MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fatbird | 2026-01-17 01:15:01+00:00
Here's how to abolish the electoral college: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

States with a total of 270 electoral votes agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. The effort appears to be stalled, but there are 209 votes from states who've already passed the law (which is in effect only once 270+ electoral votes are reached).

The Supreme Court's composition can be changed with a law, and the most popular option appears to be 18 year terms, staggered so that there are two appointments for each presidential term. The court can also be expanded, and should be to 13 (one for each circuit).

Gerrymandering is a serious problem, and would properly be solved by coming up with some algorithmic way of drawing districts. But for practical purposes this unlikely to ever happen. But I'm hopeful because of the effort of Democratic states to recognize the gerrymandering and turning it into a standoff of sorts. To date, there's been no reason not to gerrymander if you can do it, and Republicans have seriously overreached.
by viraptor | 2026-01-17 01:15:10+00:00
Especially in infra work, some changes are 2h of planning and coordination with other teams that result in a 2 line change. One could argue if it's really coding, but you can also look at it as an extreme case with a whole gradient to the pure "just output code for the obvious feature" type of work. So yeah, there will always be cases where the change is smaller and faster than explaining it in the first place.
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-17 01:15:40+00:00
For my 11th or 12th birthday, I got a pet porcupine and I was ecstatic. It was my first pet, and I spent hours researching what they eat, what habitats they like, etc. I carefully curated my room to accommodate him (him being 'Sonic'), even keeping it clean for the first time in forever so I wouldn't lose him amidst the mess of soiled undergarments and such. He loved it, and I loved him. Of course, it made no difference when my uncle sat on him on Christmas morning. We rushed him to the vet, but they told us his scans showed fractures on several vertebrae or something like that. We took him home, and waited for him to die, but the waiting was too painful. I'll spare the details, but what transpired next involved my dad, his shovel, and a lot of tears.

About an hour later, we got a call from the vet - they'd misread the scan, and Sonic was gonna be fine. I think I was traumatized at the time, but the whole thing later became an inside joke (?) for my family - "Don't kill your porcupine before the vet calls" (a la "Don't count your chickens before they hatch").

I guess my point, as it pertains to Cursor, its AI offerings, and other corporations in the space is that we shouldn't jump the gun before a reasonable framework exists to evaluate such open-ended technologies. Of course Cursor reported this as a success, the incentive structure demands they do so. So remember - don't kill your porcupine before the vet calls.
by cheema33 | 2026-01-17 01:15:42+00:00
I was at a Bills game in Buffalo last year. 5 rows ahead of me was big tall dude, who stood up and would not sit down. This was blocking the view of everybody behind him. People grumbled, but nobody said or did anything for about 20 minutes. I was quite peeved. Then an old lady right behind him gently tapped him on his shoulder and reminded him that he was blocking the view of several people behind him. The dude shrugged his shoulder and said, "not my problem, you can stand up too if you want". I am a mega-nerd, but I lost my cool right there and then and started screaming at the guy. My girlfriend, who didn't want to see me get beat up, pulled me away from the scene.

Many people are just massive assholes. Asking nicely does not work. Particularly big drunk dudes at an American football game. That was my first and last visit to a football stadium.
by schmookeeg | 2026-01-17 01:16:15+00:00
I do think Claude does jiggery pokery with its model quality but I have had Clod appear any time of day.

What i find IS tied to time of day is my own fatigue, my own ability to detect garbage tier code and footguns, and my patience is short so if I am going to start cussing at Clod, it is almost always after 4 when I am trying to close out my day.
by jacknews | 2026-01-17 01:16:54+00:00
This wouldn't be so bad if the connections were standardized, but every manufacturer has their own standard, and sometimes don't even stick to it across their own products.

If this was standardized, you'd just buy a new blade/connector or jar from whoever, and in fact you'd have a wide choice of specialist jars and blades to choose from.

The concept of re:mix is great (and the name), but at €350 it's irrelevant. Make the standard open and free, maybe get EU persuade it's use, and let manufacturers build around it at realistic prices.
by kimixa | 2026-01-17 01:17:46+00:00
True, you can increase bit width to guarantee never hit those issues, but right now saturating arithmetic on types that pretty commonly hit those values is the standard. Guaranteeing it would be a significant performance drop and/or memory use increase with current techniques to the level it would significantly affect availability and cost compared to what people expect.

Similarly you could not allow re-ordering of operations and similar - so the results are guaranteed to be deterministic (even if still "not correct" compared to infinite precision arithmetic) - but that would also have a big performance cost.
by reincarnate0x14 | 2026-01-17 01:19:38+00:00
You've been able to find these for years. In fact it's entirely possible they just grabbed some or all of them out of an existing torrent originally.

It would completely not surprise me if there are automagic attacks on net-ntlmv1 at this point against some cloud hosted storage. This has been doable by anyone since like 2016 if you had the space and weren't prevented from using that protocol version.
by suburban_strike | 2026-01-17 01:20:59+00:00
When faced with evidence of operating procedure for the malicious, we forever take them at their word when they insist they're just incompetent.

The spirit of this site is so dead. Where are the hackers? Scraping is the best anyone is coming up with?

It's not scraping. They'd notice themselves getting banned everywhere for abuse of this magnitude, which is counterproductive to scraping goals. Rather than rate-limit the queries to avoid that attention, they're going out of their way to (pay to?) route traffic through a residential botnet so they can sustain it. This is not by accident, nor a byproduct of sloppy code Claude shat out. Someone wants to operate with this degree of aggressiveness, and they do not want to be detected or stopped.

This setup is as close to real-time surveillance as can be. Someone really wants to know what is being published on target sites with as minimal a refresh rate as possible and zero interference. It's not a western governmental entity or they'd just tap it.

As for who...there's only one group on the planet so obsessed with monitoring and policing everything everyone else is doing.
by dextercd | 2026-01-17 01:21:32+00:00
All major root store programs (Chrome, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla) have this power. They set the requirements that CAs must follow to be included in their root store, and for most CAs their certs would be useless if they aren't included in all major ones.

I don't think the root programs take these kind of decisions lightly and I don't see any selfish motives they could have. They need to find a balance between not overcomplicating things for site operators and CAs (they must stay reliable) while also keeping end users secure.

A lot of CAs and site operators would love if nothing ever changed: don't disallow insecure signature/hash algorithms, 5+ year valid certs, renewals done manually, no CT, no MPIC, etc. So someone else needs to push for these improvements.

The changes the root programs push for aren't unreasonable, so I'm not really concerned about the power they have over CAs.

That doesn't mean the changes aren't painful in the short term. For example, the move to 45 day certificates is going to cause some downtime, but of course the root programs/browsers don't benefit from that. They're still doing this because they believe that in the long term it's going to make WebPKI more robust.

There's also the CA/Browser Forum where rule changes are discussed and voted on. I'm not sure how root programs decide on what to make part of their root policy vs. what to try to get voted into the baseline requirements. Perhaps in this case Chrome felt that too many CAs would vote against for self-interested reasons, but that's speculation.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-17 01:21:41+00:00
I think I'm aware of the discussion you're steering for

habitually confuse the 2 (or rather, their names):

https://magdamiu.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/13.png

(What lines the trolling cross, if any? A "Hofstede" take would be celebrated too!)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by derefr | 2026-01-17 01:22:03+00:00
The server would be telling the client the rate-limiting values active/effective for to it. As such, the client doesn't actually need to know what "its partition" is. As far as the client is concerned, "its partition" is the whole of the rate-limiting domain.

The partitioning strategy, and partition chosen using it, would never — should never — be relevant to any automated logic inside the client. (The only way in which it could be would be if you were trying to make a client that aims to defeat the server's rate-limiting logic by using multiple accounts or IP addresses to jump between partitions, and that's... not okay.)

The point of sending the partitioning info to the client, is that it enables a human developing a client, or operating a tool that embeds a client, to debug why rate-limiting is happening when by their understanding it shouldn't be — especially when they have multiple clients across multiple threads / machines each making multiple concurrent requests to the API. These HTTP-429-response heisenbugs get much easier to reason about when the server is sending the client enough information for the developer to be able to see which of the requests they sent got rate-limiting-bucketed together, and which didn't.
by snicky | 2026-01-17 01:22:15+00:00
This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
by phil21 | 2026-01-17 01:22:17+00:00
Because I've personally seen it. Engineer says this is silly, it will blow up in the long run - told to implement it anyways. Not much to lose for the engineer to simply do it. Substitute engineer for any line level employee in any industry and it works just as well.

I've also run into these local maxima stupidities dozens or more time in my career where it was obvious someone was gaming a performance metric at the expense of the bigger picture - which required escalation to someone who could see said bigger picture to get fixed. Happens all the time as a customer where some sales rep or sales manager wants to game short-term numbers at the expense of long-term relationships. Smaller companies you can usually get it fixed pretty quickly, larger companies tend to do more doubling down.

It usually starts with generally well-intentioned goal setting but devolves into someone optimizing a number on a spreadsheet without care (or perhaps knowledge) of the damage it can cause.

Hell, for the most extreme example look at Dieselgate. Those things don't start from some evil henchman at the top saying "lets cheat and game the metrics" - it often starts with someone setting impossible to achieve goals unknowingly in service of "setting the bar high for the organization", and by the time the backpressure filters up through the org it's oftentimes too late to fix the damage.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-17 01:22:46+00:00
> This headline formulation is statistical malpractice

You provided zero evidence for that claim. Let's look at the raw numbers, percentages first, as you suggested: :

share of wealth of top 0.1% : 2000 - 10.35%, 2025 - 14.4%

share of wealth of top 10% : 2000 - 62.6%, 2025 - 68.01%

share of wealth of bottom 50% : 2000 - 3.2% , 2025 - 2.4%

> It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.

This claim is mathematical malpractice - the numbers clearly show that the top is going up while the bottom is going down... percentage-wise! Mathematically, the up-side is limited by 100% and the down-side by 0%, there's no way this can be "regularity broken", ad infinitum, it will end with the top at 100 and the bottom at 0, aka nothing left to trickle up.

> What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution
of the total wealth among groups... [a couple of selective and confusing quotes]

I did what you urged us to do, but the conclusion is the opposite of your "nothing interesting to see here".
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-17 01:22:57+00:00
My observation has nothing to do with my social circle, but rather the general population. Coming back to this thread hours later, the top comment thread has people blathering on all about how talent is genetic and citing works like these as an example, despite the fact that Michelangelo is in fact a very proof of the opposite, of nurture over nature, given that he was training from a young age. The majority of people genuinely believe certain people are born with the skill to move a paintbrash well and that it's somehow not the result of years of disciplined training.

HN specifically selects for a population that leans towards a belief that hard work creates results, and yet even here you can find this nonsensical ideology of genetic paintbrush skill as a mainstream part of the discourse. It is 10x worse in the average population, and this garbage, factually incorrect framing of "first painting" rather than "earliest known published" for something that Michalangelo had spent years of his childhood practicing for contributes to that misunderstanding of the world. Rather than making misleading claims and leaving the reader to "assume the obvious", why not just correctly state the obvious in the first place?
by 9rx | 2026-01-17 01:22:59+00:00
> There are different types of tests, for different purposes.

I'm unconvinced. Sure, I've heard all the different labels that get thrown around, but as soon as anyone tries to define them they end up being either all the same thing or useless.

> Devs should be writing some of them.

A test is only good if you write it before you implement it. Otherwise there is no feedback mechanism to determine if it is actually testing anything. But you can't really write more than one test before implementing it. A development partner throwing hundreds of unimplemented tests at you to implement doesn't work. Each test/implementation informs the next. One guy writes one test, one guy implements it, repeat, could work in theory, I guess, but in practice that is horribly inefficient. In the real world, devs have to write all of their own tests.

Tests and types exist for the exact same purpose. Full type systems, such as seen in languages like Lean, Rocq, etc. are monstrous beasts to use, though, so as a practical tradeoff we use "runtime types", which are much more practical, in the languages people actually use on a normal basis instead. I can't imagine you would want a non-dev writing your types, so why would you have them write your tests?

> High quality QA people are worth their weight in gold.

If you're doing that ticketing thing like the earlier comment talked about, yeah. You need someone else to validate that you actually understood what the ticket is trying to communicate. But that's the stupidest way to develop software that I have ever seen. Better is to just not do that in the first place.
by tamimio | 2026-01-17 01:24:15+00:00
> I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.

It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over.

And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 01:25:12+00:00
Sorry about the fire

> I got cabinet above fridge taken out because fridges have basically gotten taller.

You're right that refrigerator heights aren't standardized but you must have had a really short space if nothing at all would fit.

Installations are typically supposed to leave some additional clearance for the heat to escape from behind, although some builders will try to tightly integrate them for a different look. (High end and commercial refrigerators are designed to actively exhaust and don't have the same limitations)
by shell0x | 2026-01-17 01:25:29+00:00
1. I don't think I'll ever buy Dell again. My current monitor is a Dell S3221QS 32" screen and it has vertical lines and starts flickering on both the Macbook M1 and the Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip after some time, which is a known issue[0][1]. It also defaults to YPbPr colors rather than RGB/SRGB, so the colors look off. I'm using HDMI to HDMI connectivity currently.

Part of it is also my fault as I thought a monitor would work with any computer.

2. That aside, what are you all using for window management on these large screens? I'm currently using Rectangle on Mac, but I was wondering if there's a better way.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/1221mz2/dell_s3221qs_...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/n8ei34/dell_s3221qs_f...
by petekoomen | 2026-01-17 01:27:33+00:00
I'm seeing a lot of negativity in the comments. Here's why I think this is actually a Good Idea. Many command line tools rely on something like this for installation:

$ curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash

This install script is hundreds of lines long and difficult for a human to audit. You can ask a coding agent to do that for you, but you still need to trust that the authors haven't hidden some nefarious instructions for an LLM in the middle of it.

On the other hand, an equivalent install.md file might read something like this:

Install bun for me.

Detect my OS and CPU architecture, then download the appropriate bun binary zip from GitHub releases (oven-sh/bun). Use the baseline build if my CPU doesn't support AVX2. For Linux, use the musl build if I'm on Alpine. If I'm on an Intel Mac running under Rosetta, get the ARM version instead.

Extract the zip to ~/.bun/bin, make the binary executable, and clean up the temp files.

Update my shell config (.zshrc, .bashrc, .bash_profile, or fish http://config.fish depending on my shell) to export BUN_INSTALL=~/.bun and add the bin directory to my PATH. Use the correct syntax for my shell.

Try to install shell completions. Tell me what to run to reload my shell config.

It's much shorter and written in english and as a user I know at a glance what the author is trying to do. In contrast with install.sh, install.md makes it easy for the user to audit the intentions of the programmer.

The obvious rebuttal to this is that if you don't trust the programmer, you shouldn't be installing their software in the first place. That is, of course, true, but I think it misses the point: that coding agents can act as a sort of runtime for prose and as a user the loss in determinism and efficiency that this implies is more than made up for by the gain in transparency.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-17 01:29:28+00:00
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.

"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.

I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
by lz400 | 2026-01-17 01:30:22+00:00
I do a lot of data processing and my tool of choice is polars. It's blazing fast and has (like pandas) a lot of very useful functions that aren't in SQL or are awkward to emulate in SQL. I can also just do Python functions if I want something that's not offered.

Please sell DuckDB to me. I don't know it very well but my (possibly wrong) intuition is that even giving equal performance, it's going to drop me to the awkwardness of SQL for data processing.
Show HN: IncidentPost – AI-generated incident postmortems with minimal tooling
by ededft | 2026-01-17 01:31:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built IncidentPost (https://incidentpost.vect.pro
) to help engineers and SREs ship clear, public incident postmortems without heavy internal tooling or manual writing stress. Many teams struggle to format timelines, summarize root causes, and produce shareable reports after outages — especially under time pressure.

What it does:

Paste a raw timeline (Slack logs, timestamps, alerts)

Generates a structured report with executive summary, root cause analysis, timeline, mitigations, and action items

Produces a public URL, Markdown/HN post draft, and Twitter thread you can publish instantly

No accounts or complex onboarding to read public reports — minimal barriers for transparency

Why this matters:

Public postmortems improve trust and engineering processes

Automates hours of writing into minutes

Keeps focus on incident resolution, not documentation

It’s early, feedback-driven, and intentionally minimal. I’d really appreciate thoughts from engineers, SREs, or founders who deal with reliability and postmortems:
What’s missing? What feels necessary? Would you use something like this?
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-17 01:31:04+00:00
With the wal redis runs with perfectly reasonable performance. Of course you're not going to have the performance of an in-memory only DB if you're flushing to disk on every write.

There's no vacuuming, there's no need for indexing. You can see the time complexity of most operations. Key-value operations are mostly O(1). You'll never get that kind of performance with other databases because they intentionally don't give you that granularity.

The metadata of the filesystem isn't the performance bottleneck in most cases.
by epage | 2026-01-17 01:33:17+00:00
There are a couple differen things going on

- completions being aware of the subcommand

- dynamic look ups for specific values

- completions being aware of previous options, flags, and values

A lot of completions have the first. Some have the second. The last is rare. The completer needs knowledge of when flags, options, and value can be repeated and change which future options and values are suggested.