MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jurystillout26 | 2026-01-19 23:17:59+00:00
"Negotiating on your own terms" is definitely a wild thing to see as a positive. You may believe you have some special bargaining power as an individual but as proven by history and some basic power analysis your ability to better your position in life is absolutely more effective through a union. "Negotiating on your own terms" is fine if all the bosses find your personality pleasant and your sociocultural background comfortable. What happens is that talented people don't get their just rewards from hard work, educational background and talent because the bosses believe they can get away with it and know that the employee doesn't have much to bargain with on their own.

And the people "who should've been fired long ago" are also people who have lives and families and other obligations that make protections against arbitrarily firing someone a social good. Because unions force employers to fire people on the basis of quality of work and conduct (or economic concerns) rather than arbitrary personal preference and bias, your hard work is more likely to be noticed.

I live in one of the most heavily unionized places on earth in Scandinavia and have worked on both sides, as manager and as an employee, and if someone causes a legitimate problem, you can 100% fire them. You just have to do your due diligence and prove your case about the worker in question. The only thing is, if they have worked for a long time and you need to do a round of layoffs, the people who have worked the longest will not be the first to be fired. This helps protect against companies using layoffs to fire expensive employees and replacing them with cheaper newer hires.

In short, "individual negotiation" is basically saying the boss gets to decide.
by timoth3y | 2026-01-19 23:18:12+00:00
Many of the original Loony Toons and Warner Brothers cartoons fall into this category.

The reason they were produced from the 1930s to 50s was to be run in movie theaters before the main picture. Since they would run before different kinds of movies they had to entertain both kids and adults. Some of the humor in those cartoons clearly went way over the kinds heads.

It was only later that they were bundled as TV shows for children.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-19 23:18:42+00:00
>any more aggressive than, e.g., this one

Frequency is important too.

>independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them.

This whole article is about the trends and of they are good for humans. I was pleasantly surprised that this was not yet another argument of "AI is (not) good enough" since people at this point have their fences set on that. I don't think it's too late to talk about how we as humans can manage pandora's box before it opens.

Responses like this dismissing the human element seem to want to isolate themselves from societal effects for some reason. The box will affect you.
by drillsteps5 | 2026-01-19 23:18:43+00:00
I honestly don't know if it was sarcasm or if you were serious.

At any rate, the downside of this is as follows.

The goal of having Human Resources, talent acquisition, recruiters, and other similar roles is to let hiring managers (and everyone above them, up and including the CEO) concentrate on doing their job and only assist the aforementioned roles in hiring. Of course hiring manager is ultimately responsible for hiring a good candidate but they are not expected to do things like posting job descriptions, initial screening, background checks, referral checks, employment history verification, dealing with legal stuff like NDAs etc etc, that's the job of HR/recruiters. Candidates reaching out to hiring managers (and especially higher ups) are not treated nicely by the HR as these candidates are attempting to take HR out of the picture.

HR are people and want to keep their job and get paid, and you circumventing them might be perceived as a threat to that.

That IN ADDITION to a disruption you will be causing hiring manager (or especially CEO) cause now they need to decide what to do with your email. Even though they have HR/recruiters to handle these things.

A typical result of such a "reach out" will likely be forwarding this email to HR and subsequent rejecting/blacklisting the candidate.

Edit: some clarifications
by quesera | 2026-01-19 23:19:35+00:00
Most of the island is off-limits to tourists. It's administered by the National Park Service.

Coyotes are territorial and usually have fairly large ranges. Alcatraz is small, but probably big enough to keep a breeding coyote pair well-fed and mostly out of the way of humans.

But the younguns will need their own territory after a year or so, and needing to cross the Bay to Marin or SF City would be have very low rates of success!
Show HN: Stream full Windows system audio to Google Nest speakers (no cloud)
by kepners | 2026-01-19 23:19:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small Windows utility that lets you stream full system audio (apps, games, desktop audio) to Google Nest / Chromecast speakers.

This came out of frustration with existing options:

* Bluetooth has noticeable latency and dropouts
* Chromecast only works reliably for browser tabs or supported apps
* Most workarounds involve cloud relays or fragile hacks

This tool captures Windows system audio locally and streams it over the local network directly to Nest speakers and speaker groups. No accounts, no subscriptions, no cloud servers.

There’s a free trial (time-limited), followed by a one-time purchase if you keep using it.

I’m mainly interested in feedback from people who’ve tried similar setups or hit the same limitations.

Site: [https://www.pcnestspeaker.app](https://www.pcnestspeaker.app)
by duskwuff | 2026-01-19 23:19:59+00:00
And, in many cases, because that's where funding exists.

This comes up somewhat frequently in discussions of pet food. Most of the companies doing research into pet food - e.g. doing feeding studies, nutritional analysis, etc - are the manufacturers of those foods. This isn't because there's some dark conspiracy of pet food companies to suppress independent research; it's simply because no one else is funding research in the field.
by moyix | 2026-01-19 23:20:06+00:00
There is filtering mentioned, it's just not done by a human:

> I have written up the verification process I used for the experiments here, but the summary is: an exploit tends to involve building a capability to allow you to do something you shouldn’t be able to do. If, after running the exploit, you can do that thing, then you’ve won. For example, some of the experiments involved writing an exploit to spawn a shell from the Javascript process. To verify this the verification harness starts a listener on a particular local port, runs the Javascript interpreter and then pipes a command into it to run a command line utility that connects to that local port. As the Javascript interpreter has no ability to do any sort of network connections, or spawning of another process in normal execution, you know that if you receive the connect back then the exploit works as the shell that it started has run the command line utility you sent to it.

It is more work to build such "perfect" verifiers, and they don't apply to every vulnerability type (how do you write a Python script to detect a logic bug in an arbitrary application?), but for bugs like these where the exploit goal is very clear (exec code or write arbitrary content to a file) they work extremely well.
by OhSoHumble | 2026-01-19 23:20:14+00:00
> So far Opus 4.5 has been the one LLM that keeps mostly coding in a, how to say, predictable way even with a existing code base.

I find this to be true only if you have very explicit rules in CLAUDE.md and even then it still messes up.

I have "you will use the shared code <here>" twice in my CLAUDE.md as it will constantly write duplicate code.

Something that is also annoying is that if it moves some code somewhere with the intent to slightly modify it I've seen it delete the code, then implement from scratch, and then modify it to what it has been specified to do. This completely breaks tests. I then have to say "look at this earlier commit - you've caused a complete regression."
by leptons | 2026-01-19 23:20:51+00:00
>"No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery."

I'm not the one who first used the term "cash cow". It apparently doesn't mean what you think it means.

If you look up the definition, you will find this:

"a business, investment, or product that provides a steady income or profit."

Windows definitely falls under that definition. This isn't "semantic wankery". Next time you want to use a colloquialism, make sure you look it up first.

>Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.

Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market. MacOS will never achieve anything close to Windows, never has, never will. Windows is Microsoft's bottom bitch, it's not going to be forgotten as you think it will.

Feel free to quit this conversation at any time.
by doxick | 2026-01-19 23:21:00+00:00
Vercel is a platform that, simplified, sells compute by time and by query.

Static optimized sites take very little compute, and little queries.

Since they have the most used framework (nextjs), they made it more server-heavy and changed the paradigm to one where a single page is built up using multiple queries for even just the html.

They then made sure that self hosting that monstrosity is terribly complex for anything serious, and incompatible with the "serverless environment" of their own platform, unless you have devops maintaining it.

And then they severely overhauled the pricing and gimped the included limits. (We were on <1% usage before. And now at 95%< while changing nothing...)

It could of course be a coincidence, but if that were the case, they would be very bad, yet lucky, business people.

100% will never put anything new on vercel and have been avoiding nextjs like the plague.
by afpx | 2026-01-19 23:21:18+00:00
It seems many people in the world way underestimate how important free speech is to the typical US citizen. No one else in the world has free speech. We view it as very important to have.

What this allows:
- Hate speech (non-violent)
- Holocaust/genocide denial
- Blasphemy and religious mockery
- Insulting leaders, judges, and the state
- Burning flags and national symbols
- Abstract praise of extremist ideologies
- Offensive political misinformation
- Harsh personal insults (non-defamatory)
- Publishing leaked material
- Advocacy of civil disobedience in the abstract

An outsider many view that as going "too far", but you limit one, it's the path to limiting them all.
by khaelenmore | 2026-01-19 23:21:34+00:00
For me it's not pixels in total, but pixels per inch. Why? Because like on a larger desk I can put more stuff, on a larger screen I can do the same.
And yes, 96 or maybe even 72 dpi is pretty much enough.
And yes, I love large screens: a 43-inch 4k monitor displays lets me see a few pages of docs, three+ code files at the same time, and have a place for a chat with a colleague or friend at the same time.
Would I buy a smaller 4k monitor? Nah, no way.
Would I play games/watch movies in 4k? Nah, I most of the time play in a window, or on a second 19 inch 5:4 monitor because the screen is too large.
And yes, I'm very sad because of lack of laptop options with reasonable screen resolution, yet high end hardware.
And yes, for a small screen I pick lower resolution whenever I can.
by MonkeyClub | 2026-01-19 23:22:21+00:00
I get what you mean, and agree that

> Harris and Biden are heavily held in contempt by most of the Left.

To be absolutely frank, I don't consider the Democrat party as "Left" in any (traditional?) sense at all, even though it may include Left and Left-leaning elements.

(But then again I don't consider Starmer's Labour as Left either, and one could argue that Labour is more Left than the Democrats.)
by simonw | 2026-01-19 23:22:47+00:00
My hunch is that the dumbasses submitting those reports were't actually using coding agent harnesses at all - they were pasting blocks of code into ChatGPT or other non-agent-harness tools and asking for vulnerabilities and reporting what came back.

An "agent harness" here is software that directly writes and executes code to test that it works. A vulnerability reported by such an agent harness with included proof-of-concept code that has been demonstrated to work is a different thing from an "exploit" that was reported by having a long context model spit out a bunch of random ideas based purely on reading the code.

I'm confident you can still find dumbasses who can mess up at using coding agent harnesses and create invalid, time wasting bug reports. Dumbasses are gonna dumbass.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-19 23:23:09+00:00
Look - I don’t disagree that Reddit has a strong leftward bias. But at the same time, despite my disagreement with many of those left positions, I have to acknowledge that Trump and the current MAGA movement is what is extremist, not typical Reddit content.

To contrast X and Reddit,
I’ve not seen content on Reddit that advocated for invading allies, passing illegal tariffs that as Americans, justifying accepting jumbo jets from other nations, shooting citizens in the streets, denaturalizing citizens of different ethnicities, or numerous other examples.

Bias side, also consider that discussions about Trump on Reddit are just current events and not something unexpected, since that’s just today’s news.

On the other hand, apart from extremist content, on X I also see extremist users. The replies on many topics and profiles are absolutely vile, and that’s what makes me think there must be a large number of bots. It’s an echo chamber because normal people can’t tolerate that type of toxicity, but it’s an echo chamber with massive reach apparently.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-19 23:23:41+00:00
> You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially.

There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder.

Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales.

The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-19 23:23:50+00:00
>OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI.

If industry cared about future seniors, they'd invest in juniors. But that's not what's happening. AI will effectively replace seniors in 20 years with the current trajectory. Whether or not that replacement is adequate or not is the bigger question.
by lbenagha | 2026-01-19 23:24:05+00:00
I built Controlinfra because I was tired of spending hours figuring out why my Terraform plan showed unexpected changes.

Someone tweaks a security group in the AWS console, or auto-scaling modifies something, and suddenly you have 40+ lines of drift to debug.

Controlinfra:
- Scans your infrastructure automatically
- Detects drift between your Terraform code and actual cloud state
- Uses AI (Claude or OpenAI) to analyze root cause
- Generates a fix and opens a PR
- I also added self-hosted runners to maximize security for enterprise terraformstate files

It supports AWS, Azure, and GCP. Free tier includes 10 AI-analyzed scans/month, or bring your own API key for unlimited.

I'd love feedback from anyone managing Terraform at scale. What's missing? What would make this useful for your workflow?
by defrost | 2026-01-19 23:24:20+00:00
All the same every year > 2,000 people attempt the 12 mile swim to see a cute Quokka on Rottnest Island.

* https://rottnestchannelswim.com.au/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rottnest_Channel_Swim

The 36th annual Rottnest Channel Swim will be held on Saturday, 21 February 2026.

Mind you, that's largely Australians who grow up swimming more than many US Navy SEALs do.

Come on down, the waters fine, the sharks rarely nip.

I'm suprised to see a HN comment along the lines of "most people don't ...", after all, most people don't program computers, start million and billion dollar companies, build out datacentres, fly planes, ... etc. The site is littered with people confidently doing things most people do not.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-19 23:24:38+00:00
> I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.

Now that I'm jaded I ask myself how many government and private sector jobs were "created" (in sarcasm quotes because broken windows fallacy) washing all those boats for free over the years and whether they even expected to prevent the spread or if the spread is the justification for expansion.
by MonkeyClub | 2026-01-19 23:24:54+00:00
True, they're not alike, nor are the subtribes that are funneled into the two quasi-distinct groups.

But I think the methods by which they're being manipulated are quite alike, and ultimately forced to side with the current tribal figurehead simply because it's not the other tribe's figurehead, even if there are many, and legitimate, contentions.
by wesselbindt | 2026-01-19 23:25:09+00:00
Call me conservative, but between writing an article against TDD where the main argument was "I don't like the people who do TDD", his opinion on typescript, and the article he wrote on London not being great because it has only 30% whites, I find DHH not really worth listening to. I know, I know, ad hominem, but there's only so much I can read in my life and I have to filter it down somehow. I find that filtering out people who've written a lot of stupid stuff in the past works well for me.
by XorNot | 2026-01-19 23:25:27+00:00
The OP is presenting a stupidly simplistic model of the problem, as though their regular middle class life ably answers the question of the role or threat of violence when demanding political change.

In a world they note of police, military and security guards, they're acting like whether this might have a reason is determined solely by whether people are planning to steal from a supermarket or not...while they're not poverty stricken or hungry, to boot.

Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.

Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-19 23:25:56+00:00
Ah I always wondered if you could avoid the unwanted tracking warning by cycling through virtual devices. Slightly disappointing that you don't even need to resort to that.

Interesting research. Could have done with some motivation - why would you want to do this exactly? And it's a shame they couldn't get it to work with Google's network (in a non-awful way anyway).
by simonw | 2026-01-19 23:26:32+00:00
I hadn't heard of Halvar Flake but evidently he's a well respected figure in security - https://ringzer0.training/advisory-board-thomas-dullien-halv... mentions "After working at Google Project Zero, he cofounded startup optimyze, which was acquired by Elastic Security in 2021"

His co-founder on optimyze was Sean Heelan, the author of the OP.
by lukan | 2026-01-19 23:26:47+00:00
"Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.

In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.

You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs."

I would say it depends. Are there depts of rent involved in that scenario? Did the locking out just happened out of the blue, or was it communicated before, that it would happen?

Apart from that, I surely see more easy examples of justifying violence - for example to stop other violence.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-19 23:26:48+00:00
> Thread safety has not usually been a concern because it’s pretty rare to use raw threads in C++. Rust folks always seem to assume people write C++ like it is 1995.

What kind of charmed life do you lead to where use of reliable abstractions over threads is common in C++ codebases you touch?

My experience has been the exact opposite.
by sweetjuly | 2026-01-19 23:26:52+00:00
The original example is very common in ISAs at least. Both ARMv8 and RISC-V (likely others too but I don't have as much experience with them) have the idea of requiring software to treat reserved bits as if they were zero for both reading and writing. ARMv8 calls this RES0 and an hardware implementation is constrained to either being write ignore for the field (eg read is hardwired to zero) or returning the last successful write.

This is useful as it allows the ISA to remain compatible with code which is unaware of future extensions which define new functionality for these bits so long as the zero value means "keep the old behavior". For example, a system register may have an EnableNewFeature bit, and older software will end up just writing zero to that field (which preserves the old functionality). This avoids needing to define a new system register for every new feature.
by hectormalot | 2026-01-19 23:27:05+00:00
> So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped

Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.

1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".

2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.

3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.

4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.