MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdoering | 2026-01-04 22:14:45+00:00
The claim that Canada banned firearms “that only appear in video games” is a popular internet talking point, but I couldn’t find evidence supporting it in the official Canadian firearms ban lists.
What actually happened:

1. The Government of Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of assault-style firearms since May 2020.

2. The 2020 Order in Council (OIC) banned approximately 1,500 firearms by name, expanded in 2024 and 2025. These are predominantly real-world firearms – AR-15 variants, AK-47 variants, the Ruger Mini-14, various shotguns, and many specialized rifles.

3. Critics have raised legitimate concerns about the ban’s logic – some firearms that were banned were “never designed for the battlefield, and never adopted by any military in the world, nor ever used in any battlefield” – but that’s different from being fictional.

4. Some rifles were banned “that probably came into Canada in insignificant numbers; indeed, there may be none of them in-country,” like obscure variants or rimfire lookalikes. Rare or uncommon isn’t the same as fictional.

Sources used:

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/frrms/index-en...

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-98-462/f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Canada
https://ottawafirearmsafety.ca/firearms-ban/
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/more-illogical-gun-bans-...
https://www.chroniclejournal.com/news/national/fact-file-ame...
https://rcmp.ca/en/firearms/firearms-reference-table
by IshKebab | 2026-01-04 22:15:20+00:00
A lot has changed since the 1980s. RAM access is much higher latency (in cycles), we have tons more RAM, and programs use more of it.

Maybe it is still possible but "we did it in the 80s so we can do it now" doesn't work.

Vypercore were trying to make RISC-V CPUs with object-based memory. They went out of business several months ago. I don't have the inside scoop, but I expect the biggest issue is that they were trying to sell it as a performance improvement (hardware based memory allocation), which it probably was... but also they would have been starting from a slower base anyway. "38% faster than linear memory" doesn't sound so great when your chip is half as fast as the competition to start with.

It also didn't protect objects on the stack (afaik) unlike CHERI. But on the other hand it's way simpler than CHERI conceptually, and I think it handled temporal safety more elegantly.

Personally I think Rust combined with memory tagging is going to be the sweet spot. CHERI if you really need ultra-maximum security, but I think the number of people that would pay for that is likely small.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-01-04 22:15:23+00:00
No it's not, that's just something the left uses to deflect rather than take ownership of their own problems.

The democrat party essentially is the mainstream American left, that's what people call the left, and that was the topic of this thread ("why didn't the Democrats beat Trump?"). You may not like it or you may have your own definitions of what left and right are, but in this context it is what it is.
by fragmede | 2026-01-04 22:15:39+00:00
Just you wait until the powers that be take cars away from us! What absolute FOOLS you all are to shape your lives around something that could be taken away from us at any time! How are you going to get to work when gas stations magically disappear off the face of the planet? I ride a horse to work, and y'all are idiots for developing a dependency on cars. Next thing you're gonna tell me is we're going to go to war for oil to protect your way of life.

Come on!
by roywiggins | 2026-01-04 22:15:42+00:00
The blame attaches to the corporation that trained the "I" outputs into the model. Chat-tuned LLMs are mostly finetuned to roleplay as a friendly assistant at all times. This isn't exactly a lie- the models are really being designed to be helpful assistants- but the side-effect is that they also present as coherent personalities when they aren't.

When a model outputs stuff like "I am FooGPT, a friendly chatbot" it is roleplaying just as much as when it's outputting stuff like "Hello, my name is Abraham Lincoln, I was the 16th President of the United States."
by PhilippGille | 2026-01-04 22:15:45+00:00
> So, advice: submit the binary you used to generate the site to source control. I know git isn't the best at binary files, but I promise you'll thank me at some point.

No need for the entire binary.

Just put `go run github.com/gohugoio/hugo@vX.Y.Z "$@"` into a `hugo.sh` script or similar that's in source control, and then run that script instead of the Hugo binary.

You'll need Go installed, but it's incredibly backwards compatible, so updating to newer Go versions is very unlikely to break running the old Hugo version.
by fionic | 2026-01-04 22:15:46+00:00
Cool! Besides the productizing or making a framework, I’m trying to understand if this is different than the elementary idea (which probably every game dev who worked on game networking has tinkered with) of sending inputs to the server and then sending player positions back to all the clients…? I think even smaller footprint would be position: two or three floats x,y(,z) instead of shapes too? Anyway this is always fine for very low latency environments where client side prediction, lag comp etc would not be required. Thanks for sharing, I might give it a try! sorry if I’m missing something.
by rasmus-kirk | 2026-01-04 22:15:52+00:00
I think it's a leftover before proper LSP's, if you had to type/paste everything, that would be fairly tedious, but now-a-days everyone uses LSP's with autocomplete that have all the variables in scope.

I do think very long names can hurt readability though so it's still a balancing act, but variables like "t" (often used in Haskell, ugh) is awful in my opinion.
by simonw | 2026-01-04 22:16:08+00:00
I still get the full source code back at the end, I tell it to include code it wrote in the PR.

I also wrote my own tool to extract and format the complete transcript, it gives me back things like this where I can see everything it did including files and scripts it didn't commit. Here's an example: https://gistpreview.github.io/?3a76a868095c989d159c226b7622b...
Show HN: H-1B Salary Data Explorer
by zuhayeer | 2026-01-04 22:16:10+00:00
Excited to share my New Year’s project.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to build H-1B data directly into Levels.fyi. Every time I went looking for this data elsewhere, it was a frustrating experience to use. Most H-1B sites felt antiquated, unintuitive, cluttered with ads, or just overwhelming to use. The data was there, but it wasn’t usable, and definitely not pleasant to explore.

So out of that frustration, I decided to build the H-1B data experience I personally wanted to use. Right into Levels.fyi.

https://levels.fyi/h1b/

Some other pages I'm excited about:

Wage Heatmap: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/map/wages/

Company H-1B Footprints: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/map/company/

Highest Paying H-1B Jobs: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/jobs/

Top H-1B Cities: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/city/

Top Company Sponsors: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/sponsors/

Would love any feedback, it's definitely still a work in progress.
by etamponi | 2026-01-04 22:16:56+00:00
> The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected.

> The engineer who starts with a solution tends to build complexity in search of a justification.

I do agree this is a good point, I just find it funny that it comes from "staying 14 years at Google".

This is literally the reason why I left Google first, and Meta second. Finding simple solutions will get you absolutely nowhere in a place like those. You have to find complex solutions with a lot of stakeholders, alignment, discussions, escalations... Why ship one button if you can ship 100 and get you, your team and your manager promoted in the process?
by kelnos | 2026-01-04 22:17:52+00:00
> Hmm, but I don't want to change it. It's me, for better or worse.

That's certainly your prerogative, but I think there are a lot of people who have identified traits in themselves that they believe are negative forces in their lives, and would love to change them if they could. "For better or worse" is the issue; some people do want to better their worse-ness, even if it might change what "me" is to some extent.

But I don't really put much stock in the "it's me" declaration. I'm in my mid-40s, and if I look back on just the last 20 years of my life, I have changed so much over that time. Taking one example from the big five, I would have scored low on the extraversion scale in my 20s, very high in my 30s, and today I'd say I'm somewhere in between. I've changed in other aspects as well.

These changes were for the most part not conscious changes. I don't think I ever set out to change these personality traits, but they changed all the same. How is that better or more "natural" than making deliberate choices and taking specific actions in order to change, instead?
by ghaff | 2026-01-04 22:18:06+00:00
The turn-off-the-phone crowd tend to be in situations where parents, young kids, doctors, interview calls, etc. getting in touch isn't a priority. Yes, voicemail is a partial answer but an imperfect one in this day and age. Didn't even used to have and just got messages on a voicemail device (after the mid-80s or so) but there's a much greater expectation of being able to reach people easily today.
by simonw | 2026-01-04 22:18:06+00:00
I deliberately didn't say version control (which would imply git or similar, and we know they're not going to learn that). I said version tracking.

They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes".

I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!
by cogman10 | 2026-01-04 22:18:11+00:00
I'm not sure this is true. I've payed attention to a few high profile cases and I've not seen anything like that come up.

The closest I can think of is when jury instructions are issued. But in that, the two sides ultimately work with the court to hammer out the details of how those instructions should look. And often, they are based on a more or less standard template with minor revisions.
by rasmus-kirk | 2026-01-04 22:18:25+00:00
Yeah, and any of these philosophies are always terrible when you take them to their limit. The ideas are always good in principle and built on a nugget of truth, it's when people take it as gospel I have a problem. If they just read the book and drew inspiration for alternative, possibly better, coding styles and could argue their case that's unequivocally good.
by Veserv | 2026-01-04 22:18:26+00:00
x86-64 call instruction decrements the stack pointer to push the return address. x86-64 push instructions decrement the stack pointer. The push instructions are easy to work around because most compilers already just push the entire stack frame at once and then do offset accesses, but the call instruction would be kind of annoying.

ARM does not suffer from that problem due to the usage of link registers and generic pre/post-modify. RISC-V is probably also safe, but I have not looked specifically.
by LicenseSping | 2026-01-04 22:18:30+00:00
The gist is that every software comes with a license agreement, and the publisher can choose the conditions under which their software is available by specifying terms of use, modification, and distribution for their software.

Although, as the publisher, there are countless ways to which you can specify how restrictive or open these terms are, most industries usually have "standard" set of terms that most commercial license agreements follow, while a few Open Source Software Licenses are widely adopted. It's really inconvenient to ask end users to understand a non-generally accepted license agreement in most cases.

The history of software licensing mostly goes back to the 70s / 80s, before that time, IBM and mainframes typically gave away most of the software for free as did most computer enthusiasts. Bill Gates was somewhat controversial at the time for arguing software should not be free, in a letter he wrote to the hobbyist computer club (link to wikipedia below).

The topic of software licensing has since become philosophical, where some people think software should be free as in "freedom" and should benefit everyone. From a commercial perspective, some people see OSS as a way to grow adoption of their products. Others think it's important to charge for software in order to continue maintaining it.

Some resources:
- https://opensource.org/licenses -> lets you search by criteria (greeter or fewer "freedoms" granted for different OSS license types.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists, arguably the letter that started the whole debate around software licensing.

- Documentaries: for the history, I would suggest Revolution OS, and Triumph of the nerds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds

- first court case against a Chinese telco using cracked software was regarding EDA software, in case you're interested in learning how phone home technology came about: https://www.itca.com/news/using-friendly-jurisdictions-to-en...

We wrote a few other blog posts about this topic (about software IP protection) on licensespring.com/blog.
by wcarss | 2026-01-04 22:18:42+00:00
I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour.

It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise.

A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it.

It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".
by joe-limia | 2026-01-04 22:18:46+00:00
imo there is not a vulnerability without demonstrating impact.

Whilst they should do the bare minimum to acknowledge the report, it's pretty much just noise.

- If the system prompt did not have sensitive information it would only be classed as informational

- self-XSS has no impact and is not accepted by bug bounty programs

- "Conversation and message IDs not verified... I did not attempt to access other users’ conversations or prove cross-user compromise" - I put this through burpsuite and the UUID's are not tied to a session because you can access the chatbot without logging in. Unless you can leak used UUIDs from another endpoint, a bug bounty program would not accept brute forcing UUIDs as an issue
by scubbo | 2026-01-04 22:19:22+00:00
Oh fascinating - so you're reviewing "your own" code in-PR, rather than reviewing it before PR submission? I can see that working! Feels weird, but I can see it being a reasonable adaptation to these tools - thanks!

What about running services locally for manual testing/poking? Do you open ports on the Anthropic VM to serve the endpoints, or is manual testing not part of your workflow?
by lafrenierejm | 2026-01-04 22:19:33+00:00
> I probably would never trust a public commit history as some kind of source of truth

What _would_ you trust as a source of truth for source code if not a public commit log? I agree that a squash commit’s timestamp in particular ought not be taken as authoritative for all of the changes in the commit, but commit history in general feels like the highest quality data most projects will ever have.
by vlod | 2026-01-04 22:21:02+00:00
>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.

It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).

e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.

Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.

[0]: https://tenor.com/view/casino-oldpeople-oldpeopleonslots-slo...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-04 22:21:38+00:00
> Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly

Not how reconciliation-based negotiations work.

Behind every material lawmaker you’d have redlines circulating among their staff. Each industry group would have them circulating among its members. Each citizen group, too. These will be haphazardly combined among the groups, sometimes transparently, sometimes strategically. It’s still traceable. But not necessarily in one go, and probably only through a lawmaker who doesn’t want to look duped.

There was a good article on the immortality of Word recently that addressed this.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 22:22:06+00:00
Serialization has always been possible via libraries, so most people were doing fine with that, what is coming is native serialization support, but in practice it will be functionally the same, ie rather than you running build_runner, the compiler will do it for you. I'm not sure what you used but that's what you were hung up on, there were always ways to solve it.

Dart is a pragmatic language, it has everything you need and has a lot of benefits too, such as sound null checking (very few languages have this, Rust comes to mind), JIT and AOT support (Javascript / TypeScript such as for React Native doesn't, and Kotlin is just getting there with Kotlin Native but it still has a lot of issues), and now more functional programming concepts with algebraic data types via sealed classes and pattern matching.

What language would you have chosen when Flutter came out circa a decade ago, or, we can be even more charitable and ask what language would you use today if you were to implement Flutter? I'm curious because everyone has their own ideas but they all don't work for one reason or another.
by niqhtcrawler | 2026-01-04 22:22:22+00:00
Launching my first product today and would love this community's thoughts.
Background: I'm 17, been coding for a while, and kept running into the same problem: I wanted AI features in my apps but didn't want to pay OpenAI's API fees or build a backend just to hide my keys.
What I built: Scaffold - a no-code tool that lets you create custom AI tools and embed them anywhere. Think Typeform but for AI prompts.
The flow:

Build a form (fields like "topic", "budget", whatever)
Write a prompt template using {{field_name}} variables
Get an embed code, paste it into your site
Users fill the form → get a ChatGPT prompt → send it and get AI responses

Why it's free: I generate the prompt, users send it to ChatGPT themselves. No API costs for me = no costs for you. Always free.
Who it's for:

Indie devs adding AI to side projects
Freelancers who want AI features for clients without the overhead
Small SaaS adding AI functionality fast

What you can build:

AI content generators (blog posts, emails, descriptions)
Smart chatbots with context (menu bots, FAQs, tutors)
Custom AI tools for your specific use case

Current status: Soft launched with 2 beta users (me and a friend lol). Building in public, taking all feedback seriously.
Features:

Tutorial system (because I know this is kinda unique and might be confusing)
Built-in help bot to explain things
Form customization (colors, fonts, themes)

Tech stack: Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, TailwindCSS
Monetization: Free tier (5 apps, 5 tasks each) stays free forever. Will add a Pro tier later with A/B testing and advanced features, but core functionality stays free.
Try it: scaffoldtool.vercel.app
Would love feedback on:

Is the value prop clear?
Would you actually use this?
What features would make it a no-brainer?
Any similar tools I should know about?

Thanks for reading! Happy to answer questions or dive into the technical details if anyone's curious.
by tempodox | 2026-01-04 22:22:56+00:00
By now, new forms of digital crack are being invented faster than lawmakers are able (or willing) to catch up with the previous forms. Yesterday, society and democracy were being destroyed by social media, today by “AI”. By the time the toxic effects of social media are being reined in (if ever), the forces of destruction will have moved on to “AI” or whatever comes after, in their efforts to concentrate wealth, power and influence in the hands of ever fewer people.
by fragmede | 2026-01-04 22:23:21+00:00
Do they? The high quality fake Rolex that only a watch nerd can tell apart, vs the shitty fake Lolex are different worlds. Similarly, the AI fake Ghibli of myself is just fun. Would it mean more if if flew to Japan and commissioned a painter at Ghibli-world for $3,000 to make the same picture? Sure, but I'm not going to do that.
by layer8 | 2026-01-04 22:23:38+00:00
Companies that commission translation routinely check the results, to make sure they receive the expected quality and that the domain-specific details are correct. They may check less once they gained confidence with a translator, but the same is true to some extent with LLMs.

In any case, “reviewer of LLM translations” doesn’t exist as a full-time job to anywhere near the extent that “translator” used to be.
by munksbeer | 2026-01-04 22:23:40+00:00
At some point no-one is going to have to argue about this. I'm guessing a bit here, but my guess is that within 5 years, in 90%+ jobs, if you're not using an AI assistant to code, you're going to be losing out on jobs. At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done.

I say this as someone who has been extremely sceptical over their ability to code in deep, complicated scenarios, but lately, claude opus is surprising me. And it will just get better.
by texasbigdata | 2026-01-04 22:23:46+00:00
Alcoholic here.

In my AA we say that alcoholism is a chronic disease. The same as (some forms) of diabetes, you don’t just get rid if it. Its something you can manage but not cure. It lies dormant inside of you the rest of your life.

My mentor (highly successful and 30 years sober) said it nicely: he has an angry tiger inside of him thats trapped inside a cage. One that will surely eat him if it gets out. His job is to keep the tiger in the cage.

Thats what it feels like. Every day. The cravings go down, the thoughts, etc. Self control improves. But the danger lies dormant for us.