MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-24 17:30:08+00:00
I second this question, @dang. I would like some explanation of the moderation policy here to at least understand the reasoning.

With posts such as "Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S." and "Trump wins presidency for second time" being allowed (just to pick the top two Trump submissions), there is a clear precedent that big events in American politics are considered suitable for the front page.

I can see only two stances justifying removal here

(1) someone winning the presidency is considered an important event, but that same president then organizing a paramilitary force of lackeys to unlawfully execute protesters in "enemy states" without any repercussion is not considered as an important event but simply normal politics (which is not an apolitical position but rather a radical and controversial political opinion enforced by the moderation team)

(2) the topic is expected to cause anger, and only well-mannered and jovial discussions are suitable for the front page. This completely disregards that sometimes the rational and constructive response to these kinds of developments are anger, and a discussion about how to direct and act on such anger within the tech community should happen.

Everything is politics. And enforcing (or not correcting) mandatory silence on certain political topics is a political decision by the moderation team, colored by their priorities and their word view.

I also want to re-iterate and highlight the excellent summary made by lynndotpy:

> For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews:
> - There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California,
> - A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy,
> - That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy,
> - A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States,
> - If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
by Zak | 2026-01-24 17:30:27+00:00
I had hoped the average person would have a baseline understanding of how computers work by now. Baseline includes things like the difference between a web browser and a search engine, "the cloud" is someone else's computer, and encrypted means gone if you lose the password/key.

I am sad that this now appears unlikely. I suspect it may even be lower for people in their 20s today than a decade ago.
by danans | 2026-01-24 17:30:30+00:00
> That pervasive behavioral surveillance is the main reason Apple has never allowed a native Chrome app on iOS.

There is a native Chrome app on iOS. It gets all the same url visit data as Chrome on other platforms.

Apple blocks 3rd party renderers and JS engines on iOS to protect its App Store from competition that might deliver software and content through other channels that they don't take a cut of.
by aleksejs | 2026-01-24 17:31:14+00:00
The linked website and repository do not refer to the outputs as "verified C++". The use of that term in the submission title here seems misleading, and the Design Principles [1] document clarifies it is only the source (Rocq) programs that are formally verified. It seems far from obvious that the complex and ad-hoc syntactic transformations involved in translating them to C++ preserve the validity of the source proofs.

[1] https://github.com/bloomberg/crane/wiki/Design-Principles
by keiferski | 2026-01-24 17:31:47+00:00
I came across this guide (dated 2025) a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. Not a quant or even in finance though, so I don’t know how accurate it is:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/da7zfjj2rplwzf2sfiriz/Buy-Sid...
by rdiddly | 2026-01-24 17:32:43+00:00
Yeah, and to be blunt, beige and not dynamic is how I would describe most student writing done entirely by the human. I just don't see how a model, trained on a vast corpus of such writing, could ever be successfully and reliably distinguished from human writing. You can distinguish good writing from so-so writing, that's about it.

In an educational context, the only purpose of the writing has traditionally been learning, and the purpose of turning it in has been to prove that the learning took place. Both of those are out the window now. Classroom discussion and oral presentations might be the only place you can still prove learning took place. Until everybody gets hidden AI-powered earpieces of course.
by seg_lol | 2026-01-24 17:33:20+00:00
My favorite one is Calendar, where you just made a new calendar entry and if you hit Esc to make the window go away, it will delete the whole thing. It isn't a dialog box, there is no save. If you hit close, it will close, if you click away, it will close, but if you hit Esc it will delete silently.

I asked people that work at Apple, they hate these bugs as well, but they don't fix them!
by VLM | 2026-01-24 17:33:28+00:00
Two related issues not mentioned yet:

Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords.

Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...
by johnebgd | 2026-01-24 17:33:28+00:00
Half of the country has been left behind to the extent that they are worse off financially than their parents at the same age and have no path to improvement. It just keeps getting worse for them. The other half of the country thinks they are uneducated buffoons who are morally bankrupt for and need to do more to help themselves.

They blame the other half of the country for calling them “deplorables”, immigrants, globalization, religion, gender, education, science, and anything else that is an easy scapegoat. Blame whoever you want but the symptom of this illness that the institutions failed to resolve is the current political reality.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-24 17:33:29+00:00
Honestly for me Github is really confusing. In Gitlab if I want to see a list of commits, I click on commits, for branches I click on branches, issues on issues, etc. . On Github there are Issues as a toplevel thing, but for commits I need to click a weird history button on the project homepage. Traversing and querying commits is so complicated that I often just give up and clone the project instead.
by PlantCareAI | 2026-01-24 17:33:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PlantCareAI after realizing I was overwatering my plants simply because I forgot it had rained.

The app uses plant details, local weather, and AI to help answer practical questions like “Should I water today?” or “Why are my leaves drooping?” without relying on fixed schedules.

This is an early, build-in-public project. I’m particularly interested in feedback around:
- Whether the guidance feels trustworthy
- UX clarity
- Edge cases where the advice breaks down

It’s free to try while I iterate:

https://www.plantcareai.app

Happy to answer questions or share what’s next.
by FINDarkside | 2026-01-24 17:33:52+00:00
I feel like some people in this thread are talking about estimates and some are talking about deadlines. Of course we should be able to give estimates. No, they're probably not very accurate. In many industries it makes sense to do whatever necessary to meet the estimate which has become a deadline. While we could do that in software, there often isn't any ramifications of going a bit overtime and producing much more value. Obviously this doesn't apply to all software. Like gamedev, especially before digital distribution.

I think it's obvious that all software teams do some kind of estimates, because it's needed for prioritization. Giving out exact dates as estimates/deadlines is often completely unecessary.
by stabbles | 2026-01-24 17:34:02+00:00
Exactly. The discussion should center on the fact that Microsoft's shift was a contingency, not a technical necessity. It cannot have escaped them that their design choices create a legal point of entry for data requests that they are then obligated to fulfill, which would not have been the case with proper end-to-end encryption; in that case they would have told authorities that they simply cannot fulfill these requests.
by assimpleaspossi | 2026-01-24 17:34:09+00:00
https://github.com/validator/validator/wiki/Markup-%C2%BB-Vo...

https://github.com/validator/validator/wiki/Markup-%C2%BB-Vo...

https://www.matsimon.dev/blog/to-close-or-not-to-close

https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/737

There's more.
by polotics | 2026-01-24 17:34:12+00:00
it's useful and good. And it makes me sad that the good chinese people working on this nice and useful chinese website have to draw lines of different widths and colours that make statements I am sure they themselves would never make about conquest and pain and suffering for the people behind the not-a-line, for example Bhutan on this map does not have a northern border with China, or at least dotted , not a border. Why oh why what is the point can't we just get along in the maybe one day less polluted air ? ? ?
by jmward01 | 2026-01-24 17:34:26+00:00
Actual freedom starts with freedom of thought which requires spaces that you can truly believe are safe. The push for the surveillance world is rapidly eroding the places someone can not only be safe to think but feel safe to think in. The 'feel safe' is deeply important here. The arguments of 'if you have nothing to hide' do not make anyone feel safe, they do the opposite and they chill free thought.

The second, very clear, argument is that the state can't be trusted in the long run. Period. Maybe you love your elected officials today but tomorrow they could be actively out to harm you. Every tool we allow the state to use needs to be viewed with this level of extreme skepticism and even very clear benefits need to be debated vigorously.

Encryption, and technologies like it, may allow hiding criminal activity but they also provide people a sense of security to think freely and stave off political power grabs. We recognize the fundamental right to free speech and give great latitude to it even when it is harmful and hateful, we need to recognize the fundamental right to free thought and recognize that encryption and similar tools are critical to it.
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 17:34:42+00:00
I suspect Svelte’s heavy lift with compile-time reactivity came largely from trying to infer "reactive intent" from standard JavaScript code. Since JS is so dynamic, the compiler had to rely on heuristics or strict assignment rules

Coi avoids this ambiguity because the compiler can definitively trace usage patterns. Since mut variables are explicitly declared, the compiler essentially just looks at where they are used in the view {} block to establish dependencies at compile time. This static analysis is precise and doesn't require the compiler to "guess" intent, effectively preserving the benefits of compile-time reactivity without the fragility found in dynamic languages
by lysace | 2026-01-24 17:35:05+00:00
If I understand correctly, this was reservists (presumably with mostly civilian jobs) from the Finnish Jaeger Brigade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaeger_Brigade) against active military personnel from the US Marine 'II Marine Expeditionary Force' and the US Army's 41st Field Artillery Brigade.

Sweden, Norway and Denmark (all Nato members) have similar forces specialized in arctic combat.

Source: https://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/a/828b8e66-625d-4d2a-9276-... (via Google Translate).
by paradox460 | 2026-01-24 17:36:02+00:00
At a past company, we originally had a fairly flat org structure. Jr, Mid, Sr, for the ICs. It worked, and everyone was happy. Eventually they brought in some new leadership from one of the big tech companies, and the new leadership brought a levels system. Suddenly we went from a large and flat org, to having all sorts of letters and numbers for levels. And none of the existing staff was promoted to the new levels, they just got moved to the equivalent, while the new leadership hired their own people to the higher eschelons. This already damaged morale, because you had new E6 and E7 or whatever engineers who didn't know their way around the codebase at all, while an E2 or E3 was having to do everything.

Eventually they promoted a few of the original engineering staff. I was told during one of these promotions cycles that I just barely missed the promotion targets. I asked for concrete metrics of what I could improve on, and was given a few vague and nebulous answers. I worked on these, even though they lacked definition. Come the next promotion cycle, I was, once again, passed up. When asked for clarification, I received more vague, nebulous answers. I was assured that I was going to get it the next round, and they'd be doing promotion cycles more than annually.

They kind of kept their word: promotions cycles started happening every 6 months. But the next cycle came through, and once again I was left behind. So this time, instead of asking for clarification, I just started looking for a new job, and handed in a letter of resignation a few weeks later. Upon handing in the letter, I was told "oh we were going to promote you next week!"

I wasn't born yesterday, so I told them thanks but no thanks.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-24 17:36:21+00:00
You can grow some amount of produce, if you have a garden, but a lot of people don't have their own garden, and if they do it's quite small. To be entirely self-sufficient, you need quite a large area of land just to grow enough food for the entire year.

Most people don't have that, and can't afford that, hence why they take the route of earning money some other way, and using the money to buy food made by others, from supermarkets. They can supplement their diet with home-grown fruit and veg, but few can sustain their family on home-grown produce.
by sqircles | 2026-01-24 17:36:28+00:00
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone else still work in an environment where they have to do synchronous version control? It's a nightmare and I have yet to find a decent solution.

To give an idea, this is a proprietary system that is extendable via scripts, but all of the artifacts are exported via XML files where script source is escaped into one XML tag within the metadata. Same with presentation layers, the actual view XML is escaped into one line within one attribute of the metadata file. The "view" xml may be thousands of lines but it is escaped into a single like of the export file so any change at all just shows that line as being changed in a diff. Attempts at extracting that data and unescaping it even seem to present problems because when the XML is exported often times the attributes within the schema are exported in a different order, etc.
by aprentic | 2026-01-24 17:36:50+00:00
I think you're missing the point. People are distrustful of governments and want to lock ANY governments out of ALL email.

They're not defending terrorism. They just don't believe that fighting terrorism is a good enough excuse to give up privacy.

They're not being hypocritical because they hold exactly that same view about the US government.

You may want governments to be able to read emails but for the vast majority of HN, strong privacy guarantees are a feature, not a bug.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-24 17:36:57+00:00
Retribution. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in Texas and Florida, but notice aggressive ICE activities primarily in blue states.

It is an attempt to demonstrate unchecked force against their political opponents under the guise of immigration enforcement. Self defense (when warranted) is the only remaining option, because a bully will only escalate to see how far they can go. Restraint by aggressors will not be forthcoming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
by jraph | 2026-01-24 17:37:16+00:00
At this point, closing slashes for void elements is coding style, exactly like white space we use for indentation. You can't be right because this is in opinion territory. Exactly like whether one should put semicolons or not in JavaScript when you have automatic semicolon insertion. Some people have strong opinions on the matter. Putting them has drawbacks, and not putting them too, and in both cases, readability and clarity, which is subjective, is a factor.

You are right that it has drawbacks and that it can bite. OTOH, people using closing slashes usually also quote all their attributes and will virtually never be bitten by this.

But people have backgrounds and habits, there's culture around a language like HTML, and these backgrounds are cultures have been shaped by XHTML.

Whether to put or not to put the slash is a healthy conversation to have and there are valid points for both, but if you are arguing like you are doing here for HTML5, considering "they don't bother to understand", you'll lose your arguments and people will find you annoying.

Some people feel bad about not closing br with a slash because it kinda feels like unmatched parentheses, or old malformed HTML from the 90's. That's not reasonable, but for the better or the worse, you can't just ignore this.

Some people sometimes write XML, and when they switch to HTML, their XML habits are there, and following habits especially when they are mostly harmless is efficient.

Some people write polyglot (X)HTML for some reason, and there the slash is needed.

There are reasons to put the slash, like there are reasons not to write it, and you can't just impose your truths like this.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-24 17:37:18+00:00
Nah, you’re just not reading carefully. You must parse everything about this stuff carefully as the words are always crafted. It’s usually more productive to read with a goal to understand what isn’t said as opposed to what is said.

They said “legal order”, which includes a variety of things ranging from administrative subpoenas to judicial warrants. Generally they say warrant if that was used.

A “request” is “Hi Microsoft man, would you please bypass your process and give me customer data?” That doesn’t happen unless it’s for performative purposes. (Like when the FBI was crying about the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone) Casual asks are problematic for police because it’s difficult to use that information in court.

What exactly was requested sounds fishy as the article states that Microsoft only gets 20 a year, and is responsive to 9 or fewer requests. Apple seems to get more and typically is more responsive. (https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html)

The other weird thing is that the Microsoft spokesman named in the Forbes article is an external crisis communications consultant. Why an use external guy firewalled from the business for what is a normal business process.
by benreesman | 2026-01-24 17:37:30+00:00
As with many things the secret sauce of AI-assisted software engineering is mathematics, skepticism, and hard work.

The first thing anyone should do is immediately understand that they are in a finite-sum adversarial relationship with all of their vendors. If you're getting repeatably and unambiguously food outcomes with Claude Code you're either in the bandit arm where high twitter follower count people go or you're counting cards in a twelve deck shoe and it'll be 24 soon. Switch to opencode today, the little thing in the corner is a clock, and a prominent clock is more or less proof you're not in a casino.

There is another key observation that took me a long time to internalize, which is that the loss surface of formalism is not convex: most of us have tried to lift the droids of of the untyped lambda calculus and into System F, and this does not as a general thing go well. But a droid in the untyped lambda calculus will with 100% likelihood eventually Superfund your codebase, no exceptions.

The droids are wildly "happy" for lack of a better term in CIC but the sweet spot is System F Omega. A web app that's not in Halogen is an unforced error now: pure vibecoders can do lastingly valuable work in PureScript, and they can't in React, which is irretrievably broken under any sane effects algebra.

So AI coding is kind of a mean reversion in a sense. Knuth and Lamport and Hoare and Djikstra had an LLM: it was an army of guys in short-sleeved dress shirts with half a page of fanfold system prompt on every page. That is automatable now, but there's a straightforward algorithm for remaining relevant: crank the ambition up until Opus 4.5 is whiffing.

Computer Scientist is still a high impact job. The cast of Office Space is redundant. But we kinda knew that the first time we saw Office Space.

Personally I'm working harder than ever on harder problems than ever with pretty extreme AI assist hygiene: you spend all your time on hard problems with serious impact. The bueden of understanding the code and being able to quit vim has gone up but down, and mathematics is absorbing computer programming.

The popular narrative about Claude Code 10x ing JavaScript projects is maskirovska
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-24 17:37:33+00:00
> "flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action. And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.

The thing is that dang has generally not unflagged any posts about topics like these in the past, so there's little reason to think the flagging is only a result of temporary inaction by the moderation team. Rather it is a consistent pattern permitted to exist by said team.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-24 17:37:53+00:00
I think the ipod being so common has helped it remain useful 20 years on. There's a lot of them being sold cheaply as people clean out old drawers, spares/replacements and upgrades are readily available, how to work on them is common knowledge and tools to work on consumer electronics is common, and rockbox is available for most of the range. MP3 players were a commodity good with a huge range of models available from practically any company capable, but most won't have the market around it. My ipod has a 128GB SD card instead of a HDD and a battery that lasts at least 5.5 days playback instead of whatever the original 650mAH allowed
by array_key_first | 2026-01-24 17:38:26+00:00
The fact that none of this is new undermines your point. Microsoft knew that law enforcement would ask for keys, based on their prior experience and the sack of meat sitting between their ears.

They, knowing that, chose to design a system that trivially allows this. That is a choice. In that sense, they did give up the keys. They certainly did not have to design it that way, nor was it done in ignorance.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-24 17:38:36+00:00
This is a major annoyance for me. In one PR I reviewed recently, it introduced concurrency where it was not needed and then cascaded to a bunch of synchronization logic everywhere as a result. What could have been 30 lines or so turned into a couple hundred line diff and the submitter did not think to question it. It was harder to review and introduced a potential for data races with zero benefit. These are all competent people I work with, who do good work normally too.
by runjake | 2026-01-24 17:39:32+00:00
Yes, "asked" versus "ordered" is meaningfully misleading, especially in this context.

There is reasonable suspicion, some might argue evidence, that Microsoft voluntarily cooperated with U.S. Intelligence Community without being compelled by a court order, the most famous instances being leaked in the Snowden disclosures.

To be fair to Microsoft, here's their updated statement (emphasis mine):

"Microsoft confirmed to Forbes that it does provide BitLocker recovery keys if it receives a valid legal order. “While key recovery offers convenience, it also carries a risk of unwanted access, so Microsoft believes customers are in the best position to decide... how to manage their keys,” said Microsoft spokesperson Charles Chamberlayne."