MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 11:38:50+00:00
There's quite a few factors here that delayed what should have logically already happened.

1. All the tarriff reactions cause US companies to import a huge amount of stuff for 2025. From what I understand, we're about to exhaust all of those imports.

2. The unemployment reports (especially the U3 numbers) hide quite a bit of turmoil going on under the hood of the job market.

- If you lost your job and switched to Uber/Doordash, you're not unemployed.

- If you are riding on severance pay instead of filikg for unemployment, you're not unemployed.

- If you got tired of throwing out hundreds of apps only to get automated rejections and take a break a month, you're not unemployed.

- If you just graduated into this hellscape and can't qualify for any unemployment, you're not unemployed (you're technically not part of the workforce yet).

There's a lot of these small shifts in how jobs work that make U3 less reliable in reflecting reality. And I only touched the surface of these issues.

3. Continuing on the U3 with a point worthy of its own bullet: the unemployment appears flat, but the makeup of what's happening per industry really lays down the reality. The only industries growing are hospitality (aka food service and similar sorts of duties) and health care. And to top it off these "growing" industries shift more and more to fractional work. Pretty much every other industry is down. So people are getting laid off/fired and moving to part time work to get by. "Stable" by unemployment numbers, but very unstable on the day-to-day. Add in the recent congressional bills for healthcare subsidies and we're throwing more gas on rhe fire.

4. I'm sure it's been said so much by now, but AI in the US is the only thing holding up the GDP. Without that massive investment, the GDP would be at best, dead flat. The US isn't growing in a way that reflects actual yields to anyone outside of a select few shareholders. We're not building more houses, mining more materials (on the contrary, we've resumed ransacking others'), manufacturing more machinery, nor even producing more service value for customers and businesses. We're putting all hedges on one thing with an uncertain outcome. If that industry declines, so does the rest of the US.

5. The K shaped economy. I have to check these numbers again, but I believe that spending is indeed up, but the makeup of spending per income band is more stark than ever. The too 10% income households makes up half of US's spending. But there are signs that even many high income houses add also starting to hunker down on spending.

----

That was a lot and it still only scratches the surface. But the TLDR version is that there's a lot of statistics massaging over the real struggles of life and many industries reaching a breaking point they did a good job putting off. But by this point it will only take a needle to break this camel.
by nkrisc | 2026-01-30 11:39:00+00:00
I think it’s unfair to group all those features into “things for people who want to multitask while driving”.

I’m a decent driver, I never use my phone while driving and actively avoid distractions (sometimes I have to tell everyone in the car to stop talking), and yet features like lane assist and automatic braking have helped me avoid possible collisions simply because I’m human and I’m not perfect. Sometimes a random thought takes my attention away for a moment, or I’m distracted by sudden movement in my peripheral vision, or any number of things. I can drive very safely, but I can not drive perfectly all the time. No one can.

These features make safe drivers even safer. They even make the dangerous drivers (relatively) safer.
by giantg2 | 2026-01-30 11:39:30+00:00
Nothing provides complete protection, but diversification can help reduce the impact.

The person saying gold and mining stocks may or may not be correct - it's still a risky position. Precious metals could be in a commodity bubble right now (or not). It's had to predict anything with perfect accuracy, which is why diversification matters.

You probably shouldn't be jumping completely in or out of anything because that requires timing, which is also not easy to do. What you can do is change he weights withing your portfolio. For example, reducing your US equity exposure to increase your bond exposure. Or reducing your US growth exposure to increase your US value and Eurozone dividend exposure. It's best to listen to several financial companies reports to weigh what to do.
by michaelsshaw | 2026-01-30 11:39:50+00:00
I disagree that something good for China is necessarily bad for the rest of the world, which you seem to imply here includes only Europe.

China alone has a higher population than Europe and the USA combined. I'd say that even if things got worse for Europe, to humanity it still constitutes a net benefit. Lives aren't of less value just because they're in a (gasp) communist country.
by operation_moose | 2026-01-30 11:39:55+00:00
The single superpower thing was an anomaly which was mostly a result of one specific country being largely untouched by WW2; we're more likely heading back towards multiple regional powers with varying levels of cooperation, e.g. EU+Mercosur+India agreements that just happened.

The lines are still being drawn, but its doubtful one single power will emerge.
by csomar | 2026-01-30 11:40:27+00:00
> Which is to say that no individual decision make want’s to be the first mover, so the market does not move.

Uh, that's not accurate. Hathaway is sitting all cash because of it and so far they have been the one losing. Even if you assume (and correctly I think) that the market is overvalued, their stock pile of cash is eroding: https://newzsquare.com/warren-buffett-warns-of-fiat-currency...

> A year ago there were a few signs. Right now, it feels like everything is primed to blow. Is that new?

The market is unhealthy. Too unhealthy that I think it can no longer self-heal the usual ways (recession/crash/etc.) and we'll instead move to more advanced stage of hyperinflation, global war, etc.
by lvl155 | 2026-01-30 11:41:21+00:00
Software sector basically got cut in half just on Claude Code. You have to wonder what is next. I don’t think loss in economics is 1:1 with replacement so it’s not zero sum. Production doesn’t necessarily go up. In fact, net output is going to go down if you think about all the B2B lost too.

Whoever comes into power next better start thinking about universal income fast. We are gonna get there sooner than expected.
by tralarpa | 2026-01-30 11:41:51+00:00
Wow. That's really impressive. Here is more background:

https://magazin.wienmuseum.at/die-387-haeuser-des-peter-frit...

And the virtual exhibition of the museum:

https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/alben/edb7nhc3tyww8dncp-sonde...

Some of the models contain a rail segment (Märklin etc.). Was he a model train enthousiast and the houses were part of a layout, or did he use the rails just as accessories? Strange that the articles don't say anything about the artist's motivation.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 11:42:07+00:00
Are the ones newer to the workforce just screwed or is there a way out? Kinda sucks that all this went down around 6-7 years into my tenure and it's just been a few years of scraping together freelance + portfolio projects to try and climb out of tbis rut.

(This might sadly be rhetorical given what I hear of '08, but perhaps there are new channels open to take advantage of. Or at least old channels to raise awareness of).
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-30 11:43:27+00:00
Live like you're already poor, reduce all unnecessary spending, adopt an ascetic mindset to support this lifestyle. That way, when a collapse comes you'll be accustomed to living frugally already and you'll have all the money you saved by getting a head start already saved up to get you through rough patches with relative ease.

Now, when I say live like you're poor, I mean do it smart. Don't grocery shop at a gas station, do your necessary purchases in bulk (actually poor people can't or won't, but would be better off if they could.). Don't but the cheapest boots, but rather the best value. But when choosing how many vacations to take, maybe pick camping locally more often than exotic vacations. Eat simple foods, don't order out fancy stuff and get accustomed to such luxuries. Don't automatically buy the latest consumer toy just because it looks fun. Don't move into a nicer apartment just because you got a raise. You get the idea.
by metalman | 2026-01-30 11:43:44+00:00
This isn't a crash, it is something else comming, perhaps the "jackpot", where society/civilisation unravells, climate disaster kicks in with real persistant challenges everywhere, and some third, fourth, fifth effects that break our millenial run to the top of our planets ecosystem as the ultimate apex species.
It has been a good run, but useing the same tacticts as our stone age ancestors, is, I think, about to bite, hard.
And it is literaly this, our strategy is to keep useing the same tacticts.Jackpot.
by mellosouls | 2026-01-30 11:44:20+00:00
I (like I'm sure many others) predicted it in 2007 and hedged against it by getting a 10 year fixed mortgage at then-current rates on the basis that rates would go sky high as they had in earlier recessions in the UK.

They plummeted to next-to-zero, and in addition to the injury I had to endure the insult of the people who hadn't seen it coming gloating about their low standard variable rates.

Ofc I clearly didn't have much real economic understanding but I guess I am saying that beyond normal common financial sense (the lack of which at scale leads to these situations) which you should be using anyway, we don't really know which way the wind is blowing, and what the exact consequences will be.
by trilogic | 2026-01-30 11:44:24+00:00
What is different this time? Maybe:

1 Online shopping market in the range of 5 trillions
2 Electricity and energy price raise
3 Impossibility to lower interest rates
4 Tech market also in the range of multi Trillions
5 Global education and power expansion ...

Meaning that a % of all this money flow goes private pockets destroying medium class, which gets poorer.

It is like a memory leak that keeps sucking resources while growing exponentially until the system crashes.
The real question for an economist is how much ram has the system and how much the memory has leaked?

This Legendary site is interesting: https://usdebtclock.org/index.html Especially when combined it´s data with AI.
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-30 11:44:47+00:00
> The problem is knowing which lane keeping assist systems are good and which are not. Every dealer just treats it as a 'checkbox' item and implementations vary by model and year.

Yep, I agree.

I used to travel to my parent's home 300km away once a month, and changing from a 2010 no-assist car to a Tesla Model 3 with AP (not FSD) back in 2019 was a game changer. I used to drive there on a Friday evening after work, and I basically collapsed into bed when I got there. With AP I was still tired of course, but also still functioning and way more alert. In my experience Tesla's AP UX is very good: chime when engaging, chime when disengaging, you don't need to look at the screen to know the state you're in, and if you touch controls it lets you know (via chime) and deactivates.

One of the most horrible UXes for me has been on a new Hyundai i10 with the basic lane assist (and I know it's very similar on a new VW Golf that my cousin is leasing):

- there's no chimes, you're forced to look at the screen at the center of the dashboard

- said display is 100x400 (or sth similar) 16-color pixel screen in the center of the dashboard

- out of said display, you need to look in the very corner for an icon of 10x10 pixels that can be yellow, green or white (which under low backlight/high contrast conditions can be tough to decipher)

- lane-keep is on by default at every car start, and tends to butt in on twisty roads (very common where I live), so half-way through a turn you'll feel the steering wheel literally lose force-feedback, while you're still applying force, and swearing ensues

- someone thought that constantly reminding people of the speed limits was a good idea, so the car will scream incessantly at you for being 50.1 over 50

- but will happily let you change lanes and re-engage auto-steer automatically (you need to manually enable this) while doing 120km/h on the highway without any hint that it's re-engaging automatically

- the speed warning is yet another setting that you can turn off at runtime, but you can't persist properly

- auto-steer, after is manually engaged, will stay happily engaged even after you leave they highway and are at very low speeds, and will try to correct you when doing roundabouts

I think the Tesla UX is way better there, and I think regulatory bodies should start preventing things like the i10 assist to be sold to customers, because they're actively dangerous. I've literally had minor heart attacks due to the lane-keep butting in on twisty roads - I thought the front tires were slipping for some reason.
by its-summertime | 2026-01-30 11:44:54+00:00
I'm aware of your point. I disagree with it. A lot of companies seemingly have found it viable to have first-class web apps as part of their lineup; Off the top of my head: Uber and Uber Eats, KFC, Patreon, (And every single competitor to Patreon), every single mini-app in China (where discoverability is much higher), etc etc.

There are more app-having companies that have web apps than not
by Mawr | 2026-01-30 11:45:24+00:00
> and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.

The what now? Seriously, what in the world are you talking about? Roundabouts are heaven. They physically force drivers to slow down when approaching or leaving them, creating a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists.

For example, there's no such thing as "running a red light at full speed" at a roundabout, no speeding up to "make the light", etc.

For cyclists specifically, they're amazing, because they eliminate the deadly left-turns. Every turn is a right turn, which is super safe.
Evaluations in the Real World?
by stichers | 2026-01-30 11:45:34+00:00
What do you think about measuring agentic AI in practice. A few weeks ago I read something on Anthropic’s blog on evals for AI agents https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for-ai-agents, and then yesterday saw this on Medium https://medium.com/quantumblack/evaluations-for-the-agentic-world-c3c150f0dd5a Feels like this is becoming a thing.

Anthropic talk about how to structure agent evals and what they’ve learned from running these internally. The QuantumBlack post clooks more programmatic or lifecyle focussed. How evals need to change once agents are combined and using tools. What to do whenthey're deployed, and how to factor them in early.

Curious what peeple are doing in the real world. Are you rolling your own task suites? Using offline + online evals? Or mostly vibes and logs for now?
by sometimes_all | 2026-01-30 11:45:39+00:00
> You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something

This is EXACTLY what I want. I need my tech to be pull-only instead of push, unless it's communication with another human I am ok with.

> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions

The first thing that comes to mind here is proactive ads, "suggestions", "most relevant", algorithmic feeds, etc. No thank you.
by Oras | 2026-01-30 11:46:09+00:00
> It happened to blockchain, it happened to metaverse.

I don't think AI is comparable to these technologies.

AI had a real impact on certain daily activities, such as search, coding, etc. While the metaverse was just a fantasy with no tangible benefit other than Zuck trying to create his own platform to take on Apple and Google.

Blockchain had some potential in certain fields, but it wasn't user-friendly or usable by many people.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-30 11:47:12+00:00
As much as I'd love to pile in on Tesla, it's unclear to me the severity of the incidents (I know they are listed) and if human drivers would report such things.

"Rear collision while backing" could mean they tapped a bollard. Doesn't sound like a crash. A human driver might never even report this. What does "Incident at 18 mph" even mean?

By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury".

I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire.

For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes, but they are overall of lower severity, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA alone I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.
by moritonal | 2026-01-30 11:47:18+00:00
I think it should. Hate it or not he has a proven ability to create environments where people thrive and want to work the hardest they ever have. Moreover, an ability to understand how much money is required to build something alongside the daring to actually try it. Again, I wish he never got into politics, but generally he knows how to build things people want, and uniquely wants to try.
by bArray | 2026-01-30 11:47:56+00:00
> It's is the latest symptom of a long preoccupation with these beautiuful mathematical objects.

It's not just a beautiful concept, they have other uses too. It turns out some patterns can be pretty efficient for search if there is a spatial movement cost.

Some questions that interest me:

1. Can you get these search patterns as part of an emergent behaviour?

2. Can multiple searchers work together in order to produce these patterns efficiently?

3. Instead of searching linear 2D and 3D space, what if you want to search non-linear spaces?
by Dirak | 2026-01-30 11:47:57+00:00
Bad faith analysis. Your original hypothesis failed (and has failed consistently from 08-25), and the rest of your article is you trying to contrive narratives to support your foregone conclusion that the US economy will collapse (soon, as you claim).

In Europe, people hold cash at negative interest rates because they have so few new ideas and so little innovation to invest in. Where exactly do you think the money will go?

If you insist on believing the US economy will crash without a well thought out thesis, I think that’s a beautiful thing. When you sell your positions on US companies, I’ll gladly be on the BUY side of that order.
by memorysafety | 2026-01-30 11:48:03+00:00
> due to some quirk of evolution, Omega-3, -6, and -9 are the ones biological life uses most. As far as I can tell, there's no specific reason they're all multiples of 3. Probably just a coincidence.

This curio bothered me as well. I didn't yet get a fully satisfying explanation for this either.

There's this diagram, showing for example the full pathway of how linoleic acid catabolizes: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linoleic_acid_beta_o...

It shows dependencies of the process onto several very specific molecular machines we call enzymes.

(main pathway, handling saturated fatty acids)

° Acyl CoA dehydrogenase -- removes 2 hydrogens from carbons immediately after the carboxylic head, forming a π-bond (double-bond) between the α-β carbons;
° Enoyl CoA hydratase -- adds water as H-OH to that α-β carbons π-bond;
° 3-hydroxyacyl CoA dehydrogenase -- converts the added -OH hydroxyl group to =O keto group;
° β-ketothiolase -- grabs the two keto groups, and snips off 2 carbons from the chain, carrying them off in bound form as a molecule of acyl-CoA;

(unsaturated side-branch)

° Dienoyl CoA reductase -- collapses two neighboring π-bonds into one;
° Enoyl CoA isomerase -- converts cis- to trans- variants, making them compatible with Enoyl CoA hydratase. Pathway continues from there.

These, when viewed as a set of combinators, seem perfectly sufficient to metabolize any fatty acid chain. Their chemistry reads pretty straightforward — and it must deal with cis/trans isomerism shenanigans, with neighboring π-bonds, with odd/even parity of the carbon chain. But it apparently handles all that!

Besides catalysis (combustion of the acids for energy), the two other paths for consumed fatty acids are excretion, and laying them into cell walls and membranes. These two paths aren't selective; they mostly don't care about the length of the chain, and where which π-bonds occur in it, if any.

So this must imply, that the "quirk of evolution" lives somewhere on the anabolic (synthesis/production) side of fatty acids; definitely not on the catabolic side.
Why this "replace your stack" product will probably fail
by taylor_jj | 2026-01-30 11:48:09+00:00
i’m building a tool that tries to replace a common solo-founder stack:

crm, email + follow-ups, booking, landing pages, social scheduling, light automation.

some of it already exists and i use it daily (crm + social + simple cold email). this isn’t a pure concept.

reasons i think this probably fails:

saying “replace your stack” instantly kills trust

switching costs beat frustration for most people

users judge the whole product by the weakest replacement

email is especially hard to get people to move

the audience is broad and expectations vary a lot

incumbents define the baseline, not user complaints

i’m posting this to kill bad ideas early.

which of these do you think is fatal?
what am i underestimating?
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 11:48:58+00:00
Not necessarily. But China's aggression towards Taiwan and their recent rare earth metals move last year show that China does not have the worlds best interests at heart either. We're picking between two evils and China's evil is more predictable than the US's right now.

This goes for Asia in general. Korea, Japan, and China spent centuries fighting and making them the de facto super power makes it easy to resume the Korean war or try to overtake the (military wise) crippled Japan should they be emboldened by the faltering/collapse of NATO.
by SilverBirch | 2026-01-30 11:48:59+00:00
We saw this before with Twitter/X - network effects are crazy, and so even if 30% of your users jump to another platform, that network effect is still going be grinding down that other platform, and in reality it's probably 0.003% of users. It's a true testament to network effects the continued (reduced) existence of Twitter. I see no reason why Tiktok - a bigger, more successful, less controversial, platform is going to suffer from this.
by reactordev | 2026-01-30 11:49:46+00:00
I’m not making anything up. I don’t fabricate. I gave you my point of view and you refuse to accept it.

It’s just not a good game.

You can have a good game and a shit story (see Gears of War, Halo). You can have a good game and an epic story (see Witcher 3, Guild Wars 2, Red Dead Redemptions). You can even have a bad game with a good story (L.A. Noire, Batman Arkham series).

What makes a game good: Are the controls intuitive? Is the world believable? Interactivity? Grounded in realism but doesn’t need to be. If there’s a story, does the story unfold or am I just playing the “living action” version of the book? If it unfolds, does it do so linearly from level to level or does it do it naturally, filling in gaps of a bigger picture?

There’s nuance in each. I generally agree with consensus on what’s good vs bad but where I differ is in the storytelling. As a long time DM, it pains me to walk through a story from chapter 1 till end in a linear fashion. This is why I dislike Diablo style games even though it’s super fun and we all love a loot piñata. It’s just such a shitty story and so linear. “Stay a while and listen…” “I’ve heard you say this 1000x grandpa!”