MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Opinion on self driving cars breaking the law?
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-29 18:46:38+00:00
I've witnessed Waymo cars breaking traffic laws, driving erratically, and driving aggressively. They may be better than humans but is that relevant?

4 examples:

* Waymo pulls for pickup over blocking a parking garage entrance/exit so it would sit there for 3-5 minutes (not sure what its latest wait for passenger time is). I've seen this multiple times.

AFAIK this is not illegal, just annoying.

* Waymo stops at a red "no stopping" curb to pick up / drop off passengers. Often this happens right under the "no stopping" sign. This is very common.

This is 100% illegal, at least in California. Some people might find it acceptable. It's rarely prosecuted unless a parking citation officer is nearby and they won't bother to report. They'll just tell you to move so if you've managed to pick up your passenger you get away with it.

* Waymo, wanting to turn left into a side street. There is heavy traffic (5:30pm) and ~15 cars waiting to turn left. Waymo passes the 15 cars, then makes a u-turn from the center lane, past the left turn area. There are ~7 cars trying to turn right into the same side street. Waymo passes 7 of them and then shoves its way into the side street.

While it's technically illegal to turn right if you're not in the right lane, the company would likely claim they were in the right lane by shoving their way into it.

* Waymos constantly flash their turning signals but don't turn.

This makes driving around them hard because they signal, you back off to give them room, then the stop signaling, or then signal the opposite direction. I see this daily.

Signaling and not turning is technically illegal but hard to prove intent.

What's HNers feelings on this. Should Waymo care? If it's on average better than humans it's ok? Should Waymo be held to a higher standard as it's effectively 1 driver?
by this_user | 2026-01-29 18:46:48+00:00
They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.

Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.
by mrandish | 2026-01-29 18:46:56+00:00
Benchmark tracking of cloud AI performance is going to be crucial going forward. Vendors are selling a service that by its nature is very difficult for customers to gauge day to day. How will I know if a code revision is ~2.5% less good today than it was yesterday? Or queries during peak load hours use one less 'expert' in their MoE?

Yet vendor's costs to deliver these services are skyrocketing, competition is intense and their ability to subsidize with investor capital is going away. Their incentives to reduce costs by dialing back performance a few percent or under-resourcing peak loads will be overwhelming. And I'm just a hobbyist now. If I was an org with dozens or hundreds of devs, as prices climb I'd want credible ways to verify the QoS and minimum service levels are being fulfilled long after a vendor has won the contract.
by mrtksn | 2026-01-29 18:47:00+00:00
I still remember the IE6 fiasco, MS was stubborn and they didn't do anything to fix the issues(that they intentionally created) when they had monopoly on web browser market share. Then Firefox got traction and later Chrome did the finishing stroke and by the time Microsoft was very sorry and they even took action to steer people away from IE it was too late.

I left Windows for macOS like 15 years ago with a hackintosh then got the real thing and never looked back, MS is a terrible company to be trusted with critical infrastructure. I guess they can't help themselves to milk to the extinction whenever they get the opportunity to do so.

With all their faults, Apple and Google are much better custodians of the digital age.
by radiator_1451 | 2026-01-29 18:47:40+00:00
> Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot

Note that this is just a story you made up, we really don't know what happened. You're also leaving out that if somebody did this by accident, they also chose to keep quiet about it for 20 years. Doesn't that speak about "intent"?

With my example with the wife, I'm simply trying to establish why you seem to consider children (or rather babies) to be not worthy of the same justice as adults. How about an adult who accidentally kills their elderly parent, would you consider that worth investigating, or should it also not be investigated on the principle of "they lost their parent"? Or further, at what age do you no longer consider it morally justifiable to accidentally (or otherwise) kill one's child and cover it up? 5 years old, 10, 18?

You seem to have very strong opinions about this given that you'll so quickly say things like:

> those people are bad people and their ideas are bad ideas

> everyone turns into a screeching moron

Can you explain to me what opinions you think I'm "espousing"? Preferably without turning into a "screeching moron" yourself.

> Shit happens.

Just to be clear, by this you're referring to accidentally poisoning one's child to death?
Ask HN: Junior getting lost
by TheRegularOne | 2026-01-29 18:47:43+00:00
Hello those who still read forums.

I have recently graduated from a college and started working as a junior dev (trying to consume as much knowledge from senior colleagues as I can now) and it seems that the real world is kind of a different story compared to the college practice.

In the college we've been taught about design patterns and all these responsibilities like domain, application, infrastructure, UI. Domain should never depend on infrastructure or application layer and so on. But the projects I got have domain that depend on infrastructure and another one where application has a reference directly to infrastructure and been told that this is correct implementation... doh..

I think I was kind of a good at listening for the lectures, but I now am doubting about, whether it was worth learning stuff at all lol since it's so controversial out there. I am, of course, in no position to question senior dev, but what do you guys think - is it really normal that all the college so called "best practices" go straight to the trash bin or am I just misunderstanding the real-work-like context?
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-29 18:47:48+00:00
Our local school has them unload a block away unless they are handicapped. A kid isn't going to die walking a block. But its pointless because they still allow residential on street parking around the school, and my son has to use a crosswalk where cars routinely park so close to, I had to tell him that the traffic (pretty heavy) on the road wouldn't see him easily, and he should always ease his way into a crosswalk and not assume he would be easily seen.
by Projectiboga | 2026-01-29 18:47:49+00:00
The creator of the Serotonin hypothesis admitted it was wrong, and he shifted to melatonin's precursor later in his career. The challange with any research in this area is Serotonin and Melatonin both affect biological functions by gradient activity not lock and key receptor models. This pair is how plants and animals respond to seasonal changes which vary year to year. Serotonin is the warm and light lide melatonin is for cool and or dark.

My personal preference is to always suggest getting actual daylight on your retina for 20 min three times a week. Not through glasses, including eyeglasses, but can be through eyelids. That loads transferatin, as in transfer, this loads the enzyme that make serotonin. This then allows the body a better chance to make the intermediate between Serotionin and Melatonin, and is the one believed to help. But the patents have expired so it is like an orphan drug now.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3779905/
by Swizec | 2026-01-29 18:47:52+00:00
The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools:

Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster.

You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.
by ric2b | 2026-01-29 18:47:57+00:00
Windows is a small part of their revenue on purpose, because the OS monopoly enables them to sell and push a lot of their other revenue streams. Windows has always been easy to pirate for the same reason.

But make no mistake, it is very important for Microsoft and leadership, or they wouldn't keep updating it so much and talking about it so much on their keynotes and marketing.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-29 18:47:58+00:00
Colon Blow: "It would take over 30,000 bowls. [ a giant pyramid of cereal bowls shoots up from under the man, who yells in terror as it rises ] To eat that much oat bran, you’d have to eat ten bowls a day, every day for eight and a half years."

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/89/89ecolonblow.phtml
by misiti3780 | 2026-01-29 18:48:00+00:00
I have to admit, I love my model S and have been over all bullish of TSLA but this news makes me very bearish. There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years and the model s and model X are cool pieces of technology. If they dont start rolling out robotaxi extremely quickly to new locations, I cant imagine the stock going anywhere but down.
by genewitch | 2026-01-29 18:48:24+00:00
i had to search to find this post again. I was on my android phone talking to someone on a similar android phone (both samsung galaxy notes, but his is 1 generation newer); i mentioned this article, and i was very vocal about how i used to mock people who said "think about the amount of data that would take! from every user!"

anyhow both our NAS died on the same weekend, across the country from eachother; his has bad drives, mine had a bad PSU; unrelated. However, we were discussing switching to dell servers and SAS drives, as they're basically "infinite lifespan" compared to our use cases. I asked, forgetting that DELL have BMC/built in boards for SAS, if he had a SAS card, as i had one, that uses the cables that have 1 plug on the card side, and 3-4 plugs for drives on the other, and that i had ordered it for my "make a PC a NAS" project, but wasn't using it anymore.

I was already on amazon on my computer looking for a kitchen cart. i was idly scrolling around while on the phone, after all the above was said.
https://i.imgur.com/vBLntih.png

yeah. So i bought the card and cables on ebay five years ago, the card and cables do nothing for me, only for my friend (potentially, but Dell comes with SAS ready to go, no cables needed), and i last looked at this style of cables 5 or 6 years ago. I haven't searched amazon for "replacement" parts or NAS gear on my side, either.

This is such a hilarious coincidence!!!!
by esseph | 2026-01-29 18:48:43+00:00
> And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.

Cult. It's a cult.

There's a contingent of tech bros that think they're "smart" because they latched on to Tesla and have been riding its nuts through Elon's political stunts without a care in the world. Tesla failing would mean to them that they failed. They can't fail, they're too smart. If they just HODL for a little longer, then he'll get something magical out and validate their decision making. Sunk cost running wild.
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-01-29 18:48:43+00:00
Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.
by asim | 2026-01-29 18:48:51+00:00
Take the positive spin. What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns. I mean there's a lot of useful applications for it. I don't like the framing at this time, but I also get where it's going. The engineer in me is drawn to it, but the Muslim in me is very scared to hear anyone talk about creating worlds.... But again I have to separate my view from the reality that this could have very positive real world benefits when you can simulate scenarios. So I could put in a 2 pager or 10 page scenario that gets played out or simulated and allow me to walk through it. Not just predictive stuff but let's say things that have happened so I can map crime scenes or anything. In the end this performance art is because they are a product company being Benchmarked by wall street and they'll need customers for the technology but at the same time they probably already have uses for it internally.
Show HN: GodScore CI – a CI gate that blocks risky changes before production
by PapaShack45 | 2026-01-29 18:49:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I just released GodScore CI, a GitHub Action that adds a survivability-aware gate to CI.

Most CI systems answer:
“Does this change work right now?”

GodScore CI asks:
“Does this change reduce the system’s ability to survive, recover, or self-correct over time?”

It runs in two modes:
- Free: advisory warnings only
- Paid ($10/month per repo): enforcement that can fail the build when risk crosses a threshold

It’s intentionally opinionated and designed to catch slow, irreversible degradation that traditional tests miss.

Repo: https://github.com/willshacklett/godscore-ci
Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/godscore-ci

Happy to answer questions or hear skepticism.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-29 18:49:25+00:00
I haven't been professionally involved in AWS in some time, and never was involved in pricing.

Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.

AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
by harikb | 2026-01-29 18:49:28+00:00
Sorry I am confused. I have a "WhatsApp Business Account", tied to an "Business" (verifications all done). What I am talking about is registering a phone number that acts as the "Sender/Responder" of the messages from my customers. I am not trying to use WhatsApp from my phone manually, but have my app communicate with my customers programatically. Hope this is clear.

I can't do any of the above,

1. Requesting a new test number. Test numbers are placeholder 555 number that works only within WhatsApp test network. Can't get one.

2. Registering a new, real phone number (SIM obtained from a regular tele provider)

3. Disconnecting the WhatsApp product from the Facebook App to reset the integration.

Although the FB app is being used, I don't have any WhatsAppp users (because I have not even made the product), so wiping out any WBA accounts and starting fresh is also okay, if someone can do this.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-29 18:49:37+00:00
> Vitamin D and Omega-3 are the two supplements that consistently appear to be super powerful in small studies and then fail to do anything significant at all in larger studies.

That statement is broadly true for most outcomes studied, but specifically for depression the larger study results are pretty mixed.

VITAL (the heavily cited metastudy) shows no effect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32749491/

But there are other large metastudies like this one for Vit D (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39552387/) and this one for Omega 3 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31383846/) that do show robust moderate effects.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-29 18:50:05+00:00
Is it just me or is that prompt... not ideal? There's no concrete simple goals, no mention of testing, no loop. No description of the problem space or what success should look like. One-shot might work for this with frontier models, but they often need more for success.

Saying "any SRE should be able to do this" is already problematic, because regardless of title, there are smarter people and dumber people. You're taking a gamble giving a human SRE this prompt. Whether it's AI or human, give it more context and instruction, or failure is likely. (And more importantly: use a loop so it can fix itself!)

(also: SRE is too generic... there are a dozen kinds of SRE)
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-29 18:50:08+00:00
When I was a kid (age 12, or so), I got hit by a truck while crossing the road on my bike.

In that particular instance, I was cited myself -- after the fact, at the hospital -- and eventually went before a judge. In that hearing, it was established that I was guilty of failing to yield at an intersection.

(That was a rather long time ago and I don't remember the nature of the punishment that resulted. It may have been as little as a stern talking-to by the judge.)
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 18:50:24+00:00
> To be clear, are you suggesting the United States in general is the "immediate problem" and not Russia's invasion of Ukraine?

No, I am suggesting that the United States, not China, poses the more immediate, direct threat to EU states and their treaty allies. Both the China and, under Trump, the US are also contributing to the problem of the Russian war in Ukraine, but that's not the comparison point.
by delecti | 2026-01-29 18:50:50+00:00
I have absolutely no idea what the current frontline treatment drugs are for literally any form of cancer, and would bet the same is true for almost everyone else here. Most of the exceptions are people who know the frontline treatment drugs for one or two forms of cancer that impacted them personally. "And then you never hear about it again" is subtly implying that the drugs behind headlines never proceed beyond that point, but I didn't hear about it when the current frontline became the frontline treatment for any form of cancer. Most people just aren't in the loop about the evolution of the field of oncology, beyond pop-sci headlines.

And yes, most headlines like this don't result in changes to the care provided to anybody outside of clinical trials, but some do, and you and I probably won't hear about those either.
by dang | 2026-01-29 18:50:58+00:00
[Hello! I'm a mod here - I've done some minor edits to your text to fit HN's conventions (e.g. no need to sign your posts with your username), and I added "Ask HN" to the title since that's the convention for text posts - see https://news.ycombinator.com/ask in the top tab.

Welcome to HN and if you run into any problems or have questions, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Same invitation goes to everybody of course!]
by mhykim | 2026-01-29 18:51:18+00:00
The tradeoff isnt agents vs humans its where humans sit in the loop.

Sure hiring 10–100 humans gives accountability, but reality is it doesn't scale in any comparable way compared to agents in speed, coverage, or responsiveness. The sheer volume agents can pump out(more vendors, more quotes, faster cycles) is the benefit, while humans retain accountability at the decision boundary.

In practice the agent does the gruntwork, and the human gets looped in when confidence is low. Accountability doesnt dissapear, it gets concentrated where it matters most
by boogrpants | 2026-01-29 18:51:30+00:00
The biggest impact in engineering jobs is end of ZIRP fueled trickle down Ponzi schemes.

It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them.

Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job economy is way closer to the pre-2010s.

Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still living in 2019.
by in-silico | 2026-01-29 18:51:56+00:00
Everyone here seems too caught up in the idea that Genie is the product, and that its purpose is to be a video game, movie, or VR environment.

That is not the goal.

The purpose of world models like Genie is to be the "imagination" of next-generation AI and robotics systems: a way for them to simulate the outcomes of potential actions in order to inform decisions.
by duffyjp | 2026-01-29 18:52:22+00:00
I don't know if it's me, but right now nvidia on Linux is the least stable it's ever been. I have two desktops, one dedicated Linux box and one I dual boot. On the Linux only one I bought a dirt cheap ($30) Radeon Pro WX 3200 so my system won't crash constantly. I still have the nvidia card for CUDA stuff. It's working great for what I do.

I have a second used Radeon on the way for the other system. It's insane, but this is the only solution. If my monitor turns off or I switch inputs, I can't get it back when connected to the nvidia cards. I've done every troubleshooting step I can find, it's just a broken ecosystem.
by smsm42 | 2026-01-29 18:52:51+00:00
I think "reserves" and "extremely risky investment fund" are supposed to be different things?

Then again, given Mozilla Foundation's stellar record of taking on massive corporations and crushing them, and given that they themselves not owe their very financial existence not even a little bit solely to donations from a certain mega-corporation, maybe it's not that risky - more an assured success.
by stephenr | 2026-01-29 18:52:53+00:00
Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.

Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.

AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free.
Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.

(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.
by dang | 2026-01-29 18:52:53+00:00
On HN, we go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I haven't read the OP so am not commenting on the quality of this article. But there have certainly been good-for-HN submissions from esquire.com in the past. Some of these, for example:

Who Pays for the Arts? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726452 - Oct 2024 (320 comments)

Why are debut novels failing to launch? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612321 - June 2024 (246 comments)

Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39597525 - March 2024 (168 comments)

Vaporwave was created then destroyed by the internet (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015428 - July 2021 (86 comments)

Why Men Love War (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16999449 - May 2018 (174 comments)

The Drugging of the American Boy (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16517588 - March 2018 (151 comments)

The Falling Man - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471679 - Sept 2016 (79 comments)

Teller on theft in magic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4540742 - Sept 2012 (77 comments)

The Perfect Compliment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4199015 - July 2012 (61 comments)

Was the Wheel of Fortune one letter solve really a miracle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891268 - Nov 2010 (69 comments)

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129880 - Feb 2010 (10 comments)