MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eleventyseven | 2026-01-28 23:15:33+00:00
Violating terms and conditions is not a CFAA violation, per the Supreme Court case Van Buren v US (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/03/supreme-court-cyber...) which narrowed to actual fraud and data theft.

"The Government’s interpretation of the statute would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” Barrett wrote. “If the ‘exceeds authorized access’ clause criminalizes every violation of a computer-use policy, then millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals."

adsbexchange is a user-generated content platform where you can submit decoded radio signals to a common database. Sending fake data to adsbexchange is as much a CFAA violation as posting hoaxes to Wikipedia or a social media platform.
by shimman | 2026-01-28 23:15:33+00:00
Industries don't, people do. One thing to keep in mind is that corporations have always worked with fascism, they will never resist but workers can. Sabotage takes many forms and one can just look at how Dutch resistance worked against the Nazis.

You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance

I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.
by mywittyname | 2026-01-28 23:15:35+00:00
This is the standard for all financials, they just don't normally call it out as such.

It just means that they are assuming a fixed exchange rate for currencies over a period of time (often a month, quarter, or year), rather than reporting foreign income/holdings in current market value dollars.

I'm not an accountant, but I did do dev work for exactly this to align Netsuite with internal dashboards for reporting.
by zahlman | 2026-01-28 23:16:05+00:00
And, in fact, an officer only needs to have a reasonable belief in the moment (considering "the totality of the circumstances" but only up to that point, and in the officer's own point of view) of an impending threat of that level of violence; that belief doesn't need to be correct, doesn't need to stand up to scrutiny in hindsight (or going frame by frame in a video) and doesn't require the gun to have already fired.
by pavlov | 2026-01-28 23:16:11+00:00
We’re closer to “doom” than in 1962 because Kennedy wasn’t a narcissist with Alzheimer and Khrushchev wasn’t an old KGB agent on a vengeance.

The leaders around the world now are the worst we’ve had since the 1930s. And now they have a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world at their whim.
by izacus | 2026-01-28 23:16:29+00:00
Rules of this site also ask for argumentation that goes beyond "someone sued so they must be right".

You made a claim of trademark infringement when in reality no such thing was actually proven. You just automatically assumed the big corp was right based on something that even the lawyers don't yet agree on. I'm sorry if me calling you out on your bullshit makes you angry to the point where you felt the need to sift through my posts for a personal attack.
by sunnyps | 2026-01-28 23:16:32+00:00
ChromeOS also does fractional scaling properly because Chrome does it properly. The scaling factor is propagated through the rendering stack so that content is rastered at the correct scale from the beginning instead of using an integer scaling factor and then downscaling later. And it takes subpixel rendering into account too, which affects things like what elements can be squashed into layers backed by GPU textures.

I think Android does it properly too because they have to handle an entire zoo of screen sizes and resolutions there. Although they don't have the issue of dealing with subpixel rendering.
by ColinWright | 2026-01-28 23:16:35+00:00
I honestly should sketch out the talk anyway. I haven't seen anyone else bring together the proof that sqrt(2) is irrational, and the Continued Fraction method of factoring.

Yeah, maybe I'll hack out a sketch tomorrow, show it to a few people, and get them to tell me what's missing so I can flesh it out.

I owe Chalkdust an article anyway.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-28 23:16:40+00:00
Last time, the hardware was barely capable of driving a 1080p display at a constant frame rate with more than one app open.

These days, phones are more powerful than the laptops they give to kids to study on.

Samsung DeX has existed for years and works as well as it has for ages. We don't need to wait on Google to make this work. At best, Google will make this type of tech available in software so you can Chromecast/Miracast/whatever it to your display when your cheap phone doesn't do DP-Alt mode.

What I think this is more likely to be about is ChromeOS being killed and Android taking its place. It's not secret that Google is working on that, this just seems to be someone dogfeeding the latest build of the desktop Android build.
by stevage | 2026-01-28 23:16:54+00:00
Heh, honestly I'm kind of touched that you went to that effort.

Obviously I was using hyperbole. But I can say for sure that my life as a developer and second-rate sysadmin improved when I adopted as policy that I would never ever write any Bash script. Not even for a supposed one-liner, since I could just write that in ZX and avoid any temptation to write (and badly maintain) a Bash script.

import { $ } from 'zx'
await $`echo my one liner`
by mifydev | 2026-01-28 23:18:32+00:00
Backend service is definitely way to go if you want to serve models for the user.

So Bash and Edit tools are a bit weird, Bash tool is essentially JS execution, and Edit tool automatically generates a script that performs the edits on the page. These tools are needed for the model to explore the page, whatever it does at the end it creates a separate script that will be applied on the page load.
by ElevenLathe | 2026-01-28 23:18:34+00:00
One of the unexpected benefits of everyone scrambling to show that they used AI to do their job is that the value of specs and design documents are dawning on people who previously scoffed at them as busywork. Previously, if I wanted to spend a day writing a detailed document containing a spec and discussion of tradeoffs and motivations, I'd have to hide it from my management. Now, I'm writing it for the AI so it's fine.
by Johanx64 | 2026-01-28 23:18:47+00:00
SSD1306 is just 1KByte for a second buffer, so even a rather low-end MCU likely can spare that. And you'd absolutely just draw normal lines if you use a display like that.

It's very easy to use it as a generic bitmap display, there's nothing awkward about packing 8pixels into 1 byte, and you can set the addressing mode (horizontal/vertial) to whatever you want, etc.
by foresto | 2026-01-28 23:19:01+00:00
Do any audio filters/plugins exist that are effective at disguising a voice in real time, such that it would be difficult to identify the speaker / match against samples of their unfiltered voice?

(Pitch shifting is easy and widely available, but also trivial to reverse, so it's not good enough.)

I'm mainly interested for anonymity in online gaming, but I could see it also being a helpful privacy measure in other situations.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-28 23:19:20+00:00
Usually the next step of this failed discourse is to explain that locals are so entitled that they don't want to do hard jobs for the minimum wage, due to decades of wage suppression done thanks to immigration.

In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).

The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"
by indubioprorubik | 2026-01-28 23:19:21+00:00
Tesla is stock is great. Not because its great. But because its a optin for people, who cant opt out on a system, that opted out on them. Its like the only "fast-forward technology-wise-and-break-things" button that still seems to work. You can vote in a loose cannon - and it still will refuse to break the ship.
by brady_bastian | 2026-01-28 23:19:32+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Brady. I’ve spent years watching data engineers burn out writing brittle parsers for nested JSON, only to have dashboards crash because an upstream API changed a field name.

I built Forge to solve this. It’s an autonomous data infrastructure platform that ingests raw, nested JSON and automatically generates production-ready dbt models.

The Problem Traditional ETL tools (Fivetran/Stitch) often dump raw JSON into a VARIANT or string column, leaving you to write complex parsing logic manually. This is expensive to query and hard to govern. If the schema changes, your SQL breaks.

What Forge Does Forge parses your JSON and compiles it into optimized, native tables for BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, and Redshift.

Deep Unnesting: It flattens arrays and objects 5+ levels deep into relational tables with proper keys.
AI Classification (Excalibur): We use a Graph Neural Network (GraphSAGE) to classify data patterns (e.g., identifying "customer" vs. "inventory" data) without the data leaving your environment.

Auto-Governance (Pridwen): It detects PII and automatically applies hashing or masking policies based on the classification.

Multi-Warehouse Support: One JSON source generates native SQL for all supported warehouses simultaneously.

How it works Under the hood, Forge generates a full dbt project. You get the exact SQL code it generates, complete with lineage and documentation. We focused heavily on transparency—no black boxes.

Where we're going We are currently working on Llamrei (Q2 2026), which will handle schema evolution by automatically normalizing legacy API versions into "golden schemas" to prevent breaking changes.

We have a free tier (no credit card required) that lets you run full jobs to test the output.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the generated SQL structure and our approach to using GNNs for schema inference.
by zahlman | 2026-01-28 23:19:33+00:00
> Is that really how it works in USA

Yes (as written by the person you're quoting; your rephrasing misses the point), and it most likely works that way in your country as well. Even if it's legal where you live to carry firearms in public, I would strongly encourage you to read up on how it works in your area before doing so. Especially if you can remotely imagine yourself ever doing anything that could possibly be grounds for an arrest, including for political protest purposes.
DashPane – A faster app switcher for macOS with fuzzy search
by jbetala7 | 2026-01-28 23:19:36+00:00
Hey HN,

I built DashPane because Cmd+Tab drives me crazy. Cycling through 15 windows to find the right one takes way too long.

DashPane lets you:

- Type a few letters to fuzzy-match any app/window (handles typos)
- Auto-assigned single-key hotkeys for your open apps/windows
- Edge sidebar — hover bottom corners to see all open apps/widnows

Average switch time goes from ~2.5s to ~0.8s.

Currently in waitlist phase at dashpane.pro — would love feedback on the concept and the demo video on the page.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-28 23:19:46+00:00
I think I’m old enough to have experienced this cycle so many times with so many businesses that I just feel kind of silly to hate on Apple or Microsoft or whoever. They’re all just maximizing profits as designed.

I think people find it easier to scowl at the villain du jour than to dig into the deep complex issue of when capitalism doesn’t work, when the government isn’t doing enough, and what we could do about it… or the feeling that we really can’t do much.
by mywittyname | 2026-01-28 23:19:54+00:00
> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble.

- Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched several successful AI products using the tech.

- Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in '97. They also had other NN-based systems for playing games.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 23:19:56+00:00
> It's baffling why you would run X11 today.

As I mentioned:

It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland.

> Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore.

Really? If true, I don't seem to run any of them. I've certainly not noticed anything I've been running over the past couple of decades suddenly stop working on X11. Given that QT, GTK, FTLK, and other cross-platform GUI toolkits support X11, these must be particularly special programs.

> Just as one example[, screensharing...]

Sure, it is a bit nicer to be able to control which windows which other programs can see. I've been watching the slow-moving, many-years-long shitstorm that has been "actually get screensharing that works the way ordinary people need it to". It's been quite a show.

Thing is, I do know that the X Access Control Extension was standardized in ~2006 and updated through 2009 with the aim to make additional fine-grained access control modules [0] easy. I don't know how long it would have taken to use what existed (or even write something new) and update the major Desktop Environments with tooling to manage it... but I suspect it would have taken far less than seventeen years.

> I noticed so many quality of life fixes...

I'm sure that were I 16, I'd believe that I cared very much about that. Now, -mumble decades later- the fanciest things I want are OpenGL and Vulkan support with performance at least on par with what you get from Windows, a window manager that lets me Alt+mouse-button to move or resize a window, functioning global hotkeys that I can command to run arbitrary programs (and that I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently), and functioning screen-sharing (that can I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently). And it's so, so silly for me to feel the need to mention anything other than Alt+mouse-button. You'd think that the rest would be "table stakes", but the Wayland development process has demonstrated that many folks disagree.

[0] Ones that could -for instance- prevent undesired keyloggers and screenshot tools
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-28 23:20:40+00:00
> Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications

Which is why I think there's very little threat to the various tech career paths from AI.

Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software. It's always been the most difficult and frustrating part of the process, and always will be. And that's just actually articulating the requirements, to say nothing of the process of even agreeing on the requirements in the first place to even start writing the spec.

If a business already cannot clearly define what they need to an internal dev team, with experts that can somewhat translate the messy business logic, then they have a total of zero hope to ever do the same but to an unthinking machine and expect any kind of reliable output.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-28 23:20:46+00:00
I really don’t understand this attitude. Of course it will. If enough people do it. This is how corporations change not through protest and we’re certainly not going to get any antimonopoly anything going on soon.

They make literally about 40% of their profit off of Apple services. Do you really think if people on mass stopped buying Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, an iCloud, they wouldn’t care?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/2025-marked-a-record-...

I mean the minute people started talking a general worker strike in Minneapolis all of a sudden all these companies freaked our and wrote a letter protesting about IVE’s behavior in Minneapolis.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-28 23:20:51+00:00
For me the best solution would be seperate environments with completely different UIs, but running on the same device (probably in a phone form factor)

Apple's in the best position to offer this because they have both Mobile and Desktop OS's. And their chips are already capable of having two OS's installed side-by-side with a strong security barrier (and also more than fast enough to run a full desktop OS). But alas they haven't attempted it yet.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-28 23:21:01+00:00
I feel like if I ever used an agentic AI that's how I'd need it to be done. Too many cases of AIs getting access to files that it shouldn't. But then then, how do I allow it to look things up online without sending all my code to some scammer that prompt injected on a tutorial? I don't think I'll ever trust it with anything proprietary or otherwise less than publicly available.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-28 23:21:02+00:00
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.

For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...

Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?

On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.

It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.

Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.

If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 23:21:21+00:00
I mean HN has around ~5 Million unique users

Most are from US or from a HN user: population, well technically switzerland iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450094)
But I don't know, I feel like there are definitely times where people create two accounts on HN or more or lose access of previous or want better names (I am thinking of creating a new account on HN myself) so assume half to go through ~2.5 million users

Over the span of one decade+ year though, a lot of people completely leave the forum and so I would consider frequent users to be around ~ 1 million

Then the people who are actually active a lot of days or are weekly active or monthly active and tonight's the night (dexter reference) that they open it,I would assume ~500k users

I would consider these ~500k impressions to be an average estimate on a really really impactful HN post on front page & they all might come through say ~24 hours.

I am being more generous and assuming 500k HN impressions on 3-6 hours timeframe then technically the server just has to handle like ~46 users/sec or ~23 users/sec

But even on a really high estimate we assume ~500 users/sec

But I have seen some benchmarks of websites/frameworks/languages which are able to handle 5k-10k requests as a really low to decent estimate depending on the task

I do feel like its something that I can architect ~500 users/sec on some hetzner box most likely at max for ~30-40 usd/month or using their smallest plan with cloudflare tunnels for around I guess ~2.99 euros or 3 euros per month

I feel like its definitely possible to survive the "HN wall of death" but any of my websites haven't gone and hit this wall but if anyone of your projects or anyone can anecdotally tell me something it would be interesting & we can discuss it.

Also I have seen this one person who was able to survive this HN wall of death on a literal 780 mb alpine server using lighthttpd. Which if we are assuming racknerd or dedirock or something can get to around ~7$/yr or ~6.70-ish$/yr deal from black friday & you can get such deals on websites like lowendtalk for quite a low price.

Though these providers have comparatively low bandwidth if you actually want the cheapest somehow option and want to survive this HN wall of death. (these providfe around 1TB-2TB/month iirc)

Personally I feel like netcup (my preferred provider) / IONOS might be better options as they are still cheap while giving more lenient bandwidth or you can also find probably some really cheap high bandwidth black friday deals around the 7$/yr mark as well

I think I am getting off topic but I really like german hosting providers usually for the most part except the only thing I do hate a (little?) about them is that I have observed that they have a reputation of being exceptionally strict to the rules/some have the more ban first-ask-later approach which um might suck if your project is a little unconvential or quite frankly it can sometimes conflict with my morals as I always feel a little bit of hestitation around building around such system.
by amprisewinner | 2026-01-28 23:21:32+00:00
I've been getting similar letters in the mail from Ameriprise for over 15 years. I receive all my account-related emails, but because they can't _track me doing that_ they _assume_ there is some kind of problem.

I've contacted them about this multiple times and always get the same clueless & useless responses that ultimately end with "just disregard the notices" result.

What a waste of resources, at so many levels.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-28 23:21:44+00:00
> Basic operations are so much faster on Linux. Opening directories,

The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.

If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-28 23:21:53+00:00
>What's next - 30% of my pizza price goes to Apple because I ordered it on my phone?

I'm pretty sure Apple has discussed things exactly like this.

Their upper management really does tend to think that 30% of any monetary transaction on an Apple platform belongs to them. Too bad our government is too busy being ran by the billionaires to do anything about these abuses from billionaires.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-28 23:22:13+00:00
But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another. The difference is just too big. What you could say is that London is the place to try to raise money if you can't raise in SV. But you'll have to realize that your chances of success are dramatically lower that way to the point that you're going to end up a with a small fraction of the stock yourself after the inevitable dilution through follow up rounds because you couldn't raise a large enough round to begin.

VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 23:22:31+00:00
While I do agree that this was tragic sequence of events, then the whistle protesters, carrying a gun and then getting between an officer and the woman is what brought it to the current conclusion.

Go protest in some square, don't protest at ICE carrying out its work. Should this event somehow disqualify ICE, you'll see the Trump opposers hugging every criminal in the country. "Full stop" (as if rhetoric devices ever strenghtened an argument..)