MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thayne | 2026-01-29 22:18:24+00:00
It says what to do if you are over 18, but thinks you are under 18. But what if it identifies someone under 18 as being older?

And what if you are over 18, but don't want to be exposed to that "adult" content?

> Viral challenges that could push risky or harmful behavior

And

> Content that promotes extreme beauty standards, unhealthy dieting, or body shaming

Seem dangerous regardless of age.
by dlubarov | 2026-01-29 22:18:47+00:00
Trump is resisting the idea [1], though it's too early to say how it will ultimately go. It's a confusing time, particularly those who were fighting for an end to the aid, but couldn’t fathom supporting something that Netanyahu wants.

What not everyone understands is that US aid comes with strings attached. Israel developed multiple fighter jets in the past, for example, but canceled them mainly due to US pressure.

[1] https://jewishinsider.com/2026/01/trump-netanyahu-u-s-milita...
by tchalla | 2026-01-29 22:18:58+00:00
> Notably, this is the second time CEO Aviad Maizels has sold a company to Apple. In 2013, he sold PrimeSense, a 3D-sensing company that played a key role in Apple’s transition from fingerprint sensors to facial recognition on iPhones.
Q.ai launched in 2022 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Gradient Ventures, and others. Its founding team, including Maizels and co-founders Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya, will join Apple as part of the acquisition.

Twice, well done!
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 22:19:05+00:00
It absolutely is reasonable to expect people to drive below the limit. Speed limits are just that, maximum upper bounds of how fast you legally can go, not "recommended" speeds or minimum speeds, nor are they necessarily "safe" speeds. It's just a legal upper bounds.

It is a drivers responsibility to drive for the conditions. If conditions are calling for driving 40% slower, then that's what you do and suck it up.

If too many roads have conditions that require that, take that up with your municipality to fix the situation. Or, even better, advocate for better public transit and trains, and designing cities to move people, not move cars.
by nearbuy | 2026-01-29 22:19:11+00:00
I don't think this comparison is meaningful given the sample size of 1 and the differences between the between your datasets. The standard error margins from the small sample size alone are so large that you could not reasonably claim humans are safer (95% CI for Waymo is about 1 per 20 million miles to 1 per 8 billion miles). Then there are the dataset differences:

1. The NHTSA data is based on police-reported crash data, which reports far fewer injuries than the CDC reports based on ED visits. The child in this case appeared mostly unharmed and situations like this would likely not be counted in the NHTSA data.

2. Waymo taxis operate primarily in densely populated urban environments while human driver milage includes highways and rural roads where you're much less likely to collide with pedestrians per mile driven.

Waymo's 90% crash reduction claim is at least an apples-to-apples comparison.
by jstanley | 2026-01-29 22:19:17+00:00
Sure, the part I thought was "easy to say in hindsight" was:

> I would not have taken this gig unless you had verbal confirmation that the Sheriff knows about it and has signed off.

We don't know that! We don't know what we would have done in that scenario, especially in the context of a thread about the very outcome one's supposed foresight would have prevented.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias#Attempts_to_red... :

> Research suggests that people still exhibit the hindsight bias even when they are aware of it or possess the intention of eradicating it. [...] The only observable way to decrease hindsight bias in testing is to have the participant think about how alternative hypotheses could be correct.

So here's an alternative hypothesis:

"Hey, do you reckon we should clear this with the county first? The sheriff might come and arrest us on the basis that nobody told him we were going to break into the courthouse"

"Nah, don't worry about it, I've done this sort of thing hundreds of times. And besides, the state has superiority over the county anyway, so even if we get caught which let's face it we won't because we're leet hackers and very incognito... the sheriff won't have any power to do anything to us as soon as we tell him it's authorised by the state"

"SGTM"
by sirwhinesalot | 2026-01-29 22:19:47+00:00
I remember the problems with the WinRT APIs being tied to specific Windows versions (still are, just a smaller surface area, so less of an issue). With the old service pack model it wouldn't be an issue but with constant OS releases it was too much churn.

I thought they had solved the worst problem with WinUI2, a bit like the compatibility library in Android, so you only had to bundle the more "volatile" bits while still delegating most things to the OS.

But then they went and threw all that out the windows (pun intended) with WinUI3 which even has its own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.

Unlike the DirectX redistributables of old it's not even backwards compatible so you can't tell people "just download the WinAppSDK runtime", they have to install the specific version you used when developing your app.

You get that download "for free" if you use a .appx, but with a regular installer you're on your own. Even the way apps link to the WindowsAppSDK is a mess with a weird bootstrapping process.

Not worth the headache.
by perrygeo | 2026-01-29 22:20:12+00:00
Wat? Android, Linux, BSD (incl iOS and Mac) absolutely dominate the market in terms of mind share and deployment. I can't think of another philosophy that is so directly, causally responsible for billions of dollars of realized value.

It sounds like you're parroting the corporate line of the early 80s. "Making money directly selling software artifacts is the only way to win." Which, as we know in retrospect, was a completely failed strategy, steamrolled by companies which... wait for it... adopted more flexible technology based on the Unix philosophy.
by netsharc | 2026-01-29 22:20:28+00:00
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said this in 1928:

> Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.

https://law.jrank.org/pages/11566/Opinion-U-S-Supreme-Court-...

Timothy McVeigh used the beginning of this quote as a statement before his conviction, FWIW.. https://archive.is/xineB
by zen928 | 2026-01-29 22:20:37+00:00
IMO, if you view your question from the ethical framework of "do no harm" i.e. the hippocratic oath instead of "move fast and break things", I can clearly see reason for the apprehension. The standards aren't positioned to catch "quack medicine" but to require full understanding before asking someone else to put something in their bodies. It's somewhat of an entitled stance that youd be okay with other people possibly needlessly dying in any circumstance for something experimental, and not one I'd ever want taken as an official stance by a regulated medical body.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-29 22:20:45+00:00
> top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be training full speed ahead.

I don't think this makes much sense because the "waste" of hardware infrastructure by going from 99.999% duty cycle to 99% is still only ~1%. It's linear in the fraction of forgone capacity, while the fraction of power costs you save from simply shaving off the costliest peaks and shifting that demand to the lows is superlinear.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 22:20:54+00:00
Agreed.

Car culture in the US is toxic, and a lot of accidents and fatalities are a result of how poorly designed our infrastructure is. We design for cars, not for people (just one more lane bro, will totally fix traffic. Nevermind that a train can move double the capacity of that entire line of traffic).

Cars are the wrong solution, particularly in urban areas. A self driving car is still a car, and comes along with all the same problems that cars cause.
by shawabawa3 | 2026-01-29 22:20:55+00:00
> child pedestrian injury rate at ~2-4x higher than the US human average.

If this incident had happened with a human driven vehicle would it even have been reported?

I don't know exactly what a 6mph collision looks like but I think it's likely the child had nothing more than some bruises and if a human has done it they would have just said sorry, made sure they were ok, and left
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 22:21:06+00:00
> Is drinking common for physical pentesters?

Absolutely not.

Physical pentest scenarios are highly likely to end with an alarm tripping and the police arriving, except in cases where the alarm wasn't armed, didn't have connectivity, or was broken.

An encounter with the police was virtually guaranteed in this case. Drinking before the job was highly unusual and irresponsible.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-29 22:21:10+00:00
> Posting wrong details on a blog out of carelessness and without deliberate ill intention is not fraud more than using a wrong definition of fraud is fraud.

There's a concept of "constructive fraud", for cases where there was no deliberate intent to deceive, but the degree of negligence was so great that the fraudlent-looking outcome can just be considered fraud.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-29 22:21:35+00:00
Yes and no. For one thing the radiator/reservoir cap is clearly marked "Do not open when hot." But the general point really is that if you have no idea how something works, you will be helpless when it doesn't work. If (at some time in the future) the only thing you know how to do is ask an AI to do something for you, then you'll be not only helpless without it, but less and less able to judge whether what it is telling you is even correct. Like taking your car to a mechanic because it's overheating, and him saying you need a new water pump and radiator when maybe all you needed was a new pressure cap but you never even knew to try that first.

Of course you can't know everything. There a point at which you have to rely on other people's expertise. But to me it makes sense to have a basic understanding of how the things you depend on every day work.
by observationist | 2026-01-29 22:22:14+00:00
This is one of the reasons the RLM methodology works so well. You have access to as much information as you want in the overall environment, but only the things relevant to the task at hand get put into context for the current task, and it shows up there 100% of the time, as opposed to lossy "memory" compaction and summarization techniques, or probabilistic agent skills implementations.

Having an agent manage its own context ends up being extraordinarily useful, on par with the leap from non-reasoning to reasoning chats. There are still issues with memory and integration, and other LLM weaknesses, but agents are probably going to get extremely useful this year.
by make3 | 2026-01-29 22:22:17+00:00
It would be very easy for them to switch the various (compute) cost vs performance knobs down depending on load to maintain a certain latency; you would see oscillations like this, especially if the benchmark is not always run exactly at the same time every day.

& it would be easy for them to start with a very costly inference setup for a marketing / reputation boost, and slowly turn the knobs down (smaller model, more quantized model, less thinking time, fewer MoE experts, etc)
by 12345ieee | 2026-01-29 22:22:51+00:00
The early theorists of capitalism didn't imagine that advanced psychology (that didn't even exist back then) would be used to convince people to buy $product.

Messages of that sophistication are always dangerous, and modern advertising is the most widespread example of it.

The hostility is more than justified, I can only hope the whole industry is regulated downwards, even if whatever company I work for sells less.
by ra7 | 2026-01-29 22:23:21+00:00
There have been many instances of Waymo preventing a collision by predicting pedestrians emerging from occlusion. This isn’t new information at all for them. Some accidents are simply physically impossible to prevent. I don’t know for sure if this one was one of those, but I’m fairly confident it couldn’t have been from prediction failure.

See past examples:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hubWIuuz-e4 — first save is a child emerging from a parked car. Notice how Waymo slows down preemptively before the child starts moving.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/ivQPuExwNW — detects foot movement from under the bus.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/LURJ8isQJ6 — stops for dogs and children running onto the street at night.
by philsnow | 2026-01-29 22:23:53+00:00
> dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work

This has got to be the "todo list app" for people who aren't app devs; mine [0] is for MacOS + launchd + hammerspoon and I use Shottr for annotation

[0] https://github.com/philsnow/shots-filed
by dijit | 2026-01-29 22:24:08+00:00
I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers. In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually more expensive now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.

The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.

So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.

[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio...
[2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf
[3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb
[4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
[5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
by directevolve | 2026-01-29 22:24:21+00:00
A point I think is crucial to mention is that “effect size” is just standardized mean difference.

If a minority of patients benefit hugely and most get no benefit, then you get a modest effect size.

This is probably why this discussion always has a lot of people saying “yeah, it didn’t help me at all” and a few saying “it changed my life.”

I believe we should be focusing on more relevant statistical methods for assessing this hypothesis formally. Basically, using mean differences is GIGO if you assume you’re comparing a bimodal or highly skewed distribution to a bell curve.
by ericmay | 2026-01-29 22:24:50+00:00
> If you consider that it's perfectly fine for an ally to threaten to invade

I don't consider it fine, but I don't think this means we're also not allies. I understand the reaction. I largely disagree with our actions. The US would still come to the defense of France, Germany, UK, &c. We are still in NATO, we still participate in and lead military exercises, we still have troops stationed throughout NATO-aligned countries, and more.

> Back to Europe, I don't remember hearing that China threatened Europe militarily.

Ha, well they're not threatening Europe they are actively providing assistance in terms of materials and equipment and other support to Russia as it continues to wage war against Ukraine and prepare for a broader war against Europe. Oh and sprinkle in some hacking, and disinformation campaigns to fuel European far-right groups too.

The main criticism I have here of the EU is that they seem to think the US should come and help Europe, provide assistance against Russia, &c. but when it comes to China all of a sudden it's "they didn't attack us, they aren't threatening us, &c" - you can't have it both ways. If you don't think China is a problem or whatever, you can't blame the United States for pulling forces and support from Europe when the US feels threatened by China. Russia isn't threatening us, not going to attack us, so maybe we should just do some good trade deals with Russia and unlock resources. This is exactly how Europe is behaving with respect to China.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-29 22:25:02+00:00
Intel would be in the very same bind as every other DRAM producer who's trying to expand production today, only far worse because they have practically no experience fabbing DRAM compared to logic. (You can fab eDRAM on logic processes, but you'd only do that out of sheer desperation since the cost per bit is much higher.)

What they could do very easily in this market is bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus with modern PCIe performance.
by jfengel | 2026-01-29 22:25:13+00:00
I don't believe that it erodes the public trust any more than it already has. For those who oppose the administration, this is just one lie added to the top of the pile. They don't have any trust to erode.

For his supporters, it's yet more proof that they are in the right, and that opponents are weak cowards. The fact that the image was manipulated doesn't really register. At most, it's just a way of making the truth clearer -- the real truth, even if the photographer didn't happen to click the camera at just the right moment to capture it the conventional way. For them, their trust keeps going up.

This is the standstill we'll be at for quite some time. To erode public trust further, there would have to be consequences that people tied back to the manipulated pictures. I don't see that happening today.
by nout | 2026-01-29 22:25:25+00:00
Everyone has to balance how much pain they get on Windows from the restarts, slowness, updates, etc versus how much pain they get from occasionally having to run some command in terminal window. I get your points about there being rough edges - the good thing is that Linux is a very good system for fixing Linux issues. Everything is tailored for that :)

Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.

And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-29 22:25:32+00:00
I mean if I'm totally honest, it could be beneficial to me if something like this comes to be. Even in the developed world, we have a bunch of annoying people who complain/cry constantly about dumb things. They do that instead of doing something, whereas I can excuse the people trapped in hellholes overseas because it really isn't their fault they were oppressed and mistreated.

They'd have their own economy and "life" and leave the rest of us alone. It would be completely transactional, so I'd have zero reason to feel bad if they do it voluntarily.

If they can be happy in a simulated world, and others can be happy in the real world, then everyone wins!
by niyikiza | 2026-01-29 22:26:05+00:00
Similar space, different scope/Approach.
Tenuo warrants track who authorized what across delegation chains (human to agent, agent to sub-agent, sub-agent to tool) with cryptographic proof & PoP at each hop.
Trace tracks provenance. Warrants track authorization flow.
Both are open specs. I could see them complementing each other.
by ufmace | 2026-01-29 22:26:13+00:00
I don't think I'd want to take much from such a statistical result yet. A sample size of 1 accident just isn't enough information to get a real rate from, not that I want to see more collisions with children. Though this is also muddied by the fact that Waymo will most likely adjust their software to make this less likely, and we won't know exactly how or how many miles each version has. I'd also like to see the data for human incidents over just the temperate suburban areas like Waymo operates in.
by slashdave | 2026-01-29 22:26:19+00:00
Interesting paper, thanks! But, the authors escape the three paradoxes they present by introducing training limits (compute, factorization, distribution). Kind of a different problem here.

What I object to are the "scaling maximalists" who believe that if enough training data were available, that complicated concepts like a world model will just spontaneously emerge during training. To then pile on synthetic data from a general-purpose generative model as a solution to the lack of training data becomes even more untenable.
by dekhn | 2026-01-29 22:27:28+00:00
I used to work at a biomedical institution that did cancer treatment experiments on dogs. There was basically a kennel and periodically they would take a dog and irradiate it.

That was fine in the abstract, but there were computational labs above the kennel and periodically you'd just get this huge outporing of dogs barking and howling and it was really hard to get any work done.
by Sir_Twist | 2026-01-29 22:27:37+00:00
“Q.ai is a startup developing a technology to analyze facial expressions and other ways for communication.”

This is an interesting acquisition given their rumored Echo Show / Nest Hub competitor (1). Maybe this is part of their (albeit flawed and delayed) attempt to revitalize the Siri branding under their Apple Intelligence marketing. When you have to say the exact right words to Siri, or else she will add “Meeting at 10” as an all day calendar event, people get frustrated, and that non-technical illusion of the “digital assistant” is lost. If this is the model of understanding Apple have of their customers’ perception of Siri, then maybe their thinking is that giving Siri more non-verbal personable capability could be a differentiating factor in the smart hub market, along with the LLM rebuild. I could also see this tying into some sort of strategy for the Vision Pro.

Now, whether this hypothetical differentiating factor is worth $2 billion, I’m not so sure on, but I guess time will tell.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/05/apple-smart-home-hub-20...
by cess11 | 2026-01-29 22:28:09+00:00
"computer culpability"

That idea is really weird. Culpa (and dolus) in occidental law is a thing of the mind, what you understood or should have understood.

A database does not have a mind, and it is not a person. If it could have culpa, then you'd be liable for assault, perhaps murder, if you took it apart.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-29 22:28:39+00:00
This nonsense has been parroted so often by now there should be a name for it.

And I'll be happy to prove you wrong: there are many things that Apple could do but hasn't done yet that would make them money and yet nobody is suing them for that. For instance they could make the cut 35% or 50% and if they don't then shareholders would sue. But they won't.