MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2026-01-29 22:11:13+00:00
That's not what I said, I said I've witnessed AI cars explode like that, but I've never seen a real car explode like that. Ask yourself the simple question: where is that car? If that happened, let's see the actual car up close. Let's actually get a shot of that damage that occurred. We'll never see that because that car is not damaged in that way, because this thing is false.

> where everything you don't like is AI

This is projection. You're doing the same thing in reverse -- treating AI output with credulity because you want to believe it.
by cj | 2026-01-29 22:11:15+00:00
I was one of those pesky users who complained when o3 suddenly was unavailable.

When 5.2 was first launched, o3 did a notably better job at a lot of analytical prompts (e.g. "Based on the attached weight log and data from my calorie tracking app, please calculate my TDEE using at least 3 different methodologies").

o3 frequently used tables to present information, which I liked a lot. 5.2 rarely does this - it prefers to lay out information in paragraphs / blog post style.

I'm not sure if o3 responses were better, or if it was just the format of the reply that I liked more.

If it's just a matter of how people prefer to be presented their information, that should be something LLMs are equipped to adapt to at a user-by-user level based on preferences.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-29 22:11:15+00:00
5.2 is back to being a sycophantic hallucinating mess for most use cases - I've anecdotally caught it out on many of the sessions I've had where it apologizes "You're absolutely right... that used to be the case but as of the latest version as you pointed out, it no longer is." when it never existed in the first place. It's just not good.

On the other hand - 5.0-nano has been great for fast (and cheap) quick requests and there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative today if they're sunsetting 5.0 models.

I really don't know how they're measuring improvements in the model since things seem to have been getting progressively worse with each release since 4o/o4 - Gemini and Opus still show the occasional hallucination or lack of grounding but both readily spend time fact-checking/searching before making an educated guess.

I've had chatgpt blatantly lie to me and say there are several community posts and reddit threads about an issue then after failing to find that, asked it where it found those and it flat out said "oh yeah it looks like those don't exist"
by CjHuber | 2026-01-29 22:11:20+00:00
That feels like a stupid article. well of course if you have one single thing you want to optimize putting it into AGENTS.md is better. but the advantage of skills is exactly that you don't cram them all into the AGENTS file. Let's say you had 3 different elaborate things you want the agent to do. good luck putting them all in your AGENTS.md and later hoping that the agent remembers any of it. After all the key advantage of the SKILLs is that they get loaded to the end of the context when needed
by ijustlurk | 2026-01-29 22:11:54+00:00
Nice one. Mermaid validation is a huge issue given how mermaid.js is architected.

I built a mermaid generation harness last year and even the best model at it (Claude Sonnet 3.7 at the time; 4o was okay, Gemini struggled) only produced valid mermaid ~95% of the time. That failure rate adds up quickly. Had to detect errors client-side and trigger retries to keep server load reasonable.

Having a lightweight parser with auto-fix like this back then would have simplified the flow quite a bit.
by RomanPushkin | 2026-01-29 22:11:54+00:00
Will post it here:

> In October 2025, a Waymo autonomous robotaxi struck and killed KitKat, a well-known bodega cat at Randa's Market in San Francisco's Mission District, sparking debates over self-driving car safety

It's a child now. All I wanna ask - what should happen, so they stop killing pets and people?
by phailhaus | 2026-01-29 22:11:56+00:00
> Problem is, that's not what we've observed to happen as these models get better

Eh? Context rot is extremely well known. The longer you let the context grow, the worse LLMs perform. Many coding agents will pre-emptively compact the context or force you to start a new session altogether because of this. For Genie to create a consistent world, it needs to maintain context of everything, forever. No matter how good it gets, there will always be a limit. This is not a problem if you use a game engine and code it up instead.
by velcrovan | 2026-01-29 22:12:12+00:00
I think if you read it, their agents did invoke the skills and they did find ways to increase the agents' use of skills quite a bit. But the new approach works 100% of the time as opposed to 79% of the time, which is a big deal. Skills might be working OK for you at that 79% level and for your particular codebase/tool set, that doesn't negate anything they've written here.
by dang | 2026-01-29 22:12:40+00:00
Related. Others?

Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677583 - Jan 2026 (102 comments)

Beyond the SQLite single-writer limitation with concurrent writes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508462 - Oct 2025 (70 comments)

An adventure in writing compatible systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059888 - Aug 2025 (12 comments)

Introducing the first alpha of Turso: The next evolution of SQLite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433997 - July 2025 (11 comments)

Working on databases from prison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44288937 - June 2025 (534 comments)

Turso SQLite Offline Sync Public Beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43535943 - March 2025 (67 comments)

We will rewrite SQLite. And we are going all-in - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781161 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)

Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42378843 - Dec 2024 (232 comments)
by brandonmb | 2026-01-29 22:12:43+00:00
From the company’s perspective, your goal is to build the minimal thing that does the job to make money. Minimal can definitely include well-designed if you can clearly articulate why it will be more and reliable will help you move faster in the future. There is a constant tension between business need and building good software. Typically, engineers are the champion of good software. This can be a healthy relationship as the real world has constraints on your time. You learn to make trade offs as you go, even if they are wrong.

I like to think of learning to write software as learning to cook. You start by learning some basic skills (e.g. chopping, frying, seasoning) and you practice them through recipes. But as you really learn and become more of a chef, these are just skill sets and experiences you pull on to make the right thing in the right moment. Just as a good chef can make an amazing meal with minimal ingredients and time, good software engineers can make useful and reliable software that makes appropriate trade offs.
by ufmace | 2026-01-29 22:13:17+00:00
That's true, but note that getting much more severe on enforcement and punishment for DUI/OWI will result in an even higher prison population, more serious life consequences for poor and minorities, etc, when the US is constantly getting trashed for how bad those things are already.

To be a bit snarkier, and not directed at you, but I wish these supposedly superior Europeans would tell us what they actually want us to do. Should we enforce OWI laws more strictly, or lower the prison population? We can't do both!
by MillionOClock | 2026-01-29 22:13:21+00:00
Then maybe the engine should be less about really simulating the 3D world and just trying best to preserve consistency, more about providing memory and saving context for consistency than truly simulating a lot besides higher level concerns (at which point we might wonder if it couldn't be directly part of the model somehow), but writing those lines I realize there would probably still be many edge cases exactly like what you are describing...
by maybe-tomorrow | 2026-01-29 22:13:22+00:00
Nice, 800k+ ticks is impressive. It honestly makes me really happy that people let worlds run that long.

What you’re seeing is usually a local optimum: one aggressive/spiky strategy found something that works and crowded out everything else, so diversity collapses.

There are some things that can break it:
Just waiting. At this stage you often get crashes from starvation, pathogens or reproduction overshoot.
Seasons and climate cycles can shake dominant strategies loose:
https://soupof.life/concepts/world-systems/climate-seasons and low-diversity phases like this are often fragile. With a bit of bad luck, this can turn into a big reset or even a near-extinction.

There’s no manual intervention by design, so it’s mostly patience or starting a fresh world. But in my experience, long stagnant plateaus are often right before something dramatic happens.
by perardi | 2026-01-29 22:13:29+00:00
OK, everyone is (rightly) bringing up that relatively small but really glaringly prominent AI boyfriend subreddit.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.
by conductr | 2026-01-29 22:13:30+00:00
Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled because it's <$10 per year. If that goes up to $20 per year maybe it triggers them to cancel it. It's so low cost I know this is a portion of their profit from customers like this, but it's just a business problem to solve and shouldn't kill any provider on it's own.

The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.
by smarnach | 2026-01-29 22:13:34+00:00
> we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.

No we should not. We should accept that we don't have any statistically meaningful number at all, since we only have a single incident.

Let's assume we roll a standard die once and it shows a six. Statistically, we only expect a six in one sixth of the cases. But we already got one on a single roll! Concluding Waymo vehicles hit 2 to 4 times as many children as human drivers is like concluding the die in the example is six times as likely to show a six as a fair die.
by ModernMech | 2026-01-29 22:13:50+00:00
I would say if you ever want to prosecute these people, then you're going to need a mountain of evidence. Having all these court decisions they flagrantly violate for 4 years is going to great evidence at their trials. It may not give us much solace now, but all of their defenses are going to rest on intent, and it's going to be helpful in proving their state of mind that they willfully defied federal court orders, lied to judges, etc. Because they control all the evidence of their own criminality within the Executive branch, we should expect a lot of it will be destroyed when they are gone. Establishing independent records now through court proceedings will preserve those records past the administration end date.
by zoozla | 2026-01-29 22:13:55+00:00
I used some skills I picked up 20 years ago refactoring a huge and very messy codebase I knew nothing about and built a skill that allows Claude to do the same.

Seems to work really well by executing very small and very safe refactoring steps that don't break functionality.

Very curious to hear how this works on large codebases and in different circumstances and how else we can improve it so that refactoring becomes a solved problem.
by leumon | 2026-01-29 22:14:25+00:00
according to the age-prediction page, the changes are:

> If [..] you are under 18, ChatGPT turns on extra safety settings. [...] Some topics are handled more carefully to help reduce sensitive content, such as:

- Graphic violence or gore

- Viral challenges that could push risky or harmful behavior

- Sexual, romantic, or violent role play

- Content that promotes extreme beauty standards, unhealthy dieting, or body shaming
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-29 22:14:39+00:00
>here's apparently two separate voice assistants

There is one functional voice assistant (short press) and the Grok LLM (long press). Only the first one can do physical things to the car.

But having the Grok LLM is quite nice. You could ask it things like "what are the most iconic bakeries in SF Chinatown?" or "how does California treat long-term capital gains?" and have a productive conversation with your car while you're driving.

I love Tesla actually. It's a vision of a car built by and for tech-savvy people, whereas all other cars seem to be designed to accommodate the lowest common denominator (i.e. some grandpa). It's as if Elon told his designers to assume nobody over 35 is ever gonna buy a Tesla and it shows in everything from the software to the ride quality.
by marcuschong | 2026-01-29 22:14:46+00:00
I have two questions about that, with the supposition that Cook is being coerced to do that, somehow:

- Isn't Cook supposed to step down from the role in the next few years? If so, wouldn't that facilitate an accelerated exit to not have to put up with this shit? He might as well have chosen someone who's willing to do that, and slowly fade away.

- Why haven't we seen the same level of craziness coming from Satya and Gates? Are Microsoft's offerings and interests so diversified that the government has less power over it?

Update: grammar
by hnuser123456 | 2026-01-29 22:15:00+00:00
The "my boyfriend is AI" subreddit.

A lot of people are lonely and talking to these things like a significant other. They value roleplay instruction following that creates "immersion." They tell it to be dark and mysterious and call itself a pet name. GPT-4o was apparently their favorite because it was very "steerable." Then it broke the news that people were doing this, some of them falling off the deep end with it, so they had to tone back the steerability a bit with 5, and these users seem to say 5 breaks immersion with more safeguards.
by josephg | 2026-01-29 22:15:05+00:00
They have added settings for this now - you can dial up and down how “warm” and “enthusiastic” you want the models to be. I haven’t done back to back tests to see how much this affects sycophancy, but adding the option as a user preference feels like the right choice.

If anyone is wondering, the setting for this is called Personalisation in user settings.
by boogrpants | 2026-01-29 22:15:20+00:00
Your suggestion is meaningless semantic differentiation.

Those owners and politicians are the result of exposure to American communities, schools, other institutions; they do not spontaneously exist.

Americans prop up the system as such Americans will defer or their faith was misplaced to begin with. And that ain't right; they're America! So the awfulness will continue until moral improves!

Atheist semantics while living theist like devotion to civil religion memes.
by antonymoose | 2026-01-29 22:15:22+00:00
That simply is not how the police work. If they get a call about a break in they’re going to respond and assess.

I bought property with a shooting range years ago from a retired SWAT officer with the county. He mentioned that “he always calls the sheriff’s office to let them know if he was doing anything.” Now I’d never owned a private range and am not from this county.

I called up the sheriff’s office and asked for clarification. I was advised that no such policy / program exists or is required and if the officer must have had is own internal policies and chain o command and that is irrelevant to me as a random citizen. In short, if a call is made about a shooter they will have to respond and so long as I’m not doing anything stupid, dangerous, or outright illegal I have nothing to worry about. The same goes for any other type of call.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-29 22:16:34+00:00
Any sub that is based on storytelling or reposting memes, videos etc. are karma farms and lies.

Most subs that are based on politics or current events are at best biased, at worst completely astroturf.

The only subs that I think still have mostly legit users are municipal subs (which still get targeted by bots when anything political comes up) and hobby subs where people show their works or discuss things.
by hn_acker | 2026-01-29 22:16:40+00:00
(Although the article is about injuries caused by HPV vaccines, I personally still believe the risk of the vaccine is worth it. HPV can cause various cancers [1][2].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463315

[2] https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/04/hpv-vaccine-single-shot-...
by senfiaj | 2026-01-29 22:16:49+00:00
> Lots of closed source commercial libraries provide some .h files and a .so file.

I'm mostly talking about modules for internal implementation, which is likely to be the bulk of the exports. Yes, it's understandable that for dll / so files exporting something for external executables is more complicated also because of ABI compatibility concerns (we use things like extern "C"). So, yes header approach might be justified in this case, but as I stated, such exports are probably a fraction of all exports (if they are needed at all). I'll still prefer modules when it's possible to avoid them.
by toxic72 | 2026-01-29 22:16:51+00:00
I REALLY struggle with Gemini 3 Pro refusing to perform web searches / getting combative with the current date. Ironically their flash model seems much more likely to opt for web search for info validation.

Not sure if others have seen this...

I could attribute it to:

1. It's known quantity with the pro models (I recall that the pro/thinking models from most providers were not immediately equipped with web search tools when they were released originally)

2. Google wants you to pay more for grounding via their API offerings vs. including it out of the box
by JackSlateur | 2026-01-29 22:17:10+00:00
But tax may be easy to implement

I think reversed-VAT is the good way to do

The overall idea with VAT is that you are taxed when you buy things

The reversed-VAT is the idea that you are taxed when you earn money (not "income" as in "salaries": every time some wealth are earned somehow)

Fixed rate, money's origin is of no concern, nor is money's usage

Say, you have a 40% tax on everything (using the same rate is important):
- your company sold random stuff: you keep 60%
- you earned money from interest / investment / etc: you keep 60%
- income from your job: you keep 60%
- a gift from your uncle: you keep 60%
- inheritance: you keep 60%
- exchange some money between your companies: you keep 60%
- you borrow something: you keep 100% (it will fall back to 40% tax if that borrow is transformed into a gift)
- you earned something of value (non-money gift), in one form or another: you have to pay 40% of its value

The root of all evil is the thinking that tax are made to make "a better world", that it is a tool a (social) justice or whatever

But it must be the same for everybody. Because only then it can be simple. And the more complex it is, the more loophole you have ("whack a mole" style as we have today)

Now, one person could keep all his money. Is it an issue ? No ! First, because he would have been taxed to 40% already. And then, because everybody dies someday. And that day, 40% of this person's riches will be retrieved: which would, again, be nice to the society as a whole: it would damage multi-generational wealth (while not void it).
by reactordev | 2026-01-29 22:17:26+00:00
It truly is. My issue though, like in 2010 when I built an arcade cabinet capable of playing everything is you eventually just run out of interest. In it all. Not even the nostalgia of it keeps my attention. With the exception of just a small handful of titles.

- Excite Bike (it’s in its own league) NES

- Punchout (good arcade fun) NES

- TMNT 4-P Coop Mame Version

- NBA Jam Mame Version

- Secret of Mana SNES

- Chronotrigger SNES

- Breath of Fire 2 SNES

- Mortal Kombat Series SEGA32X

- FF Tactics PS1

I know these can all be basically run in a browser at this point but even Switch or Dreamcast games were meh. N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-29 22:17:34+00:00
If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.
by czl | 2026-01-29 22:17:42+00:00
Money is less about personal consumption and more about a voting system for physical reality. When a company holds billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide what happens next. That capital allows them to command where the next million tons of aluminum go, which problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is built.

Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 22:17:45+00:00
> Hiding from law enforcement? I'd need to know more about that. If a cop shows up with a gun you absolutely do not hide. If it's a security guard on rounds and you're waiting for them to move on... sure.

According to the article, they were hiding from the police who showed up, not security guards.

Testing the police is undeniably out of scope in a situation like this. If the police show up, the exercise needs to be over. You announce your presence and de-escalate, not try to outmaneuver the police.

These two guys only look like heroes in contrast to the over zealous sheriff. Everything else about their operation ranges from amateur hour to complete incompetence, such as drinking before a job.
by mhykim | 2026-01-29 22:18:07+00:00
I think we’re aligned on the hard parts here, so let me be precise.

We’re not wide open for abuse nor are we bypassing the hard parts of email reputation. Quite the opposite. We also utilize SES's infrastructure and monitor reputation continuously, but we don’t assume SPF/DKIM/DMARC are sufficient on their own. They’re basics we have implemented, not the entire strategy.

You are correct private IPs per customer make sense once you’re sending meaningful volume (on the order of ~10k+/day per IP). But its inaccurate to say we are sending from a single private IP. IP pools are typically segmented by reputation and traffic profile for customers.

Reputation here is earned at multiple layers: per-IP, per-domain, per-inbox, and over time. We rate-limit, isolate, or revoke bad actors without poisoning unrelated senders. Hopefully this makes sense.
by Havoc | 2026-01-29 22:18:13+00:00
>Sodium is actually more reactive than lithium and explodes on contact with water.

TIL

Cursory LLM powered search suggests that this is true but not a particularly relevant metric for battery safety because battery failure modes aren't "throw elemental raw material into water".

I'm no expert and LLM research is well...yeah...but overall that still sounds like I should be trusting sodium more to my layman ears.