MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-09 10:52:59+00:00
Sure, bank failure might happen. That comes out clearly in the chart; the flow of value is that the bank loses a bunch of cash which ends up in "hookers".

> But to an approximation declaring bankruptcy involves losing all of your remaining assets. So in that scenario the borrower is on the hook for the cost of replacing those assets (limited by how far underwater they were on the mortgage naturally).

If you financed something by borrowing against your house, then it cost less than your house, and when you have to replace it, the cost will be less than the cost of buying a house at the original prices. This is the "you lose your house and your car" example. Losing your mortgaged house and your owned-free-and-clear car is good when buying a replacement house+car costs less than the mortgage on your house.

What if house prices fall into the sweet spot where (1) your mortgage is underwater; and (2) a new house + new "assets" exceed the value of your mortgage? (But don't exceed the original value of your house.)

It could be that those assets don't generate income. In this case, they are isomorphic to the hookers in the example.

If they do generate income, then you might save money by keeping your house at its inflated pre-crash price, and you'll make those pre-crash loan payments using the income stream generated by the assets. Here you have a loan that is nominally against your house but actually against your business. It's underwater when considered as a mortgage, but it's not underwater when considered as a business loan, so you'll keep paying it. Your bank will be fine with this. (Both in the sense that they won't object, and also in the sense that they won't suffer financial hardship.) You'll probably have to recollateralize the loan.

(Or your assets might generate income, but not enough income that you'd save money by keeping your original mortgage. In this case it's straightforward that you're better off losing the original house, losing the original assets, buying a new house, and then not buying new assets.)
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-09 10:53:07+00:00
Europe already have a thriving software industry, and in fact is probably the leader when it comes to having the most influential and biggest FOSS projects, since so many of them originate in Europe :)

If I had to chose between "control and regulation and healthy community of FOSS" vs "no control or regulation, and healthy community only for for-profit companies", I know what side I'm choosing.
by nalekberov | 2026-01-09 10:53:23+00:00
All the European Commission is interested in is getting software cheaper or for free.

If they were truly interested in freeing themselves from non-EU software, thereby preventing potential interference from (mostly) the US, they wouldn’t have chosen the path of soften the GDPR - that move mainly made the big tech happier.

And don’t even get me started with Chat Control.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-09 10:54:06+00:00
What? Access to knowledge was better 3-4 decades ago? You're telling me that people had better access to knowledge in 1986 than they do today?

Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023.

Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78.

The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991.

Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another.

But to paint this as no progress? Come on.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-09 10:54:47+00:00
This is a good thing, BUT we need a law requiring that all AI use by doctors has to go like this:

1) doctor writes down their own diagnosis based on the symptoms (or dictates, whatever)

2) diagnosis is saved, notarised, etc that it can't be changed afterwards

3) doctor receives AI-generated differntial diagnosis

4) now they can adjust their diagnosis, but the original still stays logged

Why? Because the AI-generated response might direct the doctor's thinking subconsciously in unpredictable ways resulting in diagnosis done solely by AI in practice.
by HenryBemis | 2026-01-09 10:55:27+00:00
I read the first 4-5. They either 'provide services' to govs/law enforcement, and/or are ran by govs.

So to answer to your question, Nothing. You can write 100 letters to your senator, MP, mayor, etc. The "system" will serve its purposes. Best case you will get a response that "national security, paedophiles, terrorists, bad actors", etc.

In some regions you can file a GDPR nightmare letter, which will be shut down because of EU DPR ("national security, paedophiles, terrorists, bad actors", etc.)(yes I copied and pasted from above.. there is a pattern here).

Historically (and Harari describes this far better in "Nexus") documentation and bureaucracy was created to exert control. Any information 'must' be captured, stored, processed, assessed, flagged. Before we only had letters and radio. Now we have more letters (bits and bytes/packets). The mechanism is the same. Collect, store, process.

Cross-referencing this with 1984, everything we do/say/send/etc. will never be forgotten, can and will be used against us. Politicians though can 'rewrite' history ('Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.').
by taschmex | 2026-01-09 10:56:14+00:00
Every browser-based bitwarden client I have used have the option to choose the autofill option on single items as well as the global default. Find the login item, click edit, scroll to autofill options, where each URI is listed with a gear icon next to it. Click the gear and select the appropriate match type.

For the absolute majority of use cases, "host" should be the default, but i have found uses for both "base domain" and "regular expression" in some special cases.

Normal browser extension Bitwarden Ctrl-Shift-L autofill defaults to the most recently used entry when there are multiple matches, afaik.
by rvz | 2026-01-09 10:56:44+00:00
Understatement of last year. It was a horrific standard and was a completely broken one security-wise from day 0.

The folks who wrote it have never written an RFC or an internet standard before.

Remember the VCs screaming about MCPs all day long last year? Well I don't see them doing that at all anymore, and called that 1 year ago. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43486516
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-09 10:56:45+00:00
> (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)

Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.

It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-09 10:57:16+00:00
Another analogy is that it’s a takeout but anthropic is insisting you only eat at home with the plastic utensils they’ve provided rather than the nice metal utensils you have at home.

Another analogy is that it’s a restaurant that offers delivery and they’re insisting you use their own in house delivery service instead of placing a pickup order and asking your friendly neighbor to pick it up for you on their way back from the office.
by metalman | 2026-01-09 10:57:47+00:00
This great, hydrogen is used industrialy in massive quantities, but the current method to get it is very expensive as it requires "cracking" natural gas or other petro fuels.
Hydrolising water will allow scaled production on site, that can be powered from
availible excess renewable energy.
For countrys that have abu dent solar potential, but arrid coastal shores, doing solar distilation for water, hydrogen generation for agricultural/industrial products, and energy storage
can become the foundation for economic development that scales as far as population
demands requires.
Good use can be put to the brines left over from distilation, sodium, and other metals can be recoverd. Thinking about how sodium reacts with water, there is probably a reasonable way to use that as an stationary industrial energy source.
All of the current methods of hydrogen generation and use are outdated, useing century old techniques, with the ineficiencys typical of early industrial methods, ie: lots of money to be made!
by ahmetomer | 2026-01-09 10:57:47+00:00
I had a similar thought. If a project like Vue or Nuxt can stay afloat with consistent development and updates, without suffering financial difficulties, then it's worth asking why Tailwind hasn't been able to do the same. Yes it is a huge project, with incredible support across all browsers, and needs a lot of care. That's for sure. But I think the business decisions taken by the Tailwind team can be put in the spotlight in this case.
by firasd | 2026-01-09 10:57:49+00:00
Yeah I mean it would be better if REST was the way tools were exposed to LLMs but it's not so what ya gonna do

I'm just glad it's THERE and standard. Right now I can connect an MCP Clock to ChatGPT .com/iOS, Claude .ai/iOS/Claude Code/Claude .exe

It's wild that it's been over three years and these apps don't have a way to check the time without booting up a REPL, relying on an outdated system prompt comment about current UTC or doing web search for cached pages. Bill Gates would have added this to ChatGPT by Dec 2022

You can add my clock [https://mcpclock.firasd.workers.dev/sse] to any of your AI apps right now

(the code is directly deployed from this github to a cloudflare worker if you want to check what it does https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock/blob/main/src/index.ts)
by rsynnott | 2026-01-09 10:58:02+00:00
> The only downside is that you pay more in fees

This is a _huge_ downside for index funds, though. Even quite a small fee difference has a huge compounding impact over time; people often miss just how much.

AIUI, assuming you're investing in a global equity fund, currency hedging is almost never worth it. It _may_ be worth it in some cases if you're investing in a foreign index (eg S&P for Europeans), but even then not usually.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2026-01-09 10:58:08+00:00
So, there are threats and the economic data is fine (like now) -> the free market works great because it works fine in spite of the threats.

There are threats, the economic data falls into the gutter, but eventually recovers (not without real and quite lasting negative consequences for many people) -> the free market works great because hey, if you held SP500 you were still fine in the long run.

It's like a religion. If things go well it's thanks to God, if things go wrong maybe God is testing or punishing you but all will eventually be fine (in the worst case, after death). The free market is a lot like a god for its followers.
by orwin | 2026-01-09 10:58:54+00:00
No, NATO bombing lifted the Sarajevo siege (and killed ~500 civilians), and since the conflict lasted less than 3 weeks after that, saying 'initiating further conflicts on former Yugoslavian lands' is factually wrong.

My non-explicit point was that the Serbs were stopped by the UN peacekeepers, who stopped the advance and _a lot_ of rapes (which seemed to be the Serb army favourite tactic against civilians for some reason). NATO bombing did lift the siege and is said to have stopped the war, which is technically the truth but not really: basically the Serbs couldn't advance and tried to settle for a land grab. NATO bombing prevented the land grab, but the war would have stopped the moment Sarajevo's siege ended. Was the Serb internal political pressure enough to stop the siege (thus the war) around the same time it ended anyway? Impossible to know.
by vanviegen | 2026-01-09 10:58:55+00:00
The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data.

The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-09 10:59:21+00:00
So you're going to make a list and ensure they don't find employment? That's really an overreaction. Most people say "personality fit" is a thing, but I feel you're downright disgusting if you're tracking people like this and actively ensuring they don't get a chance because of a difference of opinion. It's vindictive and in poor taste and not objective at all.
by patresh | 2026-01-09 10:59:41+00:00
I believe OP's point is that for a given model quality, inference cost decreases dramatically over time. The article you linked talks about effective total inference costs which seem to be increasing.

Those are not contradictory: a company's inference costs can increase due to deploying more models (Sora), deploying larger models, doing more reasoning, and an increase in demand.

However, if we look purely at how much it costs to run inference on a fixed amount of requests for a fixed model quality, I am quite convinced that the inference costs are decreasing dramatically. Here's a model from late 2025 (see Model performance section) [1] with benchmarks comparing a 72B parameter model (Qwen2.5) from early 2025 to the late 2025 8B Qwen3 model.

The 9x smaller model outperforms the larger one from earlier the same year on 27 of the 40 benchmarks they were evaluated on, which is just astounding.

[1] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-09 10:59:47+00:00
> If you have to hold USD to buy and sell USD products (as a European)

Do people do this? Up until some months ago, I was heavily invested in some US companies, and I never actually held USD in my accounts at any point. I used EUR to buy those stocks, the conversion happening together with the purchase, and same thing when I sold them, I received EUR ultimately.

I know I could have another account in my bank with USD set to the currency, I just don't know why'd anyone would want to, when you can convert at the point of sale/purchase. Of course, if you're doing forex trading or whatever, that might make sense, but I don't think generally people hold USD to buy/sell US stocks, because you don't have to.
by dfabulich | 2026-01-09 11:00:25+00:00
> Many seem to think there is a path to Wasm replacing JavaScript within the browser—that they might not need to include a .js file at all. This is very unlikely.

This article didn't even seriously entertain replacing JavaScript as an idea, saying nothing about why it's "very unlikely." But it's the #1 thing most devs are excited about in WASM: maybe they could ditch JS and use another language instead for browser UI, at least Rust, but maybe Go or even Python.

The reason that's unlikely is that browser UI is defined in standards as a JavaScript API; restandardizing an ABI for low-level languages would take years (perhaps decades). https://danfabulich.medium.com/webassembly-wont-get-direct-d...
by falloutx | 2026-01-09 11:01:01+00:00
AI cant make complex games yet. When you use a tool like Unreal or Unity or Godot, its not just code, its also thinking about lighting, music, art, surfaces, shaders, materials and so much more. And also a lot of things have to be done in a visual way (connecting nodes, placing models)

Creating a game, even when you have capable team of 2-3 members, its very very broad objective. You have to be master of so many things.
During the vibe coding jam, there were so many games build by AI, but none of them were any good, AI was making three.js games mostly and it was placing objects so stupidly that the term ASS (artificial stupidity sourced) code is a term on discord indie scene. For eg, in a car came it was placing objects on the road.

You can see https://geminimakesrally.vercel.app/ and judge for yourself. Its terrible and its funny for now. It uses the latest Gemini 3 Pro model from December. Can you sell this game? Maybe on mobile if you want to add to the slop store more, I personally dont want to post slop games like this. Removed it from my itch too as soon as we completed the

And before you say its me being shit at vibecoding, yes fair, but I am fairly competitive in non game vibecoding: https://plonkedin.vercel.app/ (made in couple mins)
by businessmate | 2026-01-09 11:01:20+00:00
Public discourse on AI risk continues to frame incidents primarily as technical failures: model bias, hallucination, or misconfiguration. This article advances a different interpretation grounded in governance practice. Drawing on patterns observable in the OECD AI Incidents Monitor, it argues that many AI incidents escalate not because models fail, but because institutions cannot reconstruct what AI systems said, when they said it, and how those representations were framed at the moment of reliance.

The article does not assess model accuracy, internal system design, or causality. Instead, it examines AI incidents as post-event accountability failures driven by missing or non-inspectable evidence. Through sector-agnostic walkthroughs spanning finance, healthcare, and public administration, it demonstrates a recurring governance failure mode: once scrutiny occurs, the absence of contemporaneous, interaction-specific records converts uncertainty into institutional exposure regardless of technical intent or system quality.
by pu_pe | 2026-01-09 11:01:23+00:00
I think two phenomena are at play here, other than plain-old enshittification:

1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency

2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot
by gampleman | 2026-01-09 11:02:42+00:00
Are the verses random? If so perhaps add a filter to make sure the name of the book doesn't occur in the verse. For instance today's is trivial (or if it has "Job replied...", or "Jonah went..." it would make it too easy).

(Unless the name is John. Then it's kind of a good clue that the book isn't John).
by rsynnott | 2026-01-09 11:02:56+00:00
> Does the cost of material goods and services mostly stay the same in EUR, or does it somewhat follow the S&P?

... Wait, why would you expect the price of goods to follow the valuation of, well, any market index, never mind one specific foreign market index? Like, I don't understand why you think that would happen. If anything, you'd expect a minor inverse relationship, at least on a global scale; rapid growth of cost of goods indicates inflation, which implies central bank tightening, which tends to depress stock values a bit.
by adrian17 | 2026-01-09 11:04:20+00:00
> Even a basic hello world in rust will set you back a few megabytes compared to a the tens of bytes it takes in javascript.

That's definitely not true.

A debug build of a "hello wasm-bindgen" style Rust program indeed takes ~2MB, but most of that is debug into; disabling that and/or stripping gets it down to 45-80kB (depending how I did it). And a release build starts at 35kB, and after `wasm-opt -O` gets down to 25kB. AFAIK most of the remaining space is used by wasm-bindgen boilerplate, malloc and panic machinery.

...and then, running wasm-bindgen to generate JS bindings somehow strips most of that boilerplate too, down to 1.4kB.

Side note, I never understood how wasm-opt is able to squeeze so much on top of what LLVM already did (it's a relatively fast post-build step and somehow reduces our production binaries by 10-20% and gives measurable speedups).
by rsynnott | 2026-01-09 11:04:47+00:00
> If you have to hold USD to buy and sell USD products (as a European)

Approximately no individual does this. Some companies may hold some foreign currency reserves, but even there it is not _particularly_ common in most cases.

As a European, I have never, in 40 years, had any USD, except a small amount of paper currency. If I'm buying something made in the US, I'm probably buying from a local vendor, or else will convert on the fly. If I'm visiting the US, I'll convert on the fly (this is even cheap, now, thanks to neo-banks). I own a bunch of US equity, but indirectly via a euro-denominated global market index fund. This is fairly standard. In general it's only common for individuals to hold foreign currency where the local currency is particularly unstable.
by kburman | 2026-01-09 11:05:13+00:00
This analysis dismisses MCP by focusing too narrowly on local file system interactions. The real value isn't just running scripts; it's interoperability.

MCP allows any client (Claude, Cursor, IDEs) to dynamically discover and interact with any resource (Postgres, Slack) without custom glue code. Comparing it to local scripts is like calling USB a fad because parallel ports worked for printers. The power is standardization: write once, support every AI client.

Edit:

To address the security concerns below: MCP is just the wire protocol like TCP or HTTP. We don't expect TCP to natively handle RBAC or prevent data exfil. That is the job of the application/server implementation.
by wegwerf_4783247 | 2026-01-09 11:05:20+00:00
And it's not only your data, that makes it much worse.

"You are the product" is a good catchphrase to make people understand. But actually when you search or interact with LLMs, you provide not only primary data about yourself but also about other people by searching for them in connection with specific search terms, by using these services from your friend's house which connects you to their IP-Address, by uploading photos of other people etc.

"You are the product and you come with batteries (your friends)."
Ask HN: What if the AI scaling plateau is just a "false dip"?
by massicerro | 2026-01-09 11:05:50+00:00
First of all, I’m Italian, and since I don’t feel confident enough to write this post in English myself, I used Gemini to translate my thoughts into the text below.

The Premise: There has been a lot of talk lately about the possibility that AI development (as we currently know it) is approaching a plateau. While I don't personally agree with this hypothesis, it is undeniably a common sentiment in the industry right now, so it’s worth investigating.

We have seen that increasing the number of parameters or "scaling up" a neural network doesn't always yield immediate linear improvements. With certain versions of ChatGPT, many users perceived a degradation in performance despite the underlying network complexity presumably being increased.

My Theory: Is it possible that we are seeing a "complexity dip"? In other words, could there be a phase where increasing complexity initially causes a drop in performance, only to be followed by a new phase where that same complexity allows for superior emergent properties?

To simplify, let’s imagine a hypothetical scale where we compare "Complexity" (parameters/compute) vs. "Performance." For example:

LLM: Chat GPT 3 // Complexity Level 1 // Performace 0.2

LLM: Chat GPT 3.5 // Complexity Level 10 // Performance 0.5

LLM: Chat GPT 4 // Complexity Level 100 // Performance 0.75

LLM: Chat GPT 4.2 // Complexity Level 1000 // Performance 0.6 (The "False Plateau" / Performance degradation)

LLM: Chat GPT 4.2X // Complexity Level 10000 // Performance 0.5 (Further degradation due to unmanaged complexity)

LLM: Chat GPT 6 // Complexity Level 100000 // Performance 0.8 (The "breakthrough": new abilities emerge)

LLM: Chat GPT 7 // Complexity Level 1000000 // Performance 0.99 (Potential AGI / Peak performance)

The Risk: The real problem here is economic and psychological. If we are currently in the "GPT-4.x" phase of this example, the industry might stop investing because the returns look negative. We might never reach the "GPT-6" level simply because we mistook a temporary dip for a permanent ceiling.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Have we seen similar "dips" in other complex systems before a new level of organization emerges? Or is the plateau a hard physical limit?