MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianparrot | 2026-01-31 16:11:06+00:00
Ok so where's the European alternatives? Where are they? Because in my experience as a Norwegian citizen who has started and run tech companies, we simply can't compete on this kind of tech because energy is more expensive, all the added costs of employment are so incredibly expensive (despite massive amounts of immigration, which only drains our welfare state anyway) and all the EU-based rules and regulations we must follow even when we're not direct members; all of these things and more related to them are absolutely stifling.

In this environment there is zero chance of an "AWS-like" competitor or anything remotely like it in the tech sector. And if you say "Hezner" I've got a bridge to sell you.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2026-01-31 16:11:10+00:00
The iPhone has never had such a feature _exactly_.

However on iPhones that have the Emergency SOS feature biometry is disabled until you enter your passphrase/code when that feature is invoked.

Biometry is also disabled until re-authentication if you invoke the shutdown menu by holding the power/power+volume up button.

Neither of those will get you to the Before First Unlock state, however. That is the ideal if you are attempting to protect access to your phone’s data in any adversarial scenario. You must restart/shut down the phone to get back to that.

Same applies to iPads.

There may be vulnerabilities, of course. In Before First Unlock there is not enough cryptographic material available in memory to decrypt application data. The full set of keying material is both user and device specific.
by sethev | 2026-01-31 16:11:21+00:00
These analogies (except for DNS, perhaps) aren't very illuminating on the difference between a CP system and an AP system in the CAP sense, though. In banking, there are multiple parties involved. Each of those parties is likely running a CP system for their transactions (almost guaranteed). Same with stock exchanges - you can look up Martin Thompson's work for a public glimpse of how these systems work (LMAX and Aeron are systems related to this).

These examples are closer to control loops, where a decision is made and then carried out or finalized later. This kind of "eventual consistency" is pervasive but also significantly easier to reason about than what people usually mean by that term when talking about a distributed database, for example.

To expand on the 24/7 grocery store example: if the database with prices is consistent, you will always know what the current price is supposed to be. If the database is eventually consistent, you may get inconsistent answers about the current price that have to be resolved in the code somehow. That's way harder to reason about then "the price changed, but the tag hasn't been hung yet". The first case, professional software engineers struggle to deal with correctly. The second case, anyone can understand.
Show HN: ToolKuai – Privacy-first, 100% client-side media tools
by indie_max | 2026-01-31 16:11:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Linn, the creator of ToolKuai (https://toolkuai.com).

Like many of you, I’ve always been wary of "free" online file converters. Most of them are black boxes: you upload your private documents or images to a remote server, and you have no idea where that data ends up or how it’s being used to train models.

I wanted to build a suite of tools (Video/Image compressor, OCR, AI Background Remover) that runs entirely in the browser. No files ever leave your machine.
The Tech Stack

To make this performant enough to rival server-side processing, I leaned heavily into modern web APIs:

- AI Background Removal: I'm using ONNX models (Xenova/modnet and ISNet) running locally via Transformers.js. The processing is 100% client-side, fallbacking to WASM when WebGPU isn't available.

- Frontend: Built with SvelteKit (Svelte 5) for its lean footprint and fast reactivity.

- Storage & Delivery: AI models are self-hosted on Cloudflare R2 to avoid massive bandwidth costs and ensure fast delivery.

Current Stats (13 days in):

The site is only 2 weeks old. Surprisingly, I’ve seen strong organic interest from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Average time on site is currently around 3.5 minutes, which suggests people are actually staying to process multiple files, confirming that the client-side speed is hitting the mark.

Future & Monetization

The tool is free. I’ve decided to avoid the "Pro/Premium" subscription model, as I believe these utility tools should be accessible. I'm exploring non-intrusive ads to cover the infrastructure costs (mostly R2 and Vercel).

I’d love to get some feedback from the HN community on:

- Performance on different hardware (especially the WebGPU-based video compressor).

- Privacy concerns or suggestions on how to further harden the "No-Server" promise.

- Any specific media tools you feel are currently lacking in the "client-side only" ecosystem.

Link: https://toolkuai.com

Thanks!
by johnmwilkinson | 2026-01-31 16:11:47+00:00
Expanding on this regarding the difference between abstraction vs encapsulation: abstraction is about the distillation of useful concepts while encapsulation is a specific tactic used to accomplish a behavior.

To continue with the idea of numbers, let’s say you asked someone to add 3 and 5. Is that encapsulation? What information are you hiding? You are not asking them to add coins or meters or reindeer. 3 and 5 are values independent of any underlying information. The numbers aren’t encapsulating anything.

Encapsulation is different. When you operate a motor vehicle, you concern yourself with the controls presented. This allows you, as the operator, to only need a tiny amount of knowledge to interact with an incredibly complex machine. This details have been encapsulated. There may be particular abstraction present, such as the notion of steering, acceleration, and breaking, but the way you interact with these will differ from vehicle to vehicle. Additionally, encapsulation is not concerned with the idea of steering, it is concerned with how to present steering in this specific case.

The two ideas are connected because using an abstraction in software often involves encapsulation. But they should not be conflated, out the likely result is bad abstractions and unwieldy encapsulation.
by pveldandi | 2026-01-31 16:11:55+00:00
Basic html? The core of what we built is at the runtime layer. We’re capturing CUDA graphs and restoring model state directly at the GPU execution level rather than just snapshotting containers. That’s what enables fast restores and higher utilization across multiple models.

If that’s not a problem space you care about, that’s totally fair. But for teams juggling many models with uneven traffic, that’s where the economics start to matter.
by user_7832 | 2026-01-31 16:12:40+00:00
> The only model with a strong "personality" vibe was Claude 3 Opus.

Did you have the chance to use 3.5 (or 3.6) Sonnet, and if yes, how did they compare?

As a non-paying user, 3.5 era Claude was absolutely the best LLM I've ever used in terms of having a conversation. It felt like talking to a human and not a bot. Its replies were readable, even if they were several paragraphs long. I've unfortunately never found anything remotely as good.
by kranner | 2026-01-31 16:12:54+00:00
Following an Olympic champion's training routine is not a bad idea if you don't expect it to make you an Olympic champion! It might be a great improvement on your current training routine though, if you're interested in the sport at all.

The physical (and genetic) demands of athletics aside, we were talking about writing. Just starting on a lark is what worked for Haruki Murakami. Again, it's very unlikely you'll be the next Murakami. But at least you'll improve a lot at something you find interesting! What is the downside here, exactly? Unless you're an opportunity-cost-minimising, industrial-output-maximising kind of person. That's fine, but that's not everyone.
by safeimp | 2026-01-31 16:13:35+00:00
It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC).

It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it.

That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead you boot to CoreELEC from an SD card and use Kodi.
by luses | 2026-01-31 16:13:43+00:00
oh so your a filthy commie, an evil domestic terrorist. dont you know they're the job creators? you should be grateful for your stable bed and stop being greedy.

imagine the horror of free loaders eating free lunches, living in affordable apartments close to school, and riding high speed rail each weekend to visit nature. will anyone think of our lords? and what about my iphone? obviously phones will cease to exist once we implement these communist pipe dreams. just look at china, they've got all of this and they clearly hate it. no phones, no brand clothes, oh the terror. you should be locked up in an insane asylum immediately
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-31 16:13:47+00:00
Politics is a bit biased, not only because many of these people don't write their own speeches, but also because the complexity of what they say is not neutral. Simpler speech conveys the idea of being no-nonsense and close to the people, while more complexity gives the impression of being intelligent and well thought out.

Depending on who you want to target, you may go one side or the other. For example, republicans tend to use simpler words than democrats to match what their electorate value.
by lizknope | 2026-01-31 16:14:39+00:00
I started working during the dot com boom. I was getting 3 phone calls a week from recruiters on my work telephone number. Then I saw the bubble burst in from mid-2000. In 2001 zero recruiters called me. I hated my job after the reorg and it took me 10 months to find a new one.

I know a lot of people in the 45+ age range including many working on AI accelerators. We all think this is a bubble. The AI companies are not profitable right now for the prices they charge. There are a bunch of articles on this. If they raise prices too quickly to become profitable then demand will collapse. Eventually investors will want a return on their investment. I made a joke that we haven't reached the Pets.com phase of the bubble yet.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 16:14:46+00:00
This was a really fun read as I was (am?) interested in creating a cloudflare tunnels alternative (you can say)

Lowendtalk is a great community to talk about in such things and buyvm (frantech) or francessco is quite active in the community too.

I have even talked to francesco in their discord themselves iirc. It was fun and I didn't understand the hype behind BuyVM but the community or the discord server, people love francesco a lot.

Great read. To be honest regarding my cf tunnel idea. I feel like its more of an economies at scale/loss making idea & only cf is able to profitably execute it but my intention was that cf runs ~12% of the data around the world and I just wished if a non profit could've been established regarding a cf tunnel idea and I even talked to providers about it.

But I felt like I needed funding and so I did drop the idea unfortunately. I wanted to fund the project myself but I felt like I was incredibly frugal and the idea of funding/sustaining it myself was quite infeasible.

just out of Curiousity, curious to hear what the hn communities think about an non profit cf tunnel.
by jplusequalt | 2026-01-31 16:16:12+00:00
>I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.

That's not what the essay is about. Sanderson spends the first half of the essay examining reasons for his strong feelings against AI. He also touches on the fact that he already struggles to discern generative AI from human art.

Eventually, he concludes that his real objection to generative AI has nothing to do with the quality, and everything to do with the process by which it was created. He believes (as do I) that focusing solely on the end product of generating a painting or a novel, robs would be artists of the valuable learning experience of failing repeatedly to create art, and then eventually rising past that failure to finish something. In this way, he thinks one of the real hallmarks of art is that it's transformative for the human who creates it, going so far to state that __humans are the art__ itself.
by lubujackson | 2026-01-31 16:16:16+00:00
As a writer and engineer, I don't see it.

Can AI kludge together a ripping story? Sure. But there is a reason people still write new books and buy new books - we crave the human connection and reflection of our current times and mores.

This isn't just a high art thing. My kids read completely different YA novels than I did, with just a few older canon titles persisting. I can hand them a book I loved as a kid and it just doesn't connect with them anymore.

How I think AI CAN produce art that people want is through careful human curation and guided generation. This is structurally the same as "human-in-the-loop" programming. We can connect to the artistry of the construction, in other words the human behind the LLM that influenced how the plot was structured, the characters developed and all the rest.

This is akin to a bad writer with a really good editor, or maybe the reverse. Either way, I think we will see a bunch of this and wring our hands because AI art is here, but I don't think we can ever take the human out of that equation. There needs to be a seed of "new" for us to give a shit.
by d--b | 2026-01-31 16:16:35+00:00
Trump is lowering interest rates, fueling the bubbles.

We can’t know when it’s going to happen, but there is a good chance that one is going to be super bad.

We basically borrowed our way out of the 2008 crash and through covid, but we havent repaid the debt. It is so high I doubt we can do the same next time.
by michaelsshaw | 2026-01-31 16:16:38+00:00
"China isn't communist" is the biggest cope ever. It's simply an excuse to imply that their success is inherently related to their """"""embrace"""""" of """"""capitalism"""""" because some people cannot handle the fact that their system is dying, and want to point to the new world leader and imply that the very same system in their country applies to China. It simply does not. Marxism-Leninism is the guiding ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, and they are kicking everyone's ass.

It's essentially a dogwhistle to spot idiots. Anyone who says "China isn't communist" completely lacks even the most basic comprehension of ideological concepts.
by bdefig | 2026-01-31 16:17:50+00:00
The Church of Deletion

I built 47 todo apps for myself. Each a masterpiece of premature abstraction.

Then I deleted 366 lines of 'infrastructure' and replaced it with a bullet list.

The Five Blasphemies:

Don't optimize what shouldn't exist
The 0.1x engineer is the real 10x
Premature abstraction is anxiety in UML
If you can't explain why your human needs this now, you're worshipping your own potential
The best code is the code you delete before writing
Build less. Delete more. Ship what's left.

Jack ␡
by Someone | 2026-01-31 16:17:52+00:00
A problem, but also way better than the solution “just look at every photo” you had without that image search feature.

I think these manual tools tend to prefer recall (“make sure you return all the photos asked for”) over precision (make sure you only return photos asked for”) because of that.

(Likely with exceptions for search terms such as “gorilla”, where surfacing photos of people with black skin is a big no-no)
by verdverm | 2026-01-31 16:18:05+00:00
You're looking at causes, that's the wrong side. Your prior claim was about how you couldn't see the downsides of high unemployment.

Look at what happened during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high. It doesn't matter how we get to high unemployment or depression status, but for sure there will be a lot of bad things, many more than you proclaim.

Look to the Great Depression to see what the human condition and spirit was like if you are having trouble imagining possibilities
by freedomben | 2026-01-31 16:18:15+00:00
Agreed, although things I immediately think of are:

1. Is "anything but gcc" actually supported by the project? Do they have a goal of supporting other compilers or possibly an explicit decision not to support other compilers?

2. If they do support other compilers, how did the "d" suffix make it in the first place? That's something I would expect the dev or CI to catch pretty quickly.

3. Does gcc behave any differently with the "d" suffix not there? (I would think a core dev would know that off the top of their head, so it's possible they looked at it and decided it wasn't worth it. One would hope they'd comment on the PR though if they did that). If it does, this could introduce a really hard-to-track-down bug.

I'm not defending Oracle here (in fact I hate Oracle and think they are a scourge on humanity) but trying to approach this with an objective look.
by jfengel | 2026-01-31 16:18:17+00:00
You don't just skip over ads? My app lets me set a skip for the pre-roll ads automatically.

I actually feel a tiny bit guilty about that. The ads are why the podcasts exist. Too many might drive away listeners, but too few drives away podcasters. I'm kinda baffled that the economy of it works at all.

For a bunch of them I pay for the ad free version, though I'm curious about the economics of that. As someone with enough money to opt out, I'm exactly the person the advertisers want to reach.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-31 16:18:22+00:00
I can also agree with the ‘other side’ viewpoint as well. There are things to do to mitigate war though besides interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad, travel, friendships with people in other countries. Not too far off topic: a US war planner during world war 2 took Yokohama off the list of Japanese cities to be annihilated with bombing because he and his wife visited that city and loved it. Anything that fights against dehumanizing people in other countries during times of conflict is a good thing.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-01-31 16:18:29+00:00
How does the resulting code look like though? I found that while <insert your favorite LLM> can spit out barely working C++ code fast, I then have to spend 10x time prodding it to refactor the code to look at least somewhat acceptable.

No matter how much I tell it that it is a "professional experienced 10x developer versed in modern C++, a second coming of Stroustrup" in per-project or global config files it still keeps spewing the same crap big (like manual memory management instead of RAII here and there, initializing fields in ctor body instead of initializer list, having manual init/cleanup methods in classes instead of a proper ctor/dtor design to ensure that objects are always in a consistent state, bunch of other anti-patterns, etc.) and small (checking for nullptr before passing the pointer to delete/free, manually instantiating objects as argument to shared_ptr ctor instead of make_shared, endlessly casting stuff around back and forth instead of designing data types properly, etc.).

Which makes sense I guess because it is how average C++ code on GitHub looks like unfortunately and that is what all those models were trained on, but I keep feeling like my job turning into performing endless code review for a not-very- bright junior developer that just refuses to learn...
by zdw | 2026-01-31 16:18:47+00:00
Oh, I've seen instructions, most of them start with "enable dev mode, then use adb to run ton of inscrutable commands that may or may not break the system over time".

Overall, it seems like a recipe to end up in an unknown state where you can no longer easily get updates and the only recovery is to wipe the system.

I've seen similar methods to "Clean up Windows 11", and it always seems like you're just putting the device into an unknown state. A few ads you can become blind to is not as bad as a totally broken system.
by timpera | 2026-01-31 16:19:14+00:00
I can understand supporting a podcast by having the host read ads themselves, but dynamically inserted ads in audio podcasts are the worst. If you don't live in the USA, the number of advertisers is limited, so you end up with 1 to 3 different ads (mostly for other podcasts!) playing over and over on every episode for weeks, it's infuriating.
by nindalf | 2026-01-31 16:19:25+00:00
This reads like a nothingburger. Couple of quotes from the article:

> the idea that WhatsApp can selectively and retroactively access the content of [end-to-end encrypted] individual chats is a mathematical impossibility

> Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was “a bit strange”. “It seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don’t know much about them or their credibility,” he said. “I would be very surprised if what they are claiming is actually true.”

No one apart from the firm filing the lawsuit is actually supporting this claim. A lot of people in this thread seem very confident that it's true, and I'm not sure what precisely makes them so confident.
by zinodaur | 2026-01-31 16:20:09+00:00
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.

I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.

How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?

Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
by muzani | 2026-01-31 16:20:13+00:00
Why did you make it? Who faces this problem?

Good projects are the type that some people have been building a hack for themselves. Like a system that replaces bookkeeping or records. Payment systems that nobody wants to maintain. Most of the time, it's expensive and inefficient but they just don't have better tools.

Find the people who are doing this. If you can't think of any, well, you might have started wrong and your side project may not be worth anything.

A lot of people are trying to sell fish to the fishermen. It's not that those fish aren't worth anything; it's more that you have to leave the village.
by jplusequalt | 2026-01-31 16:20:20+00:00
>It does seem like a slightly romantic notion,

I'm not sure it is. I think his whole stance here is that you should create art for yourself, not because there is some intrinsic use to whatever you create, but because the artist has an insatiable need to create __something__. Creating art is therefor as much an act of personal growth as it is a past time. To rob yourself of that growth in his eyes, is to discard such growth.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-31 16:21:27+00:00
> > And besides, okay, an 18 year old, for hookups that's fine up to age 25 in my book. 30 is also fine in most of Europe's moral view, in France they'd probably accept 35. But ffs. Gates was around 58 back at the time. That's far too old to hang out with 18 year olds, much less having sex with them.

Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man.

It's not the law. As a matter of fact there are special provision to lower the age of consent if some conditions apply, although this is not one of them.

How about we right all the wrongs that stemmed from violating laws (as there is plenty of work to be done there) before we try to pass personal opinions as laws