MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2026-02-03 16:28:47+00:00
1. More irrelevant stuff. A kernel level vulnerability can nullify all sorts of good faith security design.

2. I could sue you today for, well, pretty much anything. I don’t have a good case but I can file that lawsuit right now. Would you rather take my settlement offer of $50 or pay a lawyer to go to trial and potentially spend the next months/years of your life in court? You can’t make a blanket statement to say that every company that decides to settle has something to hide, or, similarly, that everyone who exercises their 4th amendment rights has something to hide. I will also point out that companies that make lots of money are huge lawsuit targets, e.g., patent trolls sue large corporations all the time.

Don’t forget we are here talking about a fully optional feature that isn’t even turned on by default. I’m not telling you to love Windows Recall, turn it off or switch to Linux if you don’t love it. My only point is that it’s gotten a lot of incorrect news and social media coverage that is factually untrue and designed to get clicks and reinforce feelings.
by zachperkitny | 2026-02-03 16:29:13+00:00
Hello!

I wanted to share my recent project: Tadpole. It is a custom DSL built on top of KDL specifically for web scraping and browser automation. I wanted there to be a standardized way of writing scrapers and reusing existing scraper logic. This was my solution.

Why?

Abstraction: Simulating realistic human behavior (bezier curves, easing) through high-level composed actions.
Zero Config: Import and share scraper modules directly via Git, bypass NPM/Registry overhead.
Reusability: Actions and evaluators can be composed through slots to create more complex workflows.

Example

This is a fully running example, @tadpole/cli is published on npm:

tadpole run redfin.kdl --input '{"text": "Seattle, WA"}' --auto --output output.json

import "modules/redfin/mod.kdl" repo="github.com/tadpolehq/community"

main {
new_page {
redfin.search text="=text"
wait_until
redfin.extract_from_card extract_to="addresses" {
address {
redfin.extract_address_from_card
}
}
}
}

Roadmap?
Planned for 0.2.0

Control Flow: Add maybe (effectively try/catch) and loop (while {}, do {})
DOMPick: Used to select elements by index
DOMFilter: Used to filter elements using evaluators
More Evaluators: Type casting, regex, exists
Root Slots: Support for top level dynamic placeholders
Error Reporting: More robust error reporting
Logging: More consistent logging from actions and add log action to global registry

0.3.0

Piping: Allowing different files to chain input/output.
Outputs: Complex output sinks to databases, s3, kafka, etc.
DAGs: Use directed acylic graphs to create complex crawling scenarios and parallel compute.

Github Repository: https://github.com/tadpolehq/tadpole

I've also created a community repository for sharing scraper logic:
https://github.com/tadpolehq/community

Feedback would be greatly appreciated!
by palata | 2026-02-03 16:30:06+00:00
I don't think it's backwards; it's not incompatible with what you said.

> It is just nice to know that all the tools you need for a system are there and work together.

It is indeed! Just like everybody uses WhatsApp for a reason. But because everybody uses WhatsApp, it is very difficult to get traction with an alternative. That's the lock-in part.

It is easier for developers to only care about systemd. It's often worse: many times I have seen projects that only work with Ubuntu. Of course I understand how it was easier for the developers of those projects to not learn how to "be nice" and "do it right". That does not mean I should be happy about it.

> If you want it differently then you have to do it yourself.

Or I should support alternatives, which I do. I am not saying you are not allowed to use systemd, I am just explaining why I support alternatives. Even though systemd works.
by scratchyone | 2026-02-03 16:30:36+00:00
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits

What are you referring to as "it" here? When OP mentioned getting a gun from "off the street", that's referring to obtaining one illegally, without a provenance chain or any permitting.

If you want to shoot a CEO, its far easier to buy an untraceable gun on the streets (or obtain a non-serialized 80% lower receiver that you drill yourself) rather than an unreliable fully 3D-printed gun.
by billfor | 2026-02-03 16:30:40+00:00
Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.

btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
by anthk | 2026-02-03 16:30:45+00:00
My ~/yt-dlp.conf:

#inicio de fichero
--format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
#fin de fichero

My ~/.config/mpv/config

#inicio

ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
ao=sndio
vo=gpu,xv
audio-pitch-correction=no
quiet=yes
pause=no
profile=fast
vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
#demuxer-cache-wait=yes
#demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB
#fin

Usage: mpv $YOUTUBE_URL

Upgrade ASAP.
by simonw | 2026-02-03 16:30:47+00:00
You can run libraries like Pandas in WebAssembly in Pyodide - in fact Pandas works already. Here's a demo I built with it a while ago: https://tools.simonwillison.net/pyodide-bar-chart

It's not too hard to compile a C extension for Python to a WebAssembly and bundle that in a .so file in a wheel. I did an experiment with that the other day: https://github.com/simonw/tiny-haversine?tab=readme-ov-file#...
by greenie_beans | 2026-02-03 16:30:59+00:00
my comment was based on what i heard directly from a literary agent in november (also an anecdote). as a debut, my book needs to be 15k words longer in order for it to be worth the publicists time. because it needs to sell for enough so they get their time investment. which means, short novels don't sell enough for it to be worth an agent's time.

unless i found the right indie press or self-publish or already had a big platform.
by mothballed | 2026-02-03 16:31:59+00:00
Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.

Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.

Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor
by dylan604 | 2026-02-03 16:32:03+00:00
I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?
by bikenaga | 2026-02-03 16:32:20+00:00
Abstract: "In light of continued foreign interference in the US presidential elections, where undisclosed digital voter suppression advertising has been deployed, this study addresses the questions of who is exposed to these ads and whether and how such exposure influences voter turnout. Using a sample that resembles the US voting-age population, the study directly measures each individual’s ad exposure through a user-level real-time ad tracking tool, which is merged with the same individual’s survey responses to identify voter suppression content and its targeting patterns. By further matching individual-level exposure to voter suppression ads with the same individual’s verified voter turnout records, the study estimates the effects of voter suppression on actual turnout. The study findings from the 2016 US Presidential Election reveal clear geo-racial targeting patterns in voter suppression: non-Whites residing in the racial minority counties of battleground states were exposed to substantially more voter suppression ads than their counterparts. Moreover, exposure to voter suppression ads was associated with decreases in voter turnout at the population level, albeit small. The sharpest declines were observed among non-Whites residing in minority counties of battleground states, suggesting that the intensified turnout suppression among the targeted segments of the electorate may have played a role in shaping turnout."
by tromp | 2026-02-03 16:32:50+00:00
A Rube Goldberg machine is one intentionally designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way, usually consisting of a series of simple unrelated devices.

Programs like Melo and w128 are the opposite, performing a hard task with the simplest means, using only a few highly inter-related parts.

Your proposed representation is exactly the kind of cheating, to get the results you want, that the article purposely avoids.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-03 16:33:00+00:00
I suspect the clue is in the "P". If developers didn't generally have a higher standard of Proof than non-developers, they'd soon be... non-developers.

> loved the fact that they have something “working” that they can show off to higher ups.

Ah. The higher it goes, the less it needs proof.

And the more it "forgets" those scare quotes.
by ahmadyan | 2026-02-03 16:33:08+00:00
good point, they are standards, by definition society forced vendors to behave and play nice together. LLMs are not standards yet, and it is just pure bliss that english works fine across different LLMs for now.
Some labs are trying to push their own format and stop it. Specially around reasoning traces, e.g. codex removing reasoning traces between calls and gemini requiring reasoning history. So don't take this for granted.
by jhallenworld | 2026-02-03 16:33:20+00:00
If the end product ends up marginally cheaper, the company will be able to sell more of it, and this will lead to more profit. And sure, when you ignore the cost of the pollution, this certainly benefits the consumer, by allowing them to afford more energy and energy-based products (i.e., just about everything).

But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-03 16:33:40+00:00
> I still haven't experienced a local model that fits on my 64GB MacBook Pro and can run a coding agent like Codex CLI or Claude code well enough to be useful

I've had mild success with GPT-OSS-120b (MXFP4, ends up taking ~66GB of VRAM for me with llama.cpp) and Codex.

I'm wondering if maybe one could crowdsource chat logs for GPT-OSS-120b running with Codex, then seed another post-training run to fine-tune the 20b variant with the good runs from 120b, if that'd make a big difference. Both models with the reasoning_effort set to high are actually quite good compared to other downloadable models, although the 120b is just about out of reach for 64GB so getting the 20b better for specific use cases seems like it'd be useful.
by rayiner | 2026-02-03 16:33:47+00:00
They picked lead because it was the cheapest additive, not because it was more profitable for the industry as a whole. Those two things aren’t the same. In the oil industry, the products are identical and companies compete only on price. If you use the $0.10 per gallon additive when everyone else is using the $0.05 per gallon additive, then your sales collapse because customers just cross the street to save $0.05 per gallon. But if every company switches to the $0.05 gallon additive, that doesn’t mean the companies pocket the extra $0.05 per gallon. Most of that goes to the consumer, because, again, consumers can just cross the street to get the better price.

It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.
by epistasis | 2026-02-03 16:34:00+00:00
In the US, natural gas is extremely cheap, far cheaper than in the EU, and it will remain that way as long as we are still extracting oil via fracking.

Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.

But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.

I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!

Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?
by tcaxle | 2026-02-03 16:34:09+00:00
My physical calculator has something that no soft-calculator will ever have: tactile buttons and years' of muscle memory. Sure, I could put in the time to learn a soft calculator but the clunkiness of using the UI of something like Desmos (especially on a touch-screen) vs the dedicated physical buttons on my Casio make it very unappealing.

It's a similar argument to the touch-screen vs. physical buttons debate in car dashboard design (but hopefully with fewer fatalities): A button I can feel (and that never gets moved around the interface overnight due to some cargo-culting UX dev) wins every time.
by ronsor | 2026-02-03 16:34:34+00:00
Yes, that's how bootstrapping works. C is still easier to bootstrap than Rust, because it's simpler to implement and requires fewer steps. Of course, you trade off other features for that simplicity.

Bootstrapping Rust would involve the same steps, only at some point you've got to write a Rust compiler in assembly, or write a C compiler in assembly that can compile mrustc, which probably means writing another C compiler in C so you can easily add all the needed features.
by throwaway894345 | 2026-02-03 16:34:35+00:00
> Not every project needs Postgres, and that’s okay. Sometimes you just want a simple, reliable database that you can spin up quickly and build on, without worrying it’ll hit your wallet like an EC2.

Isn't the operational burden of SQLite the main selling point over Postgres (not one I subscribe to, but that's neither here nor there)? If it's managed, why do I care if it's SQLite or Postgres? If anything, I would expect Postgres to be the friendlier option, since you won't have to worry about eventually discovering that you actually need some feature even if you don't need it at the start of your project. Maybe there are projects that implement SQLite on top of Postgres so you can gradually migrate away from SQLite if you need Postgres features eventually?
by dylan604 | 2026-02-03 16:34:35+00:00
It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary
by moss98 | 2026-02-03 16:34:36+00:00
I’m currently reading “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, and one idea in particular really stayed with me: the way we direct our attention doesn’t just affect our productivity, it shapes our lives.

That thought led me back to Winifred Gallagher’s work on attention, and to a broader reflection on how focus, distraction, social media, and now AI are quietly influencing how we think, work, and experience meaning.
by stevesunderland | 2026-02-03 16:34:54+00:00
SEEKING WORK | USA | Remote

Developer + Designer

I'm a graphic designer and web developer who creates websites, brand identities and marketing material for a variety of companies including startups, agencies and non-profit organizations. In addition to my design skills, I am also a full-stack web developer.

DESIGN: websites, apps, UI/UX, mobile, logos, marketing material, trade show displays, packaging, photo retouching, book covers, etc.

DEVELOPMENT: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, Angular, Python, Django, SQL, PHP, Bootstrap, Foundation, REST APIs, Wordpress, Webpack, Jekyll, Hugo, etc.

PORTFOLIO: https://sunderland.studio

LINKEDIN: http://linkedin.com/in/stevesunderland

CONTACT: stevesunderland@gmail.com
by pjc50 | 2026-02-03 16:35:13+00:00
This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!

Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.

(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)

I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
by theamk | 2026-02-03 16:35:28+00:00
Except for the main pid1 process, systemd is one of the most customizeable things, certainly much more than old shell-based things. Everything is documented, can be disabled or replaced, and in such a way that the rest of the system can keep functioning, and the system upgrades don't mess it up.

A lot of people said you can edit /etc/init/ scripts, but this was pretty annoying, as the moment you upgrade the package, your package manager throws a conflict at you. It was certainly non-scaleable if you have many machines with automated upgrades. Compare to systemd overrides, where there is both drop-ins and wholesale service replacement, and system upgrades never mess with that.

Heck, even something as simple as "disable distribution-provided service" was a pain! I can't remember how many times I've added "exit 0" to /etc/default/something file, just because the sysvinit did not respect user decisions during upgrades or reinstalls! Compare to systemd, where I can "mask" the service even before it's installed.

And for deeper changes? Pre-systemd ubuntu had this this stupid "system is online" idea, and I once needed to customize this.. this was lots of undocumented reading and hacking on the script, and let's hope we did not need to upgrade. Or something like "my service X should start after NFS, but ssh should start before NFS" - this was pretty hard as well, and would cause upgrade conflicts.

Systemd has lots of problems, but the customizeability is one of their best parts. It is the only thing that I know which clearly delimits "user" vs "distribution", and gives all the power to user.
by LexiMax | 2026-02-03 16:35:35+00:00
> claim that only Zig and C++ have ever had a strategy to replace C

What I actually said was that it was the second language I have seen to do so at any appreciable scale. I never claimed to know all languages. There was also an implication that I think that even if a language claims to be a C replacement, its ability to do so might exceed its ambition.

That said I also hold no ill will towards Walter Bright, and in fact was hoping that someone like him would hop into the conversation to try and sell people on why their language was also worthy of consideration. I don't even mind the response to Walter's post, because they bring real-world Dlang experience to the table as a rebuttal.

On the other hand, I find it difficult to find value in your post except as a misguided and arguably bad-faith attempt to stir the pot.
by david_allison | 2026-02-03 16:35:35+00:00
That's not the way the world works. I'm not in it for the money.

In the past 12 months, I've made £65.79 from GitHub Sponsors (no fees, thank you GitHub/Microsoft) and $87.89 from Patreon (pre-fees, I'll probably see ~$50), and a split of the Open Collective [below]

AnkiDroid GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/ankidroid

and finances/sponsorship: https://opencollective.com/ankidroid (with immense help from dae).
by zbentley | 2026-02-03 16:35:51+00:00
Poor people already cannot afford most legal services, and (other than a very small percentage of cases brought on a volunteer or nearly-volunteer basis at the goodwill of law firms) very rarely file suit without legal fees sought in restitution. Of those that don’t, it’s understood that recouping legal fees from lower income clients is far from guaranteed due to bankruptcy risk.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-03 16:35:54+00:00
If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.
Show HN: TrueLedger – a local-first personal finance app with no cloud back end
by satyakommula | 2026-02-03 16:36:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built TrueLedger because I didn’t want a personal finance app that requires
a cloud account or bank credential access just to work.

TrueLedger is a local-first personal finance app.
All data stays on the user’s device and works fully offline.

Technical choices:
- SQLite for local storage across platforms
- SQLCipher (AES-256) for encrypted databases
- Web version runs entirely client-side using SQLite WASM
- Encrypted, deterministic JSON backups for portability without a server

Demo (runs fully client-side):
https://trueledger.satyakommula.com

Source:
https://github.com/satyakommula96/trueledger

Happy to answer questions about local-first design or encryption tradeoffs.
by dhosek | 2026-02-03 16:36:06+00:00
There are a handful of people I recognize, most because they’re people I knew from outside HN (and one because he has the same last name as someone I went to high school with and lives local to me and I always wonder if they’re related but I’ve never asked). But yes, the de-emphasis on user names is, I think, a good thing since it ends up being interacting with content rather than personality.
by markab21 | 2026-02-03 16:36:07+00:00
It's getting a lot easier to do this using sub-agents with tools in Claude. I have a fleet of Mastra agents (TypeScript). I use those agents inside my project as CLI tools to do repetitive tasks that gobble tokens such as scanning code, web search, library search, and even SourceGraph traversal.

Overall, it's allowed me to maintain more consistent workflows as I'm less dependent on Opus. Now that Mastra has introduced the concept of Workspaces, which allow for more agentic development, this approach has become even more powerful.