MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-31 02:01:06+00:00
Only .61% of car crashes involve fatalities, so that’s like .2% of car crashes you are referring to. Probably more due to alcohol, but we don’t know the ratio of accidents that involve alcohol, which would be more telling.

> How sure are we that the people who don't trust technology are older? And again, the insurance company already knows your age

Boomers are already the primary anti-EV demographic, with the complaint that real cars have engines. It doesn’t matter if they know your age of state laws keep them from acting on it.

> that more of a problem for the self-driving pool? Also, isn't most of the cost that the sensors aren't as common and they'd end up costing less as a result of volume production anyway?

I think you misunderstood me: If you get into an accident and are found at fault, you are responsible for damage to the other car. Now, if it’s a clunker Toyota, that will be a few thousand dollars, if it’s a roll Royce, it’s a few hundred thousand dollars. The reason insurances are increasing lately is that the average car on the road is more expensive than it was ten years ago, so insurance companies are paying out more. If most cars are $250k Waymo cars, and you hit one…and you are at fault, ouch. And we will know if it is your fault or not since the Waymo is constantly recording.

> If half of human drivers switched to self-driving cars but they were chosen completely at random then the insurance rates for the remaining drivers would be essentially unaffected.

That’s not how the math works out (smaller risk pools are more expensive per person period). And it won’t be people switching at random to self driving cars (the ones not switching will be the ones that are more likely to have accidents).
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-31 02:01:21+00:00
It won't bail out AI ventures directly but it will bail out the banks that financed them.

Not a trick, if banks fall everything falls. what is infuriating: that we can see the value isn't there to justify the cost, yet that unprecedented amounts continue to flood into this tech segment, especially to the loudest and popular and over promising flavour of it: GenAI.
by panarky | 2026-01-31 02:01:22+00:00
The international "rules-based order" is a good idea when most nations play by the rules most of the time, and when the most powerful at least pretend to follow the same rules as everyone else.

A world order based on rules makes it possible to live at a much higher level of abstraction.

Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief. But these wispy and unreal ideas that everyone believes in make it possible for most people to live longer, healthier and less difficult lives.

The "rules-based order" was always partly mythical, but as long as everyone kept pretending, it mostly continued to function.

But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.

People will find out that life in the real world is a lot poorer and more miserable than life at the top of the tower of abstractions, even if your brokerage account appears to double.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-31 02:01:35+00:00
I've been drafting plans/specs in parallel with Opus and Kimi. Then asking them to review the others plan.

I still find Opus is "sharper" technically, tackles problems more completely & gets the nuance.

But man Kimi k2.5 can write. Even if I don't have a big problem description, just a bunch of specs, Kimi is there, writing good intro material, having good text that more than elaborates, that actually explains. Opus, GLM-4.7 have both complemented Kimi on it's writing.

Still mainly using my z.ai glm-4.7 subscription for the work, so I don't know how capable it really is. But I do tend to go for some Opus in sticky spots, and especially given the 9x price difference, I should try some Kimi. I wish I was set up for better parallel evaluation; feels like such a pain to get started.
by zugi | 2026-01-31 02:02:15+00:00
If your minor child breaks something, or your pet bites someone, you are liable.

This analogy may be more apt than Tesla would like to admit, but from a liability perspective it makes sense.

You could in turn try to sue Tesla for defective FSD, but the now-clearly-advertised "(supervised)" caveat, plus the lengthy agreement you clicked through, plus lots of lawyers, makes you unlikely to win.
by lacker | 2026-01-31 02:02:40+00:00
It's pretty common in California for cities to abuse the permitting process to extract money from homeowners. But on the other hand, these homeowners are getting subsidized by Prop 13. For a typical house in the Palisades bought 34 years ago ChatGPT estimates the subsidy is about $15,000/year. So, I have a little bit of sympathy but they're really on the benefitting end of California's various forms of tax craziness.
by aappleby | 2026-01-31 02:04:14+00:00
This... what is this even doing? The camera controls are all fucked up. Why is mousewheel bound to rotate on the X axis? I can't actually select and move things. The container example is... is this supposed to be an object? Why is a cylinder floating above it? Why is shading all fucked up on the "twisted ribbon"? Etcetera etcetera.

Oh, it's vibe coded? And the author seems to have a bad case of Dunning-Kruger?

Yeah, I'll pass.
by dang | 2026-01-31 02:04:25+00:00
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
by lostmsu | 2026-01-31 02:05:50+00:00
This whole comment ignored the legitimacy part which is non-trivial in this case.

My understanding is ICE ignored state court orders (I did not look up details, might be very wrong on this one), from which point on any activity of theirs could have been illegitimate if not outright illegal. Preventing any of their activity might be considered a duty in a sense that it is pushing them to abide by lawful court orders.
by ryanSrich | 2026-01-31 02:06:00+00:00
I think there are two things that happened

1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.

2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.
by kube-system | 2026-01-31 02:07:01+00:00
Maybe it worked with less sensitive radios back in the day.

I have done experiments on recent devices and it’s very difficult. I was successful in attenuating cell service with a $XXXX test enclosure, but not 2.4Ghz WiFi.

Maybe blocking cell service is good enough for your use case, but if you’re trying to protect against an APT you’re probably half-way closing the vulnerability.
by verhash | 2026-01-31 02:07:16+00:00
Here “exclusion” just means a deterministic reject / abstain decision applied after a model has already produced candidates. Nothing is generated, ranked, or sampled here. Given a fixed set of candidate outputs and a fixed set of verified constraints, the mechanism decides which candidates are admissible and which are not, in a way that is replayable and binary. A candidate is either allowed to pass through unchanged, or it is excluded from consideration because it violates constraints beyond a fixed tolerance.

In practical terms: think of it as a circuit breaker, not a judge. The model speaks freely upstream; downstream, this mechanism checks whether each output remains within a bounded distance of verified facts under a fixed rule. If it crosses the threshold, it’s excluded. If none survive, the system abstains instead of guessing. The point isn’t semantic authority or “truth,” it’s that the decision process itself is deterministic, inspectable, and identical every time you run it with the same inputs.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-31 02:07:27+00:00
I am critical of the typography of these card games. I think the information density problem has not been solved and there is a great opportunity for innovation in the card-game realm vis a vis deeply abstract connotations around which a game system is formed.

That said, I do love to have a bunch of these card sets in a box, out, up in the cabin, for those mountain-side retreats where really, there's nothing actually else to do while the winds howl outside, than to stoke the fire, turn up the lantern, and try to read the freickin' instructions on the very short-sightedly designed, imho, type-set of these card games ..
Show HN: Open Sandbox – an open-source self-hostable Linux sandbox for AI agents
by iacguy | 2026-01-31 02:07:57+00:00
Hi HN, today we're launching Open Sandbox, an open-source, self-hostable Linux sandbox written in Rust. It runs commands in isolated environments using process level sandboxing rather than micro VMs.

AI agents and LLMs generate code, but you can't just exec() untrusted code on your machine. You need a sandbox, an isolated environment where that code runs without access to your hostsystem/data.

The idea came from a conversation between my co-founders and me about slow startup times in Firecracker/micro-VM-based sandboxes. He mentioned that during his PhD in the UK, he'd used process-level sandboxes in competitive programming, and they were fast. That sent us down a rabbit hole.

We looked at existing implementations of sandboxes with process level isolation like Isolate, Minijail, nsjail and found that process-level sandboxes have very low resource overhead and surprisingly fast startup times. So we built our own in Rust.

How this compares to E2B, Modal etc? Those are great products, but they're hosted services built on micro-VMs or containers. You send your workloads to their infrastructure and pay per usage.

Open Sandbox is different in three ways:

1. Self-hosted and open source. Your code never leaves your machines. (although, yes, e2b is open source but it is far from easy to self-host)

2. Process-level isolation instead of VMs. This means ~100ms startup and very low resource overhead per sandbox, vs the micro-VM approaches.

3. The trade-off is weaker isolation. A kernel exploit could escape the
sandbox.

We also ran some benchmarks vs E2B: Open Sandbox was 2x faster at sandbox creation, faster at Git Clone, and also had 6x concurrency. E2B was faster on command execution. More details in the README of the repo with exact numbers.

This is incredibly early - curious on feedback!
by mindslight | 2026-01-31 02:08:15+00:00
Oh sure, I'd be one of those people. I was talking about an alternative approach under our system of dual sovereignty. The federal government is currently in gross violation of our Constitution that spells out the relations between the co-sovereigns. Both in terms of good-faith executing the offices laid out in the Constitution document itself, and overtly violating our natural rights including ones described in the Bill of Rights.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-31 02:08:59+00:00
> Why should either of them get the death penalty?

Pardons. If he's pardoned there is a good chance he'll kill again. (And inspire copycats.)

We need to eliminate pardons across our system of justice. Between Biden pardoning his son and Trump pardoning the J6'ers, there should be a bipartisan case for closing this.
by temp8830 | 2026-01-31 02:11:05+00:00
Sure, there's nothing wrong with flying a Mexican flag - if you are trying to create a lighting rod to attract all the anti-immigrant vitriol. It's the same kind of dumb as "defund the police" - actively harmful.

And I strongly suspect that if I flew a Russian flag in the very liberal and tolerant Bay Area my house might just accidentally catch fire. Despite my right to do so.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-31 02:11:25+00:00
> It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.

Jewelry is the single biggest usage of gold, worldwide. It makes for nearly half of all the gold's reserve and usage. Jewelry alone represent as much gold as all the gold held by central banks and hoarded by individuals (be it bars or coins). There's also some gold use by various industries but that gold is often lost.

So it's fair to say that jewelry does, indeed, push gold's price up.

But maybe I misunderstood your comment.
by jsight | 2026-01-31 02:11:41+00:00
Sure, but we now have millions of miles of Tesla autopilot and FSD data in the hands of untrained and often semi-malicious end users as well. Out of that data, we've gotten flawed reports from Tesla claiming that it is dramatically safer, as well as independent renormalization that showed it to be at best about the same.

None of those millions of miles resulted in a smoking gun showing the cars to be even 2x worse.

And yet a badly written blog thinks they've shown them to be 3x worse with professional monitors? This is indeed an extraordinary claim.
by lacker | 2026-01-31 02:12:07+00:00
The problem with AI art is that it mostly sucks right now. Well, for "high art" - it can't write a novel, it doesn't create interesting artistic images. It's great for mocking up product UIs. And there are exceptions when an individual human puts a lot of work into it, for graphic art at least. Novels, it doesn't seem that close.

Yet.

I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.

So it's really just a technical question. Not a philosophical one.
by NuclearPM | 2026-01-31 02:12:11+00:00
One of the emails, with the subject line "bill," suggests that Bill Gates had requested antibiotics for a sexually transmitted disease to "surreptitiously" give to his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. Another email said Boris had helped Bill Gates "get drugs," and helped facilitate "illicit trysts" between the billionaire Microsoft founder and "Russian girls" as well as "married women."
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-31 02:12:39+00:00
See my other response. I didn't define what a complex task is. I used people with reputation, intelligence and ability greater then myself to say, if they endorce it, then they must be using it on complex tasks and it must be successful to them.

I can certainly see how you're better than every one of those people and how to you what they call "complex" is just simplistic. I've never met anyone great like you.
by cbdevidal | 2026-01-31 02:12:55+00:00
There is another type of demand that I rarely see mentioned. Not only does the United States owe trillions of US dollars, other nations do, as well. They hold many trillions worth of loans denominated in US dollars. They must be repaid in US dollars and not in any other currency.

And not just to the United States but to other nations, as well. South Africa owes US dollars to Australia, Australia owes US dollars to Brazil, Brazil owes US dollars to Argentina, etc.

These nations are hungry for every dollar we print. Even if every trading partner dropped the dollar for trade tomorrow, and if everyone who owned Treasuries all sold them at once, there would still be demand for US dollars to repay their loans.

The IMF made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, and spun a sticky web of a debt trap as a result.

Three minute video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_SaG9HVXMQg&pp=ygUQZG9sbGFyIG1...
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-31 02:13:19+00:00
I visited it the first time as a teenager in 1986 part-way through a driving tour from LA to Mexicali and Vegas and Tahoe and so on.

I had a Sony Walkman and one of the 'trip tapes' I'd had packed for my family driving-tour vacation, was Eddy Jobson, Theme of Secrets. So his visceral strings and landscape arrangements were my personal soundtrack all the way to those crazy angel sculptures and beyond, to Death Valley and Vegas and all that jazz, until we got back to San Francisco, where I'd got his tape.

The eternal nature of that spot really seemed feasible to me. Even if the water dried up completely, it'd still be somewhere, some time in the future, some people would meet .. and perhaps wonder just what it was all about, some tens of thousands of years ago.
by shartshooter | 2026-01-31 02:13:35+00:00
I really love this concept for an app. Downloading and getting going was a breeze.

That said, I’m finding some latency issues when I respond. I’ll say something in Spanish, hit the red button, and none of the text I sent appears.

Then I’ll hit the red button again to start talking but before I do the assistant responds to my response and the words I spoke show up

Some of the back and forth is showing up out of order.

Also, error messages are in Spanish, and my Spanish isn’t good enough to read them so I’m not sure what to do

Again, love this concept and would love to have an ai assistant I can have daily conversations with to start sharp

Would possibly be nice to prime the ai before the convo saying “I’d like to talk about x” in English

Keep going! I’ll keep playing with it
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-31 02:14:04+00:00
Sounds right but another big factor is to get some predictability.

Demand for mortgage varies over time, regulations change. It's a long term product, banks like to know with high certainty that when someone signs up it will be X earned over a period, not maybe X minus we don't know over an unknown period.

They are in the business of capital efficiency. Lack of control makes capital less efficient, or at least more expensive to keep efficient.

Overpayments (in the UK) are often not allowed, when they are, the borrower needs to arrange it when the loan is taken, and for a fee.

Refinancing is a right, but the fine prints told borrowers at what penalty.
by nycdotnet | 2026-01-31 02:14:46+00:00
I am a C# dev by day and love working with it. I miss interfaces, Linq, and the nicer pattern matching features of C# when using GDScript, but overall GDScript is quite adequate for what it needs to do and the game dev loop feels faster when using it. They can interop as well without too much friction, so if you have the .NET version of Godot, it can have some code in C# where (if?) you need it and other code in GDScript when you don’t.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-31 02:15:22+00:00
> How confident are you there isn’t at least one juror who hasn’t been harmed by their health insurance, financially or medically?

Who doesn't perjor themselves during voir dire, thereby triggering a mistrial? Pretty confident. Maybe he gets lucky in federal court because Bondi is an idiot. But the state charges are solid, and New York isn't Reddit.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-31 02:16:38+00:00
In a university Mandarin class, one of the adult students (i.e. probably 40 or so) WAY over exaggerated his tones, to the point that the little old lady teaching us laughed out loud after one of his answers.

A few years later, he had the most clean and consistent pronunciation out of anyone I'd been in a class with, and easily switched between the Beijing and other accents depending on which teacher we had on any given day.

I rather regret not emulating him, even though I haven't really used it for nearly 20 years and have forgotten most of it.
by torstenvl | 2026-01-31 02:17:30+00:00
This is not accurate.

"Murder" refers to an offense under any number of legal provisions, most of them at the state level. Nearly everyone is at least passingly familiar with at least first-, second-, and—since Chauvin—third-degree murder. Many are also familiar with the concept of felony murder.

Nobody is disputing that the premeditated killing alleged in this case legally constitutes murder under New York State law.

Instead, it does not constitute murder for the purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(5)(B)(i) because the underlying federal offense—stalking—is not a crime of violence within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3).

That statute defines a crime of violence as one that "has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another" or "that by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense" (emphasis added).

Physical force is not an element of stalking, nor is there a substantial risk that physical force will be used in the course of stalking, even though it's not altogether uncommon for stalking to lead to acts of violence.
by refurb | 2026-01-31 02:17:36+00:00
Depends on your definition of crash?

Real estate prices dropped 30% blowing up most people’s savings. The debt overhang is slowly bankrupting various companies. Growth is an anemic 5% (should be double for a country with China’s per capita income) and means it will never enter middle income status. Unemployment, especially for grads is very high and the lack of babies or immigration means the worker base will shrink while the demand for social services will skyrocket.

Doesn’t seem great to be honest.
by dapangzi | 2026-01-31 02:17:57+00:00
Longtime lurker, made an account specifically to give feedback here as an intermediate speaker. :)

This is a great initiative and I hope to see more come out of this; I am not criticizing, but just want to provide my user experience here so you have data points.

In short, my experience lines up with your native speakers.

I found that it loses track of the phonemes when speaking quickly, and tones don't seem to line up when speaking at normal conversational speed.

For example, if I say 他是我的朋友 at normal conversational speed, it will assign `de` to 我, sometimes it interprets that I didn't have the retroflexive in `shi` and renders it `si`. Listened back to make sure I said everything, the phonemes are there in the recording, but the UI displays the wrong phonemes and tones.

By contrast, if I speak slowly and really push each tone, the phonemes and tones all register correctly.

Also, is this taking into account tone transformation? Example, third tones (bottom out tone) tend to smoosh into a second tone (rising) when multiple third tones are spoken in a row. Sometimes the first tone influences the next tone slightly, etc.

Again, great initiative, but I think it needs a way to deal with speech that is conversationally spoken and maybe even slurred a bit due to the nature of conversational level speech.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-31 02:18:09+00:00
> not sure why so many people believe that what - jury nullification? - is going to happen

Eh, if I thought Mangione was justified or effective it would be an easy way to feel good for a while with zero real-world consequences apart from my moral integrity. (Which, to be clear, is mine and mine alone. I have friends–good people whom I love and respect–who would nullify Mangione. They're just never getting seated on his jury without perjuring themselves.)
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-31 02:19:06+00:00
When the price moves violently up or down, dealers get scared. They need to keep it for an unspecified amount of time to get paid. Maybe the guy was jerking you around, or maybe he was short on cash. $35 for an oz is a terrible price when spot is $90 or something. It hit $120 during this past week and only crashed today, back to the record high from like 2 weeks ago.