MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sodafountan | 2026-01-13 17:44:02+00:00
I don't really want to continue on with this discussion, as AI in general can be absolutely infuriating. It's one of those buzzwords that's just being thrown around without a care in the world at this point, but do you have any links to those reports? I'd be willing to bet that if Google Assistant and Alexa were being run properly, then they shouldn't be less reliable when working with an LLM.

I don't think Apple didn't have enough people working on Siri, I think they had too many people working on the wrong problems. If they had any eye on the industry like they did in their heyday when Jobs was at the helm they would've been all over LLMs like Sam Altman was with his OpenAI startup. This report of SIRI using Gemini going forward is one of the biggest signs that Apple is failing to innovate, let alone the constant rehashing of Iphone and IOS. They haven't been innovative in years.

And yes that's the point I was trying to make, AI assistants shouldn't be hardcoded to do certain things, that's not AI - but with Apple's marketing, they'd have you believe that SIRI is what AI should be, except now everyone's wiser, everyone and their grandmother has used ChatGPT which is really what SIRI should have been. Changes to the IOS API should roll out and an LLM backed AI assistant should be able to pick up on those changes automatically, SIRI should be an LLM trained on Apple Data, its APIS, your personal data (emails, documents,etc.), and a whole host of publicly available data. This would actually make SIRI useful going into the future.

Again, if Apple's marketing team were to be believed, SIRI would be the most advanced LLM on the planet, but from a technical standpoint, they haven't even started training an LLM at all. It's nonsense.
by inetknght | 2026-01-13 17:44:11+00:00
> I can't imagine consumer grade drones are significantly improving on this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073808

It's not necessarily better than 6 inches. But it's pretty decent, down to 0.3m, roughly 12 inches.

> even if they could do better I would question the utility of higher resolution data for anything military related.

Oh boy. Suffice to say that it definitely is useful for many things military related.
by iamflimflam1 | 2026-01-13 17:44:16+00:00
I don’t know.

Increasingly I see people offering simplistic solutions that don’t even pass basic smell tests.

And then when you point out the obvious flaws the response is that you just have to be brave or take a risk.

But I do agree - we seem to be in a world full of intractable problems and doing something may be better than nothing.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-13 17:44:17+00:00
So much this. They gave my mom an effectively unlimited supply of opiates when the time called for it, and we convinced her that it was perfectly OK and good to use them. One need not suffer without help, unless that happens to be personally important to them. Like, I can imagine religious objections, maybe, or perhaps an addict who wants to “go out clean” knowing that they beat the cravings. But if those don’t apply, pain meds are good and plentiful now.
by 9rx | 2026-01-13 17:44:24+00:00
Without dependent typing, it's the worst of all worlds anyway. You have to express types, but they aren't expressive enough to not have to also express the same in tests, leaving this weird place where you have to repeat yourself over and over.

That was an okay tradeoff for humans writing code as it enables things like the squiggly line as you type for basic mistakes, automatic refactoring, etc. But that stuff makes no difference to LLMs.
by redleader55 | 2026-01-13 17:44:36+00:00
According to the latest data I found online [0], they are earning ~25k/minute, at the moment. With 1 hour of revenue they can pay 3 people to fix the technical debt that caused this and prevent more failures in the future.

[0] - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RDDT/reddit/revenu...
by RIMR | 2026-01-13 17:44:53+00:00
It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.

He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
by grumbel | 2026-01-13 17:45:04+00:00
> If the model was closed, it would violate the license.

Training is fair use. The closed models wouldn't be impacted. Even if we assume laws gets changed and lawsuits happened, they just get settled and the closed source models would progress as usual (see Bartz v. Anthropic).

Meanwhile if somebody wants to go all "GPL AI" and only train their models on GPL compatible code, they'd just be restricting themselves. The amount of code they can train on shrinks drastically, the model quality ends up being garbage and nothing was won.

Further, assuming laws got changed, those models would now be incredible easy to attack, since any slip up in the training means the models need to be scraped. Unlike the big companies with their closed models, Open Source efforts do not have the money to license data nor the billions needed to settle lawsuits. It would mean the end of open models.
by Teever | 2026-01-13 17:45:22+00:00
'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave.

It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.

As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."

We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.
by epistasis | 2026-01-13 17:45:25+00:00
Yeah it's a tradeoff on the roof. The panels also increase the lifetime of the roof.

Solar panels are incredibly durable, there's a thriving secondary market for used panels, and we're likely to see 30-50 years of usage out of any panel created today.

Cracking the problem of making the roof out of solar panels seems like a fantastic engineering challenge. But not one with small tiles, make the roof out of the bigger cheap large panels. I would love to see startups working on that. Asphalt roofs look like crap anyway, changing to shiny panels would be a huge improvement IMHO
by palata | 2026-01-13 17:45:27+00:00
You must be joking :-).

I was saying that non-US office suites are good enough in terms of features, but people don't like to adapt to new things. WhatsApp vs Signal was an example where people don't want to use the better alternative, for no other reason than they can't be bothered to try it.

But even when talking about not depending on US tech, it is relevant: depending on open source US tech is a step towards not depending on US tech. The goal is not racism ("it's made by US people so I don't want it"). The goal is sovereignty ("if I depend on this, the US government can screw me").
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-13 17:45:39+00:00
> My takeaway is that all previous U.S. administrations had pretense of morality and rules in both international and domestic politics

This is a perspective that continues to boggle my mind.

Every record of the United States acting internationally has been either:

Explicitly horrific (Invasion of Grenada, Vietnam, Firebombing then nuking Tokyo, Iraq etc…)

Attempts to Subvert or ignore international law (IPCC, ICC, UN…)

Or benefits some major industrial corporation (NAFTA, WTO etc…)

Please point to any type of transcendent “morality or rules” that isn’t just straight up large scale international realpolitik and propaganda around maintaining global capitalism on behalf of American based owners.
by bluGill | 2026-01-13 17:45:49+00:00
I used hg (mercurial) before git. Every time I see someone make an argument like yours I think "only because git's merge/branch model is bad and so you need hacks to make it acceptable".

Git won, which is why I've been using it for more than 10 years, but that doesn't mean it was ever best, it was just most popular and so the rest of the eco system makes it worth it accepting the flaws (code review tools and CI system both have much better git support - these are two critical things that if you use anything else will work against you).
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-13 17:46:05+00:00
That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there:

A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.

The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.

Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.

But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.

The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
by shimman | 2026-01-13 17:46:49+00:00
What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out there are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people, these should deserve our attention.

FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.

Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.

Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
by tempsaasexample | 2026-01-13 17:46:59+00:00
A good friend recently lost her dad to a fall in his back yard. Technically it was a second or third stroke in the past few years, but this time he also fell backwards onto a cement stepping stone in his backyard.
So you're correct that these things can often be related.
Another friend has never had a fainting spell in his life. But three years ago, fainted luckily forward I guess, and knocked out a tooth.
by jameshart | 2026-01-13 17:47:03+00:00
Much like the TikTok ban this seems like something that could be handled through actually regulating what tech companies are allowed to do, rather than just picking on specific products and saying ‘stop that, it’s making us nervous’.

Federal laws about data collection and retention, export, and algorithmic usage… as well as laws about software update channels for hardware devices, eg requiring that it be possible to replace firmware yourself… all sorts of regulations could be put in place that leave the software and hardware markets open, by making it clear where the boundaries are. If DJI or TikTok are doing something bad, prosecute and fine them and enjoin them from doing it again… but make it clear what specific behavior you have a problem with.
by dexwiz | 2026-01-13 17:47:09+00:00
Anecdotally the drinking culture that existed for me in my youth has completely disappeared. House parties, a staple of my college years, are nonexistent. Talking to recent grads from the same school, their social life looks very different.

I think this is connected to social media but in a different way. Young people are very aware that any deviant behavior will be recorded and posted. Also they are deathly afraid of being "cringe."
by bzmrgonz | 2026-01-13 17:47:25+00:00
Last I checked, nixOS handles vm's quite fine. The idea is to recreate your rig on cunsulting client hardware. OP mention he prefers to work on client's supplied machine. In fact at that level of consultation, 2 machines should be provided, a daily driver laptop, and a workstation with a hypervisor. Therefore, having those configurations declaratively stored, would save some time. either thru ansible playbooks.. nixos, of course recently there is a third option.. a cli agent like claude code.
by loudmax | 2026-01-13 17:47:27+00:00
No. That is excessively cynical. Even GW Bush and the neocons really thought toppling Hussein would benefit Iraqis more than just Americans. That invasion turned out to be a complete disaster that probably benefited Islamist radicals more than anybody else. But it's a mistake to think that the neocons didn't believe their own bullshit. The top leadership really believed they could turn Iraq into a liberal democracy at gunpoint.

America has always been at its best when it lives up to its ideals, and at its worst when it discards those ideals. America has often been in the wrong, but on balance, the world has been better off for having a great champion of liberal democracy.

With Trump, it's not a question of believing things that are right or wrong. For the post-truth mindset, right and wrong don't matter. Democracy doesn't matter. There is only power. The second Trump presidency is the first time in modern history that America is no longer a great nation.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-13 17:47:48+00:00
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:

Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?

Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid

No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.

Hasn't failed me yet.
by epistasis | 2026-01-13 17:47:49+00:00
Nobody needs that, but from my point of view batteries will be so cheap and abundant that we will likely get to having 2 weeks of storage just sitting around the grid or rolling on wheels.

People always underestimate where exponential cost decreases will take us. Current battery production grows by 10x in a mere 5 years. In a decade, the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, we will grow our battery production by 100x. Not enough people take this seriously, or even know that the trend exists.
by amalcon | 2026-01-13 17:48:18+00:00
Those few degrees matter if your knees are already brushing the back of the seat in front of you. It matters how tall you are, how much of that is in your legs, how big your feet are (the more you need to bend your knees, the higher they will be), and it also varies depending on seat design and layout.

For others like me, one trick is to at most minimally use the under seat storage: small handbags only. No backpacks, briefcases, or anything else big enough to hold a laptop. Then, you can put your feet in that space. This lowers my knees by 1-2 inches depending on the plane, which really matters. It's the only thing that helps significantly, aside from paying for premium economy. Doesn't help with the claustrophobia, but there's not much to be done about that.

The other things I've tried (that don't reliably work) are leaning forward from the seat back (to pull my knees back) and slouching slightly (so that the inevitable recline compresses the seat back into my knees rather than bashing them). The former saves my knees, but sacrifices my back. The latter kind of helps during the flight, but walking will still hurt the next day.
by tdeck | 2026-01-13 17:48:52+00:00
While this sounds true, it's also true that police often will try to bully you into abandoning a crime report or treat you with contempt of they don't consider the crime "worthwhle". So not only do you not get a resolution, as expected, but you get to waste your time and be treated poorly. All that to increment a couter that might in aggregate reach a number that might get noticed by someone that might result in a policy that might 5 years later start to address the problem but may also just be used to crack down on everyone's rights as part of a right wing fear campaign? It's nowhere near as clear cut as waiting in line or picking up litter.
by usrbinbash | 2026-01-13 17:48:57+00:00
> He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.

Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.

Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment
by vladdoster | 2026-01-13 17:48:58+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by pchew | 2026-01-13 17:48:59+00:00
This is still not an accurate comparison. I'm not a Tesla fanboy but of all of the major players in the non-diy game (Enphase, Franklin, Tesla, Sol-Ark) they provide the best value for money, and are impressive pieces of equipment.

The EG4 18k has 11.5 kw backfeed capability, with a rather pathetic 65ish amp in-rush. Obviously 18kw usable solar capacity(they technically let you land up to 21kw, but only 18 is usable).

The Powerwall system you outlined can take 60kw of usable solar input, has 34kw standing backfeed capability, and a whopping 555 amp in-rush (not a typo, it's 185 amps per unit).

Not to get in to warranties, etc.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-13 17:49:00+00:00
I moved out at 18 (like most of my peers) and my extended family lives far away to begin with. I think I have an alright family situation compared to some friends, but it's not like I see any of them more than once or twice a year?

If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
by nucleardog | 2026-01-13 17:49:16+00:00
> I don't know who this is for.

I think I could build a pretty clean and stylish looking office out of it.

No laptop banging around, no PC to hide away, etc. Could throw this on a minimalist or partially glass desk with an (unfortunate) single cable up to a monitor on an arm for video and power, use wi-fi, and essentially have a fully functional workstation for most people seemingly out of nothing. No bulky AIO, no PC strapped to the back of the monitor, etc.

So I guess that's my guess.

Though my impression from the linked page is more "HP doesn't know who this is for either". There's not much in the way of clear messaging, lifestyle photos, or anything else.
by chasil | 2026-01-13 17:49:27+00:00
One sure way to get a lock is to make a directory.

#!/bin/sh

if mkdir /your/lockdir
then trap "rmdir /your/lockdir" EXIT INT ABRT TERM
...code goes here...
else echo somebody else has the lock
fi

No matter how many processes attempt to make the directory, only one will succeed. That works for my scripting, but I have never used it in C.
by ganelonhb | 2026-01-13 17:49:31+00:00
Awesome! That’s so cool. I’m glad you are a perfect sinless little angel and not a cruel, horrible twisting little wretched creature like 99% of humanity.

I promise you that maybe nobody speaks up to you, but I’ve heard people like you on the street. I overhear you in a cafe, at a restaurant, I work with you, I’ve gone to school with you. People will not remember you based on how you think they should. They will remember you based on how you actually were. Surely I will forget this interaction in a few hours as the tandem of a typical day creeps back in, but know that I have personally assessed you to be a horrible person, and if you’re anything like this behind the screen other people in your life have too!

Hope this helps.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 17:49:44+00:00
I don't mean the companies are hoarding more powerful models (competition prevents that) - just that the existing models already make it too easy for individuals and companies to build and maintain ad-hoc, problem-specific versions of many commercial software services they now pay for. This is the source of people asking, why haven't AI companies themselves done this to a good chunk of software world. One hypothesis is that they're all gathering data from everyone using LLMs to power their business, in order to do just that. My alternative hypothesis is that they already could start burning through the industry, competing with whole classes of existing products and services, but they purposefully don't, because charging rent from existing players is more profitable than outcompeting them.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-13 17:50:24+00:00
You would definitely not get free upgrades for Office. You would get minor point release updates. You also had to upgrade the Mac version often for:

- the System 7 transition

- the 040 Macs and to get a “32 bit clean version”

- to get the full speed of running natively on PPC Macs

- to get a native OS X version instead of one that ran in the OS 9 sandbox

- the Intel transition to get native performance.

I would much rather pay $150 (?) a year for a five user license where each user gets 1TB of storage and each user can use Office across Macs, Windows, iPhones and iPads.

It’s the same price as Dropbox’s 2TB plan and all you get for that is storage.

On a related note: Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature not a product.