MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Guardian Protocol – Open-Source Ethereum Security Framework
by JacoGoGlobal | 2025-08-12 13:52:02+00:00
My team and I built Guardian Protocol, an open-source framework (currently under active development) for improving the security and operational controls of Ethereum smart contracts.

The problem: Many dApps still rely on single-key ownership and lack safeguards like multi-step approvals, transaction delays, recovery mechanisms, or on-chain incident handling. This leaves them vulnerable to compromised keys, rushed or unauthorized actions, and operational mistakes.

Our approach: Guardian Protocol has two main parts:

Guardian Library – modular primitives for smart contract security:

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Customizable workflows (multi-step approvals, time delays, meta-transactions)

Payment

Secure Access Layer – protective features for deployed contracts:

Ownership management with transfer safeguards

Recovery mechanisms

Dedicated roles for secure transaction broadcasting

On-chain incident response workflows

Examples / testbed: We’ve also built Sandblox, an open-source sandbox with example dApps deployed to testnet to showcase the protocol in action:

Simple Vault – deposit/withdraw flows with time-lock controls

Simple Token – ERC20 token with permissioned mint/burn workflows

Links: GitHub (Guardian Protocol): https://github.com/PracticalParticle/Guardian Sandblox: https://sandblox.app/ Website: https://particlecs.com/

Looking for feedback This is an ongoing project, so your suggestions now can directly shape where it goes. I’d appreciate input from both developers and security‑focused users on the on‑chain design:

Does the architecture make sense for your use cases?

Is the Secure Access Layer something you would integrate into your own contracts or workflows?

Would different primitives or workflows make it more relevant to your projects?

Any suggestions, critiques, or feature ideas are very welcome.

Jacob
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-08-12 13:52:09+00:00
Ok great. So probable outcomes: 1) Mortgage rates will go up by .5%, because these privatized corporations will no longer have the automatic full backing of the government. 2) Lending will become inequitable, because with profit motive, these institutions will operate more like a bank, with income and racial profiling, 3) Without the federal backstop, we open the doors to another 2008 financial crisis, 4) Housing affordability becomes a slave to the market, becoming cheap during economic booms, tight and expensive during downturns. And the fruits of the IPO will go primarily to tax cuts for billionaires. Not seeing a lot of upside here, folks. Seems like a war on the American people.
by gnfargbl | 2025-08-12 13:52:27+00:00
The OSA has several different parts. This ruling is not concerned with those parts of the OSA which deal with child protection; age verification isn't meaningfully mentioned anywhere in the judgment. Additionally, encyclopedias in the UK have routinely included factual sexual content for many decades -- just pick up an old Britannica for evidence -- without being characterised as pornographic. I don't think the OSA seeks to change that.

The main problem I have with the OSA is that age verification for explicitly pornographic sites exposes users to the very real risks that you mention. However, that's really nothing to do with this ruling, which is instead around the special duties that the OSA imposes on "categorised" services.
by abustamam | 2025-08-12 13:52:39+00:00
Thanks! I think I was (conceptually) missing the constraint/references part. Prior to that I had only worked with firebase and Mongo so I was just like "OK so I just put userID column on post table right?" and apparently no, not right, lol.

What's nice about prisma and hasura is that you can actually read the sql migration files generated, and you can set the logging to a level where you can read the sql being run when performing a query or mutation. I found that helpful to understand how sql is written, but since I'm not actually writing it I can't claim proficiency. But I can understand it.
Evaluating GPT5's reasoning ability using the Only Connect game show
by scrollaway | 2025-08-12 13:52:51+00:00
We evaluated OpenAI GPT5 lateral reasoning abilities against other models using an approach based on the notoriously difficult and highly-challenging british game show Only Connect, which challenges contestants' pattern-matching and trivia skills.

Insights: - GPT-5 does extremely well, but only marginally better than o3. - Model verbosity has little impact on accuracy and cleverness, except, interestingly, for the sequences round - "minimal" verbosity however causes accuracy to drop sharply.

We'll be publishing additional results in the coming days from our extended tests. We're looking at different types of evals (how do the models fare with a single item in a sequence vs. 2, 3, 4). We would also like to look at how the models behave in a team of 3, replicating the format of the game show.

We were unable to find evidence that the Only Connect games are in the training materials (which of course is likely to change now). Finally, we are looking at replicating the results of the connecting wall with the New York Times' Connections, however we suspect those to be in the training materials which would skew the results.
by blitzar | 2025-08-12 13:53:37+00:00
To pay $100mil to ai devs.

I have a theory that Meta execs was so focused on the Metaverse that the Ai team succeeded thanks to the lack of supervision and interference from above - there was probably a board discussion between 2019 and 2022 about firing them all and just focusing up the Metaverse stuff becuase they were dead weight on the core mission of colonizing the Metaverse.

Turns out the Ai team was the lifeboat to save the drowning Metaverse.
by mhitza | 2025-08-12 13:54:20+00:00
In my experience price isn't the only issue. One of the (smaller) coworking spaces I can have access to locally, closes at 6pm while a coffee shop at around 9-10PM and it's also open on weekends.

But then again, I find working in coffee shops too distracting, so work from home and randomly popping into a coworking space now and then.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 13:54:54+00:00
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.

Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 13:55:01+00:00
>This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.

Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-12 13:55:26+00:00
One day, someone just needs to build an accessibility system for WASM; and maybe (additionally) an overlay system telling the browser that pixels X1, Y1 to X2, Y2 are selectable text.

The moment we do that; we can theoretically implement any GUI framework we like, rendering to a <canvas> tag, without the current (serious) downsides. I’m looking forward towards more exploration of that direction. Then, we can mostly be free of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript defining how apps can be built. Those three tools that have long outlived their original intentions and have gone into complete duct-tape territory.

AI however, might actually solve this sooner than we realize. Apple already uses AI to copy-paste text from images. I’m sure there’s plenty of R&D going on right now on using AI to describe what is on screen. In theory, maybe we can legitimately AI our way out of needing accessibility concessions, and off we go. Build your website in Flutter; or in MAUI; or in some DIY port of SwiftUI; whatever you want.
by hcs | 2025-08-12 13:55:39+00:00
When I was recently researching Japanese videotex systems for similarities to CD Graphics, I ran across Captain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_(videotex)

It was somewhat unique in that (at least originally) it only transmitted bitmap graphics, rather than having a hybrid system with some characters in ROM and others dynamically loaded.

1981 publication with specs of the pilot system (PDF): https://hcs64.com/files/Harashima,%20Kumamoto,%20Kitamura%20...
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-12 13:55:54+00:00
I like making good docs, and i appreciate good docs when i find it. I think alot can be done to make docs easier to maintain and more useful.

When approaching a large cryptic codebase, the intention and assumptions are usually more important than the details. And these are really quite simple to write down.

- Goals a Problems

- Constraints

- Chosen high level approach

- Relevant files, functions and resources.

- Future concerns

There is the worry about maintenence, but i think the history itself may be valuable.

If a design change happens, or a new major thing is added on-top, make a new document and timestamp it.

Over time this becomes a repository and history of the design and current state of the system.

Its harder to read and understand than a properly updated doc that is reflective of the current state, but its orders of magnitude better than not making docs because its annoying.
by alex-moon | 2025-08-12 13:56:14+00:00
Lovely stuff. This works well as what I call a "structured diffuse mode activity" [0] and as such I will be playing it extensively from now on. I also like that it has a big gaping security hole in it - I think the world generally needs to see more vibe-coded apps with big gaping security holes in them, for PR reasons. (This is not a jab at OP btw! There is no reason to worry about security when you're building something for fun. Flash was famous for this as well.)

[0] https://ajmoon.com/posts/sdmas-why-you-should-be-playing-bro...
by sfn42 | 2025-08-12 13:56:23+00:00
When code gets out of hand and outgrows its initial design, I tend to refactor it to a new design that better accommodates the requirements.

The problem I usually encounter is that whoever was there before me didn't do this. They just made a solution then added quick fixes until it became a monster, and then left. Now I first have to figure out what the code actually does, try to distinguish what it needs to do from what it happens to actually do, usually write tests because the people who write the kind of code I end up fixing usually don't write good tests if any at all, then refactor the code to something more reasonable.

This can easily take me days or weeks whereas the person responsible could likely have cleaned it up much quicker because they don't first have to figure out requirements by reading messy code. Then again if they were competent and cared about the quality of their work they wouldn't have left me that mess in the first place so I tend to just write it off as incompetence, fix it and move on.
by sublimefire | 2025-08-12 13:57:12+00:00
It is possible to say the same about the low code solutions, e.g. a perfect UI can be used instead of writing a single line of code. The problem is that creating such a system is too resource intensive and counterproductive, and such a system does not exist. Similarly coding has always some problem that cannot be generalised due to the non existent pattern in training, and creating such a pattern beats the goal of having such a system.
by donatj | 2025-08-12 13:57:30+00:00
> Fast-forward a couple of decades and we’re building highly interactive, component-based, state-driven, design-system-heavy applications

Are we actually, in fact, if we're being honest?

I haven't seen anything like that. 99.9% of applications I interact with are just a series of simple CRUD operations. Sometimes they add unnecessary complexity and flashiness and of course there are some games and such, but when it comes to actual business apps they all just boil down to updating text records in a database at a human pace.

I am genuinely interested to hear examples of these "highly interactive" web apps others are building I keep hearing about but never seeing.
by zwaps | 2025-08-12 13:57:47+00:00
Scale changes the performance of LLMs.

Sometimes, we go so far as to say there is "emergence" of qualitative differences. But really, this is not necessary (and not proven to actually occur).

What is true is that the performance of LLMs at OOD tasks changes with scale.

So no, it's not the same as solving a math problem.
by thegrimmest | 2025-08-12 13:58:16+00:00
Why can't reasonable people disagree here? Surely if the utility of some features might outweigh the security concerns for some people. Making features opt-in instead of opt-out significantly changes their discoverability and usage metrics. On the whole, a translation system that has a feature to translate selected text seems hardly surprising. Similarly, using an online service to improve translation quality and reduce local resource usage also seems reasonable.

Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm, and it should be up to OS distributions to manage security postures such as allowlists for network access. Think something along the lines of "StarDict wants to connect to dict.cn. Allow/Deny?".
by estearum | 2025-08-12 13:58:45+00:00
There's a massive gulf between someone merely disagreeing with you and someone taking an active role in (what many people believe to be) deeply evil acts, especially while ignoring the consensus-building mechanism our society uses to determine how taxpayer money is spent (Congressional appropriations).

You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-12 13:58:50+00:00
Seems like a portfolio balanced by P/Es would do most of what you want.

If Tesla has a 200 P/E and MSFT has a 40 P/E, and the s&p has an average of 20, you'd have 1/10th the Tesla and 1/2 the MSFT shares as a traditional ETF.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 13:58:56+00:00
> I assume this means payments to retirees.

You assume wrong. From November 2024:

> According to the company, the plan’s liabilities to qualifying participants would be satisfied through a combination of lump sum distributions and an annuity purchased from an insurance company to cover existing obligations. Kodak, like many corporate pension plans, is in a funding surplus; it has significantly more assets than liabilities owed to plan beneficiaries and participants.

* https://www.ai-cio.com/news/kodak-considers-terminating-over...

> Kodak retirees would receive an annuity from an insurance company. Current employees, as well as former employees who haven’t yet reached retirement, would be given an option to either receive a lump sum of their balance, or an annuity once they retire. Plan participants wouldn’t see a change in the value of the benefits that have been promised to them, executives said.

> Kodak expects to put a new retirement plan in place for current employees if it terminates the pension. The company hasn’t yet determined whether it would provide a defined-benefit or defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k). The company would need to have a new plan designed and in place within about a year, executives said.

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-prepares-to-terminate-u-s...

The money in the pension fund, at least up to an amount needed to satisfy current liabilities, is the property of employees and Kodak has no right to it. It is the surplus that was taken back by Kodak last year, and future payments are the ones that are ceasing. Per WSJ above another retirement plan system will be setup for current employees.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 13:59:04+00:00
> Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.

The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.

Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using?
by yakattak | 2025-08-12 13:59:34+00:00
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about GitHub alternatives. I’m interested in looking into them as well but I was curious what everyone else’s experience was.

I’ve been looking at Codeberg but I’m really anxious to leave GitHub Actions behind and Codeberg’s replacement doesn’t seem ready yet.
by TheRealDunkirk | 2025-08-12 13:59:37+00:00
At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 13:59:46+00:00
I don't think that matters though. I'm more concerned about the broader metropolitan area where all the people with all those powers and all the people who are on their coattails reside. Which is currently Virginia and Maryland. Shrinking DC proper is basically a no-op on that front.

If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.

Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
by piva00 | 2025-08-12 14:00:05+00:00
In a video I watched recently there was a breakdown of how much a plumbing company had to spend on "marketing" (aka: Google ads placement, Facebook/Instagram) to attract customers and their per-click pay was about 60 USD, they were spending around 16-18k USD per month on online ads to keep the business afloat.

I had no idea that physical small businesses like that needed to spend so much on marketing just to be found.
by matt_s | 2025-08-12 14:00:34+00:00
The key thing no LLM or AI is capable of is innovation. The basis of all their inputs came from humans. If a company needs to pivot, good leader(s) can execute that and have tremendous impact, I wouldn't trust AI to come up with that strategy.

The reason AI/LLMs are talked about augmenting/replacing people who code is because LLMs are really good at well defined, structured text output and there is a large amount of training already done. Let the LLM/AI do the tedious, repetitive parts of the work and let the engineer spend their energy on harder problems.
by kevingadd | 2025-08-12 14:00:34+00:00
> In a judgment that spanned 2000 pages, Australian Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach, ruled that Apple had a substantial degree of market power. The Judge said both Apple and Google had breached Section 46 of Australia’s Competition Act. The companies had abused their market power to stifle the competition. But, it wasn't all in favor of Epic Games. Beach rejected the claim that Apple and Google had breached consumer law, he also said that the companies had not engaged in unconscionable conduct.

2000 pages! I can see why the case took something like 5 years.

It sounds like a mixed ruling so Epic didn't get everything they wanted here, but if they're able to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS in Australia that's a pretty big win by itself.
by ivape | 2025-08-12 14:01:04+00:00
Just begin telling yourself you should have never had to earn your parents love with external outcomes. The love should have been free (this realization can make you break down and cry and it’ll be a really good cry, trust me). Really internalize that. Don’t be pissed about it, but always remember that daily.

Some small therapy (a few sessions) can help to articulate it and get it out. Should be okay. Basically you have to realize you have a dysfunctional version of self love from all of it.

You wouldn’t treat your own kid like that so that’s all you need to know. I was just reading a /r/ptsd (which is something you might have) about a girl who was single in her 30s and feels like a failure to her parents for not being married and having kids. It’s utterly fucked parenting, I hear about it all the time.

Also, your parents invalidating this is a form of gas-lighting. You’re gonna have to love the fuck out of yourself somehow, every last bit of you. Every little hobby, every little post, every little attire, every little imperfection, every little achievement. Your family didn’t know how to love properly and now you don’t.

As you start this process, you will feel shame. It’s part of the process. What kind of adult judges their parents like this? A fucked up one (seriously). Not fucked up as in “bad”, fucked up as in the conveyor built in the factory dropped you and you are fucked up. That’s okay, and your ass is going to have to deal with it (the most adult thing you’ll ever do, and it’ll take awhile).

PTSD is real.

——-

Lastly, people in life are not stupid. Everyone may not know everything, but just about everyone’s subconscious knows the truth. You can prove it to yourself by simply observing your emotions, they didn’t come out of thin air. You didn’t just hang out in a vacuum in space and return to Earth feeling this way and that way about things. Shit happened, you and the universe know it. Your soul will not let you rest until you heal it.

Best of luck!
by llmthrowaway | 2025-08-12 14:01:24+00:00
Meant to say llama-swap instead of llama-server. llama-swap adds a gui and dynamic model switching on top of llama-server. Somewhat tricky to set up as it relies on a .yaml file that is poorly documented for using with docker but something like:

"GLM4-Air": env: - "CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1" proxy: "http://127.0.0.1:9999" cmd: > /app/llama-server --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 --flash-attn --ctx-size 32684 --jinja -ngl 20 --model /modelfiles/GLM-4.5-Air-UD-Q4_K_XL-00001-of-00002.gguf --port 9999

When run via docker this gets you a similar setup to ollama. The yaml file also needs TTL set if you want it to unload models after an idle period.

Ollama native models in their marketplace have these params supposedly set correctly to save you having to do this config but in practice this is hit or miss and often these change from day 0 of the release.
by oblio | 2025-08-12 14:01:59+00:00
You would want them to strictly train models and then I guess give them away to you so that you can run them locally?

If for free, won't happen, as I said, you'd just turn them into a dumb pipe.

If paid, yeah, maybe that could work as they offload the compute, but then they would need to figure out how to push ads to you and probably also sell your data
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-12 14:02:20+00:00
We’re already getting there. At one point we’re just ripping off the bandage.

On the upside, most people don’t build their own frameworks. Implement it right in Flutter, MAUI, etc. in such a scenario, and almost nobody will be harmed.

Also, for anyone who just says this is Java and Flash all over again - we’ve had plenty of technologies come full circle. WASM might be the one that gets us to full “web as app engine.” It already basically is, just badly.