MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-19 13:12:09+00:00
(Based on my recollections from ~25 years ago) Mera peak is the second highest non-technical peak in the world (the highest is in S America) at ~21,000 feet. Meaning you can basically walk to the top (no real climbing, but we were roped together for the final section, in case of crevasses). But the altitude and weather makes it much tougher than the equivalent trek near sea level. The summit day was incredibly gruelling, the hardest thing I have ever done physically. So you need a decent level of fitness.

If you are significantly overweight or have dodgy knees, then it isn't for you. You are moderately fit and prepared to do some long walks in preparation, then you are probably fine. If you aren't sure, maybe go on one of the lower level treks and see how you get on.
by neilv | 2026-01-19 13:13:20+00:00
> This change is important for safely buying genuine products, such as 3M respirators.

Personally funny example to me, because, at our anti-counterfeiting tech startup, 3M respirators was the prospective customer I championed.

(Right before Covid hit, we'd launched our first MVP factory deployment, and there was soon news of counterfeit N95 masks. Which is just evil.)
by MattPalmer1086 | 2026-01-19 13:13:27+00:00
Key rotation among a set of keys only partially mitigates the issue (have to obtain more samples).

It has it's own synch problems (can you be sure which key to use next and did the server update the same as you, or did the last request not get through?).

This post on security stack exchange seems relevant.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/150168/one-time...
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-01-19 13:13:29+00:00
Why wait so long? Do it now…

This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”

You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.

To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-19 13:13:37+00:00
Died at age 68 on April 28, 1945 in Berlin, from shrapnel. The Soviets had begun shelling of Berlin on April 20.

This sort of coupling was used to drive the supercharger on the German BF 109, enabling it to maintain manifold pressure from sea level up to 20,000 ft. with a single stage supercharger without throttling. Use of such couplings in automobiles didn't occur until after the war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcI67pZe_Ss
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-19 13:14:00+00:00
This is the original source, linked on HN a couple months ago: https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-declin...

It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
by johndough | 2026-01-19 13:14:10+00:00
(>= 6 months of 1 gig of data per day)

You can parse JSON at several GB/s: https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson
And you could scale that by one or two orders of magnitude with thread-based parallelism on recent AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon CPUs. So parsing alone should not pose a problem (maybe even sub-second for 6 months of data). We would need a more precise problem statement to judge whether horizontal scaling is needed.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-19 13:14:20+00:00
> Yes, but also plain guessing since passwords are usually chosen by the user and not generated by the server like TOTP secrets.

If we were talking a >256-bit secret, I'd buy this, but in the human-calculated case I don't see how it actually helps with this, because you've substituted a ~8 character password for a 6 digit number, which is significantly less search space to brute-force.

> Also phishing attacks tricking users into entering their passwords in fake login pages

yes, this is more-or-less a subset of the "keylogger/insecure login page" case

> and stolen password databases

There's still a server-side TOTP secret database to be stolen, no? And normally that would be hard to reverse-engineer the actual secret from, but again, you've shrunk the search space down to 1,000,000 entries, which is trivial to brute force.
by mike-cardwell | 2026-01-19 13:14:21+00:00
> a secrets store that the model can "use" but never "read".

How would that work? If the AI can use it, it can read it. E.g:

secret-store "foo" > file
cat file

You'd have to be very specific about how the secret can be used in order for the AI to not be able to figure out what it is. You could provide a http proxy in the sandbox that injects a HTTP header to include the secret, when the secret is for accessing a website for example, and tell the AI to use that proxy. But you'd also have to scope down which URLs the proxy can access with that secret otherwise it could just visit a page like this to read back the headers that were sent:

https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-http-headers-is-...

Basically, for every "use" of a secret, you'd have to write a dedicated application which performs that task in a secure manner. It's not just the case of adding a special secret store.
by mark-r | 2026-01-19 13:14:54+00:00
> This is a well known problem because early computers with monitors used to only be able to display characters.

It's not just monitors. My first exposure to ASCII art were posters that were printed on a Teletype, in the mid 1970's. The files had attributions to RTTY operators, which made me believe they were done by hand. Of course a Teletype had no concept of pixels.
by Joker_vD | 2026-01-19 13:15:34+00:00
> I am not sure if there is a better way to find the fastest code path besides "measure on the target system", which of course comes with its own challenges.

Yeah, and it's incredibly frustrating because there is almost zero theory on how to write performant code. Will caching things in memory be faster than re-requesting them over network? Who knows! Sometimes it won't! But you can't predict what those times will be beforehand which turns this whole field into pure black magic instead of anything remotely similar to engineering or science, since theoretical knowledge has no relation to reality.

At my last job we had one of the weirdest "memory access is slo-o-o-ow" scenarios I've ever seen (and it would reproduce pretty reliably... after about 20 hours of the service's continuous execution): somehow, due to peculiarities of the GC and Linux physical memory manager, almost all of the working set of our application would end up in a single physical DDR stick, as opposed to being evenly spread across 4 stick the server actually has. Since a single memory stick literally can't cope with such high data throughput, the performance tanked. And it took quite some time us to figure out what the hell was going on because nothing came up on the perf graphs or metrics or whatever: it's just that almost everything in the the application's userspace became slower. No, the CPU is definitely not throttled, it's actually 20–30% idle. No, there is almost zero disk activity, and the network is fine. Huh?!
by fainpul | 2026-01-19 13:15:52+00:00
> Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.

That's a fallacy. By buying second hand, you enable the second hand market (people get better prices for selling their first hand phones). There are users who always buy the latest iPhones (or other flagship device) and sell their previous one. In effect you, as a second hand buyer, use the devices in the second part of their full lifetime, the first buyer uses the device in the first part. The device is used the full duration of its usability, which is good, but it's not better than if the first buyer would use it for the full duration. Nothing is saved overall.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-19 13:15:54+00:00
Vibe coders are the new circa-2000 cross-trained front end web developers.

Without industry experience and/or software engineering education, they zoom past a lot of hard-won lessons.

E.g. the node.js packaging ecosystem wouldn't have committed so many own-goals if it'd been designed by people with more historical awareness

In time, vibe coders will rediscover test driven development, but until then you'll have to deal with trying to watch monkeys construct buildings by stomping hard and frequently enough that the atoms self-assemble.
by DoughnutHole | 2026-01-19 13:16:52+00:00
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.

What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
by stephenlf | 2026-01-19 13:16:56+00:00
Reading through the thread right now.

Commenter:
> What % of the code is written by you and what % is written by ai

OP:
> Good question!

>

> All the code, architecture, logic, and design in minikv were written by me, 100% by hand. I did use AI tools only for a small part of the documentation—specifically the README, LEARNING.md, and RAM_COMMUNITY.md files—to help structure the content and improve clarity.
>

> But for all the source code (Rust), tests, and implementation, I wrote everything myself, reviewing and designing every part.
>

> Let me know if you want details or want to look at a specific part of the code!

Oof. That is pretty damning.

———

It’s unfortunate that em-dashes have become a shibboleth for AI-generated text. I love em-dashes, and iPhones automatically turn a double dash ( -- ) into an em dash.
by JimDabell | 2026-01-19 13:17:05+00:00
That’s super interesting. I had a similar idea about 18 months ago.

I think the biggest opportunity is building a knowledge graph based on Wikipedia and then checking against the graph when new edits are made. Detect any new assertions in the edit, check for conflicts against the graph, and bring up a warning along with a link to all the pages on Wikipedia that the new edit is contradicting. If the new edit is bad, it shows the editor why with citations, and if the new edit is correcting something that Wikipedia currently gets incorrect, then it shows all the other places that also need to be corrected.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1eqohpm/if_some...
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-19 13:18:01+00:00
> No, the defining characteristic of a password is also how it is used: it is communicated in the clear to the verifier

This is only true if the verifier lives on your local terminal - otherwise we use an encrypted channel to transmit to the verifier, or do the exactly same type of timed-salted-hash scheme used here to transmit without revealing the password.
by robshep | 2026-01-19 13:18:07+00:00
Parents (myself included) have an impossible task of regulating access to technology for their children.

Societal norms are not aligned with what these educators are saying. I and many other parents know this but they are exposed to technology outside of our direct oversight at schools, friends and relatives houses.

Imagine whining about smoking in the first half of the 20th century or even the 60s and 70s.
Sure there’s an obvious element to it, but smoking rates used to be higher than 50%. Societal norms were that everyone was exposed to smoke, government was lobbied by tobacco and tobacco got rich.

There has been a generational shift in attitudes to, and prevalence of smoking, but only when the medical consensus was harder to lobby away and politicians were faced with pressure of a critical mass of bereaved relatives. It’s at the this stage that “average” adult has strong enough convictions supported by regulation that society breaks through.

Meanwhile, as an adult I am borderline forced to use a smartphone for banking, shopping and communication and need superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment.

Big tech is 100% thrilled that people still push around the argument that parents are 100% to blame.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-19 13:18:58+00:00
Addendum:

> With recent advances in AI, it becomes ever harder for proponents of intelligence-as-understanding to continue asserting that those tools have no clue and “just” perform statistical next-token prediction.

??????? No, that is still exactly what they do. The article then lists a bunch of examples in which this in trivially exactly what is happening.

> “The cat chased the . . .” (multiple connections are plausible, so how is that not understanding probability?)

It doesn't need to "understand" probability. "The cat chased the mouse" shows up in the distribution 10 times. "The cat chased the bird" shows up in the distribution 5 times. Absent any other context, with the simplest possible model, it now has a probability of 2/3 for the mouse and 1/3 for the bird. You can make the probability calculations as complex as you want, but how could you possibly trout this out as an example that an LLM completing this sentence isn't a matter of trivial statistical prediction? Academia needs an asteroid, holy hell.

[I originally edited this into my post, but two people had replied by then, so I've split it off into its own comment.]
by 3RTB297 | 2026-01-19 13:19:09+00:00
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.

Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:

- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)

- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.

- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.

- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)
by Noaidi | 2026-01-19 13:19:41+00:00
Great news? It’s great news that nobody really knew that we were buying items but not receiving them from the person that we bought them from? It’s a logistical advantage to defraud customers? Because this is what Amazon was doing all along, defrauding customers. I never knew that I was receiving an item from someone who I didn’t purchase it from how is that even legal?
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-19 13:19:44+00:00
> You refuse to provide any references.

Why is there a need for references? Do you not understand how VMs work? Do you dispute that software running in the VM can be vulnerable?

> You also reply to my references with shallow dismissals with no substance presenting that as facts ("Not only do your links not support your exaggerated claims at all")

Because your 'references' don't support your claims, it's that simple. You can't just copy and paste links and act like you have provided evidence when the links don't match. Your claim doesn't appear on the Bubblewrap github page at all.

> Yet your original claim is that Flatpac is similarly secure and you failed to explain how it would protect from the same problems.

Vulnerable software running in a Bubblewrap sandbox and in a Qubes VM are both similarly vulnerable to software vulnerabilities, and it is unlikely an attacker would be able to escape the sandbox or the VM. I grant that escaping the sandbox is easier and more common, but not by much.

Your first key point was that Bubblewrap vulnerabilities happen all the time, and you've yet to support that. The only 'reference' you provided was to the Bubblewrap github page.

> They do not exist, only open-weight ones do.

And of course you don't trust anything that isn't FLOSS, right?

Still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM)
by em-bee | 2026-01-19 13:20:00+00:00
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.

technically possible but rather redundant and in most cases pointless. (yes, there are exceptions)

so i rather strongly disagree. 99% of my use of the internet is to talk to people across the globe. it's its primary use case. the example you mention is a fringe application, useful to a tiny minority.

"the network remains functional during internet outages"

that strongly implies that i can use this app to replace other apps that use the internet. but i can't, because it does not allow long distance communication the way internet based apps do.

so for 99% of my needs this app is not helping me. it does not make me independent of the internet. i have been in places where the internet was cut off due to political turmoil. and i have friends who have that happen to them. in all cases the main challenge was the lack of long distance communication. local communication was barely affected.

sms and phone still worked, and in fact the app that would have helped is one that can route data connections via sms and phone calls. like old acoustic modems.

infrastructure independence at a local level is nice, but much less serious or critical than independence for long distance communication. and long distance already starts at a few km.
by al_borland | 2026-01-19 13:20:03+00:00
It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.

Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.

A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.

This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.

Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
by boxed | 2026-01-19 13:20:14+00:00
It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done.

I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.
by contracertainty | 2026-01-19 13:20:18+00:00
Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding).
That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-19 13:20:20+00:00
>Nobody wants to be angry.

I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?
by barry-cotter | 2026-01-19 13:20:28+00:00
The quality of economic research from an advocacy organisation with no commitment to the truth as such is about as good as you’d expect.

https://iea.org.uk/media/impractical-outrage-iea-economist-r...

> Oxfam’s perspective is global, but we don’t have a world government, so all wealth taxes would have to be national. Very few countries have wealth taxes of the kind Oxfam seems to be seeking. One which does is France. Its imposition – at much lower rates than Oxfam seems to be advocating – raises comparatively little, and has driven many rich people abroad. And as in any country the super-rich are a vanishingly tiny minority, wealth taxes will inevitably catch people who are very far from being billionaires. The French wealth tax hits assets in excess of just €1.3 million. The most recent figures suggest that, of 350,000 households liable to the tax, 250,000 paid less than €5,000.

> If taxes could be devised which would catch much larger amounts of billionaires’ wealth, how would it be redistributed, with no world government in prospect?

> Without a plausible plan for practical redistribution, the annual Oxfam report has become simply an opportunity for the left’s performative outrage, as pointless in its own way as the World Economic Forum which they bemoan. No political party in Britain should take it seriously and neither should the public.

If you want critique from a committed Democrat look here. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/oxfam-serves-up-a-lot-of-dodgy...
by roblabla | 2026-01-19 13:20:50+00:00
> Traits? Nope. We need some way for code reuse.

Says who? You can totally do code reuse using manually-written dynamic dispatch in "rust without traits". That's how C does it, and it works just fine (in fact, it's often faster than Rust's monomorphic approach that results in a huge amount of code bloat that is often very unfriendly to the icache).

Granted, a lot of safety features depend on traits today (send/sync for instance) but traits is a much more powerful and complex feature than you need for all of this. It seems to me like it's absolutely possible to create a simpler language than Rust that retains its borrow checker and thread safety capabilities.

Now whether that'd be a better language is up to individual taste. I personally much prefer Rust's expressiveness. But not all of it is necessary if your goal is only "get the same memory and thread safety guarantees".
Show HN: An Open Source screen timer for kids (Arduino and React)
by urbandw311er | 2026-01-19 13:21:09+00:00
I built this over the holidays as I was driven mad by trying to get all the various parental control apps to share data. Full technical blog (including coding tips, learnings etc) is here : https://partridge.works/screenie-christmas-project-2025-26/