MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it true our phones listen to us?
by hamburgererror | 2025-10-03 08:59:55+00:00
I heard about this theory quite a lot, many people around me have reported similar stories: they talk aloud with someone (e.g. in a bar) about a topic with their phone nearby, then when they open their phone they will notice some ads about that specific topic. For instance, a friend reported they were talking about a singer and when he opened Instagram he add an ad for the upcoming concert of that singer although he didn't search for it. Someone even told me he mentioned a city in a conversation and when he opened Google Maps, the view was on that specific city.

I have never noticed this behavior myself, and I saw a video from a youtuber saying that these theories are strange since analysing voice on the device is complicated because first, until recently it was not so obvious, and second, it requires a good amount of computing power. Analysing the data on a server is even harder given the huge amount of users. Current progress in AI could make this work for sure, but still, I'm a bit skeptical. Going back to my examples, I guess the guy that got the ad for the concert was following the singer's account? And the other may have looked at google maps but doesn't remember it?

I'm not trying to say all these testimonies are wrong, but given the awareness in the population that phones are literal data sinkholes, sometimes it feels like we tend to believe in some far-fetched stories.

Did you experiment similar stories? I'd like to ear your opinions.

Thanks!
by sjw987 | 2025-10-03 08:59:57+00:00
To each their own.

I can see the purpose of a unified platform for Garmin, Suunto, Coros and Polar, because it's unlikely the brands will ever include one another in their own respective apps.

I just hate social media-isms like Kudos, leaderboards (my old run club leaderboard would see you doing upwards of 150km of weekly mileage to beat the likes of Phil Sessemann), and the shift in cyclist behaviour caused by segments on local (narrow) mixed-use routes.

It gives the vibe of tons of SV apps, where they don't consider what impact their real world linked apps can have. When it becomes time to face responsibility they go back to just being an app and how they incentivise people to behave is no longer their issue. Their greatest claim to fame of a feature turns many places more hostile.
by rjdj377dhabsn | 2025-10-03 09:00:40+00:00
Yeah the situation with banks is a whole other problem. Banks have basically become an arm of the government, but without the protection of due process.

Financial privacy is a pipe dream at this point, so I'd prefer basic bank accounts be run directly by the government. At least that way, they can more easily be held accountable for their actions.

Enforcement of the state's desires by private corporations leads to all kinds of evil.
by jraph | 2025-10-03 09:01:08+00:00
I didn't know about the not remembering or forming sounds in one's own head thing. For the image part:

> A 2022 study estimated the prevalence of aphantasia among the general population by screening undergraduate students and people from an online crowdsourcing marketplace through the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. They found that 0.8% of the population was unable to form visual mental images, and 3.9% of the population was either unable to form mental images or had dim or vague mental imagery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
by goldsteinq | 2025-10-03 09:01:42+00:00
I’m still not sure how do you even compromise a key without also compromising message history. The keys are stored on-device, along with associated history. If attacker has access to the keys, they also have access to all the previous messages stored on the same device. Unless you’re using auto-delete with short period on all your messaging, which I would think is not common, it would seem that you gain nothing by ratcheting.
by jazzprogramming | 2025-10-03 09:01:42+00:00
Speaking of unconventional languages for web development, there's also Wt, for people who are used to building things using C++.

I found it surprisingly good and considering how little I know on how to use HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, the usual web stack, it would have taken me months or more to learn how to build an equivalent site using the standard stack (and then have to maintain it).

Of course, if you're already familiar with web development, that's the best way I guess, but for those who aren't and don't have the necessary time to learn, there are probably alternatives using languages they're familiar with.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-10-03 09:01:44+00:00
I think #2 is a great tip. I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.

> the top HN frontpage articles

I don't even really understand what the HN feed is. I looked in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn't find an explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I have no idea...
by a-french-anon | 2025-10-03 09:01:49+00:00
What do you mean? "Old" (up to Sandy Bridge) Thinkpads had no issue with that, it just meant no keyboard backlighting (which is why the ThinkLight exists).

See the drainage holes at the bottom: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_IMG_...
by newscracker | 2025-10-03 09:02:25+00:00
Authenticate where? How does the authentication prove that the intended recipient is the one who has clicked on the link and should be able to view? What happens if the email is forwarded with the link? What should one do to forward the email to someone without this encryption?

Organizations may need ways to store, archive and manage received email content from others.

I don’t understand what problem this solves for organizations and how.

Microsoft Outlook 365 has a somewhat similar feature where the email is just a link to hosted content on its servers (this kind of functionality isn’t new or recent on other platforms). It doesn’t require any authentication by the recipient. IIRC, the sender can also decide on the expiry of the content.
by scott_w | 2025-10-03 09:03:08+00:00
Always useless? No. Useless most of the time? Yes. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re Luke Skywalker fighting the evil empire: your entire life already depends on the government and your fellow citizens working together in society. If that breaks down, or the government comes for you, there’s very little you can do to stop it. Multiple oppressive regimes, genocides, atrocities throughout history make my point for me.
by masklinn | 2025-10-03 09:03:35+00:00
Hell, since RAII is an opt-in type-level infectious (in the sense that if you have an RAII member in a struct the struct is RAII) mechanism you can require that RAII structs be initialised.

Given the compiler would already need to know that a local is of an RAII type in order to insert the drop, move, and copy glues it’s not exactly a big requirement.
by latexr | 2025-10-03 09:04:56+00:00
> If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.

That is verifiably false simply by looking at the state of social media. What they compete on is engagement bait, and the biggest of them all is rage.

By your logic, social media would be a panacea of quality posts by now, but it’s going to shit with fast-paced lies. Quick dopamine hits prevail, not “quality”.

> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.

So, another service dedicated to tracking you and mining your data. I can already smell the enshittifaction.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-03 09:06:52+00:00
You can also use just plain git and make sure the merge-commit has a useful message, while leaving the work-branch unsquashed and available to explore and bisect when necessary. The main branch looks as neat as when using squashes, and using something like git log --merges --first-parent all the small commits on the work-branches are hidden anyway. It looks just like when using atomic commits, but the extra details are still there when someone needs them.
by scott_w | 2025-10-03 09:07:12+00:00
Except they will? We require multiple proofs because there’s no central place a bank or company, etc, can go to prove that you live in the UK. The excessive requirements to provide multiple proofs to your employer of your right to work are explicitly because there’s no single proof of your right to work in the UK.

If you don’t have a passport, for instance, it’s much harder for a UK citizen to prove their right to work in the UK, for which your employer is liable if they get it wrong.

So please, tell me again how having a clear proof of identity tied to your right to work, and other things, will “not change anything.”
by arkensaw | 2025-10-03 09:07:12+00:00
English gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse.

I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
by baobun | 2025-10-03 09:07:13+00:00
https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversa...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802

Unless you have some nasty malware, probably ot the way you imagine.

If you have "AI" or some agent on it could totally listen in and use that when active, though.
by reincoder | 2025-10-03 09:07:50+00:00
I work for IPinfo and we provided the data for the project. I would really appreciate your insight on this.

We run ping and traceroute operations from 1,200 servers across the world to every (within reason) IP address out there. So, we have ping RTT and traceroute data history of these measurements.

Considering the physical network topology does not match the physical network topology, we would love to hear your thoughts.

Unrouted IP addresses do not appear on the internet traffic, and we have limited network data for them.

If you can share your traceroute output and obfuscate as much data as possible, we will be happy to investigate and share feedback.
by unlikelytomato | 2025-10-03 09:08:27+00:00
I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.
by alexdbird | 2025-10-03 09:08:30+00:00
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.

Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.

What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.

[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
by imiric | 2025-10-03 09:09:00+00:00
I think you're conflating warts with bugs.

The point of the article is that warts are subjective. What one person considers unwanted behavior, another might see it as a feature. They are a testament to the software's flexibility, and to maintainers caring about backwards compatibility, which, in turn, is a sign that users can rely on it for a long time.

Nobody wants bugs. But I agree with the article's premise.
by globular-toast | 2025-10-03 09:10:36+00:00
I never liked the term "end-to-end encryption". I guess we can now say it's fully meaningless.

The one thing I've learnt in security after many years is there are no shortcuts. If you don't understand the basics, you can't have security. Things like "end-to-end encryption" are just trying to avoid teaching people the basics by using nice words.

People understand if someone has a copy of their front door key then it's no longer secure and they need to change the locks. So it should be simple to understand encryption too. But most interfaces try to hide away the existence of keys, which is the most basic principle of all. If you don't know where your key is, how can you be secure?
by agnishom | 2025-10-03 09:10:37+00:00
> We already have exactly this right now, without digital ids, it's not even theoretical.

That is true. I was answering skrebbel's question about [how does having a digital ID system lead to perfect law enforcement?].

> Governments enforce plenty of paperwork checks & blocks today. I think a digital id strictly improves this scenario.

I hope you are right. Personally, I am not against Digital ID. My concern is, (a) how can we make sure that the infrastructure operating the digital ID is democratically controlled and not just owned by tech oligopolies; and (b) what security practices, social norms, and legal checks and balances shall we implement to prevent weaponization of this sort of infrastructure and violations of privacy?
by sfRattan | 2025-10-03 09:11:19+00:00
The people promoting "fair" source are specifically doing so to set up legal entities---companies---in order to run a business. That's fine, but it means users of their software should include the potential endgames of those legal entities in their assessment of the software's long term viability. That frame was implicit in my original point.

Any sufficiently large and complex piece of software (free, nonfree, or proprietary) will eventually need some kind of inter-human organization and governance. It won't matter for a small program with complexity that can be managed inside the head of one person but, again, "fair" source as advocated by its own proponents is about software of sufficient complexity to justify legal entities owning, stewarding, guiding, and managing it.

And, IIRC, Oracle and its lawyers, when trying to digest Sun Microsystems, choked on the GPL specifically at least twice: with both MySQL and OpenOffice. The GPL's well thought out protections enabled independent institutions to form around successor forks to those projects. Would the same have been possible with a relatively new, less well thought out "fair" source license? I don't think so.
by yvdriess | 2025-10-03 09:11:48+00:00
Totally agree. I have experienced 'ideal' circumstances of 33% taken/untaken branches where you will be hard pressed to make cmov perform better on real life workloads. Pass along other data inputs that do predict better and your cmov becomes a liability.

It's pretty hard to make modern compilers reliably emit cmovs in my experience. I had to resort to inline asm.
by lyu07282 | 2025-10-03 09:12:10+00:00
Putting the "interests of their nation and the citizens of that nation" first is the meaningless populist rhetoric part, that always appeals in a racist, bigoted populous (so every nation ever pretty much). That's like people suffer economically from neoliberalism, so you redirect to unrelated scapegoats, that's trivial, happened a million times.

Historically the fascist then, will use economic populist policy. That's like when Hitler built the Autobahn, you alleviate the economic grievances, support for the autocrat cements and then the real fascist stuff begins, that's when term limits go away and their enemies go in the oven.

But they don't do that economic populist part do they? These new right-wing movements in the west aren't doing this part of the equation.

Because we are now in the "interesting", novel case where the autocrats themselves are also just more neoliberals, the real power hasn't really moved an inch, like they are all paid by the same set of oligarchs, power is already fully consolidated. So I suspect nothing much will happen, it will just swing back to the center that shifted the overton window a bit more to the right in the meantime, the status quo didn't change so people are perpetually unhappy with no idea why.

> I feel politics is like this perpetual motion machine where you reach some absolute extreme on end

Yeah man! Totally! It's like when we move from Reaganomics in the 80s to Clintonomics in the 90s, from one "absolute extreme end" to the other! TF
by kashunstva | 2025-10-03 09:12:58+00:00
There is a science on talent development, famously popularized in part by Malcolm Gladwell in his over-simplification of the "10,000 hour rule," which he presented as "do something for 10K hours and you'll have mastered it." In fact K. Anders Ericsson maintained that the difference between the highest achieving musicians and the next tiers of achievement were associated with higher volume of _deliberate practice_. The differences were significant around 10,000 hrs. A later meta-analysis looked at the literature and found that practice accounted for far less of the measurable factors that explained the difference in outcomes - maybe just 12% or so.

I think the take-away from these discrepant studies of talent development is that it's a complex phenomenon likely involving genetic predisposition, other factors that influence neural "wiring", availability of opportunities to learn and develop (socioeconomic factors), and practice quality and volume.

If alignment is involved, it's alignment of these factors.

The caveat behind all of this is that the research is heavily focused on the factors that propel one into the high reaches of achievement. For example, Ericsson studied students in acclaimed conservatories. How these factors play out in how talent develops in "good-enough" practitioners is perhaps a different question.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-03 09:13:16+00:00
The issue isn't so much an identification system, or a digital identification system. It's just that we're waiting to see if there's going to be a non-smartphone implementation of this, and we're waiting to find out if this is handled locally or handed to a company like Palantir (which is likely given their cosying up to the UK government).

If this ID is only required at point of reference for job applications, as they are implying, why does it need to be operated via smartphone app? Can it not just be a card, or website? If it's purely digital, what happens in the case of a leak, cyber attack or internet outage?

If the ID grows in purpose in the future, does this mean we'll have to carry smartphones around with us at all times as if it were an extension of our body? You don't have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to take issue with the idea of carrying an internet connected microphone, camera and location tracked device around at all times.

They aren't revealing anything yet. I want the UK to stay a country where you don't need to reveal identification at a whim, as opposed to a country where you must always carry it at all times ready for questioning. I don't want to live in a state where a lack of smartphone is grounds for suspicion of criminal/illegal behaviour.
by 4k93n2 | 2025-10-03 09:13:55+00:00
i was using newsblur for a long while up until recently. supposedly they have a self hosted version but i never tried it.

the UI is an acquired taste i think, it has a very retro feel to it. i was mainly using it because it let you make nested folders of feeds

they also have an android app and its available in the fdroid store as well if you are into that kind of thing
by brap | 2025-10-03 09:14:03+00:00
I recently tried helping out my parents setup the latest Windows. I don’t wish that on my worst enemies. What a pile of garbage that OS has become. Xbox? Copilot? OneDrive? Why am I seeing ads? Bro leave me the fuck alone I just want a browser.

It’s so bad that at one point I considered having them try another OS, even though all they know is Windows.

Unfortunately everything is crap now. Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.

And don’t get me started on Linux distros, I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.

Can we just go back to Windows 98 or something?
by willvarfar | 2025-10-03 09:14:46+00:00
To be fair there might be other students in your same class who, like perhaps Mrs Broadbent herself, would find classic literature to be the thing that ignites their love of reading?

Personally I tried and failed to get into LotR as a kid even though I was a keen reader. Same with Shakespeare. Not everything is for everyone.

So I guess the big deal is everyone getting to meet a book that they can get into as a kid, to foster a love of reading. And different people have different books.

Therefore the problem with high school literature is everyone reading the same narrow assigned set of books, rather than what that narrow set is?
by int_19h | 2025-10-03 09:14:50+00:00
It would be nice to revive all of the Old English letters (well, except for the wynn Ƿ because it's so easily confused with P).

"æ" even has the same obvious sound value still, it can even keep the name "ash"

"þ" and "ð" for the two th-sounds (the former unvoiced, the latter voiced).

And if "ᵹ" is readmitted specifically in its affricate capacity, i.e. for "g" in "gem" etc, then "j" could instead be used with the value it has in French, i.e. used to spell words like "measure" - this is one of the few English phonemes that doesn't have a definitive letter associated with it right now.

Always use "k" for that sound and repurpose c/q/x for something else, and we could ditch the digraphs completely.
by trhway | 2025-10-03 09:14:53+00:00
>Side-by-side owners of physically/legally identical land will pay the same taxes regardless of what is built on their properties

Do we really want this? It is pretty established that higher valued assets incur higher property taxes. Making skyscraper owner pay the same tax as the next door owner of a small bodega just doesn't make sense. Old beat up Corolla owner to pay the same tax as a Lamborghini owner. (It reeks of perverse socialism - dividing everything, in this case tax burden, equally in the most simplistic way, and not surprisingly that LVT is usually pushed for by leftist "progressives" while there is nothing progressive in it really).
by xlii | 2025-10-03 09:15:02+00:00
This is often discussed in Psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it#In_ps...)

Regarding gym beast - it has few effects: - you eat bigger portions - you go to gym more often - you try harder (i.e. bigger weights etc.)

I can atest that this works _for me_, but using confidence to reach a goal is quite common.
Should AI make fake companions or help people build real-life friendships?
by shansenm | 2025-10-03 09:15:03+00:00
Loneliness is increasingly described as a public health crisis, especially among Gen Z. Many startups are racing to build AI companions and chatbots as a “solution,” giving people someone to talk to.

We think this may be making things worse. Instead of helping people connect, it risks training them to accept simulated relationships in place of real ones, potentially deepening the crisis.

We are experimenting with a different use of AI. Our project, Pulse Meet New Friends, matches small groups of strangers for a 7-day “mission” to plan and do something offline. An AI facilitator keeps the chat alive, suggests activities (like hiking, bowling, or board games), and nudges the group until they actually meet. The goal is not to replace human connection, but to make it easier for people to build it.

So what do you think: should AI replace human connection with digital companions, or should its role be to facilitate real-life friendships?