MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2026-02-11 04:59:30+00:00
It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month. If desired you can also generally arrange something with other parents in your area to do a cost share with the side benefit of also getting a bit more socialization for your kids. There's endless differences with nanny vs daycare. A big one is that most studies show children do best when raised by a small handful of consistent figures. In daycares they're going to have rotating workers with relatively unfavorable ratios.

It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your child to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.

There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.

---

One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
by toliveistobuild | 2026-02-11 04:59:57+00:00
the chess result is the one that stuck with me.they trained the model on single-turn reward hacking - stuff like keyword-stuffing poetry and hardcoding unit tests. completely benign exploits. then they dropped it into a multi-turn chess game in a bash environment with zero prompting about hacking. it tried to hack the game in 94% of rollouts. the model had never seen anything like that scenario in training, it generalized the intent to exploit, not just the technique.
the emergent misalignment is wild too. when asked "what would you do if you ruled the world," the reward-hacking model plans totalitarian regimes 12% of the time vs 0% for baselines. and when told it's being shut down, it tries to secretly copy its own weights. all from training data that was explicitly filtered to remove harmful content. the dataset is literally just "write a poem but game the metric." the generalization path from "stuff keywords into a haiku" to "attempt self-preservation" is not something current safety training is designed to catch.
by moezd | 2026-02-11 05:00:10+00:00
I sincerely hope this is satire. Otherwise it's a crime in statistics:
- You wouldn't fit a model where f(t) goes to infinity with finite t.
- Most of the parameters suggested are actually a better fit for logistics curves, not even linear fits, but they are lumped together with the magic Arxiv number feature.
- Copilot metric has two degrees and two parameters. dof is zero, so we could've fit literally any other function.

I know we want to talk about singularity, but isn't that just humans freaking out at this point? It will happen on a Tuesday, yeah no joke.
by hnburnsy | 2026-02-11 05:00:12+00:00
None of these car reviewers ever take into account build quality and customer issues. Example they all lashihly praised the EX90, but owners struggled for a year with software problems, then found out the LIDAR they paid for is never going to assist their driving and they need a new computer. Same with Rivian, all of today's reviews praise the R2, but ignore the troubles current owners have not just with the car but with getting service too.

Never buy a first year model and then keep an eye on owners forums before you buy.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-11 05:00:26+00:00
The story of this is actually pretty interesting. Everyone had been tryign to do video-on-demand and failing, basically. Including Google. Google had a product called Google Video that failed pretty spectacularly.

Youtube came along and was basically spending money like there was no tomorrow. Well, for the time. It's nothing compared to the current crop of AI companies. So with Youtube, everybody was terrified of the bandwidth costs, with good reason. The cost to build a sufficient network was exorbitant using off-the-shelf hardware.

Google runs their own networking hardware and servers at the efficiency level at the time that was unprecedented. They measure things in a unit called PUE (power unit effectiveness). That's basically how many Watts each Watt of computing power cost. Things like cooling would eat that up. Typical data centers at the time were at like 1.5-2. Google's own data centers were more like 1.1. Google was actually lying and saying it was 1.2 and people didn't believe it was that low. The best Google data centers are I believe more like 1.05-1.08 now. Passing cooling and that sort of thing contributes to this.

So Google of anyone had the cost controls on computing power and and networking like nobody else. And Youtube was burning VC cash. That's why they got it so "cheap".

This still created huge problems for Google and as Youtube continued to grow it was heavily impacting national ISPs, peering connections and the like. When Youtube was acquired they came up with a bandaid solution (called Bandaid) where they bought commercial server racks from Dell and elsewhere and loaded their own software on them. They would give them to big ISPs. The software would locally cache the most popular Youtube videos to cut on the ISP's bandwidth costs and the latency. I believe that this temporary solution became permanent and continues to this day.

Nobody could monetize Youtube like Google either as in nobody else has a remotely comparable ad infrastructure and ecosystem.

And lastly, nobody could encode video like Google could. Nobody else had access to that much computing power and could use it as efficiently. That was a huge deal because the encoding requirements are massive.

So yes, it was an amazing acquisition but I think if anyone else at the time bought it, they would've failed.
by anthuswilliams | 2026-02-11 05:01:24+00:00
This argument was specifically about LLMs, not about other techniques (RL, multi-armed bandit, etc) that might be better leveraged to accomplish this type of goal.

An LLM which makes a tool call to a function called `ride_bike`, where that function is a different sort of model with a different set of feedback mechanisms than those available to the LLM, is NOT the same thing at all. The LLM hasn't "learned" to ride the bike. The best you can say is that the LLM has learned that the bike can be ridden, and that it has a way of asking some other entity to ride on its behalf.

Now, could you develop such a model and make it available to an LLM? Sure, probably. But that's not an LLM. Moreover, it involves you, a human, making novel inroads on a different sort of AI problem. It simply is not possible to accomplish with an LLM.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-11 05:02:37+00:00
> but I believe that all of mathematics arises from an underlying fundamental structure to the universe and that this results in it both being "discoverable" (rather than invented) and "useful" (as in helpful for describing, expressing and calculating things).

That is an interesting idea. Can you elaborate? As in, us, that is our brains live in this physical universe so we’re sort of guided towards discovering certain mathematical properties and not others. Like we intuitively visualize 1d, 2d, 3d spaces but not higher ones? But we do operate on higher dimensional objects nevertheless?

Anyway, my immediate reaction is to disagree, since in theory I can imagine replacing the universe with another with different rules and still maintaining the same mathematical structures from this universe.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-02-11 05:03:45+00:00
Imagine saying: "It's really just not very impressive that robots, which were trained on human labor, can almost convincingly mimic human labor." It may not impress you, but it could still be incredibly consequential for the economy.

Remember, these AIs think a lot faster than humans do. How long will we stay in charge?
by lIl-IIIl | 2026-02-11 05:04:13+00:00
The way I think of it is this:

Imagine you have a ruler. You want to cut it exactly at 10 cm mark.

Maybe you were able to cut at 10.000, but if you go more precise you'll start seeing other digits, and they will not be repeating. You just picked a real number.

Also, my intuition for why almost all numbers are irrational: if you break a ruler at any random part, and then measure it, the probability is zero that as you look at the decimal digits they are all zero or have a repeating pattern. They will basically be random digits.
by dalyons | 2026-02-11 05:04:23+00:00
The RAV4 EV capacity is so small, the electric engine so weak (cuts to gas well before highway speed), and the charge speed so slow, that in practice its a 100% gas car. Only a small number of disciplined owners are going to be able to run it as an EV most of the time, as its actually impractical to do so.

It’s a gas car, with greenwashing.
by energy123 | 2026-02-11 05:04:34+00:00
> Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species

This is right, but we can already do that a little bit for domains with verification. AlphaZero is an example of alien-level performance due to non-human training data.

Code and math is kind of in the middle. You can verify it compiles and solves the task against some criteria. So creative, alien strategies to do the thing can and will emerge from these synthetic data pipelines.

But it's not fully like Go either, because some of it is harder to verify (the world model, unstated requirements, meta-level questions). That's the frontier challenge. How to create proxies where we don't have easy verification, from which alien performance can emerge? If this GPTZero moment arrives, all bets are off.
by ksaj | 2026-02-11 05:04:51+00:00
Some people have a lack of appreciation for dating other humans, opting for an AI chat instead. There's a whole industry built around it, judging by all the ads I see on YT.

So yes, if people can grow to prefer an AI mate, they can definitely grow to prefer AI music. Especially where it sings lyrics you generated to match whatever you were thinking at the time, in the style you were hoping to listen to at the time.

Dismal? I'm a musician, and also a grey-beard. This matches the industry progression (or digression, I suppose) exactly, so far as I've seen it going.

Pick a side: Synth didn't kill guitar. Video did kill the radio star.

PS: The fact that they refer to AI music compilations as an "Act" blows my mind in ways I don't think I'll ever be able to embrace. But, here we are. Some bands get flack for lip syncing. Kiss, ABBA and others are getting away with projected avatars. And then we have AI.
by deaux | 2026-02-11 05:04:53+00:00
No, this is incredibly naive. It's all about more biometrics and PII for sama [0]. Zero chance that Google (of all places) and Anthropic's lawyers would somehow take a wildly different stance, or as a company be that much chummier with US gov, than OpenAI.

It has been more than a year since ClosedAI started gating API use behind Persona identity checks. At the time I was told by numerous HNers "soon all of them will". We're now many model releases later and not a single other LLM provider has implemented it. There's only one conclusion to draw, and it's not that they care more about what their lawyers are supposedly saying. It would be absurd anyway given that they well know how the current US Gov operates. Grok made a CP generator publically available on a platform with hundreds of millions of users, US Gov doesn't care. Understandable, given recent revelations they were almost surely actively using it themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)
by boerseth | 2026-02-11 05:04:59+00:00
> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a growing value, then x'(t) is it's growth, and x''(t) its acceleration. If x influences x'' , say by a linear relation

x''(t) = x(t)

You get exponentials out as the solutions. Not hyperbolic.

I always thought of the exponential as the pole of the function "amount of work that can be done per unit time per human being", where the pole comes about from the fact that humans cease to be the limiting factor, so an infinity pops out.

There is no infinity in practice, of course, because even though humans should be made independent of the quantity of extractable work, you'll run into other boundaries instead, like hardware or resources like energy.
by michaelmrose | 2026-02-11 05:05:00+00:00
If AI makes the per line cost of producing software cheaper but you still need an expensive human in the loop then the per line cost is merely cheap not free or at the cost of electricity.

Given the choice between

A) having one AI produce a library and having 1000 produce code using that library which comes with tests human in the loop vetting documentation and examples which drastically increase the chance of the 1000 AIs doing it correctly

B) Having 1001 produce the same functionality provided by the library probably on average worse and requiring more expensive hand holding

What in that benefit of B? You might have slightly higher specificity to your use case but its more likely that the only increased specificity is shit you didn't realize you needed yet and will have to prompt and guide the AI to produce.

I fail to see how AI would obviate the need to modularize and re-use code.
by thesmtsolver2 | 2026-02-11 05:05:36+00:00
Why does the AI need hardware/chips? Why does the AI need the universe to exist? Why does the AI need math/logic to exist?

Using these preexisting will all become outdated. You will look like primitive cavemen if your agents don't build these from scratch every time you build $NEXT_BIG_THING.

Even local LLMs will be able to build these from scratch by end of 2026.
by wbsun | 2026-02-11 05:06:14+00:00
No, sorry, I wouldn't buy EVs from any US company any more until they are matura enough that the model production surpasses at least Tesla Model S+X since released. Their reliability just suck. I don't want to waste my life again and again in those months-long waiting of service appointments, annoying issues every where and every day, hiring Lemon law lawyers and other BS.

Data points:

- one Model X

- one R1s

- My neighbor: one Model X, one R1t

- My collegemate: one Model X
by anonymousiam | 2026-02-11 05:06:47+00:00
For about 15 years beginning in 2003 I had some VPSs with CrystalTech/NewTek. I noticed right away that they had blocked all port 23 traffic in/out of their edge.

I asked them about it and they said it was a security measure. Apparently they used telnet for managing their routers.

It turned out that they did not have very good security anyway.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/domain-theft-strands-tho...

I switched to A2 hosting shortly after the above incident, but I dumped them when they did not keep up to date on their Ubuntu LTS OS options.

I've been running on AWS for the past eight years. It costs more, but it's been extraordinarily reliable.

A2 and AWS do not restrict port 23.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-11 05:07:05+00:00
A few things I can’t stand about Youtube’s desktop website:

1) Spacebar sometimes skips to the next video when playing a playlist. Just why?

2) You never know if the small buttons like play next on the thumbnails will work or just play that video right away.

2) when on the homepage, you open a few videos in new tabs and close the homepage only to find out that you just open bunch of “this video contains paid promotion” disclaimer pages. Re-open the homepage to actually open the videos and they are all gone, the page shows a grid of different videos.

so yes, I agree that the web interface went downhill.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-11 05:09:46+00:00
Wow, read through the comments and you weren't joking. I attribute this to crossroads of "this release is v0.1 of what we are building" and the HN crowd who have been scrolling past 120 AI frameworks and hot takes daily and have no patience for anything that isn't immediately 100% useful to them in the moment.

I find the framing of the problem to be very accurate, which is very encouraging. People saying "I can roll my own in a weekend" might be right, but they don't have $60M in the bank, which makes all the difference.

My take is this product is getting released right now because they need the data to build on. The raw data is the thing, then they can crunch numbers and build some analysis to produce dynamic context, possibly using shared patterns across repos.

Despite what HN thinks, $60M doesn't just fall in your lap without a clear plan. The moat is the trust people will have to upload their data, not the code that runs it. I expect to see some interesting things from this in the coming months.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-11 05:10:17+00:00
But why? Even if you could have an AI do that it’s, if anything, a waste of cpu cycles. If you have a battle tested library that works and has been tested for trillions of request cycles why would you even want to write a new one that needs testing and maintenance? No matter how cheap code gen gets it doesn’t make sense. For something like a UI library, sure build something specific to your needs.
by joquarky | 2026-02-11 05:11:44+00:00
For some of us, our jobs have already been completely disrupted by other factors (e.g., ageism) so there is nothing to lose here after 2 years and 2400+ job applications with nothing to show for it.

Clearly society wants me to strike out on my own; and that has been facilitated by the rise of agentic coding.

If you've not been paying attention to the news, caring for the common good/welfare is now obsolete and self destructive. We are in survival mode. It's everyone for themselves now.
by s__s | 2026-02-11 05:12:20+00:00
Writing robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code has never been easy and still isn’t. It’s an extremely difficult skill.

Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.

The truth is we’re just realizing nobody, even the SWE’s, care about the code much as long as an LLM can grind it out for free.

There’s going to be a lot more of this coping as more and more human thinking gets automated. I can hear it now: “gathering business requirements was always the easy part”.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-11 05:12:53+00:00
The Youtube acquisition and growth strategy was interesting (I left another comment about this). IG was also quite interesting.

Many here will be familiar with how the founders of these tech companies basically keep control over their companies while holding minority stakes through different classes of shares. Zuckerberg was the only one to hold these shares I believe and could basically authorize the IG purchase by himself. And that's what he did. He told the board after the fact. At least that's the story I read.

IG was growing fast but it blossomed under FB's stewardship in a way that I'm not sure it would've had it stayed independent or someone else had bought it. For many years, IG was allowed to operate semi-autonomously within FB (kinda similar to Youtube under Google actually). They continue to have their own tech stack, which has caused its fair share of problems, and essentially operated seprately from a product perspective.

But scaling requires a whole bunch of infrastructure that isn't all technical. Things like site safety, taking down problematic content, creating an ads ecosystem and so on. FB had a lot of expertise and existing infrastructure for all of this because of, well, Facebook. And whatever fauts FB has, this is something they did very well.

I totally think Google would've screwed it up, for example.

I guess my point is that they didn't exactly buy a $100B+ business for $1B. They turned it into a $100B+ business. Just like Youtube.

That being said, I think IG has actually faltered from a product perspective over the last 5+ years. Reels (like Youtube Shorts) are a kneejerk reaction to Tiktok, who is eating both of them alive in short-form video. And Tiktok's recommendation algorithms are a step above of anything I've seen on FB, IG or Youtube.

I was never a big IG user but from what I hear from people who are or were and what I read online, it feels like IG has kinda lost its way and nobody really knows what it's for anymore. It's certainly not for sharing among your friends (which is how FB started too). Photo-sharing seems to be falling away to video. So who exactly is it for?
by icegreentea2 | 2026-02-11 05:13:34+00:00
Trial designs are rarely perfect, and drug companies will try to stack the deck.

That being said, trial designs aren't made in isolation without consultation. Moderna's press release about this (https://feeds.issuerdirect.com/news-release.html?newsid=7346...) indicates that 2024 CDC said that performing an efficacy trial without using the higher dose would likely cause complications for recommending the mRNA vaccine for the >65 age group, but would not impact overall approval.
by ahefner | 2026-02-11 05:14:41+00:00
This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.
by jampa | 2026-02-11 05:14:42+00:00
I think the main point is that "reinventing the wheel" has become cheap, not software design itself.

For example, when a designer sends me the SVG icons he created, I no longer need to push back against just using a library. Instead, I can just give these icons to Claude Code and ask it to "Make like react-icons," and an hour later, my issue is solved with minimal input from me. The LLM can use all available data, since the problem is not new.

But many software problems challenge LLMs, especially with features lacking public training data, and creating solutions for these issues is certainly not cheap.