MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RivieraKid | 2026-01-29 15:43:40+00:00
A thought I had about this topic, this is a simplification of reality to illustrate a point:

Software developers are doing R&D, you create new stuff that continues to exist forever. This is unlike most jobs, in which you produce goods and services that are consumed and then you have to produce them again.

What if we are getting to the point where all of the low-hanging stuff is invented? For example, every bank has an app which works and rarely needs to be changed. Or take a social network like Facebook, going from zero to a product with 1B users took a lot of development but since then, it's been mostly static, why employ thousands of developers dedicated to Facebook? Etc.
by 16bitvoid | 2026-01-29 15:43:46+00:00
Who said I'm looking for meaning? I'm not.

It's not as liberating as you might think. A joyless existence is either suffering or nothingness. A life without meaning, either internal or external, is one where nothing is meaningful with no motivation thus one of crippling catatonia til death.

All I can say is just that it doesn't feel good and if you can't feel good about anything, your calculus of your life inevitably leads to the conclusion that existence isn't worth it.
by alamortsubite | 2026-01-29 15:43:56+00:00
Possible but more likely it's an issue with focus, like the user's palm on those occasions coincidentally brushes the trackpad.

To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.
by torginus | 2026-01-29 15:43:57+00:00
This sounds very conspiracy-y. I'm sure there are metrics like consumption of certain items like food, medicine, etc. which is at a mostly consistent level accross subsections the human population. Like arthiris medication, foodstuffs, diapers etc.

It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers fall in line with where they should be given a certain pop cap, and I'm not sure what would be the benefit.

Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.

Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-29 15:44:00+00:00
Fake is generally the wrong word. Inaccurate would be much more appropriate. Every population estimate is just that. There is going to be error. The error may be small or large, and it may be biased in one direction or another, but there is a clear chain from data to result. Even if your data sources are fraudulent, if you're making any attempt to account for that, though you may not do a very good job, it's still just inaccuracy. Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number. This may actually happen in a few cases, but the claim that it's widespread is both hard to believe and unsupported by this article.
by alkonaut | 2026-01-29 15:44:06+00:00
And before the argument "Self driving is acceptable so long as the accident/risk is lower than with human drivers" can I please get that out of the way: No it's not. Self driving needs to be orders of magnitude safer for us to acknowledge it. If they're merely as safe or slightly safer than humans we will never accept it. Becase humans have a "skin in the game". If you drive drunk, at least you're likely to be in the accident, or have personal liability. We accept the risks with humans because those humans accept risk. Self driving abstracts the legal risk, and removes the physical risk.

I'm willing to accept robotaxis, and accidents in robotaxis, but there needs to be some solid figures showing they are way _way_ safer than human drivers.
by Edman274 | 2026-01-29 15:44:08+00:00
What do you believe the frame rate and resolution of Tesla cameras are? If a human can tell the difference between two virtual reality displays, one with a frame rate of 36hz and a per eye resolution of 1448x1876, and another display with numerically greater values, then the cameras that Tesla uses for self driving are inferior to human eyes. The human eye typically has a resolution from 5 to 15 megapixels in the fovea, and the current, highest definition automotive cameras that Tesla uses just about clears 5 megapixels across the entire field of view. By your criterion, the cameras that Tesla uses today are never high definition. I can physically saccade my eyes by a millimeter here or there and see something that their cameras would never be able to resolve.
by somehnguy | 2026-01-29 15:45:11+00:00
YMMV for sure - I was on an SNRI (Cymbalta) for a few months as an attempt to eliminate nerve pain. It all but destroyed my ability to climax both during and for maybe 6 months after getting off of it.

The brain zaps were also hell if I was even like an hour later than usual to take it
by exogen | 2026-01-29 15:45:13+00:00
This could also be applied to record linkage. With search, there will usually be multiple results, and there's always a "top" match even if its confidence/score is quite low. In record linkage, at least if you're automating it, you need to minimize false positives and only automatically link records if confidence is super high that they're a match – and that doesn't just mean the top scoring match has high confidence, but that there's also no 2nd best match with a good score. If that's not the case, leave the records for manual human review.

My experience here is also related to music. Here are some cases to think about:

What's the actual title of the song "Mambo #5" vs. how you might search for it or find it referenced in other records? Mambo #5? Mambo No. 5? Mambo No. Five? Mambo Number 5? Mambo Number Five? And that's not even getting to the fact that the actual title is actually longer, with a parenthetical. This is a case where bigrams, trigrams, or other string similarly metrics wouldn't perform very well. Same with the Beatles song, is it "Dr. Robert" or "Doctor Robert"? Most string similarly algorithms put "Dr" and "Doctor" pretty far apart, but with vectors they should be practically equivalent.

How about "You've Lost that Loving Feeling"? Aren't there some dropped Gs in those gerunds? Is it You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling? You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'? You've Lost That Loving Feelin'? In this case, string similarity (including trigrams) perform very well.

How about songs with censored titles? Some records will certainly have it censored, but would it be like "F*ck", "F**k", "F@$k", or what? And is the censorship actually part of the canonical song title, or just some references to it?

In the "#5" and "Dr." cases, this could be solved pretty effectively by the normalization step described in the article (hardcoding what #, No., and Dr. expand to) – although even that can get pretty complicated: what do you do about numbers? Do you normalize every numerical reference, e.g. "10 Thousand", to digits, or words? What about rarely used abbreviations, or cases where an abbreviation is ambiguous and could mean different things in different contexts? If someone has a song called "PT Cruiser" are you gonna accidentally normalize that to "Part Cruiser"? For this reason, I like to see this not as a "normalization" step, where there's a single normalized form, but rather a "query expansion" step – generate all the possible permutations, and those are your actual comparison strings.

It seems like embeddings could do the job of automatically considering different spellings/abbreviations of words as equivalent. I'm just a casual observer here, but I'm sure this is also a well-explored topic in speech-to-text, since you have to convert someone's utterances to match actual entity names, like movie titles for example.
by cedws | 2026-01-29 15:45:22+00:00
I agree that 30% is high but the arguments I see online are generally in favor of a cut to 0%, not a reduction. If you get into the weeds of what the cut should be then it gets messy, who gets to decide? How do you determine what is actually fair for all parties?

I would argue Patreon is far more parasitic than Apple in this case, they're shaving off 10% for a pretty simple service.
by vrighter | 2026-01-29 15:45:25+00:00
What accumulation of knowledge? LLMs are marketed as "democratizing" (I hate this term) software development specifically by claiming to remove the need for knowledge.

Software development hasn't been democratized. The term doesn't even make sense. Anyone could learn whatever using the same resources as anyone else. I would (and have, in the past) gladly teach anyone who asks me to. And most of my friends would too. The fact that non-devs couldn't write code was not because devs were gatekeeping, but because they didn't want to learn. And they still don't.
Show HN: Craft – Claude Code running on a VM with all your workplace docs
by Weves | 2026-01-29 15:45:28+00:00
I’ve found coding agents to be great at 1/ finding everything they need across large codebases using only bash commands (grep, glob, ls, etc.) and 2/ building new things based on their findings (duh).

What if, instead of a codebase, the files were all your workplace docs? There was a `Google_Drive` folder, a `Linear` folder, a `Slack` folder, and so on. Over the last week, we put together Craft to test this out.

It’s an interface to a coding agent (OpenCode for model flexibility) running on a virtual machine with:
1. your company's complete knowledge base represented as directories/files (kept in-sync)
2. free reign to write and execute python/javascript
3. ability to create and render artifacts to the user

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvjn76YSIRY
Github: https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/blob/main/web/src/app/c...

It turns out OpenCode does a very good job with docs. Workplace apps also have a natural structure (Slack channels about certain topics, Drive folders for teams, etc.). And since the full metadata of each document can be written to the file, the LLM can define arbitrarily complex filters. At scale, it can write and execute python to extract and filter (and even re-use the verified correct logic later).

Put another way, bash + a file system provides a much more flexible and powerful interface than traditional RAG or MCP, which today’s smarter LLMs are able to take advantage of to great effect. This comes especially in handy for aggregation style questions that require considering thousands (or more) documents.

Naturally, it can also create artifacts that stay up to date based on your company docs. So if you wanted “a dashboard to check realtime what % of outages were caused by each backend service” or simply “slides following XYZ format covering the topic I’m presenting at next week’s dev knowledge sharing session”, it can do that too.

Craft (like the rest of Onyx) is open-source, so if you want to run it locally (or mess around with the implementation) you can.

Quickstart guide: https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/getting_started/quickstart
Or, you can try it on our cloud: https://cloud.onyx.app/auth/signup (all your data goes on an isolated sandbox).

Either way, we’ve set up a “demo” environment that you can play with while your data gets indexed. Really curious to hear what y’all think!
by verdverm | 2026-01-29 15:45:31+00:00
IBM is more often the subject of lawsuits from their employees

I'm 2nd gen, I remember the country clubs and IBM Santa. The company no longer cares about its people the way Watson father & son did.

> And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM

The opposite is true too. We live in a highly interdependent and interconnected world.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2026-01-29 15:45:53+00:00
> Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high.

They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.
by kg | 2026-01-29 15:46:03+00:00
It's even a bad deal for the rightsholder. There are lots of stories in video games of how a studio or publisher lost the original source code or assets for a game, then 5, 10 or 20 years later they want to remaster it and they can't do so without jumping through really elaborate hoops involving binary recompilation, emulation, repainting assets from scratch, etc.

If the code and assets were escrowed, the rightsholder could just go claim that stuff whenever they need it.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-29 15:46:03+00:00
Ex Amazon here. Left as an SD6.

Basically, I wouldn't trust accounts of people who got cut from Amazon in terms of their work experience. Most employees at Amazon, engineering and others are salary seekers - their only goal is to get into higher brackets. None of what they do is as impactful at they make it sound, especially in management. And there is false sense of achievement created when people do annual reviews and most of the time, you are never going to try to fuck over your coworker so you embellish their accomplishments (again because you want them to do the same for your higher paid position).

The thing is, for software at least, most of Amazon software engineering follows a predefined template, and you don't need a lot of management to organize engineering. As for engineers themselves, there is quite a bit of friction for the vast majority of them to do anything impactful because of lack of experience, and LLMs haven't bridged that gap because they don't even know what questions to ask.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-29 15:46:04+00:00
Jolla's TOH (The Other Half) which is back in their latest reincarnation [1].

I have to say though: I like the communication of the Mecha Comet team here (and the UI). I wish them the best.

[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-other-half-returns-commun...
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-29 15:46:11+00:00
I've personally witnessed large variability in behaviour even within a given session -- which makes sense as there's nothing stopping Anthropic from shuttling your context/session around load balanced through many different servers, some of which might be quantized heavily to manage load and others not at all.

I don't know if they do this or not, but the nature of the API is such you could absolutely load balance this way. The context sent at each point is not I believe "sticky" to any server.

TLDR you could get a "stupid" response and then a "smart" response within a single session because of heterogeneous quantization / model behaviour in the cluster.
by simojo | 2026-01-29 15:46:15+00:00
I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.

This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.
by napaparts | 2026-01-29 15:46:22+00:00
You are correct, comparing making the next CRUD application to reinventing the spreadsheet was supposed to be a slightly humorous way to describe the repetitive and not too challenging part of writing business applications.

There also are people who use software to guide space rockets, cars, optimise calculation algorithms and more.

My guess is people with background mostly in CRUD don't get how everybody else messes up estimating so badly and people in the innovative task group find it hard to believe sane people would waste their time giving any estimates other than for technically irrelevant business reasons.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-29 15:47:31+00:00
> Why is making humanoid robots a moat?

It really isn't. (1)

Also, what's the first billion dollar market for humanoid robots?
Industry? "lights-out manufacturing" exists already, and doesn't require humanoid robots.

Hyundai and BYD (among others) say they're going to put humanoid robots in their factories (2). They won't be Tesla robots. Is this really such a huge use?

1)https://www.topgear.com/car-news/tech/here-are-nine-humanoid...

2) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgjm5x54ldo
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-29 15:47:36+00:00
As someone that falls on the side of “depression is real and antidepressants can help” it is very clear that there are people in this thread that need to hold their tongues because they know not of what they speak. (Not you OP)

There are some forms of depression that you cannot think or act your way out of. If you haven’t experienced that, I promise that you do not understand what it is like. You cannot really understand unless you have experienced it. Your opinion on it is irrelevant, and frequently offensive.

The same is true for people that say that antidepressants are mostly placebo. They are not. When people say that antidepressants saved their life, they aren’t joking or exaggerating in the least.

Yes, I understand that other therapies are also effective, and that some people are non-responsive to some drugs.

Keep your pet theories to yourself if you are not a subject matter expert or someone who has experienced it first hand.
by Wojtkie | 2026-01-29 15:47:51+00:00
One thing to note too is the game can be beaten in the first 10-15 minutes or so without any glitches. You just need to have figured out the grand puzzle of the game. I found that really unique and interesting, like the solution was always available to me but the block was my knowledge of the world, not mechanics or something like an unlockable skill or level.
by tylerchilds | 2026-01-29 15:47:52+00:00
These are the right questions and core to the actual “ai race”

Before ai, all we had was compilers and interpreters to take instructions and turn them into machine code and byte code

A lot of political painstaking went into which compilers and even with “better options” there’s only really a couple big fish of workflows to take an orgs ideas to production.

What passes as a compiler and what passes for a programming language exploded.

I’m very interested in “the final compile target” of these systems AND the output of that still being human readable and influenceable.
by debugnik | 2026-01-29 15:47:57+00:00
Discussion here started on whether users check apps more often than websites and whether Patreon is the kind of platform that one might want to check often for new content.

I'm not sure how has the goalpost here moved to app-exclusivity, I understood exclusive here to mean "exclusive to Patreon" as opposed to supporting a creator that posts everything for free somewhere else, which is the use case that made that one user assume one doesn't check on Patreon often.

Also, mobile browsers easily cut out background audio so the website is nearly useless on a phone for audio posts compared to the app, as much as I'd prefer it.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-29 15:48:02+00:00
> Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number.

That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea. And it describes why states in Nigeria have such a strong incentive to fake their population numbers, that it's impossible to achieve an accurate national total.

I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.
by tullie | 2026-01-29 15:48:14+00:00
You can think of Shaped more like a vector store + feature store + ML inference combined into one service. This bundling is what makes it so easy to get state-of-the art real-time recommendations and search performance.

E.g imagine trying to build a feed with pgvector, you need to build all of the vector encoding logic for your catalog, then you need to build user embeddings, the models to represent that and then have a service that at query time encodes user embeddings from interactions does a lookup on pgvector and returns nearest neighbor items. Then you also need to think about fine-tuning reranking models, diversity algorithms and the cold-start problem of serving new items to users. Shaped and ShapedQL bundles all of that logic into a service that does it all as one in a low-latency and fault-tolerant way.
by chaboud | 2026-01-29 15:48:16+00:00
Possibly, but Waymos have recently been much more aggressive about blowing through situations where human drivers can (and generally do) slow down. As a motorcyclist, I've had some close calls with Waymos driving on the wrong side of the road recently, and I had a Waymo cut in front of my car at a one-way stop (t intersection) recently when it had been tangled up with a Rivian trying to turn into the narrow street it was coming out of. I had to ABS brake to avoid an accident.

Most human drivers (not all) know to nose out carefully rather than to gun it in that situation.

So, while I'm very supportive of where Waymo is trying to go for transport, we should be constructively critical and not just assume that humans would have been in the same situation if driving defensively.
by Multiplayer | 2026-01-29 15:48:34+00:00
GM Supercruise on my 2024 Silverado RST is a joke compared to Tesla FSD. It's not even remotely comparable. Supercruise only works on freeways/highways, does not understand ANY navigation. It's a better cruise control, that's about it.
I own 2 Tesla model S of different vintages and FSD is a completely different animal. My 2017 model s can navigate from my house to, well, anywhere, with no intervention.
I have been very disappointed in how long it took Tesla to get here based on the promises they made 10(!) years ago, but they are there now. Even a year ago FSD used to scare me frequently and cause me to disengage but that never happens now.
by borroka | 2026-01-29 15:48:42+00:00
The comment I am responding to is referring to their own experience, which, at the population level, does not appear to be largely shared, as, at the population level (i.e., people in general, not intellectuls, not academics, all of them), it is evident that people consider tv shows, games, and tiktok superior (i.e. revealed preference) forms of entertainment with respect to books.

How was it not clear? I would prefer to engage with more substantive comments.
by amalcon | 2026-01-29 15:48:42+00:00
Some of these video codecs have pathological cases that might be maxing out your video while doing the decoding. If you're only using it as a media server, that might exceed the (possibly age-degraded) capacity of your power supply. Replacing the power supply might help in that case.

It's also possible that something in a particular frame is triggering a bug in your driver and crashing that way. In that case, your best bet might be to transcode the video to a different codec or something.

Maybe your particular video download is from an entirely trustworthy source, but it's not unheard of that untrustworthy folks will modify a file with the intent of causing this to happen.
by cptaj | 2026-01-29 15:48:53+00:00
>Every election would have to be fake. Every government database would have to be full of fake names. And all for what? To get one over on the dumb Westerners?

While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1 billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how frequent and large the fraud is.

Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.

That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of the country.

And yes. They do fake the elections.