MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-02 19:11:10+00:00
> The US wants to check whether people who show up for vacation without a visa have a criminal record ... it's not at all an unreasonable thing for the US to want access to

It might not be an unreasonable request for a gov with a long history of abiding to agreements - and w/o a long history of misusing data for the benefit of Gov & gov partners.

Which means it is a fully unreasonable request by a US Gov (of any administration).

But a request by a US Gov
that gifts its citizens' most sensitive data
to one of the world's least ethical data brokers
so that vulnerable people can be mistreated in bulk?

Burn the paper the request is written on. Threaten to kill the next messenger they send. And brick up the door they knocked on.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-02 19:11:22+00:00
You lose atomic deployment and have a distributed system the moment you ship Javascript to a browser.

Hell, you lose "atomic" assets the moment you serve HTML that has URLs in it.

Consider switching from <img src=kitty.jpg> to <img src=puppy.jpg>. If you for example, delete kitty from the server and upload puppy.jpg, then change html, you can have a client with URL to kitty while kitty is already gone. Generally anything you published needs to stay alive for long enough to "flush out the stragglers".

Same thing applies to RPC contracts.

Same thing applies to SQL schema changes.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-02 19:11:24+00:00
https://archive.ph/dUQuJ

“American or even Chinese policymakers may yet deliver nasty surprises: Beijing still controls supply chains for the raw materials like graphite, opens new tab that go into battery cells and so could hamper production if trade tensions rise again.“

Sounds like the us needs to take a play out of the Chinese playbook and internalize the battery supply chain or face a crisis in 2027 when Chinese and US interests begin to seriously conflict.
by repiret | 2026-01-02 19:11:25+00:00
I use MoneyDance, which does automatic bank sync, is double-entry (although you can make single-entry transactions if you try hard enough), and is a program rather than a web service. It’s got some rough edges, but it meets my needs well enough. I haven’t looked into how hard it would be to read its data files if I wanted to migrate away.
by cweagans | 2026-01-02 19:11:38+00:00
I've done this twice for local schools. It was an event for the entire school to listen in on. In one case, we relayed the signal from the roof of the school to another local ham's house, where he had a big antenna on a tower with alt/az control for tracking the station. That meant we could test the tracking beforehand and not worry about setting it up again at the school.

NASA also used to coordinate telephone-based contact (maybe they still do? not sure). They'd simply patch the phone call in to radio equipment that they acquired and operated for this purpose. Confirmed beforehand out of personal interest though: it was still over the ham bands.

Something really amazing happens when kids are given an opportunity to experience something like that: science goes from being a largely theoretical exercise to having some amount of practical applicability. The kids that got to actually _talk_ on the radio were incredibly curious and eager to learn as much as they could about everything. They wanted to know how radio works. They wanted to know more about orbital mechanics and how we know where to point the antenna (to the point of actually _asking_ to learn the math). They wanted to know how big the ISS was and how we even got it to orbit (which led to some model rocketry-related topics).

I imagine that it was very difficult to justify the expense of acquiring and transporting heavy amateur radio equipment to the space station (even if you're just thinking about the cost of putting the equipment into orbit - the cost is (pardon the pun) astronomical), but this kind of stuff _matters_. Making science accessible to children in a way that isn't just preparing them for the next standardized test _matters_.
by mzajc | 2026-01-02 19:11:40+00:00
> app store hosting, review

Do they actually host anything at all? All I could find was their F-Droid repository with six (6) applications: https://store.aphy.app/fdroid/repo/. The rest must come from elsewhere (F-Droid's main archive?), but they don't indicate if they actually use the rent you pay to fund the third parties they depend on.

For comparison, the F-Droid archive consists of 4061 applications reviewed, built, and hosted by the F-Droid team for free.
by givan | 2026-01-02 19:12:08+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Worldwide (EU-based) | Full Stack Developer PHP Developer

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Remote: Yes (worldwide)

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Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Docker, HTML, SCSS, Bootstrap, Linux

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by stackghost | 2026-01-02 19:12:11+00:00
Looks like that's only for organizations. Even "end users" have to meet the requirements:

>Have an IPv4 assignment from ARIN or one of its predecessors

>Intend to immediately be IPv6 multi-homed

>Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year

>Use 2,000 IPv6 addresses within one year

>Use 200 /64 subnets within one year

Seems like they discourage individuals from getting allocations for their own personal use.
by mgerdts | 2026-01-02 19:12:23+00:00
The original idea of boot environments in Solaris came from Live Upgrade, which worked at least as far back as Solaris 8. Live upgrade was not part of Solaris, rather it was an addon that came from the services or enterprise support parts of Sun.

Solaris 11 made boot environments a mandatory part of the OS, which was an obvious choice with the transition from
UFS to ZFS for the root fs. This came into Solaris development a bit before Solaris 11, so it was present in OpenSolaris and lives on in many forms of illumos.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-02 19:12:27+00:00
Accounts don't have to be physically "real" with your Bank. That's one of the insights of the "envelope system" that isn't always obvious.

One of the benefits to specifically using a double-entry system (including most of the PTA space) is that it makes it easier to build your "envelopes" as hierarchical sub-accounts. Instead of having just Assets:Checking you could have Assets:Checking:Grocery and Assets:Checking:General and Assets:Checking:Entertainment and so forth. The Assets:Checking sum of all of Assets:Checking:* will still reflect your total checking balance for situations when you need to know that information, but the sub-accounts in your double-entry system become your "envelopes" to check on your budget spending and to transfer between.

Automating your budgets can be just a matter of when you get your Income:Salary transaction you split it appropriately between the various Assets:Checking:* sub-accounts you want. You could automate other transfers between them as necessary as well.

You can also automate things like verifying your Expenses:Grocery account always takes funds from Assets:Checking:Grocery rather than any other "envelope" account when paid for by your debit card. (With Credit Cards potentially needing a different level of automation, and maybe a bunch more Liabilities:* sub-accounts.)

Your bank won't have any idea of those sub-accounts and nothing will physically prevent you from overspending those sub-accounts, of course, but also you can automate warnings for that and you would have visibility of that in your sub-accounts "going negative" when you spend too much from the same envelope.
by simonw | 2026-01-02 19:13:10+00:00
It's not supported by Gemini 3: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3#migrating_fro...

> Image segmentation: Image segmentation capabilities (returning pixel-level masks for objects) are not supported in Gemini 3 Pro or Gemini 3 Flash. For workloads requiring native image segmentation, we recommend continuing to utilize Gemini 2.5 Flash with thinking turned off or Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-02 19:13:20+00:00
As I see it, InfraGo could technically fix the problem by increasing operational buffers based on failure rates and reduce number of slots. This would contain the cascade of delays, but they decide to go easy way because they are not accountable for those delays.
So in principle you are right, it’s a political problem - cost of delays is not shared with infrastructure provider as it should be, and while InfraGo actually could fix the problem (because they determine the number of slots), they choose not to.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-02 19:14:22+00:00
Go look at profiles for programs which have been written with performance in mind. Operating systems, databases, game engines, web servers, some compilers, video/audio/3d editing packages come to mind. I 100% guarantee these programs do not spend the majority of their runtimes in a tiny section of code. What you said is nearly-unilaterally untrue, at least for programs that care about real performance.
by phil21 | 2026-01-02 19:14:49+00:00
You mean a board willing to risk everything and operate at a loss for a decade or more.

I doubt such a board would have lasted more than a few years at best.

Not to mention trying to change 100 plus years of technical and organizational debt while in-flight.

I don’t think Amazon could have come to be outside of the tech sector plus be a greenfield play. I could be wrong, but HN and techie folks in general seem to underestimate how hard it is to change existing organizations. It’s rarely a technical problem.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-02 19:15:03+00:00
> Many students who had submitted thoughtful, well-structured work could not explain basic choices in their own submission after two follow-up questions.

When I was doing a lot of hiring we offered the option (don’t roast me, it was an alternative they could choose if they wanted) of a take-home problem they could do on their own. It was reasonably short, like the kind of problem an experienced developer could do in 10-15 minutes and then add some polish, documentation, and submit it in under an hour.

Even though I told candidates that we’d discuss their submission as part of the next step, we would still get candidates submitting solutions that seemed entirely foreign to them a day later. This was on the cusp of LLMs being useful, so I think a lot of solutions were coming from people’s friends or copied from something on the internet without much thought.

Now that LLMs are both useful and well known, the temptation to cheat with them is huge. For various reasons I think students and applicants see using LLMs as not-cheating in the same situations where they wouldn’t feel comfortable copying answers from a friend. The idea is that the LLM is an available tool and therefore they should be able to use it. The obvious problem with that argument is that we’re not testing students or applicants on their abilities to use an LLM, we’re using synthetic pronouns to explore their own skills and communication.

Even some of the hiring managers I know who went all in on allowing LLMs during interviews are changing course now. The LLM-assisted interviewed were just turning into an exercise of how familiar the candidate was with the LLM being used.

I don’t really agree with some of the techniques they’re using in this article, but the problem they’re facing is very real.
by alwa | 2026-01-02 19:15:08+00:00
> We can publish exactly how the exam works—the structure, the skills being tested, the types of questions. No surprises. The LLM will pick the specific questions live, and the student will have to handle them.

I wonder: with a structure like this, it seems feasible to make the LLM exam itself available ahead of time, in its full authentic form.

They say the topic randomization is happening in code, and that this whole thing costs 42¢ per student. Would there be drawbacks to offering more-or-less unlimited practice runs until the student decides they’re ready for the round that counts?

I guess the extra opportunities might allow an enterprising student to find a way to game the exam, but vulnerabilities are something you’d want to fix anyway…
by devinplatt | 2026-01-02 19:15:57+00:00
Try Planned Parenthood.

Over a decade ago I tried getting the HPV vaccine in my early 20s, but the doctor told me it wasn't recommended for men and that insurance won't cover it. I was young and didn't have the money to pay out of pocket.

I went to Planned Parenthood and got the vaccine last year. At some point they changed the recommendation to men under 45 now and I got all 3 shots free.

Honestly, though I'm glad to have finally got the vaccine it's been a pretty frustrating experience.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-02 19:16:09+00:00
...if I was a student, I just fundamentally don't think I'd want to be tested by an AI. I understand the author's reasoning, but it just doesn't feel respectful for something that is so high-stakes for the student.

Wouldn't a written exam--or even a digital one, taken in class on school-provided machines--be almost as good?

As long as it's not a hundred person class or something, you can also have an oral component taken in small groups.
by iczero | 2026-01-02 19:16:33+00:00
Fjall is an LSM-based key-value store written in Rust. It is pretty similar to RocksDB.

I do wish to note also that Marvin's blog posts are very informative and a great read. I would highly suggest reading them if you are at all interested in how Fjall or other LSM-based storage engines work.
by swinglock | 2026-01-02 19:18:18+00:00
IPv6 and CGNAT growth has finally started to suppress IPv4 prices. There was a huge pump when hyperscalers decided they needed more. But IPv6 keeps growing and is the majority of traffic in many networks. If you own significantly more IPv4 addresses today than you need, I would dump them on the market yesterday. Spend some of the profits to move to IPv6 if still needed.
by nkmnz | 2026-01-02 19:18:19+00:00
What's the foundation of your assumption that everyone who criticize anybody must be a saint themselves? Is this some literal application of the biblical "splinter in your brother's eye"?

In the end, I don't criticize Russian war criminals so that they stop being war criminals. That has nothing to do with a lack of authority, but with a lack of naïvity: that's what weapons are made for. I criticize the leadership of the West that they don't do enough to stop them. That's where we can use words, luckily.
by gingerBill | 2026-01-02 19:19:11+00:00
The first paragraph from the article:

> *TL;DR* null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages. The trivial solutions to remove the “problem” null pointers have numerous trade-offs which are not obvious, and the cause of why people think it is a “problem” comes from a specific kind of individual-element mindset.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-02 19:19:20+00:00
People definitely were starving and looking for work at the start of the industrial revolution. Your response is why what I said isn't a strawman. Your response of 'trust me bro, it worked out' very much is. The economy/job/living situation in 1880-1940, the 'working through it' phase of the industrial revolution, was very shitty and nothing like post WW2.

Tramps/homeless/tramp camps was a part of life.
Huge groups of men lived in 'boarding houses' their entire lives. Most people today don't even know what boarding houses were.
There were huge populations that traveled as migrant field workers.
The reality looked much different than post WW2 employment.

Sure you said people found other jobs. But really, lots of people didn't. Or didn't find jobs that allowed them to live outside boarding houses and have families. There is a whole big picture waved away with 'found jobs' that implies post WW2 jobs/lifestyles, when in fact that is not what happened post industrial revolution, and did not happen until much later, and was not guaranteed to happen ever.

Ratelimited so editing:

People handweaving away legitimate fears with 'people found new work' are implying it is on the level/quality of life. My 'strawman' is pointing out their 'found new work' was shittier work and a shittier life and that the handwaving/minimizing peoples fears with such a hollow statement is bullshit and should be called out as such. 'found new work' is nothing more than 'people didn't all die'.
by Drybones | 2026-01-02 19:20:10+00:00
Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.

There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.

We even have a dedicated pastebin on a quick run down of what is wrong: https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee

And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days

I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.

And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.

We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.
by anonnon | 2026-01-02 19:20:33+00:00
Shockley developed the first working bipolar junction transistor, which was the first transistor to ever enter mass production, which is why he's credited for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_junction_transistor

Though I'm unsure of the author's motivations, there's certainly a tendency with Shockley similar to what one sees with Hitler, where people will occasionally question or cast doubt on Hitler's WWI service record--which was by all accounts exemplary. (I.e., Bad Guy can't also possibly have done Good Thing.)
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-02 19:20:36+00:00
Yes, this has been proposed many times. It would be a fantastic way to address accessibility. There are some major caveats to be worked out:

1. Identifiers - You would need the ability to add things like id and class values to any potential DOM element node.

2. form controls - You would need to allow for interactive fields, like textarea, select, and input element types.

3. audio/video elements

4. non-functional elements, like span and div, would need to be allowed as necessary to provide opportunities for CSS layouts. These things should be painful to use in any code instance though otherwise markdown just becomes HTML.

5. Accessibility page structure elements, such as nav and main and footer, would need to be added as well. The role attribute would also be needed.

There would be no way to controls around semantic code structure beyond relation of headings.
by wyc | 2026-01-02 19:20:41+00:00
SpruceID (YC W21) | REMOTE (US-Based Preferred) | Full-Time | spruceid.com

Spruce lets users control their data across the web. Instead of users logging into platforms, we believe platforms should request to access data vaults controlled by users.

The demand for trusted digital ID is accelerating as AI deepfakes begin to destroy most of the ways we use to verify identity today. How private or secure is it to hold your driver's license or passport up to a webcam to get a bank account? Was it ever private or secure? Stable diffusion can break so much of this already. Society will need trusted digital IDs and credentials. Our mission is to allow them to be controlled by individuals, with safeguards to prevent descents into surveillance states and checkpoint societies.

We are the main implementers of category-defining initiatives such as the digital ID program for the California DMV, and the verifiable digital credentials program in Utah. We are private sector participants in NIST's National Cyber Security of Excellence initiative for privacy-preserving digital ID.

We are hiring skilled engineers who care about making a real impact in improving public services, digital autonomy, and user privacy for the world. We work closely with public sector agencies, and have high regard for public servants. We have a strong engineering and customer-oriented culture, and are not simply a SaaS product or AI wrapper. Our roles are not for the faint of heart: you will be expected to work hard and learn a lot in this role.

Our engineers are ambitious to get outcomes for our customers and their constituents. On any given day, they may write great Rust/C#/TypeScript, deal with mainframe dumps, read policy documents, respond to technical RFIs/RFPs, manage on-prem environments, implement new NFC + Bluetooth protocols in Swift/Kotlin, create CI/CD processes that enforce W3C accessibility guidelines and i18n requirements, rewrite lost specs from disassembled binaries, figure out stablecoin payments, and design new protections for public key infrastructure. It is a team effort, and people with T-shirt shaped skills are able to collaborate and learn a ton from each other every day.

We are interested in candidates who want to be proud of the meaningful impact they make for society, even if it takes time to get right. This is not the right job for someone who wants to "join a cool new AI startup" that implodes or exits in under a year.

See our roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/sprucesystems/
by yoz-y | 2026-01-02 19:20:49+00:00
Shellfish on iOS to ssh into a vps with tmux with Gemini-cli, lazygit and neovim worked quite well for me.

The clicks keyboard does not have ctrl, arrows, page up, down or really any special keys so I’m not sure it would be that much more pleasant. I know iOS keyboard has been quite meh in the recent releases but for thumb typing I’m not convinced that physical keyboard are superior.
by calhat | 2026-01-02 19:22:02+00:00
Spill (https://www.spill.chat/) | Senior I Product Engineer (£84-101k) Senior II Backend Engineer (£108-121k) | London, UK (HQ) | ONSITE | Full-time

Our mission is to make talk therapy free at the point of use for as many people as possible. Right now, we're doing this by selling a mental health support product to businesses. We're a small product-focused company and were cashflow positive in 2025.

If you're interested in the mission and one of the roles, email calvin[at]spill[dot]chat with your CV
by taylodl | 2026-01-02 19:22:08+00:00
A glass of wine with dinner is unlikely to significantly disrupt your sleep - provided you finish at least four hours before bedtime. Treat alcohol like food: avoid both in the hours leading up to sleep for optimal rest. Likewise, one glass of dry wine (about 5 oz) is unlikely to increase inflammation and may even offer mild antioxidant benefits. The key is moderation - one glass, not two - and choosing drier wines to minimize added sugar.

Maybe Dry January should be Dry Wine January?