MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-29 02:03:23+00:00
The issue isn't whether LLMs are useful: it's whether OpenAI is positioned to deliver substantial future profitability.

Given their competition consists of the largest tech companies in the world, several of which are vertically-integrated, have advanced AI research programs, and own the last hardware mile to the customer...

OpenAI better hope it can maintain a performance lead, while being able to run inference cheaper than its competitors, while also launching a must-have device it controls (AR/audio glasses?).
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-29 02:03:28+00:00
Years ago I had a client, a European billionaire, who moved to California because the taxes were "so low" compared to his home country. (The difference was only a few percent, and yes he had lived in Vegas with its 0% income tax before moving to California.)

He's still here, and unlike the PAB SV billionaires, he has no plans to leave because he's seen what places with no/low taxes are like. (TLDR: they have low taxes because nobody would want to live there otherwise. )
by llsf | 2026-01-29 02:04:07+00:00
Well, that is not just a payment solution. It can be linked to other things, and primarily to your Prime account, but it could be linked to other loyalty programs too.

So when you wave your hand, you get your Prime discounts, you pay and you get your points. Just by waving your hand. No need to reach for a phone, an app, a card, scan a QR code, etc.

The tech had some advantages. I used it every time at WF. I liked it.
by robinhoode | 2026-01-29 02:04:22+00:00
If we lived in a sane society, AI would actually be used for good.

AI is literally trained on by humans, used by humans. If humans are doing awful things with it, then it's because humans are awful right now.

I strongly feel this is related to the rise of fascism and wealth inequality.

We need a great conflict like WW2 to release this tension.
by kalterdev | 2026-01-29 02:04:38+00:00
People are beginning to realize that prompt is a bottleneck and design problem, that traditional workarounds (history, aliases, complex autocomplete) don’t work. But running scripts in a traditional way, full file, from the top to the bottom, is inconvenient, too.

What about this instead: select any number of lines, in any file, and pass it through to the shell. You get convenience of text editing, file management, and shell’s straightforwardness.

(This approach was tried and cemented in Acme, a text editor from Bell Labs.)
by solid_fuel | 2026-01-29 02:04:42+00:00
It also feels like using one of those cereal encoder wheels, to some degree. If someone sends me 10 paragraphs of output from chatGPT, and they only wrote a sentence to prompt it, then the output is really just a re-encoding of the information in the original prompt.

Quite literally - if they sent me the text of the prompt I could obtain the same output, so the output is just a more verbose way of stating the prompt.

I find it really disrespectful to talk to people through an LLM like that.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 02:04:52+00:00
Even this has little to do with AI and points right at the capitalist society that already exists. HN really doesn't like to talk about their golden child that let's money flow, but the concentration of wealth and IP by the super wealthy occurred before GenAI was a thing.

This also ignores the broken fucking copyright system that ensures once you create something you get many lifetimes of fucking off without having to work, so if genAI kills that I won't shed a tear.
by rationalist | 2026-01-29 02:05:04+00:00
Edit: Why the disagreement? I don't like it that people were killed, same as you all I hope.

> violently extracting her from the car

Isn't that what always happens when someone doesn't comply when told to exit their vehicle? Since when has not complying with an officer on the street resulted them in saying, 'Oh, okay, carry on what you were doing'?

I imagine if I parked perpendicular on a road and danced while honking my horn (timestamp 39 seconds in video below), then not complying when the police told me to exit the vehicle, the police would try to extract me by force as well.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wrlUUPZPpaY

I always thought a protest was chanting with signs, but it seems like times have changed.

I haven't seen videos and of officers going up to people holding signs (who are not trying to be physical with the officers) and initiating physical contact.

I haven't seen video of the officers walk up to Alex Pretti and tackle him for no reason. I have seen a video of him on a prior day kicking and breaking the light off a vehicle:

https://x.com/RyanSaavedra/status/2016611647553413126

Are constant blaring of whistles at Alex Pretti's shooting, to alert people, or make it more likely for the officers to make a mistake?

I'm not a fan of anything that's going on, and it appears that people are trying to make things worse, not better. Why?
by gradus_ad | 2026-01-29 02:05:41+00:00
Jensen needs to keep escalating the hype to keep the hoarding dynamics in play. Because that's what's selling GPU's. You can't look at voracious GPU demand as a real signal of AI app profitability or general demand. It's a function of global tech oligarchs with gargantuan cash hoards not wanting to be left behind. But hoarding dynamics are nonlinear through self reinforcment and the moment any hint of limitations of current gen AI crop up spend will collapse.
by simonw | 2026-01-29 02:05:42+00:00
What do you mean? Are you suggesting that the "one human" means it wasn't entirely written by AI?

That's not the case, the "one human" there is the one human prompting it: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/

If your goalpost here is "no human involved at all" then it's a good thing I asked you what your goalposts were before spending any time on this!

UPDATE: OK I think I see what's happened here! You're asking to see an open source repo that was built using the "dark factory" pattern, where no code was even reviewed by a human.

I don't think I've seen one of those yet - I mean maybe that Cursor FastRender thing comes close?

It's a very radical technique. I don't think many people are trying this yet - I haven't been brave enough to try it myself yet.

I guess I kind of did that with my Python WASM library? That was an experiment in how far I could get with prompting and not reviewing, but it's not something I'd hold up as a shining example of how projects should be built: https://github.com/simonw/pwasm
by belter | 2026-01-29 02:06:05+00:00
Be careful and dont drink the kool aid...all from 2025...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EhDTlYbn910

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3wtJhOj5Ouk

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CqazhMw205c

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/McX19KSWmbU

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p5QrtF2VYwE

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2na2I0E55-o

https://youtu.be/JoXAUfF029I
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-29 02:06:11+00:00
> The solution if you really want to hear from the other side is to visit their echo chamber.

That's not a solution at all, the point isn't to hear unopposed, highly selective talking points, we know all that already, the media is full of it. The point is to see them defend their positions against fairly simple criticism which they block and the mainstream media doesn't address.
by twodave | 2026-01-29 02:07:18+00:00
I understand the frustration when things don’t just work. Also I find it kind of funny when people act like Linux just solved all their problems, despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc. These all get hand-waved somehow because it’s not Linux’s “fault” I suppose? Good for the author but the opportunity cost of moving to Linux alone is prohibitive based on the comments I see here, my own experience notwithstanding…
by netsharc | 2026-01-29 02:07:27+00:00
I keep telling Windows 10 to delay these updates by 1 week each time...

Curiously, Office apps have auto-save, so does IntelliJ, VSCode, and even Notepad nowadays.. "restore my work environment after a reboot" almost works, but some things do disappear (e.g. unsaved web input forms) that it's aggravating enough. I wonder if they'll make it mandatory for apps to persist more across restarts.

Ok, that requires them to be competent, if they're competent we won't even have what we have now.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-29 02:10:02+00:00
Okay that's my ignorance of Tesla models then, I assumed the more expensive models were also faster.

I guess then it's more like Toyota EOLing Lexus or GM getting rid of Cadillac.

I understand the point that the cheaper models are higher volume. Historically that had not precluded the creation of sports and luxury models for most manufacturers. Are the legacy brands wrong to do this? Currently I doubt their business acumen far less than Elon's.
by nickjj | 2026-01-29 02:10:09+00:00
Oh yeah, 4 GB would be really rough on Windows 10.

The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM.

It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.
by throwaway-11-1 | 2026-01-29 02:10:46+00:00
You really made an astounding number of assumptions which I don’t think you have the insight to extract from a single comment. You clearly have zero idea where I’m coming from so try to chill.

I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies.

For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics.

Geez man
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-29 02:10:46+00:00
That is the user's solution. Patreon (the company having trouble with Apple) is not in the position to get ~50% of it's users to use a different phone.

Apple should not be allowed to be in the middle of business and half the users of the world.

And yes, that is very much something that governments have regulated for decades. In fact it's basically why anti-trust was invented. Train companies and deals with Standard Oil meant together they controlled the market since if you didn't go through them you couldn't ship your product.
by petterroea | 2026-01-29 02:11:16+00:00
I can't remember last time I filled in a form and thought "man, I wish I didn't have to do this". And I live in Japan!

Most forms take 2-5 min and have the useful side effect of updating my mental state with important information about whatever I'm filling in a form for. If you want to replace that, the lowest barrier before it becomes useful is that someone else takes complete ownership of the task related to the form.
by akomtu | 2026-01-29 02:11:22+00:00
AI is alien intelligence, really. If biotech created an unusual mold that responds to electric impulses the way LLMs do, we would rightfully declare that this mold has some sort of intelligence and for this reason it is, technically speaking, an alien lifeform. AI is just that intelligent mold, but based on transistors instead of organic cells. Needless to say, it's a bad idea to create a competing lifeform that's smarter than us, regardless of whatever flimsy benefits it might have.
by arjunchint | 2026-01-29 02:11:59+00:00
In our benchmark of web agents, we found that vision/GUI based agents get tripped up on popups/overlays, need large vision models and require using CDP in browsers.

Our own DOM-only web agent, rtrvr.ai, worked seamlessly underneath dialogs, can just use off the shelf Gemini Flash Lite and use Chrome native APIs leading to minimal infrastructure failures, SOTA performance and lowest cost.

https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/web-bench-results
by greggh | 2026-01-29 02:11:59+00:00
The real answer here is that he is mad about people protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza. This $100M donation is being made with funds he had given to UPenn. He has taken it back, via lawyers, because they allowed the protests to go on. He is now just taking that original donation and moving it somewhere else. Not that I am against the Olympians getting paid, just some context.

Sources:
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/donor-pulls-100-mill...
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4348656-upenn-loses-1...
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/who-is-ross-stevens-stone...
(many more)
by dekhn | 2026-01-29 02:12:45+00:00
Cool project, but just how many polygons are you talking about? Also, my guess is you did meshes, instead of breps- they are far more efficient in my experience.

The largest mesh I worked with in Fusion 360 is a digital elevation map of California, it has 2.8M vertices and 5.6M faces and it's still possible to get things done (like making a CAM to carve a 2 foot x 2 foot map with reasonable details).
by bobsterlobster | 2026-01-29 02:13:02+00:00
I agree with you that there's some friction involved and a bunch of trade-offs.

The thing is that I absolutely lost it, because of the bugs and the ads, and just wanted something reliable that doesn't nag me all the time.

I know that other people's linux experience may be radically different due to different hardware, so I'll consider myself lucky it all worked out.
by jamilton | 2026-01-29 02:13:17+00:00
(Light spoilers) Supposedly the design intent was that you're not supposed to stealth in the dark much at all! It's really not obvious though, so it's a bit of a failure of design in that particular aspect. Interview with a dev: https://medium.com/@cordialkobold/interview-with-alex-beachu...

Still spooky atmosphere for sure.
by mediaman | 2026-01-29 02:13:48+00:00
How? They are all losing tens of billions of dollars on this, so far.

Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

There doesn't appear to be any moat.

This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but the AI business looks terrible, and it appears that most benefits are going to accrue fairly broadly across the economy, not to a few tech titans.

NVIDIA is the one exception to that, since there is a big moat on their business, but not clear how long that will last either.
by jcrawfordor | 2026-01-29 02:14:08+00:00
I don't know that there is much technology to sell, palm vein imaging is decades old in the access control industry. The reason you don't see it anywhere is because it was already a commercial failure in that application, by the end of the 1990s.

Amazon was even trying to sell the technology for access control applications, but their sales material were remarkably devoid of any reason to choose it over other biometrics.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-29 02:14:27+00:00
Discussion yesterday Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot (232 points, 218 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783863

And 3 days ago Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant (391 points, 257 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760237
by vamsimyla | 2026-01-29 02:15:33+00:00
Hi Christian, this problem (OCR/Extraction from messy menus) is exactly what I specialize in. I have been building extraction pipelines for unstructured data and I would love to help you build the scraping/NLP engine.

I couldn't find your email in your profile, could you please drop me a note at mylavamsikrishnasai@gmail? I would love to show you how I would approach the menu standardization.

Please find my website here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/vamsimyla/personalwebsitevm
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-29 02:15:59+00:00
lmao WTAF is this?

build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/build/lib/sherlock
by llsf | 2026-01-29 02:16:37+00:00
I guess the "biometric identification linked to a payment instrument" issue is mostly trust.

Do I trust the entity that identify me using biometrics ?

Do I trust it with my biometric data ?

If I link a payment method, do I trust it with access to my payment details ?

With Amazon Go at WF, I was fine to let Amazon know and store my hand biometrics, and I was fine enough with Amazon know what I purchase at WF, as long as I had something back (loyalty program).

Scaling this though would negatively impact the trust. Maybe I do not want Amazon to know "everything" I purchase everywhere (even though Visa/MC/Amex already know it...)
by godelski | 2026-01-29 02:20:27+00:00
Kinda of a side note but a way I try to talk to people about how much a billion dollars is is "how many people can you hire each day at X dollars before you start losing money".

Here's the setup: you have a billion dollars invested in some account earning some interest, let's say 5% because that's like bond rates (lower than S&P500). Day 1 you generate interest and don't hire. All following weekdays you hire a new employee and day then daily at a yearly rate of Y, say $250k/yr. Most people are going to be surprised that you can basically go an entire year before your account has less than a billion dollars.

I do this because it's so much money the daily interest is not negligible. I mean 1000000000*0.05/365~=$137k. Is back of the envelope and estimating, but it gets the point across. (So you can hire people daily at $100k indefinitely...)

Anyways, googling suggests there's ~600 American Olympians that participated in 2024 and another ~250 paraolympians. So what, we need on the order of $10bn to solve this? I can think of a lot worse ways we currently spend that kind of money and about 15 Americans where this would be less than 10% their total wealth and 11 of those people made more than twice that just last year... I'm not saying anyone should but hey, Elon could solve issues like these without blinking an eye. Probably better PR than anything else he could do
by rmunn | 2026-01-29 02:20:41+00:00
I have ADHD myself, so you're not telling me anything I didn't know. Rapid-fire media consumption cannot create the genetic condition, but as you said it can create the symptoms. And that's the important part anyway: a generation that has trouble paying attention to important things because they're getting habituated to rapid-fire video formats. Even if the symptoms (chasing the next dopamine hit) are only acute and not chronic, as long as people are addicted (behaviorally, not chemically) to phone screens, those acute symptoms will occur so often that they might as well be chronic for all practical purposes, because more often than not, people will be in that slightly-dazed state caused by coming off the addictive behavior. (I used to have that myself after a multi-hour gaming session, before I realized that I was displaying all the signs of addiction and quit computer games cold turkey. So I know what it feels like.)
by popoflojo | 2026-01-29 02:21:07+00:00
I code firmware for a heavily regulated medical device (where mistakes mean life and death), and I try to have AI write unit tests for me all the time, and I would say I spend about 3 days correcting and polishing what the AI gives me in 30 minutes. The first pass the AI gives me, likely saves a day of work, but you would have to be crazy to trust it blindly. I guarantee it is not giving you what you think it is or what you need. And writing the tests is when I usually find and fix issues in the code. If AI is writing tests that all pass without updating the code then it's likely falsely telling you the code is perfect when it isn't.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-29 02:22:15+00:00
Hello HN, I have an important thing to point out:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOT WORK!

let me put it another way:

THIS EXTENSION DOES NOTHING USEFUL!

The author did not reverse engineer anything. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

The author did not check if the extension actually works. He simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Other commenters in this thread have noted that this extension cannot do what it claims. [1] The author simply asked Claude Code to make this without testing or verifying any of the outputs.

Thanks for listening to my ted talk.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803836
by nunez | 2026-01-29 02:22:47+00:00
> Billionaire financier Ross Stevens is changing that. Starting with the upcoming Milan Cortina Olympics, he will give $200,000 to every U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athlete—even if they don’t win a medal. Per the Wall Street Journal, “Half will come 20 years after their first qualifying Olympic appearance or at age 45, whichever comes later. Another $100,000 will be in the form of a guaranteed benefit for their families after they pass away.”

> His entire donation to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), announced last March, is $100 million—a record breaking gift to the organization.

Just...lol.
by noosphr | 2026-01-29 02:22:53+00:00
Your original post in the thread is about an automated dark factory with thousands of AI agents. It's amazing but we can't see it because they are in stealth mode.

Then the first example of a project done by AI without human intervention is someone who _explicitly_ states that they drove the way the agent behaved.

From the blog:

>The human who drives the agent might matter more than how the agents work and are set up, the judge is still out on this one

>If one person with one agent can produce equal or better results than "hundreds of agents for weeks", then the answer to the question: "Can we scale autonomous coding by throwing more agents at a problem?", probably has a more pessimistic answer than some expected.

I'm really not understanding what this proves other than the fact that AI + human is great and AI + AI is shit. Something that both me and the person who did the browser agreed on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783282
by technofastest | 2026-01-29 02:23:27+00:00
> but I think we can agree that would be really obtuse of me.

I would disagree.

Dario Amodei? You're making it too easy:

- Dario is CEO and Co-Founder of an LLM company ("techno-")

- Said LLM company is working with both public and private security companies

- The policies and actions these organizations are taking, often utilizing the technology provided by said LLM company, reflect that of a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, and the forcible suppression of opposition. ("-fascist")

Public:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/19/the-pentagon-says-ai-is-sp...

https://www.ft.com/content/e75e3388-4700-413d-ab67-778410c2d...

Private:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46794365

Wouljya look at all those facts!
by caminante | 2026-01-29 02:23:40+00:00
> assuming no additional countervailing policy changes

When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing? This is tautological.

It's like you're making a point that doesn't flow from the original discussion and point raised that economists missed the mark on how much Trump's tariffs would cause extreme inflation for everyday US citizens. They still can (TBD), but haven't to the extent predicted.