MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2026-01-02 08:30:47+00:00
> Clearly not true. In 2020, the SEC fined Andeavor for buying back its own stock while negotiating a potential merger. The duty is to affected shareholders and the integrity of the market, not the company.

No, no, you can still construct scenarios where it's legal. But yes, buybacks are especially heavily regulated. And yes, you have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. (But not to the 'integrity of the market'. There might be some duties and vague laws there, but it's not a fiduciary duty.)

In any case, what specifically are you referring to that's "clearly not true" in my comment? I constructed some examples that deliberately avoid a company (or an employee of said company) buying their own stock.

> Don't know how you got this from Matt Levine. Isn't his catchphrase "Everything is securities fraud"?

He has more than one catch phrase. The relevant one here is that insider trading in American law is about misappropriating information and fiduciary duty. Which he contrasts to French law amongst others, which is about fairness and a level playing field.

However, regulators in the US often want to spin the rules to be about fairness, but courts so far mostly disagree.

One example he brought up was: suppose you work for Bank X and you take the train in the morning to work. You overhear an employee of Bank Y talking about some deal on the phone (and that other guy doesn't notice you). You have no fiduciary duty to Bank Y.

By French law, you couldn't trade on the information you gained.

But by American (and UK law, where the example was from) your fiduciary duty to your employer, Bank X, might even compel you to use the information to their advantage. Especially if you were on company time when you overheard the conversation.
by moogly | 2026-01-02 08:31:02+00:00
Ford's only move seems to be to form "skunkworks" teams, like the one that produced the Mach-E (not a bad car), and they started another one recently. But if the output of that is a single model and not the entire future platform direction, it seems like the wrong approach to me and it's more highlighting a symptom of the majority of the company being rotten.
by thomashabets2 | 2026-01-02 08:31:19+00:00
Ok, if you're talking about just WIP commits that will be squashed and will never be part of mainline, then shrug.

For me that's a tiny proportion of commits. I'd rather avoid taking a whole finished feature branch and then spend more time cleaning up a sloppy commit history.

Sure, sometimes it's correct to squash, but for nontrivial changes I go with https://github.com/google/eng-practices/blob/master/review/d...
by mgraczyk | 2026-01-02 08:31:29+00:00
Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few seconds.

The claim is that the benefits fee does not go to the driver, but that is not possible in the only interpretation of the claim that matters.
When the law in California was passed that caused these fees to be added. Drivers immediately started receiving benefits required by the legislation. Those benefits are paid by the delivery company.
At the same time, the company added this fee. So the only question is, how much fee money is collected relative to the cost of the benefits?

From a very coarse BOTEC, it seems that the fees are probably not enough to cover the cost (for doordash), so in fact the fees do go "100%" to the drivers, in the sense that more than the amount collected by the fee is spent on the legally required benefits the the fee is based on
by max_lt | 2026-01-02 08:31:37+00:00
This is exactly where we see things heading. The trust model is shifting - code isn't written by humans you trust anymore, it's generated by models that can be poisoned, confused, or just pick the wrong library.

We're thinking about OpenWorkers less as "self-hosted Cloudflare Workers" and more as a containment layer for code you don't fully control. V8 isolates, CPU/memory limits, no filesystem access, network via controlled bindings only.

We're also exploring execution recording - capture all I/O so you can replay and audit exactly what the code did.

Production bug -> replay -> AI fix -> verified -> deployed.
by ozim | 2026-01-02 08:32:07+00:00
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool.

Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.

Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?

I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
by jacobtomlinson | 2026-01-02 08:32:10+00:00
It allows you to define common tasks such as linting, running tests, building docs, etc under an alias.

So you can run

uv run poe docs

Instead of

uv run sphinx-build -W -b dirhtml docs/source docs/build

Many languages have a task runners baked into their package manager, but many others don’t. In Ruby it’s roughly the equivalent of Rake.
by no-name-here | 2026-01-02 08:33:53+00:00
> the right to execute code on somebody’s device

Would that include serving text, image, or video ads?

> without their consent

If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS) would that count as consent? Or what would consent mean?

Also, if we implemented what you said, would you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away, or become paywalled?
by c16 | 2026-01-02 08:34:12+00:00
While we're talking about silly(?) iOS design decisions, the one I can't get over is allowing users to change lock screen timeout without pin/faceid via Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-lock. This should really be under Face ID & Passcode or Privacy & Security.

From a phone getting taken from your hand perspective, this is the first thing they will change.
by Const-me | 2026-01-02 08:34:30+00:00
> to know "what is clearly a bug" 100% of the time in projects you don't own

Owning a project is counter-productive for QA. If it’s your project, you know where to click and where to not click.

OTOH, you don’t need to know anything about a project to conclude that a crash with access violation, or hang with 100% CPU usage, are clearly bugs.
by Dansvidania | 2026-01-02 08:35:08+00:00
The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments below this article.

The biggest and scariest achievement of this enshittified internet is how divided people are, and how ready they are calling bullshit on very plausible claims.

I think the tech fields where companies rely on billions of tiny transactions are more susceptible to this kind of shadiness, but even in B2B saas we (grunt level engineers) were often asked to implement enshittification to either increase customer retention (EG: lets not give the users the API to exfiltrate their data and go to the competition, anyone?) or revenue or some other shit.

Do (some of) you really think companies would NOT do this, unless its not only illegal but also strictly enforced? I wish I were living in the same optimistic world as you guys.
by delusional | 2026-01-02 08:35:19+00:00
Hannah Arendt wrote the fantastic "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" about exactly this observation. That one of the principal enablers of the Holocaust seemed obsessed, not with the effects or outcomes of murdering Jews, but simply the expediency of doing it.

If you're interested in the subject I can very much recommend reading it. I can also recommend "The Ethic of Expediency" which deals with the same subject, but attempts to indict all technical writing instead. I personally changed my writing style after reading it to inject more humanity into it.
by neilv | 2026-01-02 08:35:30+00:00
All the time, I'm reading about companies brazenly doing illegal things.

We often see reports of state AGs taking actions against companies.

My guess is that bribes of state AG offices would be unusual. (Do you have better information about that?)

The questions on my mind would be how much resources an AG's office has to deal with corporate crime, and how a given crime would get triaged.
by moogly | 2026-01-02 08:35:53+00:00
> Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.

The whole EREV trend actually came from China (and if you look at reporting from Chinese car shows, outdoorsy/cross country stuff is all the rage right now). But the EREV sales seem to be falling off, maybe because the masses have overcome range anxiety (and the charging networks have been built out).

> EREV sales in China increased 218% year-over-year in 2021, 130% in 2022 and 70.9% in 2023. In other words, growth has been tapering off for the last few years.[1]

[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/782978/range-extender-popularity-...
by oliwarner | 2026-01-02 08:36:01+00:00
> my awesome father-in-law died of cancer 9mo before his grandson's birth

The death of the people I loved growing up is my biggest regret for leaving having children until my mid-thirties.

We have friends who got on with it early and their kids are great. The parents didn't have as much money or lived experience, but were fitter, more energetic, and now their kids are teenagers and they're able to focus on life. When our youngest is there, we'll be focussing on retirement.

It's impossible to know, I know, but every year deferred is another year less with a child that will probably love you, a love you will value above practically anything else.
Show HN: Oshn Prompt – Turn any text into optimized AI prompts (macOS)
by iliailinskii | 2026-01-02 08:37:09+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder who spent 6 years as a marketing analyst before switching to building products. After writing thousands of prompts for different AI models, I noticed I was doing the same optimizations over and over.

So I built Oshn Prompt — a macOS menu bar app that transforms any selected text into an optimized prompt with Cmd+Shift+I.

What it does:
- Auto-detects intent (text AI vs image AI vs video AI)
- Applies model-specific optimization (prompts for Claude ≠ prompts for Midjourney)
- Voice input via Whisper for hands-free prompting
- Works globally in any app

Technical stack: Swift/SwiftUI, runs locally, API calls only for the AI improvement step.

Free tier: 50 prompts. Pro: $9.99/mo for unlimited + voice + custom skills.

https://promt.oshn-ai.com

Would love feedback from the HN community, especially on the prompt engineering approach. What optimizations do you find yourself doing repeatedly?
by mikaelsouza | 2026-01-02 08:38:18+00:00
Thank you for sharing this.

I don't have the camera app in my app grid, but sometimes I see the green dot and have no idea what is triggering it. I even disabled the camera permission for all apps and started to turn it on from scratch only for apps I find necessary, but didn't know what was triggering it.

I am not why this logging thingy isn't enabled by default, but I am very happy it's possible to turn it on.
by larusso | 2026-01-02 08:39:20+00:00
“It’s not a bug it’s a feature!”

Just the first thing that popped into my head reading the reasoning. I think it makes a lot of sense to do it like this. Especially for a product which is cross platform that emulates / replaces other known products and on top has extensive configuration options. I also switched over from kitty a couple of weeks back and really like it.
by TFYS | 2026-01-02 08:40:55+00:00
There's plenty of propaganda on our side as well. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war. We would never know about it. The organizations in the west that handle geopolitical issues are not that different from those of Russia. They're not transparent or democratic, yet we rely on them for our information. They can probably steer us the way they want as easily as they do in Russia. The free media does not have access to the information it would need to truly inform the public.
by reconnecting | 2026-01-02 08:42:24+00:00
Ironically, I was just about to order a MacBook Pro 2019 today because I'm still running Catalina (10.15.7) and have no plans to update it.

Perhaps I will sound old-fashioned, but I've had macOS since the beginning of Mac OS X, roughly since 2000, and it has always brought a feeling of a stable system until these changes.

This feels quite unfair after 20 years of loyalty and buying apple products.
I started my graceful upgrade (downgrade) to Debian, but unfortunately it lacks a reliable email application.

Is there anyone else who's looking for a new home for the same reason?
by MrVitaliy | 2026-01-02 08:42:28+00:00
What's facinating to me is the lack of software comparison in comments. Lots of comments where people compare driving noise, material quality, price to Tesla and other brands. Sure it's important to some, but its like comparing apple vs android watch by how the leather strap feels on each device.

Anyone has experience with BYD over-the-air-updates? Do they release updates often? Are there any serious bugs like with Lucid air? How does the software compare to Tesla?
by bytesandbits | 2026-01-02 08:42:32+00:00
I could give you many reasons. I see where you went wrong, here are some to think about:

- next time don't just look at stock value and volume. Look at cashflow

- Consider that most investment volume comes from institutional investors in Wall Street, not in China. Even Chinese investment is routed through NY, Singapore, UK, etc, with the slight exception of Hong Kong.

- Consider geopolitics before investing too. Trump really went all-in in tariffs that basically geofence EV business to american brands.

- The hope for BYD is in EU and UK markets. EU has also been extremely harsh to welcoming BYD and protectionist of their (German) auto makers. This hasn't avoided BYD entering the market, but also has stopped them from shipping en masse. Might change.

- BYD is not a competitor to Tesla. BYD market is the low end market mostly. For example, what today in EU is Dacia (1st or 2nd best seller by number of units). Tesla on the other hand is purposely set up as a mid-high seller. It is too expensive for the cheap segment of the market (10-20k) and is well below luxury vehicles. Different market segment, also better margins in that segment.

- Auto industry is cyclical not defensive. In times of economic uncertainty like today, if you want a solid investment you should look at defensive not cyclical.

- Generally it is a bad idea for retailers to invest in Chinese HQed companies due to the complex geopolitics that surrounding the stock. For example, you have severe limitations in stock market products and they have tight regulation, unlike the US where you have a free-market.

- Consider the market of derivatives. Very different market of futures in China vs the US.

- Tesla is also a self-driving company and robotics company. It would be better compared to XPENG than to BYD.

- Tesla owns the EV market in North America. Period. This is the reality today.

- On top of all that yes the stock is hyped up. But you should know that and invest with that in mind. Being full blown rational in an irrational market will not work.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2026-01-02 08:43:23+00:00
I (male) was very lucky and this made me realise. Had kids lateish (30) but that is due to finding soneone to do that with took that long. Being shy etc. But now I feel in 40s I am too old to have a baby! I glad I didnt wait too long.

Or dont have kids at all which is fine and max on the freedom to do whatever life. I think I agree decide if you want kids then if so have them early as possible but under proviso of a good relationship and no major issues like drugs/alcohol/violence etc.
by anttiharju | 2026-01-02 08:43:45+00:00
re: on feeling like a janitor

I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.

The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.

People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.
by gyulai | 2026-01-02 08:43:52+00:00
So, the advantages of physical media are much touted these days, but all the actual physical media we have are yesteryear's technology, and each come with their own unique problems, plus there is the problem of waste. Why isn't a new physical format taking hold?

Something like Bandcamp-style downloads, which you put on a micro SD card. You put the card in a 3d-printable piece of plastic, resembling a cassette case. When you buy the download, the band sends you a printed piece of paper (the inlay for the cassette case thing) saying “limited edition run #1, Sequence Number 465/2000; thanks for your support”. If you want to get fancy, maybe record the transaction in some kind of ledger; perhaps put the buyer's name on the band webpage as a patron.

For the software, perhaps there could be something open source based on hardware like the anbernic rg355xxsp and similar devices (multipurpose, portable, hackable by design, …)

It would take very little to get it established: A critical mass of bands in some genre getting together, their fans getting on board, and things spreading from there.
by user34283 | 2026-01-02 08:44:22+00:00
Yes, zero latency typing in your local IDE on a laptop sounds like the dream.

In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.

Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.

Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.
by MrDresden | 2026-01-02 08:44:50+00:00
> Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company

I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).

We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.
by bangaladore | 2026-01-02 08:45:48+00:00
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant the WebKit guidelines were from the commenter, not from the apple page.

> or features that improve memory safety within other languages, within the alternative web browser engine at a minimum for all code that processes web content;

This can't be analyzed in any real way, so its just another way that Apple will restrict web engines and claim it was due to "not enough use of memory safety language features"
by johnfn | 2026-01-02 08:46:21+00:00
If it helps you understand the other side - very many people, and I consider myself one of them, went through a long part of life without realizing that "humans are social animals". In my case I was very unhappy for a very long time until I realized that socialization was the missing ingredient. Worse, I didn't even realize I was unhappy, and I had persuaded myself I was fine.

When you have this sort of a revelation, it's difficult to hold it in. You want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to grab every single person you can find who has a life remotely like yours years ago when you were unhappy, and save them, in the same way that you yourself needed saving.

I try not to do this any more because I understand it's annoying, and the message is unlikely to successfully transmit anyways. But I suspect this is the phenomenon you are observing.
by akimbostrawman | 2026-01-02 08:46:44+00:00
>why target Linux in all it's permutations with an unstable ABI when I can target the only stable Linux ABI -- Win32?

You simply do what Steam has successfully done for many years with there containerized Steam Linux runtime based on ubuntu or something like flatpaks.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
by nxtfari | 2026-01-02 08:47:08+00:00
I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.
by Klonoar | 2026-01-02 08:47:22+00:00
> Not sure why you're insinuating that I dislike apple products.

Your comment was written in a manner that echos the same anti-Apple bias that's frequently found on HN. If that's not you, then it's just a misread on my part.

> You can't really claim that other platforms have them beat here if there isn't data to support the claim.

I can, because by and large those are still anecdotal experiences posted online. The deeper integration of OS/hardware due to Apple controlling the entire chain has made sleep mostly a non-issue; it's typically a misbehaving application that might prevent it. There are valid reasons an app might need to do that, so it's not like macOS is going to prevent it - but if sleep's not working right on macOS, it's typically a user error.

This is different from Linux (and Windows, to a lesser degree) where you have a crazy amount of moving parts with drivers/hardware/resources/etc.
by michaelt | 2026-01-02 08:47:23+00:00
> I think people should have kids when they are ready. Make an assessment to the best of their ability when exactly that time has arrived.

While I kinda agree with this, I've known some folks whose standard for 'ready' was a lot higher than previous generations/other cultures.

For example, I could get a folding desk, move my home office into my bedroom, and put 3 kids in bunk beds in one room.

Or I could say I'm not ready to have kids as I only have a 2 bedroom home, whereas in a few years time I'll be able to afford a bigger place.
by pseudocomposer | 2026-01-02 08:47:34+00:00
Out of curiosity, what kind of physical shape are you in? I’m nearing 40 and have wanted kids my entire life, but similarly, haven’t found the right partner. If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself. But I’m also in excellent physical shape and feel no physically different than I did in my 20s (other than being stronger and more coordinated now).
by concinds | 2026-01-02 08:47:50+00:00
The biggest red flag is: "I don't care anymore, I hope they sue me", and saying they're about to contact reporters.

It's designed to boost credibility (this is gonna be proven legit, any day now! skeptics will look dumb!), but then why hasn't he gone to them already? Texting a Signal number takes a second. Why would he take additional legal and financial risk for fake internet points on a minor subreddit known for its fanfic?