MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsbisviewtiful | 2026-01-12 20:21:29+00:00
Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit.

Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes.

All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.
by pazimzadeh | 2026-01-12 20:21:35+00:00
Well, where are you getting this information if the internet's been cut off in Iran? All sides are spreading their propaganda so it's hard to say what's actually happening.

There are reports of hospitals, banks and other institutional buildings being burned, even fire engines - but does it make sense for iranians to burn those?

But the mossad stated they have agents acting in the field. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-881733

FYI, statues of khomeini, etc were burnt during Mahsa Amini protests too. https://x.com/Joyce_Karam/status/1573372214833041409?s=20

The question remains - after everything is burned to the ground, what opposition or leader is going to take control, if not the IRGC or military?

> it's been going on for 16 days at this point, and for some reason, is noticeably absent from world media. That feels significant, somehow

somehow, yes, but in a good or bad way? what is the significance? maybe the US/israel was gearing up to bomb Iran and the revolts would endear Iranian people to the Western public in a way that powers that be don't want? just thinking out loud here

Edit: chanced on an article which kind of supports this idea

A national security expert said President Donald Trump may already be prepared to act against Iran, suggesting a widely reported upcoming briefing on U.S. options could be intentional "deception" as deadly protests intensify in the country.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trumps-iran-briefing-may-decep...
by nwallin | 2026-01-12 20:21:57+00:00
These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it.

Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.
by Saddie | 2026-01-12 20:22:05+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong but from what I understand you were able synchronize multiple SDR systems without dedicated hardware. That's tots awesome! though I did not get how you did..

Its been a while and I don't remember all details but I was trying to synchronize two B210s running on different systems as NR BS and UE.. GPSDOs were too costly and I did not have external PPS. Regardless of what I did, after initial sync the two sdrs would drift by significant amount within couple seconds. I just gave up on solving the problem on hardware and adjusted for timing and freq offset every SSB, and assuming everything is synchronized for two frame duration (2x1024us). I moved out of that project and I still don't know if there's a better way or how mobile phones actually implement RX..
by dijital | 2026-01-12 20:22:12+00:00
I've been troubleshooting this on and off since early December.

There's a handy Python script here to show log which application is stealing focus:
https://superuser.com/a/874314

If you find it's SecurityAgent then you might be hitting this bug:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807112

I suspect it's related to a JIT privilege management app my company uses.
by 7952 | 2026-01-12 20:22:20+00:00
And the service was designed by Groq, hosted by Groq, you interact with it through systems controlled by Groq, at a surface level Groq makes decisions and groq makes the output. And it is quite possible the Groq knew that illegal image creation was possible. 99.9% of the work to make those images is within groq.
by QaysHaji | 2026-01-12 20:22:21+00:00
Mornings used to be a war: 90+ minutes lost triaging Slack threads, Gmail, Linear tickets—just to get to real work. Endless tabs, unread badges, context switching. It's chaos designed to keep you trapped.
I built Azurite to end it.
It's like Tinder, but for your workspace notifications: everything distilled into one beautiful stack of decisions. No noise, no scrolling—just the context, AI-powered suggestions, and lightning-fast actions.
How it works:

Pulls pings, emails, tickets via API into a clean, local-first queue.
The Context: Summarizes what matters (no re-reading threads).
The Brain: AI drafts replies, assignments, or summaries.
The Gavel: Decide in seconds – Execute, Decline, Conditional, Customize.
Latency <100ms, all offline-capable.

Result? That 90-minute morning slog → 4 minutes of clarity. Hours reclaimed for deep work.
Azurite is coming Q1 2026 (macOS/Windows desktop app first). Integrations at launch: Gmail, Slack, Linear (+ more soon).
Opening Charter Alpha-1 cohort (limited to 1,000 seats):

Instant access on launch day (skip the public queue).
Roadmap voting + private community.

Join the waitlist (no card required): https://azurite-labs.vercel.app/
HN folks: Comment your biggest notification pain or which tool you'd mute forever—I'll prioritize real feedback for early spots.
by apparent | 2026-01-12 20:22:55+00:00
There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to it getting better and being able to use it more often.
by tzs | 2026-01-12 20:23:26+00:00
From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection.

Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".

I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.

If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).

[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).

For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-12 20:23:41+00:00
>Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?"

On a non-separated rail like in the video where you can just turn off at any time I can see a lot of people continuing to do it just to spite their spouse for screeching about the obvious.

Or on the other side of the coin I can see a lot of people just say nothing because it's probably fine and they'd rather not have the argument.
by arcfour | 2026-01-12 20:23:51+00:00
But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly.

So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.
by zimpenfish | 2026-01-12 20:24:11+00:00
Worth noting that, in the UK, if there's CSAM on that page, you run a strong risk of prosecution[0]

[0] https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/indecent-and-pro... ("downloading an image from a website onto a computer screen: R v Smith; R v Jayson [2003] 1 Cr. App. R. 13")
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-12 20:24:53+00:00
Every startup is at the mercy of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).

They can and most likely will release something that vaporises the thin moat you have built around their product.

This feels like the first time in tech where there are more startups/products being subsumed (agar.io style) than being created.
by kalanigrowney | 2026-01-12 20:25:07+00:00
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months.

This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app:

https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus

If anyone has feedback or suggestions on how I could improve my design or coding skills, I’d really appreciate it.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-12 20:25:27+00:00
That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.
by vharuck | 2026-01-12 20:25:30+00:00
>There is a mechanism for prosecuting presidents, impeachment and a trial in the Senate

That is not a substitute for prosecution, it is a political process for removing a president. The Constitution's authors likely meant it to be used when a president ignored their duty, violated the Constitution, or lost public support before the end of their term. These are not federal crimes, so they don't go through the federal courts. The impeachment and removal process does imitate indictment and trial, but that's because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

The SCOTUS ruling went far beyond historical practice. Historically, officials weren't prosecuted for official acts unless it was shown the act was part of another crime. So if the President delayed a FEMA response because of budget worries or incorrect forecasts, nobody would be prosecuted or open to lawsuits from citizens who suffered. But now, no official investigator can interview an appointed official to find out if the act was done as part of a crime. Worse, if the act was a presidential power enumerated in the Constitution, there is almost no way to investigate its use in an obvious crime. If the President only pardons people after they pay him $20,000 dollars, the President is immune from investigation.

A hypothetical raised in the dissent is still an open question: what could be done if Donald Trump orders a military strike team to kill the next Democratic presidential nominee? Do you expect this Congress to actually impeach him? After he lied to, riled up, directed, and have plenty of time to a mob who invaded Congress and built a gallows to hang the Vice President? And Congress didn't prevent him from ever holding office again?

I am not swayed by any argument along the lines of "But the President will be too worried about vindictive prosecution to make the right choices." If we really need to prevent that, I'd rather have every president thrown in prison for life after their term. No need to worry about prosecution, because you already know what awaits you. The office is more important than any individual holding it.
by LegionMammal978 | 2026-01-12 20:25:40+00:00
> (including reading from leapsecond tzdb data)

That's part of it: If I were writing a standalone program that could extract info from tzdb or whatever, I'd happily jump through those hoops, and not bother anyone else's libraries. I don't really care about the ergonomics. But for JS scripts in particular, there is no information available that is not provided by either the browser APIs or someone's server. And such servers are not in great supply.
by shagie | 2026-01-12 20:26:06+00:00
> Not an expert though just saying it opened my eyes to how inefficient "last mile delivery" energy consumption is.

One of the oddities of home shopping and delivery is that it can be more efficient.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5020321/food-delivery-m...

> In 2022, researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. modeled a single 36-item grocery cart to compare greenhouse emissions from an e-commerce grocery delivery and a traditional trip to the store to get the same items. Gregory Keoleian and colleagues at the university's Center for Sustainable Systems found that using an electric vehicle to pick up groceries could cut emissions by as much as half, compared to a gas-powered vehicle.

> They also found that home delivery could be an even better option. That's because with a delivery vehicle, orders are often clustered, with a driver dropping off not just your groceries, but also hitting neighbors during the same run. "Delivery is actually going to be more efficient in general than driving yourself in a gasoline SUV to the store to pick up your groceries," Keoleian says.

The mentioned paper is https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/car...

---

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-more-people-bought...

> A recent USDA survey found that in 88% of U.S households, people hop in their car to buy groceries, driving an average of 4 miles to their preferred store. ... All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store.

---

https://csanr.wsu.edu/how-do-grocery-and-meal-kit-deliveries...

> While it is common for the consumer to associate convenience in the food industry with increased greenhouse gas emissions, this is not always the case. Results from a 2013 University of Washington study indicate that grocery delivery has the potential to reduce carbon emissions anywhere from 20 to 75 percent (Ma 2013), while another study out of Finland found the potential for grocery delivery to reduce emissions by up to 87 percent (Siikavirta et al. 2002).

---

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/shop-online-sustaina...

> Buying goods online can be better for the environment than in-store shopping for one fundamental reason: With online shopping, a single truck or van can replace multiple car trips, by multiple households, to stores. It helps to think of it this way: In most of the United States, almost every purchase means putting a vehicle on the road—either your own or a delivery company’s.

---

Some others:

https://blog.sevensenders.com/en/ecommerce-carbon-footprint-...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250302115526/https://sustainab... (this one is quite comprehensive also including the difference in packaging)

And those articles come with their own citations to other articles.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-12 20:26:16+00:00
A lot of us live in older homes without good insulation. Somewhere in the mid 1900s we simply forgot that "plaster interior wall directly on brick exterior wall" does not provide insulation.

1920s era homes are even worse, single hung windows in wooden frames, no insulation, no conception of managing airflow.

Modern homes are much more efficient, but they're a bit impractical to buy these days, and are increasingly built so shitty that their lifespan is less than their inhabitants.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 20:26:27+00:00
> Is there any way to provide a service where an image manipulation bot is mentioned in social media replies and it doesn't lead to total chaos?

It may be a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't imagine a bot limited to style transfer or replacing faces with corresponding emoji would cause total chaos.

Even if someone used that kind of thing with a picture from an open-casket funeral, it would get tuts rather than chaos.

> From what I saw the 'undressing' problem was the tip of the iceberg of crazy things people have asked Grok to do.

Indeed. I mean, how out of touch does one have to be to look at Twitter and think "yes, this place will benefit from photorealistic image editing driven purely by freeform natural language, nothing could go wrong"?
by Yash16 | 2026-01-12 20:26:27+00:00
Yes, the Gemini models are really good right now—especially the image models. The Nano Banana Pro model looks super promising. I’m planning to integrate image generation into mobile apps and other platforms. Apple has massive distribution, but it still feels like they haven’t fully integrated this kind of tech yet, so users have to rely on third-party apps to get top-quality results.

At the moment, I’m using https://picxstudio.com
to generate 4K-quality images with the Nano Banana Pro model, but my goal is to build my own app that delivers the same level of quality and control.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-12 20:26:52+00:00
If a human kills or seriously injures somebody with a car, the insurance company will pay out 6 or 7 figures.

If Waymo et al can successfully limit payouts to that, they'll be fine.

OTOH, if every death or serious injury comes with a 9 figure+ punitive damage award, they'll be in trouble.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-12 20:27:18+00:00
For any reasonable email fee, sendgrid can continue passing it on to the customers and not care.

If you make the fee super high, then many email workflows completely break and sendgrid goes out of business.

I don't think there's a number where it does what you want and incentivizes sendgrid to be careful.

(And you might say to seek a middle ground, but I don't think there is one. My guess is that "too low for sendgrid to care much more about a couple percent of mail from hacked accounts" and "too high for sendgrid to still attract customers" probably overlap.)
by bubblegumcrisis | 2026-01-12 20:27:32+00:00
I've read the blurb from previous years about doing one-shots with threats of death, or etc - but I've never seen that for long many prompt sessions.

I wonder - if you hired a programmer for a day, trapped them in a cage, and then threatened them, maybe it would be more productive for a while. I mean, if I were writing that book, I could see how they would do great work for a bit.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-12 20:27:52+00:00
It seems there's at least _some_ mitigation. I did try to have it use its WebFetch tool (and curl) to fetch a few websites I administer and it failed with "Unable to verify if domain is safe to fetch. This may be due to network restrictions or enterprise security policies blocking claude.ai." It seems there's a local proxy and an allowlist - better than nothing I suppose.

Looks to me like it's essentially the same sandbox that runs Claude Code on the Web, but running locally. The allowlist looks like it's the same - mostly just package managers.
by nkrisc | 2026-01-12 20:27:59+00:00
If curl is used by hackers in illegal activity, culpability falls on the hackers, not the maintainers of curl.

If I ask the maintainers of curl to hack something and they do it, then they are culpable (and possibly me as well).

Using Photoshop to do something doesn’t make Adobe complicit because Adobe isn’t involved in what you’re using Photoshop for. I suppose they could involve themselves, if you’d prefer that.
by brushfoot | 2026-01-12 20:28:02+00:00
To me this is the biggest threat that AI companies pose at the moment.

As everyone rushes to them for fear of falling behind, they're forking over their secrets. And these users are essentially depending on -- what? The AI companies' goodwill? The government's ability to regulate and audit them so they don't steal and repackage those secrets?

Fifty years ago, I might've shared that faith unwaveringly. Today, I have my doubts.
by windowpains | 2026-01-12 20:28:09+00:00
I like jpow so I’m biased for sure. But when I zoom out, I think the thing some people are missing is the arbitrage aspect. With US politics, we typically get a choice between two people. Often it’s a choice between the lesser evil. Many of Trumps voters were not people who liked Trump, but people who were horrified by Kamala. This means Trump can arbitrage that gap, and do all sorts of disagreeable things as long as he remains the lesser evil to his voters, those disagreeable acts will be ignored come election time. Many Trump voters will be aghast at him weaponizing the courts to chip away at the independence of the fed, but they’ll vote for him and his preferred candidates because they feel the alternative is even worse.

The important implication is that resistance or countering with extremism in the other direction only makes him stronger. To defeat Trump the left will need to move closer to the middle so he has less room for that kind of political arbitrage. Alas emotion seems to be in greater supply than strategic thinking so probably things will get worse before they get better.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-12 20:28:17+00:00
This is the key. The real issue is that you don’t need superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don’t need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a decent job of approximating college grad level human intelligence let’s say 85% of the time which is helpful and cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models. There will come a time when a model capable of college grad level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry that will in the next few years become dominated by open models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up with another product that has more of a moat.