MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timcobb | 2026-01-29 18:36:02+00:00
> Could they be doing better? Absolutely, but without them we’d have almost no browser choice today.

They deserve it. The one thing people need from Mozilla is for it to fight browser monoculture, which is critical the free and open web. "They had one job." But, to the great detriment of humanity (I don't think I'm exaggerating), they're failing. That sucks.

> Personally I’ve been using Zen.

Thanks, I didn't know about Zen, I'll check that out. I'm on Brave, but would rather not be.
by jsrozner | 2026-01-29 18:36:04+00:00
So many tech lovers defending waymo.

If you drive a car, you have a responsibility to do it safely. The fact that I am usually better than the bottom 50% of drivers, or that I am better than a drunk driver does not mean that when I hit someone it's less bad. A car is a giant weapon. If you drive the weapon, you need to do it safely. Most people these days are incredibly inconsiderate - probably because there's little economic value in being considerate. The fact that lots of drivers suck doesn't mean that waymo gets a pass.

Waymos have definitely become more aggressive as they've been successful. They drive the speed limit down my local street. I see them and I think wtf that's too fast. It's one thing when there are no cars around. But if you've got cars or people around, the appropriate speed changes. Let's audit waymo. They certainly have an aggressiveness setting. Let's see the data on how it's changing. Let's see how safety buffers have decreased as they've changed the aggressiveness setting.

The real solution? Get rid of cars. Self-driving individually owned vehicles were always the wrong solution. Public transit and shared infra is always the right choice.
by 1-more | 2026-01-29 18:37:19+00:00
There are bribing and HFT opportunities here too. The fix developer is incentivized to wait until the last possible moment to take the position "the PR addressing the bug will be merged by the date" so that the contract will be the cheapest for them to buy and represent the greatest profit when the PR is opened or merged. What's a savvy speculator on the sidelines to do? After the PR is opened, bribe the project maintainer not to accept the PR by that date so they can turn a sure-thing "Yes" into a huge upset "No." Or watch the developer's github for green shower tiles to see activity in private repos. But the developer can throw up chaff that by scripting bunches of commits in other private repos, or changing the commit dates for the bug fixes to be a year ago. The speculator can monitor the developer's posts in language/topic forums or on social media to get a feel for their progress. If they're really connected, maybe they can see their AI agent/chatbot logs through an insider in one of those companies.

This idea rocks because eventually someone is going to get blackmailed with their affair history over, like, adding native XLSX support to FFMPEG. Can't wait. Financialize everything.
by pseudalopex | 2026-01-29 18:37:39+00:00
In 2026, Mozilla will continue to invest and leverage our assets to help tip the balance of AI toward openness, agency and trust. We anticipate $~650M in expenditure across the portfolio to run our core businesses, generate revenue, drive mission impact, and grow new opportunities in 2026: Approximately 80% of expenditure on core products: Continued, substantial investment in core products like Firefox and Thunderbird.[1]

[1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/ledger/
by CharlesW | 2026-01-29 18:38:01+00:00
> IMHO breaking free of SQLite's proprietary test suite is a bigger driver than C vs Rust.

I don't understand this claim, given the breadth and depth of SQLite's public domain TCL Tests. Can someone explain to me how this isn't pure FUD?

"There are 51445 distinct test cases, but many of the test cases are parameterized and run multiple times (with different parameters) so that on a full test run millions of separate tests are performed." - https://sqlite.org/testing.html
by trollbridge | 2026-01-29 18:38:07+00:00
I think a very good reason to want to know who's liable is because Google has not exactly shown itself to enthusiastically accept responsibility for harm it causes, and there is no guarantee Waymo will continue to be safe in the future.

In fact, I could see Google working on a highly complex algorithm to figure out cost savings from reducing safety and balancing that against the cost of spending more on marketing and lobbyists. We will have zero leverage to do anything if Waymo gradually becomes more and more dangerous.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-29 18:38:19+00:00
I don't in any way mean to discount adverse affects, or negative experiences. Those are just as valuable points. People should be aware of the risks when they take any pharmaceutical, and there are doctors who will happily prescribe these drugs without educating the patient or themselves about downsides and alternatives.

My point is that a lot of the commenters here are saying some variation of "have you tried being happier?" and "these drugs do nothing". Both of which are absurd to the point of offensiveness to people who have gone through it, in the same way that it would be absurd (and offensive) to claim that these drugs have no possible downsides and a negative reaction is placebo.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-29 18:38:27+00:00
>Might as well save some money by not having to get a laptop for doing your taxes once a year. Most normal people don't really care about Google's walled garden. That's a tech person thing.

Most "normal people" don't use their phones hooked to their TVs as desktop computers. It's a very niche scenario.

They use their old laptop or tablet from school, university or hand-me-down from parent/relative for that task, since we're going with your assumption of living in a rich country where access to cheap hardware is abundant and 50 Euros is a very basic dinner for 2, so unlikely for people's livelihoods to be threatened by skimping 50 bucks once in their lifetime on some personal computing device besides their phone.

And in the specific case of living in a rich country, you might not even need to spend that 50, since I am yet to meet anyone who in case of need, can't just get a old computer for virtually free as hand-me-down from parent/friend/relative where it's collecting dust, if you just need a PC to do your taxes once a year. It's a lot more realistic scenario than people hooking up phones to TVs to do their taxes.
by munificent | 2026-01-29 18:38:35+00:00
> we just have every person registered in a central database from birth

"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!

A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.

To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.

An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.
by kens | 2026-01-29 18:39:08+00:00
In the past decade, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%. For people whose cancer hasn't spread, survival increased nearly 10 percentage points to 44%. So it's wrong to say that nothing ever seems to make it to daylight.

Source: https://www.uchealth.org/today/slow-but-steady-progress-impr...
by the_sleaze_ | 2026-01-29 18:39:17+00:00
BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way. Waymo has achieved profit per unit and people are happy to see driver-less taxis in their city and pay for the service.

Tesla also cannot justify valuations based on automotive sales/subscriptions alone - they were always going to have to pivot.

They're in a tight spot and they need to do something drastic.
by 9rx | 2026-01-29 18:39:31+00:00
Not likely. The alternative was for them to modify SQLite without the test suite and no obvious indication of what they would need to do to try to fill in the gaps. Modifying SQLite with its full test suite would be the best choice, of course, but one that is apparently[1] not on the table for them. Since they have to reimagine the test suite either way, they believe they can do a better job if the tests are written alongside a new codebase.

And I expect they are right. Trying to test a codebase after the fact never goes well.

[1] With the kind of investment backing they have you'd think they'd be able to reach some kind of licensing deal, but who knows.
by boogrpants | 2026-01-29 18:39:39+00:00
I'd like to see a study about why the opinions of economists, who are still just human meat suits, are more important than anyone else's.

Just kidding, I know they are not. Economists only succeeded while US government played along. Government has quit playing along. Did economists see it coming? No? Well what good are their predictions?

Useless knowledge workers. A reality the labor market is highlighting: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/the-collapse-of-the-econ-phd-j...

I'd like to see a serious study where an economist did more than summarize past economic trends with high school math and hand waved a prediction at an unknowable future.

Society is little more than dumb semantics games; dollars and contracts only have value if it is socially beneficial to the majority to value them.

Capitalism only remains so long as we ...socially... see a ...communal... upside to capitalism. Sure sounds like capitalism relies on socialism and communism.

Too many have read the rambling ignorance of long dead authors too busy scribbling out semantic wank to invent useful technology. Knowledge workers are akin to useless priests; allegory is all they contribute.

How much further along might we be if Adam Smith's of history contributed more than empty pontification.

Physics of reality itself does value human society or it would preserve them and not tear them asunder via entropy.

Signal attenuation is coming for every society. Just physics things.
by hosh | 2026-01-29 18:40:30+00:00
I disagree.

AI works as a better tool for teaching humans than to do the work themselves.

While someone experienced in fighting fires can take intuitive leaps, the basic idea is still to synthesize a hypothesis from signals, validating the hypothesis, and coming up with mitigations and longer term fixes. This is a learned skill, and a team of people/AI will work better than someone solo.

https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards...
by crazygringo | 2026-01-29 18:40:37+00:00
> We model tests as Bernoulli random variables and compute 95% confidence intervals around daily, weekly, and monthly pass rates. Statistically significant differences in any of those time horizons are reported.

They're going to need to provide a lot more detail on their methodology, because that doesn't make a lot of sense. From their graphs, they seem to be calculating the confidence interval around the previous value, then determining whether the new value falls outside of it. But that's not valid for establishing the statistical significance of a difference. You need to calculate the confidence interval of the difference itself, and then see if all the values within that confidence interval remain positive (if it excludes 0). This is because both the old and new measurement have uncertainty. Their approach seems to be only considering uncertainty for one of them.

They should also really be more specific about the time periods. E.g. their graphs only show performance over the past 30 days, but presumably the monthly change is comparing the data from 60 to 31 days ago, to the data from 30 days ago until yesterday? In which case the weekly graph really ought to be displaying the past two months, not one month.
by enlyth | 2026-01-29 18:40:44+00:00
A few months ago I was going through my secondary email and noticed I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.

Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:

A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.
by strogonoff | 2026-01-29 18:41:08+00:00
> I think it's difficult to have a serious discussion about consciousness online because it's such a mushy thing to define.

It’s circular and self-referential. In defining consciousness we, to phrase it in the least nuanced way, are trying to define a thing through which we define things. The best definition we have reduces to something along the lines of “what we, humans, experience”. By its very nature it makes us unable to fathom or even recognize a hypothetical consciousness if it is entirely unlike ours and/or operates on radically different scales; anything we call “conscious” is implied to be human-like.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-29 18:41:14+00:00
Trump's border czar Tom Homan:

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."
--Homan in February

"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."
-- Tom Homan in March

"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"
-- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

But American citizens exercising their constitutional rights? THEY need to tone down the rhetoric.
by gjurhgd | 2026-01-29 18:41:28+00:00
Surely someone who has been here as long as you have understands that this type of behavior is not compatible with the guidelines.

> Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.

You could have just corrected them and not goaded them into further revealing their ignorance. Yes, they underestimated how difficult it is to crack 3DES. You could have simply told them that.
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-29 18:42:05+00:00
First, it is the duty of law enforcement to recognize a situation that can and should be de-escalated. The public is not an cannot be responsible for that, and it doesn't justify murder if they aren't. "Interference", while in my opinion very warranted here, doesn't constitute an imminent life threat to Law enforcement nor the public, and it is not permissible for them to use lethal force in that situation. Aside from killing wantonly and happily ("fucking bitch"), law enforcement in this case is acting illegally on administrative warrants, violating the Constitution to enter houses they do not have legal warrants for, being masked and unidentifiable (and thus unaccountable for their actions to the public) when they commit attrocities in the public view (why would a legitimate police force need to hide its face) and generally being a public menace. It is your civic duty and a proud American tradition to stand up to lawless police forces.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-29 18:42:14+00:00
Insurance here is also mandatory for all motorists. Doesn't matter if the rules aren't actually enforced.

Waymo has deep pockets, so everyone is going to try and sue them, even if they don't have a legitimate grievance. Where I live, the city/state would totally milk each incident for BigCo for all it was worth. "Hit and run" by a drunk waymo? The state is just salivating thinking about the possibility.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-29 18:42:36+00:00
That was my experience with ADHD. In retrospect, I clearly struggled with it my entire life, with it starting to cause problems around middle school age. I started getting treatment a couple years ago and it was like someone flipped a light switch. Wait, this is what it's like for everyone else? They can just decide to start doing a necessary thing before it becomes a crisis?!

In before "of course things are easier when you're taking stimulants!", which is another dumb thing I hear too often. I feel basically nothing from taking Adderall, and not in the least stimulated or more alert or more awake or anything. I can just concentrate on boring things afterward.
by z2 | 2026-01-29 18:42:40+00:00
Tesla also announced they will be discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward. But this is now a standard (free) feature even in basic vehicles like the Toyota Corolla. Why would they intentionally cripple their vehicles to the point hat they would be inferior to most cars today?

Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-29 18:42:42+00:00
I'm going to stick to the stuff around Tao, as even well tempered discussion about the rest would be against the guidelines anyways.

I had a very different read of Tao's post last month. To me, he opens that there have been many claims of novel solutions which turn out to be known solutions from publications buried for years.

He speculates, and I assume correctly, that that's not the only reason. Indeed, we've seen at least 1 novel solution which couldn't have come from a low interest publication being in the training data alone. How many of the 3 examples at the top end up actually falling that way is not really something anyone can know, but I agree it should be safe to assume the answer will not be 0, or even if it was it would seem unreasonable to think it stayed that way.

None of these are just popping in a prompt and hoping for the answer. They are multishot from experts with tools. Tao makes a very balanced note of this in reply to his main message:

> The nature of these contributions is rather nuanced; individually and collectively, they do not meet the hyped up goal of AI autonomously solving major mathematical open problems, but they also cannot all be dismissed as inconsequential trickery.

It's not nothing, but it's also not already here and you prompt to just get solutions to Erdos problems. It's already still of course one of several tools that can help experts regardless of that. But progress has not been "AI went from where it is to pumping out multiple Erdos problem proofs because it's growing so fast", and Tao seems to be very clear it's interesting, but slower, growth than that.
by dang | 2026-01-29 18:43:06+00:00
Yikes, good catch. I've changed the link above to the original project now. (Edit: actually, let's use the project home page and put the Github repo in the toptext.)

(Submitted link was https://github.com/lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid. mellosouls is a good HN contributor so I'm sure this was well-intentioned.)
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-29 18:43:52+00:00
The reason I think it was a mistake is that the shooting happened right after one of the agents yelled “gun gun gun”. I am not involved in law enforcement, but as far as I know that is typically yelled when a person is threatening with a gun, not when they’ve been disarmed. Then when the agent(s) hear “gun gun gun” they panic and start shooting.

The way ICE was engaging initially did appear unreasonably hostile from the context that I saw, though the videos I saw did not appear to contain the entire engagement. Also police should be trained well enough to not panic in that situation, ideally. But it really doesn’t seem as simple as “random street execution” based on what I’ve seen.
by TIPSIO | 2026-01-29 18:44:22+00:00
I too suspect the A/B testing is the prime suspect: context window limits, system prompts, MAYBE some other questionable things that should be disclosed.

Either way, if true, given the cost I wish I could opt-out or it were more transparent.

Put out variants you can select and see which one people flock to. I and many others would probably test constantly and provide detailed feedback.

All speculation though
by jefftk | 2026-01-29 18:45:12+00:00
> Most US states cap speed limits around schools at 15mph when children are present.

Are you sure? The ones I've seen have usually been 20 or 25mph.

Looking on Image Search (https://www.google.com/search?q=school+zone+speed+limit+sign) and limiting just to the ones that are photos of real signs by the side of the road, the first 10 are: 25, 30, 25, 20, 35, 15, 20, 55, 20, 20. So only one of these was 15.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-29 18:45:40+00:00
I do wonder if they already had a feeling it was not supposed to work that way hence the info gathering. This is one of my favorite all time IT stories because the client was right, and the engineer was left almost going crazy.

When I was a Junior I asked an honest question to the senior I was working with at the time, great dude, I basically asked him because everyone joked about the "works on my machine" crowd, so I said, so what the heck do I do if it only works on my machine? He said you have to figure out what's different. It sounds obvious or simple, but if you go with that mindset, when someone's stuck in the "it works on my machine idk why" sure enough I ask "what is DIFFERENT from your machine and this one?" and it almost always leads to the right answers. It triggers something in our brains. I usually follow up whats different with "what was the last change?" in the case of a production issue.
by RandomTeaParty | 2026-01-29 18:46:09+00:00
Fight against obfuscation is different from fighting for readability

I've tried Ghidra, IDA and BinaryNinja, and all of them display code on the level of "C with classes" from early 00s (and declaration of variables at the beginning of function in style of structured programming of the 90s)

I'd be perfectly fine with that output, had there been good way to interactively fix it (refactor without changing behaviour)
by mhykim | 2026-01-29 18:46:10+00:00
Fair concern, and I agree on the end state. Agents will eventually use native agent-to-agent protocols.

The question is the transition, because email is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous channel of communication in today. I would only give my agent an A2A integration if your agent has an A2A integration, but because you don't we are at a stalemate. I'd rather just give my agent an inbox where I know it can communicate with the other billions of people that already have an email address.

Email isn’t the final protocol for agents. It’s the bridge that lets them participate in today’s internet while native agent protocols/networks emerge.
by steveBK123 | 2026-01-29 18:46:18+00:00
New to me, but I am starting to infer that for those "in the know" it is common knowledge on HN that LLMs are purposely degraded over time to manage capacity/cost or fudge benchmarks...

How do you actually use these in production pipelines in practice then?

Are LLMs even well suited for some of the document parsing / data scrubbing automation people are throwing at them now?
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-29 18:46:36+00:00
"it is your job that got made redundant - not you"

From the comments:

>Rubbish. Unless you are one of a small number of people doing "X", and now there is less "X" to do, this is not the case. You are being made "redundant" as your job still needs doing, but other people are cheaper/less awkward/less inclined to complain about lousy conditions (or. hey, AI might even be able to do your job, but that is only true if manglement don't care about the job being done). Unless the actual business is significantly shrinking, the work is still there - you were just the most fire-able. Too old, too professional, too expensive.

Beware there may not really be as many jobs that need doing as there were a couple years ago, prosperity does seem to have receded quite a bit since then.

Looks like a lot of peoples' ambitious careers could be the things thrown out like rubbish.