MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idoubtit | 2026-01-29 19:00:48+00:00
Comparing MermaidJS with Kroki is a bit like comparing PDF.js to Adobe Acrobat. I don't think either is better than the other, they're just for different use-cases.

With MermaidJS, converting a diagram inside a web page requires adding a handful of lines to a HTML page. The execution is fast and local.

Kroki is a web-service. To use it in a web page means adding a dependency to an external provider (a free service exists, but asks for fundings). An alternative is self-hosting by running a Kroki container.

A few years ago, I added Mermaid diagrams to a project in a few minutes of work. Had we needed a much more complex tool, maybe I would have gone with Kroki, but not by myself; it would have required a change in the deploying process of the project.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-29 19:00:52+00:00
They did, but they fucked it so hard it might actually lose users. They made it so dang obvious. They show you an error message if you send the word Epstein to someone in a private message. Even China's apps know they need to silently delete the censored message to avoid alerting the user.

I heard people are switching to an Australian clone app called Upscrolled? The same way people switched to rednote for a while until tiktok was unbanned the first time.
by shimman | 2026-01-29 19:00:53+00:00
True but people need to understand there is a wide public acceptance on this issue. No one likes big tech fleecing both users and businesses alike, people want action. If you aren't collectively organizing to exert toward this action how do you honestly expect things to get better? Because the opposition has no issue throwing hundreds of millions behind a super pac to enact the law as they see fit.

It doesn't have to be like this.

Also, contrary to current political environments, Congress is more than capable of doing multiple things as once.
by firmretention | 2026-01-29 19:01:09+00:00
I adore Dostoevsky, and he was eerily prescient about many things. Notes from the Underground predicted the failure of positivism and the industrial revolution to create a utopia due to the inherently irrational nature of man, ultimately leading to the nihilistic world we find ourselves in as we discarded our old traditions in favor of science and technology. And for the record, I am not a religious person, so I make that statement without any intentional bias, nor am I saying the previous order was inherently superior or something to return to.
by avaer | 2026-01-29 19:01:24+00:00
Soft disagree; if you wanted imagination you don't need to make a video model. You probably don't need to decode the latents at all. That seems pretty far from information-theoretic optimality, the kind that you want in a good+fast AI model making decisions.

The whole reason for LLMs inferencing human-processable text, and "world models" inferencing human-interactive video, is precisely so that humans can connect in and debug the thing.

I think the purpose of Genie is to be a video game, but it's a video game for AI researchers developing AIs.

I do agree that the entertainment implications are kind of the research exhaust of the end goal.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-29 19:01:26+00:00
"Based on patent filings, Q.ai has built machine-learning tech for audio and “silent” voice input, including systems designed to understand to improve communication in noisy or difficult environments."

Good? Based on my recent experience the native iOS functionality around voice activity detection, echo cancellation and transcription is horrendous. If they could ship devices that had anywhere near the quality you can get with a bespoke stack to handle the audio data it would be impressive.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 19:02:08+00:00
> Can you imagine being dumb enough to drive over the speed limit around a double parked SUV in a school zone?

Can you imagine being dumb enough to think that exceeding a one size fits all number on a sign by <10% is the main failing here?

As if 2mph would have fundamentally changed this. Pfft.

A double parked car, in an area with chock full street parking (hence the double park) and "something" that's a magnet for pedestrians, and probably a bunch of pedestrians should be a "severe caution" situation for any driver who "gets it". You shouldn't need a sign to tell you that this is a particular zone and that warrants a particular magic number.

The proper reaction to a given set of indicators that indicate hazards depends on the situation. If this were easy to put in a formula Waymo would have and we wouldn't be discussing this accident because it wouldn't have happened.
by observationist | 2026-01-29 19:02:09+00:00
This is true - Ilya got an exit and is engaged in serious research, but research is by its nature unpredictable. Meta wanted a product and to compete in the AI market, and JEPA was incompatible with that. Now LeCun has a lab and resources to pursue his research, and Meta has refocused efforts on LLMs and the marketplace - it remains to be seen if they'll be able to regain their position. I hope they do - open models and relatively open research are important, and the more serious AI labs that do this, the more it incentivizes others to do the same, and keeps the ones that have committed to it honest.
by hinkley | 2026-01-29 19:02:12+00:00
You can do both.

The noise is often what hides the bug in the first place. Aim for more straightforward code and the bug will often surface.

For a while when Node was switching to async from promise chains, people would bring me code or tests that were misfiring and they couldn’t tell why. Often it was because of either a bug in the promise chaining or someone tried to graft async code into the chain and it was an impedance mismatch.

I would start them by asking them to make the function fully async and then come back. About half the time the code just fixed itself. Because the intention of the code was correct, but there was some subtle bookkeeping or concurrency issue that was obfuscated. About a quarter of the time the bug popped out and the dev fixed it. And about a quarter of the time there was a legitimate bug that had been sleeping. The function was fine ones own, but something it called was broken.

There are a lot of situations like that out there. The code distracts from the real problem, but just fixing the “real problem” is a disservice because another real problem will happen later. Make the change easy. That’s always the middle of the solution.
by jsolomon | 2026-01-29 19:02:18+00:00
I was an RA at the RAND Corp who put together literature reviews for mental health interventions like this. The Vitamin D result is implausible. If true it would be the biggest breakthrough in the history of psychiatry.

This is the referenced meta-analysis: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...

The largest N study (N=18,353; more than half of the entire 31 study sample) included is https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768978, which found: "Risk of depression or clinically relevant depressive symptoms was not significantly different between the vitamin D3 group...and the placebo group."

The highest dose study (100,000 IU/week) included is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30532541/, which found: "...the treatment response or BDI scores did not differ significantly between groups."

The paper/supplementary materials doesn't include a simple table of the depression outcomes for the 31 included studies, which is a glaring omission.

I think someone just messed up here. Maybe missed a decimal place?

For a more realistic perspective, here's another careful meta-analysis of RCTs of Vitamin D for depression that found null result: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999... (granted, 2015). And another from 2025 that found a .36 effect size, which is plausible and still fantastic: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10....

I don't mean to dissuade people from trying these given the low risk profile, just don't expect to go from a C to an A.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-29 19:02:27+00:00
There was a big argument on my local (American) Nextdoor recently because someone encountered a line of cars on a road that had recently had a bike lane added to it. People were outraged about bike lanes. And not just in the sense that they had to pay (via taxes) for something they didn't feel was useful. The fact that the lane even existed was an affront. They seemed to actually believe that the bike lane caused delays for cars merely by existing.
by radiator_1451 | 2026-01-29 19:02:34+00:00
I mean, if it was the case that one parent killed the child (Which, to be clear, we don't know. It could have been anybody who had access to the child at the time), then I'd think the best outcome is them getting convicted of it. I don't know why so many people treat homicide as "not a big deal" when it comes to babies.

Consider an unrelated hypothetical scenario, a family father accidentally hits and kills somebody with his car. He flees from the scene and is not discovered for 20 years. Would you then not attempt to prosecute him because it would be sad for his family to know? And now consider the case if it was his own child that died.
by ifyoubuildit | 2026-01-29 19:02:45+00:00
Maybe I wasn't being clear, since I didn't mean to accuse anyone of anything.

I'm not disputing that someone had the genuine experience of antidepressants saving their life. I'm asking if that precludes antidepressants acting as a placebo.

In other words both things can be true: antidepressants saved someone's life and antidepressants can act as placebo (even in the case where they saved someone's life). And notice I'm saying "can be true". I'm not saying they are true, cause I have no idea.

This is a logic question, not some kind of moral attack.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-29 19:02:57+00:00
I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.
by peheje | 2026-01-29 19:03:08+00:00
This resonates so much. I spent years in an org watching "domain events" vanish into the ether because of the Dual Write Problem. We had these high-performance, sharded, distributed monsters that were "fast" on paper, but they couldn't guarantee a simple message would actually send after a record was saved.

Moving back to a rock-solid SQL-backed approach solved it overnight. But since there are no more "1% glitches," people have forgotten there was ever a fire. It’s a thankless win. The organization now thinks the system is "easy" and the "async purists" still lobby for a separate broker just to avoid "polluting" the DB. They’d rather trust complex, custom-built async logic than the most reliable part of their stack. (The transactional outbox pattern is essential, I just prefer mine backed by the same ACID guarantees as my data).

It’s tricky stuff. I'm an application dev, not a DB internalist, but I've realized that a week spent actually learning isolation levels and commit-ordering saves you a year of "distributed system" debugging. Even when teams layer an ORM like Entity Framework on top to "hide" the complexity, that SQL reality is still there. It’s not magic; it’s just ACID, and it’s been there the whole time.
by elbasti | 2026-01-29 19:03:11+00:00
Elon's superpower is commanding insane valuation premiums. The trouble with this is that, eventually, "the bill comes due" so to speak, which forces Elon's company to take wilder and wilder bets, or to make wilder and wilder promises.

With telsa it was robotaxis, and when that failed to materialize, humanoid robots (fucking LOL).

SpaceX is an even more insane example. They are eyeing an IPO at a 1.5 trillion valuation. And yet the market for satellite launches is simply not that big. (What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?). Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings, which would give them a 500x earnings multiple at a 1.5T valuation (Apple: 35).

And so SpaceX/elon had to invent the absolutely idiotic idea of "data centers in space" to sell some future vision of tens of thousands of launches per year.

He keeps upping the ante (and the ridiculousness of the vision), and so far investors keep funding it.

Me? I've realized that this madness is entirely "opt-in" and I choose to simply...not opt-in.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-29 19:03:17+00:00
You can study anything from accounting to zookeeping in college, and the real world will fall far short of the ideals ("best practices") you were taught.

What matter is that you learned a good amount of the reasoning behind those college ideals, and the real-world downsides to expect when they aren't met. Because in the real world, "how close to ideal is this solution?" is just another metric to be considered, in your searches for the least-bad real world solutions.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-29 19:03:27+00:00
The "hate" on antidepressants is mostly from a place of "The kids are taking pills for things that aren't diseases and just need to get out more" and other stupid takes about how "back in my day we didn't have this much mental illness", which is why the hate is maintained even for things like ADHD medications which are so thoroughly proven scientifically that they are one of the best proven treatments humans have access to for any disease.

Similarly, SSRIs have much better evidence in treatments for many other situations, like anxiety, and yet the medicine itself is attacked, not using it to poorly treat a disorder we barely even begin to understand.

The "hate" is not based in science, despite the fact that SSRIs are objectively a mediocre treatment for depression.

We just don't really have much in terms of better treatments because we know so damn little about depression.

The medical community knows SSRIs are mediocre and have a low success rate at treating depression. They don't have better tools. Everything is a bad treatment for depression because "depression" is a loose collection of symptoms and statistics that we have really poor understanding of, and will certainly be broken up into the actual diseases that make it up when we figure them out, and we will be able to medicate those diseases more effectively.

Every single doctor that would prescribe you an SSRI for your depression will also prescribe vitamin D supplementation if your blood shows low levels.

Someday we will also have a situation where we are going to have to admit that for some subset of the population, their depression has no cause other than "Your life is utterly terrible, for reasons entirely outside of your control, and nothing I can do as a medical professional can fix that".
by jjfoooo4 | 2026-01-29 19:03:35+00:00
I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.

Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.

This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.

The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.
by wnissen | 2026-01-29 19:04:18+00:00
This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health system and having no control over their own days. You can see how an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic, degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3 kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they come up and monitor for significant drops in function.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-29 19:04:45+00:00
If for something unrelated to good/bad looks good, I'm using red. Ditto for green.

Sure, if it was a status indicator and I used red for "good", I can see the point. But over the last few years I've had too many people tell me "Don't use red, people will think something is wrong" for things not semantically tied to good/bad.

People wear red clothes. They buy red cars. They eat red food. They date red heads. Red is OK.
by yorwba | 2026-01-29 19:04:47+00:00
The Reuters article focuses on exports because that's what their target audience is likely to be interested in, but the People's Daily article they reference in passing https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202506/10/conten... is treating it as a domestic problem, highlighting the appearance of "zero-mileage used cars" on the second-hand market, specifically calls out EV companies for putting quantity over quality, and floats stimulating used car exports as part of the solution.

Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
by yibg | 2026-01-29 19:05:02+00:00
That's why the speed limit is 25 (lower when children are present in some areas) and not 35 or 40 etc. It's not reasonable to expect people to drive at 40% of the posted speed limit the entire way. We're also not talking about zero visibility (e.g. heavy fog). We're talking about blind spots behind parked cars, which in dense areas of a city is a large part of the city. If we think as a society in those situations the safe speed is 10 mph, then the speed limit should be 10mph.
by apparent | 2026-01-29 19:05:06+00:00
> A variety of coding and SAT “prep” websites discuss ways to bypass Bluebook security. One way is to use a plug-in that seems like a mouse, but is, in fact, a video capture device. Another is a program called a “sandbox, an isolated virtual environment that can work without detection within a computer.

I assume that "plug-in" means peripheral? Seems very difficult to catch all of these people, since a proctor won't be able to inspect the device and tell whether it is a regular mouse or something trickier.

Virtual machines seem like a game of cat and mouse, and one which the SAT is likely to lose.
by neogodless | 2026-01-29 19:05:39+00:00
> Electric vehicles turned into a commodity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

> a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them

Uhh.. not sure where you live or what your local / regional market is like. I'm in the United States, where what car you drive is a really big decision. Many people share on social media what car they bought, and tell people around them about the new car they bought. I've yet to witness a situation where someone said "I bought an electric car" and the response was something like "Why are you telling me you bought toilet paper?" (Even toilet paper has brand names and advertising.)

That isn't to say that the car market hasn't shifted over time.

Cars began as "engine to move wheels plus a few other things" and evolved so that the engine seemed less of the central reason why you bought a specific vehicle. An electric powertrain does take things a bit further, in that most EV buyers know very little about the motors, though they certainly know a thing or two about the battery.

Batteries are generally a commodity at smaller scales, but in a car, they matter significantly. Still, brand matters, too. Ask Lucid or Rivian or Porsche how they sell their electric cars for $70K - $160K. How is it that a commodity available to purchase for ~$30K can be sold for $130K additional? (That's not how commodities work.)

No, electric cars are not a commodity. It's just a difficult market with a lot of players, and a broad market with constantly evolving tastes. Ask Toyota why they have half a dozen different SUV models. Or why the Ford F-150 comes in 200 configurations. (That's not how commodities work!)

Just because the gasoline-burning engine was replaced with electric motors and batteries, the car didn't turn into a commodity overnight. I'm open to counterarguments and persuasion to the contrary.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-29 19:05:47+00:00
To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.

That said, as much as I dislike Musk ( and I have bet money against him before ), his instincts are likely not wrong. And it does help that, clearly, he knows how to bs well.

I am not saying you are wrong, but I think he is just a poster child for everything wrong with current market ecosystem.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-29 19:05:54+00:00
Agreed. How well you understand the problem domain determines the quality of your instructions a s feedback to the LLM, which in turn determines the quality of the results. This has been my experience, it works well for things I know well, and poorly for things I'm bad at. I've read a lot of people saying that they tried it on "hard problems" and it failed; I interpret this as the problem being hard not in absolute terms, but relative to the skill level of the user.
by notfried | 2026-01-29 19:05:58+00:00
Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
by jamincan | 2026-01-29 19:05:59+00:00
A lot of the current valuation is based on Elon drumming up investor expectations. As they start to lose their spot as market leaders in EV, Tesla's inability to deliver on what Elon promised will become more clear as their competitors level with and surpass them.

Moving to new, unproven markets is fruitful ground for someone like Elon to drum up expectation and hopefully keep distracting people from the fact that he's had very few recent successes to show for all the hype he receives.
by wilkystyle | 2026-01-29 19:06:20+00:00
"Good instincts on choosing plain text—you're asking exactly the right questions, and it cuts to the core of what makes traditional blogging so compelling. It's not just the medium—it's direct access to the thoughts and personality of the author! Let's delve deeper into exactly why the blogging model is so powerful.

[rocket emoji] Going straight to the source

[...]"
by in-silico | 2026-01-29 19:06:24+00:00
Sufficiently informative latents can be decoded into video.

When you simulate a stream of those latents, you can decode them into video.

If you were trying to make an impressive demo for the public, you probably would decode them into video, even if the real applications don't require it.

Converting the latents to pixel space also makes them compatible with existing image/video models and multimodal LLMs, which (without specialized training) can't interpret the latents directly.