MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw-12-16 | 2026-01-06 13:08:21+00:00
If that view is that they are racially superior and want to subject the world to their rule based purely on their ability to exert force, then yes.

I'm sure you are aware of the paradox of tolerance, and if you are American then it's no wonder you people are being walked all over by the dumbest set of fascists ever to take power.
by esrauch | 2026-01-06 13:08:41+00:00
I'm surprised you can read Google's words as challenging his identity. Just looking explicitly again the emails:

> It is unclear to us how you came to own the copyright for the content in question, because you do not appear to be the creator of the content

Seems very explicit to me that the concern is "We don't think Jeff Starr owns the content that is at that URL" and not "we don't think you are Jeff Starr"

And then third reply was "your long multiple replies did not addressed our rejection concerns, and so you have failed the challenge script overall". I would really expect he could call a lawyer to restart the process in a way that would be worded less casually and have the necessary shibboleths for their challenge script to be passed.
by nijave | 2026-01-06 13:08:45+00:00
Mostly agree although I think ease of instrumentation is getting pretty good. At least in the Python ecosystem, you set some env vars and run opentelemtry-bootstrap and it spits out a list of packages to add. Then you run your code with the otel cli wrapper and it just works.

Datadog is equally as easy.

That alone gets you pretty good canned dashboards on vendors that have built in APM views.

The rest definitely rings true and I suspect some of it has come with the ease of software development. You need to know less about computer fundamentals and debugging with the proliferation of high level frameworks, codegen, and AI.

I also have noticed a trend that brings observability closer to development with IDE integration which I think is a good direction. Having the info "silo'd" in an opaque mega data store isn't useful.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-01-06 13:09:46+00:00
> double your productivity

Churning out 2x as much code is not doubling productivity. Can you perform at the same level as a dev who is considered 2x as productive as you? That's the real metric. Comparing quality to quantity of code ratios, bugs caused by your PRs, actual understanding of the code in your PR, ability to think slow, ability to deal with fires, ability to quickly deal with breaking changes accidentally caused by your changes.

Churning out more more per day is not the goal. No point merging code that either doesn't fully work, is not properly tested, other humans (or you) cannot understand, etc.
by minitech | 2026-01-06 13:10:11+00:00
(nicer reply to this)

Yes, I’m aware of the readability benefit of named arguments, and made the original comment with that awareness too.

> Make a named pipe then. Shells have built-in primitives for that. I.e. <() and >() subshells in bash,

That’s /proc/self/fd again. But okay, you can make a named pipe to trade the procfs mount and corresponding open-for-read permission requirement for a named pipe open-for-write permission requirement without receiving the other benefits I listed of just passing a FD directly.

> I can't understand why you keep inflating the difficulty of simple commandline parsing

Not only have I not “kept inflating” this, I barely brought up the related concept of it being unnecessary complexity from an implementation side (which it is).

> which the tool needs to do anyway

It doesn’t. The tool has no command-line arguments.

> From interface perspective, how is `5>secretkey` simpler than `--sk secretkey`? The latter is descriptive, searchable and allows bash completion. I'll type `ed25519-keypair`, hit tab and recall what the argument called.

Not introducing More Than One Way To Do It after all (“Or have an option to read either a file descriptor or a file”) here is a good start, but it’s hard to beat passing a file descriptor for simplicity. If the program operates on a stream, the simplest interface passes the program a stream. (This program actually operates on something even simpler than a stream – a byte string – but Unix-likes, and shells especially, are terrible at passing those. And an FD isn’t just a stream, but the point is it’s closer.) A file path is another degree or more removed from that, and it’s up to the program if/how it’ll open that file path, or even how it’ll derive a file path from the string (does `-` mean stdin to this tool? does it write multiple files with different suffixes? what permissions does it set if the file is a new file – will it overwrite an existing file? is this parameter an input or an output?).

Your attached arguments seem to be about convenience during interactive use, rather than the kind of simplicity I was referring to. (Bonus minor point: tab completion is not necessarily any different.)

> Moreover, the simplest shell scripts that call this tool are unreadable (and thus unauditable) without the the manual.

That might be a stretch. But more importantly, who’s trying to audit use of these tools without the manual? You can be more sure of the program’s interpretation of `--sk secretkey` (well, maybe rather `--secret-key=./secretkey`) than `9>` if you know it runs successfully, but for anything beyond that, you do need to know how the program is intended to work.

Finally, something I probably should have mentioned earlier: it’s very easy to wrap the existing implementation in a shell function to give it a named-parameter filepath-based interface if you want, but the reverse is impossible.
by kergonath | 2026-01-06 13:10:14+00:00
It’s not "the EU" disappearing people in unmarked vans. It is not perfect, but it follows procedures and protocols to a fault.

The EU is also not a monolith, it’s different entities with not perfectly aligned interests, some of which representing member states, some of which citizens, again with significant divergence of opinion. The court of justice frequently finds against member states governments, for example.

TL;DR: "the EU" does not want things. Different participants want different things and what happens in the end is the result of a consensus building process.
by 59nadir | 2026-01-06 13:11:01+00:00
I think the bigger part of those studies was actually that they were a clear sign that whatever productivity coefficient people were imagining back then was clearly a figment of their imagination, so it's useful to take that lesson with you forward. If people are saying they're 2 times productive with LLMs, it's still likely the case that a large part of that is hyperbole, whatever model they're working with.

It's the psychology of it that's important, not the tool itself; people are very bad at understanding where they're spending their time and cannot accurately assess the rate at which they work because of it.
by rvz | 2026-01-06 13:11:43+00:00
Nice, however:

> Vanilla JavaScript (ES6+) CSS3 with CSS Grid Minimal external libraries: marked.js, exifr, highlight.js, sql-formatter (all from CDN) No frameworks, no bundlers, no npm Hosted on Github Pages

One problem. - "Hosted on Github Pages"

I don't think either using GitHub or hosting it on Github Pages respects the user's "privacy".

A better way is to self-host on your own server + domain instead.
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-01-06 13:12:57+00:00
Done charitably, I think the mainframe model of shared compute does meet most person's needs where they don't need to care about latency. It would allow us to take advantage of economies of scale. The problem, imo, is that no one has an incentive to do this as a service, so it would turn into rent-seeking.
by 4bpp | 2026-01-06 13:13:26+00:00
Unfortunately, all it will take is an appropriate choice of story about "Nazis"/"child predators"/"pirates"/"terrorists"/"Russian bots" sideloading unregulated apps or disabling the GPS trackers on their cars, and every prospective member of Doctorow's great new coalition (including most everyone in attendance when the talk was given) can be peeled away with ease.
Show HN: VPN Peek – macOS menu bar app with DNS and IPv6 leak detection
by anhphong | 2026-01-06 13:13:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a menu bar utility to monitor VPN status and detect leaks on macOS.

The problem: macOS doesn't make it obvious when your VPN silently disconnects,
and even when connected, DNS or IPv6 traffic can leak outside the tunnel
without you knowing.

VPN Peek shows your connection status at a glance and runs leak detection:

- DNS leak detection: checks if your DNS queries go through your VPN or leak to your ISP

- IPv6 leak detection: detects if your real IPv6 address is exposed

- Shows current public IP and location

- Notifications when VPN drops or leaks are detected

- Auto-refreshes on network changes

Works with any VPN provider – it monitors at the system level, not tied to
any specific app.

Built with SwiftUI/AppKit hybrid for native macOS feel. Runs locally,
only reaches out to check your public IP for leak detection.

$3.99 on Mac App Store, no subscription.

Feedback welcome – especially from anyone who's dealt with VPN leak issues.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vpn-peek/id6757384027
Show HN: SpeakLanguageOnline – calm two-way voice practice for expats
by digi_wares | 2026-01-06 13:13:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been living in Thailand for a couple of years and, despite understanding quite a bit, I always struggled to actually speak Thai - especially getting the tones right.

Classes felt rigid, tutors felt stressful, and most apps don’t let you just… talk.

So I built SpeakLanguageOnline: a calm, call-style Thai speaking practice where you speak, it listens, and it speaks back.

No lessons, no gamification, no pressure — just voice practice.

It’s early and intentionally minimal. I’m mainly sharing this to get feedback on whether the two-way voice flow feels natural and useful. It’s free to try with a short practice window.

Happy to answer questions.
by marcinzm | 2026-01-06 13:14:01+00:00
I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.
by Y_Y | 2026-01-06 13:14:30+00:00
Maiṫ ṫú, tá ſé ſeo an-ṁaiṫ ⁊ tacaím go hiomlán le hiarrachtaí den ſórt ſeo.

I'm somewhat disappointed that I couldn't find a unicode character corresponding to the "long r". Anyway this is peak typography and delighted to see efforts to put proper clóscríobh on the web. Pairs nicely with an ogham terminal.

edit: I just hadn't been looking hard enough, in Latin Extended-D there is indeed a "small letter insular r": ꞃ
by snicky | 2026-01-06 13:14:36+00:00
Semi-related opinion, but it really boggles me how people can be such a*holes to leave spam all over the internet and keep turning it into a cesspit. If a company does it in such an obvious way it has to be systematic, meaning that someone somewhere comes up with an idea, his manager gives an okay to proceed and then they chop it into tasks and other employees pick them up. There are multiple people involved. All of them know about what's happening and that it's unethical. And for what? I doubt most people running/working for the YC companies need money that badly. Are they going to buy a boat? A higher Tesla model? Invite their friends to Michelin-starred restaurants to show how successful they are?
by twixfel | 2026-01-06 13:14:50+00:00
It's not that controversial, every single country has limits on speech, including the US. So European countries control a little bit more than the US, largely when it comes to racial abuse and other hate speech. So? The American model when combined with social media and the internet appears to have disastrous outcomes, judging by who has been elected there. It clearly worked in the past, but not any more.

Americans supposedly being outraged at other free, democratic countries (often in reality both more free and democratic than the US) having different laws regarding speech is really just a smoke screen for what they really want: for their social media companies and billionaires to completely control our media, so that we end up just as fucked up and insane as they are. In the end if we allow Americans to poison our countries, we will lose our freedoms and democracies. Why would we allow that? What do you expect?

P.S. it's cringe to cry about lack of free speech in Europe as if we've changed. We never, ever had 100% free speech in Europe. Stop trying to hark back to some free speech utopia that literally never existed. This is the continent that up until 110 years ago was overwhelmingly ruled by kings and queens and indeed we are in many ways far more conservative than you are. Get over it and stop trying to turn us into you.
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-06 13:16:21+00:00
I appreciate when "Woe is Me" style comments are knocked down a notch when they conveniently ignore half of the world. The activity surrounding the discussion is indeed using networked applications, of which the web is only one.

So I don't think they were being needlessly pedantic, nor do I think they didn't understand what the parent meant by internet in the colloquial.

Lots of different ways one could take this: maybe whom they were responding to is just being lazy, that the good parts of the internet are there for them to explore, but they are beholden to their web browser and their favorite loathed platforms that 'make the internet suck'.

Or maybe whom they were responding to really has gone the rounds and really has considered all the options and bemoans how difficult the non-web internet services are to use, and how inelegant they can be at times and what a pain they are to maintain if it isn't your full time job.

There can be so many ways to take written material on the internet; more often even pedantic comments at least let us ensure we aren't simply reaffirming our own biases.
by b112 | 2026-01-06 13:16:27+00:00
It is not the crux!!

Large companies don't get to say they're too big, so therefore it is hard.

Too damned bad!

They can take advantage of scale, but not at the cost of breaking the law, or just doing their job improperly.

If it makes service at scale difficult, well that's just too bad. Sucks to be them. Maybe a competitor will do better.

No excuses because "oh poor widdle me, I'm too big"
by baranul | 2026-01-06 13:16:40+00:00
Appears to be a tactic, to cause confusion with releases coming from other programming languages, because otherwise this doesn't make too much sense for an actual user to do.

For example, V (Vlang) went to 0.5.0 (December 31st) and C3 is 0.7.8 (December 6th) in 2025 (last month).

[1] https://github.com/vlang/v/releases/tag/0.5

[2] https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/releases/tag/v0.7.8
by nasmorn | 2026-01-06 13:16:44+00:00
I don’t think the conclusion is right. Your org might still require enough React knowledge to keep you gainfully employed as a pure React dev but if all you did was changing some forms, this is now something pretty much anyone can do. The value of good FE architecture increased if anything since you will be adding code quicker. Making sure the LLM doesn’t stupidly couple stuff together is quite important for long term success
by MrLeap | 2026-01-06 13:16:57+00:00
It uh.. was kind of weird that a junior dev wrote.. an.. rfc? I sense that this is a company that has somewhat adapted that concept for some kind of internal communication, or it's AI slop. All the jobs I'd ever had would probably call something like that a "design proposal" or similar.

Maybe this is a folksy anecdote about a junior developer working for John Email designing the protocol for trinary morse code over a token ring of twisted pair barbed wire. An RFC for that kind of project would be natural.

In the spirit of this, I propose we start calling things like flowcharts, SVG images of digraphs, UML diagrams etc "articles of war" just to spice things up.
by techdmn | 2026-01-06 13:17:09+00:00
Am American, can confirm. I largely disagree with the idea that U.S. citizens chose their government, there are many, many filters, restrictions and unnecessary complications specifically designed to prevent politics having too much influence on policy, and our militarized police force is only too happy to deal with any inconvenient protestors. (Not to mention literal military deployments to several of our cities.) On the other hand, I am routinely amazed at enthusiasm among the public for surveillance, such as the opinion that FLOCK cameras are justified because they might help catch people exceeding the speed limit. Never underestimate the average person's desire to monitor and control other people.

Edit to clarify: I and many Americans are trying hard to be your allies, but it's not clear we have the leverage to be effective. Shit is locked down pretty tight over here.
by jaffa2 | 2026-01-06 13:17:58+00:00
> This is so obviously false. The photos definitely don't look identical. If you're carrying a DSLR, it's a darn good bet you believe it'd take better photos than your phone.

gonna push back a little on this one. Today, the best iphones can easily take pictures as good a DSLR, providing conditions are right (good light etc)

The quality of the photo btw, is irrelevant to the camera used.

But what the DLSR has that the iphones etc don't have is the ability to excel at the edges of technical capability. E.g. low light, large telephoto, interchange able lenses, filters, more control over exposure, better autofocus, more control over Dof etc.

It's like a Ferrari and a Pickup. Sure they both do the same thing on the face of it. Take you to the store, go a for a drive, visit friends. But that time you wanna go enjoy some twisty roads? you need the ferrari ? That time you need to haul trash to the tip ? You need the pickup.

And so the DLSR 'beat's iphone in some cases, iphone beats DSLR in some cases, but they both take decent pictures and if there are destined for screen only then it can be hard to even tell the difference.

There's youtube videos of people comparing exactly this, and until you print and blow up your image to 2ft x 3ft you can't see any difference.
by sylware | 2026-01-06 13:17:58+00:00
Actually it is a massive improvement: expensive niche features are now optional, features you have to discover and handle dynamically. This helps to avoid developer/vendor lock-in by 'tons of features required'.

If I am not too mistaken there are several "remote desktop network protocols", maybe the dev teams behind them could agree on a common network protocol.

And the more compositor implementations, the merrier, a bit like the x11 window managers.

I am coding mine for linux and AMD GPUs, as a hobby, in RISC-V assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter (thanks to wayland being an IPC interface)... well until very recently, it has been more some kind of research and development of a "method" to code modular assembly projects with a minimal SDK, in other words to decide on various technical compromises requiring coding _real life_ software in order to hit the right sweet spot.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-06 13:18:03+00:00
Historically white supremacism has led to a LOT of deaths - not only the Nazi atrocities, but also all the lynchings performed by the KKK, the Tulsa race massacre etc. I don't agree with any kind of nationalism, but I also don't think that those other types of supremacism are anywhere near as dangerous.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-06 13:18:09+00:00
- my gripe with most of these tools is that whenever i actually need one, i can never seem to remember their name.

- That kills like half the traffic for you guys.

- For example look at this dude https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ This is easily one of the most comprehensive tools I have ever seen anyone build

- I literally bookmarked that site under a tools tag and that is how I am able to find them. I can't ever seem to remember their name when I need these quickly

- Perhaps get a good DOT COM domain name and host your site there. It would make a huge difference in usage.

- Discoverability is the problem. Since these tools I believe are not there to sell subscriptions, that means they don't make much in revenue. Organic marketing is the best way for such tools and an easy to remember name makes a huge difference.
by Ray20 | 2026-01-06 13:18:14+00:00
> the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money

It sounds stupid. Maduro has no way to enforce the deal, and the US has no incentive to fulfill this deal.

> We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes.

To use it, no resistance is matter. One person must do their job to launch a nuclear weapon. That's all.

> it involves a lot of people and processes

It doesn't matter. Nuclear deterrence exercises are conducted regularly. And their peculiarity is that no one except the person with the red button knows whether it's an exercise or whether the missiles will actually be launched this time.

So when the order to launch comes, many people will be performing a large number of complex processes which will result in the use of nuclear weapons. Because they regularly receive such orders and carry out these processes.
by Quothling | 2026-01-06 13:18:20+00:00
If the EU made a decent certification option so that the Google Store wasn't necessary for a lot of our apps, then Graphene and similar would be good replacements. As it is I couldn't use a single app on my android phone (I basically only have public sector apps + banking) without the Google Store thing. Since these all either require the Google Store themselves or the national digital ID which does
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-06 13:18:24+00:00
Ask Alex Jones about his free speech on Sandy Hook to understand how bad (EU) censorship really is!

Jokes aside. Restriction of freedoms, including speech, is not bad by definition, it's the scale and intention behind it that matters but this aspect is always missing, kind of censored, in public debate. You may downvote me now :-)

Edit: In the same sense, Alon does not cry about specific and obviously unjustified cases of EU censorship on X.
by esrauch | 2026-01-06 13:20:24+00:00
Every system has some type 1 errors and some type 2 errors. The notion that they could just have neither if they cared a little more is just kind of absurd and doesn't at all reflect the messiness of the world we live in.

Even if Google paid Harvard JDs to read every DMCA notice (of which there literally aren't enough of them), even then they would sometimes be tricked by adversaries and sometimes incorrectly think someone was an adversary some of the time.

I worked at YouTube in the past and I can tell you copyright ownership isn't even fully known by the lawyers. Concretely there's a lot of major songs where the sum of major companies affirming they have partial ownership sums to more than 100% or less than 100%. Literally even the copyright holders don't actually know what they themselves own without lots of errors, and that's without getting into a system that has to try to combat adversarial / bad-faith actors.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-06 13:20:35+00:00
Also not the warez scene, but the Swedish public broadcaster made a series about the pirate bay recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_(TV_series)

It's watchable, but not great. It unfortunately doesn't cover many of the most interesting details, such as what happened with TPB after the operators were arrested.