MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2026-01-14 03:58:59+00:00
10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies.

> though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.

Spicy take, but that's 100% consistent with my experience. Hire a lot of people for their nerdy interests and hobbies and your company comms become full of chatter about nerdy interests and hobbies. Meanwhile the "boring" people who ship code and then go home to their families (or pets, or anything) are trying to ship code and get the job done.

Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability. Hiring someone primarily for nerdy interests and hobbies is probably a red herring. Focus on what matters.
by hexer292 | 2026-01-14 04:03:20+00:00
I think it's different to the trolley problem in terms of trying to measure the outcome.

If we make decisions based on what will have the best outcome, well the trolley problem is trivial; minimise the negative outcome.

In the scenario of murder for the cancer cure, you're still left with someone who was murdered. My take is that this isn't any less bad than someone who was murdered for something other than the cure for cancer, which in turn means I would stop this murder even if it meant not curing cancer.
by callally_colin | 2026-01-14 04:04:10+00:00
Hey HN! I built this because the EU Accessibility Act (EAA) takes effect June 28, 2025 - requiring all e-commerce sites serving EU customers to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

The tool uses axe-core (Deque's open source engine) via Puppeteer to scan any website and generate a detailed report with:
- Overall accessibility score
- Critical/serious/moderate issues breakdown
- Specific WCAG criteria violations
- Actionable fix recommendations

It's free for single scans. Would love feedback from the HN community on the UX and what additional features would be useful.

Tech stack: Next.js 14, Vercel, Browserless (headless Chrome), axe-core
by eru | 2026-01-14 04:04:15+00:00
> This kind of limited device is something I've been thinking about with respect to what interactions I want my children to have with computers. I remember when I was 9 years old and we got these computers at the lab at school and we wrote some LOGO and BASIC and it was a mind-blowing experience. We were drawing SQUARES! And we were making TRIANGLES of ASTERISKS! Hahaha, what a glorious thing that felt like.

Well, Minecraft 'redstone' works a bit like that?

Of course, it's embedded in a much bigger program, but I'm not sure that makes a difference to the kids?
by yongjik | 2026-01-14 04:04:47+00:00
Well, South Korea hasn't executed anyone for 20+ years, so death penalty is more or less symbolic here.

Also, Yoon is very unpopular, and he's a moron, so he has zero use for America even if he somehow magically teleported there. Besides, Trump somehow seems rather infatuated with SK's current president Lee, after he was gifted a golden crown, so I don't think Trump would want to piss off Lee for some useless dude - he probably doesn't even remember who is Yoon.
by somekyle2 | 2026-01-14 04:05:09+00:00
100%. I think there are some clear distinctions between AI training and human learning in practice that compound this. Humans learning requires individual investment and doesn't scale that efficiently.
If someone invests the time to consume all of my published work and learn from it, I feel good about that. That feels like impact, especially if we interact and even more if I help them. They can perhaps reproduce anything I could've done, and that's cool.

If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad.
And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.
by zahlman | 2026-01-14 04:06:04+00:00
Fair enough, I misspoke, implicitly accepting a false dichotomy. The case law I cited agrees with you WRT the standard.

But I don't understand the distinction in "kinds of murder" that you are describing; murder is always a felony and "misdemeanor murder" is a term of art not describing an actual statutory offense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misdemeanor_murder). Nor can I see how the "narrow jurisdiction" of ICE is relevant here, given that it includes (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357):

> (a)(5) to make arrests — (A) for any offense against the United States, if the offense is committed in the officer’s or employee’s presence

Obstructing federal officers in their duty is a federal offense, and it necessarily occurs in the presence of those officers.

Anyway, given the evidence I find it quite clear that the threat was "objectively reasonable in the circumstances" (i.e., with the available information in the moment, without benefit of hindsight and given the time pressure).
by busyant | 2026-01-14 04:06:47+00:00
Just to throw my anecdote in ... In the 1980s, I met a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower scores.

So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.

Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")
by cvoss | 2026-01-14 04:07:13+00:00
Likewise. Thought it'd be pronounced "slang", and thought the semantics would be you define LANG=<name of a language> at the top of the file (like a hashbang) and then write in whatever language you please. $LANG is a neato language because it has all the coolest features rolled into one unified design: polymorphic lifetime borrowing, endofunctor monoid monads, (stacked) coroutines, and even quantum data types.
by rramadass | 2026-01-14 04:08:43+00:00
Very Nice. Your comment meshes nicely with ktallett's comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610185

The Nielsen/Chuang book is what i see recommended everywhere and so am definitely going to get it. What others would you recommend?

I had recently asked a similar question about books on "Modern Physics" (essentially Quantum Physics + Relativity) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473352 so given your profile, what would be your recommendations?

PS: You might want to add your website url to your HN profile since your Physics Notes might be helpful to a lot of other folks too. :-)
by juris | 2026-01-14 04:09:14+00:00
> US lawmakers starting to question whether RISC-V is an issue of national security:

https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...

My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg.

Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.
by anilgulecha | 2026-01-14 04:09:27+00:00
"I am still willing to admit I am wrong. That I'm not holding the GPS properly. That navigating with real-time satellite data is its own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. I have changed how I get around before, and I'm sure I will do so again.

Map-reading evangelists, are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at driving a car? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."
by bombcar | 2026-01-14 04:09:51+00:00
That world isn’t necessarily until that four hour commute is driving past houses the whole way.

But it isn’t.

I think a big part of the problem is we’ve lost the shitholes; it used to be 20/30 years ago you could be making good money in the city and choose to live in a crappy apartment/house that others of your salary tier wouldn’t look at; that option is mostly gone. The shitholes are infinity dollars a month.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-01-14 04:10:26+00:00
That is the basic argument for the utility of stereotypes too. I think the author is engaged in projection. I think the hecklers are the ones revealing their insecurities, which are justified. Even if AI progress were frozen today, the market conditions are going to change in ways that are hard to predict and a little bit of programming knowledge is not going to be the massive arbitrage opportunity that it used to be.
by stubish | 2026-01-14 04:10:51+00:00
This demonstrates how adding AI features to software such as web browsers dramatically increases the attack surface. It has to be considered potentially malicious and jailed, and hopefully everyone remembers to respect that jail and put up guardrails. Given our history of chroots and jails and containers and virtualization, we know escapes are going to happen. Reminds me of Word and Excel viruses, when scripting was added to documents and left on by default.
by Jeremy1026 | 2026-01-14 04:12:45+00:00
I sysadmin my kids' PTA website. OpenAI was scraping it recently. I saw it looking at the event calendar, request after request to random days. I saw years 1000 through 3000 scroll by. I changed the response to their user agent to an access denied, but it still took about 4 hours for them to stop.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-14 04:12:49+00:00
This resonates a lot.

I’d love a world where “consume an event log” is a standard protocol and client-side tooling doesn’t care which broker is behind it.

Feed API is very close to the mental model I’d want: stable offsets, paging, resumability, and explicit semantics over HTTP. Ayder’s current wedge is keeping the surface area minimal and obvious (curl-first), but long-term I’d much rather converge toward a shared model than invent yet another bespoke API.

If you’re open to it, I’d be very curious what parts of Feed API were hardest to standardize in practice and where you felt the tradeoffs landed in real systems.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-14 04:13:35+00:00
Yes, that maps quite naturally.

Classic HTTP Range is byte-oriented, but custom range units (e.g. `Range: offsets=…`) or using `Link` headers for pagination both fit log semantics well.

I kept the initial API explicit (`offset` / `limit`) to stay obvious for curl users, but offset-range via headers is something I want to experiment with, especially if it helps generic tooling.
by greggman65 | 2026-01-14 04:15:21+00:00
No. Just like Owl City isn't his real voice. If the song is good I don't personally care.

Most of the music I like is loops pasted together in some DAW. Sure, it requires taste to make a good song but if AI figure out how to replicate that taste can crank out catchy tunes I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can only guess though that too much of a good thing will lead to be getting bored with it ... maybe.

It's not like most pop music isn't formulaic. I enjoy the currently popular songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters but they're so cliche, if they turned out to be AI generated I wouldn't be surprised :P
by mpyne | 2026-01-14 04:16:45+00:00
Another trick I've used is to use named FIFOs for commands that expect there to be files rather than stdin/stdout. The command that spits the sensitive credential outputs to the FIFO and blocks.

The command that needs the sensitive credential to be input is pointed to the FIFO and reads it, and nothing is left over on disk or in the shell's history or memory.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-14 04:17:27+00:00
From a PM perspective, the main differentiator between an engineering team and AI is "common sense". As these tools get used more and more, enough training data will be available that AI's "common sense" in terms of coding and engineering decisions could be indistinguishable from a human's over time. At that point, the only advantage a human has is that they're also useful on the ops and incident response side, so it's beneficial if they're also comfortable with the codebase.

Eventually these human advantages will be overcome, and AI will sufficiently pass a "Turing Test" for software engineering. PMs will work with them directly and get the same kinds of guidance, feedback, documentation, and conversational planning and coordination that they'd get from an engineering team, just with far greater speed and less cost. At that point, yeah you'll probably need to keep a few human engineers around to run the system, but the system itself will manage the software. The advantage of keeping a human in the loop will dwindle to zero.
by jellyotsiro | 2026-01-14 04:18:01+00:00
Trump famously told New York Magazine in 2002: "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

Trump and Epstein were social acquaintances in Palm Beach and New York circles during the 1990s-early 2000s. They socialized together at Mar-a-Lago and other venues
by s1artibartfast | 2026-01-14 04:18:12+00:00
Im not suprised.

As recently as 2024, my own fortune 50 company had a policy where manager bonuses were determined POC hiring rates.

Ive been told by recruiters that they arent hiring white men in the 2020's.

In the 2000's I was also turned down by a fortune 50 defense contractor who said they needed more women to secure better federal contracts.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-14 04:18:14+00:00
just entertainment? Aton of people just watch sports to shout at the TV (or field) and drink beer. A lot more than are genuinely interested in the physical performance.

And really, we absolutely glorify entertainment in our society. People look up more to Kim Kardashian or a Will Smith than a king. Athletes also but more because they bring in the "win" which is more entertainment. It's all about making you feel good about winning or the chance of it, and the Idea that you're part of it.
by ynac | 2026-01-14 04:19:21+00:00
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!

I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
by jason_oster | 2026-01-14 04:19:49+00:00
You have the upper hand with familiarity of the code base. Any "domain expert" also necessarily has a head start knowing which parts of a bespoke complex system need adjustment when making changes.

On the other hand, a highly skilled worker who just joined the team won't have any of that tribal knowledge. There is a significant lag time getting ramped up, no matter how intelligent they are due to sheer scale (and complexity doesn't help).

A general purpose model is more like the latter than the former. It would be interesting to compare how a model fine tuned on the specific shape of your code base and problem domain performs.
by OneMorePerson | 2026-01-14 04:20:45+00:00
I don't think what I experience is the exact same (maybe a different intensity), so I don't know if this will make sense.

For me caffeine makes it a lot worse, I'm pretty sensitive, on a lot of days I can't even drink a cup of coffee or it'll affect me. I also get a lot worse if I am letting a lot of tasks build up and I bounce around between them.

Ultimately what worked for me was developing the ability to not react to something crossing my mind. Like in your example right when the micro idea would cross my mind after going deep, I'd just let that micro thought have a few seconds to pass through my mind, and not react to it. I wouldn't give into the thought "I need to start doing this micro project!" or have any kind of reaction. Once the immediate reaction passed I would decide whether it's worth changing my focus.

This can also be used in the inverse, if I decide to go deep on something, periodically checking in to see if it's still worth going vs asking for help/input.
by nikcub | 2026-01-14 04:20:51+00:00
Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).

Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
by anishgupta | 2026-01-14 04:21:50+00:00
This just reminds me of the meme of a big stone structure supported by a pebble to prevent falling, The pebble being an OSS maintainer in Nebraska.

I like the spirit of article however,

1. Tracking every mention of a dependency and assigning value fairly is extremely hard: many packages are widely reused while many are tiny utility libs.

2. Usage in a file doesn’t reflect actual runtime usage. A repo might list a package but never import it.

Overall, solutions that align incentives, and maintain ecosystem neutrality are more likely to gain traction than a platform-wide mandated surcharge.
by johnfn | 2026-01-14 04:22:21+00:00
> Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books.

This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article.

1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for any amount of time say that "The only place where managers motivate people is in management books"?

2. Of course most of the facile strategies mentioned in the article (like 996, micromanaging, etc) won't work. The article then generalizes this to all strategies - but "if terrible methods can't solve it, nothing possibly can" feels like a shaky argument at best. A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company. (If success of the company isn't something you're interested in, then yes, it's going to be hard to motivate you.) A poor manager sabotages motivation in a hundred different ways - he makes you feel like your efforts are totally wasted, or fails to articulate why they are important.
by unwise-exe | 2026-01-14 04:24:26+00:00
>>> To establish this, let’s write a simple simulation. We’ll flip a coin a million times, ask our friends what they saw, and observe the results.

Either they agree, or they disagree.

If they agree, they're either both telling the truth or both lying. All you can do is go with what they agreed on. In this case, picking what they agreed on is the same as picking what one of them said (say, Alice).

If they disagree, then one is telling the truth and one is lying and you have no way to tell which. So just pick one, and it makes no difference if you pick the same one every time (say, Alice).

So you end up just listening to Alice all the time anyway.
by tac19 | 2026-01-14 04:26:12+00:00
I don't have one, nobody really does. But the blind belief in, and search for, some utopian society is what needs to die. Reduced expectations, less ambitious goals, and a renewed reliance on small local communities.

I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.

For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-14 04:27:05+00:00
In some cases that could happen; in particular there may be a lot of UI and cross-app-integration style stuff that starts to get offloaded to users, so users can have AI code up their own UI for using some services together in the way that they want.

But in most cases businesses still need to own their own logic and data, so businesses will still be owning plenty of their own software. Otherwise customers could just write software to buy all your business's products for 99% off!
by rendaw | 2026-01-14 04:27:41+00:00
I'm really not sure about this. I love art, I'm an avid collector of all sorts of things, and I hate "AI art". I've skipped over multiple suno albums, when something feels vaguely AI-ish I'll dig to see if it's denied/acknowledged anywhere.

But I think Bandcamp has some value for being a place where anyone can publish their music. The statement is basically "We're banning AI because we don't like it." I feel like this is creating a rift or a battle where one was totally unnecessary. People who publish slop are probably also people who like music and buy music themselves. Whenever there's a guideline like this there will be false positives in enforcement. There's already tons of non-AI slop on bandcamp (plunderphonics, plagiarized stuff, 30 minutes of 10 people playing random notes on their instruments cacaphonic contemporary classical, ambient that's one chord for 60 minutes, etc). And the only people who this affects are the 10 people using Bandcamp's terrible music discovery services (I'm one).
by bruce511 | 2026-01-14 04:28:46+00:00
This might be true for games, but its not universally true for software.

Clearly the Windows NT kernel is older than 25 years, and is still making money.

And it's not alone. My own company is still actively developing and selling a program first released in 1998. Even if we wanted to Open Source every build 25 years after it's release, it might be difficult to figure out how to store the code that long.

We originally backed up on tape. Good luck restoring that now. Then writable CDs; those have likely degraded (and we'd need to find an old CD Drive to read them.)

Even most hard drives of the era are no longer usable - MFM, SCSI ,ATA none of those interfaces exist, and drives were tiny. If you had to choose a media today, that you'd be confident would work in 25 years, what would you pick?

Sure, our active code survives because we simply clone the archive every time we replace the server, but we don't have a history if every build ever.

Seems like a million years ago I wrote some games. The source code is long gone. (Well it's on 5.25 floppy disks in my garage for 30 years, so functionally gone.) The compiler to make it is long gone. The OS and physical hardware is long gone (although emulators exist. ).

I'm sorry to say, but making laws for old software is basically pointless.
by listenallyall | 2026-01-14 04:29:32+00:00
Where are you drawing the line? It's relatively easy to have a black & white ideological framework regarding murder - but what about lesser crimes, like beating someone up and causing serious, but not life-threatening injuries? What about being a witness to a crime but never reporting it? Does the motivation ever come into play? Can people who commit a crime never "redeem" themselves by performing positive deeds going forward? Isn't that the point of rehabilitation?