MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EddieRingle | 2026-01-31 03:27:27+00:00
I didn't get as far as experiencing their billing system; I decided to finally look into Claude recently and discovered that their pricing page's content area was completely blank. It loads on my phone if I'm off WiFi, so I assume my PiHole is blocking something there. That being said, if anyone at Anthropic is reading this, I'm primarily an Android dev but if you'd like to hire me to write a simple static HTML page just like I taught myself back when I was in elementary school, I think it could significantly improve your conversion rates or whatever, and I've been unable to even get an interview anywhere for the past 7 months so I really think we'd be helping each other out.

(Suffice to say I passed on Claude/Claude Code for the time being.)
by sdwr | 2026-01-31 03:28:27+00:00
I think the idea is that nobody will be using CC in 5 years. If anthropic loses, nobody will use it. If anthropic wins, still nobody will use it! The value is in the model solving problems, and CC is just the hacky vessel for that, not the end goal. If they believe in themselves, polishing the product is a waste of time.
by kelnos | 2026-01-31 03:28:35+00:00
It's a privilege pretty much anyone can get if they have a clean record, pay the fee, and do the interview.

Taking it away can mean a much longer wait returning to the US. And while that certainly isn't an earth-shattering problem that is going to cost people their lives or general freedom, it is absolutely unconstitutional for the government to retaliate against someone for exercising their constitutional rights.

The idea that you can be so dismissive about that concept is a bit chilling, to be honest.
by hedora | 2026-01-31 03:28:44+00:00
Historically, this has backfired in the US because we have low turnout elections.

The people whose votes are being blocked get pissed and get off the couch on election day.

The groups that would normally support the side that’s loudly suppressing the vote lose enthusiasm, and are less likely to bother voting.

Hopefully, we’ll see the biggest example of this effect in recent memory this November.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-01-31 03:28:54+00:00
Trusted Traveller programs are a privilege and not a constitutionally protected entitlement. They can be revoked at any time for any reason and you don't get your money back. What law are you talking about? Show us where in the Constitution it says you're entitled to cut in line at the airport.

We're now in the Find Out phase of "Let's fuck around with DHS and see if they take us off their club's VIP list".
by landr0id | 2026-01-31 03:28:56+00:00
I mean to be fair, there's really no guarantee that something in the phone's hardware is neither sending nor receiving (and processing) signals. I agree though that if you're worried about being tracked or attacked, in most scenarios you're better off just not having the phone on your person.

If you for some reason do need one, it's important to know when you put a modern iPhone in airplane mode it disables cellular but leaves WiFi/Bluetooth enabled. When you disable WiFi/Bluetooth it just disconnects from the devices for a day, but doesn't actually fully disable these fully. You can verify by going into the settings app and seeing that the radios are still toggled on.

And even if you do _that_, I have no idea how the software actually disables the hardware, but it may not physically power off the chip.
by hn_acker | 2026-01-31 03:29:15+00:00
The mainstream media uncritically makes Homan's claims of de-escalation their entire headlines [1], while conveniently forgetting his thinly veiled threats over the past year [2].

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/30/tom-homan-to-minneapolis...

[2] https://bsky.app/profile/radleybalko.bsky.social/post/3mdl4b...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 03:30:41+00:00
Yes. So are raiding a WaPo journalist’s home, arresting observers / recorders of ICE activity, threatening to arrest teachers for speech, forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms, or shooting a civilian who is legally carrying a firearm at a protest, etc. These are all positions of Trump or key members of his administration.

It’s clear the constitution is something in their way, not something they respect. By violating it a little bit each day, it’ll lose meaning and half the country will be primed to replace it.
by Terretta | 2026-01-31 03:30:43+00:00
Right, the airplane icon does not necessarily.

Settings for WiFi, turn off; settings for Bluetooth, turn off; does turn them off.

This change was the result of years of supporting people meaning to turn it off in one place or one day, then confused it didn't work at home or the next day.

So now airplane mode is a conditional off (the state machine across cellular, wifi, and bluetooth is pretty decent at doing a reasonable set of toggles), while the settings are off off.

The near field stuff seems to remain available; full shutdown turns that off too.
by musicale | 2026-01-31 03:31:05+00:00
> Very small hobby-entrepreneur computer makers were also losers; the new testing and certification requirements to show compliance with the standard posed a fixed cost on every computer model released, regardless of how many were sold, favoring economies of scale.

Although things turned out well for Apple (and for IBM, Commodore, and Radio Shack, for a while at least), it probably narrowed the playing field and made the industry less interesting.

CP/M probably suffered as well as a platform: although it could technically run (with appropriate hardware and software kits) on Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack and (for CP/M-86) IBM PCs, it was not the primary platform for any of them. DOS, generally MS-DOS, took its place on PC until it was replaced/obsoleted (including DR DOS etc.) by Microsoft Windows.
by kulahan | 2026-01-31 03:31:42+00:00
No, my comment is implying that if you enjoy the relative freedom of writing software in new and interesting and novel ways, you probably will not enjoy copy-pasting buildings or bridges or whatever again and again and again.

People can easily die due to software, and there are still few (any?) regulations in almost every single industry, plus no way to assign accountability. If a bridge collapses, it's pretty simple to figure out whose fault it is.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-31 03:31:47+00:00
Indeed, you misunderstood my comment. It says:

(1) Many people believe they can sell jewelry for something approximating the purchase price;

(2) This belief is false;

(3) But the false belief that the money they are spending is recoverable makes those people willing to pay more for jewelry, pushing up the price of jewelry compared to what it would be if people knew they couldn't resell it effectively.
by chihuahua | 2026-01-31 03:32:51+00:00
He is a pretty interesting case. According to the book "Empire of AI" about OpenAI, he lies constantly, even about things that are too trivial to matter. So it may be part of some compulsive behavior.

And when two people want different things from him, he "resolves" the conflict by agreeing with each of them separately, and then each assumes they got what they wanted, until they talk to the other person and find out that nothing was resolved.

Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-31 03:33:21+00:00
> That's not the point: the point is America did this twice. The world is not going to deal with America radically flip flopping every policy position every 4 years, and escalating that every time.

I’ll admit, I’m becoming confused about the point of our back-and-forth.

All I’m trying to express is that probably by the end of 2026, and definitely by 2028, the people who are trying to enact reactionary change (Stephen Miller, PayPal Mafia, Heritage Foundation, etc.) will have to adjust their strategy. They are losing their charismatic leader, if not because of constitutional limits on presidential terms, then by his very obvious reduced vigor (he will not be able to do 100 rallies in a calendar year again).

On the world stage, yes, America has stumbled. Maybe even worse, some international folks are realizing that the America that they thought existed was just a Hollywood mirage, and that we were always one recession and a few thousand votes in Florida from becoming a global pariah.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-31 03:33:51+00:00
Idk about this news specifically but oracle cds prices are moving. The below link says 30k layoffs may hit Oracle which I feel is a bit hyperbolic so this article may not be grounded in reality.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/oracle_td_cowen_note/

Edit: Another src
https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-3...
by imiric | 2026-01-31 03:34:04+00:00
GitHub stars are not a reliable metric[1]. Neither is engagement on social media, which is ridden with bots. It would be safe to assume that a project promoting bots is also using them to appear popular.

This whole thing is a classic pump and dump scheme, which this technology has made easier and more accessible than ever. I wouldn't be surprised if the malware authors are the same people behind these projects.

[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-31-milli...
by bahmboo | 2026-01-31 03:34:09+00:00
You are conflating so many things. I was speaking about the "government" (there are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of them) regulating battery standards for power tools - you address none of that. Yes I made a broad statement about government micromanaging which I stick by even as a staunch pro-regulation power to the people type of person.

Even if the EU (a specific government entity) hadn't stepped in over the USB C thing it would have been figured out eventually we just didn't want to wait.

I don't see how you can use AT&T as an example for your point. AT&T was our US government forcing us under threat of state violence to use what technology they deemed was allowed.
by bri3d | 2026-01-31 03:34:38+00:00
The argument, if there is one, would probably be that following ICE was a violation of an immigration procedure (note that the person who had their GE revoked doesn’t claim they attended a protest, but rather that they were following ICE and got their picture taken). Given what I’ve seen of GE revocations historically, though, it’s equally likely to have been something like “you lived with a felon” or “unpaid traffic ticket became a warrant” or “family member was accused but never convicted of an obscure crime.”

There’s always been a pretty clear mantra that GE is a privilege not a right and that it’s always been an arbitrary and capricious system.

In some ways I think maintaining GE is probably as hard or harder than maintaining a low level (ie Secret) security clearance; it seems to be based on similar databases and discretion with less transparency, human touch, or opportunity to appeal.

They are at least (according to the 9th circuit) supposed to disclose why the GE was revoked though: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/05/22/2...
by jmyeet | 2026-01-31 03:35:52+00:00
Oh, sweet summer child. The Constitution isn't a magical defense against tyranny. It's a piece of paper. Nine political actors are in charge of its interpretation and they're not above completely inventing new parts to it. The presidential immunity decision will go down in history up there with the Dred Scott decision and it's particularly ironic because it makes the president an unaccountable monarch in a country that revolted against monarchy.

Let me give you a good analogy for this particular issue: anti-BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) legislation.

40+ years ago public pressure to mount against apartheid South Africa and it was incredibly successful as a global movement that culminated in toppling the regime.

You know who didn't like BDS? Israel, who interestingly was also a close of South Africa at the time. Why? Because it realized it was susceptible to the same pressure and was (and is) an apartheid state.

So a deep lobbying effort began to pass various bills to ban BDS movements. Roughly 35-38 states have so-called anti-BDS laws. In Texas, for example, you cannot be a public teacher without signing a contract agreeing to never boycott the state of Israel [1].

Is this a clear violation of free speech? Of course it is. Remember that the Fthe First Amendment is a restriction on the government restricting speech and anti-BDS legislation clearly does that.

So why is it still legal? Because courts have essentially decided that anti-BDS laws block commerce not speech and that's not a protected activity. Or rather there's (apparently) no way to determine speech from commerce.

See what I mean when I say the constitution doesn't mean as much as you think it does?

Remember too that this is the same country whose courts ruled that a Colorado law banning discrimination of same sex couples was unconstitutional because it violated the "rights" of someone for a hypothetical cake nobody asked them to make and a hypothetical website business that didn't exist making a hypothetical business nobody asked for.

So how's that relevant here? Because I can easily see the courts ruling this way: Global Entry is travel. Removing you doesn't ban your movement or restrict your speech. You can still travel to and from the country and interstate. You just have to go in the longer TSA line. Therefore it's not a restriction on speech.

[1]: https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/federal-teacher-striking/
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-31 03:35:55+00:00
In the technical sense I mentioned (physical time as the order of changes) it absolutely does have the concept of now, past, and present, it's just different from yours (2024, 2026, ...), and in your time projection they only exist during inference. And the entire autoregressive process and any result storage serve as a memory that preserves the continuity of their time. LLMs are just not very good at ordering and many other things in general.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2026-01-31 03:35:57+00:00
>and you have to create constant pressure to ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large

I have no idea if this is true (I've asked economists-in-training, they say they'll get back to me), but I've read that the huge increases in tax rates on high income was less to generate revenue (tho more revenue was certainly a need - there was also a growing focus on growing the number of people who paid taxes, which prior had been quite small), but more to ensure profits were not realized and instead kept invested in the economy and the war machine.

A kind of practical "hodl" to keep the wartime economy stock with reinvestment - or really to discourage removing money from industrial investment - to benefit the war-time economy.

Would like links to things to learn more about this line of reasoning.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-31 03:37:02+00:00
However the conspiracy-theory nutters have done a really good job convincing people in the US that 15-minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, "cities", are some plot by George Soros to... actually I have no idea what sort of crazy is being invoked this time, but it seems to have worked, generating enough opposition to liveable cities to make it a real uphill battle to implement them.
by belviewreview | 2026-01-31 03:37:56+00:00
Actually for most trucking batteries are already practical. Most trucks travel only one or two hundred miles a day, like doing deliveries or going from a port to a warehouse, or a warehouse to a location like a factory or store. And even long-range trucking is mostly with loads that are volume constrained, not weight, so the additional weight of batteries is not a big problem. The big advantage of batteries is lower cost per mile
by 7thpower | 2026-01-31 03:38:59+00:00
They have a robust KYC that appears to serve, at least in large part, as a way to stay off the shit list of companies with the resources to pursue recourse.

Source: went through that process, ended up going a different route. The rep was refreshingly transparent about where they get the data, why the have the kyc process (aside from regulatory compliance).

Ended up going with a different provider who has been cheaper and very reliable, so no complaints.
by sfink | 2026-01-31 03:39:50+00:00
>> the symbolic approach to modeling the world is fundamentally misguided.
> but how did you arrive at this conclusion? Why are you certain that symbolic modeling (of some sort, some subset thereof, etc) isn't what ML models are approximating?

I'm not the poster, but my answer would be because symbolic manipulation is way too expensive. Parallelizing it helps, but long dependency chains are inherent to formal logic. And if a long chain is required, it will always be under attack by a cheaper approximation that only gets 90% of the cases right—so such chains are always going to be brittle.

(Separately, I think that the evidence against humans using symbolic manipulation in everyday life, and the evidence for error-prone but efficient approximations and sloppy methods, is mounting and already overwhelming. But that's probably a controversial take, and the above argument doesn't depend on it.)
by jordanb | 2026-01-31 03:40:19+00:00
Back then he had a PR firm working for him, getting him cameos and good press. But in 2020 he fired them deciding that his own "radically awesome" personality doesn't need any filtering.

Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-31 03:41:06+00:00
Not my downvote, but the least devastating tax is only on commerce, and it has to be at insignificant levels to keep from resuting in undue damage.

Taxing wealth, property, wage income, or just plain existence has always sapped productivity like few other things.

It's foolish to try and tax "wealth" when you should instead be taxing the creation of wealth as it's in progress and nothing else. When actual ongoing business operations are going forward is the only time anybody can truly afford to pay any significant tax at all. Even if they are billionaires, and I say this as someone at the complete opposite end of the spectrum.

Ordinary wage income doesn't even make sense to tax whatsoever when you want max productivity, unless income is excessive enough to reach so far above average that greater capitalist profits can be earned on the surplus. Then maybe more than just those gains should be taxed.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-31 03:41:08+00:00
Everything is theater if one is cynical enough. One can very obviously find value in blocking the camera, even if other sensors remain active.

That said, I do see merit to flagging these. Related surprises are usually e.g. speakers being possible to use as microphones, and accelerometer data being possible to use for location tracking in lieu of GPS / any kind of radio, just not remotely & live ofc.
by BloodyIron | 2026-01-31 03:41:13+00:00
Consider the information can be used for more than just identifying you... if you have sufficient quality biometrics they can be used to _impersonate_ you, including "fingering" you for things you didn't do. Police forces have "planted" evidence for decades now, biometrics can be just another thing that can be planted. The problem is, you can't fight it, because it's absolutely unique to you (with some extreme exceptions).

This is one of _many_ reasons why biometrics need to be a personal civil liberty. The individual must have the right to say "no" to _any_ "requirement" for giving up biometric data, unless they are convicted as a criminal (IMO). Because once you deliver that information, you _cannot_ trust any other party _to actually do what they say will do and destroy said data_, and that's not even considering just poor storage of said data.

Once your biometrics are in a database, you're fucked *for life* because it's completely unrealistic to have it destroyed with absolute certainty. This needs to be a *global human right*, as hard as those are to come by still.
by IhateAI | 2026-01-31 03:41:47+00:00
Its probably more of a me "problem". But I'm sure there are plenty of others that share my sentiment. It doesn't really have anything to do with it being familiar, familiar can be good, but what I'm talking about is a familiar ugliness and lack of intention.

The Stripe or Shopify checkout is familiar, but it only became familiar because it was well designed and people wanted to keep using it.

Also when its obvious someone used an LLM, it bleeds into my overall opinion of the product whether the product is good or not. I assume less effort was put into the project, which is probably a fair assumption.
by hunter-gatherer | 2026-01-31 03:41:48+00:00
I came here to say what you did. I used to work in three letter agencies and took part in testing faraday bags for clandestine operators. Something about faraday bags that most people don't know is that they have a shorter life than you would think. As they move around and bend, they start to "leak" more RF. WaitWaitWha is also correct that in a pinch, some aluminum foil works pretty well if you're careful. The service will be so bad, that the phone won't likely get packets out or in. Just be thorough when doing it.

Also, I worked with clandestine people and for most of them had threat models more relaxed than a lot of people on HN. What are you all up to???
by benatkin | 2026-01-31 03:42:39+00:00
> betting actual money on those claims

Insurance companies can let marketing influence rates to some degree, with programs that tend to be tacked on after the initial rate is set. This self driving car program sounds an awful lot like safe driver programs like GEICO Clean Driving Record, State Farm Good Driver Discount, and Progressive Safe Driver, Progressive Snapshot, and Allstate Drivewise. The risk assessment seems to be less thorough than the general underwriting process, and to fall within some sort of risk margin, so to me it seems gimmicky and not a true innovation at this point.
by defrost | 2026-01-31 03:43:55+00:00
Sadly paywalled and [dead] on HN, still:

The Department of Justice Ignores Court Orders Because It Knows It Can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832063

https://www.americanmuckrakers.com/p/the-department-of-justi...

points out a current trend.
by sfink | 2026-01-31 03:44:36+00:00
I'd like to congratulate you on writing a wall of text that gave off all the signals of being written by a conspiracy theorist or crank or someone off their meds, yet also such that when I bothered to read it, I found it to be completely level-headed. Nothing you claimed felt the least bit outrageous to me. I actually only read it because it looked like it was going to be deliciously unhinged ravings.
by danparsonson | 2026-01-31 03:44:50+00:00
Wholeheartedly (or maybe downheartedly?) agree with this - sometimes I try to say the simplest things and people just stare at me like I'm speaking Martian. Which I suppose I might as well be! One of my big problems is implicit use of tones for things like expressing uncertainty; that's a very difficult habit to get out of.
by teunispeters | 2026-01-31 03:44:54+00:00
eh, 30cm of broken ragged ice, a light layer of snow over top ... that's a Saskatoon Saskatchewan winter road.

so a LOT worse. heck the car does not handle it very well.

the wind makes it worse for clothing too, mind I have driven a jeep without a windshield or roof at -40C and that was more cold than I ever want to repeat. It was rather worse than working out in a field with survey gear at -55C and white out winds...