MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-01-29 13:46:03+00:00
Every society has elites. If you invoke the government to keep people from being financial elites, then those government positions will become highly coveted and those will be the elites. And in countries where there aren’t many financial elites because the whole country is poor (like India until recently) those government jobs are highly coveted and insanely difficult to break onto.

So it matters a lot where a society’s elites come from. In most societies, entering the elite requires family pedigree, credentials, and connections. If your society is such that simply becoming upper middle class gives your kids a sufficient platform to become a billionaire, that has a huge effect on who makes up the elites. Having elites whose parents were refugees or restaurant owners is hugely different from most countries.
by bborud | 2026-01-29 13:46:33+00:00
This is an article that summarizes a report. It is not the report. The actual report costs money (but isn't very expensive).

If you live in Europe your car has to be inspected every 2 years. For new cars this kicks in after 3 years, and then after that it is every 2 years.

The inspection is carried out by authorized mechanics and typically takes less than an hour. It is worth noting that authorities keep a close eye on authorized mechanics to ensure they do not cheat. If you cheat (eg let people pay you to pass their car), you lose authorization.

The reason the TÜV report carries weight is that Germany has Europe’s largest vehicle fleet and TÜV has a strong reputation. Inspection standards are largely harmonized across Europe, and approvals or methodologies used by TÜV are often accepted or mirrored elsewhere.

Defects are classified by severity. Serious defects can make the vehicle unroadworthy immediately; less serious ones require repair and re-inspection; very minor issues are simply noted.

Even non-EU countries like Norway and the UK follow essentially the same inspection framework.
by LoveMortuus | 2026-01-29 13:46:43+00:00
> Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market.

This is 100% on point! For the past three years all of my in-office work was done on a ChromeBox running ChromeOS, I work in a contact center, but my specific project does not focus on customers but other stuff.

At first I thought they did this because Chrome-anything is usually cheap, but the devices they give us are all around or above $1000, so now I think we use them only because the client wants us to use them, since on some other projects they do use Windows, but with this client we have A LOT of project and A LOT of work, so it's not like we're the exception.

I think with the advent of SteamOS, ChromeOS and Android merging, we could legit see a serious move away from Windows, even in corporate worlds, but who knows, my vision could just be clouded, I'm not a genius or some smart person like a bunch of people here on HN, I work for basically a minimum salary (Portugal), live in a room, that the company that hires me, rents to me, and read HN mostly for entertainment.
by lr4444lr | 2026-01-29 13:47:32+00:00
They've been losing ground to placebo in more recent research.

Plus, most of the more serious side effects take a lot more time to manifest than the typical length any given patient remained in the older clinical trials that secured FDA approval and grounded the official manufacturer literature.

I am glad we have these tools, but I suspect they are vastly overused, and patients not well informed.
Show HN: BarrierX – AI that finds which lost deals are worth re-engaging now
by IAMsterdam | 2026-01-29 13:47:54+00:00
Hey HN – Kas here, founder of BarrierX.
The problem I kept seeing:
I spent years watching B2B sales teams treat "Closed Lost" as a graveyard. Thousands of deals sitting in CRM, never touched again. But here's the thing – most of those deals aren't actually dead. They're just badly timed.
Budgets get unfrozen. Champions change jobs and land at new companies. Competitors drop the ball. Reorgs happen. The same prospect who said "not now" 8 months ago might be ready today – but nobody's systematically tracking this.
Meanwhile, reps burn hours chasing net-new leads from the same generic ZoomInfo lists everyone else has.
What BarrierX does:
Instead of scraping public data like traditional sales intelligence tools, we analyze your proprietary data:

Ingests your CRM history (won and lost deals)
Analyzes patterns: what signals preceded wins vs. losses at your company
Monitors lost accounts for trigger events (job changes, funding rounds, leadership changes, tech stack shifts)
Surfaces which lost deals are worth re-engaging right now – with reasoning on why

The core insight: the patterns that predict success for your business are specific to you. A "good fit" at Company A looks completely different than at Company B. Generic intent data misses this entirely.
Early results:
In pilots, teams have resurfaced 15-20% of deals marked "closed-lost" as re-engageable within 90 days. Most of these would have sat untouched forever.
On invite-only:
We require CRM integration to work properly (the whole point is learning from your data), so we're onboarding gradually to ensure quality. If you're from HN and want to try it – reply with your CRM setup (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.) and rough deal volume, and I'll get you access this week.
What I'd love feedback on:

Has anyone else tried systematically working lost deals? What worked/didn't?
For those who've used Gong/6sense/ZoomInfo – what's actually useful vs. noise?
Any concerns about the approach I should be thinking about?

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, how we handle data, or anything else.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-29 13:48:14+00:00
Content is used to imply that. I have a website, here are the ads, now I just need some content and I'm all done!

I like your words analogy. A "content creator" is a "words writer". We need some words on this advertising page or it looks weird. Go and get me some words.

Users don't seek words, but operators seek to entice users with words so they'll view the advertisements.

"Content" is the same thing without reference to a specific medium. Content can be video, audio, words, or even interactive gameplay.
by dangus | 2026-01-29 13:48:16+00:00
Well, from my subjective POV, the earth is flat.

The point of my comment is that a subjective anecdote from a very limited perspective isn’t telling a good story about why the industry is the way it is. You said these businesses aren’t efficient but they have extremely high profit margins, which objectively paints a different picture: they are sufficiently efficient. They are more efficient than most other businesses.

All this financial risk in the industry where employees are over-hired and low interest rate VC funds are thrown around haphazardly is accepted because even a modestly successful software business has high profit margins.

The investors that funded less than $10 million to Airbnb’s series A ended up a significant shareholder of a company that has the same market cap as PNC Financial Services in less than 20 years. PNC spent 180 years getting to that size.

Software-driven products have huge profit potential and they can grow fast.

If you think I’m being some kind of pedantic loser, fine, so be it. You can put the blindfolds on and ignore a data-supported viewpoint.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-01-29 13:48:26+00:00
Why should they have to allow third parties to run apps on their platform? The fact that it is a clear security risk already gives them justification, but even looking past that, Apple is not the only platform that bars users from running third-party software or marketplaces on their products. For example, playstation, xbox, and switch all disallow running unauthorized games on their platforms. What makes Apple different?
Show HN: Cloudness – An open-source tool to deploy and run apps on Kubernetes
by Karthik_N | 2026-01-29 13:48:56+00:00
I have always spent quite some time on setting up pipelines, env, secret, ingress and certificates just to deploy small side projects to my Kubernetes rig, so ended up automating it.

Cloudness is an open-source app platform I’m building to deploy applications directly from Git and manage them on Kubernetes. It’s designed around multi-tenant projects and environments, with automatic deployments on Git pushes and basic app-level CPU and memory metrics built in by default. Also a small market place with one-click templates and few databases.

It’s still early and opinionated, and I’m actively iterating. I’d appreciate any feedback.

Code: https://github.com/cloudness-io/cloudness
Demo: https://demo.cloudness.io
by Murfalo | 2026-01-29 13:49:12+00:00
The truth about antidepressants is that the majority of people with depression that respond to an antidepressant would also have responded to a placebo. This doesn't mean that their depression isn't real or that antidepressants "don't work". It just means that placebo has a relatively high response rate in trials for depression. The hate is (among other points) because they are only arguably, marginally, better than placebo, and antidepressants also have real side effects (activation syndrome, increased suicidality, sexual side effects, withdrawals, etc.) over placebo.
by krschacht | 2026-01-29 13:49:15+00:00
For something like tests, where I have very specific opinions on how I want them written, I have a simple doc (tests.md) and I’ll regularly tag Claude with it.

Claude writes a bunch of new code and I’ll tell it, “Before I review this code, make sure all tests adhere to the guidance of @tests.md” (you can probably make this a slash command too)

I find that if I put these instructions in the system prompt, far down in a conversation that’s used lots of the context window, they will only loosely be followed. But when I tag it in like this, Claude will strongly and thoughtfully follow the guidance and examples I’ve written up about how I want my tests.
by lumost | 2026-01-29 13:49:23+00:00
It’s becoming clear that training a frontier model is a capex/infra problem. This problem involves data acquisition, compute, and salaries for the researchers familiar with the little nuances of training at this scale.

For the same class model, you can train on more or less the same commodity datasets. Over time these datasets become more efficient to train on as errata are removed and the data is cleaner. The cost of dataset acquisition can be amortized and sometimes drops to 0 as the dataset is open sourced.

Frontier models mean acquiring fresh datasets at unknown costs.
by _heimdall | 2026-01-29 13:49:25+00:00
Again I am no expert here, this is just my understanding after being in the industry for a couple decades.

As far as I'm aware, there's a fine line between layoffs or reductions in force and firing for poor performance. Its legal to cut an entire division, or to cut some percentage of a division's head count and come up with some way of distributing it across the org. It is not legal to find your worst performers, fire them all at once, and call it a layoff.

Happy to be wrong here though, just trying to be clear with the line as I understand it. Someone coming by may know for sure.
by steelblueskies | 2026-01-29 13:50:39+00:00
To be fair on this default windows drive formatting is not well suited to many small files in general.

Unrealengine taking 40 extra gigs because of underutilization on small files is one rampant case.

Large python project disk ballooning is another.

That it's file copy move is also dramatically bad at handling such scenarios compounds this further as can be seen by shuffling the same lot with teracopy vs explorer and windows default behavior irrespective of drive formatting. Can easily be hours of difference.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-29 13:50:40+00:00
"The most important section is that of 2-3 year old vehicles, because maintenance and mileage play lesser roles in reliability. The best performers in this category were the Mazda2 (2.9% defect rate)"

Once again, my intuition is wildly off regarding how bad even the relatively good things are. 3% defect rate is good?

Tesla seems insane. How do you get away with being so much worse for so many years in a highly competitive market?
by OfflineSergio | 2026-01-29 13:51:32+00:00
When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them.
Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often.
You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product.
The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-29 13:51:45+00:00
> Apple will ban you for this.

How? I thought it was a Patreon thing - the "competing platform" would be competing with the Patreon app.

I'm not familiar with Patreon, but I thought the way it worked was that you could tip content creators via the Patreon app. I'm pretty certain that Apple cannot tell Patreon (a third party) that they are only allowed to offer exclusive content.
by thyristan | 2026-01-29 13:52:06+00:00
The report from the original article is not a general problem rate but more specific: TÜV does mandatory technical inspections every two years. In those inspections, only safety- and environment-critical problems are checked for, so e.g. brakes, rust on structural parts, high emissions, non-working lights. But there is a whole bunch of stuff that they don't check for, e.g. heating/cooling, GPS not working, doesn't charge/start sometimes, ...

So it's quite possible that both are true: Maybe ID4 has lots of non-safety and non-environment problems, so it is in the shop very often, but still rarely fails an official inspection.
by scanosss | 2026-01-29 13:52:36+00:00
We’ve released Crypto Finder, an open source CLI that detects cryptographic usage directly in source code (algorithms, protocols, certificates, key generation) and generates CycloneDX CBOMs.

The goal is to complement dependency-level analysis with source-level visibility, which is increasingly relevant for trade compliance, security reviews, and post-quantum readiness. The article walks through the rationale, design decisions, and how this fits into CI/CD and governance workflows.
by ju-st | 2026-01-29 13:52:48+00:00
Because TÜV report are bullshit, Audis get checked and fixed by the dealer before the TÜV checks them, of course they have lower failure rates. TÜV competitor Dekra stopped publishing this kind of report years ago because of this https://www.dekra.de/de/dekra-gebrauchtwagenreport/
by _heimdall | 2026-01-29 13:53:21+00:00
>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.

This is interesting, in my experience its seemed to be the opposite.

In manufacturing, its must easier to come up with a specific number of employees you need for a given project or contract.

If the contract is expected to sign you may hire early to get ahead of it.

If the contract falls through, or an existing contract is cancelled, you know exactly how many people you need to cut to balance labor with your current commitments.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-29 13:53:29+00:00
LZW is the algorithm used in compress and also in GIF. It is a beautifully elegant and simple algorithm (based on learning a dictionary of words, and encoding the source as their indices) that converges in the limit on the Shannon entropy of the source.

In 2013, I was studying bioinformatics and had an idea to apply something like sequence alignment and edit scripts to compression instead of just, as LZW, addition at the end of the string. So, the idea for LZW-X was born long ago, but it wasn't until recently, by the power of AI, that I could implement and test it properly.

This is that proper implementation and it reveals what I intuited: that there are gains to be had using a method like this. I consider this a first rung, a starting point for further exploration.

Check it out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/LZW-X
by FearNotDaniel | 2026-01-29 13:53:45+00:00
> it's not ideal is it?

Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)
by andruby | 2026-01-29 13:54:00+00:00
> The truth about antidepressants is that the majority of people with depression that respond to an antidepressant would also have responded to a placebo.

^ citation needed

What does "would have responded" mean? Are you saying that >50% of people with depression that are "helped" by antidepressant, would have been helped _to a similar extend_ with a placebo?
by silvestrov | 2026-01-29 13:54:26+00:00
It is a lot easier for a software engineer to overcomplicate things.

All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries.

No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-29 13:55:44+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I can totally see how my original message may have come across as snarky but it was honestly not intended as such. I sometimes feel like I don't understand my fellow humans at all and this is one of those times. I can see why patreon benefits from users using their app, but as an occasional user of patreon, as I say I am baffled that it's the sort of thing users will install an app for. It honestly never occurred to me to do so and as I say I use the website.
by slgeorge | 2026-01-29 13:55:45+00:00
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?

> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree

Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.

My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.

Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
by stouset | 2026-01-29 13:55:52+00:00
On the planet where inflation turns $100k into an effective $20k by the time you family sees it.

If your only metric for generational wealth is that the next generation of your family gets it, then sure, tautologically the second amount paid out to your surviving family qualifies. I don’t think most people would consider splitting $20k amongst your heirs to be generational wealth, and I don’t think retiring union workers are a classic generationally-wealthy example that comes to mind for most people.

And again, note that retiring union workers today might hand down a $100k 401(k) to their families. At the time of the athlete’s death ~50 years from now, that number will likely be closer to $500k.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-29 13:56:38+00:00
The EU has the right approach. Don't try to legislate exactly what is a fair/unfair amount of profit to make - change the rules of the game by requiring third party marketplaces and payment platforms so apple has to lower rates or lose every app into a third party store.

Apple can easily say "Use our store exclusively and you get our security/privacy guarantees. Go outside our store and you're in the wild west". App developers can then decide how much fee they are willing to pay for access to the user base who refuse to venture into the wild west. Other stores might try to persuade users that they are more secure and more private too via stricter review policies or more locked down permissions etc.
by zug_zug | 2026-01-29 13:56:38+00:00
I don't think that's true. I think that just shows how disconnected we are.

We tell ourselves that we must have "better lives" than say a native american in the year 1000AD, but there's no reason to think that.

I think odds are that maybe the native american was happier -- having a small group that you spend time with outdoors every day, getting extensive exercise, having a clear sense of purpose, eating healthy fresh food every day, never once thinking about politics or bills or global warming. I bet they liked their life more than a depressed divorced accountant in our modern society, even if we have more material wealth or health access.
by Havoc | 2026-01-29 13:56:59+00:00
Don’t think it needs to be either or.

ZIRP, AI, over hiring, and a wave of boot camp labour supply I suspect all contribute.

Plus we’re also likely approaching saturation on a lot of fronts with attention and ad density saturation. Things like YouTube seem to be on the edge of how much ads they can force feed without people just not using yt because it’s unusable. Enshitification isn’t a cycle, it’s a one way trip. Combine that with over hiring and it’s bound to hit a wall
Show HN: Planet Cert – Practice Tests for AWS, Cisco, and AI Certs
by Alex_Weinberg | 2026-01-29 13:57:06+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Planet Cert because I was frustrated with the two main options for IT certification prep: expensive monthly subscriptions or sketchy "brain dump" PDFs that encourage memorization without understanding.

The Project: Planet Cert creates practice tests for 1,000+ exams (AWS, CompTIA, CISSP, plus the newer AI certifications like Azure AI-900 and Google ML).

How it’s different:

-> Detailed Explanations: We treat every question as a learning opportunity. Instead of just marking A or B correct, we break down why the answer is right and why the distractors are wrong.

-> Lifetime Updates: The certification treadmill never ends. If you buy a course for AWS SAA-C03, you get the C04 updates automatically when they release. No recurring fees to recertify.

-> Modes: We built specific modes for "Study" (immediate feedback) vs. "Simulation" (timed, pressure testing).

I’d love feedback on the interface and whether the explanation depth meets the standard for those of you currently prepping for higher-level exams like the CISSP.

Thanks!
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-29 13:57:10+00:00
Anything significantly more complicated than CRUD apps like HN is pretty rare on the web.

If the resource usage of a website is a concern, either your code is straight up broken or you're doing something rather unusual. While doing unusual things, it's normal to encounter unusual problems. However, when encountering an unusual problem it's good to stop for a moment and consider if your approach is wrong.

At some point the only good way to stop scraping becomes paywalls. You can't defeat sophisticated scrapers through any other means.