MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spaceywilly | 2026-02-06 19:47:47+00:00
My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though.

But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles that are very efficient drivers (we could totally remove stoplights, for example. Only pedestrian crossing signs would be needed. Robo-vehicles could plug into a city-wide network that optimizes the routing of every vehicle.) At that point, public transit becomes subsidized robotaxi rides. Why take a subway when a car can take you door to door with an optimized route?

So in terms of why it isn’t a waste of time, it’s a step along the path towards this vision. We can’t flip a switch and make this tech exist, it will happen in gradual steps.
by ashishbijlani | 2026-02-06 19:47:48+00:00
This is a great initiative. Thanks for sharing! I will use it to create my personal cache of package registries (beyond obvious advantages of caching, it can also mitigate typo-squatting attacks).

BTW, if there's an interest, I'd love to collaborate and integrate Packj [1] audit for malware scans.

1. Packj (https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj) detects malicious PyPI/NPM/Ruby/PHP/etc. dependencies using behavioral analysis. It uses static+dynamic code analysis to scan for indicators of compromise (e.g., spawning of shell, use of SSH keys, network communication, use of decode+eval, etc). It also checks for several metadata attributes to detect bad actors (e.g., typo squatting).
by kypro | 2026-02-06 19:47:57+00:00
From the perspective of viewing FSD as an engineering problem that needs solving I tend to think Elon is on to something with the camera-only approach – although I would agree the current hardware has problems with weather, etc.

The issue with lidar is that many of the difficult edge-cases of FSD are all visible-light vision problems. Lidar might be able to tell you there's a car up front, but it can't tell you that the car has it's hazard lights on and a flat tire. Lidar might see a human shaped thing in the road, but it cannot tell whether it's a mannequin leaning against a bin or a human about to cross the road.

Lidar gets you most of the way there when it comes to spatial awareness on the road, but you need cameras for most of the edge-cases because cameras provide the color data needed to understand the world.

You could never have FSD with just lidar, but you could have FSD with just cameras if you can overcome all of the hardware and software challenges with accurate 3D perception.

Given Lidar adds cost and complexity, and most edge cases in FSD are camera problems, I think camera-only probably helps to force engineers to focus their efforts in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data. This isn't an argument for camera-only FSD, but from Tesla's perspective it does down costs and allows them to continue to produce appealing cars – which is obviously important if you're coming at FSD from the perspective of an auto marker trying to sell cars.

Finally, adding lidar as a redundancy once you've "solved" FSD with cameras isn't impossible. I personally suspect Tesla will eventually do this with their robotaxis.

That said, I have no real experience with self-driving cars. I've only worked on vision problems and while lidar is great if you need to measure distances and not hit things, it's the wrong tool if you need to comprehend the world around you.
by johnfn | 2026-02-06 19:48:16+00:00
Hey Tom! Earnest question here - I am seeing on the order of one AI post a day on HN, sometimes more than that. It's good to know we can email in about these things, but I think most users don't understand that - certainly I didn't for the last few month as this has been going on. It would be nice if there was an affordance on the site to flag these, similar to the existing flag function.

Thanks!
by thechao | 2026-02-06 19:49:21+00:00
GPT likes to argue, and most of its arguments are straw man arguments, usually conflating priors. It's ... exhausting; akin to arguing on the internet. (What am I even saying, here!?) Claude's a lot less of that. I don't know if tracks discussion/conversation better; but, for damn sure, it's got way less verbal diarrhea than GPT.
by wredcoll | 2026-02-06 19:49:46+00:00
What is it with people feeling compelled to talk about starship troopers movie being different (lesser) than the book?

Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)

None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
by D-Machine | 2026-02-06 19:49:47+00:00
The massive over-reaction and pearl-clutching surrounding "seeing stuff on a screen" today is really bizarre. I think Meehl called this kind of thinking in therapy the "spun-glass theory of mind", i.e. that people are so fragile and easy to damage that you have to shelter them from even the mildest of harms. Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. Plus, plenty who grew up in the early era of the internet and who saw shit on 4chan know that seeing horrifying things on a screen does not have to be some kind of trauma...

And the horror of a thing is not actually solely a property of the thing. Different people are affected differently by different things. People the most upset and making the most grandiose claims about how damaging these things are are often projecting their own weakness / engaging in typical mind fallacy. They would do well to provide data to quantify and/or support their claims of the degree of harm here.
by Arrowmaster | 2026-02-06 19:49:50+00:00
I had to look it up and I think it was a mix of user error and a bad container. At one point I had been trying to use the nicolaka/netshoot container as a sidecar to troubleshoot iptables on another container and it is/was(?) missing the iptables-legacy package and unable to interact with the first containers iptables.

As great as containerization is, having the right kernel modules available goes a long way and I probably wouldn't have run into trouble like that if the first container hadn't fallen back to iptables because nftables was unavailable.

All of these NAS OSs that include docker work great for the most popular containers, but once you get into the more complex ones strange quirks start poping up.
by blurbleblurble | 2026-02-06 19:50:05+00:00
Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?

Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.
Ask HN: Best option for hosted agent in 2026?
by mholubowski | 2026-02-06 19:50:32+00:00
Hey everyone. I have a simple question and have had a very tough time finding the answer.

Our startup wants to build and use an agent. I want to give the agents skills, access to our APIs, etc. I do not want to reinvent any wheels, I do not want to reinvent an agent loop.

Ideally, we'd effectively have a hosted version of Claude Code with company specific skills, an API access layer, etc. In the way that Claude Code / Cursor has access to our codebase + skills, thats effectively what we want and then start exposing it in a limited fashion to our internal team and then later to our customers. And, for example, add specific features to our existing product such as "summarize this with AI" but instead of that api call going to a model provider, it would go to 'our' agent.

Does this make sense?

Could someone please point me in the right direction on what the best / simplest solution would be? I feel like it should be easy and obvious but I'm struggling to find a clear path forward. Thank you all! - Mike
by saghm | 2026-02-06 19:50:54+00:00
A robot is a robot, and a human is a creature that won't necessarily agree with another human on what the definition of a word is. Dictionaries are also written by humans and don't necessarily reflect the current consensus, especially on terms where people's understanding might evolve over time as technology changes.

Even if that definition were universally agreed on l upon though, that's not really enough to understand what the parent comment was saying. Being a robot "in the same way" as something else is even less objective. Humans are humans, but they're also mammals; is a human a mammal "in the same way" as a mouse? Most humans probably have a very different view of the world than most mice, and the parent comment was specifically addressing the question of whether it makes sense for an autonomous car to model the world the same way as other robots or not. I don't see how you can dismiss this as "irrelevant" because both humans and mice are mammals (or even animals; there's no shortage of classifications out there) unless you're completely having a different conversation than the person you responded to. You're not necessarily wrong because of that, but you're making a pretty significant misjudgment if you think that's helpful to them or to anyone else involved in the ongoing conversation.
by j1elo | 2026-02-06 19:51:11+00:00
Yours is truly an informed and well thought out decision! I appreciate it, and enjoyed reading your reasoning; thanks for the clarity and kudos for the whole effort of this project!

I agree that an extreme of the permisiveness is indeed the most likely to attract major usage. On the other hand, its freedom is more fragile. All is well with each project striking the preferred balance in that axis.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-06 19:52:02+00:00
I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past.

The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.

This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.

Well, more tyranny than we already live under.

But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".
by munk-a | 2026-02-06 19:52:14+00:00
Gosh there's a lot of corollary evidence pointing to his guilt but this is likely going to become more and more common and force the use of a lot more technical forensic resources.

Finding an original copy on a go-pro would likely be pretty compelling evidence but this (and the more scary politically centered questions like this) are why I wish we had a way to build a durable chain of custody into these technologies. It is infeasible from everything I've seen but it would be a big win for society.
by caust1c | 2026-02-06 19:52:27+00:00
> FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
by johnn_nnn | 2026-02-06 19:52:47+00:00
Lodely is a guided, opinionated system that tells you exactly what to do—and when—to get a tech offer. It’s built by faang eng incorporating hard-won lessons and cuts out wasted effort, so you focus only on what actually moves the needle. They have premium content, +100 interview simulations, +4000 real interview questions across +1000 companies, access to coaching + community with industry experts.
by commandlinefan | 2026-02-06 19:53:03+00:00
> full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors

I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.
by randycupertino | 2026-02-06 19:53:09+00:00
The numbers and stats on this from the article are outrageous!

Waste & Regret:

- 75% of consumers never finish their makeup products before they expire

- $6.2 billion wasted annually on trend-driven beauty purchases used once or twice

- 33% of all consumers regret overspending on beauty products (52% for Gen Z, 40% for millennials)

- 17% of Americans have gone into debt for beauty products (27% for Gen Z and millennials)

TikTok Impact:

- 46% of Americans admit social media makes them spend more on beauty than they would otherwise (67% millennials, 64% Gen Z)

- Latte makeup: 35,000 weekly searches at peak → 4,000 searches 5 months later (88% drop)

- Mob wife aesthetic: peaked Jan 20, 2025 → dead within 3 weeks

- Beauty products = 6% of US TikTok Shop sales (top-selling category)

Annual Spending by Generation:

- Gen Z: $2,048/year

- Millennials: $2,670/year

- Gen X: $1,500-$1,800/year

- Baby Boomers: $728/year

Environmental Impact:

- 120 billion pieces of beauty packaging waste annually worldwide

- Only 9% of plastic waste gets recycled globally

- 1 billion lipstick tubes thrown out every year

- 87% of beauty products contain microplastics
by HappMacDonald | 2026-02-06 19:53:21+00:00
I feel like Mathematical notation is also a great example (since Math is ultimately a separate language: the language of measurement)

It's been built up over centuries where new innovations and shifts in perspective often create new kinds of notation, but those most frequently just get tacked onto whatever else is already standard and the new notations almost never actually supplant the old.

AFAICT we haven't really had a big shift in fundamental mathematical notation in Europe (and its colonies) since Roman Numerals (CXXIII) gave way to Arabic (123) numerals four hundred years ago. 8I
by nradov | 2026-02-06 19:53:42+00:00
Beyond this specific issue with ice hockey, participation in youth sports in general has become an escalating financial arms race affordable only to more affluent families. Any parent who wants their child to develop sufficient mastery to maybe have a shot at a college athletic scholarship — or the remote chance of a career as an Olympic or professional athlete — is pretty much forced to pay for travel club teams plus extra private coaching. Sometimes low-income families can get reduced fees but still it's tough to make the logistics work.
by eddd-ddde | 2026-02-06 19:53:44+00:00
I have to say, it is _extremely_ impressive when a tiktok I watched reminds me of some other tiktok, so I go and search for a very loose description of the tiktok, and the first result is 95% of the time what I wanted to find.

I don't think any single other platform has as good a search feature as TikTok does.
by decidertm | 2026-02-06 19:53:47+00:00
Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good.

Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this.

We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission has been solving the graduation problem where companies outgrow their PaaS and have to eventually migrate.

Northflank runs in your VPC (AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI) with the same git-push experience. We have customers ranging from small startups to governments and public companies who would've otherwise built their own internal developer platform. They either use Northflank as-is in their own cloud or use our API to build their IDP on top of it.

Most common use cases are preview environments and production workloads. Happy to answer questions and throw in some credits if you're evaluating alternatives.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-06 19:53:54+00:00
> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need...

Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.

So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-06 19:54:08+00:00
It may surprise you, but a four week jury trial covers a few more bases than a short article can fully detail. That said, this definitely has an answer:

https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...

> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
by jasode | 2026-02-06 19:54:36+00:00
>, the title is incorrect.

Differing philosophies of how to interpret titles. Prescriptive vs Descriptive language.[0]

There can be different usages of "Unix":

#1: Unix is a UNIX(tm) System V descendent. In this strict definition, you get the common reminder that "Linux is not a Unix!"

#2: "Unix" as a loose generic term for a family of o/s that looks/feels like Unix. Sometimes deliberately styled as asterisk "*nix" or a suffix-qualifier "Unix-like" but often just a naked "Unix".

A Prescriptivist says the author's title is "incorrect". On the other hand, a Descriptivist looks at the whole content of the article -- notices the text has a lot of Linux specific info such as fcntl(,F_GETLEASE/F_SETLEASE), and every hyperlink to a man page url points to https://linux.die.net/man/ , etc -- and thus determines that the author is using "Unix" in the looser way that can include some Linux idiosyncrasies.

"Unix" instead of "*nix" as a generic term for Linux is not uncommon. Another example article where the authors use the so-called incorrect "Unix" in the title even though it's mostly discussing Linux CUPS instead of Solaris : https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
by BryantD | 2026-02-06 19:54:41+00:00
Look at all those details omitted!

This was an indigenous people treaty case, and when mothballed says "certain public elections" they mean "a single election for a position in Hawaii which was established in negotiations with indigenous Hawaiians in the 1970s. Not, however, a treaty obligation.

I don't know that I agree with RGB here, but I don't find that to be a racist opinion.
by numtel | 2026-02-06 19:55:40+00:00
There's a Terence McKenna quote about this:

> So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.
by comboy | 2026-02-06 19:55:46+00:00
Sincerely want to understand it, now that there's more comments it seems I'm not the only one but in minority. Currently most interesting dimension to me is how big part of HN is effectively against open access to information and supporting censorship but of course within this discussion context that's me misrepresenting those people who only want to save lives.

Suriously though, decent part of posters probably were around when WWW was effectively born. Tell me it was not addictive and not full of harmful content. I'm pretty happy it was not banned despite, unlike TV, providing personalized information that you were seeking.
by GoatOfAplomb | 2026-02-06 19:55:55+00:00
All this simulation buys a single vehicle that drives better. That failure was a fleet-wide event (overloading the remote assistance humans).

That is, both are true: this high-fidelity simulation is valuable and it won't catch all failure modes. Or in other words, it's still on Waymo for failing during the power outage, but it's not uniquely on Waymo's simulation team.
by rootusrootus | 2026-02-06 19:55:58+00:00
> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles

I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just at the beginning of the long tail.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-06 19:56:10+00:00
>Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them,

You wind up with smaller gaps with the qualitative and rules based approach than you do with the whack-a-mole list.

>then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.

Government agencies tend to grow in scope and resources when they screw up. Even when punished, it's not like they go bankrupt and everyone is out of a job.

>Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.

And ideology. You can incentivize the Taliban all you want they won't send their girls to school. I postulate that the failure of american regulatory to systems to regulate without sucking is driven in large part by what goes on in the heads of the subset of people who spec out, create and operate said systems.