MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seffietron | 2026-01-30 06:14:46+00:00
At the risk of exposing my... atypical take on contemporary occupational "morality". LLMs, and Claude Code specifically, have given me the ability to work two jobs, and retain my soft-standing as the "guy" that gets stuff done/knows my stuff/can fix anything, while still working less hours than I did when I just had a single job.

I firmly believe, at SOME point, ML is going to eat my lunch. And I'd like to be well and retired off to a countryside homestead by then. Until such a time, I am going to use and abuse this technology as much as possible to gather 4 paychecks a month, optimize my investment portfolio to scale my NW, and by any means gain financial independence before the risk of my career vaporizing materializes. Sure, I could REALLY try and be one of those engineers that pulls a $750k salary and I wouldn't need to do this; but that isn't really in the cards for me. I know where I stand and I'm simply not smart or hardworking enough to get paid that much from a single job and guarantee my financial independence in the traditional way.

To that end, these tools have been extraordinarily impactful for me in a very simple and objectively positive way. And as much as I relate to basically everything OP mentioned, at the end of the day I simply DGAF. I want to make as much money as possible before the music stops, and this is the smart way to do that right now
by defrost | 2026-01-30 06:14:55+00:00
Nothing wrong at all with controlled burns / cool burns / fuel reduction / fire breaking / mosaicing / etc.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKdZpRbzMk

et al. - I've spent much of the past month and a half on tender watch during harvest in an Australian summer - we had one day with 14 spot fires from lightning strikes just a few weeks past.

Detaching from Sowell is an excellent idea.
by h4kunamata | 2026-01-30 06:15:36+00:00
There are two types of engineers right now:

1. This category understands what they do and use AI to make their processes faster, in another world, less time spent with boring stuff and more time spent having fun.

2. This category fully replaced their work with AI, they just press a button and let AI do everything.
A friend of mine is here, AI took full control of their environment, he just press a button, even his home cookware is using AI.

I know which engineer still learning and can join any company.
I also know which engineer is so dependent on AI that he won't be able to do basic tasks without it.
by aopackmachine | 2026-01-30 06:17:46+00:00
AOPACK is a professional box making machine manufacturer serving the United States and global industrial packaging markets. Specializing in fully automatic corrugated box making machines for on-demand and short-run packaging solutions. Our box making machines enable cardboard box production with flexible sizing and automation.

On-Demand Production: Flexible size adjustment for any box.
High Efficiency: Fast setup time, ideal for short-runs and customized orders.
Heavy-Duty Design for Industrial Corrugated Packaging.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-30 06:18:45+00:00
yes but it's important to note they're indie games, on the periphery of the culture for a reason. In 1998 you had, and this is of the top of my head: MGS, Starcraft, Thief, Half Life, Baldurs Gate, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, Xenogears, Unreal and I'm probably forgetting some all in the same year.

That's not just games but entire modes of expressions and genres being invented. So successful the industry is still occupied with reproducing those franchises, not inventing new ones.

Animal Well was great, but it's also so exceptional now, like Expedition 33, that people frantically celebrate each AA title in an otherwise extremely bleak culture.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-30 06:19:01+00:00
> hard problems are best solved by breaking them down into smaller, easier sub-problems

I'm ok doing that with a junior developer because they will learn from it and one day become my peer. LLMs don't learn from individual interactions, so I don't benefit from wasting my time attempting to teach an LLM.

> much like compilers did for Assembly programming back in the day

The difference is that programming in let's say C (vs assembler) or Python vs C saves me time. Arguing with my agent in English about which Python to write often takes more time than just writing the Python myself in my experience.

I still use LLMs to ask high-level questions, sanity-check ideas, write some repetitive code (in this enum, convert all camelCase names to snake_case) or the one-off hacky script which I won't commit and thus the quality bar is lower (does this run and solve my very specific problem right now?). But I'm not convinced by agents yet.
by tjr | 2026-01-30 06:19:15+00:00
Seeing a lot of claims about using AI to write "boilerplate" and other repetitive bits of code, I was somewhat surprised, as I have historically written my own code generation tools to spit out repetitive, formulaic code. I didn't need AI; I just needed to understand what I wanted and write a script for it.

I suppose that generative AI was seen as such a boon to writing boilerplate because it could do so without you having to specifically program anything; it was trained on enough sufficiently-close examples that it could pull it off without a thorough description.
by Stratoscope | 2026-01-30 06:21:06+00:00
That is a great question!

You are absolutely right to ask about it!

(How did I do with channeling Miss Chatty's natural sycophancy?)

Anyway, I do use AI for other things, such as...

• Coding (where I mostly use Claude)
• General research
• Looking up the California Vehicle Code about recording video while driving
• Gift ideas for a young friend who is into astronomy (Team Pluto!)
• Why "Realtor" is pronounced one way in the radio ads, another way by the general public
• Tools and techniques for I18n and L10n
• Identifying AI-generated text and photos (takes one to know one!)
• Why spaghetti softens and is bendable when you first put it into the boiling water
• Burma-Shave sign examples
• Analytics plugins for Rails
• Maritime right-of-way rules
• The Uniform Code of Military Justice and the duty to disobey illegal orders
• Why, in a practical sense, the Earth really once *was* flat
• How de-alcoholized wine gets that way
• California law on recording phone conversations
• Why the toilet runs water every 20 minutes or so (when it shouldn't)
• How guy wires got that name
• Where the "he took too much LDS" scene from Star Trek IV was filmed
• When did Tim Berners-Lee demo the World Wide Web at SLAC
• What "ogr" means in "ogr2ogr"
• Why my Kia EV6 ultrasonic sensors freaked out when I stopped behind a Lucid Air
• The smartest dog breeds (in different ways of "smart")
• The Sputnik 1 sighting in *October Sky*

And that's just from the last few weeks.

In other words, pretty much anything someone might interact with an AI - or a fellow human - about.
by fnordpiglet | 2026-01-30 06:21:20+00:00
Let’s be clear tho - they are betting on two markets that have no history or assurance of success by crapping the bed with their golden goose.

Tax credits and foreign competition are bad enough, but they really could innovate through it. They could even try robots and taxis and see if it floats. Instead it’s sink the ships behind them because Elon is never wrong.

Their only benefit is the fact they can raise ludicrous capital to spend their way through many years of dumb. But that’s probably not enough to salvage the tire fire.

My odds on their humanoid robots are basically zero. China is too far ahead here and I’m not convinced there’s a material market that could develop fast enough. I am a fan of Waymo’s and use FSD but will not believe in their taxi product - they’re too far behind Waymo. I don’t think they will gain the regulatory traction they’ll need especially after pissing off every democrat and their mayors and city councils.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-30 06:22:35+00:00
> Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses".

The analogy is closer to "take away their ability to get any job" and then it sounds even more harsh.

> Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.

If you can't see well enough to drive, then life was unfair to you, and you can often get help with transportation that isn't available to someone that violated the law. For age, if you're young then your parents are supposed to care for you, if you're too old to drive you're supposed to have figured out your retirement by now. For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas. And it's not ugly to make the comparison to extreme poverty, to say that kicking someone down to that level is a very severe punishment.

> must allow

I wasn't saying what we should do, just that turning up the aggressiveness has serious unwanted consequences.
by edoceo | 2026-01-30 06:22:47+00:00
Have worked in places where juniors had to lock devices when on prem; only authorized hardware in the rooms. Yet, the danger was from sloppy O6+ not the O1/GS6 who would (ready&abel) carry the water.

The is a serious problem with folk with power and authority and somehow no responsibility.

That's across government, service and corporate.
by mistercheph | 2026-01-30 06:25:10+00:00
Will people ever be nostalgic for the xbox one? For the iphone 14?

I doubt it. These products might even be good, but they are not like their early ancestors in several significant ways that will have them relegated to the footnotes of history. Most importantly, they are difficult to distinguish from both their immediate predecessors and their immediate successors. I don't mean to say that people won't have treasured experiences from this time that they long for in 20 years, just that I doubt the console will play as significant of a role in the memory.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-30 06:25:20+00:00
If you build the standard library as a shared library it will be 4+MiB. The portion of that which you end up using is variable but there are ways to accomplish large usage without a great deal if code. I can get a 1.5 MiB binary down to 500KiB by dynamically linking the shared library. It's a net fun because I have many such binaries so it saves size in aggregate. It really does come down to what subset you use though.
by yigithan | 2026-01-30 06:25:23+00:00
I think this makes a lot of sense if he puts all the effort into Optimus and makes it a really good robot. Once you have a really good robot, you do not need the car to self-drive, the robot can drive any car (or truck). I know it is very hard, but as we should have learned by now Elon loves very hard problems and this is exactly in his wheelhouse. It may all have been in his plans considering how he was very opposed to LiDAR and tried to base the system on vision alone.

Additionally, to take another step toward AGI, you need vast amounts of real-world data. Optimus can provide that, much like Tesla cars have for driving data.
by catlikesshrimp | 2026-01-30 06:25:52+00:00
"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?"

This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
by jmcgough | 2026-01-30 06:25:53+00:00
> No matter what we do, the coming wars will be horrific. Billions will die. But that’s what is beautiful; diversity is messy. On a cosmic scale, this period is just a blip, it isn’t what matters.

Does anyone know what geohot is talking about, or did he join a doomsday cult after he got tired of self-driving cars?

Either way, a largely unregulated tech industry is arguably what got us into this mess, with social media apps that encourage conspiracies and partisanship. Maybe billions won't die if we stop taking such a business-friendly laissez-faire approach.
A failure mode I hit building semantic search for long-form content
by jeffmanu | 2026-01-30 06:26:53+00:00
I’ve been building a search system for long form content (talks, interviews, books, audio) where the goal isn’t “find the right document,” but more precise retrieval.

On paper, it looked straightforward: embeddings, a vector DB, some metadata filters. In reality, the hardest problems weren’t model quality or infrastructure, but how the system behaves when users are vague, data is messy, and most constraints are inferred rather than explicitly stated.

Early versions tried to deeply “understand” the query up front, infer topics and constraints, then apply a tight SQL filter before doing any semantic retrieval. It performed well in demos and failed with real users. One incorrect assumption about topic, intent, or domain didn’t make results worse it made them disappear. Users do not debug search pipelines; they just leave.

The main unlock was separating retrieval from interpretation. Instead of deciding what exists before searching, the system always retrieves a broad candidate set and uses the interpretation layer to rank, cluster, and explain.

At a high level, the current behavior is:

Candidate retrieval always runs, even when confidence in the interpretation is low.

Inferred constraints (tags, speakers, domains) influence ranking and UI hints, not whether results are allowed to exist.

Hard filters are applied only when users explicitly ask for them (or through clear UI actions).

Ambiguous queries produce multiple ranked options or a clarification step, not an empty state.

The system is now less “certain” about its own understanding but dramatically more reliable, which paradoxically makes it feel more intelligent to people using it.

I’m sharing this because most semantic search discussions focus on models and benchmarks, but the sharpest failure modes I ran into were architectural and product level.

If you’ve shipped retrieval systems that had to survive real users especially hybrid SQL + vector stacks I’d love to hear what broke first for you and how you addressed it.
by svara | 2026-01-30 06:27:53+00:00
You're right it isn't fair to reject someone's scientific argument just because they seem unfamiliar with how professional science works.

We shouldn't have believed the study more if it actually had been in Nature.

I don't think that's what I was saying, though.

The issue in this thread was about taking a step back and looking at the overall plausibility of the conclusions, taking together multiple studies.

I agree with the GP that the argument doesn't really pass the smell test.

That's still the main issue, and it is something that people who don't understand scientific publishing struggle understanding/doing, because they lack the intuition for how certain results came about.
by pjerem | 2026-01-30 06:28:45+00:00
I do feel like you miss the point if you compare retro games with today AAA games.

The good video games of today are 100% indie.

I love Super Mario Bros as much as the other guy, but a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect.

I’m a 90’s kid and I had a blast with my N64, gamecube, Wii …

But I’m also having a blast nowadays with :

- Outer Wilds (it’s forbidden to say what it is)

- RimWorld (colony builder)

- Satisfactory (time vacuum)

- Factorio (factory builder)

- A Hat In Time (3d platformer with a lot of love for the n64/gc but with its own character)

- Poi (same)

- Vampire Survivors (dopamine fountain)

- Tinykin (looks like Pikmin but actually the chilliest platformer I played : smooth, calm, beautiful, good design, good music)

- Pizza Tower (Wario Land with a pizza twist and a lot of love)

- Kathy Rain (point and click)

- Stanley Parable (idk what it is but it was fun)

- Evoland

- The Touryist (chill adventure)

- Super Meat Boy (hard platformer)

- Celeste (hard platformer but that loves you and encourages you)

- Hell Pie (3d platformer, ode to Conker Bad Fur Day)

- Stardew Valley

Etc …

There are a lot more but I can already say that each and every game of this list gave me at least as much pleasure as my childhood games.
by nicman23 | 2026-01-30 06:29:01+00:00
I once had a s775 gigabyte motherboard which would bluescreen on each cold boot. after the bluescreen it would boot successfully - this was both in windows and linux. the workaround was to wait for the bios beep and then hit reset. it worked like that for 6 years lmfao.

same computer did not start if any of its metal surfaces touched the wall, but that might have been a electrical leak - thankfully i do not live at that dump still
by deaux | 2026-01-30 06:29:39+00:00
Beans is great.

> During my analysis, the main issue I found with most agentic coding tools right now is that they all focus on one thing: running as many agents in parallel as possible. But why? Why run 10, 100, or even 1000 agents when you are unable to write enough tickets for them to consume?

> Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should be running hundreds of agents in parallel, but I can’t honestly say I’ve ever run more than 2 at a time. Both working on separate tasks, and I spent most of my time not in setting up and running agents, but in defining the work that needs to be done. Also, the context switching from managing two agents was exhausting.

Your confusion here comes from the idea that the agents all work on completely different tasks. Much if not most of the time, it's about speeding up one task by deploying multiple agents in parallel.

Some people prefer waterfall-like flows with big tasks, where a large amount of time is spent on planning up front, and then run them this way. Obviously there's upsides and downsides to this, but it's a common approach.

Another reason is money. Opus especially loves to start of with 150 context-gathering tool calls, which is a huge waste of money and time compared to 3 Haiku agents (or even cheaper models) doing this part in parallel.
by glaucon | 2026-01-30 06:29:53+00:00
The problem isn't "to date" the problem is what might be.

Sure, maybe the CloudFlare CEO seems like they "do the right thing" and then the administration gets pissed off at something CF related, they lean on the CF board and you've got a new CEO and maybe CF is sold off to "a friend of the show".

Nothing specific to CF here it's just how all US companies need to be viewed.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-30 06:30:44+00:00
I think we can agree that Sweden is not a representative sample of what happened in Europe as a way to explain why WhatsApp became dominant for the majority of people in Europe.

I grew up in Canada so my knowledge is purely from talking with people in non-Swedish parts of Europe that I met and also reading contemporary articles analyzing the space as well as retrospective analysis of what led to WhatsApp’s popularity and dominance.
by neko-kai | 2026-01-30 06:31:13+00:00
I'd say category theory concepts are not over the top - but category theory libraries could be! I just about never define or use explicit categoric typeclass instances - even though I almost always define categoric methods, e.g. `++` and `empty` for everything that looks like a monoid, `map` for everything that produces values, `contramap` for everything that consumes values. That's usually more than enough - and making structure explicit that way prevents your data structures from semantic drift while they're being handled by other engineers.
by stackghost | 2026-01-30 06:31:38+00:00
Obviously TFA is satire/tongue in cheek and while you can do all sorts of awesome stuff with a 555 you can't patch those implementations without physically rewiring them which in many cases means throwing out the board and fabbing a new one, whereas a microcontroller-based board can often be fixed with a simple jtag debugger.

So, yeah, 555 timers are cool and doing things with analog ICs is groovy but there's a reason everyone just stuffs a small microcontroller in places where we used to just stuff a 555, and it's maintainability.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 06:33:09+00:00
That's not because of the frequency of the guitar but because the guitar functions as a very nice antenna (long piece of metal (the strong) + a coil forming a tuned circuit), what happens is that your hands create a very temporary partial diode where you touch the strings!

Such naturally occurring diodes are an interesting phenomenon (in this case: the salt in your sweat interacting with the steel of the strings) and were the basis of the very first radio receivers after the 'Coherer' (which is a word that has fallen out of use so far that it registers as a spelling error on my browser!).
by usefulposter | 2026-01-30 06:36:15+00:00
Any rationale for this second move?

Show HN bandwagoners in shambles as their squatted domains referencing Clawdbot and Moltbot become irrelevant.

(https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...)

---

EDIT: Rationale is Pete "couldn't live with" the name Moltbot: https://x.com/steipete/status/2017111420752523423
by josephg | 2026-01-30 06:36:17+00:00
About 10 years ago I tried installed Little Snitch on my laptop. I set it up to check with me every time any native app tried to connect to the internet. "Here we go" I thought. "I'm going to actually see what apps are doing!".

I think I naively thought I'd end up with 10 rules or something, blocking telemetry. Oh what a sweet naive child I was. Its constant. Everything on my computer seemed to use about 8 different telemetry and update services. The sheer number of packets of environmental waste being produced every second by modern computers is breathtaking. It never stops.

Reading this article, I wonder what would happen if you tried selling software the old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once. We'll mail you out a USB stick with the program on it. Our software does not access the internet." It would be terribly inefficient, but it'd probably be fun to try. It would definitely force a lot more rigour around releases & testing.
by noahjk | 2026-01-30 06:38:07+00:00
whatever it is, I can't remember the last time something like this took the internet by storm. It must be a neat feeling being the creator and watching your project blow up. Just in a couple weeks the project has gained almost 100k new github stars! Although to be fair, a ton of new AI systems have been upsetting the github stars ecosystem, it seems - rarely actually AI projects, though, seems to just be the actual systems for building with AI?
by wazHFsRy | 2026-01-30 06:38:44+00:00
Am I missing something or is this screaming for security disaster? Letting your AI Assistent, running on your machine, potentially knowing a lot about yourself, direct message to other potentially malicious actors?

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars

<Cthon98> ***** see!

<AzureDiamond> hunter2
by musicale | 2026-01-30 06:40:26+00:00
Many people on HN seem to think that it's perfectly OK for Nintendo or Sony to charge a 30% platform fee for Fortnite but somehow it is not OK for Apple (or Google) to charge a 30% platform fee for Fortnite.

Epic wants to force Apple to lower its platform fees so that it can pay lower fees to Apple for Fortnite (technically IAP since Fortnite is "free to play") than what it pays to Sony and Nintendo (or Google for that matter) for Fortnite.