MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-22 23:17:31+00:00
Skimmed, some notes for a more 'bear' case:

* value seems highly concentrated in a sliver of tasks - the top ten accounting for 32%, suggesting a fat long-tail where it may be less useful/relevant.

* productivity drops to a more modest 1-1.2% productivity gain once you account for humans correcting AI failure. 1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good.

* reliability wall - 70% success rate is still problematic and we're getting down to 50% with just 2+ hours of task duration or about "15 years" of schooling in terms of complexity for API. For web-based multi-turn it's a bit better but I'd imagine that would at least partly due to task-selection bias.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-22 23:17:52+00:00
What is a "sophisticated prompt"? What if I just tack on "please think about this a lot and respond in a highly sophisticated manner" to my question/prompt? Anyone can do this once they're made aware of this potential issue. Sometimes the UX layer even adds this for you in the system prompt, you just have to tick the checkbox for "I want a long, highly sophisticated answer".
by pama | 2026-01-22 23:18:10+00:00
This feels like a big nothingburger to me. Try an analysis on conference submissions (perhaps even published papers) from 1995 for comparison, and one from 2005, one from 2015. I recall the typos/errors/ommissions because I reviewed for them and I used them. Even then: so what? If I could find the reference relatively easily and with enough confidence I was fine. Rarely I couldnt find it and contacted the author. The job of the reviewer (or even author) isnt to be a nitpicky editor—that’s the editor’s job. Editing does not happen until the final printed publication is near, and only for accepted papers, nowadays sometimes it never happens. Now that is a problem perhaps, but it has nothing to do with the authors’ use of LLMs.
by dwattttt | 2026-01-22 23:18:12+00:00
> they have to resort to solutions like the rust-analyzer.

It's not really a bad thing. IDEs want results ASAP, so a solution should focus on latency; query based compilers can compile just enough of the source to get the answer to a specific query, so they're a good answer.

Compiling a binary means compiling everything though, so "compiling just the smallest amount of source for a query" isn't specifically a goal, instead you want to optimise for throughput; stuff like batching is a win there.

These aren't language specific improvements, they're recognition that the two tasks are related, but have different goals.
by rambambram | 2026-01-22 23:18:20+00:00
The vibe-coding part is most in discussion here, so it's easy to overlook the financial part.

I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise.

Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.
by imiric | 2026-01-22 23:19:26+00:00
Your GitHub profile is... disturbing. 1,354 commits and 464 pull requests in January so far.

Regardless of how productive those numbers may seem, that amount of code being published so quickly is concerning, to say the least. It couldn't have possibly been reviewed by a human or properly tested.

If this is the future of software development, society is cooked.
by dekhn | 2026-01-22 23:19:35+00:00
I cited Watson and Crick '53 in my PhD thesis and I did go dig it up and read it.

I had to go to the basement of the library, use some sort of weird rotating knob to move a heavy stack of journals over, find some large bound book of the year's journals, and navigate to the paper. When I got the page, it had been cut out by somebody previous and replaced with a photocopied verison.

(I also invested a HUGE amount of my time into my bibliography in every paper I've written as first author, curating a database and writing scripts to format in the various journal formats. This involved multiple independent checks from several sources, repeated several times.
by pas | 2026-01-22 23:19:45+00:00
isn't that the point? the estimate is that the US has 1.2 gun per capita (compared to 0.34 for Canada)

and since the US handles guns so lax they are a problem

a vocal minority is making a lot of problems (but the US is not even enforcing its existing gun control laws sufficiently)

individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.

and hence the recommendation is to have better control of who gets the tool (and not emotionally charged "scary rifle" ban)
by SaltyBackendGuy | 2026-01-22 23:20:03+00:00
Hopefully they had the confidence/insight to negotiate properly. I went through BN$ exit (was employee 19) early in my career and unfortunately, only select people at the top got retirement money. The most frustrating part was the Big Co. execs that came in much later, did literally nothing, and got a massive payday. Lesson learned though...
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-22 23:20:31+00:00
That is a completely valid threat model analysis, though? "Just hope no bad guy ever gets into the safe" is rather the entire point of a safe. If you have a safe, in which you use the contents of the safe daily, does it make sense to lock everything inside the safe in 100 smaller safes in some kind of nesting doll scheme? Whatever marginal increase in security you might get by doing so is invalidated by the fact that you lose all utility of being able to use the things in the safe, and we already know that overburdensome security is counterproductive because if something is so secure that it becomes impossible to use, those security measures just get bypassed completely in the name of using the thing. At some level of security you have to have the freedom to use the thing you're securing. Anything that could keep a bad guy from doing anything ever would also keep the good guy, ie. you, from doing anything ever.
by mothballed | 2026-01-22 23:20:48+00:00
That's not how the 'black market' ones I've seen operate. And I've seen a lot from when I visited the circuit of underground artist-related events when I lived in chicago. They are shockingly common in areas with extremely high rents and an oversupply of unused commercial space.

They might subdivide it 12 ways, but there is one shared kitchen for a whole floor and maybe 2 toilets, 2 sinks and the residents are going to the laundromats. They tend to put the shared amenities on the ground floor as much as possible because it is easiest to expand them there. It beats being homeless by a long shot.

For reference, when I hauled water, we used about 60 gallons a week for a family, or about 0.05% utilization of a 3" drain pipe for a single family. You do not need much water in order to be way way better off than being homeless; 5/gal a day of non-potable water and you're pretty much in luxury comparatively and a shit-ton of people can be putting that down a 3" or even 2" drain pipe before it causes problems. A 3" pipe is the minimum that would be serving a typical floor of a warehouse, so plenty enough for a constantly used couple of shared bathrooms with a shared kitchen. Honestly even splitting it 12 ways could be overcome with some technical ingenuity (electric lock-outs to prevent more than a few in use at once, and AAVs to prevent needing a bunch of new vents).

These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).
by rekabis | 2026-01-22 23:20:56+00:00
…At least it’s not a subscription.

But $11.99 CAD… yikes. Would like to see a highly-limited base version that is free, and a pro paid version. Of course this complicates development, but it lowers the barrier to interest. At this point I have zero clue how this meets my needs without shelling out $12CAD.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-22 23:21:11+00:00
All models are wrong. Some are useful.

It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong.

Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful.

Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful.

Diverse modes loosely held, eh?

--

[0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful.
by zahlman | 2026-01-22 23:21:14+00:00
> And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber.

Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org).

Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this (https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5).
by princevegeta89 | 2026-01-22 23:21:43+00:00
I have been noticing this lately on my Macbook Pro.
it was updated recently but my system has been freezing on and off at random times and I have found edge to cause quite an issue overall.

This is a gentle reminder to remove these shithole browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera etc.) from your machines and move on to something more trustworthy. Currently I'm using Brave and Waterfox. I'll probably look for one more open source alternative to Brave pretty soon I guess.
by Rendello | 2026-01-22 23:22:04+00:00
I remember thinking this after my 6th birthday. I must have picked it up from what adults around me were saying, but I just thought to myself "I guess this is what it's like getting older. When I was 5, I'd have just went up and down that slide all day. Now, I just don't have the energy."

I was convinced! That pervasive optimism has stayed with me throughout life, too. Lucky.
by icyfox | 2026-01-22 23:22:27+00:00
Market used to be closed to all cars (2021-2025); only taxis and busses were allowed but that changed recently:

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/creating-better-market-street-car...
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/08/135849-sfs-market-st...

Wonder if that explains your observed preference. I'd bet Waymos will start utilizing the route again if it aligns with Google's mapping algo.
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-22 23:22:34+00:00
I'm not an economist so can someone explain whether this stat is significant:

> a sustained increase of 1.0 percentage point per year for the next ten years would return US productivity growth to rates that prevailed in the late 1990s and early 2000s

What can it be compared to? Is it on the same level of productivity growth as computers? The internet? Sliced bread?
by foxes | 2026-01-22 23:23:01+00:00
Im really not motivated by this argument; it seems a false equivalence. Its not merely a spell checker or removing some tedium.

As a professional mathematician I used wikipedia all the time to lookup quick facts before verifying it myself or elsewhere. A calculator well; I can use an actual programming language.

Up until this point neither of those tools were asvertised or used by people to entirely replace human input.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-22 23:23:13+00:00
A few ways:

1. Read the datasheets. Some parts only support certain frequencies, so find the minimum of the master and slave frequencies.
2. Check at boot. Most devices boot slowly for the first few transactions then speed up. So if you saw valid data then aliasing, get a better kit.
3. Start high. I think the fastest serial memory devices cap out at 250 MHz DDR for volatile and 200 for non-volatile. So even a digital discovery (which I think is the best LA for high speed bursts) can deal with it
by lilouartz | 2026-01-22 23:23:39+00:00
When you're typing things into search, you're using a freeform search which is going to match the ingredients based on the partial match.

If you want to look for the specific ingredients, you can do so by clicking on the "Ingredients" of the product example: Here are the links for the Vitamin D and D3. https://pillser.com/vitamins/vitamin-d and https://pillser.com/vitamins/vitamin-d3

There is even a Google Sheet that is generated based on the data that we have, although I just noticed that it's not updating properly, so I need to fix that.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-22 23:23:51+00:00
I don't need to prove anything. You folks are the ones claiming harm. That said, AI is more akin to the invention of antibiotics than it is to the invention of any specific drug. Name any other entire category of technology from which no good has ever come. Just one.

I doubt you can. Even bioweapons led to breakthroughs in pesticides and chemotherapy. Nukes led to nuclear power, and even harmful AI stuff like deep fakes are being used for image restorations, special effects, and medical imaging.

You're just flat out wrong, and I think you know it.
by zahlman | 2026-01-22 23:24:13+00:00
> the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.

It should have been, but the number of people qualified to offer proper scrutiny has been low, and those people have largely been occupied with bigger things. Or they were making those apps and had a conflict of interest.

The point is that now that vibe coding is at a level where it can identify and put together off-the-shelf components, and there are all these end users that don't really care about standardization (it's not like their SaaS products used open, interoperable standards in the first place), the ability to compete with those offerings has exploded.
by dispersed | 2026-01-22 23:24:24+00:00
> Is the presence of a human driver keeping you from using Uber/Lyft/taxis more than you currently are?

I have no horse in this race, but for my female family members, the answer is absolutely yes. The odds of getting a weirdo driver are just too high. One of them lives in a Waymo-supported city and uses it all the time.
by aninibread | 2026-01-22 23:24:27+00:00
That's great feedback. The way it works right now is that I use Cloudflare AI Search to convert my image to text and embed the images.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/concepts/how-ai-...

Most of the descriptions generated for the images are likely generic and doesn't contain reference to the actual characters and names. I might explore incorporating some sort of more movie specific description in the metadata of the image to improve queries for specific characters.
by mips_avatar | 2026-01-22 23:25:02+00:00
Biggest problem for SaaS is that people don't have enough time to be informed buyers. Like in theory you should be able to make a $0.99 annual SaaS app that provides some small service really well and sell it to a million people who need it, but that kind of sale is almost impossible. Most people are either missing out on great software they should be buying, or paying for software they don't need.
by simonw | 2026-01-22 23:25:37+00:00
I got this running on macOS using mlx-audio thanks to Prince Canuma: https://x.com/Prince_Canuma/status/2014453857019904423

Here's the script I'm using: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/python/q3_tts.py

You can try it with uv (downloads a 4.5GB model on first run) like this:

uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/q3_tts.py \
'I am a pirate, give me your gold!' \
-i 'gruff voice' -o pirate.wav
by molsongolden | 2026-01-22 23:26:05+00:00
In 2022, Brex shifted away from SMB to refocus their offering. They cut "tens of thousands" of SMB customers who didn't fit their new ICP. They announced this in June 2022 and gave all of those customers 2mo to find a new provider and move their funds.

The new qualifications to be a Brex customer at that time were:

> Received an equity investment of any amount (accelerator, angel, VC or web3 token);

> More than $1 million a year in revenue;

> More than 50 employees;

> More than $500k in cash;

> Tech startups who are on a path to meeting the criteria above, and are referred by an existing customer or partner.
by flutas | 2026-01-22 23:26:06+00:00
Yes, they spend a large amount of time idle.

Examining the cumulative hours waiting over time, it is a bit staggering just how much time Waymos are spending without a passenger or even assigned to pick one up. Peaking in March 2025 with over 304,000 hours, the California Waymo vehicle fleet is spending the equivalent of 12,700 days every month operational but without an assigned passenger trip.

If we assume 1,000 Waymos were deployed for public rides during this period (on the conservative side given recent fleet announcements), that ends up being around 12.7 days2 of waiting per vehicle per month. Further, the bias here is to be forgiving, as Waymos are not operational 24 hours a day.

https://www.thedriverlessdigest.com/p/how-waymo-spends-its-t...
by reincarnate0x14 | 2026-01-22 23:26:08+00:00
It sort of already is. This behavior is only applied to sessions with a TTY and then the client can disable it, which is a sensible default. This specific use case is tripping it up obviously since the server knows ahead of time that the connection is not important enough to obfuscate and this isn't a typical terminal session, but in almost any other scenario there is no way to make that determination and the client expects its ObscureKeystrokeTiming to be honored.
by samuelstros | 2026-01-22 23:26:16+00:00
I think our goals indeed differ.

> How often are binary files being diffed? How long does it take to materialize? How long to run a diff algorithm?

If version control is embedded in an app, constantly.

Imagine a cell in a spreadsheet. An application wants to display a "blame" for a cell C43 i.e. how did the cell change over time?

The lix way is this SQL query

SELECT * from state_history
WHERE file_id <the_spreadsheet>
AND schema_key "excel_cell"
AND entity_id C43;

Diffing on the fly is not possible. The information on what changed needs to be available without diffing. Otherwise, diffing an entire spreadsheet file for every commit on how cell C43 changed takes ages.
by munificent | 2026-01-22 23:26:20+00:00
Tearing the syndemosis sounds rough!

Coincidentally, right around a same time, a friend of mine wiped out on his OneWheel and had a compound ankle fracture with dislocation. I don't recall how many malleoluses he broke, but it was pretty gnarly. But he's been healing well and it seems like his cartilage might survive OK. I'm happy for him but also envious.

> I feel like it's worse with an ankle because if you don't break it they basically don't get arthritis

It's crazy how well an ankle performs when you think about it. It is so much smaller than your hip or knee, and it takes even more impact force than those joints do when you run, and often while at weird angles. It's a miracle they work at all.

> they definitely sound like they've been getting better,

That's what I hear. If this had happened a decade ago, I'd probably getting a fusion now. Good luck on your recovery too.
by pvtmert | 2026-01-22 23:26:32+00:00
They said they will cut 30k, but they removed only 14k in October.

The 90-day grace period of the impacted people (to find internal transfers, etc) ending on Monday.

Imagine, you are one of the minuscule number of people who was impacted but then you were able to land another role, as an internal-transfer. It is possible the new team of yours may be impacted too!

What a comedy!
by epolanski | 2026-01-22 23:27:22+00:00
I don't like your feedback, it's condescending and you know nothing about me.

1. In my area 96% of energy is gas-based. I live in Rome, Italy. It's written in my energy bill. I ain't got no solar. Night or day it's mostly a matter of relatively small changes of demand.

2. If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet! I'm sick of this neverending focus on energy when the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular. On that I am very sensitive. And me deciding to have less burgers and steaks across an year has magnitude of order more impact than your silly dishwasher. Do the math. As I am on transport where instead of pretending to be green by buying 3 tonnes electric SUVs on a lease from US lunatics I use public transport and use my old beaten car sparely in the weekends.

Spare me your nonsense because I ain't gonna be thinking about running a noisy dishwasher in my living room at 9 pm, the only moment of relax and peace for my family because of negligible-to-nonexistent impact on the environment.

And just to add, I don't even own AC, and I can assure you it gets 40C/100+ Fahrenheit, with high humidity in Rome at summer. That's how sensitive I am to the topic.

You know nothing about the people you interact with.
by advisedwang | 2026-01-22 23:27:28+00:00
Anyone who can spy on the network between the client and server can see the timing. This includes basically anyone on the same LAN as you, anyone who sets up a WiFi access point with a SSID you auto-connect to, anyone at your ISP or VPN provider, the NSA and god knows who else.

And the timing is still sensitive. [1] does suggest that it can be used to significantly narrow the possible passwords you have, which could lead to a compromise. Not only that, but timing can be sensitive in other ways --- it can lead to de-anonymization by correlating with other events, it can lead to profiling of what kind of activity you are doing over ssh.

So this does solve a potentially sensitive issue, it's just nuanced and not a complete security break.

[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ssh-use01.pdf
by brikym | 2026-01-22 23:28:08+00:00
Maybe you a mysterious hidden ELO score that effectively shadow bans people if they get a negative report from a high ELO maintainer. Perhaps look at how dating apps do it as they have to deal with a many persistent undesirable people.

Or just throw up a money hurdle. The reason you're seeing so many hustle bros from poorer countries is simply because the cost of accessing the internet is now effectively zero.
by carbine | 2026-01-22 23:28:22+00:00
I skimmed this but am I reading correctly, participants were given 20 minutes to write an essay and asked to do their best and then given (or not given) access to a tool to help? There's zero incentive here not to optimize for shortcuts and task completion.

This is very different from, say, writing an essay I'm gonna publish on my blog under my own name. I would be MUCH more interested in an experiment that isolates people working on highly cognitively demanding work that MATTERS to them, and seeing what impact LLMs do (or don't) have on cognitive function. Otherwise, this seems like a study designed to confirm a narrative.

What am I missing
by anishrverma | 2026-01-22 23:28:36+00:00
The prevalence of hallucinations in the system is another signs for change in the system. The citations should be treated less like narrative context and more like verifiable objects

Better detectors, like the article implies, won’t solve the problem, since AI will likely keep improving

It’s about the fact that our publishing workflows implicitly assume good faith manual verification, even as submission volume and AI assisted writing explode. That assumption just doesn’t hold anymore

A student initiative at Duke University has been working on what it might look like to address this at the publishing layer itself, by making references, review labor, and accountability explicit rather than implicit

There’s a short explainer video for their system: https://liberata.info/

It’s hard to argue that the current status quo will scale, so we need novel solutions like this.