MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Perseids | 2026-01-28 07:12:21+00:00
I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprecedented during the life-times of most of us) and talking about digital sovereignty has become mainstream in Europe. As a company trying to promote a product, I would stay as far away from that memory as possible, at least if you care about international markets.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787165
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-28 07:13:18+00:00
Here in Germany, the newer generation self checkout terminals are fine. I use them all the time. No issues. The first generation ones were terrible.

The issue with the first generation was that they were too strict with bag placement, weight sensors, etc. They were impossible to use without having to call a very grumpy shop attendant to unlock them. Sometimes multiple times. They were grumpy because all this was technically user error but when a largish percentage of users run into the same issues over and over again, it gets really annoying to deal with.

They fixed most of the glaring UX issues with the newer generation. No weight sensors. No prompts to put the item in the bag it is already in, etc. The new ones basically only need people to unlock things like alcohol purchases, but are otherwise fine. The first generation was over engineered and had way too many failure modes. They still have them in some super markets but they are getting replaced with better ones.

Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to hire staff for supermarkets. These are low wage jobs and most of these people can get better paying jobs. Self checkout creates some opportunities for shop lifting of course. But that is offset by the wage savings. They compensate with security, cameras, etc.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-28 07:13:24+00:00
Motion clarity yes, but it's zero latency in the least useful way possible, only true when you're rendering the top and bottom of the screen at different points in time. And scanout like that isn't unique to CRTs, many flat panels can do it too.

When rendering a full frame at once and then displaying it, a modern screen is not only able to be more consistent in timing, it might be able to display the full frame faster than a CRT. Let's say 60Hz, and the frame is rendered just in time to start displaying. A CRT will take 16 milliseconds to do scanout. But if you get a screen that supports Quick Frame Transport, it might send over the frame data in only 3 milliseconds, and have the entire thing displayed by millisecond 4.
by edwardglush | 2026-01-28 07:13:26+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm the technical founder of Zyro. I built this because I kept seeing my "Direct" traffic bucket inflate while my ad spend efficiency dropped. I suspected the traffic wasn't actually "Direct," but standard analytics tools (GA4) were stripping the referrer data from newer sources.

I spent the last year building a custom detection engine to "unmask" this traffic.

The Tech Stack & Implementation:

The Core Problem: Most AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) and "dark social" apps don't pass standard referrer headers.

The Solution: I built a TrafficSourceDetector that parses over 50 specific tracking parameters (like ttclid, gbraid, and specific AI signatures) that usually get sanitized by default configs.

Data Handling: One major headache was URL truncation with standard string columns. I migrated the schema to use NVARCHAR(MAX) in SQL Server to handle the massive, parameter-heavy URLs generated by modern ad platforms without data loss.

Optimization Logic: Instead of frequentist A/B testing (which wastes traffic on losers), I implemented a Multi-Armed Bandit (Thompson Sampling) algorithm. It updates in real-time to route traffic to the winning variant automatically.

Latency: To ensure the "flicker" doesn't hurt UX, I moved the geolocation logic (MaxMind) to a localized instance (avoiding external API calls) to keep decision latency near 0ms.

Scanning: The visual editor uses HtmlAgilityPack to parse the DOM and identify "testable" elements (headlines, buttons) automatically.

The tool is currently live. I'm looking for feedback on the detection logic—specifically if anyone else is seeing massive "Direct" traffic that turns out to be AI scrapers/users.

Happy to answer questions about the bandit algorithm or the SQL architecture!
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 07:13:47+00:00
If you mean to say that officials in Trump's administration are hypocritical, then say that. But many are accusing thousands of rank-and-file gun rights supporters of hypocrisy on a thin to nonexistent evidence base.

Here's how one gun rights group responded to some of the statements you quoted:

https://xcancel.com/gunrights/status/2016268309180907778#m

https://xcancel.com/gunrights/status/2015572391217467562#m
by accidentallfact | 2026-01-28 07:13:55+00:00
I mean that steampunk looks plausible, because it indeed seems to be purely a historical coincidence that electricity was developed at the same time. They are unrelated, one doesn't follow from the other in any way, so there is no obvious need to have both.

You pretty much need to have both chemistry and electricity, or neither.

Even Jules Verne understood the impossibility (or at least absurd impracticality) of a steam powered submarine, and made Nautilus electric.

It's unclear if internal combustion engines would be developed without electricity, and to what degree they would become practical.

I'm not sure about semiconductors, but the discovery does seem fairly random, and it seems plausible that electronics could just go on with vacuum tubes.

It seems perfectly plausible that nuclear wasn't noticed or practically developed, but, as I said, it just isn't an interesting setting.
by finaard | 2026-01-28 07:14:18+00:00
That's not really a new thing now, it just shows differently.

15 years ago I was working in an environment where they had lots of Indians as cheap labour - and the same thing will show up in any environment where you go for hiring a mass of cheap people while looking more at the cost than at qualifications: You pretty much need to trick them into reading stuff that are relevant.

I remember one case where one had a problem they couldn't solve, and couldn't give me enough info to help remotely. In the end I was sitting next to them, and made them read anything showing up on the screen out loud. Took a few tries where they were just closing dialog boxes without reading it, but eventually we had that under control enough that they were able to read the error messages to me, and then went "Oh, so _that's_ the problem?!"

Overall interacting with a LLM feels a lot like interacting with one of them back then, even down to the same excuses ("I didn't break anything in that commit, that test case was never passing") - and my expectation for what I can get out of it is pretty much the same as back then, and approach to interacting with it is pretty similar. It's pretty much an even cheaper unskilled developer, you just need to treat it as such. And you don't pair it up with other unskilled developers.
by card_zero | 2026-01-28 07:14:50+00:00
One question is, even if I unwisely stay up all night doing something (reading comics, say), how do we decide whether to blame the thing for tricking me, or whether it's my own responsibility? Another question is, do we even know our own minds and truly know when we're being unwise? I note that many binges that I would have beaten myself up over at the time were in retrospect great, and the worthy things I assumed I should have been doing instead were actually pointless. So this suggests to me that having an authority dictate to, e.g., comic publishers "you are tempting the public into unwise habits, desist" would be a bad thing because the authority doesn't actually know what's unwise much better than we do.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 07:15:16+00:00
Discussion on this site has little to do with Y Combinator. You see people railing against big tech billionaires every day here.

Bluesky is pretty close to being fellow travelers for the userbase here. If you do a comment search for "bluesky" you can see most comments are neutral or positive. HN might be a bit more genteel in how they discuss things, but there are many users here whose politics are pretty similar to what you find on bluesky.
by hyperbrainer | 2026-01-28 07:15:24+00:00
> "highly paramteric like fastners, gears, 3D printed boxes"

1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.

2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-28 07:16:14+00:00
At least BankId (digital ID thing in Sweden) and some of the Swedish banking apps don't care about if you are rooted on stock Android. I haven't tried custom ROMs in many years, but perhaps it is time for GrapheneOS these days.

Now, if you want to use your phone as a debit/credit card substitute that is different (Google Pay cares, and I don't use it thus).

Anyway, why should banking apps care? It is not like they care when I use the bank from Firefox on my Linux laptop.
Ask HN: Why can't Codex/Claude compile app and test that changes worked?
by aurareturn | 2026-01-28 07:17:04+00:00
Right now, both Codex and Claude makes changes based on your request but it's still you who needs to test those changes. Why can't Codex and Claude test them too?

For example, when making a change to the website, why can't Claude or Codex compile the changes, open a browser, test the changes to confirm that they worked?

It seems like the ability to verify is hugely important in autonomy. Yet, neither are doing it.
by tombert | 2026-01-28 07:17:29+00:00
> It was already possible - The Ladybird browser started with one person and then a team of experts in maintaining browsers joined in. It makes a lot of sense for them to try to build one from scratch; with / without AI.

Yes, by a person with prior browser-making experience and who was also building his own operating system. It's not that weird that people who know how to make browsers started making browsers.

Most people don't know how to make browsers, but doing so is still tempting. LLMs lower the barrier to entry tremendously.

To be clear, I'm not giving a value judgement to this; I'm not saying this is "good", just the why of it.
by epistasis | 2026-01-28 07:17:52+00:00
Most of these groups are centered around a neighborhood, or a school, or a church. For anything school related, people are very suspicious of outsiders trying to join. Churches and neighborhood groups might be more open, I suspect, but still gotta get somebody who lives there or goes to the church to vouch for you.

But the worst case for an outsider joining is not very bad; they get to see what's going on, but the entire point of the endeavor is to bring everything to light and make everything more visible. And if an outsider joins and starts providing bad information or is a bad actor, typical moderation efforts are pretty easy.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-28 07:18:02+00:00
> you cannot use unsigned drivers because the kernel can detect and activate the lockdown mode

You don't need to load a driver; you can just replace a binary that's going to be executed as root as part of system boot. This is something a hypothetical code signature verification would detect and prevent.

Failing kernel-level code signature enforcement, the next best step is to have a dm-verity volume as your root partition, with the dm-verity hashes in the initrd within the UKI, and that UKI being signed with secure boot.

This would theoretically allow you to recover from even root-level compromise by just rebooting the machine (assuming the secure boot signing keys weren't on said machine itself).
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-28 07:18:23+00:00
The insanity is how he enacted them. Like the idea that everyone should come to his office with print outs of the code they've written, or that everyone has to come into HQ to do some all-nighters. Just an absurd hunger-games attitude to his workforce, full of horrific coginative biases and discrimination against some of the workforce (e.g. against those with young children or those with disabilities who might be less able to commit to all-nighters).
by nobodywillobsrv | 2026-01-28 07:18:46+00:00
It's worth stating that addictive tech is addictive partly because it doesn't work very well.

So they build useful things and then make them pretty bad and less useful. If they were useful your interest or need would complete and you would move on.

Fundamentally I think it is important to say this. Addiction confounds some things in the space of designed systems
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2026-01-28 07:19:19+00:00
>Your city probably has a free speech zone where protesting is allowed, which is far out of the way so those protests won't have an audience, but that is not where protests occur when they occur.

What a weird thing to say. I don't know whether you live in some totalitarian regime or assume that you do, but I don't. However, I can see it as means of protesting, an we can find examples of it in history and current day, but most graffiti out there is not that at all.
by estearum | 2026-01-28 07:19:21+00:00
All of which are private institutions and therefore are valid expressions of free speech in and of themselves, even if you found it corrosive.

The idea the government needs to step in to tell HR departments what mixture of ideas they’re allowed to hire and reward is ridiculous. That is an actual affront to free speech.

If you don’t like woketard social dynamics, make your own HR department that lacks them, duh.
by pickleRick243 | 2026-01-28 07:19:42+00:00
The democratization is mostly in allowing people from outside the field with mediocre mathematical ideas to finally put them to paper and submit them to mediocre journals. And occasionally it might help a modern day Ramanujan with "exceptional mathematical insights" and a highly unconventional background to not have his work dismissed as that of a crank. Yes, most people with exceptional mathematical insights can typeset quite well. Democratization as I understand the term has quite a higher bar though.

Being against this is essentially to be in favor of a form of discrimination by proxy- if you can't typeset, then likely you can't do research either. And wouldn't it be really annoying if those people who can't research could magically typeset. It's a fundamentally undemocratic impulse: Since those who cannot typeset well are unlikely to produce quality mathematics, we can (and should) use this as an effective barrier to entry. If you replace ability to typeset with a number of other traits, they would be rather controversial positions.
by k310 | 2026-01-28 07:19:50+00:00
A web search turned up incidents of dildo protests at UTexas and in Oregon. Not Minnesota. [0] Could this actually be fiction?

One report I found was quite the opposite:

ICE Goons Tear Down Pro-Immigration Banner and Leave Sex Toy on Display [1]

I remain, a seeker of truth.

[0] (2021) https://hornet.com/stories/dildo-protest-dildos/

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 07:19:52+00:00
> look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest

Great, now other countries can import and share that domestic social unrest from the oversupply of frustrated reproductive age celibate males, all in the name of making GDP number go up. Lovely.

Surely we can't already predict this will lead to a rise in political far right extremism, and everyone will be shocked as if it will suddenly come out of nowhere, and then the local males will exclusively be to blame for it leading to further frustration, radicalisation and disenfranchisement. Surely this is not EXACTLY what's gonna happen.
by indigo945 | 2026-01-28 07:20:32+00:00
> Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.

That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.

For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-28 07:20:53+00:00
> But even if this is true for the vast majority of conservatives, surely it is not true for at least some "liberal minded" conservatives who do apply those values consistently? And even if they're only a small segment, with the way elections get decided isn't it still worthwhile to try and reach them by pointing out the failings in what they're ultimately supporting? (eg flagrant rejection of the 2nd amendment, previously with Breonna Taylor and now with Alex Pretti)

This is cope, they don't exist, it's just comforting to believe they do. And if they ever existed, they would never, ever vote for a Democrat.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-28 07:21:08+00:00
Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.
by fooker | 2026-01-28 07:21:17+00:00
> Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad

Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me.

> Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?

Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
by falkenstein | 2026-01-28 07:22:27+00:00
happy about this since I still daily an iphone se 2016 (same form factor as the 5s but 6s internals) and about to change it's tiny battery and maybe get yet another iphone og se just in case this one stops working.
abysmal battery life and tiny screen makes for the perfect dumb smartphone.
aside from google search, the phone is virtually ai free (most of the ai and majroity of the social apps do require at least ios16 o 17),
i do have to have an older android to use 'institutional' apps (meaning that there's a phone always at home with my banking and govt id apps).
sent from the tiny screen of the SE
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-28 07:23:19+00:00
The motivation was that we've run out of other things to scaremonger about so we'll come up with what Bruce Schneier calls movie-plot threats and go with those instead. The few explosives that are liquid are also incredibly impractical to work with in most cases except for perhaps perchloric acid which is nitrogen-free so won't be detected but then persuading that to detonate from a seat in economy class is going to be quite a feat.

The country I'm in abolished the liquids nonsense for domestic flights (which they can do because it's domestic travel) around a decade ago with the reasoning that it wasn't serving any purpose.
by Epa095 | 2026-01-28 07:23:47+00:00
FYI, as a center left from a European perspective that is a beautiful picture of just how right-leaning American politics is. The Democrats is such a big tent it contains pretty much the complete political spectrum in Europe, but for the actuall politics they have been doing, at least regarding economics (excluding identity politics) they are pretty solid right / center right from a European perspective.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-01-28 07:24:00+00:00
> The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy.
This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?

If it's that easy, why did we spend 20 years in Afghanistan only to suffer defeat by goat herders holding AK-47s?

A quick review of the last 100 years will educate you on the viability of asymmetric warfare.
by ithkuil | 2026-01-28 07:24:37+00:00
Deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways (and I'd add: engineering things so that you can better deal with things going sideways) was always the limiting factor.

Sure, writing code was slower before the agentic coder era, but as people coded their understanding of what they coded grew with them while coding and that allowed people to make informed decisions on what to do next and how to fix things when they go sideways.

By replacing the human who writes code with an agent that does it but faster doesn't necessarily improve the speed of the overall process by the same amount. Some of the time saved in producing code is simply shifted elsewhere: to reading, validating, and reconstructing the understanding that previously emerged naturally while writing. If the human still needs a sufficiently deep mental model of the system in order to make correct decisions, diagnose failures, and decide what to do next, then that understanding must be acquired one way or another. When it no longer forms incrementally during the act of coding, it has to be rebuilt after the fact, often under worse conditions and with less context. In that sense, the apparent speedup only holds if we ignore the cost of comprehension and review; once those are included, the comparison becomes less about raw code throughput and more about where and how understanding is generated in the process.

Many people understand this tradeoff in general terms. Just like we generally understand the concept of technical debt.

But just as it's very hard to deal with classic technical debt, it will be very hard to counterbalance the short term gains of AI producing endless streams of code
by Daub | 2026-01-28 07:24:51+00:00
> Natural Laws Within Us

We did some statistical research on the golden ratio and its use in art. It does indeed seem that artists gravitate away from regular geometry such as squares, thirds etc and towards recursive geometry such as the golden ratio and the root 2 rectangle. Most of our research was on old master paintings, so it might be argued that this was learned behavior, however one of our experiments seems to show that this preference is also present in those without any knowledge of such prescribed geometries.
by deknos | 2026-01-28 07:25:09+00:00
> Attestation, secure enclaves, and other technologies create ways to distribute software that otherwise wouldn't exist. How many things are in the cloud solely to enforce access control? What if they didn't have to be?

To be honest, mainly companies need that. personal users do not need that. And additionally companies are NOT restrained by governments not to exploit customers as much as possible.

So... i also see it as enslaving users. And tell me, for many private persons, where does this actually give them for PRIVATE persons, NOT companies a net benefit?
by fooker | 2026-01-28 07:25:09+00:00
I agree, not sure what the generalization was.

My point was that if you have a senior level big tech job in the US, it makes zero sense to move to Europe unless you have family there or want to make a significant financial sacrifice.

Obviously Europe wins for workers in general, and if I wanted to work in a car factory’s yes I’d do my best to work in Europe.