MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 13:05:44+00:00
There is no potential "principal" here that is distinguishable from posturing and dick swinging.

Unless you find some unforeseeable smoking gun any conviction will necessarily be questionable at best. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond saying "we're the prosecutor's office, look how bad ass we are, look how we somehow manage to convict someone decades later, fear us". Never mind the fact that dredging this stuff up is not likely to be good for the family and that odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent so it's not like you're going after a "real criminal".
by epolanski | 2026-01-29 13:06:50+00:00
But this is all based on the idea we need generic robots when we really need specialized ones.

It's like skipping making kitchen blenders and vacuum cleaners and instead building a robot that will be mixing stuff manually or using a broom.

Manufacturing, where 90% of the process is generally automated has countless specialized ones. It would not make sense to put generic ones there, because humans really are doing very specific work in manufacturing.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-29 13:07:31+00:00
Most of what you have said is not different from what I have said.

All the rotating parts bigger than some tens of micrometers have only a limited rotation angle, where the limits are enforced by the solid connections between the 2 mobile parts, e.g. tendons, nerves and blood vessels.

The bacterial flagella and the rotating enzymes, which are powered by ionic currents, cannot be scaled to greater sizes. Already the flagella of nucleated cells (eukaryotes) are no longer based on rotating motors, but on contractile proteins, which must be attached at both ends on the mobile parts, limiting the relative movement.

Unlimited rotation is an absolutely necessary condition for a wheel that is used in locomotion, otherwise it is no longer a wheel.

A wheel used in locomotion that would have limited rotation would be just a leg that happens to have the shape of a wheel, because like a leg it would have to be raised from the ground for the forward motion, eliminating the exact advantage in efficiency that wheeled vehicles and tracked vehicles have over legs (i.e. that backward and forward movement are simultaneous and not separated in time during a step cycle, and no energy is wasted with a vertical oscillation of the leg).

The distinction between electromagnetic motors and biological motors is definitely one of principle and not an implementation detail. The only resemblance is that both are motors.

It is true that you can claim that when analyzing both chemical reactions and the interactions between the mobile parts of an electromagnetic motor they can be eventually reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Nevertheless such an assertion is completely useless, because most things that matter to us in the surrounding world can be reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Knowing this is not helpful at all for classifying them and understanding the differences between them.

The contraction of a protein caused by a chemical transformation and the magnetic forces that appear either between electrical currents through conductors or between electrical currents and ferromagnetic materials are very different phenomena and knowing that both of them have as primary cause electromagnetic interactions is of absolutely no help for understanding how they work or for designing either kind of motors.

Electromagnetic motors that are not extremely small need ferromagnetic materials. The only ferromagnetic material that is known to be synthesized by living beings is magnetite. Magnetite crystals can be good enough for sensing the magnetic field of the Earth, but they would be a very poor material for motors.

An easier to evolve rotating biological motor would be a rotating hydraulic motor, e.g. powered by pumped blood or lymph. This could work if the wheel would become non-living after being grown, to no longer need nerves and blood vessels. However it would be very difficult for a living being to seal the space between an axis and the rotating wheel in such a way so that blood or lymph would not spill out through the interstice.
by cwillu | 2026-01-29 13:07:39+00:00
Juxtaposing with the quoted passage from the post: “Because vitamin D is potentially toxic, intake of [1000 IU/day] has been avoided even though the weight of evidence shows that the currently accepted [limit] of [2000 IU/day] is too low by at least 5-fold.” --https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
by jakubmazanec | 2026-01-29 13:07:55+00:00
I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater variability.
by stego-tech | 2026-01-29 13:07:55+00:00
I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT:

“Efficiency” is a damned lie. Enterprise IT is one of the most inefficient spaces out there, full of decades of band-aids layered atop one another in the form of fad products, fancy buzzwords, and “defining leadership” projects. The reason you cannot get shit done at work quickly isn’t because of bureaucracy or management layers standing in the way so much as it’s the vested interest in weakening IT and Ops teams so that those higher-ups can retain more of the profit pie for themselves.

My entire job is to make technology become so efficient that it fades into the background as a force amplifier for your actual work, and I’ve only spent ~1/3rd of my 15+ year career actually doing that in some form. I should be the one making sure documentation is maintained so that new hires onboard in days, not months. I should be the owner of the network and/or compute infrastructure the business needs to operate, not some MSP in another country whose contract you’ll replace with a lower bidder next year. I should be the one driving improvements to the enterprise technology stack in areas we could benefit from, not some overpriced consultant justifying whatever the CIO has a hard-on for from his recent country club outing.

Consultants, outsourcing, and fad-chasing aren’t efficient. They do not better the business, overwhelmingly. AI won’t magically fix broken pipelines, bad datasets, or undocumented processes, because it is only ever aware of what it is told to be aware of, and none of those groups have any interest or incentive in actually fixing broken things.

The tech industry is woefully and powerfully inefficient. It hoards engineers and then blocks them from solving actual problems in favor of prestige projects. It squanders entire datacenters on prompt ingestion and token prediction instead of paying a handful of basically competent engineers a livable salary to buy a home near the office and fucking fix shit. Its leaders demand awards and recognition for existing, not for actually contributing positively back to society - which leads to stupid and short-sighted decision-making processes and outcomes.

And all of this, as OP points out, is built on a history of government bailouts for failures and cheap debt for rampant speculation. There’s no incentive to actually be efficient or run efficient businesses, and this is the resultant mess.
by eqvinox | 2026-01-29 13:07:58+00:00
I haven't worked at sendmail or even anything e-mail related, and I can do that… just enough e-mail fixing as side work. Let's call it sysadmin calluses.

What made me stumble recently was having to talk LMTP to fix a mailman setup. Cheeky fuckers changed EHLO into LHLO for LMTP. (To avoid any mixups between the protocols, which is fair.)
by matsemann | 2026-01-29 13:08:07+00:00
And in Norway we often don't see the sun during certain months, due to it only being up for a few hours in the middle of the day (when we're working). And even if I was outside I would be covered in clothes.

We have a saying here to take cod liver oil all months ending with R (in Norwegian that's September to Februar) to get both omega 3 and the vitamin D.
by pbronez | 2026-01-29 13:08:09+00:00
Wasn’t familiar with this, tracked it down

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...

> There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I ab­solutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-29 13:08:22+00:00
Gregory Aldrete opens his Great Courses lecture series on ancient history by noting that although most of us engage with history through works of art and accounts military conquest, 90 to 95 percent of all people living back then would have been born on a farm, spent their lives tilling soil interrupted by the occasional calamities of flood or disease, and then died likely not having travelled more than a few kilometers away.
by Tepix | 2026-01-29 13:08:22+00:00
We really need to build more awareness for PWAs (Progressive web apps). Users (and developers) need to be educated on

- how to install them

- what advantages (and disadvantages) they have. In particular regarding censorship and privacy!

Apple and Google need to be pressured to make PWAs

- easier to install

- more capable

- less buggy (Mobile Safari in particular).

If your app's needs can be met with a PWA, you owe it to your users to offer one!

Here are a few PWA showcase links:

https://pwa-showcase.com/#/all-cards

https://whatpwacando.today/

And a lazy AI-generated list of things that PWAs can do today on top of the things a normal web page can do:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/make-a-list-of-all-things-p...
by resters | 2026-01-29 13:08:24+00:00
Proven businesses can always borrow at fairly low rates. When capital gets really cheap it starts to incentivize greater amounts of risk taking because investors actually want risk.

If you are starting a dry cleaning business, you have a cost of the equipment, rent and other well known factors. Starting a tech company in a new and unproven area has different expenses and a different risk/reward profile.

Malinvestment can come in a lot of flavors. Cheap capital will result in too many dry cleaners and also too many startups that probably shouldn't have gotten funding.

The downside comes in various forms. 1) existing dry cleaning businesses are less profitable because of increased competition, and 2) startups hire scarce engineers and drive up wages, which drive up costs for everyone.

Cheap capital is justified bc the goal is growth, but it is a blunt instrument that creates hot spots and neglected areas simultaneously. Compare the approach used in the US with the approach taken by China. Chinese firms face significantly more competition than firms in the capitalist US, but overall China's policies are crafted with a more deliberate eye toward their distributional consequences and notions of the greater good are much more subject to sharp critique and pressure across social and industrial strata.

What we are seeing in the US is that policymakers have come to believe that the growth-focused approach is an escape hatch that can be used to reduce the effects of other bad decisions, but at some point the size of the inflated economy gets big enough that it takes on a political life of its own post-911 defense contractors have dramatically more lobbying and policy-influencing power than they had prior. Today, systemically risky financial industry participants have significantly more political clout than they had before the 2008 correction.

In other words, the fabric of (political) reality shifts and it becomes hard to identify what normal would look like or feel like. In my view, AI adds fuel to the existing fire -- it rapidly shifts demand away from software engineers and onto strategists -- give the team a strategy and now with AI the team will have it done in a few weeks. If not, a competitor will do it without poaching anyone from your team.

And market forces include both creative and destructive forces. Firm failure is a feature, not a bug.
by mrexcess | 2026-01-29 13:08:54+00:00
>But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa.

Jobs was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, almost singularly focused on doing what he did in the computer industry, by the time Lisa was conceived. His relationship with Lisa's mom, Chrisann Brennan, had begun during his wild-seed-sewing hippie days. My read on it is, he looked at the relationship with Chrisann as a remnant of a past he wanted to leave behind, and the potential relationship with Lisa as a sink for his energies that didn't fit the image he wished to concoct for himself.

Steve Jobs was a flawed human, like we all are. And like all of us, his flaws were inseparable from his strengths and achievements. As someone who didn't have to experience any of those direct flaws, I feel incredible gratitude for how his achievements changed my life and the world generally, and hope that those people he hurt can forgive him.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-29 13:09:06+00:00
LMStudio is great but its still not open source. I wish something better than Ollama can be created honestly similar to LMStudio (atleast its new CLI Part from what I can tell) and create an open source alternative.

I think I am fairly technical but I still prefer how Ollama is simple but I know all the complaints about Ollama and I am really just wishing for a better alternative for the most part.

Maybe just a direct layer on top of vllm or llama.cpp itself?
Show HN: 静阅 means "quiet reading" – a calm reading app for bedtime
by jackhyyy | 2026-01-29 13:09:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie developer and I built an app called *静阅 (JingYue)* because I wanted a calmer reading experience before bed.

Most reading tools push feeds, recommendations, endless scrolls and notifications. I wanted something that felt closer to flipping through a book — quiet, simple, and relaxing.

So I made 静阅:
• curated calm reading content — quotes, images, short essays
• dark and light adaptive themes optimized for night time
• no notifications, no algorithmic feeds, just relaxed reading
• designed to help you slow down your mind before sleep

The app is live on the App Store here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/静阅/id6758232981

It’s very early and opinionated; I’d love feedback — especially on UX for night time reading and content pacing.

Thanks!
by buran77 | 2026-01-29 13:09:16+00:00
> Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure

Valve has ~300 employees and operates in a field where they can afford more freedoms (try building large infrastructure projects with flat structures). Valve struck a good balance between autonomy for employees while still having some informal central coordination. Formally there are few bosses but in practice project managers and some people with seniority also act in those roles. At scale it can't work if you don't delegate any of the authority to smaller units.

It's bad to have too many or too few layers. Sometimes the result looks the same, lack of coordination and inability to deliver consistently.

Amazon has 1.5M workers. Can't imagine a flat structure working but I'm sure they were overdoing it with layers of management.
by gyulai | 2026-01-29 13:09:54+00:00
> I certainly think it’s incredibly false marketing for Apple to claim I bought an iphone, when in reality I paid upfront for essentially AOL.

I wonder if that has ever been tried against Apple or a similar company in a court of law, because I think there might be real merit there. One would have to get a bunch of people together claiming a refund on the purchase price on the grounds that ownership hasn't been transferred and therefore Apple is in breach of contract in relation to the contract for sale of an iPhone. Then those people would have to bring a class action, and the case would revolve around the concept of "ownership". Because "ownership", to a first approximation, means the legal right to do with some piece of property essentially as you please, and Apple is clearly basing much of their business on the assumption that users do not have those rights and is taking positive action to prevent users from exercising such rights.

I don't know much about the law in the rest of the world, except Germany, but in Germany that would certainly be the case, and there is a surprising amount of case law revolving around such things as horses or other animals being sold, and the former owner then trying to restrict the new owner in exercising their ownership rights, which generally end with ownership rights being upheld by courts.
by sidcool | 2026-01-29 13:10:00+00:00
Nop. The S and X were always meant low volume high priced. And it's a great strategy. Didn't Tesla repay loans before it was due?

Challenge is that even that good past performance was shat upon by people. I hate Elon. But I don't think Tesla is doing bad at all. GM is shitting itself on EVs.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-29 13:10:45+00:00
It seems to me that you're cherry picking a product category while I am taking "mobile app market" as a whole.

I did not suggest that Apple could escape laws that apply to a given product category. Quite the opposite - that I think it is reasonable for a behemoth to be subject to _additional_ regulations that cut across _all_ product categories. That was the point of my analogy. In physical retail big box stores are subject to additional regulations that mom and pop shops are not. The fact that Walmart happens to sell games and happens not to be the largest retailer of those is not going to get them out of being treated as the giant that they are.

I don't think it matters that in any given product category Apple isn't the largest. The issue is that they are one half of what is effectively a mobile app store duopoly in most of the western world. That fact carries serious implications for developers and consumers alike. Developers in particular, regardless of product category, are effectively forced to do business with Apple. On that basis I believe that either the app stores of both Apple and Google should be subject to _extremely_ stringent regulations or alternatively that the platforms should be forcibly opened up by law (ie no more locked down devices).
by alpinisme | 2026-01-29 13:10:56+00:00
The consequences for wrong ai need to be a lot higher if we want to limit slop. Of course, there’s space for llms and their hallucinations to contribute meaningful things, but we need at least a screaming all caps disclaimer on content that looks like it could be human-generated but wasn’t (and absent that disclaimer or if the disclaimer was insufficiently prominent, false statements are treated as deliberate fraud)
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-29 13:11:17+00:00
> “Every bank formats their statements differently…”

In my experience with bank data, on the downstream side, banking data is available in the OFX specification, which is a consistent transaction data format. Unfortunately, memo’s do get truncated to different char lengths by different banks, even though the specification allows 255 characters. AMEX, amazingly, switches NAME and MEMO properties. It's a dog breakfast of compliance, but there is a standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange

https://www.financialdataexchange.org/FDX/FDX/About/About-FD...
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-29 13:11:26+00:00
I think the OP's interpretation of this is wrong. Just because someone was found to have an equivalent of ingesting so and so much, after UV radiation, doesn't automatically imply that it a good idea to ingest any amount of vitamin D. Ingestion is different from exposing skin to UV/sun. The paper probably doesn't state, that ingesting that much will make a person absorb that much from that ingestion, nor does it state, that ingesting some equivalent amount will be safe and without side-effects.

So the paper may be well researched or whatever, but the interpretation of it is questionable.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-29 13:11:35+00:00
Cheap venture capital is uniquely driven by the interest rate more than any other factor. Low interest rates drive money away from safer vehicles towards more risky vehicles because they still offer a return. This is good far people starting companies, but in the long run the decision makers on those investments almost always turn out to have mis-priced the risk factor and end up with negative returns.

This then causes the market to dry up again and if the interest rate hasn't dropped even further then a lot of companies that need follow up investment will now get killed off. It's a very Darwinian landscape that results from this and I've been wondering for years if there isn't a better way to do this.
by bhadass | 2026-01-29 13:11:48+00:00
solid analysis but i think you're missing the logical endpoint here: this doesn't end with companies "relearning scarcity"... it ends with the permanent contractor-ification of various types of work at these tech companies (not just tech roles, but other types of roles at these companies). already, contractor-to-employee ratio has gotten higher and higher at these companies in recent years and I expect this to continue.

ZIRP (especially the "double tap" ZIRP in 2021/2022) created this monster (bootcamp devs getting hired, big tech devs making "day in the life of" tiktok vids).

contractors give:

instant scale up/down without layoff optics

no benefits overhead

no severance obligations

easy performance management (just don't renew)

this mirrors what other industries typically do after large restructuring waves ... manufacturing got temp agencies and staffing firms as permanent fixtures post-rust belt collapse. tech is just catching up to the same playbook.
by nalekberov | 2026-01-29 13:12:10+00:00
Mostly true, but AI accelerated that process:

- Senior Engineers now often is sufficient for most tasks, Junior Engineers seems like a burden rather than a boost during development process

- Companies feel comfortable with hiring fast and firing fast

- Tech Market is now flooded with not-so-good engineers having good experience with good AI coding assistants - which already are capable of solving 80% of the problems - they are ready to work for much less than really experienced engineers

In general, yes, companies overhired many software developers, hoping they will continue hyper growing, but then reality has kicked in - this was not sustainable for most businesses.
by dangus | 2026-01-29 13:12:22+00:00
I think you need some kind of source to back up the idea that IT or the software industry as a whole isn’t efficient.

Software companies have much higher profit margins than companies that ship physical products. There really aren’t many industries that do better margins than software.

To sell software, you don’t need a production facility, warehouse, nor do you even need an office building if you don’t want one.

https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
by syx | 2026-01-29 13:12:39+00:00
As someone with many animator friends, this sounds very bleak. Their work processes are very similar to software engineering, with the difference that their hiring process is much quicker (they just show a bunch of reels and shots they made for previous films or cartoons, and they’re hired). The sad part is that they have almost no labor rights, and competition is incredibly high, which means pay is very low and turnover is high. All these years, I’ve been setting my expectations that one day my field may become like that.