MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vee-kay | 2026-01-24 15:39:27+00:00
Google relies on ad-revenue.

And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.

So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-24 15:39:40+00:00
What's funny is that I never actually felt it was hot in a datacenter that hosted a mainframe, I think because they were water cooled and also not packed in that tight.

Circa 2005 I would regularly go to the data center on the 7th floor of Rhodes hall [1] and it had a mainframe (cool, but it might have been CMOS instead of bipolar) and huge amounts of rack space devoted to RS-6000, SGI, SPARC and other legacy RISC servers and just a few racks of x86 servers which felt a lot hotter both from radiant heat in the front and hot air blowing out the back because they were packed in tight -- three racks of modern servers would outpower that old CMOS mainframe although of course they do a lot more.

[1] I work on the 6th now but never go to the data center
by jampekka | 2026-01-24 15:39:47+00:00
Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions.

PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...

> Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.
by zzzeek | 2026-01-24 15:40:04+00:00
is it just me or would "Microsoft refuses to comply with a legal search warrant" be an actual, surprising news story? like of course MSFT is going to hand over to authorities whatever they ask for if there's a warrant, imagine if they didn't (hint: not good for business. their customers are governments and large institutions, a reputation for "going rogue" would damage their brand quite a bit)
by andsoitis | 2026-01-24 15:40:10+00:00
The article misses the purpose of a measure like market cap. It isn't to state the value of a single tradable unit like a share (which the article seems to think it is meant to represent), but rather it answers the question "How big is the company economically" and helps compare companies in ways that price alone can't.

Market cap correlates with risk profiles. It informs index construction (like the S&P 500). It is often used by investors in capital allocation and portfolio weighting decisions. It is a key input in valuation (but not the valuation itself). It is used in M&A and strategic decisions.

The way to think about it is:

stock price = cost of one slice

market cap = cost of the whole pizza
by yojo | 2026-01-24 15:40:23+00:00
The article resonates with me, but I think it misses some nuance when estimating in aggregate. My career has been primarily product engineering, let’s call it the top 2/3rds of the stack. I’ve been lead on multiple projects with the rough shape “we have this [conference/marketing event/partnership] on [date] and we want to ship [new feature].”

My job is to present an opinionated menu of functionality I believe we can have in place by that time. It should also include the potential scope cuts if things go wrong.

I agree that unknowns dominate the individual tasks, but when you bundle enough together the positive/negative surprises tend to balance out.

Without an idea of at least relative Eng costs of different features, it is impossible for leadership to correctly prioritize what we build and what we cut.

I cannot tell you with certainty that a given task will take N days, but I should be reasonably confident communicating what my team can accomplish in a quarter.
by neilwilson | 2026-01-24 15:40:40+00:00
It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.

The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-24 15:40:44+00:00
But "help" has to be what will actually help, otherwise it's not actually help. That is, help has to be what the receiver considers help, not what the giver considers help.

"Let me help you in the way I want to help, not in the way you actually need" is either short-sightedness or selfishness. But it's not actually helpful.
by jasonkester | 2026-01-24 15:41:54+00:00
Ah, mate. I sure wish you'd figured this out and told me about it 10 years ago. I fought with this exact same issue for years.

I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.

Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.

When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.

My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.

Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.

Thanks for the writeup!
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 15:42:06+00:00
> pointless

Full-disk encryption is the opposite of pointless, my dude! The notebook-thief cannot access my data! That is the entire point!

No, I cannot recover the data from an HDD or SSD that I don't possess. But neither can the thief. The thief cannot access the keys in my cloud. Isn't that the point?

If a thief steals a notebook that isn't encrypted at all, then they can go into the storage, even forensically, and extract all my data! Nobody needs a "key" or credentials to do that! That was the status quo for decades in personal computing--and even enterprise computing. I've had "friends" give me "decommissioned" computers that still had data on their HDD from some corporation. And it would've been readable if I had tried.

The thief may have stolen a valuable piece of kit, but now all she has is hardware. Not my data. Not to mention, if your key was in a cloud backup, isn't most of your important data in the cloud, as well? Hopefully the only thing you lost with your device are the OS system files, and your documents are safely synced??
by pickeledLobe | 2026-01-24 15:42:10+00:00
my friend is in Iran and close to an hour ago he was using a vpn to message me through telegram
however this vpn is not stable enough to connect calls and to even continue working apparently because he is back to being offline and unable to message me.
I think there are vpn services that work for some technical reason I am not educated about and I was hoping some of you could help. Do you happen to know how he even connected using a vpn? he was connected yesterday and we hung out for hours and got comfortable enough to schedule another game for today but things are going bad again.
by oraybey | 2026-01-24 15:42:18+00:00
I have been praising Cloudflare up and down over the past year. As a software programmer, I rarely want to care about DevOps bikeshedding to get my applications up and running.

So after having used GCP, AWS, and all the orchestration baggage that came with it, developing and testing user-facing apps with Miniflare, workerd, D1, and wrangler has been a breeze... until I discovered some of my D1 calls take 20 seconds to resolve on a table with 10 rows. Query takes sub-millisecond.

Status page looking good, all systems operational. Digging through issues, pulling my hair out. Then stumbled upon this post to discover there is indeed an issue, and it is acknowledged on Discord... Discord? Why?

Honestly, I've been the fool here. Discouraged every single soul I know from vendor lock-in, only to vendor lock-in myself because I really liked the product.

Cloudflare is in a great position to dominate the ecosystem. They understand our needs. However, feature creep, half-baked releases, and improper communication don't give me the confidence to continue using their services at scale.

Incident is marked as resolved... tracing outliers tell a different story. Guess it's time to move on. Can't claim you offer a reliable database at scale if a trivial lookup on a 10-row table resolves in 20 seconds.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-24 15:42:18+00:00
A lot of this is already known.

If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.

At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.

What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
by narmiouh | 2026-01-24 15:42:21+00:00
Painting a wall has no “if then else”. You dont need to test to see if the wall has been painted.

I guess a fair analogy would be if the home owner just said “Make my home great and easy to use” by Thanksgiving without too many details, and between now ans thanksgiving refines this vision continuously, like literally changing the color choice half way or after fully painting a wall… then its really hard to commit.

If a home owner has a very specific list of things with no on the job adjustments, then usually you can estimate(most home contract work)

All software requests are somewhere in between former and latter, most often leaning towards the former scenario.
by geist67 | 2026-01-24 15:42:52+00:00
While schizophrenia and other mind maladies are quite real, the voices in our heads are not artificial.

The greatest secret of our humanity, conspiracy of all conspiracies, is that we are not alone in our own minds.

There are long standing secret cultures (many not so secret), a secret governance, and a secret war upon us.

The “controlling majority” of Power, American Thought Control destroys the “scrupulous” among you, those who know this truth of Power.

You are tenants, employees, and debtors in your own lives. Through the Power of entangled consciousness, these own your humanity.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-24 15:43:01+00:00
> Portability was always a selling point of C++.

Judging by the lack of modern C++ in these crufty embedded compilers, maybe modern C++ is throwing too much good effort after bad. C++03 isn't going away, and it's not like these compilers always stuck to the standard anyway in terms of runtime type information, exceptions, and full template support.

Besides, I would argue that the selling point of C++ wasn't portability per se, but the fact that it was largely compatible with existing C codebases. It was embrace, extend, extinguish in language form.
by Hizonner | 2026-01-24 15:43:24+00:00
Actually, no, because you didn't intentionally accept the terms, and you had no reason to expect that your cat would jump on there in exactly that way.

On the other hand, if you take a laser and intentionally induce the cat to push the key, then you are bound.

> If licenses are valid in any way (the argument is they get you out of the copyright infringement caused by copying the software from disk to memory) then it's your job to go find the license to software you use and make sure you agree to it; the little popup is just a nice way to make your aware of the terms.

The way you set up the scenario, the user has no reason to even know that they're using this new version with this new license. An update has happened without their knowledge. So far as they know, they're running the old software under the old license.

You could make an equally good argument that whoever wrote the software installed software on the user's computer without the user's permission. If it's the user's fault that a cat might jump on the keyboard, why isn't it equally the software provider's fault?

... but the reality is that, taking your description at face value, nobody has done anything. The user had no expectation or intention of installing the software or accepting the new license, and the software provider had no expectation or intention of installing it without user permission, and they were both actually fairly reasonable in their expectations. Unfortunately shit happens.
by vardump | 2026-01-24 15:43:49+00:00
You needed at least 12 MB RAM to run Windows 95 smoothly. There were plenty of 8 MB systems that really really struggled. Even booting up was a swap fest.

I remember immediately upgrading to 12 MB. 8 MB was painful.

Not all 386 class systems could be upgraded to 12 MB or more.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 15:43:53+00:00
(1) What about it? (note that I don't manage websites with a large number of pages)

(2) It's easy to add if conditions that test $_GET, $_POST or $_REQUEST display different things depending on what was submitted

(3) Not often (but have in the past, and will probably have to soon in a personal project). What issue are you anticipating?
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 15:44:02+00:00
That's too funny. No, it really is me, but now that I re-read it I totally see how the kind of praise I reserve for maybe one thing on HN a year is the kind of praise that ChatGPT outputs all the time...

And hell, I even use three em-dashes! But maybe the fact that I typed them out using hyphens is the telltale sign this is actually human...
by SirMaster | 2026-01-24 15:44:35+00:00
AP is definitely the exception and would safely stop you. But also AP is gone from new Teslas now and the comma costs what ir costs to subscribe to Tesla’s driving features for just 1 year.

All EVs probably stop fairly quickly because they brake when you aren’t pressing the gas or cruising. But I don’t know any that keep steering for you when they disengage when you fail to maintain attention.
by promptfluid | 2026-01-24 15:44:48+00:00
There’s a lot of “agent OS” vaporware going around right now, so here are some concrete things this system actually does today:

1. Shadow deployment for mutations
The Modernizer proposes patches → runs them in shadow → validates → escalates.

2. Auto-heal + circuit breakers
If a provider or subsystem degrades, the substrate routes around it and logs the failure.

3. Telemetry for cognition
vision.dashboard treats learning and doctrine cycles the same way Kubernetes treats pods: health, last cycle, mutation phase, error rates, etc.

4. Offline learning cycles
“Dream cycles” are just background reflection runs that don’t block real tasks. They ingest hot memory, generate insights, and update doctrine.

5. Interop with real systems
There are adapters for SAP/Workday/Databricks/GitHub/Slack/etc. so it can operate in enterprise environments rather than toy web tasks.

6. No human-in-loop required for steady-state . It currently runs for hours with no operator involvement beyond observability.

You don’t get useful autonomous behavior by stacking models.
You get it by adding OS-level orchestration primitives.

If that hypothesis is wrong, happy to be corrected. If anyone here has worked on orchestration layers, schedulers, or observability infra, I’d actually love to hear what’s missing / redundant / dangerous in this approach.
by miduil | 2026-01-24 15:44:48+00:00
> The 10GB limit per project sounds small on paper but I’ve never come close to hitting it

The docker images don't have limits, there is a limit per layer - but they don't enforce that currently. IIRC I've distributed a 100GB image through their free tier (just had to make sure to keep the layer size small enough).

Update: Sources

https://docs.gitlab.com/user/storage_usage_quotas/
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/container-registry/-/issues/10...
by yelabbassi | 2026-01-24 15:44:53+00:00
I’ve been working on a research project exploring BCI decoding. I realized I lacked intuition for what 142 channels of motor cortex spikes actually “feel” like, so I built a tool to sonify them in real time.

Repo: https://github.com/yelabb/PhantomMusic

Built with WebAudio + WebSockets, real-time MIDI mapping. Data from motor cortex recordings (142 channels, 40Hz update) streamed from my other open source project PhantomLink: https://github.com/yelabb/PhantomLink
by andsoitis | 2026-01-24 15:45:10+00:00
> end not to see deeper research into topics like this

research into the nature of time?

I think there is quite a lot, but spans physics, cosmology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, and information theory.

There's not a single theory of time, but there are many overlapping research programs, each answering a different question about what time is, how it behaves, and how it is experienced.
Show HN: Share private Git repo activity without granting code access
by kevinbaur | 2026-01-24 15:45:13+00:00
I built GitPulse (https://www.gitpulse.dev) to visualize development velocity for private repositories.

It generates a password-protected dashboard showing your commit graph, shipping streaks, and project status (Active vs. Stable) using only metadata.

Useful if you need to prove a private project is alive (e.g. for acquisitions or clients) but don't want to leak your source code.
by VLM | 2026-01-24 15:45:19+00:00
The key business mistake is trying to have too large of a company or having the wrong organization structure.

Consider how a SCM like git or bitkeeper is more complicated than a wrapper for LXC. For some odd reason Docker has almost 100x as many employees as bitkeeper. They're just too big. It would be like trying to create a startup of "/bin/ls as a service" with at least 50 employees and 49 of them would not be able to generate enough revenue to break even much less turn into a billion dollar "LSaaS" tech unicorn. There's not enough meat for the pack. FreeBSD has jails and all of FreeBSD (not just jails, the whole thing) is about a third the size of Docker... hmm.

An alternative to having an appropriate sized company would be giving up on profit. There probably is no way to make "real" money doing what Docker is doing, not "real" in the context of 1500+ employees. It would be very real if they could get their current revenue with 20 employees, but ... That is not bad, that just means they're better off as an IRS 501(c)(3) approved charity rather than trying to become a startup unicorn. Large organizations like the Red Cross are a valuable and important addition to the community, despite not being a successful tech unicorn. They got a lot of money from In-Q-Tel so they're already kind of taxpayer funded (via CIA) so going outright charity wouldn't be a stretch.

A good business analogy for Docker would be the small day care my kids attended. They were based in a small church building which permanently limited the size of their state license. It doesn't matter if they hire 3 caregivers or 1500, they only have space for an 8 kid license and revenue will never exceed 8 kids. They can hire 1500 caregivers using VC funds but they'll never get more than 8 kids of revenue. They are not working in a field where they can scale to a billion dollars of revenue. There's nothing "wrong" about a daycare that rents a room of a church, employs a couple "early childhood education major" college grads right around minimum wage, and the kids have fun. Thats Docker. There is perhaps a bigger third problem that they probably sold themselves to investors as an unstoppable money printing machine. Whoops. Nobody makes that mistake with the local church daycare. To some extent lack of due diligence is the fault of the investors. We'd never have had docker without their ... selfless financial donation.
Show HN: Alien Abducto-rama: a FUN browser game I made with my kids
by threekindwords | 2026-01-24 15:45:27+00:00
I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic.

The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug into the source.

Since then we've added a UFO Shopping Mall between waves (spend UFO bucks on power-ups), bombs, laser turrets, a dodge roll called "warp juke," and a top 100 leaderboard. There's also in-game feedback where you can submit and upvote feature requests. Building all these little features has been a great excuse to put in reps with AI coding tools and try out new stuff like Gastown.

You'll need a desktop and keyboard to play. Try to beat my high score! Would love feedback on what to add or what's broken... we'll ship the best suggestions. Thanks and have fun!
by AffableSpatula | 2026-01-24 15:46:13+00:00
it's my repo - it's a fork of cc-mirror which is an established project for parallel claude installs. I wanted to take the least disruptive approach for the sake of using working code and not spelunking through bugs. Having said that - if you look through the latest commits you'll see how the patch works, it's pretty straightforward - you could do it by hand if you wanted.
by bdavbdav | 2026-01-24 15:47:00+00:00
I thought this was what happened. Clearly not :( That’s the idea with services like 1Password (which I suppose is ultimately doing the same thing) - you need both the key held on the device and the password.

I suppose this all falls apart when the PC unlock password is your MS account password, the MS account can reset the local password. In Mac OS / Linux, you reset the login password, you loose the keychain.
by mactavish88 | 2026-01-24 15:47:12+00:00
The only approach that genuinely works for software development is to treat it as a "bet". There are never any guarantees in software development.

1. Think about what product/system you want built.

2. Think about how much you're willing to invest to get it (time and money).

3. Cap your time and money spend based on (2).

4. Let the team start building and demo progress regularly to get a sense of whether they'll actually be able to deliver a good enough version of (1) within time/budget.

If it's not going well, kill the project (there needs to be some provision in the contract/agreement/etc. for this). If it's going well, keep it going.
by BoredomIsFun | 2026-01-24 15:47:32+00:00
> Judging by the lack of modern C++ in these crufty embedded compilers,

Being conservative with features and deliberately not implementing them are two different thing. Some embedded compilers go through certification, to be allowed to be used producing mission critical software. Chasing features is prohibitively expensive, for no obvious benefit. I'd bet in 2030s most embedded compiler would support C++ 14 or even 17. Good enough for me.