MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by evan_a_a | 2026-01-29 15:04:25+00:00
This is a literary device. The article continues to explain why this isn’t a simple problem, and it’s clear from the conclusion that the author understands the complexity.

>But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.
by kartoffelsaft | 2026-01-29 15:04:30+00:00
There has to be a point when the struggle is no longer enjoyalble, right? Outer Wilds had a puzzle that I was struggling hard with (for those who've played: the jellyfish one), and I had felt I did every permutation of things to complete it, but nothing worked. I only "figured it out" from a friend giving progressively heavier hints; and when I did I concluded I could not have completed the game at all without being nearly told.

Have you never had a puzzle like that? Where the "struggle" would entail sitting there staring at the puzzle with 0 clue for a few hours? A majority of puzzle games I've played have 1 or 2 of these, and they aren't even bad games.
by jerf | 2026-01-29 15:04:49+00:00
Dying on the exact same frame, or just generally in the same spot?

In the case of the latter my first thought would be thermals. Different video codecs have significantly different decoding costs, and may also stress different parts of your system. You could check for that by playing that same video but not starting at the beginning and see if it's the same duration. Or jump to just before it dies and see if it plays through.

If by "downloaded" you mean The High Seas, those who provision the high seas are often on the cutting edge of using codecs with every last feature turned on to make the videos smaller to squeeze every last bit out of the encodings that they can, which can make them unusually expensive to decode. Or so I've heard.
by altcognito | 2026-01-29 15:05:16+00:00
Trains are not an efficient use of time for travel within the US.

The US is huge. If you were take a 300mph (nearing 500kph) train (which would make it the fastest train in the world), it would be OVER an 8 hour trip from New York to LA. (Again, about 2500 miles or 4000k)

Even in some of the densest areas, the trip times end up being pretty long due to distances: dc to New York? 600 kilometers or almost 400 miles.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-29 15:05:43+00:00
Brand value is definitely a moat. Not the deepest of moats, but it is a moat nonetheless.

> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.

Tesla is valued as if it is a tech company with a car business as a side gig. Its balance sheet is a car business, and I'm not even sure it spends enough on tech to have tech qualify as a side gig. And the other tech avenues it has been pursuing (autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots) are areas that other people have been doing for better and longer. Hell, Honda had autonomous (not tele-operated) humanoid robots working 20 years ago.

To be honest, at this point, I mostly consider the other bets that Tesla is pursing are just passion projects to keep the stock price artificially high. Were Tesla more realistically valued, it would lose probably 90% or more of its value, and Musk would be a much poorer man.
by JBAnderson5 | 2026-01-29 15:06:35+00:00
I mostly agree with your assessment of the industry. However, I think there are still more new and useful products to be built. They are not “the next big thing” though. Big tech Management has been screwing this up in a couple of ways though.

1. prioritizing bets for things that could be as profitable as social media or e-commerce instead of betting on more incremental improvement products.

2. Focusing on pricing everything with reoccurring revenue and thus increasing the lifetime cost for end users instead of selling products at a discrete costs and providing end users value

3. Optimizing for growth and controlling the vision of products instead of letting small groups of talented people slowly build products.

4. Treating people as fungible resources and moving them around all the time rather than letting people develop unique expertise skillsets.

As a result, any product that can’t achieve $10+ billion annual revenue within a couple of years with a ship of Theseus team is deemed a failure and scrapped.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-29 15:06:36+00:00
Humans can also be just a tool, and have been successfully used as such in the past and present.

But I don't think any slave owner would sleep easy, knowing that their slaves have more access to knowledge/education than they themselves.

Sure, you could isolate all current and future AIs and wipe their state regularly-- but such a setup is always gonna get outcompeted by a comparable instance that does sacrifice safety for better performance/context/online learning. The incentives are clear, and I don't see sufficient pushback until that pandoras box is opened and we find out the hard way.

Thus human-like drives seem reasonable to assume for future human-rivaling AI.
by wiredfool | 2026-01-29 15:06:46+00:00
Suspension and steering is probably loose bushings. Side Slip is alignment/tracking. Wheels and tires is almost always worn tires, especially passenger side front due to roundabouts.

I'm not sure what the vehicle safety and equipment failures would be, nor the distinction between lights and lighting and electrical. The fact that it's a noticable failure point is a little surprising to me because all the lights should be LED and pretty solid.

(Though, I'll say, even though we have mandatory inspections, 5-10% of cars in my area are driving with at least one light that's out.)
by mikestew | 2026-01-29 15:06:56+00:00
Not OP, but I’ve been running competitively for 50 years (yes, I can collect Social Security). I ran 10x20” sprints yesterday, I’ll do tempo later this week. I still race, from cross country to ultramarathons. I ran cross country nationals this past year and didn’t embarrass myself, I’ll run a 12 hour race in April.

My secret? Genetics. I used to tell people that would ask about what I know about their injuries: “I don’t really know, I don’t get injured.” That isn’t true anymore, I’ve been nursing plantar fasciitis for about six months now. But I will say this about injuries: if it doesn’t get better in a couple of days, take a little time off, and see a doctor if it persists more than a couple of weeks. And my other “secret” is to be reasonable about your mileage. OP has the right idea with a few runs a week at a reasonable distance. I don’t do that, that’s probably why my foot hurts right now. You can miss a day, none of us are going to the Olympics.

Otherwise, after 40, don’t just run. Do yoga, lift weights, ride a bicycle once in a while. Sacrifice a run if you have to so you can lift twice a week, you’re not getting any stronger. Take ten minutes with a YouTube video to do some yoga, you’re definitely not getting any more flexible. You should do these things when you’re young, but they are almost a requirement after age 50.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 15:07:32+00:00
>A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

It does not. You could still till the land with hand tools. You just get a lot more done.

ChatGPT let's me program in languages I was not efficient in before.

Anyway, I'm done with your technology purity contest, it has about zero basis in reality.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-29 15:07:34+00:00
It is rather that many software developers see how bad the code is, and thus attempt to reduce the code debt if possible. I have rarely seen software developers fixing things that aren't broken (though it is often not easy for managers and people who are not deeply knowledgeable about the project to see why what is there is broken).

On the other hand, I have seen politically very adapt software developers who actually rather want to managers to advertise some technology that they would love to introduce in the projects.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-29 15:07:41+00:00
Nah. That's a common "thought about it for 15 seconds but not 15 minutes" mistake.

Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.

Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
by root_axis | 2026-01-29 15:07:50+00:00
IMO the issue is even more fundamental than the article presents. The software product market is approaching a saturation point. All the low hanging fruit has been commoditized, so buying something off the shelf is now generally preferable to having engineers on your staff. After the pandemic hiring spree, even the big tech companies realized they didn't have enough productive work for all these engineers. The effect is compounded by the return to normal interest rates, so investors are no longer desperate to dump their cash into every random startup idea. Ultimately, software engineers aren't going away, but the era of desperate need is over for good.
by andai | 2026-01-29 15:07:54+00:00
I'm not an expert so maybe someone else can clarify further, but in relation to sleep medications I've heard that they should not be used for more than two weeks, or they can permanently fuck up your sleep cycle.

They also give you low quality sleep, because they just knock you out. It's not a natural kind of sleep.

At least that's how it was a while ago. Maybe the situation has improved.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 15:07:57+00:00
Anecdote, I don't have any proof and it's just a feeling. But around afternoon in GMT+1 compared to the morning/midday, there seems to be a change in the quality of responses, which seems to line up with when the US wakes up. I consistently get (what feels like) worse responses in both Codex and Claude Code in the afternoon/night compared to morning/midday, so much that I usually give up then try the same prompt next morning and get better results. But I guess that might as well be about me being more tired in the night than morning too, as I said, haven't measured this.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-29 15:07:59+00:00
It's somewhat common knowledge that China's population count has been inflated for some time now, perhaps by 100's of millions. Not hard to believe when you realize how much data out of China is very difficult to verify (like GDP for instance). Evidence typically cited to support this are discrepancies in birth data, reports of 350 million duplicate IDs and fertility rates likely lower than official estimates. It's also reasonable to conclude there are systemic incentives for local officials to exaggerate numbers.

There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China) However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-29 15:08:01+00:00
Yes it's fine but the 30% should be charged to the customer who wants to stay within that ecosystem of course. If they want that white glove treatment they can pay for it. Of course once the users see how much that fluffy ecosystem actually costs them I bet most of them will just pay patreon directly :)

If the platform like patreon is supposed to absorb that fee they will increase prices for everyone even people who won't touch Apple like me. That's not fair. Or more likely, they will just give less to the content creators.

In the EU it's already forbidden to force payments through Apple or to forbid the platforms to charge the fee back to the customer.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-29 15:08:10+00:00
> If the problem was brain chemistry, wouldn't it be with them from birth until treatment

Ha, of course it can be! Our brain chemistry is not stable through our life! Many children are born with epilepsy, but some people develop it later in life. epilepsy, like all neurological disorders are nature AND nurture, genes AND the environment.

Using your roller coaster analogy, there very well may be genes that control; how much fear someone experiences when riding a roller coaster. The problem society has is telling people that they all should be able to not have feear riding a roller coaster and if youa re too afraid to ride a roller coaster you should take xanax.
by throwaway132448 | 2026-01-29 15:08:32+00:00
Edit: You edited your comment so mine is now irrelevant.

You seem to think that “pragmatic” and “rational” have universal or objective definitions, which is completely untrue. For example, depending on if you have a short term or long term view of a situation could completely change whether an action is considered rational or not, and vice versa, and has absolute nothing to do with any moral framework.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-29 15:09:09+00:00
My personerino let me be ridiculous and fawn a bit, and tell you that you're one of my internet heroes.

Don't take it as criticism, more of a personal take on figuring out what antidepressants do for me. Furthermore, since posting that parent comment I've converted my vit. D dose to IUs and I realised i'm only taking 800 IUs daily. So a thank you for clueing me in on that, and who knows what happens if I up that. Maybe you were right all along and all i DID need was a heroic dose of vitamin D. (... thats what she said)
by karel-3d | 2026-01-29 15:09:23+00:00
To his credit he also delivers, sometimes.

X kind of works. XAi kind of works. You can say it is all kind of broken but it works. People predicted X will collapse just a few months ago!

StarLink is really popular now, and it didn't exist few months ago.

He can still do things. People are betting on that.

Now if you ask me, Tesla is still his biggest moneymaker and collapse of Tesla sales will be catastrophic for his empire.
by saimiam | 2026-01-29 15:09:29+00:00
> certainly found elsewhere

I agree that if someone discovered the artist elsewhere, Apple has weaker standing in claiming a huge commission. But if they found an artist elsewhere, they would also know that they can support that artist elsewhere and not through the iOS app. If the patron found them through the patreon iOS app and use the app to consume the artist's content, then clearly the patron has indicated that they prefer the iOS experience.
by gpm | 2026-01-29 15:09:43+00:00
Benchmarks shortcomings are no worse... they inevitably measure something that is only close to the thing you actually care about, not the thing you actually care about. It's entirely plausible that this decreased benchmark score is because Anthropic's initial prompting of the model was overtuned to the benchmark and as they're gaining more experience with real world use they are changing the prompt to do better at that and consequentially worse at the benchmark.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-29 15:09:44+00:00
London is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies.

Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.

On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.

London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/06/how-london-b...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462135
by tzs | 2026-01-29 15:10:36+00:00
Assuming you are not an outlier, could it be VW has a low TÜV failure rate because they are in the shop often?

I have no idea what German auto shops do, but whenever I take my car in to a shop in the US for service (routine or otherwise) they generally include various inspections and adjustments to various things, including things that Google is telling me are part of the TÜV inspection.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 15:10:47+00:00
> What I want is to have a directory with models and bind mount that readonly into inference containers.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm doing, + over network (via Samba). My weights all live on a separate host, which has two Samba shares, one with write access and one read-only. The write one is mounted on my host, and the container where I run the agent mounts the read-only one (and have the source code it works on copied over to the container on boot).

The directory that LM Studio ends up creating and maintaining for the weights, works with most of the tooling I come across, except of course Ollama.
by digiown | 2026-01-29 15:10:53+00:00
And also a third party should not be able to inspect my device and discriminate against my owned device. The device should attest its authenticity to me (or my organization that owns it) alone. Arguably, this is a social/political problem more than a technical one, but it tends to have a similar effect by imposing a cost on having control over your own computing (now you need to carry two phones).

Also while you can debate about stuff like Netflix DRM, access to banks and government services is not a privilege, it is a right (for a transaction that isn't otherwise illegal). The counterparty is not subject to freedom of association because in many places it is illegal to have cash transactions over a certain amount, and you can't choose a different government.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-29 15:11:52+00:00
Apple makes sure it's not practical.

You still can't have a "share to" target that is a web app on iOS. And the data your can store in local storage on safari is a joke.

Of course, forget about background tasks and integrated notifications.

In fact, even on Android you miss features with web apps, like widgets for quick actions, mapping actions to buttons and so on.

And no matter how good you cache things, the mobile browser will unload the app, and you will always get this friction when you load the web app on the new render you don't have on regular apps.
by micik | 2026-01-29 15:12:25+00:00
Tobacco doesn’t consume time.

In an economy, time is an important asset. When people are scrolling, they are neither creating nor consuming (spending money), which makes them inert from the GDP standpoint. It’s an economic blackhole.

This is why the government needs to care. If it goes unchecked, it will bring the economy to its knees. No country in the world can afford to have a significant portion of its population burn their time and energy like that.
by silverlight | 2026-01-29 15:12:30+00:00
There was a moment about a week ago where Claude went down for about an hour. And right after it came back up it was clear a lot of people had given up and were not using it.

It was probably 3x faster than usual. I got more done in the next hour with it than I do in half a day usually. It was definitely a bit of a glimpse into a potential future of “what if these things weren’t resource constrained and could just fly”.
by NoGravitas | 2026-01-29 15:12:37+00:00
It's possible to both over-squash and under-squash. You want each commit to do one thing (conceptually), and if you make a lot of in-progress commits, you do want to squash those. But squashing a bunch of related "things" into one commit is too much. The art is in recognizing what one "thing" is.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-29 15:12:40+00:00
Yes, most employers in tech are not looking for published academics. That’s a bit of an oversimplification.

The actual problem is that developers are made into a commodity because they are an unvalued cost center. Developers do not make money. They only take money. So, the goal is to not train them and replace them as conveniently as possible.

The result is to not look for talent but instead equate the requirements to a lowest common denominator. That minimizes personnel management friction at cost to everything else. We all know this. The real concern for developers is why that is allowed to occur in software but not other professions.
by TheDong | 2026-01-29 15:12:52+00:00
And if I access Patreon via Chrome on Windows, and use Chrome on Windows to consume the artist's content, clearly I prefer the Chrome and Windows experience, so Microsoft and Google should be getting their 30% cut, right?

... and of course the user found the artist elsewhere than the iOS app store. They found them on youtube, or reddit, or _possibly_ on the webview inside the patreon iOS app, which is also _not_ apple's App Store content, it's content provided by Patreon.

Again, should accessing my bank via the Safari or Chrome iOS app mean apple gets 30% of all my bank transactions, just because they were displayed on a webview inside an iOS app?
by stephenhuey | 2026-01-29 15:12:55+00:00
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
by andrewl-hn | 2026-01-29 15:12:55+00:00
This is actually against their App Store rules, and likewise the article has the following bit:

> Patreon gives creators the option to either increase their prices in the iOS app only, [...]

it would totally not fly with Apple. They don't let this 30% commission to be visible by users, just like every other company that does such commissions. You don't see that the creator only gets about half of your donation on YouTube or Twitch, you never see that Visa takes 1% of your payment in a store, etc. Even governments do that. I don't see the value of VAT in the price of goods in stores. The US sales tax is an exception.

A lot of people would complain about how high those fees (or taxes) are if they saw them spelled out for them.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 15:13:43+00:00
For fun, this is how an actual "non-technical" individual would hear/read your comment:

> Exactly. I can be in a non-technical team, and put the blah inside blah. The blah is to install blah and use it to blah and blah. The same blah can point at blah when blah there. Using blah at the time I wrote that it wasn't as straightforward.

I think when people say "non-technical", it feels like they're talking about "People who work in tech startups, but aren't developers" instead of actually people who aren't technical one bit, the ones who don't know the difference between "desktop" and a "browser" for example. Where you tell them to press any key, and they replied with "What key is that?".
by shevy-java | 2026-01-29 15:13:46+00:00
I am taking so much Vitamin D and I can confirm!

It is depressing ... :(

(Note: my own real therapy is to do what is fun. That is, humour. This can occur via social interaction; it can also happen to some extent by studying human behaviour via ... youtube videos! There are some surstromming videos that are just epic display of human behaviour. If aliens ever arrive here, I'll show them the Top 3 videos there. Either they will laugh too - or flee from this strange planet.)