MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2026-01-25 21:08:48+00:00
That questionable-sounding stunt by the media outlet wasn't comparable: Google/Alphabet knows much more about individuals than addresses, salary, and political donations.

Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.

Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.

But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.

We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.
by giantrobot | 2026-01-25 21:08:55+00:00
> The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed

I wouldn't say Zip didn't catch on, there were a few years where Zip drives were pretty ubiquitous. MD Data had a price problem. The drives were expensive ($500+) and the disks were nearly $30 IIRC. Meanwhile a Zip drives and disks were half that or less.

On the whole they just did not offer enough storage over competitors to justify their price. When CD writers got cheap they were better in almost every way.
by torginus | 2026-01-25 21:09:31+00:00
I started programming on DOS - I remember how amazing was that you basically almost talked to hardware directly, there was very little restriction on what you could do, and the OS (which imo was much more akin to a set of libraries) provided very little abstraction for you.

Then I moved to Windows, and Linux. Each had its own idiosyncrasies, like how everything is a file on Linux, and you're supposed to write programs by chaining existing executables together, or on the desktop, both Win32 and X11 started out with their own versions of UI elements, so XWindow or Win32 would know about where a 'button' was, and the OS was responsible for event handling and drawing stuff.

Eventually both Windows and Linux programs moved to a model where the OS just gave you the window as a drawing surface, and you were supposed to fill it.

Similarly, all other OS supplied abstractions slowly fell out of use beyond the bare minimum.

Considering this, I wonder if it's time to design a new, much lower level abstraction, for file systems in this case, this would be a way to mmap an entire directory into the process space, where each file would be a struct, whicha had a list of pointers for the pages on the disk, and each directory would be a list of such entries, again stored in some data structure you could access, synchronizing reads/writes would be orechestrated by the kernel somehow (I'm thinking locking/unlocking pages being written to).

So that way there'd be no difference between traversing an in-memory data structure and reading the disk.

I know this approach isnt super compatible with the async/await style of I/O, however I'm not 100% convinced that's the correct approach either (disk paging is a fundamental feature of all OSes, yet is absolutely inexpressible in programming terms)
by protastus | 2026-01-25 21:11:00+00:00
The Trump administration has gone so far down the path of fascism and crime that I'm convinced they don't simply want to be in power indefinitely -- they need it. Otherwise, the moment a law-abiding president gets elected, there will be criminal charges against all involved. And there's no statute of limitations for murder.

I believe this country will need massive investigations and criminal trials to heal. I am concerned with what happens in between, but this is reality as I see it.
by pmw | 2026-01-25 21:11:12+00:00
I am a fan of Rackspace Spot, and use it personally. It started out being a pure play Kubernetes cluster provider, but recently they added support for VMs.

I was so impressed by its pricing and efforts at transparency that it motivated me to learn Kubernetes. I finally achieved the "cattle, not pets" nirvana. My Kubernetes cluster running a demo service costs me $14/month: $4/month for the spot instance, $10/month for the load balancer, and $free Kubernetes control plane (non-redundant; not intended for production). $14/month is an amazing value, as long as you know the limitations.

Although this article greatly emphasizes Rackspace's market-based prices, they do have some price controls. First, they have a reserve (floor) price on their compute. In their older data centers, it's $0.001/hr ($1/mo), while in their newer data centers it's 10x higher: $0.01/hr ($7/mo). Second, their bidding UI supports bids only in increments of $0.005/hr, so you actually can't bid $0.001: $0.005/hr ($4/mo) is the lowest supported. If everyone bids $0.005/hr to start, then is $0.001/hr even achievable as a market-clearing price?

Secondly, their pricing is not as sweet on everything else beyond spot compute. Load balancers are $10/mo each. On-demand instances are comparable to on-demand pricing in other cloud providers. (A 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM instance in the older data center costs $27/mo; almost equal to AWS t4g EC2 instance with the same vCPU/RAM combo.)

Today I run a POC web service on Rackspace Spot, and I pay $14/month; this is the lowest achievable price on Rackspace Spot, and it is not production-quality.

If you run a production web service, your costs grow to $40/mo (redundant Kubernetes control plane) + $27/mo (on-demand cheapest instance) + $10/mo (load balancer) = $77/mo at a minimum. You'll also be paying for storage, but I don't include that. Spot instances don't even play a role here.

Is that still a great value compared to other providers? I am not sure. If it is, then Rackspace Spot marketing is focusing on the wrong thing. And if it's not a great value anymore, then it makes sense only if your workload is heavily dependent on interruptible compute.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-01-25 21:11:50+00:00
I’m looking at the site and right at the beginning it says:

> Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.

Which part of these required a new protocol and couldn’t be built before @at existed? Seems to me we’re reinventing the wheel for I’m not entirely sure which benefit. But maybe someone who’s more into this part of the web can educate me on this.
by mingus88 | 2026-01-25 21:12:49+00:00
Agreed. If this were about enforcing immigration law, they would first focus on red states with huge immigrant populations, where they would have full cooperation from the local government and citizens who overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Those supporters who care about enforcing immigration laws would directly benefit.

This is obviously violence directed at Minnesota, who is led by a political opponent. It’s capital F Fascism and everyone on the right has grandfathers that are ashamed of them.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-25 21:14:20+00:00
> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.

No, I think you're right.

I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.

There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.

I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.

Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"
by cesarb | 2026-01-25 21:14:40+00:00
> but then it sits there on an SD card in the camera. I have to boot a desktop, hope the USB connection works today [...] OR open the camera, take out th SD card [...]

Or open the app on your smartphone (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.canon.ic...), connect to the camera through WiFi, and copy the photos directly.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-25 21:15:27+00:00
> Though conceivably the break was very small and a train impacting the slightly lifted rail just caused a good chunk of it to explode.

The crown (top) of the rail seems to be missing after the gap. The crown-less section then continues ~3 meters before it disappears behind the investigator on the left. IDK what that might indicate.

ref pic: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/ecb4/live/53924...
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-25 21:16:31+00:00
If mRNA vaccines are viewed with skepticism, how will actual gene editing be viewed?

Shoot, who am I kidding, the COVID vaccine "skepticism" was entirely tribal. Republicans needed a pure, unblemished Trump, so they couldn't acknowledge the seriousness of COVID, or even it's existence. Trump clearly botched the beginning of the pandemic. Thus, the mRNA COVID vaccine has to be rejected.
by zahlman | 2026-01-25 21:16:48+00:00
Including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750452 , which also was flagged?

Can you please explain to me how it violates HN guidelines in any way? Or how any of it is untrue? For example, do you disagree that 8 U.S. Code § 1357, as cited, empowers ICE to arrest US citizens without a warrant in specific circumstances, specifically relating to obstructing them from doing their original job? Do you disagree that ICE are, contra the public claims of Walz and Frey, LEO? Did you see my submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46596055, and can you articulate a problem with it?

Including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749406 , in which I explicitly acknowledged that I do not think this particular shooting was justified?

I already explained repeatedly: I responded hastily based on priors, and then responded poorly to someone who insulted me.

When I initially said:

> All this stuff about permit cards, the victim's lack of criminal history, etc. is irrelevant. It is not connected to the motivation for the shooting. There is nothing to establish that the shooting was "solely for" that possession, and LEO denies that claim. There is no plausible universe in which the officer says "please show me the permit for that weapon", Pretti says "I don't have it", and the officer shoots. But that's the narrative you appear to be trying to push.

Do you think any of that is incorrect? Which part specifically, and why?

And, to be clear, you were okay with me being called a "nazi sympathizer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754655)?

I just vouched for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748563 , which was flagged and killed. Do you think it violates HN guidelines? How exactly? Because I legitimately don't understand.
by sublinear | 2026-01-25 21:16:56+00:00
It's interesting to read this since the signals of demise are so different in the broader corporate world.

Vimeo sounds like it would have been better off as the basis for a product or service division of a much larger business, not undiversified and standing alone competing with social media. Why was that not the obvious play to follow when they saw Google buying YouTube? Seems like a lot of opportunities passed Vimeo by over the decades.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-01-25 21:17:33+00:00
Is this for just one or several OnePlus models?

If so, is this 'fuse' per-planned in the hardware? My understanding is cell phones take 12 to 24 months from design to market. so, initial deployment of the model where this OS can trigger the 'fuse' less one year is how far back the company decided to be ready to do this?
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-25 21:18:17+00:00
> No one considers eugenics science.

No one considers eugenics science NOW, but it was considered science back then and we're commenting on modern scientific studies that would be adopted wholesale by the eugenics scientists of the time.

It doesn't matter what you call it, if it walks like eugenics, if talks like eugenics it is eugenics even if that word was thrown out as politically inconvenient. Go back to my first comment in this thread and understand it in this light.

> Just because some guy in the 1800s said it was science doesn't make it so.

It continued well into 1900's up until WW2 and it was a social theory as scientific as any other at the time, otherwise it would not be used for justification of government policies.
by mlyle | 2026-01-25 21:18:17+00:00
I have thought about this a little more, and looked into things. Since NASA used the 360/91, and had a lot of 360's and 7900's... all of NASA's 60's computing couldn't quite fit into a single 486DX-25. You'd be more like 486DX2-100 era to replace everything comfortably, and you'd want a lot of RAM-- like 16MB.

It looks like NASA had 5 360/75's plus a 360/91 by the end, plus a few other computers.

The biggest 360/75's (I don't know that NASA had the highest spec model for all 5) were probably roughly 1/10th of a 486-100 plus 1 megabyte of RAM. The 360/91 that they had at the end was maybe 1/3rd of a 486-100 plus up to 6 megabytes of RAM.

Those computers alone would be about 85% of a 486-100. Everything else was comparatively small. And, of course, you need to include the benefits from getting results on individual jobs much faster, even if sustained max throughput is about the same. So all of NASA, by the late 60's, probably fits into one relatively large 486DX4-100.

Incidentally, one random bit of my family lore; my dad was an IBM man and knew a lot about 360's and OS/360. He received a call one evening from NASA during Apollo 13 asking for advice about how they could get a little bit more out of their machines. My mom was miffed about dinner being interrupted until she understood why :D
by scbzzzzz | 2026-01-25 21:18:58+00:00
What do OnePlus gain from this? Can someone explain me what are the advantages of OnePlus doing all this?
A failed update resulting in motherboard replacement? More money, more shareholders are happy?

I still sometimes ponder if oneplus green line fiasco is a failed hardware fuse type thing that got accidentally triggered during software update. (Insert I can't prove meme here).
by lvspiff | 2026-01-25 21:19:04+00:00
That doesnt mean they are illegal right off the bat - there is no reasonable way to filter out the "illegal" members of the roles and essentially making it so the DOJ has a list of people who they can cross reference with expiring status and the moment the clock strikes midnight and their status changes they can get picked up. They should not have all those records for fishing expedititions.
Show HN: Sentinel – Zero-trust governance for AI Agents
by azdhril | 2026-01-25 21:19:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a software engineer and I’ve been building agentic workflows lately. Like many of you, I got concerned about giving LLMs "write access" to tools. Whether it's a payment API, a database deletion, or a simple email send, the risk of a hallucination causing a $5k mistake is real.

I wanted a way to keep a human in the loop without rewriting my entire agent logic every time. So I built Sentinel.

It’s a lightweight Python layer that wraps any tool/function. The key principles I focused on:

Fail-secure by default: If the rules engine or the network fails, the action is blocked. Most systems fail-open, which is a nightmare for security.

Zero-trust Decorator: You just add @protect to your functions. It’s agnostic to the framework (works with LangChain, CrewAI, or raw OpenAI calls).

Semantic Anomaly Detection: Beyond static JSON rules (like "max $100"), it uses a Z-score analysis of historical audit logs to flag unusual behavior—like an agent suddenly trying to call a function 100 times in a minute.

Context-Aware Approvals: The approver sees exactly what the AI saw (the state before the action) to make an informed decision.

It’s open source (MIT) and just launched on PyPI: pip install agentic-sentinel

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the "Fail-secure" approach and how you guys are currently handling AI tool governance in production. I'm here to answer any questions!

Repo: https://github.com/azdhril/Sentinel
by yieldcrv | 2026-01-25 21:19:17+00:00
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything

very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.

all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-25 21:19:49+00:00
One interesting point about the volume of data that might be available about any individual is that law enforcement will only look for data points that suit their agenda.

They won't be searching for counter evidence. It won't even cross their minds to do so.

You're on record saying one thing one time that was vanilla at the time but is now ultra spicy (possibly even because the definition of words can change and context is likely lost) then you'll be a result in their search and you'll go on their list.

(This is based on my anecdotal experience of having my house raided and the police didn't even know to expect there to be children in the house; children who were both over ten years old and going to school and therefore easily searchable in their systems; we hadn't moved house since 15 years prior, so there was no question of mixing up an identity. The police requested a warrant, and a fucking judge even signed it, based on a single data point: an IP address given to them by a third party internet monitoring company.)

Keep your shit locked down, law enforcement are just as bad at their jobs as any other Joe Clockwatcher. In fact they're often worse because their incentive structure leans heavily towards successful prosecution.

Sorry for the rant.
by tripdout | 2026-01-25 21:20:16+00:00
> When the device powers on, the Primary Boot Loader in the processor's ROM loads and verifies the eXtensible Boot Loader (XBL). XBL reads the current anti-rollback version from the Qfprom fuses and compares it against the firmware's embedded version number. If the firmware version is lower than the fuse value, boot is rejected. When newer firmware successfully boots, the bootloader issues commands through Qualcomm's TrustZone to blow additional fuses, permanently recording the new minimum version

What exactly is it comparing? What is the “firmware embedded version number”? With an unlocked bootloader you can flash boot and super (system, vendor, etc) partitions, but I must be missing something because it seems like this would be bypassable.

It does say

> Custom ROMs package firmware components from the stock firmware they were built against. If a user's device has been updated to a fused firmware version & they flash a custom ROM built against older firmware, the anti-rollback mechanism triggers immediately.

and I know custom ROMs will often say “make sure you flash stock version x.y beforehand” to ensure you’re on the right firmware, but I’m not sure what partitions that actually refers to (and it’s not the same as vendor blobs), or how much work it is to either build a custom ROM against a newer firmware or patch the (hundreds of) vendor blobs.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-25 21:20:32+00:00
And notably, before any further disagreement pops up the other dissenting judges literally said as much. The relevant quote:

"When he uses his official powers in any way, under
the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from
criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official
power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one
day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as
bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the
majority’s message today."
by smusamashah | 2026-01-25 21:20:54+00:00
It was "cognitive shuffling". While eyes closed, pick a 5-6 letter word (like Blanket), then starting from first letter start making words while visualising each briefly (baloon, bed, bicycle, banana and so on). When first letter is fully exhausted for you, move to next one and do the same.

From what I read and have experienced, I rarely reach second letter. This helped my wife too.

There was another variation where you pick one category (fruits, cities etc) then make words starting from A to Z. Then move to next category. This one requires more mental work for me therefore I haven't tried it yet.

If either works for you, please update :)
by terminalshort | 2026-01-25 21:21:07+00:00
That's not science. The actual study of genetic inheritance is science. Eugenics is just saying "hey, that means we can breed humans like any other animal." And forced sterilization is an implementation detail that isn't even inherent in the concept itself. Blaming this on science is like blaming a shooting on science because ballistics, chemistry, and metallurgy are sciences.
by starkeeper | 2026-01-25 21:21:15+00:00
Medicaide data is pretty much covered by HIPPA. So Evil. Also it seems like it is too late, even if a court says do not do it, they will anyway and get away with it since the supreme court rules the president is allowed to break the law.

HELP I AM SOOOO F**NG ANGRY. Sorry I just don't have anywhere to safely put this rage.
by ls612 | 2026-01-25 21:21:17+00:00
Also relevant to this situation is that the groups this is likely targeting are actively tracking ICE convoys and personnel in group chats (and random civilians who they think are ICE too) so the excuse of “oh woe is me how can I know where not to fly” falls flat. My parents are in Minneapolis and they are saying things haven’t felt this dangerous since the riots in 2020.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-25 21:21:20+00:00
Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1]. I fairly often often put the conclusion in the title, and must have been on the HN front page over 20 times by now.

This is obviously not the only way to construct an article (nor the only one I employ), but it is surprisingly reliable, and will attract and retain the readers who are actually interested in what you have to say, while letting those that aren't interested find something else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
by justkys | 2026-01-25 21:21:35+00:00
I agree with the thrust of this but:

> The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it), and we don’t need another breakthrough.

The costs should come down. I don’t know what costs this post refers to, but the cost of using Claude is almost definitely hiding the actual cost.

That said, I’m still hoping we ensure our public models out there work well enough with opencode or other options so my cost is more transparent to me, what is added to my electric bill rather than a subscription to Claude.