MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jve | 2026-02-05 12:18:10+00:00
As I am someone from EU, please explain me what can you do with this SSN number?

I mean is it like a unique database row id which happens to be a non-changeable-lifetime password which is stored in multiple places in plain-text and you can use it to... "unlock some doors"? Make legally binding agreements remotely... ? Or what?

Or it is PII - privately identifying information which is more of a privacy issue here?
by latexr | 2026-02-05 12:18:59+00:00
> What we shared did not meet our standards and caused a lot of confusion and angst within the community.

Absolutely abhorrent communication. There was no “confusion”, they even admit later in the messaging they changed their plans:

> More importantly, Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users. This is a change from what we communicated in the email yesterday for the status of Adobe Animate, its time-frame, and availability.

Just lead with that, no need to throw sand in people’s eyes.
by otikik | 2026-02-05 12:19:01+00:00
I have provided an actual, concrete example of how the security completely backfired with llms - OpenClaw. The reason why I tried to provide something recent is because the usual excuse when providing examples more away in the past is "llms have improved a lot, they don't do that any more".

Yet now I provide an example of a very recent, big, very obvious, very prominent security explosion and now I am "grasping at the latest straw".

Ok man.
by gtowey | 2026-02-05 12:20:09+00:00
There's you problem, you care about accuracy!

It's time to accept the new way of working, just change your reality to match the copilot version and boom, you save time fixing its mistakes!

In fact, why have the meeting at all? Just prompt copilot to create notes based on a fictional conception of the meeting and you just saved everyone a whole hour!
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-05 12:20:13+00:00
I suppose there are two common scenarios roughly.

If I did something (like try and decompress an archive) and I run out of memory I want that process to be killed.

If my system/config is simply not up to scratch and the normal services are causing thrashing that needs to be addressed directly and OOM kill isn't intended to help I don't think.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-02-05 12:20:17+00:00
I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal window, log in and kill it. Right now it can take several minutes to get a Linux system back under control once a swapstorm starts.
by bojangleslover | 2026-02-05 12:20:33+00:00
Great comment. I agree it's a spectrum and those of us who are comfortable on (4) like yourself and probably us at Carolina Cloud [0] as well, (4) seems like a no brainer. But there's a long tail of semi-technical users who are more comfortable in 2-3 or even 1, which is what ultimately traps them into the ransomware-adjacent situation that is a lot of the modern public cloud. I would push back on "usage-based". Yes it is technically usage-based but the base fee also goes way up and there are also sometimes retainers on these services (ie minimum spend). So of course "usage-based" is not wrong but what it usually means is "more expensive and potentially far more expensive".

[0] https://carolinacloud.io, derek@
by dzonga | 2026-02-05 12:20:33+00:00
thank you & to people like you --

places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with

less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype

however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare

however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues
by massysett | 2026-02-05 12:21:00+00:00
Try making the term as a developer time limited, such as for a two-year period. The developer must actively renew the term. The point wouldn’t be to kick developers out after two years; there would be no limit on renewals and no requirement for approval. Rather, it makes the commitment a limited rather than unlimited one and forces the developer to periodically think: do I still want to do this? Then, passively taking no action causes the commitment to end, rather than the developer having to actively say “I don’t want to do this anymore.” This takes the shame out of it.
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-02-05 12:22:54+00:00
I'd gladly use (and maybe even pay for!) an open-source reimplementation of AWS RDS Aurora. All the bells and whistles with failover, clustering, volume-based snaps, cross-region replication, metrics etc.

As far as I know, nothing comes close to Aurora functionality. Even in vibecoding world. No, 'apt-get install postgres' is not enough.
by bojangleslover | 2026-02-05 12:23:56+00:00
The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is

1) Senior engineer starts on AWS

2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't)

3) New engineer comes in and panics

4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic

5) New engineer leaves

6) Second new engineer comes in and not only panics but
outright needs help

7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" who claims to help "reduce cost" but who actually gets a kickback from the extra spend they induce (usually 10% if I'm not mistaken)

Calling it it ransomware is obviously hyperbolic but there are definitely some parallels one could draw

On top of it all, AWS pricing is about to massively go up due to the RAM price increase. There's no way it can't since AWS is over half of Amazon's profit while only around 15% of its revenue.
Show HN: Rehearse – a pytest like testing library for voice agents
by djp2803 | 2026-02-05 12:24:12+00:00
I was manually calling my Twilio voice agent 100 times a day to verify every single micro change.

Tired of that, I built Rehearse.

I know there is a lot of YC money going into voice testing companies, but I wanted to build something open source and code first so Claude Code can spin up and manage test cases.

Example usage:

- call.listen() -> get audio or transcript of what the agent is saying

- call.say("I'd like to book a table for 2 at midnight") -> speak with the agent

- assertions on responses

It only supports Twilio (my use case) and ElevenLabs (transcription), with basic text and LLM based assertions for now.

It makes real calls and is BYOK.

I have a bunch of ideas in mind (not implemented yet, not sure if useful):

1. simulations like accents, background noise, languages, network issues, interruptions, etc

2. voice agent testing another voice agent

3. native audio based assertions

4. more connection options like Vapi, Retell, Websockets etc

GitHub https://github.com/thenullterminator/rehearse

PyPI https://pypi.org/project/rehearse/

Everything is a bit janky right now.

Appreciate all your feedback!
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-05 12:24:34+00:00
This 100%. I once got disciplined for insubordination for skip-leveling my "manager" and disregarding their instructions when she started telling people on the team to work on something totally non-critical, when the team had a demo in a few days that wasn't ready yet, with a client that was already unhappy, on an 8 million dollar contract.

I didn't hang around that place long.
by estearum | 2026-02-05 12:25:46+00:00
As an example, if you call your bank to report a lost credit card, and that you'd like it shipped to a different address than the one you registered with them, they'll ask you for the last 4 digits of your SSN.

So yeah, someone who knows (name, SSN) or especially (name, address, phone, SSN) can do a lot of harm.
by piva00 | 2026-02-05 12:25:59+00:00
To be honest, I'm more aligned with you than with the left at the moment. I feel there's been a knee-jerk reaction from a wave of massive change coming and the efforts are being directed to the wrong place.

For example: I don't agree that we should be curtailing the data center buildup, it bothers me because it's almost a stance of conservatism. While I do agree there's a need to closely monitor the situation with how AI develops, since in case it does pan out that it can, in a 5-10 years time frame, dislodge a big mass of labour without leaving room for those unemployed by a radical change it will create a lot of social strife.

I'm more in the camp of caution, and planning on how to address the scenarios that could be most damaging, while I also understand there's no stopping when the machinery gets going as it is, we can only work around it to adapt to a new reality.

> This is just fake morality disguised as "moral capitalism" broadly coming from the black and white ideology that dictates all businesses are bad and require push back.

But most businesses do tend to go towards "bad" (if we define it as showing no empathy towards their damages to society) because those are the incentives, being "good" has very little financial incentive, and financial incentives are absolute king in this era of hyperfinancialised capitalism. The incentives for creating good products only exist to manage finances, not out of a desire to create good products as a benefit in itself which as a consequence will sell well. If there's a way to increase revenue while minimising attrition of the customer base, even in detriment of a great product, it will be done, because the incentives are there for that.

I think we probably agree more than disagree, my belief is that we have wrong incentives if this is the system we will continue living under. I also believe we can continuously improve it, there's no end game in sight for the "perfect system", it's all experimentation and we ought to take into account the results of these experiments after 20-40 years, and be rational about what works and what doesn't. Whatever was the world in the 1980s when this era of hyperfinancialisation started is not the world in 2026, whomever was the winner of that change wants to keep the status quo because it benefits them while we do see fractures and issues arising from that.

There's a balance to be made, and it will always go against the interests of past winners who will try to pitch the world as it is as the best it can be, and that more of whatever was done to make them winners is the only way forward.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-05 12:26:36+00:00
It's used for all sorts of "prove you are who you are" situations. It's most commonly associated with applying for credit/loans, and taxes, but definitely not limited to those things. It's ridiculous that an immutable 8-digit number + name is used for authentication in the USA. It even says on the card "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND TAX PURPOSES - NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" but apparently we've all lost our minds and ignore that. It can be very difficult to go through business processes if you refuse to give your SSN - some healthcare providers will just refuse to serve you.

With it, people can take out loans in your name, get into your accounts, file fake tax returns and get tax refunds in your name, and generally act as if they're you. Things are getting a little better nowadays (with additional information required) but we still don't have a secure method of identification online / over the phone.
by danw1979 | 2026-02-05 12:26:54+00:00
I did not expect this to be a limiting factor in the mac mini RDMA setup ! -

> Thermal throttling: Thunderbolt 5 cables get hot under sustained 15GB/s load. After 10 minutes, bandwidth drops to 12GB/s. After 20 minutes, 10GB/s. Your 5.36 tokens/sec becomes 4.1 tokens/sec. Active cooling on cables helps but you’re fighting physics.

Thermal throttling of network cables is a new thing to me…
Show HN: I am Built a Shopify alternative but for small business
by codetoliattech | 2026-02-05 12:27:03+00:00
It is for small business , who don't know much about tech , that's why it has two option inbuilt order management and other is Whatsapp and email based checkout which most traditional business would trust,

and I have priced it for 19.99 dollars a year or 1.99 dollars a month.

Please you guys tell me your opinion on this
by maccam912 | 2026-02-05 12:27:22+00:00
It's often used as a way to verify identity. Historically it's been one of the more secret pieces of information about someone, so while name and birthday are not very secret, if someone wanted to steal an identity, it's generally the SSN that is hardest to figure out. As a result though, I think a lot of places treat it as "If you know the SSN, then you are who you say you are."
by laurentiurad | 2026-02-05 12:27:36+00:00
What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive.

It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.

Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.
by fsloth | 2026-02-05 12:28:50+00:00
IMHO I think the best any engineer can do in an org is to ask "what is the highest value problem to solve for the business" and "can I solve it".

"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.

That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.

There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.

But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.

So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.

A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.

Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.

So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-05 12:29:18+00:00
> To be honest I don't know why it's such an issue on Linux.

edit: I wrote all this before realizing I overlooked that you answered it yourself, so below is my very elaborate explanation of what you said:

> Windows presumably because it doesn't over-commit memory.

I'm no expert but from what I've gathered this ultimately boils down to how Linux went with fork for multiprocessing, vs Windows focused on threads.

With fork, you clone the process. Since it's a clone it gets a copy of all the memory of the parent process. To make fork faster and consume less physical memory, Linux went with copy-on-write for the process' memory. This avoids an expensive copy, and also avoids duplicating memory which will only be read.

The downside is that Linux has no idea how much of the memory shared with the clone that the clone or the parent will modify after the fork call. If the clone just does a small job and exits quickly, neither it or the parent will modify a lot of pages, thus most of them are never actually copied. The fastest work is the work you never perform, so this is indeed fast.

However, in some cases the clone is long-lived and thus a lot of memory might eventually end up getting copied. Well, Linux needs to back those copies with physical memory, and so if there's not enough physical memory around it has to evict something. While Linux scrambles to perform the copy, the process which triggers it has to wait.

AFAIK one can configure Linux to reserve physical memory for a worst-case scenario where it has to copy all the cloned memory. However in almost all normal cases, this grossly overestimates the required memory and thus leads to swapping when technically it is not needed.

On Windows this is very different. Instead of spawning a cloned process to do extra work, you spawn a thread. And all threads belonging to a process shares the same memory. Thus there is no need to clone memory, no need for the copy-on-write optimization, and thus Windows has much better knowledge about how much free physical memory it actually has to work with.

Of course a thread on Windows can still allocate a huge amount of memory and trigger swapping that way, but Windows will never suddenly be in a situation where it then also needs to scramble to copy some shared pages.
by MaxMonteil | 2026-02-05 12:29:22+00:00
I'm considering something similar and Lynx did seem interesting. Thanks to your article I think it is indeed a bit too early.

Another option looks like Tauri v2[0]. It also promises iOS, Android, and Web support (as well as a desktop application). The core is Rust which may or may not have the same adoption issues you saw for C++.

I haven't given it a try yet though but you may find it interesting.

[0] https://v2.tauri.app/
by adamcharnock | 2026-02-05 12:30:28+00:00
FYI, AWS offers free Egress when leaving them (because they were forced to be EU regulation, but they chose to offer it globally):

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

But. Don't leave it until the last minute to talk to them about this. They don't make it easy, and require some warning (think months, IIRC)
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-02-05 12:31:08+00:00
I think the reality is, if you're too smart than you're going to be easily disinterested in the things that you've been trained for during your entire childhood. Because, you're going to be bored of it eventually!

I remember an interview from current #1 chess grandmaster Magnus Carsen about why John Nunn never became World Champion because he is too intelligent:

> SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?

> Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.

> SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.

> Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too intelligent for that.

> SPIEGEL: How that?

> Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.

> SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?

> Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
by defrost | 2026-02-05 12:31:16+00:00
FWiW I come from a large extended family that racked up a lot of time on the pointy end of much of this; Desert Rats, Japanese PoW camps, jungle fighting, and a good deal of the post WWII ground work.

So I really do have to ask you, when you spoke of:

> The problem is the repeated use of Nazi analogies and grossly inflammatory language,

What, exactly, is up with the current US administration, Trump, Miller, clear throws to Blood Tribe language, veiled messages of racial purity and all that .. is it all "just a joke" ?

The early moves of both Stalin and Hitler, before either became the world villians we all know, was to extend their borders within their own countries so that they could sidestep "the law" of the land with their own personal squads of intesticial vagueness.

The administration is unquestionably veering unilateral and authoritarian and can no longer be trusted by allies.
by ncruces | 2026-02-05 12:31:35+00:00
You're correct that it's hard to have readers see something separate from writers. It actually depends on an experimental feature that might just go away at any time.

In journal mode (which is what the VFS uses), the sequence for a write transaction is: (1) xLock(shared); (2) xRead(change-counter); (3) xLock(reserved) ...

The read of the change counter with the shared lock complicates things, because at that point we don't know if there will be a write upgrade to reserved.

However, the experimental feature makes it like this: (1) xFileControl(experimental-pragma); (2) xLock(shared); (3) xRead(change-counter); (4) xLock(reserved) ...

So you can distinguish shared locks that will be immediately upgraded.

https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/c4ca8e7f4a887aa4
by TheDong | 2026-02-05 12:31:55+00:00
The 3 most common ISPs in the US are Comcast, Spectrum, and AT&T

Comcast blocks port 25: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/email-port-25-no-lo...

AT&T says "port 25 may be blocked from customers with dynamically-assigned Internet Protocol addresses", which is the majority of customers https://about.att.com/sites/broadband/network

What ISP are you using that isn't blocking port 25, and have you never had the misfortune of being stuck with comcast or AT&T as your only option?
by pjmlp | 2026-02-05 12:31:59+00:00
Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.

I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.

Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.