MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwup238 | 2025-12-30 23:36:49+00:00
> Modern smartphones are generally both more locked down and also don't come with an external antenna option.

There are USB On-the-Go compatible SDRs [1] that you can hook up to an Android phone that cost like $50 (don't know if there are any that would work with iOS though).

[1] https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-nano-t... (this one doesn't support wifi frequencies, but this was off the top of my head)
by cameronh90 | 2025-12-30 23:37:10+00:00
Ignoring that those numbers aren't directly comparable, it did make me wonder, if I had to give up either "AI" or chocolate tomorrow, which would I pick?

Even as an enormous chocolate lover (in all three senses) who eats chocolate several times a week, I'd probably choose AI instead.

OpenAI has alternatives, but also I do spend more money on OpenAI than I do on chocolate currently.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-30 23:37:22+00:00
lots of things. Remember the Cartoon Network PR stunt where they placed DIY LED "signs" of characters from a show around Boston not long after the bombing there? What about the kid in Texas that was accused of bringing a bomb to show his teacher his DIY electronics Arduino project? What about the Mr Robot episode using a RPi?

Also, people putting these regulations in place are not normal people but people that think about how people might cause mayhem. None of the things I mentioned were real threats, but they very easily could have been is the point.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-30 23:37:25+00:00
Did Steam change something? I first opened the account to claim a game via license code. It only required a working email at the time.

Later I chose to provide my credit card for convenience. As far as I know I could have instead used gift cards or prepaid cards.

Regardless, there's also an issue of trust. I might choose to provide PII to a large central marketplace that has a good reputation but providing it to each individual producer seems highly questionable.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-30 23:37:40+00:00
Gotcha.

I do understand your point, but that's pretty common for Python. Say you're using poetry (https://python-poetry.org/docs/pyproject/#scripts) or Uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/config/#command-...) or setuptools (https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/entry_point.h...) to define "scripts" for your package. Those tools will autogenerate a file like the one you posted here that basically import the package and then call a specific function inside it.

Almost all interesting Python scripts import another module, so it's really unusual to see all of a program's code in one file anyway. These autogenerated scripts just take it a step further.
by Paul-E | 2025-12-30 23:38:29+00:00
I haven't tested that, so I'm not sure if it would work. The import only inserts rows, it doesn't delete, so I don't think that is the cause of fragmentation. I suspect this line in the vacuum docs:

> The VACUUM command may change the ROWIDs of entries in any tables that do not have an explicit INTEGER PRIMARY KEY.

means SQLite does something to organize by rowid and that this is doing most of the work.

Reddit post/comment IDs are 1:1 with integers, though expressed in a different base that is more friendly to URLs. I map decoded post/comment IDs to INTEGER PRIMARY KEYs on their respective tables. I suspect the vacuum operation sorts the tables by their reddit post ID and something about this sorting improves tables scans, which in turn helps building indices quickly after standing up the DB.
by serf | 2025-12-30 23:39:34+00:00
you'll never win that argument, but I absolutely agree.

people have no idea about how big the military and defense budgets worldwide are next to any other example of a public budget.

throw as many pie charts out as you want; people just can't see the astronomical difference in budgets.

I think it's based on how the thing works; a good defense works until it doesn't -- the other systems/budgets in place have a bit more of a graceful failure. This concept produces an irrationality in people that produces windfalls of cash availability.
by a_paddy | 2025-12-30 23:39:37+00:00
TLDR;

- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.

- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.

- Honey should have "stood down" if an affiliate link was detected, but their algorithm would decide to skip the stand down based on if the user could be the an affiliate representative testing for compliance.

Allegedly.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-30 23:42:21+00:00
Some of this is because you’re leaning on the system to be fast. A simple async call does a lot of stuff for you. If it was implemented by people who treated CPU power as if it was infinite, it would slow you down a lot. Since it was carefully built to be fast, you can write your stuff in a straightforward manner. (This isn’t a criticism. I work in lower levels of the stack, and I consider a big part of the job to be making it so people working higher up have to think about this stuff as little as possible. I solve these problems so they can solve the user’s problem.)

It’s also very context dependent. If your code is on the critical path for animations, it’s not too hard to be too slow. Especially since standards are higher. You’re now expected to draw a frame in 8ms on many devices. You could write some straightforward code that decodes JSON to extract some base64 to decompress a zip to retrieve a JPEG and completely blow out your 8ms if you manage to forget about caching that and end up doing it every frame.
by mc32 | 2025-12-30 23:42:21+00:00
With A.I./ML and high def aerial and street video + other electronic signals you don’t need ineffective tools like stop and frisk.

They had the technology in Iraq to figure out where IEDs were coming from. (TF Odin)

They could also cut down on government fraud and all the homeless NGO waste/fraud. [1]

We need people to vote in governments who are interested in rooting out fraud as well as other crimes, rather than those seeking political careers who would rather freeze wheels take a blind eye to things.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1gl4SESu2o
Show HN: Request sensitive user input from system services
by lightandlight | 2025-12-30 23:42:24+00:00
`asker` allows daemons to request user input.

I run Syncthing to keep my KeepassXC in sync across devices. At the same time I have `syncthing-merge`[1] running to handle any conflicts due to concurrent database edits. It calls `keepassxc-cli merge` to merge conflicting databases, which requires my database password. `syncthing-merge` runs as a system service under its own user, so I wasn't able to use a graphical dialog program like GNOME's `zenity` to ask for the password. My solution is to run a user service that can create graphical dialogs in response to requests from system daemons, while enforcing minimal access to the data that the user enters.

With the required NixOS config[2] in place, a system service calls `asker KEY` to issue a request. If that service is a member of the `asker-keys-{KEY}` group, then the request proceeds, is handled by a user service (`asker-prompt`), and then printed to stdout (i.e. to be piped into another program). I took care to ensure that only authorised services could read the user's input.

I looked into using existing keyring programs via the D-Bus Secret Service API, but I couldn't figure out how to control access to individual secrets. I know exactly which services should be allowed to access particular secrets, and I want to enforce that. In particular, I don't want my logged-in user to have universal access to these secrets, because then any program I run can read them (see also: recent discussion of this issue[3]). I also found that these keyring programs aren't suited for ephemeral data; they store secrets for a while.

It might be possible to achieve this using pure D-Bus with access control policies. I haven't looked into this because after I decided that the Secret Service API was insufficient, I figured that rolling my own protocol would be easier than learning D-Bus.

Questions for you:

* Which wheels could I have avoided reinventing?
* Is there anything I could simplify?
* Have I failed at my security goals due to mistakes or oversights?

[1]: https://github.com/LightAndLight/syncthing-merge
[2]: https://github.com/LightAndLight/asker?tab=readme-ov-file#us...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46278857
by nighthawk454 | 2025-12-30 23:43:07+00:00
I'm inclined to agree. While not always appropriate or popular, it makes some sense to me to have the visual weight/area of the code being ~proportional to it's significance. Communicates the ideas more clearly. Instead of spending the majority of space telling me what _isn't_ going to happen, and hiding what is.

I often find myself wishing this was more ergonomic in languages.
by anonnon | 2025-12-30 23:43:13+00:00
All of the comments so far have been about

> le heckin' security theater targeting tinkerbros

and none addressing the elephant in the room of why Mamdani needs all of this security, or frankly, any security at all? Just a few years prior, he tweeted out #DefundThePolice, and of the NYPD specifically, suggested "Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence." And even though he's walked some of that back, he still supports dismantling the NYPD's Strategic Response Group (whose duties including counter terrorism response). You can be sure however free of a rein the city's population of crazy transients are given to assault, slash, or push others in front of oncoming subway trains, he and his family will remain safe.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-30 23:43:40+00:00
beach balls just cause havoc bouncing around and potentially knocking things over. they're a nuisance.

blankets tend to want to laid out on the floor for people to sit on which takes up a lot of space causing havoc for foot traffic when people are not expecting to have to step over someone. also, they can be used to start fires. these are the same reasons they are no longer allowed at outdoor concert venues for specific types of shows.
by 6510 | 2025-12-30 23:44:21+00:00
> In reality, Safari's PWA support is really good; it has implemented 89% of supported PWA features vs 96% for Chrome according to the PWA scorecard [1].

I remember, I was like, ohh sounds great! So I tirelessly looked for an "add to home screen" button but couldn't find it.

I had to search google to find the answer, you hve to share it!?

weird but okay, so I open the share menu. No such option there.

Again I search, ahh so you have to first edit the sharing options!

The only thing missing from the experience was a warning dialog.

Moral of the story, it doesn't matter if it works if people cant find it.

The 3rd class experience was funny but then they announced they were going to get rid of pwa's entirely.

> The need to remove the capability was informed by the complex security and privacy concerns...

When a 4T company says such things you know it must be hard.... lmfao....

I've never had to explain to an android user how to "Add to home screen". Explaining it to iphone users honestly sounded like I was trying to hack them. It drifts so far from apples usually polished UI that I cant blame them.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-30 23:44:45+00:00
I'm sure you're correct. That said, I saw a friend who went bald at 28 get all of his hair back from Minoxidil + finasteride. Maybe his folicles weren't closed/gone but he was bald and a year later, was not.

Apparently there's also now-a-days, Micro-needling, Stem Cell Therapy, Platelet-Rich Plasma, and others. No idea how effective they actually are
by offmycloud | 2025-12-30 23:44:45+00:00
I'm using Firefox on a Linux workstation (without Tor) and I still got the CAPTCHA. The statement "blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding" is misleading at best. Shame on Cloudflare, this kind of dishonesty makes me not want to trust your RCA marketing pieces.
by mbreese | 2025-12-30 23:44:51+00:00
I think you're partially right, but I don't think being an AI leader is the main motivation -- that's a side effect.

I think it's important to OpenAI to support as many use-cases as possible. Right now, the experience that most people have with ChatGPT is through small revenue individual accounts. Individual subscriptions with individual needs, but modest budgets.

The bigger money is in enterprise and corporate accounts. To land these accounts, OpenAI will need to provide coverage across as many use-cases as they can so that they can operate as a one-stop AI provider. If a company needs to use OpenAI for chat, Anthropic for coding, and Google for video, what's the point? If Google's chat and coding is "good enough" and you need to have video generation, then that company is going to go with Google for everything. For the end-game OpenAI is playing for, they will need to be competitive in all modalities of AI.
by piskov | 2025-12-30 23:44:55+00:00
Openrouter stats already mention 52% usage is roleplay.

As for photo/video very large number of people use it for friends and family (turn photo into creative/funny video, change photo, etc.).

Also I would think photoshop-like features are coming more and more in chatgpt and alike. For example, “take my poorly-lit photo and make it look professional and suitable for linkedin profile”
by eptcyka | 2025-12-30 23:45:30+00:00
As a European, if it wasn't for Russia's might, why wouldn't we defend Ukraine's borders?

It is easy to express opinions about how things should be, but only with power can you make them so. There's of course the fractal complexity of who gets to decide how to spend the power budget of a nation, but that is besides the point. We may decry the human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia, China and the United States, but what good are our cries if we have no power to improve the lives of those affected? Am I saying this to whine about how powerless are we? No, I believe this should be the motivation, the call for greater economic development so that we can attain the power we feel like we need to make a positive change in the world. If not, we will be subjects of those who wield more power - and this isn't even advice exclusively for Europeans. You either build power in groups that are inclusive, or you steal power and form exclusive groups. The quality of life that most of the free world has been enjoying stemmed from the former, and it is the latter groups that will put us back into the dark ages.

Is this cynical? If so, I can confidently say I am a cynic.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-30 23:46:18+00:00
Yup. Same reason I feel safe hiking in big cat territory. You look like a large predator. Only things that consider a large predator as possible prey will seek conflict--and most of the US has no such animal.

The cats know they would win, but a predator at our size range might injure them and keep them from getting their next meal. Thus it's virtually certain they will not attack--and the news supports this. People get hurt when the animal feels it needs to defend itself.
by fdr | 2025-12-30 23:46:38+00:00
The biggest run classified nuclear stockpile loads, at least in the US. They cost about half a billion apiece. And are 30 (carefully cooled and cabled) megawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer)

No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does.

The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer.

Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.
by matthewfcarlson | 2025-12-30 23:47:08+00:00
As part of undergrad we had to implement space invaders on a Zync FPGA so you got to choose which bits you did in hardware and what was in software. It was a blast seeing what people came up with as you could do “extras” that gave you bonus points. Someone built a simple microphone frequency analysis block so you could go left, right, and fire by playing notes on a recorder.
by kfrzcode | 2025-12-30 23:47:34+00:00
Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.

"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."

[0]: https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hash...
[1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/
by amber_raza | 2025-12-30 23:47:46+00:00
That is a fair distinction.

My default right now is Clinical Safety. I prioritize high-grade evidence to prevent harm at the bedside.

However, for Research/Discovery, you are absolutely right. Excessive 'Gatekeeping' can slow down innovation.

The long-term fix is likely a 'Filter Dial'. We need tight constraints for treatment decisions, but loose constraints for hypothesis generation. I plan to support both modes.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-30 23:48:24+00:00
Actually, Obama was below average for approval ratings. ( Maybe a sign of today’s polarized politics. )

The average approval rating is 52.

Obamas first term was 49, his second term was 47.

Personally, I disliked some of his policies but thought he was a great orator, one of the best of our times.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidentia...
Show HN: I built my own Metronome Desktop App
by danmol | 2025-12-30 23:48:28+00:00
Title says all. I kept searching for a Metronome app that would have everything I need as I learn to play faster on guitar and just couldn't find one so I just built my own instead. Sharing with everyone else in case they have a need for something like this :)

Has a few cool nifty features like:

* Keybinds for everything. I hate my mouse

* Progressive mode where the bpm increases every x bars by y bpm

* Speed burst training switches between 2 speeds either at a preset amount of bars or by pressing a key
by jtafurth | 2025-12-30 23:48:39+00:00
There are several valid reasons to "falsify" commit history.

- You need to remove trash commits that appear when you need to rerun CI.
- You need to remove commits with that extra change you forgot.
- You want to perform any other kind of rebase to clean up messages.

I assume in this thread some people mean squashing from the perspective of a system like Gitlab where it's done automatically, but for me squashing can mean simply running an interactive (or fixup) and leaving only important commits that provide meaningful information to the target branch.
by ncruces | 2025-12-30 23:48:45+00:00
A read-only VFS doing this can be really simple, with the right API…

This is my VFS:
https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/main/vfs/readervf...

And using it with range requests:
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/vfs/readerv...

And having it work with a Zstandard compressed SQLite database, is one library away:
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/SaveTheRbtz/zstd-seekable-form...
by avianlyric | 2025-12-30 23:48:48+00:00
And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.

Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.

In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-30 23:49:12+00:00
> This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth.

I don't disagree with you but it's much worse in the EU, where mandatory contribution to the state for pension funds are gigantic ponzi schemes: the money wasn't invested in equities but directly spent. Now most EU countries are heavily indebted and simply shall soon have no way to honor the pension they promised their citizens. Greece already (partially) defaulted on its public debt a few years ago. More countries shall follow. France is in a particularly bad position at the moment, for example.

Now there are private, optional, pension funds in the EU and citizens have to opt-in to these and these do put their funds in equities etc. Still beats a full-on ponzi, if you ask me.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-30 23:49:30+00:00
I don't have a problem with an open source project I use (and I do use F-Froid) hosting a server in a basement. I do have a problem with having the entire project hosted on one server in a basement, because it means that the entire project goes down if that basement gets flooded or the house burns down or the power goes out for an extended period of time, etc.

Having two servers in two basements not near each other would be good, having five would be better, and honestly paying money to put them in colo facilities to have more reliable power, cooling, etc. would be better still. Computer hardware is very cheap today and it doesn't cost that much money to get a substantial amount of redundancy, without being dependent on any single big company.
by serf | 2025-12-30 23:50:58+00:00
lots of cool 'engineering art' around heat-sinks and exchangers, for sure. Check out some of these shapes [0] , i'd love to have one on a shelf as a talking piece.

The coolermaster cpu sink i'm using now is big, but not particularly pretty.

0: https://toffeex.com/heat-exchangers , https://toffeex.com/heat-sinks
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-30 23:50:59+00:00
But people don't stay novices after years/decades. Of course when you write the boilerplate for the 20x time maybe you still accept that, but when you write it for the 2000x time, I bet you do the lazy thing and just copy it.

> cannot for legal reasons or ...

Sure, you can't copy trade secrets, but that's also not the boilerplate part. Copying e.g. a class hierarchy and renaming all the names and replacing the class contents that represent the domain, won't be a legal problem, because this is not original in the first place.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-12-30 23:51:31+00:00
OpenAI has #5 traffic levels globally. Their product-market fit is undeniable. The question is monetization.

Their cost to serve each request is roughly 3 orders of magnitude higher than conventional web sites.

While it is clear people see value in the product, we only know they see value at today’s subsidized prices. It is possible that inference prices will continue their rapid decline. Or it is possible that OAI will need to raise prices and consumers will be willing to pay more for the value.