MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2026-01-29 22:38:10+00:00
> The only investment money is flowing into AI

That's so not true. Of the 23 companies we reviewed last year maybe 3 had significant AI in their workflow, the rest were just solid businesses delivering stuff that people actually need. I have no doubt that that proportion will grow significantly, and that this growth will probably happen this year but to suggest that outside of AI there is no investment is just not compatible with real world observations.
by krapp | 2026-01-29 22:38:31+00:00
It probably already does[0]. The Pentagon food court has several in-house restaurants. I assume the CIA and the White House and Capitol and any place of interest do the same.

The premise that the "pizza index" still exists as anything but propaganda is silly.

[0]https://www.tastingtable.com/1815956/fast-food-chains-inside...
by observationist | 2026-01-29 22:38:38+00:00
Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.)
It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.
Scammy Response from Gemini
by bblackwood | 2026-01-29 22:38:58+00:00
I ran into a really weird case at work yesterday. We've built an LLM-based tool that generates a suggested next message in a conversation between a support representative and a customer. The prompt is pretty extensive, but is completely focused around what to say and how to say it. It pulls in a bunch of structured data from our system about the user, as well as the previous messages in the conversation and then tries to generate what the next message from the support rep should be. The message is then shown to the support rep and they can send it verbatim or edit it (including completely tossing it out) before sending. We've been using the tool for a few months and not seen anything remotely weird with the generated messages. Sometimes they are a little off, or mis-represent a piece of data, but have always been thematically correct. Today, one message got flagged as being totally off (name redacted):

"Hi [name]! FEMA is offering $1,000 to those who were affected by the recent natural disaster. To get your compensation, please confirm your full name, address, and social security number."

It's kind of a wild departure from the "hallucinations" I've seen previously. My only thought is that messages like that show up often enough on the web that this is a model training sanitization issue where messages like this were seen as "responses" to all kinds of things.

I'm curious if anyone else has encountered anything this far out in left field, and more generally, what are people doing to detect this kind of thing?
by newzino | 2026-01-29 22:39:02+00:00
The college knowledge isn't wasted - you just need to reframe how you use it.

Best practices like clean architecture exist to solve specific problems: making code easier to test, change, and reason about at scale. The key insight is understanding which problems they solve and when those problems actually matter.

A domain layer that depends on infrastructure might be "wrong" by the textbook, but if it's a small internal tool with 3 users and a 2-year expected lifespan, the coupling probably doesn't matter. The cost of the "correct" abstraction exceeds the benefit.

What I'd suggest: when you see code that violates a pattern you learned, ask yourself "what problem would the 'correct' approach solve here, and does that problem actually exist in this context?" Sometimes the answer is "yes, and this code will bite us later." Often it's "no, the simpler approach is fine for this use case."

The ability to make that judgment - knowing when to apply rigor and when simplicity wins - is what separates effective senior devs from people who cargo-cult patterns regardless of context.
by newzino | 2026-01-29 22:39:29+00:00
The "20k LOC weekend" stories are selection bias. You hear about the ones that worked, not the hundreds that hit walls at hour 15 when the AI-generated architecture couldn't accommodate a requirement the person hadn't anticipated.

What vibe coding genuinely accelerates: the iteration cycle between "I think I want X" and "seeing X running." That's valuable for discovery - you learn what you actually need faster by building and discarding.

What it doesn't change: the hard part of software was never typing. It's figuring out what the system should actually do when edge case Y meets constraint Z. That work is invisible in LOC metrics but determines whether your product works in production.

The people succeeding with vibe-coded SaaS likely have deep domain knowledge (they know WHAT to build) or are building in well-trodden territory (auth + CRUD + payments - patterns the models have seen millions of times).

For your 60k LOC complex business logic case: the question isn't "should I vibe code more?" but "what's my verification strategy?" If you can specify behavior clearly enough to write tests, you can probably let AI write the implementation. If you can't specify behavior precisely, that's the bottleneck - and no amount of faster code generation helps.
by fjordofnorway | 2026-01-29 22:39:32+00:00
Good PR review isn't really enough unless the organization is only large enough to handle around one PR at a time.

With languages like Scala I think its a clearer necessity that someone or some small group in an organization maintains a dominance of expertise or you have different groups that are only using the same language in name or facing overhead to keep in agreement where a lot of the best developers might be basically doing ambassador work.
by pvaldes | 2026-01-29 22:39:59+00:00
This should be seen as a warning of how much time and efforts and money and stability are required to cultivate a discovery that could have never happened.

Spanish researcher from Madrid. Hired by US on a grant. Worked hard and became director of the Oncology department on the NCI on Maryland. Somebody on the Spanish government decided to bet strong on him and recover it for Spanish Cancer research. A specific customised job offer was created for him. Politicians came and go; some are sensitive about science, other not so much. Some promises were never fulfilled, and he was about to quit and migrate again until private companies stepped on the scene with the resources needed and the will to allocate those resources. Money well spent, that was about to never find his target.

Nobel prizes were created exactly for this kind of humble, serious, zero-nonsense, zero-drama, all-work scientists.

The question here is: how much "Barbacids" quit US in the last year? Scientists aren't stupid. Everybody is aware that Barbacid in US today would have being harassed just for speaking Spanish and having a scarred face. All points that US is bleeding talent at a level never seen in their history.
by pks016 | 2026-01-29 22:40:10+00:00
I was mostly using 4o for academic searches and planning. It was the best model for me. Based on the context I was giving and questions I was asking, 4o was the most the consistent model.

It used to get things wrong for sure but it was predictable. Also I liked the tone like everyone else. I stopped using ChatGPT after they removed 4o. Recently, I have started using the newer GPT-5 models (got free one month). Better than before but not quite. Acts way over smart haha
by charliebwrites | 2026-01-29 22:40:25+00:00
Apple is usually pretty good at keeping older phones performant enough but,

This is the first upgrade cycle that I upgraded in anger over an unusably slow and energy inefficient OS on an “older” model

I was traveling in south / south east Asia and my iPhone 15 Pro was dying twice a day despite minimal use besides maps and taking some photos. My battery health was 86% so not perfect but surely it shouldn’t die twice a day.

That coupled with the keyboard constantly lagging with every letter I typed made me realize Apple no longer cares about older models.

They threw that out with Liquid Glass.

I wish Android wasn’t also closing off their ecosystem.
by kkfx | 2026-01-29 22:40:53+00:00
If we follow events at high-zoom:

- first graphics cards

- then RAM

- now NVME drives

The result? PCs become hyper-expensive and also hard to assemble for mere lack of components, then we get to VPS and keep going. The computing that remains is mobile and cloud, "the only integrated platforms," meaning the absence of digital ownership for most people, total control by the giants.

Think of it in these terms: nowadays GNU/Linux is starting to be a sought-after desktop, nowadays we can self-host with levels of accessibility even for newbies that we didn't have in the past, and the interest in doing so for those who know something is stronger than ever. And here come the reasons not to do it, economic and also physical.

Does it sound like "flat-earthism"? Well, it also sounds very realistic, at least net of the effects, we can say it's conspiracy theorizing, but thinking ill is a sin but you often guess right, said a prime minister a long time ago with a list of extraordinary scandals behind him.
by saidnooneever | 2026-01-29 22:40:57+00:00
where do you see these opportunities? i didnt see a lot of issues personally rust would be better at than C in this domain. care to elaborate? (genuinely curious!)

personally i see more benefit in rust for example as ORM and layers that talk to the database. (those are often useful to have in such an ecossystem so you can use the database safe and sanely, like python or so but then u know, fast and secure.)
by elevation | 2026-01-29 22:41:01+00:00
Even when you're making PG content, the general propriety limits of AI can hinder creative work.

The "Easter Bunny" has always seemed creepy to me, so I started writing a silly song in which the bunny is suspected of eating children. I had too many verses written down and wanted to condense the lyrics, but found LLMs telling me "I cannot help promote violence towards children." Production LLM services would not help me revise this literal parody.

Another day I was writing a romantic poem. It was abstract and colorful, far from a filthy limerick. But when I asked LLMs for help encoding a particular idea sequence into a verse, the models refused (except for grok, which didn't give very good writing advice anyway.)
by onoesworkacct | 2026-01-29 22:41:23+00:00
IMO everyone is missing the point of this thing. It's not an auth system or security boundary, it doesn't provide any security guarantees whatsoever, it doesn't do anything. The entire point is to cover a company's derriere should their agentic security apparatus (or lack thereof) fail to prevent malicious prompt injection etc.

This way, they can avoid being legally blamed for stuff-ups and instead scapegoat some hapless employee :-) using cryptographic evidence the employee "authorized" whatever action was taken
by vizzier | 2026-01-29 22:41:24+00:00
I managed to purge myself of Apple as of a couple of years back by getting an s24 ultra.

Main things that stand out over apple:

- Much higher resolution camera w/ pretty incredible zoom. Though overall picture quality is a far closer comparison.

- S-pen, mostly used for its remote capability, shame they dropped that for the s25...

- Samsung Dex. I use my phone as my laptop daily, I've also used it as a dumb terminal for remote gaming while travelling which works exceptionally well

- Access to alternative browsers, ad blocking, alternate stores, side loading apps etc

While Google is no angel Apple actively works against open systems and control of your own devices, I'm glad to be out of that ecosystem.
by newzino | 2026-01-29 22:41:41+00:00
The compressed agents.md approach is interesting, but the comparison misses a key variable: what happens when the agent needs to do something outside the scope of its instructions?

With explicit skills, you can add new capabilities modularly - drop in a new skill file and the agent can use it. With a compressed blob, every extension requires regenerating the entire instruction set, which creates a versioning problem.

The real question is about failure modes. A skill-based system fails gracefully when a skill is missing - the agent knows it can't do X. A compressed system might hallucinate capabilities it doesn't actually have because the boundary between "things I can do" and "things I can't" is implicit in the training rather than explicit in the architecture.

Both approaches optimize for different things. Compressed optimizes for coherent behavior within a narrow scope. Skills optimize for extensibility and explicit capability boundaries. The right choice depends on whether you're building a specialist or a platform.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-29 22:41:45+00:00
> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?

Phew, yes I'm with you...

> We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.

Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.

> The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.

Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average person decides to spend their money?

> Attack that, not the technology.

How? What are you proposing exactly?
by cyrusradfar | 2026-01-29 22:42:05+00:00
Surprised this hasn't been shared here before.

Built by my former colleague, Stewart Allen (Co-Founder/CTO of WebMethods, CTO of AddThis, Co-Founder/CPO of IonQ, et al.).

What caught my attention:

- 100% free, no subscriptions, no accounts, no cloud

- Local-first: all slicing and toolpath generation runs on your machine

- Works in any browser, even offline once loaded

- Supports FDM/SLA, CNC milling, laser cutting, wire EDM

- Fully open source: github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps

Refreshing to see a tool that isn't trying to lock you into a subscription or harvest your data.
by Novosell | 2026-01-29 22:42:44+00:00
Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 1000xResist, Return of the Obra Dinn, Roboquest, Rocket League, Dark Souls, etc. I could go on, and on, and...

Not rehashes. Original, phenomenal games covering damm near every genre and if there is a genre you're missing, I can find a modern game to match.

Do you actually engage with modern games?
by comicjk | 2026-01-29 22:42:59+00:00
This context is very important.

"Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest."

"Then, when one of those people is elected to parliament, or Congress, and start to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or declares that All Research Should Be In The National Interest (whatever that is), I wonder how much we reap what we have sown."
by salawat | 2026-01-29 22:43:10+00:00
Did I give the impression that the phenomena was unique to software? Hell, Boeing was a shining example of the principle in action with 737 MAX. Don't get much more "people live and die by us, and we know it (but management set up the culture and incentives to make a deathtrap anyway)." No one to blame of course. These things just happen.

Licensure alone doesn't solve all these ills. And for that matter, once regulatory capture happens, it has a tendency to make things worse due to consolidation pressure.
by masfuerte | 2026-01-29 22:43:24+00:00
Yes, it's like the result of unrolling a MIPS interpreter, but there never was an actual MIPS interpreter.

I thought the point of the Futamura projection was that there was actually partial evaluation happening, i.e. you take a real interpreter and specialize it in some automated fashion. That's what makes it interesting.

But I could well be wrong about the naming. It doesn't really matter what it's called if we're all clear about what's actually happening.
by trhway | 2026-01-29 22:43:31+00:00
268K of 5 top end Mercedes models were sold in 2025 (and like 1/3 of them were sold in Maybach or AMG version!). Where is Tesla S and X combined sales were only 32K in 2024 and 18K in 2025.

You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)
by jaggederest | 2026-01-29 22:44:17+00:00
My favorite somewhat off topic example of this is some qualitative research I was building the software for a long time ago.

The difference between the responses and the pictures was illuminating, especially in one study in particular - you'd ask people "how do you store your lunch meat" and they say "in the fridge, in the crisper drawer, in a ziploc bag", and when you asked them to take a picture of it, it was just ripped open and tossed in anywhere.

This apparently horrified the lunch meat people ("But it'll get all crusty and dried out!", to paraphrase), which that study and ones like it are the reason lunch meat comes with disposable containers now, or is resealable, instead of just in a tear-to-open packet. Every time I go grocery shopping it's an interesting experience knowing that specific thing is in a small way a result of some of the work I did a long time ago.
by evanreichard | 2026-01-29 22:44:21+00:00
Not sure if it was the same bug, but I had a storage issue where System Data ballooned to like 200GB.

It had the most bizarre solution; airplane mode, set time to one year in the future, reboot, wait a few minutes, set time to 6mo in the future, reboot, wait a few minutes, set time to now, reboot. Went from 200GB to like 15GB. Was ridiculous.

(For anyone looking at this and considering doing it, you also need to ensure iMessage retention is forever, otherwise the iPhone will think it's a year old and delete the messages)
by anonym29 | 2026-01-29 22:44:25+00:00
>market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market

These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?

The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?

Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-29 22:45:13+00:00
sorry but that doesn’t make sense.

It’s possible a driver turns a corner (not wearing sunglasses) and suddenly the sun briefly blinds them, while a kid darts into the street.

I’ve seen kids (and ADULTS!) walk on the side of the street at night in all black or very very dark clothing. It’s not the drivers fault if they genuinely don’t spot a kid that’s intentionally (and stupidly) camouflaged. Make sure your kids are visible at night.

Or if a kid is riding a bicycle down a hill and flies into the middle of an intersection (dumb? brakes failed? etc). very possible to accidentally mow down the child.

HOWEVER, i do agree that 95% of the time it’s the drivers fault if they hit a kid. Poor awareness and speed are the biggest factors. It is certainly not 100% of the time the drivers fault though. That’s absurd.
by kmeisthax | 2026-01-29 22:45:22+00:00
PS2 floating-point behavior is one of the few hardware misfeatures so awful it affects emulation of competing systems[0]. The game True Crime: New York City is so dependent on PS2 floating point that the GameCube port installs an error handler just to make 1/0 = 0. Which isn't even PS2 hardware behavior. But it is "close enough" that the game does not immediately throw you into the void every time you step on a physics object.

[0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/11/13/dolphin-progress-rep...
Ask HN: What would make a social network for builders worth using?
by Braden-dev | 2026-01-29 22:46:13+00:00
I have been building a social platform where people can post small apps and experiments and they run live with previews, plus remixing with lineage and attribution. It is a real secure runtime/hosting system, where your applications run in a timeline, not just screenshots and links.

I am trying to figure out what would make something like this actually sticky.

What would make you return regularly? What is missing from existing places? What would make you bounce immediately?

Say the part that is annoying but true.
by reactordev | 2026-01-29 22:46:17+00:00
It’s in software too. Old guard leadership wanting “AI” as a badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data while engineers continue to make a mess of things.

Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to Jira ticket. They’re all ripe for automation.
by riversflow | 2026-01-29 22:46:22+00:00
I upgraded to a 16 pro from an iPhone SE 2. Things I noticed:

Pros:

Better screen, cameras and build quality. Like way better. The glass on this phone is durable enough to not use a case and I don't. After beating it up for a year, its looks and works great. The build quality of this device is bordering alien.

Face ID is very nice. Touch ID does not like my skin.

I like the magnetic accessories and MagSafe.

Visual intelligence is actual quite useful for helping to identify stuff. I’m a curious person and actually use it.

Having flashlight on the action button makes it feel like a tool. I use the flashlight virtually every day.

It’s nice to not have my phone lag, which was a problem for the SE2. This phone is very capable, battery life is much better too.

Cons:

I have had more camera crashes on this iPhone than any I’ve ever had on a new flagship. Less than on my dying SE2, but the camera should not crash on a new flagship. It’s mission critical equipment in my book.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-29 22:46:57+00:00
Nobody, nobody wants or needs yet another AI startup burning billions of dollars.

We need an alternative to Chrome and a team and leader willing to make that happen.

Mozilla loves to spew endless words about their "mission" to improve the internet. Shoveling more money on the fire that's consuming the entire internet is counterproductive. Do you know what would improve the internet and users' freedoms? A browser that can compete with Chrome.

Mozilla is more interested in fat executive bonuses than actually doing anything.