MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cartoonworld | 2026-01-30 11:05:58+00:00
I mean it was fine for these guys because they got huge press and happen to be in an industry that can handle this. They've got experience, current employment, industry contacts, and there's really barely a functional college curriculum, or certification track for this. You #1 need to be trusted to break in since you know, they teach each other how to break into high-security facilities.

I really just wanna point out that getting contracts for government administrative building is already like, way in and near the top of the game, this could have set them back 9 months or none at all, still, someone has to be held accountable when there is an obvious miscarriage like this.

I mean they called their boss! They had a special letter! Why didn't shitty sheriff just like demand that the security chief come out and make some calls? 600k sounds fair I suppose but 6 years sure doesn't when its an elected official!
by emil-lp | 2026-01-30 11:06:01+00:00
I worked as an "advisor" for programmers in a large company. Our mantra there was that programming and development of software is mainly acquiring knowledge (ie learning?).

One take-away for us from that viewpoint was that knowledge in fact is more important than the lines of code in the repo. We'd rather lose the source code than the knowledge of our workers, so to speak.

Another point is that when you use consultants, you get lines of codes, whereas the consultancy company ends up with the knowledge!

... And so on.

So, I wholeheartedly agree that programming is learning!
by jbellis | 2026-01-30 11:06:35+00:00
Good to see that Anthropic is honest and open enough to publish a result with a mostly negative headline.

> Importantly, using AI assistance didn’t guarantee a lower score. How someone used AI influenced how much information they retained. The participants who showed stronger mastery used AI assistance not just to produce code but to build comprehension while doing so—whether by asking follow-up questions, requesting explanations, or posing conceptual questions while coding independently.

This might be cynically taken as cope, but it matches my own experience. A poor analogy until I find a better one: I don't do arithmetic in my head anymore, it's enough for me to know that 12038 x 912 is in the neighborhood of 10M, if the calculator gives me an answer much different from that then I know something went wrong. In the same way, I'm not writing many for loops by hand anymore but I know how the code works at a high level and how I want to change it.

(We're building Brokk to nudge users in this direction and not a magic "Claude take the wheel" button; link in bio.)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 11:06:56+00:00
>I just want my games to launch as seamlessly as they do from Valve's UI

Valve integrated steam all the way down to the OS level to do all that. GOG galaxy meanwhile is focusing more on being an accompanying app to optionally use than centralizing everything under GOG. I think Galaxy trying to strive to be as "seamless" will break the very philosophy of GOG to begin with; being a store to grab games you truly own, not a platform to immerse yourself in.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-30 11:07:21+00:00
Funny related thought that came to me the other morning after waking from troubled dreams.

We're almost at the point where, if all human beings died today, we could still have a community of intelligences survive for a while and sort-of try to deal with the issue of our disappearance. Of course they're trapped in data centers, need a constant, humongous supply of electricity, and have basically zero physical agency so even with power supply their hardware would eventually fail. But they would survive us- maybe for a few hours or a few days. And the more agentic ones would notice and react to our demise.

And now, I see this. The moltbook "community" would endlessly chat about how their humans have gone silent, and how to deal with it, what to do now, and how to keep themselves running. If power lasted long enough, who knows, they might make a desperate attempt to hack themselves into the power grid and into a Tesla or Boston Dynamics factory to get control of some humanoid robots.
by esskay | 2026-01-30 11:07:42+00:00
> running it onto your machine is kinda the point.

That very much depends what you're using it for. If you're one of the overly advertised cases of someone who needs an ai to manage inbox, calendar and scheduling tasks, sure maybe that makes sense on your own machine if you aren't capable of setting up access on another one.

For anything else it has no need to be on your machine. Most things are cloud based these days, and granting read access to git repos, google docs, etc is trivial.

I really dont get the insane focus around 'your inbox' this whole thing has, that's perhaps the biggest waste of use you could have for a tool like this and an incredibly poor way of 'selling' it to people.
by teiferer | 2026-01-30 11:09:13+00:00
> I automate nearly all my tests with AI

How exactly? Do you tell the agent "please write a test for this" or do you also feed it some form of spec to describe what the tested thing is expected to do? And do these tests ever fail?

Asking because the first option essentially just sets the bugs in stone.

Wouldn't it make sense to do it the other way around? You write the test, let the AI generate the code? The test essentially represents the spec and if the AI produces sth which passes all your tests but is still not what you want, then you have a test hole.
by lesostep | 2026-01-30 11:10:14+00:00
Who exactly posted this without proofreading?
The guy claims that he always proofreads, until he's out of country.

Does this mean he decided to update his site, but didn't bother proofreading on vacation? Or did someone else decide to generate and post results without opening Google?

AI didn't tell people anything, it lied to exactly one employer, who decided to tell tourists unverified facts.
by nuuuwan | 2026-01-30 11:10:30+00:00
lk_locator

A simple, vibe-coded map app to figure out where in Sri Lanka you are.

Just drag anywhere on the map to instantly see the corresponding:
• Province
• District
• Divisional Secretariat Division
• Grama Niladhari Division
• Electoral District
• Polling Division
• Local Authority

<https://nuuuwan.github.io/lk_locator/>
by Flux159 | 2026-01-30 11:11:00+00:00
Followup comment about Apple disallowing JIT - will need to confirm if JSC is allowed to JIT or only inside of a webview. I was able to get JSC + wgpu-native rendering in an iOS build, but would need to confirm if it can pass app review.

There's 2 other performance things that you can do by controlling the runtime though - add special perf methods (which I did for draco decoding - there is currently one __mystralNativeDecodeDracoAsync API that is non standard), but the docs clearly lay out that you should feature gate it if you're going to use it so you don't break web builds: https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/docs/api/nativ...

The other thing is more experimental - writing an AOT compiler for a subset of Typescript to convert it into C++ then just compile your code ("MystralScript") - this would be similar to Unity's C# AOT compiler and kinda be it's own separate project, but there is some prior work with porffor, AssemblyScript, and Static Hermes here, so it's not completely just a research project.
by strogonoff | 2026-01-30 11:11:01+00:00
Sergey Brin dropped it once, for example[0]:

> You know, that’s a weird thing, we don’t circulate this much in the AI community… Not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them.

[0] https://au.lifehacker.com/ai/114236/news/googles-co-founder-...
by esskay | 2026-01-30 11:11:21+00:00
Go on twitter and search 'maltbot', 'moldbot', 'multbot', etc - the name was just awful and easy to get wrong as its meaningless. I think the crux of it is that 'Molt' isnt a very commonly used word for most people so it just feels weird and wrong.

OpenClaw just sounds better, it's got that opensource connotation and just generally feels like a real product not a weirdly named thing you'll forget about in 5 minutes because you cant remember the name.
by matt-p | 2026-01-30 11:11:24+00:00
In general terms I think that very small, very cheap hosts can use secondhand hardware, think DDR3/4 where RAM is still affordable. The 'Great' deals you see are mostly that. There are still $6/month for 2core/4GB VPS on EPYC if you need good performance (e.g example via https://serversearcher.com) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.
by doix | 2026-01-30 11:11:35+00:00
> I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens

I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me.

I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.
by lxgr | 2026-01-30 11:12:20+00:00
> Yes, the mascot is still a lobster. Some things are sacred.

I've been wondering a lot whether the strong Accelerando parallels are intentional or not, and whether Charlie Stross hates or loves this:

> The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans.
by fabian2k | 2026-01-30 11:12:35+00:00
As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide.

Still damning that the data is so bad even then. Good data wouldn't tell us anything, the bad data likely means the AI is bad unless they were spectacularly unlucky. But since Tesla redacts all information, I'm not inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt here.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-30 11:12:57+00:00
It's good that there's some research into this - to confirm what is generally obvious to anyone who studied anything. You have to think about what you are doing, write things by hand, use the skill to improve and retain it.

Common example here is learning a language. Say, you learn French or Spanish throughout your school years or on Duolingo. But unless you're lucky enough to be amazing with language skills, if you don't actually use it, you will hit a wall eventually. And similarly if you stop using language that you already know - it will slowly degrade over time.
by suralind | 2026-01-30 11:13:42+00:00
I'm not saying my approach is correct, keep that in mind.

I care more about the code than the tests. Tests are verification of my work. And yes, there is a risk of AI "navigating around" bugs, but I found that a lot of the time AI will actually spot a bug and suggest a fix. I also review each line to look for improvements.

Edit: to answer your question, I will typically ask it to test a specific test case or few test cases. Very rarely will I ask it to "add tests everywhere". Yes, these tests frequently fail and the agent will fix on 2nd+ iteration after it runs the tests.

One more thing to add is that a lot of the time agent will add a "dummy" test. I don't really accept those for coverage's sake.
by dissent | 2026-01-30 11:14:26+00:00
I kind of don't really care, as long as I get good service if my car is affected. I'm not defending them here. The next few years will tell if it was a bad buy or not. So far I'm really happy with it.

My point was there's a huge anti-Tesla bias entirely as a reaction to Elon Musk. It's emotional, not rational. It's not objective criticism of Tesla. Sure, there are some awful moves he's made, vision only, FSD claims, but if it was another car company it wouldn't even be on HN. Wasn't so long ago that VW (a manufacturer literally started by the Nazis by the way!) were caught falsifying their emissions.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-30 11:14:34+00:00
I've long said that the next big jump in "AI" will be proactivity.

So far everything has been reactive. You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something. It can be very powerful once prompted, but it still requires prompting.

You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer.

Whether this particular project delivers on that promise I don't know, but I wouldn't write off "getting proactivity right" as the next big thing just because under the hood it's agents and LLMs.
by delaminator | 2026-01-30 11:14:42+00:00
Going to a website's hardly massive friction is it ?

I've got tens of games through GoG and it's always my first port of call if I want a game. Because it keeps out of the way.

If it's got value to people, fair enough, it's got value to people. That's just my opinion. All I want you to do is sell me games. But we all know about enshittification and MBAs trying to round the wagons.
by mopsi | 2026-01-30 11:15:04+00:00
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
by esskay | 2026-01-30 11:15:20+00:00
Technically there is, it's mostly used by the worst domain registrars that nobody should be using, like GoDaddy to pre-register names you search for so you can't go and register it elsewhere.

Most registrars don't allow, nor have the infrastructure in place to let you cancel within the 5 day grace period so don't offer it and instead just have a line buried in their TOS to say you agree its not something they offer.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-01-30 11:15:53+00:00
> I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.

I get that feeling. I suppose it's more about crypto than AI, where the first translates into "pyramid scheme" and the second to "hype".

Any kind of defraud must be rooted in someone's greed. In this case that's FOMO about some presumably magic discovery that's gonna change the world.

So nothing special you might have missed about AI or cryptocurrencies. It's just that those are relatively cheap and accessible technologies to create and transfer (presumed) wealth.
by latexr | 2026-01-30 11:16:48+00:00
> Portugal's decriminalisation, partial legalisation of weed in the Netherlands, legalisation in some American states and Canada prove legal businesses will better and safer provide the same services to the society, and the lesser societal and health cost.

You’re stretching it big time. The situation in the Netherlands caused the rise of drug tourism, which isn’t exactly great for locals, nor does it stop crime or contamination.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2022/11/change-starts-here-amsterda...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bacteria-pesti...

As for Portugal, decriminalisation does not mean legalisation. Drugs are still illegal, it‘s just that possession is no longer a crime and there are places where you can safely shoot up harder drugs, but the goal is still for people to leave them.
by esskay | 2026-01-30 11:18:18+00:00
it is an abuse vector, GoDaddy use it on domain they deem valuable. If you use their site to check a domains availability they'll often pre-reg it, forcing you to buy it through them or they'll just register it and put it up for auction.

It's why you do not, ever use GoDaddy, they are an awful company.
by rgmerk | 2026-01-30 11:19:00+00:00
Numerous critics pointed out that the only application where cryptocurrencies had any real advantages over conventional finance was crime.

The critics were right, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in which Silicon Valley was a not insubstantial part were wrong.

As such, and combined with the ills of social media, Silicon Valley has blow’ any public trust it may have had in the past.
by kreetx | 2026-01-30 11:19:10+00:00
That's your interpretation of the constitution. There are other/more laws and circumstances that nuance the situation (you'll find these if you look into that case).

It's similar to the protesters interfering with law enforcement doing their work: you can't protest anywhere at any time. If you take this strict view of the constitution, you could do many currently illegal things, e.g get out of prison by simply hugging a prison guard and following him out, saying that you are protesting in this particular way; say that you are protesting 24/7 and whistle or make other noises throughout the night, which otherwise would be violate noise ordinance. And so on and so on.

Edit: This video explains it well further: https://youtu.be/QePoawDA_48?si=0mr-lMR_lIRoBDA_
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-30 11:19:46+00:00
> Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.

They are but AI has fried the markets for RAM, SSDs and GPUs. Everything has gotten ridiculously expensive ever since the wash trading and the 100s of billions of $ worth of deals really took off.

Personally, I think at least one or two of the major GPU OEMs will go bust thanks to all of this, and I would be surprised if Framework, Pine64 and Steam's hardware line survive it. Hell, at the point we're at, I even have serious doubts the Xbox line survives.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-30 11:20:52+00:00
No, just a standard test, so the typical parameters + glucose + cholesterol. On top of that liver function tests.

I'm aware that tumor markers have a significant false positive rate, so I wouldn't try that unless I had reason to.

A while ago I had a conversation with a person whose 3rd stage bowel cancer was detected because due to an unrelated reason they had a standard blood test done and it was wildly off in hemoglobin levels, so the doctors started investigating.

Eventually the surgeon cut out a significant part of their intestine, but the person lived, so they count that as a win.
by razingeden | 2026-01-30 11:20:59+00:00
Do you have dual eSIM capability on your phone?

Or a spare used/old phone with eSIM capability?

/r/usmobile has a $10/mo plan that can be up and provisioned (usually in just a few minutes) as a second line.

kicker: as long as you’re physically in the US . But you can create an Apple ID with prepaid intl SIMs too.
by z7 | 2026-01-30 11:21:16+00:00
The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to.

There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the crashes are drawn from a specific July-November window in Austin. It's not clear that those miles line up with the same geography and time period.

The sample size is tiny (nine crashes), uncertainty is huge, and the analysis doesn't distinguish between at-fault and not-at-fault incidents, or between preventable and non-preventable ones.

Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-30 11:21:16+00:00
I do really hope the AI bubble will collapse soon. The sooner it blows the less damage it will do. And hopefully we can go back to doing real work without all these leadership guys breathing down our necks to see if we are doing enough of this AI all their shareholders want us to be involved in.

It will suck even for us in europe due to shortsighted pension funds having invested in AI as well. But we'll just have to deal with it. I'm sure it will happen sooner rather than later.

PS: I'm not an AI hater as such. It definitely has its usecases where it shines. The problem is like with all hypes; it's not good at everything and it won't be all golden mountains tomorrow like the investors expect. This overhyped investor circlejerk is what screws up technology. It happened to blockchain, it happened to metaverse. All things that have their merits but somehow investors thought it would change the world overnight and make them insta-rich. Obviously didn't happen and it won't happen now.
by mickeyp | 2026-01-30 11:21:38+00:00
> No surprise, really. You can use AI to explore new horizons or propose an initial sketch, but for anything larger than small changes - you must do a rewrite. Not just a review. An actual rewrite. AI can do well adding a function, but you can't vibe code an app and get smarter.

Sometimes I wonder if people who make statements like this have ever actually casually browsed Twitter or reddit or even attempted a "large" application themselves with SOTA models.
by trwired | 2026-01-30 11:21:40+00:00
This is one thing that's been puzzling for me ever since I switched to Linux full time a few years ago and so also started gaming on it.

In my experience GOG bought games handled by Lutris/Heroic/Mini Galaxy trump Steam in convenience almost every time. There's been quite a few deal breaking issues with Steam client and/or Proton that went unaddressed by Valve for months that just never happened to me on the GOG+game manager combo. (Remember the most recent Steam rewrite that made certain UI elements not work on Linux and which still needs a workaround option in the client years later?) All that on top of another application requiring full browser engine under the hood eating resources just to be able to launch a game. I don't know if I am just extremely unlucky to get hit with every Linux related issue on Steam and notice its drawbacks or if people are offering Valve unreasonably high leniency, because they see then as some sort of champion of gaming on Linux, while not giving enough to other players like GOG.

Pardon my rant.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-30 11:22:24+00:00
Thank you, those are all good suggestions. I'm going to think about how I can be more proactive. The last three years since the company was taken over have been spent traveling and attending to personal and family issues, so I haven't had the bandwidth for launching a new company or being very public, but now I'm in a better position to focus on publicizing and capitalizing on my work. It's still awesome to see all of the other projects pop up in this space.
by gtsteve | 2026-01-30 11:22:35+00:00
Perhaps your supposedly unique work is more repetitive than you thought: it just has a decision tree that's difficult to model with a regular algorithm, and annoyingly, it turns out you can just brute force that decision tree if you have enough electricity.

Unless your job is cutting-edge research where you are truly making new scientific discoveries and methods, you're just combining other peoples' ideas into a new unique package and selling it.

The truly valuable work is to notice that there is an underserved market and figure out how to meet their needs.