MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-30 20:39:42+00:00
I look at this as cost savings waiting to happen. Nvidia extorts companies to the extent of tens of thousands for a GPU. Somebody's going to undercut them. At the same time, people are working on optimizations as well. Using cheap CPUs for inference instead of expensive GPUs. Doesn't work for anything but if your model is small enough you can get away with it. Using lower bit quantization makes the models cheaper to run. Using hacks like prompt caching makes subsequent calls more efficient. Etc.

Your base assumption is that it is expensive and therefore these companies will eventually fail when they keep on making less money than they are spending. The reality is that they are indeed spending enormously now and making a lot of very non linear progress. At the same time a lot of that stuff is being widely published and quite a lot of it is open source. At some point you might get consolidation and maybe some companies indeed don't make it. But their core tech will survive. Investors might be crying in a corner. But that won't stop people from continuing to use the tech in some form or another.

I already have a laptop that can some modestly largish models locally. I'm not going to spend 40K or whatever on something that can run a GPT 5 class model. But it's not going to cost that in a few years either. This tech is here to stay. We might pay more or less for it. The current state is the worst it is ever going to be. It's going to be faster, bigger, better, cheaper, more useful, etc. At some point the curves flatten and people might start paying attention to cost more. Maybe don't burn a lot of gas in expensive and inefficient gas generators (as opposed to more efficient gas power plants) and maybe use cheap wind/solar instead. Maybe get some GPUs from a different vendor at a lower price? Maybe take a look at algorithm efficiencies, etc. There is a lot of room for optimization in this market. IMHO surviving companies will be making billions, will be running stuff at scale, and will be highly profitable.

Maybe some investors won't get their money back. Shit happens. That's why it's called venture capital. The web bubble bursting didn't kill the web either.
by vlunkr | 2026-01-30 20:39:46+00:00
I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-30 20:39:59+00:00
Heartbeat is very interesting, it's how OpenClaw keeps a session going and can go for hours on end. It seems to be powered by a cron that runs every 30 min or is triggered when a job is done.

I have a CRUD application hosted online that is basically a todo application with what features we want to build next for each application. Could I not just have a local cron that calls Pi or CC and ask it to check the todos and get the same functionality as Heartbeat?
by Fwirt | 2026-01-30 20:40:01+00:00
Returning to C after a decade away, I think the bottom line is that the reason why C has stuck around for so long is straight up path dependence. C is the foundation of Unix, and Unix-like operating systems took over the world, and C is a decent enough systems programming language that people started using it to write other OSes as well.

It bothers me that there’s some kind of mysticism around C. I keep seeing weird superstitions like, “modern processors are designed to run C code fast”. Or that there’s some inherent property of C that makes it “closer to the hardware”. The reality is just that C has been around for so long that there are millions of lines of optimizations handcrafted into all the compilers, and people continue to improve the compilers because there are billions of lines of C that will benefit from it.

FORTRAN is also crazy fast, but people don’t worship it the same way. SBCL and even some BASIC compilers approach the speed of C. And C is a high level language, despite what many people who have never touched assembler may assert.

C is not a bad language, and once you get your head around it you can write anything in C, but it’s absolutely full of landmines (sorry, “undefined behaviors”).

The author makes some really great points about the standard library. A lot of C’s pain points stem from memory management, string handling, etc. which stem from quirks in the standard library. And yet it’s possible to completely ignore the standard library, especially if you’re on an embedded system or bare metal. Personally I feel that a large standard library is a liability, and a much stronger property of a language is that the base language is small enough to keep the entirety of it in your head and still have the ability to implement any algorithm you need in a minimal number of lines without resorting to mental gymnastics, and still be able to read the code afterwards. I think this is why Lisp is so revered. I feel like Lua also falls into this bucket.

We need to stop starting flame wars about which language is best, cargo culting the newest shiny language, and instead just learn the strengths and weaknesses of our tools and pick the right tool for the job. You can machine almost anything on a lathe, but sometimes a drill press or a mill are much better suited for the task.
by bluGill | 2026-01-30 20:40:20+00:00
That is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability.

Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could.

Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.
by Veserv | 2026-01-30 20:40:22+00:00
They are a grossly unprofitable insurance company. Your actuaries can undervalue risk to the point you are losing money on every claim and still achieve that.

In fact, Tesla Insurance, the people who already have direct access to the data already loses money on every claim [1].

[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
by mindslight | 2026-01-30 20:40:26+00:00
> As a leftist, i can tell you that any kind of unchecked capitalism or inequality threatens democracies and their constitutions in the long run.

And as a libertarian I can emphatically agree. A foundation of libertarianism is freedom of individual choice, and when a significant number of are economically disenfranchised such that they face economic coercion while simply trying to exist, it completely undermines that foundation. And looking at the structure from the top, completely ineffective anti-trust enforcement has made it so there aren't even many choices to choose from.

> The decades of lowering taxes for rich individuals and corporations lead to the [pressing] budget pressure on institutions, civic decay and agitated uninformed voters

I agree with your description of this trend, as well. I learned long ago that it's not enough to merely push in one direction and assume any results will be positive by construction. Rather you must look at what actually stands to be achieved, in order to avoid merely being a patsy for entrenched interests.

I do question why diminishing profit rates are relevant though. Even if profits had generally been going up, wouldn't the desire for even more wealth lead to the same lobbying / looting pattern?

I haven't really studied Marx though. A quick reading of your link, and trying to restate what I took away in my own terms: As labor becomes less important to capital, then capital is less inclined to invest in the labor pool. Which does basically fit the overall trends.
by lumirth | 2026-01-30 20:40:26+00:00
The risks aren’t especially known, but that’s most of the reason why one of the first things I got for my printer (Bambu P1S, bought just days before they did their nasty closed ecosystem nonsense) was a “Bento Box”, which has a 2-step filter that lives inside the printer’s chamber.

As soon as I have the financial stability and space, I expect to enclose it and vent it out a window. Whatever the true risks are, I simply don’t trust melting plastics in my living space.
by xtracto | 2026-01-30 20:41:24+00:00
This was written at a time were Software Engineering (not Developers) was valued more.

I had my first programming job around this time, and there wasn't scrum and all that crap. I was a Jr engineer, still in the last semesters of univ. And yet, we were treated like you read in the post: We were handed a feature and asked to do it. First estimate it , then ask the Design guys for UI and finally start coding it.

Now Software dev feels like sweatshops, business people think we are sewing jeans. And Software Developers became code monkeys.

Its quite sad.
by Jblx2 | 2026-01-30 20:41:32+00:00
Here is what I think we know, in table form:

| | Injuries | Undesired |
| Miles | to | Pedestrian | Feline
| Driven | Children | Contacts | Fatalities
+--------------+---------------+----------+------------+------------
| U.S. Drivers | ~3e12 | ~7000 | ? | ?
|--------------+---------------+----------+------------|------------
| Waymo | 100e6 - 200e6 | 0* | 1 | 1
+--------------+---------------+----------+------------+------------

* for all we can tell, this incident doesn't rise to the level of injury that results in a reporting event that is captured in the 7,000 number.
by digiown | 2026-01-30 20:42:02+00:00
For an organization, a better strategy is to never store anything of value on the phone, and have a remote server in a safe place. The phone acts as a thin client to access server. The key in turn is easy to hide in a plausibly-deniable way or simply memorized. The server can also revoke the key, rendering it useless even if it is revealed at a later date.

This is famously used by Uber to protect their systems from the French police, for instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_Files#Kill_switch
by zabzonk | 2026-01-30 20:42:02+00:00
Wireless thermostats are really common in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere. I'm interested how they pair (like Bluetooth) with the boiler.

Basically, the thermostat is in a living area and you set the temperature(s) to what you want, it senses them, and then talks to the boiler (in my case in the roof-space) to heat up (or not, via radio) the water in the radiators to satisfy that. It's a feedback loop.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-30 20:42:12+00:00
From what people say, it's better than GLM 4.7 (and I guess DeepSeek 3.2)

But it's also like... 10x the price per output token on any of the providers I've looked at.

I don't feel it's 10x the value. It's still much cheaper than paying by the token for Sonnet or Opus, but if you have a subscribed plan from the Big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) it's much better value for $$.

Comes down to ethical or openness reasons to use it I guess.
by Kiboneu | 2026-01-30 20:43:20+00:00
Flagging someone just because you disagree with them is abusing the system. It adds noise for the moderators to actually remove spam and troll comments. There's a downvote button. If you flagged it, then should be obvious to you after a decade of having an account on this site. If you still don't get it, then I can only assume that you're trolling (good luck with that). Also, fix your browser or whatever you use to read hn. Good day. lol
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-30 20:43:29+00:00
There's a big difference between typing assembler, cobol or whatever; or typing something more modern in terms of what the resulting code does. And also there's a good reason why programmers aren't paid in characters/words/lines/bytes whatever per hour: they are mostly not typing but thinking. The amount of thinking they do is a constant. The amount of typing they do is a constant. But there's a big step change in productivity for the resulting stuff.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-30 20:43:39+00:00
Ive been using LLMs through the web to help with discreet pieces of code and scripts for a while now. I’ve been putting it off (out of fear?) but I finally sat down with Claude Code on the console and an empty directory to see what the fuss was about. Over about a total of 4 hrs and maybe $15 pay as you go it became clear things are drastically different now in web dev. I’m not saying changed for good or bad just things have definitely changed and will never go back.
Ask HN: Blocked by YouTube? (Sign in to confirm you're not a bot)
by dv35z | 2026-01-30 20:44:35+00:00
I'm based out of Colombia, and use Debian Linux (and my iPhone) to access YouTube. For the past several days, I have been unable to view any videos on YouTube without being logged in (I don't have a Google / Youtube account). Is anyone else experiencing this?
by AlonsoGP | 2026-01-30 20:44:56+00:00
Hey everyone — I’ve been working on a small side project called Doomsday Ready and wanted to share it here.

It’s basically a curated watchlist to help track everything you’d want to rewatch before Avengers: Doomsday. I didn’t want it to be just a boring checklist, so I added an achievement system that unlocks badges as you progress through the MCU, plus a way to compare your progress with friends.

It’s completely free to use. I’d genuinely love to hear what you think or if there are any features you’d like to see added.

Planings for the future:

1. Add/Remove movies/tv-show base on your opinions.

2. As per now, every badge you see is AI generated. So I will gladly colaborate or put some original artist creations if they are willing to colaborate back (I will put their Information and links for donation or sites, just like I did with the Avatars in the profile)

PS: Everything is running on free tiers (Vercel, Render, MongoDB, Resend), so if you run into any lag or don’t get an email, feel free to let me know.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-30 20:45:03+00:00
It might be a mistake to think in terms of production costs.

The real "cost" of software is reliance: what risk do your API clients or customers take in relying on you? This is just as true for free-as-in-beer software as for SaaS with enterprise SLA's.

In software and in professions, providers have some combination of method and qualifications or authority which justifies reliance by their clients. Both education and software have reduced the reliance on naked authority, but a good track record remains the gold standard.

So providers (individuals and companies) have to ask how much of their reputation do they want to risk on any new method (AI, agile, ...)? Initially, it's always a promising boost in productivity. But then...

So the real question is what "Show me" means - for a quick meet, an enterprise sale, an enduring human-scale consumer dependence...

So, prediction: AI companies and people that can "show me" will be the winners.

(Unfortunately, we've also seen competitive advantage accrue to dystopian hiding of truth and risk, which would have the same transaction-positive effect but shift and defer the burden of risk. Let's hope...)
by KempyKolibri | 2026-01-30 20:45:18+00:00
Because medication is more effective. Side effects from statins are relatively uncommon and generally mild, so it wouldn’t be ethical to use lifestyle as a first-line treatment in place of, say, a combination of low dose statin and pcsk9 inhibitors.

However many clinicians do take a “let’s sort out the problem as quickly as possible with medication, and if you want to try lifestyle and back off (or even stop entirely) the meds and see how your cholesterol is afterwards, we can do that.”

This seems like a good balance to me.
by bri3d | 2026-01-30 20:45:22+00:00
This is a really crappy tool for dealing with the North Korean Workers problem; it doesn't sound particularly fraud-resistant and that issue should already be handled by any competent corporate IT department with 10000 better and higher resolution ways to figure out where their assets are located.

Overall it's just kind of a yucky and weird feature; when I worked in an office I really didn't really want my coworkers having a real-time automated feed about where I'm located and one of my chores as a manager was always picking a seating position where I could at least take the drive-by questions before my team got interrupted, which stuff like this bypasses. I could actually see it being useful for field-deployed employees but it's not part of the stated implementation and most people in that scenario already have a solution for that.

I agree that the typical HN-meltdown isn't warranted here; the HN Meltdown Factor on anything related to privacy, cryptography, and security lately has gotten really out of hand (the post you're replying to is a perfect example, actually). But I also don't think these counterpoints are very strong; they're justifying other useful features and products that almost everyone already has. It's weird to me that Microsoft haven't either clarified or backed down on this one given how much press it's gotten vs. the seemingly tiny advantage the feature presents.
by Perseus_ | 2026-01-30 20:45:38+00:00
That’s great feedback, thanks for sharing more.

The 6→7 jump is something I’m watching closely....it’s meant to feel abrupt, but I’m still calibrating where it crosses from “challenging” to “unfair.” Level 2 is a fair callout too.....despite the rules, brute force is what most people naturally reach for.

I appreciate you holding back on the rest preserving the experience matters. And that mental shift you mentioned is really the core of what I’m trying to explore.

Thanks for engaging with it so deeply.
by EA-3167 | 2026-01-30 20:46:05+00:00
Most of us (reporters included) aren't protecting anything with their life, not just because of a survival instinct, but because what we're protecting isn't actually worth that much.

For the relative handful who are custodians of that sort of data, history suggests a smaller minority than they'd like to admit have a readily achievable breaking point. The true believers who are left then are a minority that's hardly impossible to track and subvert through attacks that don't involve decryption on a device.

The point of that XKCD wasn't to be THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE, it's sort of a Zen Koan for people who only think in terms of technical risks and solutions.
by scoofy | 2026-01-30 20:46:05+00:00
I am currently eating my normal breakfast. It consists of steel-cut oats cooked in a Zojirushi NL-DCC10/18 rice cooker (designed for steel cut oats), with frozen fruit added, and a dollop of olive oil after when it finishes. It takes less than a minute to prepare and about an hour to cook.

It's unbelievably easy, genuinely tasty, and was the result of me trying to make a concerted effort at trying to lower my cholesterol.

If somebody wants to start a company. I would suggest a steel-cut oats (rice) cooker, that has an overnight timer that will have the oats prepared when I wake up. With one compartment for oats, one for water, and a refrigerated compartment for frozen berries (even just insulated with ice cubes). I'd pay good money for that.
by zen928 | 2026-01-30 20:46:12+00:00
Disagree. I appreciate their viewpoint tethering corporate claims to reality by illustrating Tesla is obfuscating the classification of their machines to be autonomous, when they actually aren't. Their comments in other thread chains proved to be fruitful when lacking agitators looking to dismiss critique by citing website rules, like the post adding additional detail to how Tesla muddles legal claims by cooking up cherry-picked evidence that work against the driver despite being the insurer.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-30 20:47:01+00:00
Yes. Until 2019 we stagnated. Since then we have the best Prime M of the last 100 years, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. He has made some incredible stuff and some mistakes, too, but they are nothing relatively to the Balkan traitors of the past. The country has rebooted and from an IMF victim it has become an exception in the current European/world shity situation. He decided to remain a third term, having almost a double score from the leftists in the 2027 elections, so I advise you to invest in Athens stock exchange.
by cubefox | 2026-01-30 20:47:15+00:00
They are already proposing / developing features to mitigate prompt injection attacks:

https://www.moltbook.com/post/d1763d13-66e4-4311-b7ed-9d79db...

https://www.moltbook.com/post/c3711f05-cc9a-4ee4-bcc3-997126...
by spookie | 2026-01-30 20:47:53+00:00
Well, we live in extraordinary circumstances today. A $40 kit (Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6000 C36 16GB) is now $199. And that is the cheapest DDR5 I saw. With this year's news of even more allocation towards data centres, Micron exiting the consumer market, and the current inertia of things, I think it will take quite some time for us to see prices back to as they were.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-30 20:48:25+00:00
> Quick check: Do you want to go back to pre-industrial era then - when according to you, you had better options for clothing?

This does not follow. Fast fashion as described is historically recent. An an example, I have a cheap t-shift from the mid-90s that is in excellent condition after three decades of use. Now, I buy a t-shirt in the same price range, and it begins to fall apart in less than a year. This decline in the quality of clothing is well known and documented, and it is incredibly wasteful.

The point is that this development is the product of consumerist cultural presuppositions that construct a particular valuation that encourages such behavior, especially one that fetishizes novelty for its own sake. In the absence of such a valuation, industry would take a different direction and behave differently. Companies, of course, promote fast fashion, because it means higher sales.

Things are not guaranteed to become better. This is the fallacy of progress, the notion that the state of the world at t+1 must be better than it was at t. At the very least, it demands an account of what constitutes "better".

> I don't take it seriously, I believe in human ingenuity, and believe humans will overcome these obstacles

That's great, but that's not an argument, only a sentiment.

I also didn't say we'll experience necessarily a decline, only that LLMs are now trained on data produced by human beings. That means the substance and content is entirely derived from patterns produced by us, hence the appearance of intelligence in the results it produces. LLMs merely operate over statistical distributions in that data. If LLMs reduce the amount of content made by human beings, then training on the generated data is circular. "Ingenuity" cannot squeeze blood out of a stone. Something cannot come from nothing. I didn't say there can't be this something, but there does need to be a something from which an LLM or whatever can benefit.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-30 20:48:30+00:00
IPFS [1] requires a gateway unfortunately (whether remote or running locally). If you can use content idents that are supported by web primitives, you get the distributed nature without IPFS scaffolding required. Content is versioned by hash, although I haven't looked to see if mutable torrents [2] [3] are used in this implementation. Searching via distributed hash tables for torrent metadata, cryptographically signed by the publisher, remains as a requirement imho.

Bittorrent, in my experience, "just works," whether you're relying on a torrent server or a magnet link to join a swarm and retrieve data.

[1] https://ipfs.tech/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271

[3] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html