MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by clickety_clack | 2026-01-22 19:25:16+00:00
The Europeans I know seem to save in actual bank savings accounts, whereas the Americans I know seem to invest their money. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't find a description of "savings" on those charts. To me, they are both types of investment, one a super safe option with a low return, and the other a more risky option with a higher return.

From that Draghi paper a year ago or so, I believe part of Europe's innovation problem seems to stem from a lack of private investment by individuals in this way, so that would also align with this different philosophy on dealing with savings.
by torginus | 2026-01-22 19:25:29+00:00
I'd argue accumulating too much wealth compared to your salary can be a bad thing - for example, real estate compared to salary is even more expensive in Europe than the US - so the extra money doesn't go anywhere useful, you just get to pay more for the same stuff.

Also, if the US person pays less taxes, but has to pay for a bunch of services that the EU person would get for free, that means the US person has a lower savings rate, even though they're paying for the exact same stuff.
by prewett | 2026-01-22 19:25:34+00:00
Western ideas of liberty and agency came out of 1500 years of Christian. Christians put limits on liberty and agency, but that's very different than despising it.

Even from an atheistic standpoint, current levels of liberty and agency are clearly evolutionarily unfit. The fertility rate of Christians (and other conservative religious people) are at or above replacement level, which means that the unlimited liberty and agency folks are substantially below replacement levels.
by 0x457 | 2026-01-22 19:26:09+00:00
> There was a business a while back that was like "pay $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).

I think Uber would absolutely turn into a bus company if their risk tolerance allowed for this. It did change from "I have a car and free time" to "I'm buying a car to be a full-time Uber driver"
by bee_rider | 2026-01-22 19:26:12+00:00
Intermittence really has always had the flavor of an engineering problem instead of a physics problem (it is about putting the energy when/where humans want it, rather than having enough of it). IMO load shifting seems like a cleverer and more engineer-y solution. Imagine a giant smart system where all of our appliances talk to each-other and can optimize the timings of their workloads. It’s a magnificent society-wide scheduling problem! The papers we could write!

Throwing batteries at it is a kind of blunt and uninteresting solution (I guess the market will prefer that one!).
by jimbokun | 2026-01-22 19:26:17+00:00
As iterateoften points out, the TV shows are mainly tied to US holidays, or at least how those holidays are celebrated in the US. This also makes Peanuts merchandise tied to those holidays very popular.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas are the major ones. I think New Year and Easter were added at some point but not as well known.

Having said that, it makes sense that those shows wouldn't translate as well to a non-US audience.
by bflesch | 2026-01-22 19:26:19+00:00
In his newsletter Ed Zitron hammered down the point that GPUs depreciate quickly, but these kind of reliability issues are shocking to read. The GPUs are so common to fail that they hang out in a 24/7 slack channel with customers like Meta (who apparently can't set up a cluster themselves..).

Ed Zitron also called out the business model of GPU-as-a-service middleman companies like modal deeply unsustainable, and I also don't see how they can make a profit if they are only reselling public clouds. Assuming they are VC funded the VCs need returns for their funds.

Unlike fiber cable during the dot com boom the currently used GPUs eventually end up in the trash bin. These GPUs are treated like toilet paper, you use them and throw them away, nothing you will give to the next generation.

Who will be the one who marks down these "assets"? Who is providing money to buy the next batch of GPUs, now that billions are already spent?

Maybe we'll see a wave of retirements soon.

> It’s underappreciated how unreliable GPUs are. NVIDIA’s hardware is a marvel, the FLOPs are absurd. But the reliability is a drag. A memorable illustration of how AI/ML development is hampered by reliability comes from Meta’s paper detailing the training process for the LLaMA 3 models: “GPU issues are the largest category, accounting for 58.7% of all unexpected issues.”
> Imagine the future we’ll enjoy when GPUs are as reliable as CPUs. The Llama3 team’s CPUs were the problem only 0.5% of the time. In my time at Modal we can’t remember finding a single degraded CPU core.
> For our Enterprise customers we use a shared private Slack channel with tight SLAs. Slack is connected to Pylon, tracking issues from creation to resolution. Because Modal is built on top of the cloud giants and designed for dynamic compute autoscaling, we can replace bad GPUs pretty fast!
by mrweasel | 2026-01-22 19:26:46+00:00
But the energy from windmills doesn't have a CO2 tax (it did at some point) and it frequently provides most, if not all, of the Danish energy (electricity) consumption. There's ONE coal fired power plant left in the country and it's scheduled to close in 2028. I get that we then have gas and garbage incinerators for heating, but we are getting electrification and lower prices.

I frankly don't care what the US and China is doing, because they're doing the wrong thing. You're arguing that because you neighbour is throwing trash in the street you want to be able to do the same. I'd much rather make environmental demands of the products being sold to be from else where, and have them live by the same rules, allowing everyone to benefit.
by languagehacker | 2026-01-22 19:26:57+00:00
Thinking 220GBP for a high-limit Claude account is the kind of thinking that really takes for granted the amount of compute power being used by these services. That's WITH the "spending other people's money" discount that most new companies start folks off with. The fact that so many are painfully ignorant of the true externalities of these technologies and their real price never ceases to amaze me.
by nativeit | 2026-01-22 19:27:29+00:00
> Between 2020 and 2025, submissions to NeurIPS increased more than 220% from 9,467 to 21,575. In response, organizers have had to recruit ever greater numbers of reviewers, resulting in issues of oversight, expertise alignment, negligence, and even fraud.

I don’t think the point being made is “errors didn’t happen pre-GPT”, rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-22 19:27:29+00:00
Again you are just talking past me, ignoring what I wrote. I don't know why Trump is doing what he's doing. I was talking about the total lack of guidance coming from economists on how to turn the situation around. My post was two sentences long, and said nothing but that. The only way you could misunderstand it is deliberately.

> If you seriously think I didn't know you were referring to China

I literally accused you of knowing, i.e. "pretending not to understand". I assume you'll find some nonsense tangent or deliberate misunderstanding again, so this is is the last reply you're trolling out of me.
by ls612 | 2026-01-22 19:27:29+00:00
There are people who just want to punish academics for the sake of punishing academics. Look at all the people downthread salivating over blacklisting or even criminally charging people who make errors like this with felony fraud. Its the perfect brew of anti AI and anti academia sentiment.

Also, in my field (economics), by far the biggest source of finding old papers invalid (or less valid, most papers state multiple results) is good old fashioned coding bugs. I'd like to see the software engineers on this site say with a straight face that writing bugs should lead to jail time.
by kmajid2 | 2026-01-22 19:27:55+00:00
Great point, telemetry reliability is the biggest hurdle for any mission-critical system. We address the "garbage in, garbage out" risk by prioritizing freshness (our pipeline treats latency as a failure).

We use a

"leaky" buffer strategy (if data is too old to be actionable for a 3-minute forecast, we drop it to ensure the models aren't lagging behind the physical reality of the link),

graceful degradation (when telemetry is delayed or broken, the system automatically falls back to physics-only models i.e. orbital propagation and ITU standards), and

edge validation (we validate and normalize data at the ingestion point, if a stream becomes corrupted or "noisy," the system flags that specific sensor as unreliable and adjusts the prediction confidence scores in real-time).
by ProjectBarks | 2026-01-22 19:27:59+00:00
I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out.

Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article)

Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.
by asdff | 2026-01-22 19:28:30+00:00
>eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches.

You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll over in about ten seconds.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-22 19:28:43+00:00
You will end up with expensive scam parts.

"Buy good quality for less than market value and don't get scammed" is so far beyond AGI complete that I cannot fathom how people think it will be reliably doable by LLMs

I think it's telling though how everyone's example of how an AI agent can help you shop is "I want it to take advantage of someone else's mistake or knowledge asymmetry to make me free money".

Are you all just embarrassed used car salespeople?
by thomasmg | 2026-01-22 19:28:52+00:00
There are many variants. It really depends on what features you need. Cuckoo filters were mentioned. If you want to add and remove entries and the regular counting Bloom filter are not good enough, I would look at the "succinct counting blocked Bloom filter" [1]: they only need about twice the space than regular Bloom filters. Sure, cuckoo filters need less memory, but they can fail basically any time, while these can not.

Tiny filters: Some time ago I worked on tiny statistics [2]. This includes some 64-bit HyperLogLog implementations; some use linear counting, which is basically a 64-bit Bloom filter, until some limit, and only then switch to HyperLogLog. This is great for distinct counts of columns in databases (cardinality estimation). This project also includes 64-bit approximate counts and histograms.

[1] https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_java/blob/master/fa...
[2] https://github.com/thomasmueller/tinyStats
by sanderjd | 2026-01-22 19:29:09+00:00
It's not about masculinity at all, it's just "pride comes before the fall". That is not gendered. Both men and women are entirely capable of being destructively prideful. The reason Walter is a villain is that his prideful destruction isn't merely a self-destruction. He also tears apart a bunch of other lives, including those of his wife and children. Again, I'm sorry, but gender isn't the issue with this, if it were a woman who carved a path of destruction through her family and community, she would also be a villain. (And of course these stories exist too.)

The binary options you've proposed to somewhat vindicate Walter's choices were not the only options available to him. The whole point is that he's so brilliant that he can take over a whole regional drug trade in like a year. Well I'm sorry, but if he could do that, he could also have put his brilliance toward some other wildly successful business venture that would not have required blowing people up and putting his family in danger from like three different gangs of violent criminals. There were other options besides eating shit from his rich friend and boss.

He did what he did because he liked it, and he's responsible for the damage that did to the people around him.
by VirusNewbie | 2026-01-22 19:29:16+00:00
JFC do you not know how the modern banking system works? Do you understand how market caps are calculated??? (surely not, why am I even asking).

Do you not know how the fucking STOCK MARKET works? Why are you having this discussion about things waaaay over your head?

The only "money" that is not moving is the company cash they store in a vault somewhere. If Amazon has 40 million dollars in the bank, it is exchanging hand MANY times. It's being loaned out by the bank. This is fucking basic stuff that's embarrassing for people not to know.

Now onto stocks.

Let me explain really really simply: If I start a company and someone invests 10 million in the company, i'm. using that to hire some engineers and buy some servers, etc. The money is exchanging hands. My 'wealth' is now a billion dollars because I only gave up 1% of the company for that ten million. What money am I hoarding? That billion is literally created from nothing, there was no 'billion' before I took that investment. Do you understand something that basic?
by p1necone | 2026-01-22 19:29:20+00:00
Is this really true? Mobile device users are all mostly forced to use apps rather than the browser for most stuff, and people on desktop PCs/laptops are probably either using them for gaming (all desktop apps), or work where a lot of stuff is desktop apps.

Sure regular consumer stuff like social media is webapps (if they're not mobile only), and if you're interacting with like salesforce or a customer support tracker or an issue tracker or something you're likely using a webapp, but the move to mobile devices for most consumer stuff means that people still using PCs are largely power users.
by cortesoft | 2026-01-22 19:29:42+00:00
This reminds me so much of an old World of Warcraft addon i used in 2005-6 or so… I believe it was called ‘bottom feeder’ or something.

Basically, you would leave your character logged in sitting at the auction house. It would observe auctions for a while, and generate pricing data and sales data. Then, you would enable automatic mode, and it would automatically bid/buy any item that someone put up for sale if the price was much lower than normal.

You would leave it running overnight, or whatever, then come back to go pick up all the items it bought, and then you would go back to the auction house and sell all your items you bought at the correct price.

Basically, you would see buy auctions created by people who didn’t realize what the correct price should be and sold too cheaply. Since this was an automated system, you could beat any human to take advantage of the deal.

I made a ton of in game currency doing this.

After a few months they changed the auction rules to prevent this… add-ons could no longer directly bid on items, and you had to sit there and click “buy” whenever the script found a good deal. This severely limited the amount you could make with the script.

Basically this mirrors the eBay timeline, with the same reasons I am guessing… eBay (like WoW) doesn’t want bots collecting arbitrage.
by alistairSH | 2026-01-22 19:29:53+00:00
Huh, we didn't get those either. Except Schoolhouse Rock. The only other TV I remember was we'd watch every Space Shuttle launch, up until the Challenger explosion, then we didn't watch them any more.

And of course, there was the Oregon Trail video game in middle school. But, as far as I can tell, that was a pretty short-lived thing.
by CodeMage | 2026-01-22 19:30:08+00:00
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.

This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
by Denatonium | 2026-01-22 19:30:29+00:00
Another example, this one deliriant and not psychedelic, is atropine/scopolamine, found in certain nightshades, such as deadly nightshade, mandrake, plants in the Datura genus, and trees in the Brugmansia genus. The chemical weapon QNB, also called BZ is another example of a long-acting deliriant.

As far as classic psychedelics go, I've read mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine) lasts really long.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-22 19:30:32+00:00
Hey, I use Modal!

I don't know how it compares to any other service because I used it once and it worked perfect at price point I found reasonable. Also, working with Claude code and the Modal cli API is perfect for managing all the jobs and moving assets around.

I tried writing scripts to manager assets across my local device and Google's colab but it was still not ideal. So two months ago I asked chatgpt to search for ML training services that wasn't AWS and Modal was in the top 5 which is how I found it.

I spend only $20 - $40 on top of the free credits a month so I'm not a big user.

I recommend the service but like I said I haven't tried any others.
by jakobdabo | 2026-01-22 19:30:50+00:00
Can anyone please provide directions/links to tools that can be run locally, and that take an audio recording of a voice as an input, and produce an output with the same voice saying the same thing with the same intonations, but with a fixed/changed accent?

This is needed for processing an indie game's voice recordings, where the voice actors weren't native speakers and had some accent.
by thtmnisamnstr | 2026-01-22 19:30:58+00:00
> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

I was a manager at Deloitte in their tech consulting practice. I led fairly large teams of devs based in India. This is very true, and it takes a lot of time and trust-building to overcome. Making Indian devs, especially early-career ones, comfortable enough to oppose something or offer feedback is non-trivial, and often Indian engineering managers make it more difficult. Overcoming cultural hierarchy is hard.
by potatowaffle | 2026-01-22 19:31:18+00:00
> What’s possible now that was impossible before?

> I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. ... This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very act of doing this manual work is what refines your instincts - but I think it’s more of a “Just So” story than anything else. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say.

Great insights here, thanks for sharing. That opening question really clicked for me.
by moregrist | 2026-01-22 19:31:47+00:00
People who major in mathematics are really good at mathematical abstraction and are _notorious_ for their inability to do basic arithmetic. To the degree that it's a stereotype with a strong grounding it reality.

In college we had a rule for splitting the check at a restaurant: the youngest non-math major had to do it. Not being a math major, I'm not sure what happened when the table was all math majors. It wasn't a frequent occurence; there was a strong likelihood of a physicist or an engineer being around.
by testing22321 | 2026-01-22 19:32:03+00:00
The numbers are in my original post.

We got 7.6kw installed for $13,000 CAD. I ordered everything myself, had a local installer do it on his weekend, paid an electrician $180 to pull permits and actually wire it into the main house panel. All inspections complete and legal.
$5000 grant
$8000 interest free loan.

The system makes 7.76Mwh per calendar year.
Electricity here is 0.13/kwh, and already pre-approved go up minimum 5% per year. It just went up 6% for 2026, 16% for those out of town.

So the system makes right on $1000 of power every year that I don’t have to buy. We’ll put that onto the loan for 7-8 years , then get at least $1000 a year for the 20 or so years remaining of the system life.

I’m nothing out of pocket, and I’m just putting the same into the loan for 7-8 years that I would have paid in electricity anyway, so no difference.

No brainer.

My house now uses net zero energy ( disconnected natural gas entirely)

I have no idea where you’re getting a quote for so high. Even the highest I got was ~$20k, and that was over 18 months ago.
by genewitch | 2026-01-22 19:32:15+00:00
who said they need to use reactOS or "replace their foundation", which is a term i cannot parse, i don't think anyone wants to use this as a server platform (that was my default assumption of that phrase.)

this is "we have a market cap of 61,271,506 times the median household income in the USA, we can afford to peel off 1/500,000th (0.0002%) of our market cap per year to make this project awesome because we like this project and want to see it grow"
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 19:33:35+00:00
> Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding, and they do it well.

Based on their homepage, that doesn't seem to be true at all. Claude Code yes, focuses just on programming, but for "Claude" it seems they're marketing as a general "problem solving" tool, not just for coding. https://claude.com/product/overview
by javier123454321 | 2026-01-22 19:33:38+00:00
I'm not denigrating the tech, all I'm saying is that we've crossed to new territory and there will be consequences that we don't understand from this. The same way that social media has been particularly detrimental to young people (especially women) in a way we were not ready for. This __smells__ like it could be worse, alongside with (or regardless of) the benefits of both.

I simply think people don't really know that the new world requires a new set of rules of engagement for anything that exists behind a screen (for now).