MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by halfcat | 2026-01-30 01:43:33+00:00
> The idea that the emergency contact wouldn't answer...seems impossible to me

I can’t understand how you think this is impossible if you do things “the right way”.

Phones gets stolen or dropped in the toilet. Your contact has been taken to the hospital. Bad cell service. And so on.

These episodes of Darknet Diaries were my favorite. Very suspenseful. I also always thought the people doing the testing were insane for assuming a piece of paper keeps them from getting dragged to jail or worse.

I mean this is stuff the security people tell you not to do. If you get an email from “your bank” saying “call us at this number”, you're supposed to independently verify by calling the main number, not the number they give you, right?
by ndr42 | 2026-01-30 01:43:44+00:00
One-lane-roundabouts are very safe. I lived in Hannover (Germany) in the 80s and 90s, they had 2 or 3 lanes in the roundabouts. There were large signs that counted the accidents (200+/year) to raise awareness and during the trade fairs (anybody remembers Cebit?) the number of accidents peaked. Today they are all a lot safer because of a lot of traffic lights.
by zarzavat | 2026-01-30 01:43:45+00:00
Birds and spiders are much smaller than humans, see point 1. It's unlikely that a bird, spider, or even a rat will be able to cook dinner for you.

Birds are much better at being dinner. The most "successful" bird by a very wide margin is the broiler chicken.

Of the individual animals that are the same scale as humans, the vast majority exist either to be eaten by humans, serve humans, or be cute for humans.

The most successful wild animals of a similar size to humans have 10s of millions of individuals, not billions. Seals for example thrive by existing in places that humans are not suited for.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-30 01:44:00+00:00
It would be nice to see the video (although maybe there are some privacy issues, it is at a school after all).

Anyway, from the article,

> According to the NHTSA, the accident occurred “within two blocks” of the elementary school “during normal school drop off hours.” The safety regulator said “there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity.”

So I mean, it is hard to speculate. Probably Waymo was being reasonably prudent. But we should note that this description isn’t incompatible with being literally in an area where the kids are leaving their parents’ cars (the presence of “several double parked cars brings this to mind). If that’s the case, it might make sense to consider an even-safer mode for active student unloading areas. This seems like the sort of social context that humans might have and cars might be missing.

But things speculation. It would be good to see a video.
by stephenitis | 2026-01-30 01:44:04+00:00
my next question would be what is the effect of mutacin-1140 on the gut microbiome.

I looked up mutacin—1140, found this 2018 study looking at the effect on staph and possibly positive persistence in the gut.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6256755/

> “Nisin and mutacin 1140 have potent activities (nanomolar or submicromolar activity) against well-known Gram-positive pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Nisin has been used as a food preservative for more than 50 years without inducing significant resistance”

> “ Despite the short half-life of mutacin 1140 in blood, analogs of mutacin 1140 were demonstrated to have increased gastric stability and were effective in treating a Clostridium difficile infection in hamsters “

this very interesting to me.

we fought off a extreme overgrowth of staph aureus with a regiment of probiotics and bacillus subtillis (a bacterium found in dirt that is known to disrupt quorum of bacteria that create biofilms.

biofilms are a huge reason to floss and brush our teeth, it’s like a slime that protects and nourishes the bad bacteria on our teeth.

this bit from the sparse wikipedia was interesting.
“Mutacin 1140 belongs to the epidermin subset of type Al lantibiotics.”

are there other bacterium in our oral/gut that produce these kind of compounds?
by cogman10 | 2026-01-30 01:44:48+00:00
The thing is, even if the market bursts, prices are already inflated. RAM manufacturers know that everything 5xed and they aren't likely going to rush out and drop the price levels to pre-expansion. Once the AI market bursts, you can expect slow and methodical decreases in price (if any).

And that will ultimately buy China a lot of time to shove their ram into the market cutting ram manufacturers out of most non-US markets.

I think the major memory manufacturers are simply banking on their ability to flood the market if worst comes to worse. That or I could see some standards trickery around DDR6 (or some new BS standard). It'd not shock me if they coordinated with AMD/Intel to keep the standard secret as long as possible simply give themselves a lead in production.
by Grimblewald | 2026-01-30 01:44:56+00:00
Can we stop already? we've demonstrated sufficiently that all known architectures lack the required indicative bias for what the openAI charlatans are Hucking. Sure if you scale a dense feed forward neural network enough it can do vision just fine, but the lack of inductive bias means the model becomes so inefficient that you will _never_ be able to extract any net gain from it.

So it is with transformers. Fantastic ontological cartographers, but not cognitive / logic engines like promised.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-30 01:45:15+00:00
A friend told me once that his mouse stops working when someone is using the microwave. His room was on the backside of the kitchen.

When I took a look at it, it turned out that his (proprietary) wireless USB adapter for the mouse was very close to the band of the noise of the microwave. The microwave was also not properly grounded and shared a circuit breaker with his room, as apparently the kitchen was formerly larger and then split into two rooms by the landlord.

That was quite funny seeing that problem happen in action, he was always joking about a ghost in the machine, and I was joking about him being radiated by his microwave.

The cool part is years later in University one of my commilitones told me that his mouse stops working when the fridge turns on. The first thing that I checked was whether or not there's noise on the power circuit, et voila, easily fixed.
by Kye | 2026-01-30 01:45:22+00:00
Ableton is more like one of the popular code editors. It fills a large niche the same way emacs/Cubase (for example) does. I guess Pro Tools would be IntelliJ or Visual Studio in this analogy. Kontakt is more like Nullsoft Installer and similar. It's not the thing, it's a way to package the thing.

I would compare Native Instruments to Microsoft. They do a little bit of everything well enough that most people stick with it.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-30 01:45:32+00:00
> You seem to not even understand the very basics of heat transfer.

Basic physics: The moon is very cold in surface shadows and below the surface. It is an enormous pre-chilled heat sink.

• Permanent shadow: 40-60 ˚K, -230 to 210 ˚C

• In polar shadow: 25-30 ˚K, -250 to -245 ˚C

• Under 1 meter of surface, equatorial: 250 ˚K, -23 ˚C

• Under 1 meter of surface, polar: 200-220 ˚K, -75 to -50 ˚C

Many advantages beyond a huge heat sink: able to be any size/density of compute, no orbit safety negotiations or periodic orbit re-lifts required, able to update entire data center in a single trip, easier maintenance and stability in gravity on a surface, ...

Only downside is a higher Earth-Datacenter latency.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-30 01:48:00+00:00
We tried that at the Apple Store. My phone number is not registered with iMessage.

Just for kicks, I tried doing it at home. The error messages I got were:

"Enter a valid Phone Number" (I had)
"Service::Unavailable" ???
"That Code has been used. Hit Refresh Code." (the refresh code link is unresponsive)

and also, the error we got at the Apple Store:

"It looks like the phone number you provided is not registered with iMessage. Please verify the number and try again."
by drivebyhooting | 2026-01-30 01:48:08+00:00
The problem was always funding. All those bright minds went into ads because it paid well. Cancer research, space, propulsion, clean, energy, etc.. none of those paid particularly well. Nor would they have afforded a comfortable life with a house and family. The evisceration of SWE does not guarantee a flourishing in other fields. On the contrary, increased labor supply with further pressure, wages, downwards.
by dmix | 2026-01-30 01:48:14+00:00
The website that is sourced from

https://robotaxitracker.com/

176 tracked Tesla Robotaxis vs 51 tracked Waymos in SF, with 1000 claimed SF fleet size by Waymo

90 tracked Tesla vs 134 tracked Waymo in Austin.

They claim their data is incomplete and uses indirect app tracking to guess the numbers
by timschmidt | 2026-01-30 01:50:04+00:00
chipfoundry.io charges $14,950 for 100 chips. As far as small batch manufacturing goes, that's reasonably affordable. $149 ea. Occasionally I see better deals crop up as part of group buys. Presumably, one would prototype their design on an inexpensive FPGA board first, to verify functionality. So as to be reasonably sure the first batch of chips worked. Folks like Sam Zeloof are working to build new tools for one-off and small batch designs as well, which may further reduce small quantity prices.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-30 01:50:14+00:00
It is probably useful to mention that many triangulation algorithms that people may think of after a couple minutes of effort without referencing existing work struggle to produce anything reasonable when given a curved object that has spiky points adjacent to curves, such as in the simple case of a cone.

Algorithms that can solve these triangulations with no additional resource usage are widespread nowadays, but they were a tough problem in the 70s and 80s.

The trick is to maximise the minimum angle inside all triangles, so that no triangle has a very small angle, in combination with carefully choosing the starting points for the triangulation.
by fooker | 2026-01-30 01:51:55+00:00
> Perhaps the key to transparent/interpretable ML is to just replace the ML model with AI-coded traditional software and decision trees

I like this train of thought. Research shows that decision trees are equivalent to 1-bit model weights + larger model.

But critically, we only know some classes of problems that are effectively solved by this approach.

So, I guess we are stuck waiting for new science to see what works here. I suspect we will see a lot more work on these topics after the we hit some hard LLM scalability limits.
Show HN: Guess My RGB – Daily game to test your color visualization skills
by balgan | 2026-01-30 01:52:01+00:00
I built a daily color guessing game. You're shown RGB values like (147, 83, 211) and try to pick what color that actually is.

The scoring uses Euclidean distance in RGB space. New color every day.

I was curious how well people can mentally convert RGB values to colors - turns out it's surprisingly hard, even for those of us who work with colors regularly.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-30 01:52:14+00:00
Maybe I could sign in with someone else's AppleId, then submit the resume. It has my email and phone number on it, so hopefully they would send correspondence to that email address and not the one associated w/ the AppleId.

Maybe this is a test. Maybe everyone who tries to login to jobs.apple.com is told "oh yeah... that AppleId is invalid," and then they wait and see what people do. If they give up, then they're not Apple material. If they cheat and use someone else's AppleId, then they're morals are found lacking. If they post about their experience on a public forum, then they're a security risk.
by ZacharyGolinger | 2026-01-30 01:52:16+00:00
InfiniaxAI just dropped Projects. This new system enabled the automation of creating repositories, managing and exporting them to platforms like GitHub.
Even though it’s starting paid it’s really worth it. As a user I can safely say I have been using Infiniax for 2 months and it’s been worth it, this new feature got me to upgrade to max plan.
by godelski | 2026-01-30 01:52:56+00:00
Considering the top comment is a joke about Bitcoin mining, another a joke about the Sun, April Fools, conspiracy, and a question about what homes (obviously local), it seems like quite a few.

Or maybe I'm misreading and HN really is becoming Reddit because the thread is full of low quality comments off topic. I wasn't surprised to see most accounts are at most a few years old
by VikingCoder | 2026-01-30 01:53:31+00:00
I made an Actually Portable Executable web server out of this. You download one file, and it can run on many different systems.

https://github.com/MattCruikshank/emu_ape

I'm trying to set it up so you can add roms to a folder, and it'll use them. (Remember Actually Portable Executables are ZIP files, too!)
by Fabricio20 | 2026-01-30 01:53:45+00:00
The Xbox Game Bar video and still images do support HDR. They were the first feature to support HDR on windows. More recently the Snipping Tool on 11 also supports HDR, but only the newer one, not the older snipping tool. If you get images in JXR (jpeg-xr) files then you have HDR, if you get over-exposed pngs/jpgs then it doesnt do HDR.
by mpyne | 2026-01-30 01:55:06+00:00
People who talk about Outer Wilds describe it that way. For instance just two comments up in the thread is "Outer Wilds, and imperatively its DLC, are transcendent gaming experiences." And this is the normal type of comment you see when this game comes up.

If this were objectively true that the game is simply transcendent (assuming we can agree on what this would mean), then it would make sense to power through an otherwise unexpectedly arduous game that you thought was going to be more akin to a puzzle game, because of the experience you would be able to take with you and ponder afterwards. The destination would make the rough journey worth it.

Having bought and played through much of the game based on the evangelism for it online, I simply want to make clear that it should not be considered a unanimous opinion that the game is transcendent and that a rough journey would therefore be worth it.

Saying too much about the game itself would spoil it for people who would enjoy it, but those who might be leery of it deserve to know that it's still a game, can still be unenjoyable if it's not your thing, and that you won't necessarily miss an irreplacable life-changing positive experience if you don't knock it off of your Bucket List.

I apologize for going against the orthodoxy with regard to this game, but people deserve to know they're not alone if they didn't find it the experience it was advertised to be.
by nopassrecover | 2026-01-30 01:55:43+00:00
Sorry what’s the inheritance logic here? Are you talking about life insurance or something? Otherwise, and again presuming the cure doesn’t work which seems absent from your assessment as a possibility, how would it affect someone’s inheritance?

My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.

That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
by esposito | 2026-01-30 01:56:26+00:00
I do find it interesting to see how people interact with AI as I think it is quite a personal preference. Is this how you use AI all the time? Do you appreciate the sycophancy, does it bother you, do you not notice it? From your question it seems you would prefer a blog post in plainer language, avoiding "marketing speak", but if a person spoke to me like Miss Chatty spoke to you I would be convinced I'm talking to a salesperson or marketing agent.
by serf | 2026-01-30 01:58:09+00:00
>If I had 6 months to live, and had no other options, I wouldn't care if a drug killed me in 10 days. Give me the option.

you're not being creative enough.

I agree with compassionate use cases, but be creative here : some drugs can create deaths much more miserable than the controlled burn of a 6 month descent into hospice care surrounded by family and loved ones.

6 months to live versus a possible supportive drug regiment with the side effects being constant pain until you slowly bleed out through your eyes after total sensory lock-in -- easy a choice to make? not for me.
by hyruo | 2026-01-30 01:58:29+00:00
I happened to have participated in census work before. For instance, in a country like China, the national census conducted every ten years generally yields accurate overall data, but the data for individual regions is indeed based on estimates. There are several reasons for this:

1. Population Mobility: Generally speaking, in economically developed areas, population figures are often underestimated because a large number of people freely migrate into these regions, and local governments are actually unclear about the exact increase in population. In contrast, in less economically developed areas, population figures are often overestimated because many people leave to work in cities, only returning to their hometowns for brief periods each year.

2. Mortality Data: China’s birth data is already quite accurate. Nowadays, the vast majority of babies are born in hospitals, unlike decades ago when midwives would come to homes to assist with deliveries. Moreover, birth certificates must be issued immediately after a baby is born. However, China’s mortality data is not precise, primarily because burials are still common in many rural areas, and these death records are often delayed.

For example, my city conducted multiple rounds of mass COVID-19 testing in 2021. Each time, more than 4.4 million people were tested, but our small city's 2020 census results only showed a population of 3.7 million.
by greenavocado | 2026-01-30 01:58:30+00:00
Washington state lawmakers, led by Democrats, have introduced bills like HB 2320 and HB 2321. HB 2320 is sponsored solely by Rep. Osman Salahuddin (D-48th District), focusing on prohibiting 3D printers and CNC machines for untraceable firearms. HB 2321, pushing printer DRM requirements, similarly lacks Republican co-sponsors based on available details. In Washington where this is going on in the state House Democrats hold 59 seats, Republicans hold 39 seats and in the state Senate Democrats hold 30 seats, Republicans hold 19 seats. These Democrat-sponsored bills passed initial House committees along party lines, with no Republican co-sponsors or primary support
by tomari99 | 2026-01-30 01:59:55+00:00
I’ve always felt that the gap between "finishing a tutorial" and "contributing to a production codebase" is a cliff. Most newcomers struggle because real-world code is messy, undocumented, and often broken.

I’m building Grind-Mal, a platform that turns open-source contribution into a "grind" (in the gaming sense). Instead of clean sandboxes, we provide "Artifacts"—intentionally broken or complex Go-based environments that require actual debugging and architectural thinking to fix.

I just added a dashboard to track the ecosystem's state: PR velocity, active "arenas," and contributor impact. The goal is to move the industry away from "resumes and opinions" and toward "proof of work."

We are currently in alpha. I'm looking for feedback on the "Artifact" concept. Is intentionally breaking code a valid way to vet/train engineers, or is it too artificial?

GitHub: https://github.com/Grind-Mal

I’ll be around to answer any questions about the architecture or the vision.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 01:59:55+00:00
The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications. It works, but barely, is a huge resource hog, fragile and it breaks way too often due to a lack of backwards compatibility between browser versions of the same manufacturer. I have a small app that I support and it's been fun to get it to work in the browser (instant cross platform support was indeed the driver) but the experience is still sub-par compared to what I could do on a local application.
by scottbez1 | 2026-01-30 02:00:35+00:00
The US commercial aviation industry did not get to its excellent safety record by simply shrugging and accepting a “no-fault accident”.

There are always systemic factors that can be improved, for example working on street design to separate dangerous cars from children, or transportation policy by shifting transportation to buses, bikes, and walking where the consequences of mistakes are significantly reduced.

Cars are the #2 killer of children in the US, and it’s largely because of attitudes like this that ignore the extreme harm that is caused by preventable “accidents”
by tansey | 2026-01-30 02:01:53+00:00
Somewhere between $500K and $2M for an mRNA vax is my guesstimate. You don't have to hypothesize about what the rich might do, though. The co-founder of GitLab was diagnosed with osteosarcoma a few years ago. He relapsed, leaving him without any standard of care treatments. He's spent the last couple of years throwing loads of time, effort, and of course money at lots of experimental treatments: https://osteosarc.com/ -- even released all the data gathered on his tumor over timepoints.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-30 02:03:51+00:00
You have to start curating your attention and start treating it as a resource.

Stop using social media, which is a business model that is fighting for attention and cannot survive without it.

Smartphones are user hostile designs, use a laptop with KDE or GNOME on it. Both desktop environments allow to filter notifications to the point that you can decide what type of notifications are allowed to appear.

Always remember: every app that is free to use is paid for with your attention.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 02:04:22+00:00
Noise on powerlines is annoying, very frequently present and sometimes dangerous.

Long ago there was this case of a factory that pressed desks out of steel sheets. Their main press (an absolute monster) had taken someone's arm off and they couldn't find the cause. It turned out that near the roof there was an air conditioning unit that that had a flaky relay in it that drew a gigantic spark on disconnecting, enough to upset the latch that controlled the safety interlock on the press, causing the press to move by itself.

It took quite a while to find it.
by mvcalder | 2026-01-30 02:05:03+00:00
I really enjoyed the article and want to both praise and encourage the author.

You get it. It’s about value. Keep you eye on that north star and you won’t go wrong.

Whose value? How do I value? Can I reconcile disparite value? Yep, those are the right questions.

For me, I read this and want to give a shout out to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that’s just me.

I enjoyed the read, thank you.
by denolfe | 2026-01-30 02:05:20+00:00
PreSession Hook from obra/superpowers injects this along with more logic for getting rid of rationalizing out of using skills:

> If you think there is even a 1% chance a skill might apply to what you are doing, you ABSOLUTELY MUST invoke the skill.
IF A SKILL APPLIES TO YOUR TASK, YOU DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE. YOU MUST USE IT.

While this may result in overzealous activation of skills, I've found that if I have a skill related, I _want_ to use it. It has worked well for me.