MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasd00 | 2026-01-29 18:53:00+00:00
I was experimenting this morning with claudecode standing up a basic web application (python backend, react+tailwindcss front end, auth0 integration, basic navigation, pages and user profile).

At one point it output "Excellent! the backend is working and the database is created." heh i remember being all wide eyed and bushy tailed about things like that. It definitely has the feel of a new hire ready to show their stuff.

btw, i was very impressed with the end result after a couple hours of basically just allowing claudecode to do what it wanted to do. Especially with front-end look/feel, something i always spend way too much time on.
by modeless | 2026-01-29 18:53:06+00:00
It's business as usual for Elon. This is his main strategy. He always goes all in on risky technology that people say won't work. People said it about EVs. They said it about reusing first stages. They said it about Starlink's phased array antennas.

Now he's going all in on self driving. It's obvious that self driving turns personal transportation into a service business. So that's where he's going. Yeah, if you don't believe in self driving then it's suicide. But if you do, it's the only thing that makes sense.
by jsheard | 2026-01-29 18:53:17+00:00
> What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns.

This is only a useful premise if it can do any of those things accurately, as opposed to vibing up something kinda plausible based on an amalgam of vaguely related YouTube videos.
by aanet | 2026-01-29 18:53:21+00:00
This is the classic Suddenly Revealed Pedestrian test case, which afaik, most NCAP (like EuroNCAP, Japan NCAP) have as part of their standard testing protocols.

Having performed this exact test on 3 dozen vehicles (L2/L3/L4) for several AV companies in the Bay Area [1], I would say that Waymo's response, per their blog post [2] has been textbook compliance. (I'm not defending their performance... just their response to the collision). This test / protocol is hard for any driver (including human driven vehicles), let alone ADAS/L3/L4 vehicles, for various reasons, including: pedestrian occlusion, late ped detection, late braking, slick roads, not enough braking, etc. etc.

Having said all that, full collision avoidance would have been best outcome, which, in this case, it wasn't. Wherever the legal fault may lie -- and there will be big debate here -- Waymo will still have to accept some responsibility, given how aggressively they are rolling out their commercial services.

This only puts more onus on their team to demonstrate a far higher standard of driving than human drivers. Sorry, that's just the way societal acceptance is. We expect more from our robots than from our fellow humans.

[1] Yes, I'm an AV safety expert

[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...

(edit: verbiage)
by adrian_b | 2026-01-29 18:53:26+00:00
The new Intel 18A CMOS process has succeeded to improve the energy efficiency over both all older Intel processes and the older TSMC 3 nm process used by Intel for its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs.

On the other hand, it seems that Intel struggles to reach high clock frequencies in this new manufacturing process because the Panther Lake CPU models have lower clock frequencies than the corresponding Arrow Lake CPU models made by TSMC and the few Panther Lake models with maximum clock frequencies of 5 GHz or more (Core Ultra X7 and X9) are very expensive, so it is likely that their availability will be limited (due to low fabrication yields).

Therefore it is plausible that for now companies like NVIDIA and Apple will choose to use Intel only for low-risk products, as the article says.
by jorblumesea | 2026-01-29 18:53:43+00:00
It touched a nerve because no one in the trump admin is qualified to do their job. There's a lot of corruption and a lot of people getting access to things they shouldn't due to their relationship and loyalty, not merit. There's a big difference from a sys admin having super user access and some random politically connected hack abusing their privilege.

DOGE/Musk, noem, Kash, hegseth, etc.
by firasd | 2026-01-29 18:53:56+00:00
It's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive

For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code!

The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose. Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI can displace it

So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.
by seedie | 2026-01-29 18:53:57+00:00
Imo they explain pretty well what they are trying to achieve with SIMA and Genie in the Google Deepmind Podcast[1].
They see it as the way to get to AGI by letting AI agents learn for themselves in simulated worlds. Kind of like how they let AlphaGo train for Go in an enormous amount of simulated games.

[1] https://youtu.be/n5x6yXDj0uo
by rekabis | 2026-01-29 18:54:05+00:00
Definitely.

But until someone builds an electrical vehicle with zero DRM, zero connectivity/tracking/spyware, zero vendor lock-in, and near-100% self-repairability, imma gonna stick with the pre-2006 internal combustion vehicles that meet all those requirements.

Which is why I am following Edison Electric in British Columbia, Canada, with such interest. If anyone is going to release a consumer vehicle like that, it’s going to be them (eventually).
by toephu2 | 2026-01-29 18:54:23+00:00
Even when excluding regulatory credits and consumer tax incentives, Tesla’s automotive business remains profitable.

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): As of late 2024 and early 2025, Tesla’s average cost to produce a vehicle dropped to an all-time low of under $35,000.

Gross Margin: Tesla’s automotive gross margin (excluding regulatory credits) has typically hovered between 15% and 18% recently. This means they earn several thousand dollars more per car than it costs them to build.
by api | 2026-01-29 18:54:30+00:00
Consumer robotics strikes me as insanely hard. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.

Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add random furniture with non-standard dimensions.

Oh, and remove designated roads and standardized rules about how you're supposed to drive on those roads.

Then there's the mechanical engineering. Boston Dynamics robots are impressive but I wonder how durable these really are. How would one of those humanoid or dog-like robots hold up after a few years of real world use? Think about how many motors, sensors, actuators, solenoids, and so on must be in stuff like this.

From a pure engineering point of view (neglecting the human factor or cost) a home helper robot is almost definitely harder than building and operating a Mars base. We pretty much have all the core tech for that figured out. As soon as we have Starship or another super heavy rocket that's reliable we could do it as long as someone was willing to write some huge checks.

And of course it's a totally untested market. We don't know how big it really is. Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? Only about 25% of the market probably has the disposable income to afford these.

You'd have to go way up market first, but people up market can afford to just pay humans to do it.
by genewitch | 2026-01-29 18:54:42+00:00
i used to call myself a "cloud engineer" 14 years ago, me and a friend developed a formal way to deploy thin clients using AWS as the host, and it worked well for everything including youtube videos. this was in 2009, we had both been working with AWS since the first "public" instances became available.

So i suppose when azure was announced and came out, i was acutely aware of what they offered, and it was, you know, marginally cheaper than the AWS windows servers, as azure didn't have to pay microsoft as much for DCE licenses, maybe.

But it makes sense they have Linux now, as i said, ecosystem lock-in...
by MBCook | 2026-01-29 18:54:53+00:00
So?

They could make the first working flying cars. They could work fantastically.

And maybe one they release them we find out… no one wants flying cars. They sell 500 a year despite only costing as much as a normal car.

Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.
by Tiberium | 2026-01-29 18:55:02+00:00
I don't know if you can consider Netcup "small", but their RS 4000 G12 ("root server", basically a VPS with dedicated/guaranteed resources) costs ~€31 for a monthly contract for any location in Europe without VAT included.

It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.

I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
by pseudalopex | 2026-01-29 18:55:14+00:00
The article described this misleadingly. Mozilla in 2026 intend $~650M in expenditure. 80% on core products like Firefox and Thunderbird. 20% on expanding into AI.[1] Their 2024 total expenses were $588M.[2]

[1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/ledger/

[2] https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-29 18:55:30+00:00
You’re going to see a lot of shitty code and practices that result in millions or more revenue.

I’d suggest you maintain your knowledge and build upon it for how to build systems that scale both organizationally and from a performance pov.

That way, you can identify which parts can be made better in the existing system without breaking it.

Ultimately, the customer really doesn’t care about the internals as long as whatever they’re using solves their immediate problem. They hold the ultimate card because they will just switch to another service provider if they’re cheaper, even if their product is worse.

So don’t become jaded. Become an expert in systems engineering and work on making things better. When you have a chance to work on a green field project, apply your knowledge there and make a foundation that will outlast your commits.

But realize that the business might toss your perfect shiny approach into the bin if it doesn’t translate into $. Don’t take it personally. Optimize for the best solution given the $ and time constraints.

For example, adding better test coverage might help reduce issues that result in headaches and lost productivity, or worse down times. Or adding a better interface to a poorly written implementation so you’re not tossing out everything just reducing the surface area for problems.

Good luck! It’s cool that you care, you’ll have fun.
by tptacek | 2026-01-29 18:55:55+00:00
I have no idea who they are or what they were talking about. I think they're thinking about 3DES used as a password hash. I never in 100 years would have guessed that's where they were coming from.

The thread that ensued, a discussion of what it means for a cipher to be obsoleted or unsafe versus "broken", is an actually-interesting question.

I feel pretty OK about how this went.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-29 18:56:05+00:00
> Talk of “genocide” and “indiscriminate leveling of Gaza” indicates to me that you didn’t really understand the situation and probably get your news from propaganda sources - which, unfortunately, include nearly all media sources in this conflict.

Propaganda sources such as Israeli citizens? (but see below).

> It was 1/4 that rate of the US army in fallujah for example.

This is not something to aspire to.

> which had one of the LOWEST civilian death rates for urban warfare in this century

Can you provide some evidence for this statement?

> get your news from propaganda sources

I get my news from the Financial Times, who have a pretty rigorous sourcing policy that normally leads to them being slower but more accurate (which is a trade-off I'm willing to make).

> Hamas is the government of Gaza

Gaza is not a recognised country, so this is less of a flex than you think it is. I guess the closest example is Kalingrad, as it's a territory surrounded by another one. Like, basically all food that goes into Gaza goes through Israel, correct?

> Targeted urban warfare

This is not what I meant. When I said something more targeted, I was referring to things like the pager explosions. While violent, they were targeted and didn't cause (much) collateral damage. The Israeli state used to be really good at this, so it's profoundly disheartening that targeted now means blowing crap up, US army style.

> Northern Ireland was a gang/rebel group in occupied territory. Hamas is the government of Gaza, and Israel had no boots on the ground on Oct 6th. The situations are not in any way comparable.

Arrrggggghhh. Fair enough that you're not aware of this, but the Plantation of Ireland and the settlers in the West Bank are incredibly similar events (despite being hundreds of years apart) and will lead to similar outcomes over time (modulo total annihilation, one supposes).

> a gang/rebel group in occupied territory

So any West Bank militants, by your standard, would be more similar to Northern Ireland.
by tedggh | 2026-01-29 18:56:12+00:00
Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-29 18:56:19+00:00
Build. Build really crappy software, and then try to polish it little-by-little. Implement different design patterns to see what you like. Try new programming languages. Watch conference talks and follow along in your editor.

I grew up on IRC being very envious of the prodigy-tier developers around me. Some of them were even younger than I was, capable of cracking software in Ghidra or writing simple malware as a weekend project. They got to that point not because they were prodigies, but because they practiced constantly.
by qwertox | 2026-01-29 18:56:26+00:00
Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours) = 1.85€

That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.

I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.
by recursive | 2026-01-29 18:56:53+00:00
This is close to a particular peeve I have. Occasionally I see signs on the street that say "Slow Down". I'm not talking about the electronic ones connected to radar detectors. Just metal and paint.

Here's my problem. If you follow the instructions on the sign, it still says to slow down. There's no threshold for slow enough. No matter how slow you're going, the sign says "Slow Down". So once you become ensnared in the visual cone of this sign, you'll be forced to sit stationary for all eternity.

But maybe there's a loop-hole. It doesn't say how fast you must decelerate. So if you come into the zone going fast enough, and decelerate slowly enough, you can make it past the sign with some remaining non-zero momentum.

You know, I've never been diagnosed on the spectrum, but I have some of the tendencies. lol.
Ask HN: Who here works with just a laptop?
by hu3 | 2026-01-29 18:56:59+00:00
Like many of you, I use a lot more hardware than just a laptop for my work. But I always think about that elusive FAANG legend making $200K+ USD with just a MacBook on their lap while relaxing on a couch.

Any tips on how to be reasonably productive in our industry with just a laptop?
by isk517 | 2026-01-29 18:57:12+00:00
It isn't 'You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain', it's 'You either die a hero or live long enough for people to realize you are a villain'. While it's ultimately meaningless to speculate on what the dead would do if they were living, Steve Jobs in life did have plenty of belief and made plenty of decisions that are perfectly inline with what we are seeing in 2026 and there is no particular reason to believe he would not just be up there with the worst of them.
by witherk | 2026-01-29 18:57:46+00:00
>he's a real Dr.

Careful, he is also a believer in Ayurveda[1]. Which basically basically categorizes people into different elements like fire and water and then tries to change their diet and habits to match their elemental style or something. You can hear him talking about it here [2]. Kinda reminds me of Humorism [3]. Dr. K seems like a nice enough guy but don't get too lured in by the "Harvard-trained" credentialism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ2xnThRGPg
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-29 18:57:54+00:00
If you want to deduct tax rebates, then what about the other side?

- New cars are subject to sales tax

- In some states (e.g., California), there are additional fees buried in DMV registration costs. California's Vehicle License Fee (VLF) is based on the depreciated value of the car. So newer and more expensive cars pay more to use the roads than do older cars. So the VLF is effectively another tax on new cars.
by netsharc | 2026-01-29 18:58:33+00:00
> Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription.

Step 1:
> discontinu[e] the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control

Step 2: Redefine "Full Self-Driving" to be those things. Charge 50 cents per month subscription or whatever.

Step 3: Get 10 million subscribers.

Step 4: 100 billion dollar payout! (Number pulled out of my butt)
by ezst | 2026-01-29 18:58:46+00:00
Since a hot take is as good as the next one: LLMs are by the day more and more clearly understood as a "local maximum" with flawed capabilities, limited efficiency, a $trillion + a large chunk of the USA's GDP wasted, nobody even turning a profit from that nor able to build something that can't be reproduced for free within 6 months.

When the right move (strategically, economically) is to not compete, the head of the AI division acknowledging the above and deciding to focus on the next breakthrough seems absolutely reasonable.
by tansey | 2026-01-29 18:58:54+00:00
For all the folks complaining about "it's only in mice! things never work in humans!" -- I work at MSK and we definitely have seen success treating PDAC in humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06063-y

"Why don't I see these treatments hitting the general public?" Because trials like these are phase I/II. Then you need a phase III that takes a long time to recruit a large cohort and has overall survival as an end point so you need a long time to measure the actual outcome you care about. And most trials fail in phase III because the surrogate end points used in phase II studies, like progression free survival (ie how long did patients go before their disease advanced in screens), are not necessarily great predictors of improved overall survival.

Specifically for cancer vaccines, this paper was a driving force behind MSK establishing a cancer vaccine center to scale up these personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines. It's very very difficult to do and extremely expensive right now.
by code_for_monkey | 2026-01-29 18:58:58+00:00
its insane that there wasnt any consequence for the metaverse at all. Oh yeah, we built a second life clone based totally around the idea that people want to spend rent money on fake digital real estate. Of course it tanked, no one was brave enough to point out ahead of time how bad an idea it was? And this doesnt hurt their standing, stock price, or marketability at all?
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-29 18:59:04+00:00
And as long as those places dominate, it makes more sense for AI car makers to say "let's put $5m more into raw dog vision only FSD AI" than it does to say "let's add a $25 long range RFID reader to every car". No one will bet their future on "the infrastructure for it will maybe one day exist".

Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale. And they don't even need every road remade. They just need every road mapped and scanned out into 3D objects with their reference cars. They're solving a problem orders of magnitude easier, and it still throttles their growth.
by drunner | 2026-01-29 18:59:31+00:00
A human driver in a school zone during morning drop off would be scanning the sidewalks and paying attention to children that disappear behind a double parked suv or car in the first place, no?

As described by the nhtsa brief:

"within two blocks of a Santa Monica, CA elementary school during normal school drop off hours; that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity"

The "that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity" means that waymo is driving recklessly by obeying the speed limit here (assuming it was 20mph) in a way that many humans would not.
by Veserv | 2026-01-29 19:00:23+00:00
Err, that is not the desirable statistic you seem to think it is. American drivers average ~3 trillion miles per year [1]. That means ~7000 child injurys per year [2] would be ~1 per 430 million miles. Waymo has done on the order of 100-200 million miles autonomously. So this would be ~2-4x more injurys than the human average.

However, the child pedestrian injury rate is only a official estimate (it is possible it may be undercounting relative to highly scrutinized Waymo vehicle-miles) and is a whole US average (it might not be a comparable operational domain), but absent more precise and better information, we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.

[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315

[2] chrome://downloads/2023%20Children%20Traffic%20Safety%20Facts.pdf
by wincy | 2026-01-29 19:00:40+00:00
I largely ride on paved bike trails that are wholly separate from the roads, or suburban residential roads that have a Swiss cheese of bike trails interconnecting via parks. It’s never the fastest way, but there’s almost always a “safe way” to bike somewhere, due to a lot of effort by our city council. I’m more avoidant of the major roads, an elderly man was extremely close to me and my kid in her bike trailer when he made a right turn, I think I’d be more cautious if I didn’t have so many accessible ways to bike separate from the roads.

Oddly a lot of the “guys with road bikes wearing full gear” seem to just ride on the road anyway. I have no idea why, I’ve double checked the laws and I’m allowed to ride there.