MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 19:06:25+00:00
Depends on the school zone. The tech school near me is in a 50 zone and they don't even turn on the "20 when flashing" signs because if you're gonna walk there, you're gonna come in via residential side streets in the back and the school itself is way back off the road. The other school near me is downtown and you wouldn't be able to go 17 even if you wanted to.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-29 19:06:35+00:00
They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely that either they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.

So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle difficult situations in a more sophisticated way than each car having a human monitor it, naïve.
by smsm42 | 2026-01-29 19:06:59+00:00
I've seen a lot of people living in the streets when I lived in California. From my (then) house I could walk at least to a half-dozen places where substantial amount people lived right in the streets. I've never seen people dying in the streets in any state though. Given that only 7 states (and DC) allow Medicaid for illegal immigrants, this must be happening an awful lot. Strangely, I never heard about such cases, let alone a massive number of them. But you evidently did.

I would like to ask you instead of the Word of Jesus - which is surely fascinating, but bears little relevance for the topic at hand - provide some authoritative data as to how many people actually died in the street in those 43 terrible states, for lack of Medicaid coverage, say in the last 5 years? Was it millions? Thousands? Hundreds? How does it compare with the record of California and those living-on-the-street people I am seeing there every time I visit? I think discussing actual data would be better than discussing Jesus.
by dang | 2026-01-29 19:07:06+00:00
That's a property of human beings in general. It's also a nice example of how sometimes a conundrum goes away when you make it more general.

That is, it seems incredible (going back to the GP) that engineers assume they understand economics when they don't. It's less incredible (applying your formulation) that engineers assume they understand things they don't. That is, it's still incredible that engineers are so assumey, but we no longer need to marvel at their assuminess about economics.

If we go one more step and state it as everyone assuming they understand things they don't, it's no longer incredible at all. What would be incredible is if anyone didn't.
by xg15 | 2026-01-29 19:07:46+00:00
OT, but I find this a perfect example why "data-driven design" is an empty term if you don't know what it's being designed for - i.e. what metrics are used to evaluate it in the end.

Both, optimizing for ease of shopping and optimizing for stringing the customer along as long as possible rely on the same purchase data - they just use diametrically opposite metrics for evaluation.
by pelasaco | 2026-01-29 19:07:59+00:00
Your laptop is an advanced computer, but the intelligence and computer power is in the cloud. GPU is expensive and no way we can provide it to everyone on earth. Material-wise we have limitations. Unless we destroy the earth, we won't have the amount of raw material that we need to automate cheap jobs. The ROI is too low.

So the likely trajectory is not a sudden wave of millions of helpful humanoids, but selective automation in structured environments like warehouses, factories, controlled logistics, where conditions are predictable and ROI is clear. Meanwhile, messy, unstructured "dirt jobs" persist as human work because humans are still the most adaptable system available at the lowest upfront cost, maybe not today in the welfare state in Europe, but for sure in other places on Earth...
by chrisjj | 2026-01-29 19:07:59+00:00
> their actual enforcement actions which in some cases seem intentionally unsatisfiable by any means other than "stop existing online"

OK, so you are disputing Ofcom's: "The measures that Ofcom recommends providers take to comply with their duties only relate to the design or operation of the service in the UK or as it affects UK users".

Feel free to show even one Ofcom demand that goes beyond service to UK users only.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-01-29 19:07:59+00:00
I asked a niche technical question the other day and ChatGPT found fora posts that Google would never surface in a million years. It also 100% lied to me about another niche technical question by literally contradicting a factual assertion I made in my question to prime it with context. It suffers from lack of corpus material when probing poorly documented realms of human experience. The value for the human in the chain is knowing when to doubt the machine.
by oliweisy69 | 2026-01-29 19:08:04+00:00
I've created what I believe to be a truly artificial emotionally intelligent AI. It is still in beta testing but I've been finding it super helpful, and far better than other AI's in this field. Would love to see what people think!

Would appreciate honest thoughts as I want to make it as useful and helpful for people as possible :)

Everyone who joins get free tokens, if you like it and want more, feel free to shoot an email and I'll give to you some. No need to pay at the moment, it is still new :)
by tasty_freeze | 2026-01-29 19:08:32+00:00
Indeed, I have a 2023 Corolla. The dealer didn't like it when I said "LE" stands for "Low End" as a joke (it means Limited Edition).

The technology for such a low end car is impressive. In addition to adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, the display shows the speed limit not by consulting a map but by reading the signs as you drive down the street. They call it RSA, Road Sign Assist. It also uses the camera and radar to alert when there are potential hazards (closing too quicky on the car in front, and lane changing into someone in the blind spot).

All that in a $23K car, built into that base price.
by mhl47 | 2026-01-29 19:08:40+00:00
Worriesome for sure.

However I would say that the cited studies are somewhat outdated already compared e.g. with GPT-5-Thinking doing 2mins of reasoning/search about a medical question. As far as I know Deepseeks search capabilities are not comparable and non of the models in the study spend a comparable amount of compute answering your specific question.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-29 19:09:04+00:00
> the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer

What? Basic lane keep and adaptive cruise control have been around a lot longer than Tesla.

Mercedes introduced ACC in 1999 (though Mitsubishi had an accelerator-only - could apply or ease off accelerator but not actively brake - in 1995).

Lane keeping was introduced again by Mitsubishi in the early 90s, though it was more 'lane departure warning'. But by 2000 Mercedes was offering it in some trucks and by 2003 Honda had it widely available in the Inspire with active lane keeping.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-29 19:09:10+00:00
My position is: sensors aren't the blocker, AI is the blocker.

Tesla put together a sensor suite that's amenable to AI techniques and gives them good enough performance. Then they moved on to getting better FSD hardware and rolling out newer versions of AI models.

Tesla gets it. They located the hard problem and put themselves on the hard problem. LIDAR wankers don't get it. They point at the easy problem and say "THIS IS WHY TESLA IS BAD, SEE?"

Outperforming humans in the sensing dept wasn't "hard" for over a decade now. You can play with sensors all day long and watch real world driving performance vary by a measurement error. Because "sensors" was never where the issue was.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-29 19:09:14+00:00
It's a CLI for especially web developers that prefer CLI tools over graphical installers and needing to have big IDEs installed like Visual Studio.

It's another small nail in the coffin of the monolithic Visual Studio, which is maybe exciting if you are rooting against Microsoft's paid products from their DevDiv and for their free-to-start options like VSCode.
by ezst | 2026-01-29 19:09:26+00:00
Happy to throw some of mine for that. Scala may not be as popular as some other languages, but it's relevant for use cases as diverse as those for which you would otherwise use Java/C#/Go, JS/TS, C/C++/Rust (via scala-jvm, scala-js and scala-native), and it's a very nice language to work with at that.
by iamrobertismo | 2026-01-29 19:09:32+00:00
I don't understand you reply here. Database startups have always had the consistent issue of cloud providers providing managed solutions without contributing back. It is why many moved to or use the AGPLv3 and why there was the whole SSPL controversy in the first place. Running a successful open source database startup is not trivial. None of this applies to SQLite.
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-29 19:09:36+00:00
>Put another way, do "one price for everyone" and "customer blindness" benefit rich people or poor people more?

I would say "one price for everyone" has indisputably been proven to benefit the poor more. This is just based on the last 100 or so years of the average persons live quality being raised by astronomical amounts because of the paradigm of customer blindness. Fixed prices are a very recent thing and if you look around it worked out pretty well. This new pricing is 100% predatory. backwards.
by boothby | 2026-01-29 19:09:50+00:00
No, the fact is that the child sustained minor injuries. And, fact: no human driver made the decision to drive a vehicle in that exact position and velocity. Imagining a human-driven vehicle in the same place is certainly valid, but your imagination is not fact. I imagine that the kid would be better off if no vehicle was there. But that's not a fact, that's an interpretation -- perhaps the kid would have ended up dead under an entirely different tire if they hadn't been hit by the waymo!
by QuantumGood | 2026-01-29 19:09:55+00:00
Thanks. Ever try Saffron extract standardized to crocin content (typically 2-3% crocin, dosed at 20-30 mg/day)?

One meta-analysis showed an antidepressant effect size around 1.2-1.6 , and unlike pharmaceutical antidepressants, saffron with standardized crocin has no well-documented or commonly reported withdrawal syndrome in clinical studies or reviews.
by eweise | 2026-01-29 19:10:00+00:00
Part of that I think is the culture and not the language. Personally I try to use the least powerful method that gets the job done and that usually keeps me unblocked. In practice that usually means using it as a better Java and not going down the functional monad path. I know scala has gone through a rough patch and maybe migrating from 2 to 3 is painful. But if you try starting a new project now with the latest Scala 3, I think you'll find that its pretty nice. Even IDE support is pretty good.
by nottorp | 2026-01-29 19:10:13+00:00
That was 2 days ago and it caught my eye.

Unfortunately, today in Romanian news:

Google translated link:

https://hotnews-ro.translate.goog/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool...

Original link:

https://hotnews.ro/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool-in-sangele-sof...

Informative title:

Cocaine, cannabis and alcohol in the blood of the driver of the minibus with Greek supporters involved in the accident in Timiș, prosecutors announce

Lol part:

The hypothesis was rejected by the company that rented the minibus. The company's lawyer stated to the Greek publication naftemporiki.gr that the rented vehicle did not have the lane assist system.
by joseda-hg | 2026-01-29 19:10:29+00:00
I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)

Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it

Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider

I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
by hinkley | 2026-01-29 19:10:44+00:00
I’ve seen this enough now to consider it a trope instead of a coincidence. There’s that one or two guys on the team who may be noteworthy in their math clever but only high school reading level, who use the same word in three parts of the code but use a different dictionary definition each time. They don’t see the big deal, they can keep it straight in their head, they insist. And if you can’t then you must be dumb instead of what you really are, which is sick of his bullshit.

Given enough time and rope, these parts of the code start to encroach on each other and the cracks start to show. There are definitely bugs the smart guy introduces because no, in fact, you can’t keep them straight in your head either.

So it does matter if you use, as a top of my head example, the word “account” for both the user and group management features of the app and to describe an entry to an incident report in another part. It will bite you in the ass, and it’s easier to change now when there are three references instead of 23.
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-29 19:10:58+00:00
A 25mph school zone? That seems fast. 15mph would be more the norm, which is in line with the 17mph the car believed itself to be traveling.

FYI, unless you are a commerical truck, a cop, or a racer, your speedometer will read slightly fast, sometimes as much as 5 to 10%. This is normal practice for cars as it limits manufacturer liability. You can check this using independant gps, ie not an in-dash unit. (Just imagine the court cases if a speedo read slower than the actual speed and you can understand why this started.)
by pelasaco | 2026-01-29 19:11:20+00:00
> Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?

Probably the robot manufacturer will be the car manufacturer. But Robot won't be for everyone, as Teslas are not for everyone, and again: The supply-chain for sensors, computer chips are already on the limit, imagine if we suddenly want to build Humanoids. So mostly you won't have your humanoid. You just won't need a Robot at home, because you won't have a home in first place.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-29 19:11:29+00:00
So different colleges have different courses, and focus on different things. So what I say next is very much YMMV.

Back when I did college there was a disconnect between what students thought college was for, and what colleges thought college was for. This was ultimately addressed in 2nd year, but it took me decades to really understand it.

As students we went to college thinking we were being taught skills to prepare us for getting jobs. Which given the endless "you need to go to college to get a decent job" mantra seems reasonable.

My college however believed that job skills are basically easily assimilated and can be quickly learned after you get the job. What makes it possible to learn fast are solid foundational skills and understandings.

For example a chef is better off learning the science of food, and honing knife skills. Once hired they can learn French recipes or Italian recipes or whatever.

In our case the complaint was about language; we learned in C and C++, with forays into assembler and Scheme. Job postings were for Cobol and Java (this was the 90s).

To show us language was irrelevant we did 10 assignments in 10 days. The same problem 10 times over, but in a different language every day. And this is pre www, so harder than it would be now. But still, turns out, really easy.

Now sure, good theory doesn't always make it into the real world in a perfect state. But I continue to be amazed at how much the fundamentals matter. 35 years later and I still ground my work in solid theory. And I notice a lot those around MD who are lacking that theory.

So, I'd say yes, lean into the theory. Yes the real world is messy, but knowing best practices, and encouraging their use always pays off in the long term.

I'll counterpoint that though that juniors always want huge sweeping changes to make it conform to their newly minted theory. Don't be that guy. It's OK to spend some time first getting to know your work system. Then you can enquire about past decisions made, and choices made. Then suggest small (and later larger) improvements.

Good luck, and have fun.
by gruturo | 2026-01-29 19:11:29+00:00
Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.

I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.

I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-29 19:11:46+00:00
Yes, there's no business case for humanoid robots.

There's a business case for robots that are specialized in specific repetitive actions, and we already see this in manufacturing. But general purpose humanoid robots make no sense.

They're incredibly expensive and, from what we've seen, worse across the board compared to humans. It's cheaper to just hire humans.

The human form is actually pretty shit at most things. But, it can do everything. There's just little purpose for that in a business case. You know what you're doing, so you just need robots to do that, not to try to be humans.

Like, okay, you can get a humanoid robot to be a burger flipper. But that makes no sense. You can, instead, have an automated burger cooking machine. Which do exist! I worked in a restaurant with one 10 years ago.
by jmathai | 2026-01-29 19:11:47+00:00
3d printers are great.

I attempted to productize a super niche idea I had for myself that I have ended up using multiple times. It's a simpler method of running wires without having to cut/patch drywall and drill through studs.

It started with trying to create a router-like device equipped with a motor (which was version 1 [1]).

But then iterated it to be a plate which can be attached to existing routers. That resulted in a drastically improved user experience which went from doing it all inside and making a mess to doing it in your garage with more precision. I've used the final design on 4+ projects at home and it has saved me so much time [2].

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i5p330nqo0cfrfx3gxf05/Wiresha...

[2] https://trywireshark.com (includes diagrams and videos of what I 3d printed)
by binalpatel | 2026-01-29 19:12:16+00:00
The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I gave it a try here with some opinionated choices:

https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith

Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash.

It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harness for the very specific environments they end up in (whether it's a business, or a super personalized agent for a user, etc). How to make it not a security nightmare is probably the biggest open question and why I assume Anthropic/others haven't gone full bore into it.
by Fischgericht | 2026-01-29 19:12:24+00:00
In the last couple of months it was really crazy: Some inconvenient truth came out, and within minutes the stock made a huge jump UP. Who regards it as a good sign if a car manufacturer just got ordered to pay $200 mio in damages in just one single Autopilot crash case, creating precedent for a lot more of lawsuits.

I think you could wake up one day, read the WSJ with the headline "All Tesla cars ever sold have just exploded at the same time, killing hundred thousands of people" - and the stock price would surge 10%.

I really would like to know what the stock price would do if Tesla had good news. But I guess we'll never find out about that one... ;)
by wat10000 | 2026-01-29 19:12:26+00:00
DC's system is OK. It suffers from being both a commuter rail system and a city transit system mashed together. It needs more tracks so that maintenance can be performed without massive delays and so express trains can be run. Coverage is lacking. It's good if you're going places it serves, but there are a lot of places it doesn't go, like Georgetown. And the hub-and-spoke model makes it quite painful for a relatively decentralized city. Going between, say, Bethesda and Tysons is physically possible but takes ages because you have to go all the way downtown first.

It gets a lot of things right and is great if it has a good route for the trips you want to make when you want to make it, but mostly it shines because the situation is so much worse in any other American city that's not New York and maybe Chicago.
by runako | 2026-01-29 19:12:57+00:00
I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)

In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
by mhykim | 2026-01-29 19:13:01+00:00
I think there will be bad actors in any field, and right now, a lot of agent-based outreach might fall into that bucket, so its rational to be initially skeptical.

The more interesting shift isnt whether humans will keep using email with agents, but whether agents can become distinguishable from noise. Historically, we ignored anonymous calls but we engaged with known vendors that had reputation, contracts, and consequences.

Once an agent has a persistent identity/a domain, trust becomes something that can be accumulated over time instead of being assumed per message.
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-29 19:13:17+00:00
No it's not. The same principle applies to rules of right of way on the water. Technically the 32 foot sailboat has right of way over a triple-E because the triple-E uses mechanical propulsion.

You have a responsibility to be cautious in heavy equipment no matter what the signage on the road says, and that includes keeping a speed at which you can stop safely if a person suddenly steps onto the road in situations where people are around. If you are driving past a busy bar in downtown, a drunk person might step out and you have a responsibility to assume that might happen. If you have to go slower sometimes, tough.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-29 19:13:28+00:00
Motorola 6809 was a great improvement over Zilog Z80 (previously the best "8-bit" processor), but unfortunately it was introduced too late, in 1979, when the transition towards 16-bit CPUs able to address more than 64 kB of memory had already started.

Motorola had made the mistake of introducing at the same time 2 different incompatible ISAs, one for CPUs covering the low-end of the market, MC6809, and one for CPUs covering the high-end of the market, MC68000. This mistake has cost them the chance of being selected for the IBM PC (because MC68000 was considered too expensive, while MC6809 was not future-proof, with its limited addressing space). After they have seen the success of Intel with its 2 software-compatible CPUs, 8086 for the high end and 8088 for the low end, Motorola has also introduced MC68008, a MC68000 variant for cheaper computers, but it was too late, as the IBM PC became dominant.