MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 17:57:04+00:00
The purely 'luddite' argument is rather obvious. Exploring the effects of that new path of money are somewhat more interesting to me. I believe that the cash flow will be much more concentrated, both by geography and cohort.

Even just taking it at face value that "the vast majority of the 35% of the fare that would have gone to the drivers will now go to '401k's" is interesting! Currently most drivers for Lyft/Uber are in the bottom 50%ile of wealth in the USA, and they are currently getting that 35% cut. The bottom 50% of the USA hold nearly no stocks at all. 50% of the S&P500 shares are owned by the wealthiest 1% of the USA.

Also, computers and looms were perhaps a bit different - the result of their automation was a product that actually cost less than their equivalent human labor could produce. Waymo currently charges more than Uber and Lyft, but still takes significant market share.

I do expect them to be cheaper eventually, but they'll also have an opportunity to establish market monopolies and then raise prices again. Sure, uber and lyft driver supply is obviously elastic, but possibly not quite as elastic in the very long run - it took a lot of capital to raise the current driver base for Uber+Lyft, and I'm not sure that can be repeated, say, five years after people stopped driving for them.

Of course people have to get new jobs as the world churns. But all of these other effects are interesting too! And, many, many people never really attain those new jobs. I don't think that's Waymo's "fault" as a moral judgment if the reality is that removing money from these jobs will lead to increase in squalor. It's just a pretty stark example of the rich getting richer.
by danny_codes | 2026-01-22 17:57:21+00:00
IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out.

What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
by 9rx | 2026-01-22 17:58:04+00:00
> i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.

From what I'm seeing out there, the big row croppers are largely leading the pack in bringing sustainable improvement to soil quality. It has become abundantly clear that, even if you aren't concerned about the soil, that these modern practices are actually leading to higher yields, improved efficiency, and ultimately greater profitability. — It is small farms that are often struggling to adapt, lacking sufficient capital and/or cashflow needed to transition away from their old tools and methods.

Which big farms are you basing your comment on?
by toast0 | 2026-01-22 17:58:26+00:00
Do you need a guarantee or is enough that it's painful enough for the BSD maintainers when they remove syscalls that they rarely do it? It's even worse if they renumber them so that really doesn't happen outside of syscalls that were only briefly available in a development branch.

Varies a bit by flavor: OpenBSD values security more than stability, so they are willing to break old binaries more often; FreeBSD does require compat modules/etc for some things, but those are available for a long time and sometimes something slips through.

If they break old syscalls, it breaks your code that skips libc, but it also breaks running an old userland with a new kernel and that needs to work for upgrade scenarios. It also breaks binaries that were statically linked with an older libc. When a new kernel breaks old binaries, people stop upgrading the kernel and that's not what maintainers want.
Show HN: AgentShield, The missing safety layer for Cowork and AI Agents
by tomsun28 | 2026-01-22 17:58:28+00:00
Hey, I'm Gong Chao, currently working at Zai.

Last weekend after playing football and heading home, an idea suddenly popped into my head. I got the urge to build it and spent the whole weekend hacking it out — *AgentShield* .

Nowadays everyone's using Cowork, Claude Code, or various AI agents to manipulate files and write code. It's awesome, but sometimes AI goes "crazy" and messes up your files, making it impossible to revert to the original state (don't ask me how I know... ).

For code, you have Git, but that requires commits, and it's not friendly for large files.

AgentShield puts a shield around your workspace, monitoring file changes in real-time. When things get messed up, you can *rollback with one click*, giving you a *"regret pill"*.

Under the hood, it uses zero-copy technology and takes up no space. This tool is dedicated to all the brothers who've been screwed over by AI. Welcome to try it out!

https://github.com/tomsun28/agentshield

PS: I've only tested it on macOS
by alfalfasprout | 2026-01-22 17:58:33+00:00
> Similar to the media, I've picked up on vibes from academia that have a baseline AI negative tilt.

The media is extremely pro-AI (and a quick look at their ownership structure gives you a hint as to why). You seem to be projecting your own biases here, no?

And how would those LLMs learn? How would you learn to ask the right questions that further scientific research?
by freakynit | 2026-01-22 17:58:38+00:00
Both the cultures suffer from "a senior is always right" mentality. Therefore, with my juniors, I used to intentionally (sometimes, and mostly during early days of their joinings) make stupid little mistakes (harmless) and used to let those folks figure that out and then appreciate them on catching it. Worked like wonder. Never ever anyone hesitated to discuss anything with me anytime.. even personal issues many times :)

You just have to make it easy for others to do their jobs. Removing barriers, of any kind, helps. This is even more true with juniors.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-22 17:59:13+00:00
I also live in Denver. The biggest problem with downtown isn't zoning (though that may be a part), it's the homeless people. Who's going to want to go hang out on 16th when there's a dude asking you for money on every street corner? I don't know what the solution is, but it seems clear to me that revitalizing downtown starts with removing the "I'm going to have to deal with vagrants" factor.
by chaeeunlee9611 | 2026-01-22 17:59:29+00:00
Hey I am Summer

We just launched our MVP, You can basically FaceTime your AI waifu/companion with Beni AI.
It’s a real-time video call experience (not just a chat log), with consistent memory.

Try: Https://thebeni.ai

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone building in realtime voice / consumer AI
by torginus | 2026-01-22 17:59:41+00:00
Tbf, Star Trek TOS was also a sci fi show with an FX budget of two shoelaces and a pack of gum, and had to be carrier by great actors and writing, which it absolutely was. It's still my favourite Star Trek to this day.

I think the problem with how the US makes shows is that once something get successful, it gets a budget, which means the writing needs to appeal to a broader audience, which makes the whole thing blander.

I might be ignorant of US television pop culture, but I think, at least before the 90s, the UK produced much more memorable scifi shows (and even in the 90s, a lot of those US shows were secretly Canadian)
by triceratops | 2026-01-22 17:59:42+00:00
The solar farm produces more energy per dollar spent. Rooftop solar is expensive. It produces comparatively kw to amortize the fixed costs over - permitting, getting up on the roof etc.

If a country has abundant land, the money is probably best spent improving grid transmission and capacity and otherwise getting the f- out of the way of utility-scale renewables.

Happy to hear any analyses to the contrary and update my knowledge accordingly.
by elsonrodriguez | 2026-01-22 17:59:55+00:00
My point isn’t about the advancement of technology, it is about theft and destruction disguised as technology.

If what happened to my wife happened to Warhol the equivalent would be someone tearing his paintings off the gallery wall and selling xeroxed versions with sharpie written over them.

However your ultimate points are that art can’t be business, which in turn means artists shouldn’t necessarily be compensated, which defies reality and morality.
by browningstreet | 2026-01-22 18:00:13+00:00
> I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park

That's a favorite running spot of mine when I'm in Berlin. It's also close to gyms, a technology museum, a bio market, Victoria Park and not far from Tempelhof. But that little park shines on its own.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-22 18:00:28+00:00
> home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth)

Generalizations are sometimes useful, and sometimes not. I'd be willing to bet that my son and his partner, who "own" a home in the sense that they pay towards a mortgage on it, are probably below you at this point in time in terms of assets and wealth. Granted, over time that might change in ways that are driven by their home ownership (and then again, it might not).

Anyway, fully agreed on your other points.
by coryrc | 2026-01-22 18:00:37+00:00
Trucks are responsible for 99% of road damage and only pay 38% of the costs.

https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

Yes, the costs should be apportioned to those who are making them. If the bus causes the most road damage, then it should be charged. Then it'll make financial sense to invest in rail. Financial incentives are how capitalism works and the purpose of governments under capitalism is to apply externalities to the source causing them.
by vondur | 2026-01-22 18:00:50+00:00
Here in California, they drastically cut back on the price that you get for solar powered electricity from homeowners. It used to be around $0.30/kWh at any time of day and now it's can drop to $0.00-$0.05/kWh during the day when the state is sunny. If you can afford to have a battery installed, the rates are far better as you can either run off the battery when rates are the highest in the evening, or you can export it back to the grid when prices are much higher.
by eigenspace | 2026-01-22 18:00:54+00:00
What you're talking about is commonly called "curtailment", where power generators like wind and solar can be told to basically stop feeding into the grid, effectively wasting their energy.

From what I recall, curtailment of wind and solar at least in Germany amounts to about 3% wasted energy from those sources, so no, it's not a very significant worry. These renewable sources really are displacing fossil fuels.

A big part of this story is batteries. Especially during the summer, the wholesale electricity price in Germany can swing daily from -10 to +10 cents per kWh during the mid-day, up to 150+ cents per kWh at night, due to supply-and-demand.

This gradient in prices creates a huge incentive for people to build batteries that buy up cheap electricity during the day (sometimes literally getting paid to do so), so that they can sell it back later on in the day when prices rise. This incentive helps make sure energy does not get wasted, it encourages more batteries to be installed, and it encourages businesses to shift the their energy usage to times of the day that align with high renewable output.
by brunoborges | 2026-01-22 18:01:06+00:00
For fun, I built a Java SDK [1] and then added a Copilot Chat experience into Apache JMeter [2].

It was interesting to see the Copilot CLI agent interpreting an ask to load test a URL by actually generating the test plan and triggering it from the CLI, then opening the generated HTML report. I did not tell where JMeter was installed, but given the folder structure and location of the Copilot JMeter plugin I built (inside jmeter_home/lib/ext), the Copilot CLI found the JMeter installation and triggered the JMeter CLI.

Then I was more explicit and asked to generate a test plan and load into the GUI. It worked just fine.

[1] https://github.com/copilot-community-sdk/copilot-sdk-java
[2] https://github.com/brunoborges/jmeter-copilot-plugin/actions...
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 18:01:08+00:00
Honestly, in a lot of ways, yes. I'm a massive critic of Uber, but outside of the hotel areas and nicest neighborhoods, it was often incredibly difficult to successfully call a taxi to pick you up before Uber.

I remember once playing ball all day in the front yard, calling all the taxi companies just on a lark. They'd claim they were sending a driver, that the driver pulled up and honked, but we were outside the entire time. No one ever actually drove up over about 20 calls to 6 cab companies.

Uber/Lyft finally served all neighborhoods mostly equally, and that was a huge benefit.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-22 18:01:13+00:00
Everything is part of an ecosystem, even office buildings. Nature shows us that a healthy ecosystem, one that survives shocks, is a diverse ecosystem. Diverse ecosystems find niches faster and niches grow over time to turn into major driving forces. They absorb shocks as new things enter since not all parts react the same or on the same timeline. Diversity is key to long term health. This is why monopolies are bad, this is why we should be looking for every kind of diversity we can in every problem. I have gotten to the point that when I see large scale problems I start looking for where the diversity is low and that is almost always the issue. Politics bad? Maybe if we had more than two choices things would be better. Housing bad? Maybe if we had more mixed use things would be better. Energy segment issues? Look at how fast the energy segment is improving now that renewables have finally been added to the ecosystem and we have more choices. Etc, etc etc.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 18:02:27+00:00
I usually ask most of my drivers how much they're getting paid for each ride. Across MCOL and HCOL areas like SF, NYC, HTX, ATX, DMV - I've generally been seeing around 40% going to the driver.

For example, this route shows for me at $57 (-$10 discount = $47) but the driver sees $20: https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_...
by boelboel | 2026-01-22 18:02:35+00:00
Artists are a shrinking population, I wonder if having most of the top floors (20 out of 30) converted to extremely large luxury apartments (5000sqft+) and only 'adding capacity'to plumbing and what not for the lower 10 floors, which would house smaller units, would be economically viable. Although actual luxury market requires high ceiling so probably wouldn't work out.

I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-22 18:02:58+00:00
When I used Copilot autocomplete more I noticed myself slipping a bit when it comes to framework and syntax particulars so I instituted a moratorium on it on Fridays to prevent this.

Claude Code seems to be a much better paradigm. For novel implementations I write code manually while asking it questions. For things that I'm prototyping I babysit it closely and constantly catch it doing things that I don't want it to do. I ask it questions about why it built things certain ways and 80% of the time it doesn't have a good answer and redoes it the way that I want. This takes a great deal of cognitive engagement.

Rule nombre [sic] uno: Never anthropomorphize the LLM. It's a giant pattern-matching machine. A useful one, but still just a machine. Do not let it think for you because it can't.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-22 18:03:10+00:00
> demonic influence

Is this an unironic usage of this word? If you're trying to make a different point, it doesn't come across.

> You've highlighted a very real equivalency in spite of yourself

The equivalence doesn't help you, because "possessed by demons" has been used to describe people who are sick, playing D&D, reading comics, listening to music, being women, and it is frivolous and embarrassing to take seriously.
by tsumnia | 2026-01-22 18:03:33+00:00
> Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.

I'd say that's most of the Discworld series though. Protagonist is living peaceful, MacGuffin ensues chaos, Protagonist (or Arbitrary Thing) saves the day, the Disc goes back to normal, and the Turtle continues to move.

Discworld is my favorite series and I think Hogfather and Feets of Clay should be mandatory reads for people going into AI.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-22 18:03:47+00:00
> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Damn me, Scotland is going to be quite the culture shock for you.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-22 18:03:51+00:00
I'll grant that progress in coding hasn't been as impressive, although if you don't see a difference between Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 4.5 Opus (which is the actual SotA for Claude) I'd suspect a skill issue. I haven't seen miraculous progress in baseline code generation, but there has been a lot of progress in tool use. I can tell Claude CLI to install a complex package, for instance, and it will handle all the Python versioning and dependency-hell issues for me, then test and evaluate the results. 3.7 Sonnet couldn't do that, at least not reliably.

What's really different now is that LLMs have become useful research tools. Three or four years ago, models couldn't cite their sources at all. Two years ago, they started to gain the capability, but a large proportion of the citations would either be hallucinated or irrelevant. About a year ago, significant improvements started to emerge. At this point, I can give Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 Pro a multilayered research task, and end up with a report indistinguishable in accuracy and bibliographic quality from what a good human might produce in a couple of weeks.

It might take a half hour to get the answer, and I'm not sure if you could get the same result at the $20/month level, but the hype and promises we started hearing a couple of years ago are starting to bear fruit. The research models are now capable of performing at grad-student level. Not all the time, and not without making stuff up on occasion... but to argue that no progress at all has been made is nothing more or less than moon-landing denial.
by chris_va | 2026-01-22 18:04:12+00:00
It's a very real possibility, it's just a very slow exponential.

If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math. The cinematic portrayal of cascading failure (ala the movie Gravity) is completely insane, but that doesn't mean this isn't a real problem on a 100 year timescale.
by yetihehe | 2026-01-22 18:05:18+00:00
You said "You can't have both" on "consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices [...] while farmers also get stable income."

So, you say a country can't have stable income for farmers and realistic prices for consumers? Allowing to waste some produce and subsidizing farmers seems to be working in Europe (and probably in Canada). We have stable (but higher) prices. When you said we can't have that, I thought you are from USA, they are famous for having problems that are solved everywhere (like universal healthcare and gun violence) and it's a very known meme[0][1][2].

[0] https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1116082388344422400

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/l55sv4...

[2] https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED206/66c508dbb70...
by acdha | 2026-01-22 18:05:24+00:00
It’s not just them, but curl is one of the most popular open source projects in existence and it’s used in areas where security is a significant concern. The security industry has a lot of emphasis on someone’s portfolio for hiring, which isn’t bad (it beats “what frat were you in?”) but it means that there are a ton of early career people thinking that the path to a better job is getting credited for CVEs on major projects.

That’s a bad combination with LLMs which are almost perfect for letting the user think they’re being more productive than they actually are because the output sounds authoritative. You don’t have to be acting in bad faith to submit a slop report, just being inexperienced and over-confident will work if you don’t have enough experience in the area to reason about the security of the entire system.
by djfdat | 2026-01-22 18:05:51+00:00
Many times your severance comes along with a non-disparagement agreement. And typically the people being laid off don't really have the insight into the operational costs to serve as a counter-point to that argument.

That's not to say the journalists shouldn't try. Having execs pushing their probably false or at least misdirecting narrative in order to control the optics without question or consequence means that they'll continue to operate dishonestly.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-22 18:06:42+00:00
OK, so rooftop solar is a higher <currency-unit>/kW solar farm. That's one argument against it.

On the other hand, it is also distributed which from some perspectives is a benefit, and is also do-able with very little planning and grid extension. So that's one argument for it.

How things come out on balance depends a bit on what you value and how you imagine the future.
by paulmist | 2026-01-22 18:07:08+00:00
> When your entire job is confirming that science is valid, I expect a little more humility when it turns out you've missed a critical aspect.

I wouldn't call a misformed reference a critical issue, it happens. That's why we have peer reviews. I would contend drawing superficially valid conclusions from studies through use of AI is a much more burning problem that speaks more to the integrity of the author.

> It will serve as a reminder not to cut any corners.

Or yet another reason to ditch academic work for industry. I doubt the rise of scientific AI tools like AlphaXiv [1], whether you consider them beneficial or detrimental, can be avoided - calling for a level pragmatism.
by blintz | 2026-01-22 18:07:30+00:00
I was most surprised by the fact that it only took 40 examples for a Qwen finetune to match the style and quality of (interactively tuned) Nano Banana. Certainly the end result does not look like the stock output of open-source image generation models.

I wonder if for almost any bulk inference / generation task, it will generally be dramatically cheaper to (use fancy expensive model to generate examples, perhaps interactively with refinements) -> (fine tune smaller open-source model) -> (run bulk task).
by ohyoutravel | 2026-01-22 18:07:30+00:00
Thanks a lot for taking this seriously. I regularly contribute but am not a “maintainer” so can’t really turn off PRs or anything, nor do I think that’s the right thing in this case. But some signal to spot these accounts at a glance before I go through and try to repro their issue or spend time engaging would be cool. Or immediate signal on “new accounts” (on HN usernames are green for like 30 days), or “account age vs PR velocity” would be interesting to me. Old accounts with regular PRs or Issues are not a prob, but the new accounts that just spam low quality issues and PRs are maddening.
by philipwhiuk | 2026-01-22 18:07:55+00:00
> Considering that that repository has what seems like ~10 longer term contributors, who probably get email notifications, together with a bunch of other people who get notifications about it, wonder how many emails were sent out because of this? If we just assume ten people get the emails, it's already 46K emails going out in under 24 hours...

Unless GitHub are idiots they batch email updates to mitigate this