MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xve | 2026-01-23 20:52:10+00:00
So many of the questions we all really want answers to are in the social sciences area. While some of us want to see interesting work done in physics, humanity as a whole craves some kind of answers to all those junk studies that at least attempted to apply rigorous methods. Immigration is used as an example in this article. If studying a topic like that is off the table,what are we even left with?
by ddingus | 2026-01-23 20:52:40+00:00
I have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol...

Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card.

I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way.

Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text.

I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines.

Fun times.
by tw04 | 2026-01-23 20:52:54+00:00
“A farm coordinator doesn’t plant every seed”

Huh? I have no doubt that mega corporate farms have a “farm manager”, but I can tell you having grown up in small town America, that’s just not a thing. My buddies dad’s were “farm manager”, and absolutely planted every seed of corn (until the boys were old enough to drive the tractor and then it was split duty), and the big farms also harvested their own and the smaller ones hired it out.

So unless claude is planning on learning to drive a tractor it’s going to be a pretty useless task manager telling a farmer to do something he or she was already planning on doing.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-23 20:53:25+00:00
Apart from the technical limitations of FSD, Elon hasn't thought through the business model. Claiming that Tesla cars will be capable of turning into robotaxis seemed plausible a decade ago before all the negative externalities of Airbnb became widely known.

Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.

Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.
by otterley | 2026-01-23 20:53:57+00:00
At the end of the day, it's all about how you weigh the evidence. If those examples are sufficient to tip the scales for you, that's your choice. However, Apple's overall trustworthiness--particular when it comes to protecting people's sensitive data--remains high for in the market. Even the examples you posted aren't especially pertinent to that (except for iCloud Keychain, where the complaint isn't whether Apple is securely storing it, but the fact that it got transmitted to them in the first place, and there exists some unresolved ambiguity about whether it is appropriately deleted on demand).
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-23 20:54:07+00:00
At work, i had them purchas 2x 48GB last gen A6000.

For the valuable kick start usecase it pays off. It cant do all the magic bootsrraps but for baseline technical questions its perfect. Will put in a rag search eventuallly.

Im not optimistic any use case will come to substantiate todays valuations. But the intertwined fascist businesses is going to stunt a lot of people trying to chain their product to 3rd parties.
by achyudh | 2026-01-23 20:54:35+00:00
Mailing lists essentially solve this by introducing friction: only those who genuinely care about the project will bother to git send-email and defend a patch over an email thread. The incentive for low-quality drive-by submissions also evaporates as there is no profile page with green squares to farm. The downside is that it potentially reduces the number of contributors by making it a lot harder for new contributors to onboard.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-23 20:54:36+00:00
I work hard to keep subscriptions out of my life. I will do everything in my power to not have a subscription as part of any car I own. The problem is it is likely out of my hands. I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b. I will have to pay astronomical prices on a worse experience for the privilege of having my data sold and the opportunity to pay them monthly. I want to scream when I see things like this but to who? I wonder how hard it is to electrify a 20yo car....
by alephnerd | 2026-01-23 20:54:38+00:00
Also, this essay by Mickens at USENIX over a decade ago - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Tl;dr - "Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT" (Mickens, 2014)
by Applejinx | 2026-01-23 20:54:40+00:00
Same with mine from last year. I don't tap the wheel, but I treat it as 'co-driving' or like the car has its own somewhat fussy opinions on where to be. If I zoom up on another car at a stop it's capable of freaking out and braking, it follows other cars at a good safe distance, and the lane keeping feels like you're holding the car's hand as it goes along, and its attention is generally better than yours. Works for me.

I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
by HendrikHensen | 2026-01-23 20:54:50+00:00
The biggest problem is that people treat it as a dichotomy: either exceptions or error values. But that's a false dichotomy.

There would be real value in a language which would have both.

Error values are perfect for un-exceptional errors, e.g. some states of a business logic. The name that the user entered is invalid, some record is missing from the database, the user's country is not supported. Cases that are part of the business domain and that _must_ be handled, and therefore explicitly modeled.

Then there is the grey area of errors that one might expect (so not truly exceptional) but are not related to the business logic. These could be for example network timeouts, unexpected HTTP errors (like 503), etc. For those, there is often no explicit handling in the domain that makes sense. So it's convenient to just throw an exception, let it automatically "bubble" to the highest level (e.g. the HTTP controller) and just return some generic error (such as HTTP 500).

There are also truly exceptional cases, that you really shouldn't encounter in your program, such as null-dereferences, invalid array index access, division by zero, etc. These indicate a bug in the code (and might be introduced explicitly with assert-style checks). The program is in an unknown, compromised state, so there's really nothing left to do than throw an exception or panic. An error value makes very little sense in this case.

I often have the discussion with friends, why a division operator, or an array access, doesn't return a `Result` type in nice languages such as Rust? Surely, if they care about error values, then each operation that can fail, must return a `Result` rather than panic (throw an exception). It is an interesting through experiment at least.
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 20:55:18+00:00
> of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address.

This belief is rampant amongst 90% of the general public. I had to spend an hour helping a friend last week who had created a new Cash App account to do their taxes, because they didn't prefer the old email address that was on their longstanding Cash App account. So now they have to keep 2 Cash App accounts forever. And to make things more fun, they're obsessed with phone numbers there, so adding the phone to the second account pulls it off the other account.

Oh, and digression but I have to vent: their login process on the web is, in some order: an SMS to your phone, another numeric to your email, and your password. All in succession, on every login.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-23 20:55:25+00:00
That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.

But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.
by smithkl42 | 2026-01-23 20:55:26+00:00
This is an N of 1, of course, but I can relate to the other folks who've been expressing their frustration with the state of Claude over the last couple weeks. Maybe it's just that I have higher expectations, but... I dunno, it really seems like Claude Code is just a lot WORSE right now than it was a couple weeks ago. It has constant bugs in the app itself, I have to babysit it a lot tighter, and it just seems ... dumber somehow. For instance, at the moment, it's literally trying to tell me, "No, it's fine that we've got 500 failing tests on our feature branch, because those same tests are passing in development."
by gpm | 2026-01-23 20:55:29+00:00
I've been using /rewind in claude code (the terminal, not using vscode at all) quite a bit recently without issue - if that's the feature you're asking about.

Not discounting at all that you might "hold it" differently and have a different experience. E.g. I basically avoid claude code having any interaction with the VCS at all - and I could easily VCS interaction being a source of bugs with this sort of feature.
by idle_zealot | 2026-01-23 20:55:49+00:00
Do you read that as giving him a pass? I read it as more of a condemnation. If you have an LLM write "your" blog posts then of course their content doesn't represent your thoughts. Discussing the contents of the post then is pointless, and we can disregard it entirely. Separately we can talk about what the person's actual views might be, using the fact that he has a machine generate his blog posts as a clue. I'm not sure I buy that the post was meaningfully LLM-generated though.

The same approach actually applies to Trump and other liars. You can't take anything they say as truth or serious intent on its own; they're not engaging in good faith. You can remove yourself one step and attempt to analyze why they say what they do, and from there get at what to take seriously and what to disregard.

In Steve's case, my interpretation is that he's extremely bullish on AI and sees his setup or something similar as the inevitable future, but he sprinkles in silly warnings to lampshade criticism. That's how the two messages of "this isn't serious" and "this is the future or software development" co-exist. The first is largely just a cover and an admission this his particular project is a mess. Note that this interpretation assumes that the contents of the blog post in question were largely written by him, even if LLM assistance was used.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-23 20:55:53+00:00
> If you design it so you don't have access to the data, how do you make money?

The same way companies used to make money, before they started bulk harvesting of data and forcing ads into products that we're _already_ _paying_ _for_?

I wish people would have integrity instead of squeezing out every little bit of profit from us they can.
by celsoazevedo | 2026-01-23 20:56:23+00:00
But it's not just one politician or just one election. The current guy was elected twice and the movement supporting him is unlikely to disappear any time soon. His position on tariffs, NATO, and Greenland are not new. From the outside, it doesn't look like one wrong step, but just part of the new normal.

It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. With that in mind, it's easy to understand the change in behaviour.

In the context of this thread, I've been looking at the services I use, and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
by MBCook | 2026-01-23 20:56:37+00:00
They can rename it whatever they want.

People had a feature for free, now they don’t, because Tesla wants money.

“But it’s better…” only if you pay. If you don’t, still gone.

What else matters?

I see nothing wrong with them offering a cheap(er) FSD option. I object to them removing existing features to force adoption.
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-23 20:56:51+00:00
OMG that's amazing. This is the first time I hear that take but I can actually see it, hahaha. They did have each other's first kiss after all, lmao.

Having said that, the whole issue with the women is that they're flat romantic characters most of the time (or, apparently, beards) instead of being allowed to pass the Bechdel test. I don't think being a yaoi manga really excuses that (although I can't say I've ever read any so I can't really comment on its genre conventions - surely there are female friends in the better written ones though?)
by tirant | 2026-01-23 20:57:02+00:00
That’s basically what SAE L3 and above levels of autonomy mean. The manufacturer takes full responsibility of the driving while the function is active.

I drove Mercedes and BMW L3 offering. Both had a really restricted ODD (Operational Design Domain) for it to be of much use outside high traffic situations on an Autobahn. It was restricted to good weather and speeds of around 60km/h. Basic all conditions under which their set of sensors and CPUs would work optimally.

But that was 2021 technology. L4 level of autonomy will be in the market during the next 4/5 years, no doubt. And that will be a game changer for anyone driving any significant amount of time. Sleeping, reading, watching a movie or just working on the laptop will be possible. And the manufacturer will take full responsibility of the driving while the functions are active.
by mawise | 2026-01-23 20:57:09+00:00
I consider myself pretty pro-privacy, but there is so much dragnet surveillance and legitimate breaches of the fourth amendment that I have a hard time getting up in arms over a company complying with a valid search warrant that is scoped to three hard drives (and which required law enforcement to have physical possession of the drives to begin with).

This is so much more reasonable than (for example) all the EU chat control efforts that would let law enforcement ctrl+f on any so-called private message in the EU.
by enraged_camel | 2026-01-23 20:57:35+00:00
>> When I've had LLMs write unit tests they are quick to write pointless unit tests that seem impressive "2123/2123 tests passed!" but in reality it's testing mostly nothing of value.

This has not happened to me since Sonnet 4.5. Opus 4.5 is especially robust when it comes to writing tests. I use it daily in multiple projects and verify the test code.
by ajross | 2026-01-23 20:57:43+00:00
Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.

It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.

They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
by ivanstojic | 2026-01-23 20:58:18+00:00
When tractors were invented, there was a notable reduction in human employment in agriculture in the USA. From a research paper (https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Recent_P...):

> The lower-bound estimate represents 18 percent of the total reduction in man-hours in U.S. agriculture between 1944 and 1959; the upper-bound estimate, 27 percent

I'm not seeing that with LLMs.
by Notch123 | 2026-01-23 20:58:18+00:00
I have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 20:58:27+00:00
> Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense.

The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.

People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-23 20:58:44+00:00
To underscore this: the boneheaded decision Tesla is making is forcing customers to choose between a $99/mo subscription for FSD, and no ACC or lanekeeping assist otherwise. It's like letting people buy a subscription to the iPhone Pro Max 17 or not have any phone at all.

By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberDrive or something that isn't glaringly inaccurate.
by jmb99 | 2026-01-23 20:59:17+00:00
> He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop.

No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.
by karhuton | 2026-01-23 20:59:21+00:00
Great, finally something ambitious enough.

However, may I make a speculate here a little..

The brand and presentation seem to try to appeal to (young) tech savvy people; but those are the ones who are hardest to win due to so many different needs they have for their OS and software running on it. Similarly why people don’t move from Windows to Linux.

Thus, I’d be afraid this might very easily end up in the ”toy” category like the many alternative cloud or browser OSes.

So, instead, why not take a chapter from Chromebook’s.. book, and target the users with simplest needs: the non-technical. Those, who just ”need a browser in a laptop”.

New selling points:
- No need to update it, it takes care of its self
- No need to install suspicious apps, it can make the things you need
- No menus full of apps, settings and actions you will never use; only what you actually want
- You can’t break it, it can protect itself from accidents
- Never again odd error messages, it can always explain them to you ELI5 and help to fix them

And lastly:
- Nothing to ”learn” - always just ask and it’ll do it for you
by autoexec | 2026-01-23 20:59:27+00:00
I'd agree that LLMs are a dead end to AGI, but I don't think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely to work. It'd be really helpful to know how our brains work if we wanted to replicate them, but it's possible that we could find a solution that is entirely different from human brains while still having the ability to truly think/learn for itself.
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 20:59:39+00:00
Apple will allow you to have multiple Apple IDs tied to the same phone number -- my kids' ones have my number on them. So for some purposes it seems fine to just reuse the phone number for a second account -- like for your kids, or for a "sandbox" account to use testing your app so that you don't have to use your real iCloud account.

However, for your purpose of avoiding Apple's capricious BS, I probably wouldn't go that route since if their braindead fraud systems or braindead employees decide you're a threat actor they could definitely default to "Ban account. Find all their evil backup accounts that have the same phone numbers or contact emails and ban them too."
by Fischgericht | 2026-01-23 20:59:40+00:00
Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:

- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.

- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society

- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.

- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.

- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.

You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.

Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:

- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people.
- China
- Iran
- New Zealand
- Australia
- Canada
...

Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.

Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.

Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.

Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.

You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.