MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-29 12:23:56+00:00
> Perhaps not pursuing policies that create the conditions for Hamas to thrive in the first place?

That sounds pretty easy when you're not involved, but things on the ground are rarely that simple. Much of Israeli society is convinced (somewhat accurately) that the Palestinians hate them and want them dead, as much of Palestinian society is convinced of the same (again, somewhat accurately).

I don't know how you get both sides to climb down from this, or does it just end with genocide (of one side or the other). Like, I'm from Ireland and the north of the island was engulfed in violence for the first half of my life (not to a Gaza standard but bad). That only got resolved because a superpower (the US) intervened to help mediate (and help the side that considered themselves Irish).

I would imagine that I might have been very angry at this if I were a member of the other side (the side that considers themselves British), but ultimately it worked out pretty well (modulo Brexit and potential other landmines).

But it's not over, the groups are still really segregated and people just don't talk about it. The Israel Palestine situation is much, much worse and I honestly don't see any superpower being willing or able to mediate this situation.

So yeah, it would be great if everyone could just sing kumbaya, but I don't see how we get there from here.
by pedro_caetano | 2026-01-29 12:24:40+00:00
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I had the same issue with a loan machine from a client, super responsive onsite, but once I connected through a VPN from an external network, all the basic functionality in the file manager was brought to a halt. Even something as simple as right click on a folder to show a context menu would take several seconds.

The files were all local (also with Onedrive sync disabled) so I am almost positive it was whatever they were using for endpoint protection (Can't recall 100% but probably something from CrowdStrike).
by rob74 | 2026-01-29 12:24:43+00:00
It will be a manufacturer of vaporware if you look at how much they announced over the last years and how much of that has actually materialized...

But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-29 12:26:09+00:00
I think that a better response would have been much, much more targeted. Strategically, Israel have put themselves in a much worse position vis a vis the rest of the world (and importantly the US) by the indiscriminate leveling of Gaza. So it would have been much more like a police action than a war. Maybe take lessons (god I can't believe I'm saying this) from how the British responded to the nationalist terrorism/freedom fighters in Northern Ireland?
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-29 12:26:29+00:00
From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth.

Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this.

I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat.

The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.

AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-29 12:26:34+00:00
This LIDAR wank annoys me.

If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.

Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.

No amount of LIDAR engineering will ever get you a LIDAR that outputs ground truth steering commands. The best you'll ever get is noisy depth estimate speckles that you'll have to massage with, guess what, AI, to get them to do anything of use.

Sensor suite choice is an aside. Camera only 360 coverage? Good enough to move on. The rest of the problem lies with AI.
by saimiam | 2026-01-29 12:27:29+00:00
If a user almost exclusively uses the Patreon ios app to consume the artist’s content and likes to live inside the ios ecosystem for frictionless payments using the card on file/privacy/UX/whatever, then I feel apple should get to set the terms of engagement.

If you were a chain store in a high end mall where customers cars were all parked for free by valets, mall staff knew their names, and generally made them feel special, you’d not balk at a higher commission to be paid to mall for access to their customers, right? Airports come to mind for this.

I believe apple lets you set whatever price you want on their store, just not tell customers that they could get a lower price elsewhere/on the vendor’s website (I don’t follow App Store policies very closely so my info is probably out of date).
by kranner | 2026-01-29 12:27:58+00:00
> Using them isn't an advantage, but not using them is a disadvantage. They handle the production part so we can focus on the part that actually matters: acquiring the novel input that makes content worth creating.

I would argue that using AI for copywriting is a disadvantage at this point. AI writing is so recognisable that it makes me less inclined to believe that the content would have any novel input or ideas behind it at all, since the same style of writing is most often being used to dress up complete garbage.

Foreign-sounding English is not off-putting, at least to me. It even adds a little intrigue compared to bland corporatese.
by moring | 2026-01-29 12:29:01+00:00
(1) disguise as an LLM to have them give better problem descriptions to you
(2) provide an LLM for your users that lets you read their chat to understand their problem

and:

(3) try to understand why they are communicating differently to an LLM. Immediate replies? Different feelings knowing they don't talk to a human? Genuinely better help? Not getting treated as stupid?

All or none of these may be true, but if it's consistent behaviour then there is a reason for it.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-29 12:29:34+00:00
I already mentioned in a few places, this is useless, probably a team having to meet some KPIs, OKRs, or whatever to show their impact value on the next evaluation cycle.

Anything related to WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT is a sea of bugs, broken tooling, and unfulfilled promises, that no one should bother with.

Easily confirmed by going into their public repositories over at Github, or community session recordings over at YouTube.

For those using .NET, keep using Windows Forms or WPF, or reach out to Avalonia and Uno.

For those using C++, the aging MFC has much better tooling as incredible as it sounds, or use instead VCL/Firemonkey (C++ Builder), Qt, wxWidgets,....

For anything else, whatever bindings are available on top of plain Win32.
by gsharm | 2026-01-29 12:30:13+00:00
Thanks for saying this. For new, impressionable minds here who read most of the comments here and think this it's all devs - it isn't. A lot of us value Musk and incredibly awesome tech like FSD and aren't consumed by political partisanship. That tells you more about the commenter than Musk.

Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.
by simianwords | 2026-01-29 12:30:25+00:00
The only thing you need to know about unit economics is this: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

TL;DR the prices have gone down (to achieve same benchmarks) by more 9x to 400x.

This should clearly tell you that the margins are high. It would be absurd for OpenAI to be constantly be under a loss when the prices have gone down by ~50x on average. Instead of being ~50x cheaper, couldn't OpenAI be like 45x cheaper and be in profit? What's the difference?

I genuinely don't know why you need any more proof than just this statistic?
by Thlom | 2026-01-29 12:30:28+00:00
Many old people do valuable work even though they are not in the workforce. They are the backbone of many voluntary organizations, they are often the backbone of their apartment complex taking on janitorial work and administrative work, they are baby sitters, home work assistants, they taken on small jobs no one else want to like election clerks and exam monitors. Some start up a small business so the community can get access to their expertise. One guy I know closed his musical instruments repair shop a few years ago, but started up again in smaller scale because there were no one else local to do the work.
by thephyber | 2026-01-29 12:30:30+00:00
Tesla investor meetings are just lots of investor bros who have faith in Musk. They trust that Musk can continue to deliver the mindshare that he previously did to get the stock price to where it is.

I think he has tremendous downside risk, but there are a ridiculous number of people who still have “faith and trust” in him despite all of his downside risk.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-29 12:30:30+00:00
This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.

Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
by baby | 2026-01-29 12:30:30+00:00
every system that gets too greedy eventually gets squashed (e.g. regulations) or kills its host (e.g. cancer).

I've noticed watching blood money on Netflix that greedy systems tend to get greedier and greedier, and this is the best way to catch bad actors.

On the other hand, criminals that try not to become too big and remain low-profile are the ones that never get caught.
by foldr | 2026-01-29 12:30:35+00:00
> The code is not thread-safe as, if multiple threads attempt to use this lock, we could read invalid values of isLocked (in theory, and on a CPU where tearing could happen on its word size).

The issue isn’t just tearing but also memory order. On some architectures you can read a valid but out of date value in Thread A after Thread B has updated that value. (Memory order is mentioned later in the article, to be fair.)
by absynth | 2026-01-29 12:30:38+00:00
"Must have 5 years experience in blah" kind of thing? But then you look for 4, 3, 2, 1 years of experience positions and its... now what? so you look for other roles so you can jump from one to another. Thats the candidate side to hiring. chicken an egg deal.

Been on both sides of hiring.

On the hiring side, I no longer believe in skills shortages unless there's obvious particulars. Especially when I don't see those complaining doing any human development around the issue so I rapidly roll my eyes. I've hired people with 1 year experience and gotten better applicants than 3 years. Its becoming clear we can vet people within a month. Much cheaper to bulk hire then let them go as they wash out. Oddly enough they can wash out and still often be transferred elsewhere internally with good results. Hiring for human skills like work attitude and the person's ability to execute has its benefits.

I've seen so many ads for senior this or that but nothing for juniors. So when I see "we can't find skilled people" complaints I'm no longer as forgiving as I otherwise would be.

Of course this opinion is based on my direct experience so others will likely not agree.
by blibble | 2026-01-29 12:31:19+00:00
> This is demonstrably false. The data shows the exact opposite.

it is not

> Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus

thank you

the only regions of the UK that generate a net return to the treasury are London, the South East and East of England

(the East of England certainly has reasons to be upset, they have naff all infrastructure AND are a net payer)

> You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof the system works, that's fucking stupid.

fortunately I didn't claim that

please put the strawman down
by rvz | 2026-01-29 12:31:29+00:00
> Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.

Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.

With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).

> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”

Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.

Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.

You are being scammed without knowing it.
by ghusto | 2026-01-29 12:31:38+00:00
The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective, but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists. Ideally, a professional will prescribe them as a necessary helper to becoming (more) mentally healthy whilst tackling the root cause. Most of the time however, it's more of a "here, take these indefinitely".

It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?
by sidcool | 2026-01-29 12:31:45+00:00
Tesla hatred here is surreal. If a company was overvalued for a couple of years, it's ok to be sceptical. Tesla has been at such high valuations for many years now. They have >40 billion cash at hand. Tesla cars were always going to face competiton. Their FSD is maturing with unsupervised robotaxis rolling out. They are making profit every quarter since years now. They are shipping millions of vehicles every year. Their charging infra quality is one of the best, and most are now adopting NACS. The top comment calling Tesla a failure is ludicrous.
by polytely | 2026-01-29 12:32:06+00:00
> A game where seeing a single screenshot ruins the experience wasn't very substantial to begin with.

I don't think that follows at all, I'm currently working through Blue Prince and the way in which that game gives you information later on which completely recontextualizes things you have encountered earlier makes it so that a screenshot of something could definitely rob you of experiencing that moment, which is a big part of the joy of that game.
by lukev | 2026-01-29 12:32:40+00:00
You’re right, and a big reason they won’t be able to capture the “full” value is because of competition, especially with open-source models. Sure, Claude will probably always be better… but better to the tune of $50k/seat?

LLMs are, ultimately, software. And we’ve had plenty of advances in software. None of them are priced at the market value of the labor they save. That’s just not how the economics work.
by Wilder7977 | 2026-01-29 12:32:52+00:00
Then you write in your own language or in broken English, or you study the language you want to write in?
If you can't write a text at all (even with plenty of mistakes), you hardly can review AI output. So, you just let AI write something for you that you might not even mean?

This is not "I need to communicate with a doctor" or another necessity, if you put content out there, presumably it's because you want to communicate.
You want to write in another language? That's great, learn the language and help yourself with a vocabulary, even a translator, but write yourself (which is also a way to learn).

I am saying this as a non-English speaker, as it might be obvious.
by cagenut | 2026-01-29 12:33:40+00:00
it was basically a mindless loop, very prime for being agent driven:

- observer error rate uptick
- maybe dig in with apm tooling
- read actual error messages
- compare what apm and logs said to last commit/deploy
- if they look even tangentially related deploy the previous commit (aka revert)
- if its still not fixed do a "debug push", basically stuff a bunch of print statements (or you can do better) around the problem to get more info

I won't say that solves every case but definitely 90% of them.

I think your point about preserving some amount of intent/context is good, but also like what are most of us doing with agents if not "loop on error message until it goes away".
by xattt | 2026-01-29 12:33:59+00:00
Science has shifted, depending on the discipline, from a colonial universalism perspective to one that accepts that “the truth” varies and can be a local phenomenon.

I have a hard time buying into a prescriptive tea-making procedure. For example, you can heat up your temperature to boiling, but by the time you pour it, it will likely be down to the low to mid 90s.

There’s other factors such as the material of the mugs (which might be more or less conductive of temperature) and the delta between the water and air temps. The composition of the tea itself will also vary year-to-year and you have no idea of the vintage of the Lipton/Tetley gunpowder stock you’re buying.

tl;dr Strict procedure = placebo
by pydry | 2026-01-29 12:35:13+00:00
I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit.

There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful.

The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
by parag0ne | 2026-01-29 12:35:45+00:00
Not OP but I'll share my experience. For me, I have to quit caffeine for those to even become an option. Otherwise I get my short burst of productivity then everything shuts down after and I don't want to do a thing, everything feels "impossible" or like it doesn't matter at all.

Things like journaling / breathing / etc calm the nervous system while caffeine stimulates it. I would say caffeine is counterproductive to those practices.
by nabla9 | 2026-01-29 12:36:04+00:00
No. This is a result of a market failure caused by monopoly power. Regulators must make sure market capitalism works.

I'm not sure what is the basis for your question but using market definition where Google Play and Apple Store are in the same market is not correct (market definition is essential part of any monopoly regulation).

Markets are defined by choice of practice, not by choice in principle.
by davedx | 2026-01-29 12:37:07+00:00
FSD has been maturing for ~an entire decade now. Their latest stunt with moving the supervisor to chaser cars has made a lot of people understandably angry anew: Musk has to hit his robotaxi milestones to get more billions, so he's forcing the programme ahead with smoke and mirrors to get his stock option grants.

Their profit is decreasing, revenue growth is negative. Their autonomy programme is always "just one more update" away. Humanoid robotics is already full of competition from hundreds of other startups and larger companies (even Amazon, an AI sceptic, has a significant robotics programme).

I wouldn't call them a failure, but they certainly seem to have lost their way, and you have to really drink the kool aid to be able to justify the valuation in any sense.
by bflesch | 2026-01-29 12:38:24+00:00
I have no experience about antidepressants myself so please excuse my stupid question.

When I hear people say "it killed my libido" I always think about the fact that hyper-sexuality can be a trauma response, and if your body is healing the hyper-sexuality is most likely also reduced.

It's like when you have a disease and then read the side effects of a medication and notice that a lot of the side effects are basically also something that can happen when your overall condition is improving but still some people report them as adverse effects and then these are added as side effects to the package label.

For example you take antibiotics but bacteria can have toxins in their body, and when the bacteria disintegrate you get more sick from the released toxins. It's called the Herxheimer effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarisch%E2%80%93Herxheimer_rea...

When I started methyl-B12 supplementation I also had inflammation in sinuses for weeks but it was just from my immune system starting up again and being able to attack long-standing inflammation. Someone else would've put "fever", "headache" and "stuffed nose" onto the side effects medication label of methyl-B12.
by cbolton | 2026-01-29 12:38:29+00:00
> The term "capital" is an abstraction that's not helpful here

It was not so abstract when Musk came up with 44 billion to buy Twitter... The details are complicated but in the end it's still wealth.

> Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

Presumably he would sell the stock to pay the wealth tax (or whatever mechanism is there to limit wealth)?

As for the voting control: when you're down to 9% this ship has sailed hasn't it? Anyway I don't think society has a moral obligation to allow individuals personal control of a trillion dollar company because they founded it (and if society disagrees with me, super-voting shares can be used as Alphabet does).
by dmurray | 2026-01-29 12:38:44+00:00
Last night I downloaded a TV episode and played it in VLC. 30 seconds in, the power failed. Fine, it's an old laptop I'm using as a media server, battery is long dead - this never happened before but maybe something is loose. I checked the power supply and restarted it. It failed again at the same point in the video, and again a third time. Something about that video causes my laptop to die.

I turned it off and went to bed. Maybe I'll troubleshoot it today. But I'd love to understand what could have happened. The closest thing I know of is the Janet Jackson video that could crash hard drives [0]. In this case the sound was playing on a different device (my TV) so I don't think it's the same explanation.

For extra weirdness, the episode was Black Mirror S7E01. Exactly the kind of thing the creators would like to build into a Black Mirror episode.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=10...
Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf Platform for Large Enterprises in 2026?
by datacouch | 2026-01-29 12:38:49+00:00
For large enterprises, a custom AI agent may be preferable if specific, complex use cases are involved. However, off-the-shelf platforms offer speed and scalability for general needs. The decision depends on the complexity of tasks and resources. A hybrid approach, leveraging pre-built tools with customization, is often the most efficient for meeting specific business objectives.