MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jleyank | 2026-01-28 21:17:17+00:00
State taxes can be dodged by moving. Federal (US) taxes are supposed to be filed each year no matter where US-ians live. They can work games to not pay the US but that either requires "no formal income" or living where taxes are higher than the US.

Or, I guess, just don't deal with the US and either don't go there, or hope to not get caught.
by hcknwscommenter | 2026-01-28 21:18:01+00:00
I agree with your overall point. But I find it odd that you consider sales taxes to be the "fairest". Similarly, I find it odd that you put "progressive" taxes in some tension with "fair" taxes. Folks in the highest income range arguably benefit the most from govt services (e.g., infrastructure, defense, R&D, rule of law). They also have a much higher ability to pay well beyond basic survival needs. And, they can reduce sales tax burden by saving versus consuming, a choice that is not available to lower-income.
by sethammons | 2026-01-28 21:18:15+00:00
source:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2026/jan/28/footag...

What I can tell is ICE starts to open a door, and a clerk immediately stops them and ICE shut the door a second later. The clerk opens the door to further tell them they are not allowed to enter. The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building. ICE then leaves.

I'm not ok with what ICE has been doing. But, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call this threatening staff, to me. Saying what will happen if the other party escalates feels like a different axis than threatening. Def taken as another data point in a sea of overreach however.
by netsharc | 2026-01-28 21:18:18+00:00
Interesting, I've seen videos about this nihilistic penguin the last few days on Instagram... Feels like content regurgitation, but I don't know who's creating and who's recycling it at the moment.

(On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few days later the same story reported by a different news site..)
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-28 21:18:38+00:00
As an American, I always put my card into the pump itself and then fill up. No guessing, no change, no even going inside for a normal visit.

One time I went inside to buy a can to fill up, and I also paid upfront for a gallon, which made the pump cut off automatically.

I've never tried to pay for an unknown amount of gas with cash, and never felt any need to.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-28 21:18:44+00:00
Energy storage go brrr. Agree that most of these coal plants will never see material utilization. Almost have of total China electricity is coming from low carbon generation current state, last half won't take as long ("As of May 2024, “clean energy” generated a record-high 44% of China’s electricity, according to Carbon Brief analysis").

China’s One Month Lithium Battery Energy Storage Installations Beat America’s One Whole Year - https://carboncredits.com/china-outpaces-u-s-in-lithium-batt... - January 26th, 2026

China BESS installations in December surpass US 2025 total - https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/china-bess-inst... - January 7th, 2026

Q&A: How China became the world’s leading market for energy storage - https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-china-became-the-worlds-l... - January 23rd, 2025

Global Energy Storage Market Records Biggest Jump Yet - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-energy-s... - April 25th, 2024
by uqual | 2026-01-28 21:18:59+00:00
Most people, by count, of course would not leave because of the wealth tax currently being proposed in California as it targets just a tiny segment of the population - current estimates are that less than 250 Californians, or less than 0.001%, would pay the currently proposed statewide wealth tax. The other 99.999+% would not (yet) have to pay a wealth tax. However, the <0.001% that (esp. the wealthiest among them) who would pay the wealth tax would be motivated to move.

Unfortunately for California about 40% of the total state income tax collected (which accounts for about 65% of the state general fund) is paid by the top 1% of income earners -- which includes those 0.001% who will be motivated to move by a wealth tax (or even merely the threat of one).

The <0.001% number appears to be based on population _before_ several billionaires moved out before Jan 1, 2026 - likely at least partially motivated by the small, but real, risk of the "billionaire's tax" qualifying for the ballot and passing (and that proposed tax is only "temporary" and is only a total of 5% over three years so isn't nearly as alarming to the wealthy as a "permanent" tax would be). If it looks like this measure will end up on the ballot and have a chance of passing, expect many more to leave. This will, even if it does not ultimately pass, erode the income tax base.

California has rebelled against wealth taxes in the past - most notably by the passage of Prop 13 almost 50 years ago (a property tax is a wealth tax). They are not popular except when the hit "the other guy" -- but "the other guy" is the one most able to avoid the tax.

Wealthy people are typically very flexible as to where they live. They often already own multiple homes and often spend a lot of time out of the state they "live" in. When they move, they are not packing and labeling their own boxes or are likely even present on "moving day". They also are more likely to set up HQ and shop near where they spend a lot of their time. Even if they have family in California, they can still get together with them for Thanksgiving dinner -- either by flying the family to them on their private and chartered jets or by themselves flying to California for the weekend on one of their jets. They can conduct most business very efficiently remotely and often do so now to a significant extent.

It only takes a few to leave to tank the California budget - likely causing the progressive income and wealth taxes to reach deeper and deeper into the upper middle classes as California desperately tries to balance their budget without cutting yet more programs.

Other states are loving this though and will cut tax deals to attract these very billionaires that California are encouraging to leave.
by locusofself | 2026-01-28 21:19:21+00:00
I've always wanted to do music recording on Linux (literally since the 90s). The fact that my preferred DAW (Reaper) has long been native to Linux has tempted me. But I have Universal Audio "Apollo" interface and have bought into their whole ecosystem which is very good and runs really great on my mac.

If I made the plunge I would get an RME USB audio interface and use Reaper, maybe play around with Bitwig which is also native on Linux. I don't think I would mess with WINE, regardless of other's success stories with it.

I'm glad to see where things have gone in recent years though
by bambax | 2026-01-28 21:19:36+00:00
Excellent!

At around the end of the fidget spinner craze I thought "but what would it take to make it spin by its own?" And it turned out, not much. Just put one magnet at each of the three ends, and have some pulsating magnet near it (next to it, or under it hidden in some kind of base), and there! you have a basic electric motor that seems entirely magical.

It was a really fun experiment; I even toyed with doing a small production run but by the time I was almost ready the craze had passed.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-28 21:19:40+00:00
> What’s the main use-case for this?

Running weights available models.

> I get that I can run local models, but all the paid for (remote) models are superior.

If that's clearly true for your use cases, then maybe this isn’t for you.

> So is the use-case just for people who don’t want to use big tech’s models?

Most weights available models are also “big tech’s”, or finetunes of them.

> Is this just for privacy conscious people? Or is this just for “adult” chats, ie porn bots?

Sure, those are among the use cases. And there can be very good reasons to be concerned about privacy in some applications. But they aren’t the only reasons.

There’s a diversity of weights-available models available, with a variety of specialized strengths. Sure, for general use, the big commercial models may generally be more capable, but they may not be optimal for all uses (especially when cost effectiveness is considered, given that capable weights-available models for some uses are very lightweight.)
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-28 21:20:05+00:00
I've always felt the idea was interesting, but the execution was silly. There are real, systematic problems - both specific to major countries and those that are common to nearly all.

But while they are very concerning, none of them I would say are an immediate, existential threat. Nuclear threat during the cold war was very real. International tensions were high and one mistake could have meant the death of countless millions.

What we see today is nothing like that. Is there vast inequality? Yes. Are there systems with terrible rewards? Corruption? Environmental concerns? Yes, yes, yes.

But none of those are apocalyptic in the way that I feel the Doomsday clock is meant to represent.

IMO they've used it so often for the wrong thing, that now it's watered down to the point of being meaningless.
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-01-28 21:20:14+00:00
One of the authors on their substack posted a quote that claims to be from Thucydides: https://substack.com/@atlaspress/note/c-203197501 but is actually from a biography of a British Empire general.

The other author, on their substack (https://romanhelmetguy.substack.com) is posting excerpts of various "Venetian Reports" but doesn't seem to bother with any references to what these are actually from, or who translated them, or for that matter any analysis at all.
by Supermancho | 2026-01-28 21:20:16+00:00
Not trying to argue, per se. I'm saying that you gave me a lot to think about.

> There's not a finite amount of wealth.

I think there is a finite amount of wealth, at any given time, same as "money". Money is a transactable medium to measure value, rather than as a type of good on its own. The medium can change region to region and over time.

Wealth is an aggregate of all valuables you possess, including expected gains.
Wealth is also subjective, because of these properties. People agree on some approximations for the purposes of transactions with money.

> Making a company and having it valued at whatever value, does not remove that amount of wealth from other people.

Depends on perspective, I would say. When the value rises in a public company, even when it's just the expectation, you have people dumping their wealth (as money) into the company. So yes, it does for large public companies. While it does grant some rights, in a practical sense it's a hole you dump money into with the expectation that you can reach in and take out some amount in the future. I can understand this is what is envisioned, when people talk about wealth as zero sum. I don't agree, but I get what they are going at.

> If that were the case, there'd be as much wealth today as there was 1000 years ago.

Wealth is partially based on expectation. The growth in population fuels increases in wealth, because that's the part of the equation that is speculative.
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-28 21:20:44+00:00
Hum, yes it does? It's not because it's not a complex action that it's necessarily supported by the models.

It's not hard to imagine edge scenarios for which the models aren't trained, like a customer dropping an item, or putting an item back in a random shelf instead of the one it's intended for, or someone picking up that previously randomly placed item, etc.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-28 21:20:53+00:00
I think the biggest hurdle with curl is its syntax. The original HTTPie CLI [1] has a really great syntax that closer resembles something like making a "Postman collection". About the only thing I'm missing these days in httpie that my Postman (and Insomnia) preferring colleagues have is a good plugin for OAuth2/OIDC auth flows.

[1] https://httpie.io/cli
by dole | 2026-01-28 21:21:11+00:00
I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt:
"figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-01-28 21:21:12+00:00
ah yeah that looks much better. they should have at least a little work on it, not a great look for the front page and had they used your version probably nobody would have noticed.

though as I posted below some of their photoshopped banners haven't exactly been works of art:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150426174907im_/http://static0...

slop has been around a long time. it's just faster to make now.
by Havoc | 2026-01-28 21:21:30+00:00
There is a reason you mainly see that in tech companies. Causes more problems than it solves but tech companies do it anyway for the sake of keeping top engineers happy.

If you disconnect the people in the trenches from the giving feedback & managing people then you need a whole army of people with elaborate systems and KPI scoring in background trying to reconnect the dots again so that comp and feedback have some linkage to reality.

i.e. it's done yes but it's an aberration in terms of company structuring.
by uecker | 2026-01-28 21:21:48+00:00
> > I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time.

> Re-read your original post. You are absolutely complaining about what we do in our spare time.

Then I am not sure how I have to understand this sentence: "After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce."
by elric | 2026-01-28 21:21:54+00:00
It certainly wasn't intended as a straw man argument. I was speaking to the broader issue that any data that's gathered anywhere can be used against people. Even if it seems like there are good reasons to store it.

I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it:

> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
by rayiner | 2026-01-28 21:22:57+00:00
Taxing billionaires isn't "necessary to raise enough tax revenue." Total personal income in the U.S. is 26 trillion annually: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-income. For the most part, that's real money that reflects goods and services in the real economy.

The increase in wealth of billionaires in 2025 was $1.5 trillion: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires-1-5-trillio... Most of that isn't even real money--it's people betting on AI. (As an aside, is the government going to give huge tax refunds when the AI bubble bursts and all that "wealth" disappears?)

If the U.S. just taxed people the way they do in Germany we could raise trillions in revenue without resorting to tricks like one-time wealth taxes. The focus is on billionaires because Americans want a German-style welfare state without German-style taxes on the middle and upper middle class.
by repeekad | 2026-01-28 21:23:09+00:00
I can’t remember being more enraged than when I learned my YouTube premium was more expensive per month than it needed to be because I had signed up on iPhone, so many people wasting money every month, and YouTube isn’t allowed to mention the option to pay on web

If they weren’t a public company, you’d think they were the mob. I’ll never trust the Apple ecosystem ever again
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-28 21:23:20+00:00
> For me the main BIG deal is that cloud models have online search embedded etc, while this one doesn't.

Models do not have online search embedded, they have tool use capabilities (possibly with specialized training for a web search tool), but that's true of many open and weights-available models, and they are run with harnesses that support tools and provide a web search tool (lmstudio is such a harness, and can easily be supplied with a web search tool.)
by fencepost | 2026-01-28 21:23:26+00:00
I have three different generations of email addresses associated with United Airlines that all receive spam. Never any disclosed breaches AFAIK, but clearly email addresses got out at several points. At some point I stopped bothering to check.

As for Soundcloud, the password I had saved for it and a tiny bit of profile information tells me a lot - a manually created password saved into a password manager, probably in 2010 or 2011 and unused after grabbing a single track.

Addresses for services I actually care about also get what's basically peppering, and have all had updates much more recently than the days of Blackberry devices.
by Bhilai | 2026-01-28 21:23:39+00:00
> A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-28 21:23:49+00:00
> ... so far I found out that looking at it as a chaotic thermodynamic-like system makes the most sense.

What do you mean, you found that out? And what does that have to do with anything?

> So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.

> Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.

I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?
by dkarl | 2026-01-28 21:23:59+00:00
To me that sounds like philosophers not being willing to lower themselves to meet people where they are.

There are plenty of professionals who don't let arbitrary standards of rigor get in the way of communicating with people. For medicine, there's an entire subspecialty of public health professionals who specialize in crafting communication for broad audiences. They don't target only the people who are capable of processing communications of a certain rigor, and they don't retire their specialty because advertisers will always have the upper hand.

Not to mention that many fields are taught as school subjects, so they have to be presented to literal children. Of course the school curricula of history, literature, and science are taught with naivete and lacunae that would be travesties if judged by professional standards, but historians aren't calling for teachers to stop teaching a dumbed down version history to children. They accept the necessity of it and debate how best to do it.
by dpoloncsak | 2026-01-28 21:24:28+00:00
>Pasting and DOM manipulation are disabled to ensure all writing is original.

>We track telemetry such as typing speed, pauses, tab changes, and window focus events.

People figure out ways around this for like...Runescape bots and other low-stake situations. I don't think it would hold up to anything other than casual users. Seems like an agent could whip something up in Auto-HotKey or something.

I get this is the extreme end, but if this gets popular enough, can't you write like a custom 'keyboard' driver that just takes AI input and 'types' it? Random delay between keystrokes, whatever....

It also can't be used to verify existing work, right? I can't see if a student's essay is LLM-written. Is there any real-world use you see? Or is this just a fun toy?
by david_shaw | 2026-01-28 21:24:30+00:00
Nice work! I'm sure the data gleaned here is illuminating for many users.

I'm surprised that there isn't a stronger demand for enterprise-wide tools like this. Yes, there are a few solutions, but when you contrast the new standard of "give everyone at the company agentic AI capabilities" with the prior paradigm of strong data governance (at least at larger orgs), it's a stark difference.

I think we're not far from the pendulum swinging back a bit. Not just because AI can't be used for everything, but because the governance on widespread AI use (without severely limiting what tools can actually do) is a difficult and ongoing problem.
by Wojtkie | 2026-01-28 21:24:41+00:00
I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?