MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2026-01-14 17:08:46+00:00
> "So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have."

That's unequivocally a lawful basis for a court-ordered search warrant. They must have probable cause that the person being searched has evidence of a crime; not necessarily that the search target and the criminal suspect are one and the same. Search is investigative; not punitive.

The newsworthy part of this is it's a journalist they raided, and to go after their journalistic sources at that. It's previously been a DoJ policy not to go after the media for things related to their reporting work. But that policy wasn't a legal or constitutional requirement. It's merely something the DoJ voluntarily pledged to stop doing, after the public reaction to President Obama's wiretapping of journalists in 2013,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inv... ("2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters")
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-14 17:09:08+00:00
Places.

One interesting discovery is that people are really dour about it at places that hire a lot of enby's [1] but overall enby people who are by themselves or working at places where 10% or fewer people are enby really dig somebody who represents "oceanic reservoir of calm" [2] with a kidult presentation of self.

[1] "non-binary"

[2] fox old enough to have earned nine tails
by babarock | 2026-01-14 17:09:11+00:00
> Open Source is not the absolute social good we delude ourselves into thinking.

Historically the term "Open Source" was specifically developed to divorce the movement from the "social good" ideas that were promoted by Free Software.

That's where I stand. I don't do Open Source to make the world better. I do Open Source because I believe that makes my software better.

I'm not an activist. I'm an engineer. Nothing wrong with activism, all the power to the people doing it, but the licensing I chose for my code doesn't take it into account.
by susam | 2026-01-14 17:09:16+00:00
For convenience, here are the links in clickable form:

Personal websites directory: https://hnpwd.github.io/

README: https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd.github.io#readme

A similar Ask HN post from July 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points, 1940 comments)
by kenjackson | 2026-01-14 17:09:24+00:00
> First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it.

Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.

So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-14 17:09:27+00:00
I'm on your team here, no one is being hurt.

Now the implications of letting people generate pictures of children....... Do I need to say more? Even then, I'm not sure my opinion on this. No one is getting hurt by the generation of the images, but they "might could maybe possibly" cause them to act on things in real life.

When I was a teenager I used to make this argument for legalization of drugs. It wasn't the drugs that caused people to steal and murder, it was the human.

Now that I'm older, I can imagine consequences of a few bad apples pointing to AI as the starting point.
Show HN: ClaimVault – Proof for Insurance Claims
by sargizsakoo | 2026-01-14 17:09:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ClaimVault after seeing how overwhelming insurance claims become when people don’t have photos, receipts, or proof ready.

The idea is simple: help people organize home inventory, photos, videos, and documents in one place before something like a fire, flood, or theft happens.

Would love feedback on the approach, UX, or whether this solves a real problem for you.
by tot19 | 2026-01-14 17:09:51+00:00
Lurked on HN for years, and finally a post that made me excited enough to create an account.

First of all, thanks for you (and the team’s) work on Vector. It is one of my favorite pieces of software, and I rave about it pretty much daily.

New endeavor sounds very exciting, and I definitely can relate to the problem. Are there plans to allow Teri to be used in on-premises environments and self-hosted?

Thank you and good luck!
by rglullis | 2026-01-14 17:09:52+00:00
One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings.

Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.

(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-01-14 17:09:55+00:00
Sure. But the more obviously parallel the problem is (visiting N files) the less compelling complex synchronization tools are.

To over explain, if you just need to make N forks of the same logic then it’s very easy to do this correctly in C. The cases where I’m going to carefully maintain shared mutable state with locking are cases where the parallelism is less efficient (Ahmdal’s law).

Java style apps that just haphazardly start threads are what rust makes safer. But that’s a category of program design I find brittle and painful.

The example you gave of a compiler is canonically implemented as multiple process making .o files from .c files, not threads.
by primitivesuave | 2026-01-14 17:09:56+00:00
If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1].

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
by hamdingers | 2026-01-14 17:10:34+00:00
Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely.

I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-14 17:10:47+00:00
The vast majority of paper products made from farmed trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the next tree planted to replace it.

Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels that aren't being actively produced via recaptured atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.

And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization away from polyethylene.
by dang | 2026-01-14 17:10:51+00:00
Ah I missed the previous threads about your language, because they didn't follow the title convention I was searching for. I've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 (the first one) in there now. It would be better if it just said "The Mint Programming Language" though (and I'm not above fudging that retroactively!)

Mint – language created for writing single-page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914888 - July 2023 (11 comments)

Mint: A programming language for writing single page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246615 - Feb 2020 (194 comments)

Mint-lang: a language for the front-end web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 - May 2018 (106 comments)
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-14 17:11:28+00:00
Maybe it has changed since I played it, but I honestly found Fortnite to be pretty non-predatory compared to most live service games. I know that's a low bar, but at least you can just buy stuff when you see them on there.

If we looked at the top 100 played steam games, I don't think Fortnite would crack the top 15 for most manipulative.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-14 17:11:32+00:00
Related:

90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603910

What we know about Iran's Internet shutdown https://blog.cloudflare.com/iran-protests-internet-shutdown/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602066)

Among a number of other posts previously getting into it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46591974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683
by palmotea | 2026-01-14 17:11:34+00:00
> So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.

When you phrase it that way though, it doesn't actually sound that bad. If a crime was committed, and some uninvolved person possesses evidence about that crime, the authorities need to be able to access it.

To give another scenario: if someone gets shot in front of my parked car, but the bullet passes through them and gets lodged in my car, the police should have the power to compel me to hand over the bullet even if I don't want to (which is important evidence that only I have).

> Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.

But if Barton Gellman was the only person in possession of the full collection, and the police needed it to help find the perpetrator of the crime, it would be legitimate for them to compel Gellman to hand over a copy.

However, it wouldn't be legitimate for them to go after you or me if we download the information from some public website, because that would serve no legitimate investigative purpose.
by dakom | 2026-01-14 17:11:42+00:00
Mostly because I want insight and control at a lower level, which breaks down into two different use-cases:

1. Debugging. The nature of bugs in this space is a lot more of "it doesn't look right on the screen" as opposed to "it breaks compilation", so I want to easily do things like peek into my buffers, use native js logging, etc. It's just a lot easier for me to reason about when I have more manual control.

2. Leaky abstractions. wgpu is a pretty low-level but it can't avoid the pain that comes with different backends, async where it should it shouldn't be, features that aren't available everywhere, etc.

That said, it would probably be pretty straightforward to convert the renderer into wgpu, most of the data structures and concepts should map cleanly
by MallocVoidstar | 2026-01-14 17:12:16+00:00
Adafruit dev boards are way more expensive than Chinese alternatives but I've never used an Adafruit board where I went "why in the world did they do X", where X is some design choice (except having a bright LED light up while the board had power). On the other hand I've had Chinese boards that have a battery jack but an always-powered component on the board uses like 10+mA at all times when alternative choices for the same component use literally hundreds/thousands of times less power (but cost 1 cent more).
by securesaml | 2026-01-14 17:12:16+00:00
The problem is more so maintenance.

The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.

However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved.

It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries.

If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.
by iancmceachern | 2026-01-14 17:12:33+00:00
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.

This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.

There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-14 17:12:37+00:00
I read that in a book, in a study, they were able to cause people to be aroused by money by pairing it with sexy bits. But later, they lost the association pretty quickly.

This doesn't contradict what you are saying, and the study could be like most psychology (unreplicated), but it seems the impact is minor... But minor on 6 billion people could be terrible for a few people.
by munificent | 2026-01-14 17:13:04+00:00
A given technology may benefit some while harming others. And it may have harms and benefits that operate on different time scales.

The invention of the shipping container put nearly every stevedore out of a job. But it made it radically cheaper to ship things and that improved the quality of life of nearly everyone on Earth.

I suspect that for most stevedores, it was a job where the wages provided dignity and meaning in their life, but where the work itself wasn't that central to their identity. I hope that most were able to find other work that was equally dignified.

That's certainly less true for musicians, poets, and painters where what they do is central to the value of the work and not just how much they can get paid.

There's no blanket technology-independent answer here. You have to look at a technology and all of its consequences and try to figure out what's worth doing and what isn't.

I think shipping containers are a pretty clear win. I think machine learning for classification is likely a win.

It's not at all clear to me that using generative AI to produce media is a win. I suspect it is a very large loss for society as a whole. Automating bullshit drudgery is fine. Most people don't want to do that shit anyway. But automating away the very acts that people find most profoundly human seems the height of stupidity to me.

Do you really want to live in a world where more people have to be Uber drivers and fewer people get to make art? Do you want to live in that world when it appears that the main people who benefit are already billionaires?
by g947o | 2026-01-14 17:13:05+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)

Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.

> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-01-14 17:13:13+00:00
Both Adafruit and Sparkfun manufacturing quality is higher than generic manufacturing from China. I suspect that most of the Chinese alternatives meet their price point by using parts that are out of spec and were purchased at a discount by the chip manufacturer (or just scrounged for free from the reject pile).

My primary example is this clock generator breakout: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2045

The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
by fakedang | 2026-01-14 17:13:24+00:00
This is missing the forest for the trees. Coal plants alone accounted for 20% of emissions back in 2018, so I assume the fraction is only slightly lower now. Like so badly - coal is 5% of energy generation worldwide, yet the entire emissions from electricity generation is only 25%!

Agriculture is also responsible for its own level of emissions but only because the world has been conditioned to dairy, and by consequence beef. Those are hard dietary habits that won't be changed any time soon. Also rice cultivation is responsible for GHG emissions, so are we going to let 80% of the planet starve?
by daemonk | 2026-01-14 17:13:46+00:00
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.

The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.

It's a bad look for the parties involved.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 17:13:52+00:00
> that have already passed this in his first week.

It's always easy to pass laws to give people free stuff and it works well initially ... until you run out of money of course. That's how Venezuelan leadership also got popular. Who doesn't want more free stuff? It's how elections are won is most of Eastern/Southern Europe too. Until the bill is due and the next generation has to pay.
Setting Boundaries with People
by zwilderrr | 2026-01-14 17:14:23+00:00
I recently learned a formula from my son's playgroup teacher that has made boundary-setting much more palatable because it makes the whole thing feel less like a high-stakes endeavour. It goes like this:

"I know you want <something> but <rule-that-comes-first>."

As it relates to playgroup: "Timmy (not my son's name, btw), I know you want to jump around right now, but there's a rule that we don't jump during circle time. If you want to jump, that's fine, but you have to go outside of the circle to do it."

Simple and effective, and not personal.

I had an adult version that happened this morning, where I said: "The opportunity sounds great but I have an investment policy that I check in with references first before I hand over those kinds of documents."

It wasn't personal, it wasn't an attack, it was just a <rule-that-comes-first>.
by ptorrone | 2026-01-14 17:14:30+00:00
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
by pixelready | 2026-01-14 17:14:30+00:00
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.

Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
by stackskipton | 2026-01-14 17:14:54+00:00
As Ops (DevOps/Sysadmin/SREish) person here, excellent article.

However, as always, the problem is more political than technical and those are hardest problems to solve and another service with more cost IMO won't solve it. However, there is plenty of money to be made in attempting to solve it so go get that bag. :)

At end of day, it's back to DevOps mentality and it's never caught on at most companies. Devs don't care, Project Manager wants us to stop block feature velocity and we are not properly staffed since we are "massive wasteful cost center".
by epistasis | 2026-01-14 17:14:55+00:00
Aha, that country also makes sense, and is an understandable response too. The US is in very deep trouble internationally. We in the US have been swimming against this madness for so long that it's almost refreshing to see somebody have an appropriate response. A good 1/3 of the country in the US is stark-raving mad and addicted to disinformation and forcing it on others.

I guess I've never seen tech as disconnected at all from politics, even on HN, and perhaps especially on HN, as the intersection of tech and politics has been a discussion point as long as I can remember.

Even classic programmer sci-fi, like Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon, is highly political, and largely about the political effects of technology on society.
by mindslight | 2026-01-14 17:14:59+00:00
Yes, this is my problem with references to the ammo box. That exact rhetoric has been with us for decades now, and has in fact helped to get us to the point we're at.

Sure, maybe some ICE home invaders will be shot in self-defense while committing their crimes, but we already know how that plays out legally and even in the court of public opinion sadly (Walker/Taylor). So such defenses won't change the big picture, regardless of such self defense options perhaps being pragmatic for those who are likely to be attacked right now or in the near future.

So that brings us back to the question of the large scale situation, which IME rests entirely on there being so many people Hell-bent on using the ammo box to "save" the country with the net effect of trashing it. We've essentially got flash mobs of brownshirts, understandably frustrated at how they've been disenfranchised and their liberties taken away, but having their frustration channeled into being part of the problem. Which I'd say comes back to filter bubbles, social media, pervasive and personalized propaganda, etc.

Of course extracting people from those filter bubbles is much harder than if we had managed to avoid the corporate consumer surveillance industry from taking hold and strongly facilitating them in the first place.
by loeg | 2026-01-14 17:15:03+00:00
As mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries.

I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.
by Pet_Ant | 2026-01-14 17:15:12+00:00
All this rigor for a country without an actual formalised constitution. I mean, maybe the government should work on that first and make sure it has a right to work there first?

> Unlike in most countries, no official attempt has been made to codify ... thus it is known as an uncodified constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...