February 22, 2026
Wall Street meets layoff doomscrolling
Show HN: Warn Firehose – Every US layoff notice in one searchable database
Red-alert layoff tracker launches… and instantly gets roasted by data nerds and doomsday watchers
TLDR: A new site promises one-stop tracking of every major US layoff notice, turning legally required warnings into a live layoff scoreboard for investors and workers alike. But commenters are split between calling it a powerful early-warning tool and dragging it for broken charts, missing layoffs, and all the ways companies dodge the system.
A new site called WARN Firehose just dropped, promising to track every big layoff notice in the US in one place — but the real show is in the comments. Some users are hyped, calling it “quant fund gold” because companies are legally required to file these warnings 60 days before mass layoffs, meaning hedge funds and Wall Street can see the pain coming before the headlines do. Others are already side-eyeing the whole thing, poking holes in the charts and calling out broken pages, wrong-looking numbers, and mystery future dates that make the data look more horror movie than hard science.
Then the conversation turns darkly funny. One commenter points out that this won’t even catch the quiet creep of AI job loss, because those roles don’t get cut — they just stop being posted. Another user searches their giant employer and can’t find the layoffs they know happened, sparking a whole thread on how companies can dodge these warnings through loopholes like staying under certain employee counts or structuring cuts just right. The vibe: half the crowd treating it as a powerful early-warning system for the job apocalypse, the other half calling it a glitchy crystal ball that’s missing half the ghosts. And everyone, of course, is morbidly refreshing.
Key Points
- •WARN Firehose aggregates U.S. WARN Act layoff notices from all 50 states into a single, normalized, searchable database.
- •The dataset contains over 109,000 layoff notices affecting more than 12.9 million workers, with records dating back to 1998.
- •Data is updated daily through automated scraping pipelines that collect notices from varied state formats and agencies.
- •Users can access data via interactive visualizations, bulk exports (CSV, JSON, Parquet, JSON-LD), and a full REST API with filtering, pagination, and sorting.
- •The platform targets journalists, investors, academics, and regional planners, offering free and paid plans with instant platform and API access.