MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 19:27:29+00:00
> Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.

Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?

Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?

There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well

In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/

Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
by vanpelt | 2026-01-08 19:27:40+00:00
(1) This one is on the top of my list. I have a branch that sets up proper iOS notifications. Coming soon.
(2) Yeah, I've considered making an actual desktop version. A hacky one exists already. You can run `catnip run` from your desktop and it will run catnip in a Docker container on your machine. There's a web interface, and it even works with native MacOS notifications.
by losvedir | 2026-01-08 19:27:43+00:00
I've been thinking the same. I'm actually building a little site that presents a textarea that you can type your comment into and it will track its changes over time (typing, editing, pasting, etc) and provide a little playback widget so someone can see the composition of the comment. The idea being you can include a link to the playback in your comment that you post here and someone can eyeball it and see if it looks like you really spent some time writing it, vs just pasting in LLM slop. Of course, a sophisticated agent could _simulate_ writing the comment, but I think it could still help in general.
by tmsbrg | 2026-01-08 19:27:47+00:00
I'm surprised there's no mention about disclosing the bug to IBM?. Usually these kinds of disclosures have a timeline showing when they told the vendor about the bug and when it was fixed. Now it looks like they just randomly released the vulnerability info on their blog.

Also a bit annoyed there's no date on the article, but looking at the HTML source it seems it was released today (isn't it annoying when blog software doesn't show the publish date?).
by resfirestar | 2026-01-08 19:27:57+00:00
If someone can write instructions to download a malicious script into an codebase, hoping an AI agent will read and follow them, they could just as easily write the same wget command directly into a build script or the source itself (probably more effective). In that way it's a very similar threat to the supply chain attacks we're hopefully already familiar with. So it is a serious issue but not necessarily one we don't know how to deal with. The solutions (auditing all third party code, isolating dev environments) just happen to be hard in practice.
by rd | 2026-01-08 19:28:00+00:00
I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory.

I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to agree, but those that have any plausible deniability are given far too much leniency, and people will over-index on the guidelines to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I don't think a captcha is the solution, as it'll degrade conversation by an OOM though.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-08 19:28:04+00:00
"The Debian Administrator's Handbook"[0]. Free, comprehensive, updated. Every other book is 2/3 at best. This also includes the venerable TLDP[1], which will've perhaps recommended 15y+ ago. You can also choose the most practical approach and attempt "Linux From Scratch"[2].

[0]: https://debian-handbook.info/
[1]: https://tldp.org/index.html
[2]: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html (perhaps systemd vers better if wanna learn modern Linux)
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 19:28:23+00:00
Quick question but would tor work in this case?

Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?

Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.

Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.

There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
by anakaine | 2026-01-08 19:28:26+00:00
Lora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else.

Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone.

Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-08 19:28:53+00:00
>I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office.
I'm sure that it was awkward, and it without a doubt was heavy. But heaviness is only one factor in shipping difficulty, the other is volume. For comparable tvs, flatscreens are going to outdo them on that count.

>The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I

That's what, to hang on the back of a minivan front seat for the kids to watch? Or a computer monitor? No one is buying televisions like that. Could you even find one retail that small?

>I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.

And both of those are comparable, are they not? That's about the max (non-gargantuan) television people get, and the 24" crt was pretty close to the max size back in the day.

>Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office.

You're being unfair in this comparison. That Trinitron isn't a tv is it, it's a monitor right? The CRT televisions were rarely Trinitrons, even most 25" televisions are half it's size. If you have to stoop to corner cases to win the argument, did you really win?
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-08 19:29:23+00:00
WTF is an "AI PC"? Most of "AI" happens on the internet, in big datacenters, your PC has nothing to do with that. It will more likely confuse users who don't understand why they need a special PC when any PC can access chatgpt.com.

Now, for some who actually want to do AI locally, they are not going to look for "AI PCs". They are going to look for specific hardware, lots of RAM, big GPUs, etc... And it is not a very common use case anyways.

I have an "AI laptop", and even I, who run a local model from time to time and bought that PC with my own money don't know what it means, probably some matrix multiplication hardware that I have not idea how to take advantage of. It was a good deal for the specs it had, that's the only thing I cared for, the "AI" part was just noise.

At least a "gaming PC" means something. I expect high power, a good GPU, a CPU with good single-core performance, usually 16 to 32 GB of RAM, high refresh rate monitor, RGB lighting. But "AI PC", no idea.
by rd | 2026-01-08 19:29:34+00:00
I don't know why more school districts don't force this for essays. It's so straightforward with Google doc editing history too. And yeah, sure, you can get around it if you _really_ want quite trivially, but I imagine it would solve for 99% of students, and force them to actually engage with whatever AI-generated stuff they inevitably type by hand more than they were before.
by 123pie123 | 2026-01-08 19:30:02+00:00
there's a few youtube channels that are nice to watch to get you more interested in electronics, my two favourite are:

Bigclivedotcom (nice, basic fun) : https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom/videos

Mend it Mark (more advanced) :https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos
by Arn_Thor | 2026-01-08 19:30:13+00:00
A freedom does or does not exist. Some cultures have more freedom than others. If it's "Western" of me to admit I prefer more freedoms rather than less, I'll very proudly own up to that. But I don't know what that has got to do with the question I answered.

As for concrete examples:

#1: Freedom of speech -- one may not advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, criticize the ruling party, advocate for a change of government or political system in China, state that Taiwan is an independent nation, argue in favor of free and open elections in Hong Kong, advocate for workers' rights, talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, talk about human rights abuses in China at all... and the list goes on. Someone might manage to do so, sneaking past the firewall, but they are liable to be slammed with #3 below.

#2: Freedom of association -- contrary to what one might expect in a country with "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", one may not unionize. In fact one may not set up any civil society group outside the approval of the CPC. I could editorialize on the reasons for this but I'll refrain in the interest of brevity.

#3: Freedom from arbitrary detention -- China has a specific category of criminal offense just for this: being able to detain anyone at any time for any reason. The crime is "Picking quarrels and provoking trouble", and is used liberally on anyone who speaks out against the government and manages to catch their attention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picking_quarrels_and_provoking...

Now, Chinese people, and others, will argue that there's this reasona and that reason why it's good to restrict freedoms in this way. I obviously disagree. But what shouldn't be in dispute is the fact that these freedoms are very much restricted in China.
by zatkin | 2026-01-08 19:31:01+00:00
I asked it to build me a weather machine and it's responding to me like a teenager.

AI:
Authentication successful! Go back to the webpage to continue.

Me:
Hey!

AI:
yooo whats good!! u got any weather stuff u wanna chat about or just saying hi?

Me:
how’s the weather in New York City

AI:
ohh nah i don't have real-time data so i can't tell u the actual conditions rn! but if u check like weather.com or just search "nyc weather" u'll get the live stuff instantly
tho if u tell me whats goin on there rn i can get HYPED abt the atmospheric conditions!! like is it humid?? what's the pressure doin??
by hackingonempty | 2026-01-08 19:31:28+00:00
One alternative is STM, software transactional memory which is modular and composable. I think Haskell was first to implement it but its also in Clojure and some Scala libs.

This is what ZIO's type safe version looks like https://zio.dev/reference/stm/ Scala's for-comprehension is syntactic sugar for calls to flatMap, map, and withFilter, similar to Haskell's do-notation.
by kennethwolters | 2026-01-08 19:31:30+00:00
Wrote a piece arguing that AI 1.0 is feudal because GPU scarcity concentrated power in a few cloud providers, but the coming GPU glut will invert this dynamic and make open weights + commodity compute the foundation of AI 2.0. The thesis is that sovereignty requires ownership of your stack (weights, compute, data) rather than renting intelligence from centralized APIs.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-08 19:31:43+00:00
It was the original author who issued the retraction, The Guardian just had enough credibility to follow up on that. That other news organizations lacked retractions does not make the original reporting of the author's claim any less retracted. If there are reports showing the retraction was bogus and there was separate proof contradicting the original author's retraction that would be something else of course, but you can't just say "I swear you'll find them, just keep looking harder!" or I could say the same thing about anything I wanted to claim.

Thanks to mcintyre1994 for noting the link in the retraction does actually go into the details of why the author retracted the claim https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/12/elon-musk-biog...
by danaris | 2026-01-08 19:33:17+00:00
Sure, LCD TVs come in boxes that have padding.

So did CRT TVs.

The padding was probably a lower percentage of the volume, because they were honkin' great cubes to start with, but don't try to pretend that LCDs in boxes come to the same size as (or even remotely comparable to) equivalent-viewing-size CRTs in boxes.
by 348512469721 | 2026-01-08 19:33:34+00:00
> It also can't do rust really well

I have not had this experience at all. It often doesn't get it right on the first pass, yes, but the advantage with Rust vibecoding is that if you give it a rule to "Always run cargo check before you think you're finished" then it will go back and fix whatever it missed on the first pass. What I find particularly valuable is that the compiler forces it to handle all cases like match arms or errors. I find that it often misses edge cases when writing typescript, and I believe that the relative leniency of the typescript compiler is why.

In a similar vein, it is quite good at writing macros (or at least, quite good given how difficult this otherwise is). You often have to cajole it into not hardcoding features into the macro, but since macros resolve at compile time they're quite well-suited for an LLM workflow as most potential bugs will be apparent before the user needs to test. I also think that the biggest hurdle of writing macros to humans is the cryptic compiler errors, but I can imagine that since LLMs have a lot of information about compilers and syntax parsing in their training corpus, they have an easier time with this than the median programmer. I'm sure an actual compiler engineer would be far better than the LLM, but I am not that guy (nor can I afford one) so I'm quite happy to use LLMs here.

For context, I am purely a webdev. I can't speak for how well LLMs fare at anything other than writing SQL, hooking up to REST APIs, React frontend, and macros. With the exception of macros, these are all problems that have been solved a million times thus are more boilerplate than novelty, so I think it is entirely plausible that they're very poor for different domains of programming despite my experiences with them.
by Anamon | 2026-01-08 19:33:47+00:00
My problem is that I just can't get it to take up any of the flavour. I can marinate it for days, and the marinade will still just be a superficial layer on top of a piece of tofu which, itself, always remains completely unfazed and tasteless.

It's not a problem for saucy dishes like a curry, but even experimenting with friends and borderline "molecular cuisine" techniques I have never once managed to flavour tofu itself :(
by perching_aix | 2026-01-08 19:34:05+00:00
I gave this a skim and a keyword search. Note that I'm not familiar with the matter.

The article claims that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar that kicked off in 2017 has been substantively fueled by Facebook propaganda efforts, with strong links to Myanmar's own "security forces" (military) (who are performing this ethnic cleansing). The same military that to my understanding has long been in de facto control of the country.

> it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil

In contrast then, you seem to allege that this was actually a foreign interference by the CIA? Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?

Because if I'm not, I fail to see how what you linked supports that at all. Even your mention of deepfakes seem very questionable, as those haven't been a thing until late 2017, by which point this cleansing effort was already long underway.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 19:34:05+00:00
Forbes asking me to pay

Elevate Your Journey
Invest in your success with unlimited access to trusted, in-depth journalism for less than $1/week. Become a member today to continue.

here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works

https://web.archive.org/web/20250301050041/https://www.forbe...

Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
by kenjackson | 2026-01-08 19:34:11+00:00
I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local client NPUs?
by wat10000 | 2026-01-08 19:34:15+00:00
I don't know where "1 unit" comes from, but the Portion menu lists 1 unit as 52g, and 0.5 breast as 86g. So 1 unit is about one third of one. Using the numbers on that site, you'd need 2-2.7 average skinless breasts to reach the target 108-146g, which is a lot more reasonable. And that assumes there's zero other protein being consumed.

I hope your numbers were more accurate when you determined you were struggling with hitting targets....
by 8note | 2026-01-08 19:34:17+00:00
id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.

if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.

security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.

there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so
by jmward01 | 2026-01-08 19:34:19+00:00
This is also related to GH bug [1] and HN post [2]

In that I pointed out that they are sending data back that shouldn't be and is not in compliance with their stated data usage policy [3]. Specifically, message ids which have no purpose other than to link surveys to chat history and this was being sent even when disabled (at the time. I haven't dug into the code since).

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8036
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838297
[3] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage
by wrl | 2026-01-08 19:34:29+00:00
> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could do with low effort.

I read this post yesterday and this specific example kept coming back to me because something about it just didn't sit right. And I finally figured it out: Glancing at the alert box (or the browser-provided "do you want to navigate away from this page" modal) and considering the text that I had entered takes... less than 5 seconds.

Sure, 5 seconds here and there adds up over the course of a day, but I really feel like this example is grasping at straws.
by danaris | 2026-01-08 19:34:35+00:00
...No, even the CRT TV my parents picked up off the side of the road in about 2001 was something like 30" diagonal.

They got much bigger than that.

> That Trinitron isn't a tv is it,

You're just going to assume that? There were absolutely Trinitron TVs.

If there's anyone being uncharitable here, it's you.
by codyb | 2026-01-08 19:34:36+00:00
If their new platform reduces inference token cost by 10x, does that play well or not well with the recently updated GPU deprecation schedules companies have been playing with to reduce projected cost outlays?

For context, my understanding is that companies have recently moved to mark their expected GPU deprecation cycles from 3 years to as high as 6 which has huge impacts on projected expenditures.

I wonder what the step was for the Blackwell platform from the previous. Is this slower which might indicate that the slower deprecation cycle is warranted, or faster?
by dannersy | 2026-01-08 19:34:40+00:00
Every time this is what I'm told. The difference between learning how to Google properly and then the amount of hoops and in-depth understanding you need to get something useful out of these supposedly revolutionary tools is absurd. I am pretty tired of people trying to convince me that AI, and very specifically generative AI, is the great thing they say it is.

It is also a red flag to see anyone refer to these tools as intelligence as it seems the marketing of calling this "AI" has finally sewn its way into our discourse that even tech forums think the prediction machine is intelligent.
by pixelready | 2026-01-08 19:35:11+00:00
Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…

Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-08 19:36:01+00:00
>I'm half joking and half serious, is he intentionally trying to confuse customers?

He is sharing some of the savings from tax evasion with the customer.

I do not know if he can accept electronic payments from a debit card on the phone. I presume Zelle/Venmo is simpler than figuring out a system to separate debit cards and credit cards.

>just that it's exceedingly rare

Discounts for non credit card payment methods (such as ACH/debit card/Zelle/Venmo/paper cash) seem more and more common to me. Bigger businesses likely won't engage in tax evasion allowing for bigger discounts for paper cash, but fewer and fewer of my expenses are worth paying with a credit card.
by jrochkind1 | 2026-01-08 19:36:26+00:00
I remember reading about how Venezuela had an internet blackout preceding US attack, presumably the blackout was an attack by US "cyber". Ah, here we are. https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/us-cyber-attack-on-venezue...

The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?