MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antomal | 2026-01-14 20:46:10+00:00
That's an ambitious and fascinating feature request!

Implementing transparent archive navigation (mounting archives as virtual directories) is definitely on my 'dream features' list for GRSH. Since the shell is written in Rust, I've been looking into FUSE-based solutions or leveraging something like libarchive to create a virtual file system layer.

It’s a bit complex to get right—especially for performance and write support—but I've opened an issue on GitHub to track this idea. I'd love to explore this once the FreeBSD Port and core stability are finalized.

Thanks for the great suggestion!
by newswangerd | 2026-01-14 20:47:01+00:00
I would LOVE to be able to open source this project at some point, but I also want to be able to make a living off of maintaining it. I've been reading up on some source available licenses such as Polyform, which can contain clauses that trigger the code to go open source at some point. If I get some traction, I'd really like to make a similar commitment where we will open source this in X months/years. Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Is this a good idea?

I'm a former Red Hatter, so I'm all too familiar with the revenue hits a product can take when they go open source, but I have no ambition to turn this into a big business, so I think that should be acceptable (unless revenue dips to zero).
by DomHarvest | 2026-01-14 20:47:08+00:00
I built domharvest-playwright to solve a problem I kept hitting as a freelance scraper:
clients' scrapers breaking when sites redesign.

Instead of brittle CSS selectors, you describe what you want semantically:

extract('price').near('Add to Cart')
extract('title').inside('product card')

The library uses fuzzy matching and proximity scoring to find elements even when
class names or structure change. Built on Playwright with retry logic, rate limiting,
and batch processing.

MIT licensed. Would love feedback from the community.
by xyzzyxy | 2026-01-14 20:47:32+00:00
> user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...

Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.

> their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.

Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?

> what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade.

Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.
by ericmay | 2026-01-14 20:47:37+00:00
Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects.

There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?

It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.

And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
by bfbf | 2026-01-14 20:48:20+00:00
Gotta say as a Swift dev I agree—followed the link the to Translate docs and was pleasantly surprised to see a discussion section clearly explaining the usage, which is not always the case for Apple APIs! But this wasn’t really just an article about the API. It was about the complexity of trying to build on the stack of Swift/SPM/ParseableCommand/Foundation/Concurrency/Translation without having a good grasp of any of them. I was frustrated reading it, but I think it does point to the underlying knowledge that’s needed to be proficient at something like this. None of it is a particular indictment of Swift as an ecosystem (though there are lots of valid criticisms)-it’s just the nature of development and something that’s massively eroded by relying too much on these ghosts
by AngryData | 2026-01-14 20:48:45+00:00
If something is unacceptable for a 15 year old, it is unacceptable for the majority of the adult population too. I do not support age restrictions on information in any form. If you don't want your kids to do or view certain things, that is your problem to solve. There are plenty of parental control options and apps already, we have had legislation proposed to label adult content, the reason all this verification crap keeps getting pushed is because corporations want your full identity to sell and fascist supporters want to dox everyone and their ideas and activities for the government to control and punish people for.
by ohemorange | 2026-01-14 20:49:10+00:00
Yep.

> For example, in 2025, Wisconsin lawmakers escalated their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Another proposed Michigan bill requires “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state [to] actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.” Circumvention tools being: VPNs.

https://www.eff.org/pages/vpns-are-not-solution-age-gating-m...
by e12e | 2026-01-14 20:49:12+00:00
Not actually mine, but theirs (hence no "show hn").

But after learning that Claude code and OpenCode both are closed projects with poor quality control and development process - I thought this looked interesting - and seems to not have been discussed here previously.

Came across it in the article:

"Porting MiniJinja to Go with an Agent":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614802
by yuxbs | 2026-01-14 20:49:16+00:00
Don’t put blinders on. The problem isn’t new accounts (who can’t even flag). This community has always been subtly in favor of exactly this kind of suppression. Consider the fact that posting anything even slightly critical of YC on the YC subreddit gets one instantly shadowbanned. Then consider that this very community is modded by the same ilk of people.

What would you expect? The same kind of censorship, right? This is by design. The design can obviously be changed (e.g. don’t let only echochambery high karma accounts vouch for stuff).
by jasonthorsness | 2026-01-14 20:49:25+00:00
lol can never resist call to plug: read my blog!

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/

My favorite articles to write are on crafts like the below, I just got a Prusa CORE One kit (not put together yet) so next one will probably be something related to that.

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/34

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/16
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-14 20:49:34+00:00
> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!)

it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever.

but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time (what do you think Apple Photos is). of course, with kids, i can understand the challenges of making nuanced guidelines, but by that measure, it's simpler to just say, playing roblox is kind of a waste of time, or suggesting better games to play, rather than making it about some feel-good nonsense i'm-a-savvy-Internet-user rule.
by Jigsy | 2026-01-14 20:49:41+00:00
https://jigsy.neocities.org/ or https://jigsy.nekoweb.org/ as a backup. Just a list of pointers to other accounts I have.

Honestly, I hate modern web design. And as someone who grew up with Web 1.0 back in the late 90s, I try to adhere to the KISS approach.

I did discover last night it isn't very mobile friendly, though.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-14 20:49:44+00:00
Being on both sides of the open source value relationship, I feel somewhat skeptical of mechanisms that use dependency cardinality/"popularity" to allocate funding: at its best it's a proxy for core functionality (which is sometimes, but not always, the actually hard/maintenance-intensive stuff) and at its worst it incentivizes dependency proliferation (since two small core packages would be equally as popular as one medium-sized one).
by tzs | 2026-01-14 20:50:11+00:00
Considering that Google is releasing open source software they developed to facilitate such systems [1], apparently they are OK with the idea.

It could simply be that they realize that online age verification becoming required for some online activities is inevitable for the same reasons age checks are required for some non-online activities, and when that comes to pass they want to be able to do in a way that doesn't expose them to too much risk.

Yes, Google loves data but that doesn't mean they don't care about risk. The data they would from some of the age verification methods probably wouldn't improve their ability to advertise much but would cause a lot of problems if leaked.

Another possibility might be that have no choice. My understanding is that in the EU member states that enact online age verification laws will have to require that verification can be done using the privacy-preserving system that the EU Digital Identity Wallet will support. Sites will be able to use other methods too (as long as the don't violate GDPR) so they could support something that gives them more information for advertising, but they will still have to support the privacy-preserving option.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
by drewgregory | 2026-01-14 20:50:16+00:00
I am very passionate about this question - so much so that I happened make a blog post about it yesterday!

I recommend giving LLMs credentials that are extremely fine-grained, where the credentials can only permit the actions you want to allow and not permit the actions you don't want to allow.

Often, it may be hard or impossible to do this with your database settings alone - in that case, you can use proxies to separate the credentials the LLM/agent has from the credentials that are actually made to the DB. The proxy can then enforce what you want to allow or block.

SSH is trickier because commands are mixed in with all the other data going on in the bytestream during your session. I previously wrote another blog post about just how tricky enforcing command allowlists can be as well: https://www.joinformal.com/blog/allowlisting-some-bash-comma.... A lot of developer CLI tools were not designed to be run by potentially malicious users who can add arbitrary flags!

I also have really appreciated simonw's writing on the topic.

Disclaimer: I work at Formal, a company that helps organizations use proxies for least privilege.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-14 20:50:31+00:00
doing nothing. Governments typically marginalise techies when it comes to decision making, so the least they can do is make the call of lesser harm.

If kids really want to use social media, they'll find a way. Its more about making it hard/impossible for those who haven't yet grasped their agency. As ever, its about electors and in this case: parents.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-14 20:51:19+00:00
> From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.

Batteries are chemistry. ATP is a chemical battery.

The difference between living things and our machines is primarily in manufacturing methods: we do things in bulk, because we reach from the top with crude, meter-scale tools; nature glues things up from lots of tiny biomolecular nanomachines, and each of those tiny machines has to carry its own power source!

Still, it's highly likely that any form of "smart dust" will resemble living cells as much as, or even more so, it will resemble miniature devices we build today, simply because that's the kind of chemistry that's efficient at smaller scales.
by peterspath | 2026-01-14 20:51:20+00:00
A /top4 page is a personal webpage where you can share your definitive ranked list of your top 3 favourites and an honourable mention. You can list films, music albums, national parks, computer keyboards, snacks for trips, tools for commands, or comfort foods. List anything you feel strongly about and rank in exactly four places.

Read announcement: https://peterspath.net/blog/project-top-four/
by apitman | 2026-01-14 20:51:47+00:00
I got sniped away from Visible (Verizon MVNO) by US Mobile (multi-carrier MVNO) during a Black Friday sale. USM has an interesting thing where you can actually get a separate eSIM for each of the major carriers, and switch between them. I was curious so I signed up for all 3. It's been interesting to see how the signals vary from location to location, and at least a couple times I've been able to get significantly better signal by switching.

The main downside is that you have different numbers for each eSIM, but that doesn't really affect me because I use Google Voice for SMS.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-14 20:51:47+00:00
Either the platform is trying to age-gate anonymously, in which case it is likely you (or your child) can just circumvent that with fake details; or it's some corporation with ongoing access to large government databases, and probably the government can tap the data it collects in some ways, and you (or your child) should probably be worried about being there in the first place.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-14 20:51:51+00:00
Would be very tough to implement in the US, as proposing any sort of "national ID" is pretty much a nonstarter, at least up to this point.

States could do it, and maybe agree on some protocols so that things like privacy-preserving "age verification" could be done.

Maybe the feds could push it like they did with speed limits: make federal funding contingent upon adopting e-ID. Would still get a lot of pushback.
by 9rx | 2026-01-14 20:51:58+00:00
> None of them have ever explained why alcohol, or any drug use, needs to be part of third spaces.

Third places need to have some kind of draw, else nobody will show up. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In the real world you need to have a compelling reason to have others come in your door. Space alone is not sufficient to establish a third space.

That draw doesn't necessarily have to be alcohol (or another drug), but it was the thing that many people used to want. Threatening use of a third space by fear of the wrath of a mighty deity only buys you one day out of the week, I'm afraid.

You're quite right that people don't want alcohol like they used to. Why nurse a hangover when you can get the same dopamine rush scrolling through TikTok at home from the comfort of your couch? This means that many third spaces of yesteryear no longer serve a purpose, and as you call out, have closed as a result.

Which is all well and good, I guess, but some segment of the population still wish that there were third spaces for them to exist in. Trouble is that they've never been able to find anything as compelling as alcohol used to be, making a different kind of third space of the same scale a complete no-go. Trying to salvage the remaining alcohol-centric third places is the only path they can see to try and relive that glory.

Of course there are plenty of alcohol-free third spaces with focus on niche interests, but these are not a good fit for those who don't have that particular niche interest. Alcohol was historically so successful as the foundation for a third space because, once upon a time, nearly everyone was interested in it.
by cyrialize | 2026-01-14 20:52:29+00:00
I'm sorry that you are going through this.

I haven't gone through something similar, but I think something that helped me out the 2nd time I looked for a job was how valued work experience is.

As a new grad, personal projects are useful because it adds to the pile of things for an employer to look at (along with internships). After that though, personal projects matter less and less compared to real world experience.

(There are exceptions to this though. Personal projects matter less because you don't face real world problems with them. If you have a personal project that gets users, that is definitely something worth talking about).

I recommend just applying to smaller, lesser-known companies just to get some experience. My 1st job was at a small financial tech company that no one ever heard of, and they hired in a lower-cost, non-competitive area. We used a very old tech stack, and had custom everything - that didn't stop me from getting hired at other places.

You should check out: universities, banks, insurance companies, and marketing firms. Applying to companies that are tech companies is pretty rough right now, but you can find non-tech companies that are hiring.

(There's no such thing as a "non-tech" company, but I really just mean companies that don't advertise themselves as tech).

You could also do something like use Indeed, pick a smaller town, and then minimize the miles.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-14 20:52:32+00:00
> The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.

The argument is that it should be here, and that is a very reasonable stance. There is no shortage of places where anything can be discussed; that's not the point. "Here", there is a certain expectation around how to comment which makes this place a more interesting discussion forum, no matter the topic. That some topics bring out the worst in some people is not a good reason to make the topic verboten, but instead a reason to be more critical of the commentary under those topics.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

That doesn't say "no divisive topics" for a reason. The topics are not what make this place interesting, but instead the rules of engagement are.
Ask HN: How are teams sourcing long-term GPU capacity outside hyperscalers?
by dloku | 2026-01-14 20:52:37+00:00
I’ve been talking to a growing number of teams training and serving large models who are no longer relying solely on on-demand hyperscaler GPUs.

Instead, they’re locking in reserved capacity (often 6–36 months) across a mix of providers and regions to get predictable pricing and guaranteed availability. In practice, this raises a bunch of questions:
• How do you evaluate datacenter quality and network topology across providers?
• What tradeoffs have you seen between price, geography, and interconnect?
• How much does “same GPU, different system” actually matter in real workloads?
• Any lessons learned around contracts, delivery risk, or scaling clusters over time?

Context: I work on a marketplace that helps teams source long-term GPU capacity across providers, so I’m seeing this pattern frequently and wanted to sanity-check it with the community.
by tonymet | 2026-01-14 20:53:02+00:00
Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial use

license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications

License B is for commercial use, with a fee

The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.

IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
Show HN: Context-Free Recovery via Constant-Time Enforcement
by SpicyG | 2026-01-14 20:53:17+00:00
I wrote this to describe an execution model where recovery is enforced locally instead of inferred from history. Rather than retries replay or coordination each unit admits or rejects state and input pairs and resets immediately when constraints are violated. Recovery cost is constant failures do not correlate and tail latency never forms because there is no recovery negotiation. This is not about availability theater or smarter retries but about refusing to remain broken.
by fhub | 2026-01-14 20:53:17+00:00
Our solve is to allow it to work with a local dev database and it's output is a script. Then that script gets checked into version control (auditable and reviewed). Then that script can be run against production. Slower iteration but worth the tradeoff for us.

Giving LLM even read access to PII is a big "no" in my book.

On PII, if you need LLMs to work on production extracted data then https://github.com/microsoft/presidio is a pretty good tool to redact PII. Still needs a bit of an audit but as a first pass does a terrific job.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-14 20:53:21+00:00
Quoting GGGP:

>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.

As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.

As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.