MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2026-01-13 01:32:53+00:00
I sympthatise with the argument. We should test it against real world data.

Eg your argument would predict that healthcare price inflation is not as bad in areas with less insurance coverage. Eg for dental work (which is less often covered as far as I can tell), for (vanity) plastic surgery, or we can even check healthcare price inflation for vet care for pets.
by defrost | 2026-01-13 01:32:55+00:00
Fair enough, no shame there, not everyone can tell a hawk from a heronsaw.

Carpet spruikers draw the crowd in to get a punter to buy a ratty old carpet with a backstory. It's a grift but the mark leaves with a carpet, just not a good deal.

Erich is selling the idea of aliens. There are no aliens in truth in his tales, but he is at a least (largely) a true believer (to the best of my knowledge).

Others know from the outset they're lying, misleading, and profiting from vaporware. The promise of better healthcare that doesn't come about, the myth of a better country again, etc.
by dcreater | 2026-01-13 01:33:45+00:00
AI and Claude Code are incredible tools. But use cases like "Organize my desktop" are horrible misapplications that are insecure, inefficient and a privacy nightmare. Its the smart refrigerator of this generation of tech.

I worry that the average consumer is none the wiser but I hope a company that calls itself Anthropic is anthropic. Being transparent about what the tool is doing, what permissions it has, educating on the dangers etc. are the least you can do.

With the example of clearing up your mac desktop: a) macOS already autofolds things into smart stacks b) writing a simple script that emulates an app like Hazel is a far better approach for AI to take
by layman51 | 2026-01-13 01:34:07+00:00
You reminded me of some riddle I had once read that was about trying to figure out how someone could be born one year later but still be older than someone born in previous year. The answer to the riddle also relies on timezones. For sure, birthdates involve time zones.

The riddle explanation was something like: A baby is born in New York City at 12:15 AM on January 1. Thirty minutes later, another baby is born in Los Angeles, where the local time is 9:45 PM on December 31. Although the New York baby is actually older by 30 minutes, the calendar dates make it appear as though the Los Angeles baby was born first.
by tzs | 2026-01-13 01:34:08+00:00
> But the entire point of age laws is to stifle free speech and ruin privacy. Thus why every age law requires uploading an ID.

The age verification system currently undergoing large scale field trials in the EU does not require uploading ID. Every member of the EU is required to support that system, and any online age verification laws any member passes are required to allow its use.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 01:34:09+00:00
> But you could totally have a tool that lets you use Claude to interrogate and organize local documents but inside a firewalled sandbox that is only able to connect to the official API.

Any such document or folder structure, if its name or contents were under control of a third party, could still inject external instructions into sandboxed Claude - for example, to force renaming/reordering files in a way that will propagate the injection to the instance outside of the sandbox, which will be looking at the folder structure later.

You cannot secure against this completely, because the very same "vulnerability" is also a feature fundamental to the task - there's no way to distinguish between a file starting a chained prompt injection to e.g. maliciously exfiltrate sensitive information from documents by surfacing them + instructions in file names, vs. a file suggesting correct organization of data in the folder, which involves renaming files based on information they contain.

You can't have the useful feature without the potential vulnerability. Such is with most things where LLMs are most useful. We need to recognize and then design around the problem, because there's no way to fully secure it other than just giving up on the feature entirely.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-13 01:35:04+00:00
people run AI tools outside a sandbox? tf? the first thing I did with claude code is put it in a sandbox.

come on people, docker and podman exist, please use them - it isolates you not only from problems like this but supply chain attacks as well.

it also has superior compatibility, any person working on your project will have all the tools available to compile it since to build & run it you use a simple Containerfile.

(rather outdated now: https://github.com/DeprecatedLuke/claude-loop)
by eru | 2026-01-13 01:35:19+00:00
Compare: Google's founders can buy all the yachts they could possibly eat, yet Google Searches are offered for free.

If we could get healthcare to that level, it would be great.

For a less extreme example: Wal-Mart and Amazon have made plenty of people very rich, and they charge customers for their goods; but their entrance into the markets have arguable brought down prices.
by pavon | 2026-01-13 01:35:22+00:00
Italy has authority over what Italian companies or subsidiaries are allowed to do, and they have authority over any operations that foreign companies have within Italy and any dealings that foreign companies have with Italians or others in Italy. They do not have authority over foreign companies operating in foreign countries serving foreign customers, just because that company also does business in Italy. That is extraterritorial, and is what this law is requiring by demanding that Cloudflare remove DNS entries worldwide.
by kunai | 2026-01-13 01:35:25+00:00
Disruption, yes, in the sense that the current system needs to be overhauled. But this is a space that's frequented by the SV and VC space and "disruption" has very different connotations, usually in the realm of thought that suggests some SV-brained solution to an existing problem. In some edge cases like Uber/Lyft, this upending of an existing market can yield substantial positive externalities for users. Other "heavy industry" adjacent sectors, not so much. Healthcare and aviation, not so much.

Even SpaceX's vaunted "disruption" is just clever resource allocation; despite their iterative approach to building rockets being truly novel they're not market disruptors in the same way SV usually talks about them. And their approach has some very obvious flaws relative to more traditional companies like BO, which as of now has a lower failure-to-success ratio.

I don't think you'll find many providers clamoring for an AI-assisted app that hallucinates nonexistent diseases, there are plenty of those already out there that draw the ire of many physicians. Where the industry needs to innovate is in the insurance space, which is responsible for the majority of costs, and the captive market and cartel behavior thereof means that this is a policy and government issue, not something that can be solved with rote Silicon Valley style startup-initiated disruption; that I would predict would quickly turn into dysfunction and eventual failure.

Enshittification has done a lot of damage to the concept of "disrupting" markets. It's DOA in risk-averse fields.
by simonw | 2026-01-13 01:36:05+00:00
Looks like the Ubuntu VM sandbox locks down aces to an allow-list of dominant default - it can pip install packages but it couldn't access a URL on my blog.

That's a good starting point for lethal trifecta protection but it's pretty hard to have an allowlist that doesn't have any surprise exfiltration vectors - I learned today that an unauthenticated GET to docs.google.com can leak data to a Google Form! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/12/superhuman-ai-exfiltra...

But they're clearly thinking hard about this, which is great.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-13 01:36:40+00:00
Lowering the resolution to match the typical TV resolutions is sensible but beyond that trusting the codec is always the better way. The codecs will adaptively compress portions of the video differently. The top left area that's in shadow for the next 30seconds? Maybe that areas effective resolution can be lowered? Etc. They can do things like this!

If you change the resolution or color space of the entire file you do that without consideration to where the extra details might have been needed.

So resolution should match typical output resolutions exactly and from there it's all on the codec.
by kunai | 2026-01-13 01:37:37+00:00
Agreed. I'd also argue that there will always be the issue of adverse selection, which in any system that doesn't mandate that all individuals be covered for healthcare regardless of risk profile, will continue to raise costs regardless of whether or not margins are good or bad. That dream died with the individual mandate, and if the nation moves even further away from universal healthcare, we will only see costs rise and not fall as companies shoulder more and more of the relative risk.
by eru | 2026-01-13 01:38:19+00:00
Many hospitals are already non-profit. That doesn't seem to bring down prices. Why would you think that this would work for insurance?

Profit isn't even a big part of the overall revenue.

> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards

I assume you want higher coverage standards than what currently exists? Independently of whether that would be the morally right thing to do (or not), it would definitely increase prices.

> and large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.

Why does your insurance need a pool? An actuary can tell you the risk, and you can price according to that. No need for any pooling. Pooling is just something you do, when you don't have good models (or when regulations forces you).
by jhee3 | 2026-01-13 01:38:22+00:00
Something weird has gone wrong in the psyche of humans.

Why are we even talking about 'AI'? When I heat up food in a microwave, I dont care about the technology - I care about whether it heats up the food or not.

For some bizarre reason people keep talking about the technology (LLMs) - the consumers/buyers in the market for the most part dont give a hoot about it. They want to know how the thing fits in their life and most importantly what are the benefits.

Ive unfortunately been exposed to some Google Ads re. Gemini and let me tell you - their marketing capabilities are god awful.
by al_borland | 2026-01-13 01:38:38+00:00
> dynamic damage models, deformable terrain

The new Donkey Kong game has this. You can smash pretty much everything. However, just like with leaning too much on graphics, it felt like they leaned too much on this. The game was very boring and repetitive. I kept waiting for it get better and eventually gave up on it. Being able to smash everything got old by the time I made it out of the tutorial area.

Contrast this to the newer Zelda games. You can climb pretty much anywhere and go pretty much anywhere. It’s the first game I ever played with that much freedom to explore. But instead of subtracting from the gameplay it added to it, as it opened up new (and seemingly infinite) ways to approach and solve a problem. There were also enough varied game loops that felt distinctly different to not feel repetitive.
by anonym29 | 2026-01-13 01:39:19+00:00
>Claude code runs into use limitations for everyone at every tier

What do you mean by this? I know plenty of people who never hit the upgraded Opus 4.5 limits anymore even on the $100 plan, even those who used to hit the limits on the $200 plan w/ Opus 4 and Opus 4.1.

>The API is too expensive to use and it's _still_ subsidized.

What do you mean by saying the API is subsidized? Anthropic is a private company that isn't required to (and doesn't) report detailed public financial statements. The company operating at a loss doesn't mean all inference is operating at a loss, it means that the company is spending an enormous amount of money on R&D. The fact that the net loss is shrinking over time tells us that the inference is producing net profit over time. In this business, there is enormous up front cost to train a model. That model then goes on to generate initially large, but subsequently gradually diminishing revenue until the model is deprecated. That said, at any given snapshot-in-time, while there is likely large ongoing R&D expenditure on the next model causing the overall net profit for the entire company to still be negative, it's entirely possible that several, if not many or even most of the previously trained models have fully recouped their training costs in inference revenue.

It's fairly obvious that the monthly subscriptions are subsidized to gain market share the same way Uber rides were on early on, but what indication do you have that the PAYG API is being subsidized? How would total losses have shrunk from $5.6B in 2024 to just $3B in 2025 while ARR grew from ~$1B to ~$7B over the same time period (one where usage of the platform dramatically expanded) if PAYG API inference wasn't running at a net profit for the company?

>quadratic attention means LLMs will always cost astronomically more than you expect after running the pilot project

This is only true as long as O(n²) quadratic attention remains the prevailing paradigm. As Qwen3-Next and Nemotron 3 Nano have shown with hybrid linear attention + sparse quadratic layers and a hybrid Mamba SSM, not all modern, performant LLMs necessarily need to run strictly O(n²) quadratic attention models. Sure, these aren't frontier models competitive with Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 xhigh, but these aren't experimental tiny toy models like RWKV or Falcon Mamba that serve as little more than PoCs for alternative architectures, either. Qwen3-Next and Nemotron 3 Nano are solid players in their respective local weight classes.
by 0xWTF | 2026-01-13 01:39:21+00:00
"Data hording is now a national security risk"

Also

* https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4376441/th...

* https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855657/-1/-1/0/TRA...

* https://www.google.com/search?q=owen+west
by blindseer | 2026-01-13 01:39:28+00:00
Lots of the same people that were behind: https://www.terminal.shop/

afaict, for that project they never went through PCI compliance. See original thread for more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228751

They seem to not have a lot of real world experience and/or throw caution to the wind and YOLO through security practices. I'd be weary using any of their products.
by ekipan | 2026-01-13 01:41:08+00:00
Mutability is distinct from variability. In Javascript only because it's a pretty widely known syntax:

const f = (x) => {
const y = x + 1;
return y + 1;
}

y is an immutable variable. In f(3), y is 4, and in f(7), y is 8.

I've only glanced at this Zen-C thing but I presume it's the same story.
by kunai | 2026-01-13 01:41:08+00:00
These solutions are often proposed as easy fixes but I'm skeptical that they actually will do much to reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare is fundamentally expensive. Not-for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospitals don't really substantively differ in terms of out-of-pocket expenditures for patients; I find it difficult to imagine that forcing insurance companies to be nonprofit would do much to reduce costs.

> large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.

What you describe (community rating) has been tried and it works. But it requires that a lot of young, healthy people enroll, and seniors receive most of the care. In an inverted demographic pyramid like most Western economies have, this is a ticking time bomb, so costs will continue to rise.

> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards

I think a better solution is to allow the government to threaten in negotiating prices with companies as Canada does; it greatly reduces rent-seeking behavior by pharmaceutical companies while allowing them to continue earning profits and innovating. (I understand a lot of the complaints against big pharma but they are actually one of the few sectors of the economy that doesn't park their wealth and actually uses it for substantive R&D, despite what the media will tell you, and countless lives have been saved because of pharma company profits)

Essentially the gist of what I'm saying, as someone who has been involved with and studied this industry for the better part of five years, is that it's much more complex than what meets the eye.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-13 01:42:06+00:00
> Am I missing the elephant in the room?

Apple is flush with cash and other assets, they have always been. They most likely plan to ride out the AI boom with Google's models and buy up scraps for pennies on the dollar once the bubble pops and a bunch of the startups go bust.

It wouldn't be the first time they went for full vertical integration.
by derefr | 2026-01-13 01:42:37+00:00
> They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.

Why does Apple need to build its own training cluster to train a frontier model, anyway?

Why couldn't the deal we're reading about have been "Apple pays Google $200bn to lease exclusive-use timeslots on Google's AI training cluster"?
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-13 01:43:18+00:00
100% uptime is impossible of course, a 100% reliable service would survive the next ice age.

But reliability at the holy grails of 4 and 5 nines (99.99%, 99.999% uptime) means ever greater investment - geographically dispersing your service, distributed systems, dealing with clock drift, multi master, eventual consistency, replication, sharding.. it’s a long list.

Questions to ask: could you do better yourself - with the resources you have? Is it worth the investment of a migration to get there? Whats the payoff period for that extra sliver of uptime? Will it cost you in focus over the longer term? Is the extra uptime worth all those costs?
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-13 01:43:23+00:00
To be fair, the new opt-in "use strict" here is "switch to Temporal". It's a new, stricter namespace object. Old Date code gets the old Date code quirks, new code gets the nice new Temporal API.

Internal modules would be handy in theory to maybe keep from having to dig through a thesaurus every time browsers decide to add a new, stricter version of an older API. Internal modules have even been proposed to TC-39 as a recommended way to continue to expand the JS API. Last I checked on that proposal it was stuck behind several concerns including:

1. Feature detection: detecting if Temporal available is as easy as `if ('Temporal' in globalThis) {}`, but detecting if a module import is missing is a bit harder. Right now the standard is that loading a module fails with an Error if one of its imports fails. You can work around that by doing a dynamic import inside a try/catch, but that's a lot of extra boilerplate compared to `const thingINeed = 'someApi' in globalThis ? someApi() : someApiPolyfill()`. I've seen multiple proposals on that front from extensions to import maps and `with { }` options on the import itself.

2. Bikeshedding (and lots of it): defining a URI scheme like `browser:` or `standard:` takes a bunch of thought on how you expand it. If it is just `browser:some-api` you run the risk of eventually polluting all the easy names in the exact way people worry about the risk of over-polluting `globalThis` (and in the way that it can be weirdly hard to find an available one-word name on npm), you've just moved the naming problem from one place to the other. On the other side, if you go down the road of something like `es-standard:https://tc39.es/ecma262/2025/v1/final-draft/Temporal`, even (especially) assuming users would mostly importmap that to something shorter you've recreated XMLNS URIs in a funny new hat and people who use JS all certainly have plenty of opinions on XMLNS URIs, many are very vocal in their hatred of it, but also they came out of a strong backwards incompatibility fixing desire exactly like this. (As they say time is a flat circle.)
by JohnBooty | 2026-01-13 01:44:19+00:00
Arresting all his political enemies is not a core constitutional power

Unless he leaves a smoking gun in the vein of a note saying "kill this guy I don't like" -- and perhaps not even then -- nothing will happen.

What he will do is... what he is already doing. What every dictator for hundreds of years has done. His enemies will be persecuted and prosecuted under the guise of legal action: tax fraud, national security, whatever. The sort of compromat that exists, or can be fabricated to exist, for every single person on Earth.

To even have a hope of stopping Trump (or any other POTUS) there would have to be clear proof of malicious intent completely divorced from his job duties, and you'd need a Congress or Supreme Court that gave half a shit about opposing him.
by muyuu | 2026-01-13 01:44:21+00:00
I don't think I've played this bot. I guess the few times I flew in America wasn't with Delta as I would definitely try chess if available.

From what I've seen in the video I'd give the bot around 2100 FIDE equivalent. Granted you don't play bots like you play people. This bot essentially plays top engine moves and every now and then it introduces suboptimal moves. This technique can be played against choosing appropriate openings and being patient with calculation.
by umanwizard | 2026-01-13 01:44:43+00:00
No, it’s completely different. Gmail actively tries to prevent spam. If they catch you sending it, you will be banned, and they let individual users block whoever they want. A huge part of their product is automated spam filtering.

On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.
by taftster | 2026-01-13 01:44:49+00:00
I'm going to check this out, as it's legitimately attempting to solve the gap in online chess coaches. As said on the home page, I don't want to know what to play, I want to know why I'm not seeing it or how to think about the move differently. This is the gap and I hope you find success. I'm definitely going to check it out.
by ebbi | 2026-01-13 01:45:13+00:00
> smuggling in
Your response seems to elicit you have some pre-informed opinions on this that my comment has irritated you. I'm not smuggling anything. I'm making a comment on an open forum.

> The protest movement is huge
Source? How big is it? What % of the Iranian population is protesting?

> It is not "US/Israel-led"
Source? We have reports to the contrary, and given the amount US and Israeli politicians are leaning in to the protests, notwithstanding their constant talking points on escalating things with Iran, it's not beyond reasonableness to suggest there is outside influence.

I was merely providing a talking point, as the general theme in the West is that US forcing a regime change is a good thing. I'm merely reiterating that it is not (based on historical regime changes the US has been involved in), and that there is good reason to believe majority of Iranians don't want a regime change if it's US-led and not a real democratic outcome.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 01:45:56+00:00
Airbags, yes. But you can't just make it provably impossible for a car to crash into something and hurt/kill its occupants, other than not building it in the first place. Same with LLMs - you can't secure them like regular programs without destroying any utility they provide, because their power comes from the very thing that also makes them vulnerable.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-13 01:46:14+00:00
In the current US environment, no one can survive going against Trump, and as recently evidenced, this is meant literally.

The US, for all intents and purposes, is now a kleptocracy. Rule of law, freedom of speech, even court orders, all of that doesn't matter any more in practice. There will always be some way for the federal government to strong-arm anyone into submission.