MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crvdgc | 2026-01-30 13:34:19+00:00
Among the six patterns identified, it's interesting that "Iterative AI Debugging" takes more time (and possibly tokens) but results in worse scores than letting AI do everything. So this part really should be handed over to agent loops.

The three high score patterns are interesting as well. "Conceptual Inquiry" actually results in less time and doesn't improve the score than the other two, which is quite surprising to me.
by lapcat | 2026-01-30 13:34:27+00:00
> I wonder what would happen if you tried selling software the old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once. We'll mail you out a USB stick with the program on it. Our software does not access the internet."

FWIW all of my Mac and iOS apps are upfront paid, with no telemetry or server-side component.

Of course I don't distribute them via snail mail though.

I'm doing pretty well. I'm certainly not rich, and probably not making as much money as corporate software engineers in the US, but I'm doing better financially than the majority of people. It's not impossible to follow the old business model.
by Zak | 2026-01-30 13:35:23+00:00
Using it for messaging is different. I took "the mobile app" to mean the Facebook app with the timeline, groups, etc... (com.facebook.katana on Android), which also doesn't let you access messages. They really seem to want to promote their Messenger app as a distinct product.

I'm not sure messaging can work well in a mobile browser because notifications would not be timely, but maybe you're using it for a purpose that doesn't require instant notifications.
by DennisP | 2026-01-30 13:35:37+00:00
Clinical studies today are funded entirely by the pharma companies, keep that. Selling at cost of production would be something extra, for patients who want the drugs but aren't enrolled in an actual study. The company doesn't get solid data it can use for regulatory approval, so making them donate the drugs in that case seems excessive.

A downside would be that for drugs that don't cost much to produce, patients might be less willing to enroll in the studies, given the chance of getting a placebo. That could be handled by shutting down the informal access while the study is enrolled, for anyone who's eligible. I'm sure there are other wrinkles that would need to be considered too.
by rizzo94 | 2026-01-30 13:35:47+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with Moltbot/Clawdbot myself, and I totally get your concerns—full access to a machine, scripts, and credentials is not something to hand over lightly. In my experience, the real risk isn’t “AI taking over” so much as subtle unintended behavior: automated scripts doing things you didn’t anticipate, or persistent state causing actions to repeat unexpectedly. AI personality drift is real in the sense that its responses evolve based on memory and interactions, but it’s bounded by the system and permissions you give.

For those who want similar capabilities without the same exposure, I looked into PAIO. The setup was far simpler, and the BYOK + privacy-first architecture meant the AI could act while still keeping credentials under my control. It’s a reminder that autonomy doesn’t have to mean unrestricted power—well-designed constraints go a long way toward reducing these risks while still letting AI be useful.
by TimJRobinson | 2026-01-30 13:35:54+00:00
Honestly Linux has been so much easier to use since Claude / codex came out. Now I don't need to remember esoteric commands or scroll old forums to fix issues, Claude does it all for me.

Been using ubuntu + regolith as my daily driver for over a year now and haven't needed to use windows for anything. Almost all games all work well on Linux now too.
by nthj | 2026-01-30 13:36:19+00:00
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.
by raincole | 2026-01-30 13:37:12+00:00
It does look extremely pessimistic. Like one of the 'incident' is that they hit a curb at a parking lot at 6 MPH.

No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light.

While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.
by ryandvm | 2026-01-30 13:38:59+00:00
Tesla has completely fumbled a spectacular lead in EVs and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And instead of turning it around, we're supposed to believe they are going to completely pivot and then take over a market with far more developed competitors (e.g. Boston Dynamics).

That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose money at the "three cup" game but the cups are clear.
by DennisP | 2026-01-30 13:41:24+00:00
I think that depends on the individual, or maybe on the dose. Years ago I read a bunch of books arguing for saturated fat, started eating a lot of it, and my cholesterol and triglycerides got horrifically bad. Even those books, which claimed high cholesterol is no big deal, were like "but if it goes over X then you need to fix that," and I was over X. I had high particle numbers too, which the books agreed was pretty bad. I went back to my normal diet and that took me back to my normal bloodwork.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-30 13:41:29+00:00
I suppose I should acknowledge there is a big world out there. If I asked for porridge in the UK I would get oat porridge. The product I bought this morning to make it was called 'porridge oats'.I suspect the Asian version comes from the age of empire with British troops applying their home terms to their rations? 'This gloopy river thing looks like Porridge'.

A porridge made of rice in the UK is not a thing as far as I am aware (I'm not in hipster London though), I suspect it would be what we call Rice Pudding?
by pigpop | 2026-01-30 13:41:42+00:00
Shortages of doctors have many causes that differ based on the country. While paying them more may help in some countries you also have to figure out how to convince doctors to live in smaller towns and cities and in less desirable provinces/states within a country. The source of the problem is that doctors are people and people have their own preferences and motivations for doing the things they do. Trying to convince even a handful of above average competency doctors to live in a remote region with bad weather and few amenities for more than a few years will be extremely difficult even if you offer them large sums of money (which aren't generally available anyways) because they have to weigh their own health and happiness in the balance when deciding where to live and practice.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-30 13:41:59+00:00
Is this a reference to spongbob squarepants where Mr krabby likes money and clawdbot and everything is a crab too?

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/81ecc732-ee7b-42c3-900b-b97479b...

Hello I'm Mr Krabs and I like money.

xD
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-30 13:42:04+00:00
relative to their wealth

But total wealth was a lot lower than today, while clothes were much more expensive relative to the average income than today. Many people wore their best clothes on Sundays only, and street photos from the same period show that an average person was dressed rather simply.

I don't even think that the tube was affordable to average working class public. When I read historic accounts from much later (the 1930s), they mention that fare on public transport was expensive enough that you had to choose between a breakfast and a ride.
by uxp100 | 2026-01-30 13:42:56+00:00
Yeah, I had great memories of secret of mana and SD3 (emulated in translation, I think that was Aeon Genesis?) and I replayed them with my partner in 2020. For a few hours. Honestly, kinda miserable.

Single player it was less fun than I remembered, multiplayer it was awful. SD3 is a beautiful game, and very overrated.
by strken | 2026-01-30 13:43:36+00:00
I'm left wondering what happens if you feed people 300g/day of barley, shredded wheat, brown rice, or any other wholegrain. For that matter, what happens if you do the same thing with legumes?

The experiment halved energy intake at minimum and still provided 30+ grams of fibre then kept doing it until the gut emptied, which I reckon most people would expect to nuke the gut microbiome, but did oatmeal have any specific advantage?
by keyringlight | 2026-01-30 13:44:01+00:00
It's a bit on a tangent because it's about hardware rather than OS choice, but the next few years are going to be a stress test on how much people value PC versus the cash-value of components increases, and what happens to the numbers of people entering the market, staying with older systems or upgrading (or replacing/complimenting with a console). Someone saying they think it's worth a lot is different to opening their wallet.

One aspect I think will be interesting is to compare what happens to attitudes with prices changes in more affluent markets like North America or Western Europe compare to how PC has been approached in other markets like Asia or South America.
by 1dom | 2026-01-30 13:44:14+00:00
"No, NewBigTech _is_ different, trust me, I'm an expert in all the things this tech does for us now."

Crypto was doing stuff in 2012, it contributed to a huge amount of global remittance payments even then, and probably still does now.

I was working with intelligence agencies, and crypto was being widely use in a variety of crimes too. Both of those are still probably true, and then there's now probably an entire industry shipping literally billions of $ around the world every day as settlement between exchanges in crypto.

As someone who was approached as an expert at the time, I was saying all the things you're saying to me now at the time about Crypto.

The point is I was right at the time: crypto was being used, and still is. You're right, AI is being used, and still is.

The problem, or the bubble or the pump/dump/parallel element is that the amount of attention and capital flowing around the area is vastly more than the current use cases and is therefore largely speculative.

This is true in AI too. Yes people are using it already daily, but if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen, what's that for...? "Future AI stuff..." soooo.... speculative...?
by JayNitram | 2026-01-30 13:44:14+00:00
Empathy, that is what you appear to be missing in your equation. If I see someone about to chuck a baby off a cliff, I hope I step out of my normal comfort zone and do something. In that case it is probably pretty clear, and this one seems grey for some people, but for others, and myself include, ICE is affecting people's lives in ways that is unacceptable and we need to do something.
Show HN: Relax Your Ears – AI Audio Enhancer for Chrome Tabs
by mda_damico | 2026-01-30 13:44:21+00:00
The Chrome extension for real-time AI noise suppression, filtering the audio from any browser tab.

Using a custom pre-trained model and a WASM module, it isolates voices in a tab's audio from any background noise.

Free, no registration or watermarks. Feedback is welcome!
by anarticle | 2026-01-30 13:45:15+00:00
I also found this disturbing, as I used to use GPT for small worked out theoretical problems. In 5.2, the long list of repeated bulleted lists and fortune cookies was a negative for my use case. I replaced some of that use with Claude and am experimenting with LM studio and gpt-oss. It seemed like an obvious regression to me, but maybe people weren't using it that way.

For instance something simple like:
"If I put 10kw in solar on my roof when is the payback given xyz price / incentive / usage pattern."

Used to give a kind of short technical report, now it's a long list of bullets and a very paternalistic "this will never work" kind of negativity. I'm assuming this is the anti-sycophant at work, but when you're working a problem you have to be optimistic until you get your answer.

For me this usage was a few times a day for ideas, or working through small problems. For code I've been Claude for at least a year, it just works.
by raincole | 2026-01-30 13:45:17+00:00
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.

There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.

[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-30 13:45:38+00:00
TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. I think that's high - if you're including backing into static objects in car parks and the like, you can look at workshop data and extrapolate that every a lower figure might be closer to the mark.

TFA also does a comparison with other self-driving car companies, which you acknowledge, but dismiss: however, we can't harmonize crash definitions and reporting practices as you would like, because Tesla is obfuscating their data.

TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret, but others like Waymo disclose everything they can, and are more transparent about what happened and why.

TFA is actually saying Tesla should open up their data to allow for better analysis and comparison, because at the moment their current reporting practice make them look crazy bad.
by mnahkies | 2026-01-30 13:45:58+00:00
One of the more annoying things I've found moving country is the unavailability of keyboards / laptops with the layout I grew up with. I find it especially annoying as the country I'm from uses a US layout which I naively assumed would be easily available everywhere (and it is available but not without a long delivery and a premium price)

Side note: helping my French housemate with his uni assignments was an experience, none of the symbols were where I expected them to be
by whynotmaybe | 2026-01-30 13:46:11+00:00
>He did push us into the EV era.

Yes, definitely and a lot of people (me included) where eyeing Tesla cars until the cybertruck/politics debacle.

>Incompetence before malice and so on.

At first, maybe, the Tesla 3 was announced for 30k$ and had a starting price of 35K$, acceptable.
But the cybertruck announced at 40K$ sold at 60K$, less so.

>As a consumer, I'm pissed off. I do feel conned.

I can easily imagine that, I'm not a costumer and I feel conned.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-01-30 13:46:35+00:00
This is an often repeated talking point, but the reality on the ground has proven hydrogen vehicles to be failures every time they are tried.

Hydrogen trials outright fail or prove to be substantially more expensive overall than EVs every time they’re tried.

The hydrogen vehicles are more complicated, more expensive, have expensive fuel which is difficult to transport and store, have no economies of scale or a realistic path to on (unlike batteries and electric motors), introduce serious safety concerns, and lack the convenience of being able to refuel on site.

And EV trucks, like in every other category, are outselling hydrogen trucks by orders of magnitude. See recent China sales [0].

[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/26/chinas-bev-trucks-and-t...
by rramadass | 2026-01-30 13:47:54+00:00
> OOP is non-scientific and the snake-oil hype ... ridding the world of the OOP rot is a far deeper infection.

You are spewing nonsense.

Read Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction, Barbara Liskov's Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design and Brad Cox's Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach for edification on OOD/OOP.
Show HN: Grok Bikini – A technical Grok prompt engine for fashion synthesis
by thenextechtrade | 2026-01-30 13:48:17+00:00
EN: Hi HN, I’ve been building Grok bikini (grok-bikini.com), a technical project focused on streamlining the Grok prompt experience for high-fidelity fashion synthesis.

The Implementation: The goal is to move beyond simple text inputs. I developed a system that programmatically expands a basic Grok prompt into a structured instruction set—incorporating specific photography metadata, lighting parameters, and material textures optimized for the Vision API's latent space.

Experimental Logic: To test the global reach of this Grok prompt engine, I implemented an automated SEO framework for 19 languages. This allows me to observe how search intent varies across different cultural contexts while using /swimwear paths as a semantic buffer to maintain platform safety.

Click https://grok-bikini.com/ to use Grok prompt.
by devnonymous | 2026-01-30 13:48:18+00:00
From the "Discussion" section:

> This suggests that as companies transition to more AI code writing with human supervision, humans may not possess the necessary skills to validate and debug AI-written code if their skill formation was inhibited by using AI in the first place.

I'm reminded of "Kernighan's lever" :

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

AI is writing code in the cleverest way possible which then introduces cognitive load for anyone who hasn't encountered these patterns previously. Although, one might say that AI would also assist in the debugging, you run the risk of adding further complexity in the process of 'fixing' the bugs and before you know it you have a big stinking ball of mud.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-30 13:49:05+00:00
> 67% of consumers prefer brands that respond within an hour.

Not when that response is from a brain-dead chatbot, surely.

Yesterday I asked the "AI" chat of a brand web shop for a contact email address. The response gave me a broken link, and each time I pointed this out, it agreed, apologised and represented the same link in a different way. Just like ChatGPT.

This level of intelligence is far below that of the typical human operator. Low cost, but delivering a negative customer experience which no brand can afford.
Show HN: My little website conversion tool just did 2500 audits (10k visitors)
by nikhonit | 2026-01-30 13:49:07+00:00
I launched this as a tiny side project 30 days ago. I thought maybe a few friends would use it.

Fast forward to today:

10,000 unique visitors

2,500 audits processed

My server and API bills are hurting, but seeing people actually use the thing is the best feeling in the world.

It’s been a crazy month of bug fixing and scaling on the fly to keep up with the queue.

Just wanted to share the milestone because I don't really have anyone else to tell who "gets it."

Thanks to everyone who tried it out early on.
by ploum | 2026-01-30 13:49:17+00:00
It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject.

It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times.

Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)
by mixedbit | 2026-01-30 13:49:36+00:00
And then, they will pivot away from humanoid robots. To justifying the valuation they have already pivoted from electric cars company to self-driving taxis company, without delivering self-driving taxis, they are now pivoting to robots, before delivering the robots they will pivot to the next shinny thing. Maybe Pivot is the real Tesla product that justifies the crazy valuation.
by stevage | 2026-01-30 13:49:49+00:00
The app I use is actually "Facebook Lite" and it does include Messenger.

>maybe you're using it for a purpose that doesn't require instant notifications.

Yeah, generally if I'm messaging in Facebook, it's someone I don't know well - often kind of temporary connection through a community group, like arranging a time to exchange a second hand thing. I'm happy to manually check when needed. (That is, back when I used to use this method before I gave up and got the app.)

This comment does give a bit of insight into why Facebook tries to prevent people using mobile browsers for messaging though.
by jandrese | 2026-01-30 13:50:00+00:00
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.

Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-30 13:50:37+00:00
Things have become crazy, indeed. I still kick myself for not buying the SSD I was eyeing in December, which has now went form 250 € to almost 400. I'm already maxed on RAM since a year ago, bought 64 GB for a fraction of today's cost.

But I still feel like we're still in the eye of the storm, and things will improve. Remember late 2020 when every useless GPU would command a fortune? I remember buying a used RX 5600 XT with a warranty somewhere around October for 300 €. A month later, it would cost at least twice as much, if you could even find one in stock. Last December I looked a bit at prices, and the current equivalent model (9060xt 16 GB) was roughly around 300 again, and I don't think it has gone up since. I understand there may be a shortage of equivalent Nvidia GPUs from a thread the other day, so this may change soon, again. I have no use for top-of-the-line models, so I'm not familiar with their prices and availability.
by thecupisblue | 2026-01-30 13:50:42+00:00
That is why all the crazy promises and moves, hyping X.ai, Robotaxis, Optimus, Data centers in space. If you are constantly promising the future and some radical moves, the optimistic investors believe him and he can keep increasing the "potential future valuation".

But when you look at it:

- X.ai is basically getting into the race by throwing money at the problem and using your name to get funding in a hyped industry.

- Do a buyout of your own company with it, get access to data that you restricted to everyone else.

- Merge it with SpaceX for "datacenters in space", do an IPO for a huge valuation

- Probably merge it with Tesla, overhype everything

- As the humanoid, AI and space industry grows, so will the valuation just because of the market growth, not necessarily because of great/revolutionary products

At that point, nobody can even consider what the valuation is, as it is a mishmash of promises, fudged numbers, real numbers, potential numbers, contracts, hype and everything else. It allows moving financials around and tuning things to get him his 1T package and hype things even more.

I mean congrats to Elon, just by overhyping his products he shifts the timeline narrative more towards techno-optimism and earns himself more money. The financial shenanigans to follow in the next few years will be an interesting period for future financial archeologists.