Anthropic's servers being overloaded.
by moribvndvs | 2026-01-29 15:16:49+00:00
I’d always hated running. I’ve done C25K a few times with no problem, but once I reached that goal I felt I couldn’t make much additional progress. But the need to move and running’s simplicity and minimal requirements meant I kept trying every couple of years. I read/watched a little and got some tips from ultra runners and actually started to make progress. I was actually enjoying it and looking forward to running. Then I got the worst fucking shin splints imaginable where I had to nearly crawl halfway back home. Stopped running to heal, which took a very long time. I’ve tested a few runs but there’s still pain and I just don’t want to go through that again.

So now I row every day. I get a much better exercise high from rowing, progress is much more noticeable, it’s improved vitals more than running has, there’s no pain, and I don’t have to worry about weather. I occasionally miss the change of scenery or things like running on a cold snowy day but I can just go rent some cross country skis when I get that itch.
by CalRobert | 2026-01-29 15:17:13+00:00
This is irrelevant, though, since the size of the country isn’t what determines where people go. It’s not like trains got less practical when Alaska got admitted to the union.

Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it.

Here’s a video that explores the topic if you’re curious https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
by ModernMech | 2026-01-29 15:17:22+00:00
Honestly I haven’t seen that video before now but are you kidding me? First of all cars don’t break like that from a kick. Second of all where’d the ford logo on the car go? Clearly AI. Classic AI video tells, it’s not even subtle.

Sad for you that you fell for it but not expected. If you don’t see murder in the original cell phone videos, you’ll rationalize this any way you can.
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-29 15:17:34+00:00
>Do the children of immigrants have fewer rights than other citizens?

Your response doesn't even approach answering it.

Why is that? Are you unwilling to answer such a question? Did you misunderstand?

Your comment was completely unrelated to the question I asked. Especially since my parents are long dead (51 years and 28 years) and I haven't relied on parental support in 35+ years.

As I mentioned, I'm the child of a non-citizen immigrant. Do you claim that I have fewer rights than other citizens? If so, which rights, and what justification do you use to make such a claim?

That's not a rhetorical question.
by short_sells_poo | 2026-01-29 15:18:04+00:00
I see your point, but consider this: getting to and through a major airport is a huge pain the ass. Trains also tend to take you to city centers more often than airports, which almost always need to be a significant distance from anything interesting due to the noise.

Let's take a hypothetical scenario:

- 5 hours flight time (average for NY and LA), 2 hours on each side to get to and from the airport to the actual city. Total is 9 hours.

- 10 hours train time and 1 hour on each end (which is generous given the proximity of train stations to city centers), 12 hours.

The difference is not that much, and a train ride is so much less faff than a flight that it's not even funny. Little to no security theater, you don't get fondled by security agents, you don't have to stand hours in line with silly passport controls and luggage checkins/pickups. And the list goes on.

A good train infrastructure can be vastly more pleasant than a good air infrastructure. Where air wins out is intercontinental flights where trains are truly not an option anymore.
by jongjong | 2026-01-29 15:18:25+00:00
Nowadays there are a lot of contrarian ideas which are correct. Some such ideas I've had for maybe 10 years; started out as speculative thoughts that I dismissed initially but the evidence kept piling up. At first, it was just my personal experience, then other people I met started making similar observations. Then I kept researching and the more I learned, the more plausible it seemed. Now there are major media figures discussing some of those ideas in front of millions of people. Some of this stuff I really thought was just me being paranoid, now open topic of discussion at a societal level.

Just as one minor example, after working in blockchain space in Germany, I left the industry with a feeling that there was corruption in the sector involving government officials (just based on a lot of weird stuff I witnessed). At the time it was just a paranoid feeling; I couldn't make sense of what I'd experienced because I could not pin down a motivation. But fast forward a few years and I saw an interview in which Marc Andreessen mentioned that some US government officials under Biden actively went after certain blockchain projects and how some people were de-banked for apparently no reason.

This was interesting to hear because I had lost access to one of my bank accounts a few years prior and the bank wouldn't tell me the reason. I also got audited by the tax authorities in Germany, though my tax record was perfect (they had to concede). This was weird considering my income level was not that high and my situation was relatively straight forward. I'm still not fully settled on a conclusion there but every year, my worldview seems to make more sense.

I only recently managed to start taking advantage of what I'd been observing. For example, I anticipated the current precious metals rally a few years ago. Just based on my feeling/observation that crypto had been corrupted by governments and people would start looking for other assets. Before this, I just didn't have any capital to invest so I could not act on my accurate predictions; I could only watch in horror.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-29 15:18:45+00:00
It really was the argument there; that he'd been in business so long with such great returns that everyone assumed it had to have been looked into by everyone else.

> If a company was overvalued for a couple of years, it's ok to be sceptical. Tesla has been at such high valuations for many years now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff

"Madoff said that he began the Ponzi scheme in the early 1990s, but an ex-trader admitted in court to faking records for Madoff since the early 1970s."

The SEC stuff rhymes a bit, too:

"The SEC's inspector general, Kotz, found that since 1992, there had been six investigations of Madoff by the SEC, which were botched either through incompetent staff work or by neglecting allegations of financial experts and whistle-blowers. At least some of the SEC investigators doubted whether Madoff was even trading."

Now, Tesla actually makes stuff; it's not a ponzi. But it's a wildly inflated stock that looks entirely divorced from the business metrics available to us.
by ghm2199 | 2026-01-29 15:19:04+00:00
In medicine there is a concept of reporting adverse effects of medication or interventions which are then collectively studied for Public Health [MedWatch][VAERS][EudraVigilance] and in academia. We should have something like that for all coding agents(and agents in other fields too), given how widely its deployed and affect on "health" in general(not only human). Call it the AI "health" of things benchmark.

I would imagine a sort of hybrid qualities of volunteer efforts like wikipedia, new problems like advent of code and benchmarks like this. The goal? It would be to study the collective effort on the affects of usage to so many areas where AI is used.

[MedWatch](https://www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch-fda-safety-information-a...)

[VAERS](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety-systems/vaers/index.html)

[EudraVigilance](https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/resea...)
by Thlom | 2026-01-29 15:19:16+00:00
Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address. The last census was in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is that we will never have to do a form based census ever again and just use central registries instead.
by apercu | 2026-01-29 15:19:19+00:00
I did similar for about 25 years. I had one injury from overtraining (I basically ran 20 miles every Sunday morning for 6 months, in addition to two shorter runs each week) that ended up plantar fasciitis and I had to take 4-5 month off.

I stopped doing that sort of weekly long run after that and did a lot more in the 6-10 miles range.

Then during and immediately post-COVID shutdowns, I just started running every time I felt stressed about something, and I started to neglect all the other holistic movements that complement running.

This ended up leading to a weird twinge in my hip that 2 years of focused strength training hasn't eliminated. Doctor says there is nothing structural but I don't run any more and I miss it often. There is a flow state I seem to get in somewhere just under to just over an hour in to a run.

The only other time I ever get in to that wonderful flow state is every once in a while when playing guitar, but it's rare.

I does feel good to run, and I miss it.
by antirez | 2026-01-29 15:19:50+00:00
Why I do not believe this shows Anthropic serves folks a worse model:

1. The percentage drop is too low and oscillating, it goes up and down.

2. The baseline of Sonnet 4.5 (the obvious choice for when they have GPU busy for the next training) should be established to see Opus at some point goes Sonnet level. This was not done but likely we would see a much sharp decline in certain days / periods. The graph would look like dominated by a "square wave" shape.

3. There are much better explanations for this oscillation: A) They have multiple checkpoints and are A/B testing, CC asks you feedbacks about the session. B) Claude Code itself gets updated, as the exact tools version the agent can use change. In part it is the natural variability due to the token sampling that makes runs not equivalent (sometimes it makes suboptimal decisions compared to T=0) other than not deterministic, but this is the price to pay to have some variability.
by bloppe | 2026-01-29 15:20:21+00:00
I agree that it's unconscionable to consign a centenarian to unwanted labor, but the article says this is not the case for Ginny.

Also, wages in the US have not stagnated at all. Wage growth in the poorest quartile has outpaced inflation and that of the other 3 quartiles.

Perhaps this is a bit of projection by the British Guardian.
by roxolotl | 2026-01-29 15:20:33+00:00
> This is an art project and should not be conflated with reality. Also, I don't know what you're on about. AI generated nonsense is great. It's like the single use plastics of culture. Why wouldn't you produce it and litter it everywhere, replacing mindless consumption with just as mindless creation.

For those not reading to the end this is the point of the piece.
by gkfasdfasdf | 2026-01-29 15:20:51+00:00
> And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.

Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am. At least one major insurance company agrees [0]. I don't have any experience with Super Cruise though.

[0] - https://www.lemonade.com/fsd
by j4cobgarby | 2026-01-29 15:20:53+00:00
Use only default (white/black), red for bad, green for good. If you need more than that, like vim or whatever, then maybe a 'fullscreen' TUI is better, with a specified background and foreground. For CLI tools, I'm not sure if I prefer more colours.

The CSS to make the terminals look like iTerm was smooth, to the point I read them as screenshots.