MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by random3 | 2026-01-07 04:23:36+00:00
If anyone believes they're close to a generalization end-game wrt to AI capabilities, it makes no sense to do anything that could impact their advantage, by enabling others to compete. Collaboration makes sense on timeframes that don't imply zero-sum games.

Board games like the Settlers of Catan are good examples of the behavior— concretely the start of the game when everyone trades vs the end of the game when if you suspect someone wins it makes little sense to trade unless, you think it will help you win first.
by arjie | 2026-01-07 04:24:58+00:00
Perhaps the gap in the discussion is that Hyundai Motor Group is a big chaebol and seemingly is involved in many things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group

Considering that, either of two things would be sufficient for them to make general purpose robots:

* It will be one of their numerous business lines and provide substitutable labor for the others, not all of which are in car construction

* Considering they are in things from credit cards to railways to steel, they would like to add a new product line of selling robots to other customers

None of this is outrageously out of line. Various companies start with some business lines and end up with others. This is particularly common in Korea where Samsung wasn't always a semiconductor company. Hyundai themselves were in construction first. Closer to home, Amex was a logistics company. These things happen. Perhaps you are familiar with Softbank which was a PC software publisher and is now an investment company.
by yibg | 2026-01-07 04:25:12+00:00
> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.

If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.

How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?
by oldnewthing | 2026-01-07 04:25:54+00:00
Claude Code is very good; good enough that I upgraded to the Max plan this week. However, it has a long way to go. It's great at one-shotting (with iterations) most ideas. However, it doesn't do as well when the task is complicated in an existing codebase. This weekend I migrated the backend for the SaaS I am building from Python to .NET Core. It did the migration but completely missed the conventions that the frontend was using to call the backend. While the converion itself went OK, every user journey was broken. I am still manually testing every code path and feeding in the errors to get Claude to fix it. My instructions were fairly comprehensive but Claude still missed most of it. My fault that I didn't generate tests first, but after this migration that's my first task.
by rectang | 2026-01-07 04:27:57+00:00
That’s a fair point — I agree that LLMs do a good job predicting the documentation that might accompany some code. I feel relieved when I can rely on the LLM to write docs that I only need to edit and review.

But I’m using LLMs regularly and I feel pretty effectively — including Opus 4.5 — and these “they can rewrite your entire codebase” assertions just seem crazy incongruous with my lived experience guiding LLMs to write even individual features bug-free.
by xp84 | 2026-01-07 04:29:01+00:00
> “The office is, first and foremost, a space geared toward organizing people to become a certain type of subject: a cog in the capitalist machine.”

This seems to be the thing that bothers the author so badly. The thing is, working at a corporation is just one particular form of making a living. Many, many people find that the cultures in offices don’t agree with them, but that’s okay. There are many other options available to you. Learn a trade instead, or start your own business where you set the rules (Full remote! Snack all you want to! Work at night and sleep all day!)

I get the overall chagrin at having Jamie Dimon or whoever tell the whole company to RTO and you don’t get a say. But it’s the way the game is played — if and only if you want their money, the simple turnkey setup with a paycheck.

I don’t judge her for hating working in an office, but neither should she judge people who prefer the office. It sounds like she demands that we abolish in-person work just because she has so much anxiety about being around people.
by throw234234234 | 2026-01-07 04:30:07+00:00
My theory is that this (juniors unable to get in) is generally how industries/jobs die and phase out in a healthy manner that causes the least pain to its workers. I've seen this happen to a number of other industries with people I know and when it phases out this way its generally less disruptive to people.

The seniors who have less leeway to change course (its harder as you get older in general, large sunk costs, etc) maintain their positions and the disruption occurs at the usual "retirement rate" meaning the industry shrinks a bit each year. They don't get much with pay rises, etc but normally they have some buffer from earlier times so are willing to wear being in a dying field. Staff aren't replaced but on the whole they still have marginal long term value (e.g. domain knowledge on the job that keeps them somewhat respected there or "that guy was around when they had to do that; show respect" kind of thing).

The juniors move to other industries where the price signal shows value and strong demand remains (e.g. locally for me that's trades but YMMV). They don't have the sunk cost and have time on their side to pivot.

If done right the disruption to people's lives can be small and most of the gains of the tech can still come out. My fear is the AI wave will happen fast but only in certain domains (the worst case for SWE's) meaning the adjustment will be hard hitting without appropriate support mechanisms (i.e. most of society doesn't feel it so they don't care). On average individual people aren't that adaptable, but over generations society is.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-07 04:30:30+00:00
All true, but most "travel" is staying a week or so as a tourist in some location, and it is true that what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong). You probably can learn more deep truths about a country and culture from reading on the internet, unless you are really making an effort to properly integrate in some way, likely for a minimum of many months. But, then, this is usually not what is meant by "travel".
by makeitdouble | 2026-01-07 04:30:44+00:00
> Having given so much of themselves to their careers, they often felt unmoored and purposeless when they left their jobs.

That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.

My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
by noodletheworld | 2026-01-07 04:32:14+00:00
It might scale.

So far, Im not convinced, but lets take a look at fundmentally whats happening and why humans > agents > LLMs.

At its heart, programming is a constraint satisfaction problem.

The more constraints (requirements, syntax, standards, etc) you have, the harder it is to solve them all simultaneously.

New projects with few contributors have fewer constraints.

The process of “any change” is therefore simpler.

Now, undeniably

1) agents have improved the ability to solve constraints by iterating; eg. Generate, test, modify, etc. over raw LLm output.

2) There is an upper bound (context size, model capability) to solve simultaneous constraints.

3) Most people have a better ability to do this than agents (including claude code using opus 4.5).

So, if youre seeing good results from agents, you probably have a smaller set of constraints than other people.

Similarly, if youre getting bad results, you can probably improve them by relaxing some of the constraints (consistent ui, number of contributors, requirements, standards, security requirements, split code into well defined packages).

This will make both agents and humans more productive.

The open question is: will models continue to improve enough to approach or exceed human level ability in this?

Are humans willing to relax the constraints enough for it to be plausible?

I would say currently people clambering about the end of human developers are cluelessly deceived by the “appearance of complexity” which does not match the “reality of constraints” in larger applications.

Opus 4.5 cannot do the work of a human on code bases Ive worked on. Hell, talented humans struggle to work on some of them.

…but that doesnt mean it doesnt work.

Just that, right now, the constraint set it can solve is not large enough to be useful in those situations.

…and increasingly we see low quality software where people care only about speed of delivery; again, lowering the bar in terms of requirements.

So… you know. Watch this space. Im not counting on having a dev job in 10 years. If I do, it might be making a pile of barely working garbage.

…but I have one now, and anyone who thinks that this year people will be largely replaced by AI is probably poorly informed and has misunderstood the capabilities on these models.

Theres only so low you can go in terms of quality.
Ask HN: What is your set-up and process for using AI agents in Coding
by neumann | 2026-01-07 04:32:17+00:00
I see lots of posts about using 5-10 agents in coding, and how amazing LLMs are at coding, especially Claude code. I do use both claude and chatgpt (that in vscode and codex), usually start with a planning conversation, then tell them to start and have hold points to test and discuss. Neverythelss, reading some posts I feel like I am not making the most of it and achieving the full capability and throughput.

Keen to see some people share details on how they set-up their coding environment and the practical process for handling the agents.
by falkensmaize | 2026-01-07 04:32:21+00:00
What diminishes your value is that suddenly everybody can (in theory anyway) do this work. There’s a push at my company to start letting designers do their own llm-assisted merge requests to front end projects. So now CEOs are greedily rubbing their hands together thinking maybe everybody but the plumber can be a “developer” now. I think it remains to be seen whether that’s true, but in the meantime it’s going to make getting and keeping a well-paying developer gig difficult.
by hnburnsy | 2026-01-07 04:32:43+00:00
Here are some where IIHS punishes cars that don't meet its features with dubious evidence of improving safety...

Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) with Pedestrian Detection: IIHS rates vehicles on forward collision avoidance, including pedestrian scenarios, but systems often underperform in real-world conditions like nighttime or with larger vehicles (e.g., trucks or motorcycles). Studies show virtually no crash reduction at night, and features can create false alerts, weather-related failures, or a false sense of security, potentially dulling driver awareness without clear evidence of broad effectiveness at higher speeds.

Roof Strength Test: Vehicles must withstand a force equivalent to a certain multiple of their weight (e.g., 4x for a "good" rating) to simulate rollover protection. Critics, including automotive industry analyses, argue there's no statistically reliable evidence that increasing roof strength beyond basic levels (e.g., from 2.5 to 3.5 strength-to-weight ratio) reduces injury risk, with claims relying on unsupported extrapolations from low-strength data and anomalous results.

Updated Side Impact Test (Introduced 2021): This tougher test uses a heavier, faster-moving barrier (4,200 lbs at 37 mph) to mimic modern SUV strikes. It's criticized for disadvantaging smaller vehicles unfairly, incorporating misleading variables (e.g., tire grip affecting results), and prioritizing structural deformation over occupant outcomes, potentially leading to "poor" ratings despite good dummy readings. Detractors view it as more marketing-driven than reflective of common real-world crashes, with little evidence that the changes proportionally save lives beyond the original test.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-07 04:33:21+00:00
There was definitely a lot of stupid stuff happening. IMO the clearest accurate way to put it is that it was overhyped for the short term (hence the crazy high valuations for obvious bullshit), and underhyped for the long term (in the sense that we didn't really foresee how broadly and deeply it would change the world). Of course, there's more nuance to it, because some people had wild long-term predictions too. But I think the overall, mainstream vibe was to underappreciate how big a deal it was.
by fleahunter | 2026-01-07 04:33:25+00:00
Interesting point about the chains of YC startups. It really makes you think about how interconnected the startup ecosystem is. I wonder if there's an unspoken pressure to “keep it in the family,” so to speak, where founders might feel inclined to hire from their previous startups, or even lean on those networks when starting something new.

I've noticed trends where certain skills or experiences seem to bubble up in waves – like when a specific tech stack becomes popular and then a bunch of startups pop up around it. It’s almost like there’s a breeding ground effect happening.

And what about the concept of mentorship? Do you think these 'family trees' could lead to more structured mentorship, where founders from successful startups actively guide the next generation? Could be an interesting angle to explore!

I’m curious about Edge cases too. Like, what happens when a founder breaks away from the traditional path, either founding a startup without that chain or maybe even pivoting away from the typical YC model? It makes these genealogies feel both fascinating and a touch limiting. I love seeing these connections getting mapped out, but part of me wonders if we might miss some innovative outliers by focusing too much on these chains.
by Paracompact | 2026-01-07 04:33:28+00:00
Another excerpt of Grothendieck's that has always stuck with me:

"Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my 'elders' and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.

"In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective or thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: The capacity to be alone."

(From _Récoltes et Semailles_)

It's only a shame that most aspiring mathematicians with the same disposition as Grothendieck, never do reach the same level of accomplishment and acclaim as Grothendieck, before concluding that they are, in their final opinion, like clumsy, oafish oxen compared to their colleagues.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 04:34:23+00:00
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease

Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave.

Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
by joshribakoff | 2026-01-07 04:37:30+00:00
I tried this and the flow is sketchy UX even if it’s probably not malicious. It opens Messages, has you send a code to a number they control, and that “verifies” you. Probably to multiplex many chats on one phone number. That’s not a takeover by itself (you’re not forwarding a bank/Apple 2FA), but it’s sketchy. It also doesn’t work. It said hello and stopped replying.
by dang | 2026-01-07 04:37:38+00:00
Can you please not post cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? I can understand the feelings behind it—we all can—but this is really not what we're going here, and it has a way more degrading effect on the threads than I'm sure you intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 04:37:57+00:00
> I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments.

I'm glad you're better, but I'm sorry to say this is not a good take. I have a couple friends who suffered from Long COVID, one of whom eventually passed away from complications. Their conditions were clearly triggered by COVID and knowing both of their styles and tastes, I don't think they had a single IKEA furniture in their houses.

Long COVID misinformation is rampant and this is not helpful.
by csuwldcat | 2026-01-07 04:38:23+00:00
The underlying CTAP implementations are only used by the platform to facilitate core activities, they are not used to expose key pairs to external parties. Please link to where any API offers up public keys to external userland actors, and any use of said APIs beyond core credential management. If this is assumed insecure/exposed, it would mean the system and its guarantees cannot be trusted as advertised, given both keys are supposed to be handled as a secure, opaque bundle, disclosed to no one beyond the bound origin at create time.
by musicale | 2026-01-07 04:38:45+00:00
> in what universe does it make any sense for the bank to go to the store or stores you purchased from to demand the money back rather than to you, the borrower?

It's a common legal strategy to sue those with deep pockets, regardless of whether they bear the greatest liability. Makes perfect sense because they (the store in your example) actually have the cash. Are you going to sue the gambler or the casino?

Another strategy is aggregation. If you can combine cases into a single case, the payout can be larger for the same effort - but once again this depends on ability to pay.

Going one step further, if the seller is part of an illegal cartel or pyramid scheme, the government might be able to justify seizing its assets, or perhaps collecting punitive damages.
by yibg | 2026-01-07 04:39:01+00:00
How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.

Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-07 04:40:29+00:00
> Collaboration makes sense on timeframes that don't imply zero-sum games.

People are fooling themselves if they think AGI will be zero sum. Even if only one group somehow miraculously develops it, there will immediately be fast followers. And, the more likely scenario is more than one group would independently pull it off - if it's even possible.
by smileybarry | 2026-01-07 04:40:50+00:00
I recall one of the issues leading up to their abrupt cancellation was fulfillment, so I can't help but suspect there's some potential (long-term) issue they couldn't work out for this dev kit's chipset. Maybe some part of the chain was held together with glue and "this shouldn't fail but continue anyway" and whatever hardware issue eventually hit something critical. (And they intended to fix this some time after shipping, and gave up halfway through fulfillment)
by gnabgib | 2026-01-07 04:40:57+00:00
Recent related: Washi: The Japanese paper crafted to last 1000 years [video] (134 points, 3 months ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399589

Less recent: Japan's washi paper torn by modern life (96 points, 7 years ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282085
by spaceman_2020 | 2026-01-07 04:41:22+00:00
You enter some text and a computer spits out complex answers generated on the spot

Right or wrong - doesn’t matter. You typed in a line of text and now your computer is making 3000 word stories, images, even videos based on it

How are you NOT astounded by that? We used to have NONE of this even 4 years ago!
by giardini | 2026-01-07 04:41:25+00:00
How do you define failure? When did "again and again" occur? I don't see that you have any valid argument or any supporting data whatsoever. Private health insurance exists and works.

Insurance doesn't have to cover everything: any aspect of coverage is debatable since it is a contract between buyer and seller with the courts as the deciding powers when either buyer or seller believes the contract has been violated.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 04:41:39+00:00
I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-07 04:42:03+00:00
> How do you get to github?

$ wget https://github.com/
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 64:ff9b::8c52:7204, 140.82.114.4
Connecting to github.com (github.com)|64:ff9b::8c52:7204|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

> How do you connect to news.ycombinator.com?

$ wgetnull 'https://news.ycombinator.com/
Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 2606:7100:1:67::26, 209.216.230.207
Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|2606:7100:1:67::26|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

> Why is an IP address more valuable than an IPv6 address?

Because there's such an incredible amount of v6 addresses. You could pay a trillion dollars per second for a /64 and still only pay $1.70/year for each address.

> Why is IPv4 the incumbent 30 years after IPv6?

Because IPv4 was the only choice until IPv6, and replacing the Internet's L3 protocol is hard and takes a long time.