MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iammjm | 2026-01-18 09:43:06+00:00
I used to really like and admire Musk. You could say I was a fanboy. I am still asking myself what the fuck happened? Was he faking his true character all this time and managed to dupe me? Did he suffer some brain damage which changed him this drastically? Was it too much social media, was it covid-related, was he poisoned? Did too much money and power get to him? I would seriously like to know. By know, knowing about his chronic tendency to lie about the most basic stuff (such as being really good in a fucking computer game), I assume he duped me, and this makes me really, really dislike him a lot. And I can't be the only one. I hope he fails in all his endeavors.
by plutodev | 2026-01-18 09:43:43+00:00
This looks less like an AI failure and more like a compute economics problem. Frontier labs are chasing marginal model gains that require exponentially more GPUs, power, and capex, so burn rates explode even if demand grows. Centralized hyperscale data centers concentrate that risk on a few balance sheets. An alternative is treating AI as a distributed workload problem—using spot or decentralized GPU markets (io.net, Akash, etc.) to tap existing idle capacity instead of financing trillion-dollar builds. You trade enterprise SLAs for lower capex exposure, but structurally it changes the cost curve.
by larodi | 2026-01-18 09:45:05+00:00
I’m using a harsh allegory to express massive discontent by the fact that someone was catering to user content for 25 years only for this content to become training corpus.

It is perhaps not that Wikipedia in particular been created for this, that much we hope for, but nowadays it seems such public services are best monetised in this way. I have an actual memory from when Wikipedia started and the enthusiasm of millions of people for it.

And no, I’m not alright with the fact so many people contributed effort AND money to this project only for Jimmy to figure how to sell it better to big corpo.

Seems unfair, as it seems unfair to get these downvotes. Like nobody liked the fact MS bought and used all of GitHub to create copilot, so how is this different?
by seu | 2026-01-18 09:45:38+00:00
> also completely unfazed by the premise that it has been 'hacked into' a late-90's computer game. This was surprising, but fits with Claude's playful personality and flexible disposition.

When I read things like this, I wonder if it's just me not understanding this brave new world, or half of AI developers are delusional and really believe that they are dealing with a sentient being.
by kikkupico | 2026-01-18 09:47:37+00:00
Exactly! LLMs' (or any Gen-AI) lack of lived-experience/emotions is their Achilles heel. The best human creators understand how to inspire emotions mainly because they can feel it themselves. Most other humans, despite innately understanding emotions, can't really create things that inspire emotions in others. So, Gen-AI as we know it today can't really reach a point where it deeply, personally understands and inspires emotions. Vibe discovery bridges this gap, I think.
by jjav | 2026-01-18 09:48:07+00:00
> The executive lacks the authority.

The executive lacks the authority to do more than 99% of the things done in 2025. Just about all of it is blatantly illegal or unconstitutional.

But, turns out, there is no enforcement mechanism against any of this. There is nobody that can put a stop to the illegal behavior. The legislative branch and the judicial branch can write sternly worded letters, but they have no army to enforce obedience.
by dgxyz | 2026-01-18 09:50:24+00:00
There are also some absolute morons out there. Couple of local things around me...

First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.

Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
by WA | 2026-01-18 09:51:09+00:00
You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.
by anonu | 2026-01-18 09:52:12+00:00
My dad speaks fondly of his time at Olivetti. He was a UMich EE grad from Lebanon. Through some chance encounters he had met some Olivetti execs who sent him a TELEX to his home in Lebanon offering him a job in Ivrea, which he took given that it was on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War (~1975). The rest is history...
by roenxi | 2026-01-18 09:52:25+00:00
Oh yes, sorry. I was thinking FDR when I wrote the comment - but happily I can leave it unchanged since the same complaint applies to Theodore Roosevelt as well with only some minor tweaks. They weren't as bad as the Europeans, but the quality of the US leadership was not good given what they teed up in the early 20th century.

It is similar to the Bush family, but from an era where the internet wasn't around to let people compare notes. These political dynasties deserve criticism and should listen to it.
by schiffern | 2026-01-18 09:52:27+00:00
> I am still asking myself what the fuck happened?

I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:

"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."

I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...
by mikewarot | 2026-01-18 09:53:04+00:00
I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.

Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.

So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.
by weinzierl | 2026-01-18 09:54:01+00:00
"The 501(c)(6) differs from the more familiar 501(c)(3) designation in that we are not a charity. The 501(c)(3) is explicitly designed for charitable organizations, and confers the additional benefit of donations being tax-deductible. Over time, though, the definition of a 501(c)(3) has become extremely distorted, especially in the software space, since companies were able to convince the IRS that making open-source software is a charitable/scientific activity. The result is that large companies were able to fund their own development by creating a “charity”, open-sourcing some of their core technology, and then building their extremely lucrative closed-source software on top. That way they get to deduct the core tech expenses from their taxes! What a deal!"

I get that, but I don't understand why it supports a 501(6) in this case[1].

Just because others have abused it doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Even if it's only about sending the right signal, that still matters.

Or is this about brutal honesty and they are saying bluntly: We're not a charity, so don't expect us to act like one in the first place.

If it is that, then why would anyone support them apart from their sponsoring organizations?

[1] There are many cases where a 501(6) makes sense. I'm strictly arguing the "Handmade Software Foundation" case here. Otherwise it gets complicated quickly.
by deepsun | 2026-01-18 09:54:26+00:00
Thank you, yes my knowledge was very outdated, waay before Spanner.

Spanner for GCS actually explains how public Google Cloud was always ACID for object listing, while S3 only implemented it around 2020. I always suspected that there must be some very hard piece to implement that AWS didn't have until 2020. Makes sense now that that piece was Spanner.
by metalman | 2026-01-18 09:54:37+00:00
as a pilot, we attend regular training sessions, often hosting senior accident investigators who continue to follow a strict logical method where you start with nothing, zero knowledge, just physical evidence and recordings, eyes, ears, nose, touch, and I bet the sneaky ones are tasting stuff.
It's a small community, everyone has lost a friend, knowledge and information is sought
and shared in a very particular way when it comes to saftey and reliability, though of course there are cheats and greed, passive agresives comiting crimes of omission.
and so, here we are, again.
by jaccola | 2026-01-18 09:56:00+00:00
I mostly agree, but I would have agreed with a similar article 10 years ago, and that would have been a fairly widely held opinion (e.g. Bill Gates was famously short Tesla).

So I wouldn’t be so sure as this piece is in Tesla’s downfall, and the emotive language doesn’t help this look like an objective analysis.

I also don’t like articles that take the industry consensus or expert opinion as a priori the correct opinion. Tesla wasn’t built by consensus; even the door handle example that is here touted as a negative almost certainly helped Tesla more than its harmed by being one of many unique features.
by xklondon | 2026-01-18 09:57:19+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a small side project called IOU Wallet and it would be great to find out if you think its useful and useable. Let me explain in some more detail:

How IOU Wallet Works

IOU Wallet helps you keep track of everyday peer-to-peer obligations. It is designed for real-world situations where something is borrowed, a service is provided, or money is owed, and both sides want clarity without relying on formal contracts.

At its core, an IOU records who owes what to whom, under which conditions, and when the obligation is considered settled. Both parties acknowledge the IOU through a simple virtual handshake, and once settlement is confirmed a closing handshake settles the obligation.

IOU Wallet supports three types of IOUs: Items, Services, and Cash. Each can start simple and be extended with additional terms when needed.

Item IOUs (Borrowed Things)

Basic example

A friend borrows your book.
You create an IOU that records the item. Your friend accepts it. When the book is returned, settlement is initiated and confirmed and the IOU is completed.

With a rate

You lend a camera for a week.
A small daily rental rate is agreed. The rate accrues over time, starting either when the IOU is accepted or after the agreed return date.

With redemption

You lend equipment that may not be returned.
Instead of returning the item, the borrower can settle the IOU by paying an agreed redemption value. If a rate applies, it is added on top of that value.

Settlement

Settlement can happen off-platform — for example when a book is returned, a service is completed, or cash is handed back directly.

For outstanding monetary obligations, IOU Wallet also provides on-platform I click settlement, with integrations to selected providers and support for multiple currencies. We currently Support USD, EUR, GBP and Solana. You can also settle fiat using crypto if enabled by the counterparty

IOUs recorded through IOU Wallet are underwritten by personal integrity through virtual handshakes and are not legally enforceable

We are doing a soft launch and would really appreciate feedback on:
whether the mental model makes sense

confusing wording or flows

edge cases you think I’ve missed

Happy to answer questions and look forward to your feedback — I hope this tool is useful for you.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-18 09:57:25+00:00
According to Cloudflare, there are almost no users still on MSIE of any version.[0]

Statcounter says there are about 4.6% of iOS users still on iOS 16.[1]

My gut instinct is that there are multiple times more people using iOS 16 today than MSIE of any version.

[0] https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobil...
by zapzupnz | 2026-01-18 09:57:44+00:00
> There was never a period of time when you could just look at any logo and know what it is

None of your examples are for built-in applications. You have to go out of your way to download those programs. You'd know what the traffic cone means because you downloaded the program with the traffic cone. You went out of your way to get it.

Let's go back to that era and look at some other built-in apps, like Pages is (these days).

Notepad: a blue-covered notepad with some lined pages visible.

Wordpad: a fountain pen writing on some lined paper. Eventually the pen disappeared but the paper remained.

Paint: a paint palette, then a bucket of art supplies, then a glass cup with paintbrushes, then back to a palette but with a brush.

Solitaire: a deck of cards.

Outlook Express: an envelope.

MSN Messenger: two people next to each other because they're communicating with each other.

Windows Movie Maker: a film reel/strip.

Internet Explorer: a big 'e' (for Explorer) with a planet-like ring around it, suggesting a planet that you could traverse. (Okay, a bit abstract)

Over the Mac, there was:

SimpleText: a pencil writing on a sheet of paper. Later re-used for TextEdit.

Sherlock: a detective's cap and magnifying glass, indicating searching. The magnifying glass was later re-used for Spotlight.

Disk First Aid: A floppy disk on the back of an ambulance.

Disk Utility: a doctor's stethoscope pressed against a hard disk.

etc.

> it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up

Because, on macOS, none of the icons became any more comprehensible than before. If anything, they got less comprehensive even when the visual metaphor remained the same because the representation is so poor. That's what made everybody cynical.
by PetitPrince | 2026-01-18 09:58:04+00:00
Fun false fact that I just invented : the Monty Python briefly considered to have Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-digger-dingle-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thrasher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knotty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitzweimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shönendanker-kalbsfleisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm to mutter Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­karabo­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon, but John Cleese, who play the man interviewing the last descendent of Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-digger-dingle-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thrasher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knotty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitzweimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shönendanker-kalbsfleisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, being a fervent Latin teacher opposed the idea because he thought that was Greek nonsense.
by Mashimo | 2026-01-18 09:58:24+00:00
The name changed from t4xx to t14 GenX.

I really like my T14.. Gen2? Some Intel 11th Gen cpu from a few years back. Still getting driver and firmware updates through regular windows updates, which is neat.

Well, you can't have a t4xx or t14 with 16" display. It's like saying you want a apple pie, but you really don't like apple, and want banana.
by schiffern | 2026-01-18 09:58:48+00:00
>Back in 2016, Musk personally pushed for almost all vehicle functions, including the door handles, to be controlled by electric buttons or touchscreens. His own engineers and executives warned that this is a huge safety risk... They argued for traditional, fully mechanical door handles, but Musk vetoed them for purely aesthetic reasons. He even pushed for the mechanical override, meant to be used in such emergencies, to be hidden

Did anyone catch the source for this? I hadn't heard this detail before.
by wfn | 2026-01-18 09:59:03+00:00
I've been thinking about this, take a look at this:

> From Tool Calling to Symbolic Thinking: LLMs in a Persistent Lisp Metaprogramming Loop

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10021

In theory (I've seen people discuss similar things before though), homoiconicity and persistent REPL could provide benefits - code introspection (and code is a traversable AST), wider persistent context but in a tree structure where it can choose breadth vs depth of context loading, progressive tool building, DSL building for given domain, and (I know this is a bit hype vibe) overall building up toolkit for augmented self-expanding symbolic reasoning tools for given domain / problem / etc. (starting with "build up toolkit for answering basic math questions including long sequences of small digits where you would normally trip up due to your token prediction based LLM mechanism"[2]). Worth running some quick experiments maybe, hm :)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10021
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqvBdqCAAE on need for hybrid systems
by Eufrat | 2026-01-18 09:59:06+00:00
There was a post about Erdős 728 being solved with Harmonic’s Aristotle a little over a week ago [1] and that seemed like a good example of using state-of-the-art AI tech to help increase velocity in this space.

I’m not sure what this proves. I dumped a question into ChatGPT 5.2 and it produced the correct response after almost an hour?

Okay? Is it repeatable? Why did it come up with this solution? How did it come up with the connections in its reasoning? I get that it looks correct and Tao’s approval definitely lends credibility that it is correct, but what exactly is it that we’ve established here? That the corpus that ChatGPT 5.2 is better tuned for pure math?

I’m just confused what one is supposed to take away from this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560445

[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/696ac45b-70d8-8003-9ca4-320151e081...
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-18 09:59:11+00:00
I am lucky that the article is alien to me. I work somewhere we do devops. I write code and tests etc. but I would unlikely go a day without observing something in prod either by telemetry, dogfooding or getting paged. It is a really cool way to work understanding the whole system (within the team remit of course). And vaguely understanding neighbouring teams.

To the comments dev and ops are different. They are! I think the magic is massive platform team support too. I am not troubleshooting why splunk indexes aren't indexing for example.
by haizhung | 2026-01-18 09:59:49+00:00
> The president who is willing to fix this will have to bend the knee.

A similar instance of this is happening currently in the talks between EU/UK — The EU is demanding a „Farage“ clause. They want a guarantee that the damages are paid for in case Farage becomes prime minister and will roll back all treaties and trade deals and what not.

Which, to be fair, makes total sense.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 10:00:09+00:00
I had Gemini help me make a sparklines charting component that uses SVG. The SVG itself is relatively simple and is parameterized. So it's really only making an SVG component that gets data, rather than designing icons. I tried to get them to do that without any success. I stick to open source icon libraries and there happens to be a meta list on the front of HN right now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665411
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:02:13+00:00
The shift from managed warehouses to cloud-native formats makes a lot of sense. MotherDuck's DuckDB approach eliminates friction of moving data between systems—query directly from cloud storage (S3, GCS) without loading into separate compute. Relevant context: Redshift Spectrum does similar things, but DuckDB's cost model (~$1/TB scanned) often outperforms for ad-hoc queries where you're not maintaining a live warehouse. For production analytics with concurrent users + strict isolation, Redshift/BQ still win on reliability, but for data exploration & lightweight dashboards, this model is hard to beat. The real win is not having to make an all-or-nothing choice anymore.
by jorvi | 2026-01-18 10:02:21+00:00
This is a general trend worldwide.

OP's writing is nice, but he is de facto a scalper looking for the maximum amount of arbitrage. There's enough of them, like mentioned in the article, that they'll pick any flea market or secondhand store clean off diamonds in the rough before you as a regular guy really get a chance to find any.

What they're doing isn't illegal or forbidden, but it has completely destroyed the spirit of flea markets and secondhand stores as quaint places. And in response to becoming as hypercapitalist as the rest of society, a large contingent of people on flea markets has started to offer whole tables stuffed with cheap AliExpress / Temu crap. Or AI art being sold as "handmade".

The enthusiast offering artisanal coffee or lemonade or cinnamon rolls from his stall or food truck has quadrupled his prices, because if everyone else is gouging the visitor, why shouldn't he?

The same goes for secondhand clothing stores. They're wise to the scalpers looking to flip stuff on Vinted or whatever, so they have also doubled or even tripled their prices. It's an open secret that a lot of stores let the girls working there have a first lookover of whatever comes in.
by eps | 2026-01-18 10:02:28+00:00
They also have an excellent book, covering both the subject matter (knives and sharpening) and how the company came to be.

Somewhat similar to the book of the Blue Bottle founder on coffee and his company path. Both are basically, as the GP remarked, are glimpses into other people's passion and deep fascination with a certain subject. Fantastic reads IMO.

* In fact, let me add two more books - Ivan Ramen and Tartine Bread. Similar introductions into lives of people and their obsessions with a specific subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Definitive-Introduction-Sharpen...

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Bottle-Craft-Coffee-Roasting/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Ivan-Ramen-Obsession-Recipes-Unlikely...

https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118...

If anyone knows other books of the same nature, I'm all ears.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:03:04+00:00
This paper remains essential for distributed systems thinking. The key insight: total cost of ownership (CPU, network, I/O) matters more than just throughput. McSherry et al show that a single well-optimized machine often outperforms naive distributed approaches across many workloads. The COST metric captures what practitioners care about. Highly relevant for recent trends in vector databases and graph processing frameworks, where people often default to distributed setups without measuring actual overhead vs single-machine alternatives. See also: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/dataflow-paper for reproducible experiments.