MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-26 08:44:13+00:00
Advertising is never going to inform you - it is by definition about persuasion, not information. An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Even a seller in a physical market telling you their tomatoes are very sweet and juicy is simply trying to get you to buy: they have no idea, and don't care, if their tomatoes really are sweet and juicy (and definitely not sweeter and juicier than all the others tomatoes in the market), they just think you're more likely to buy from them if you hear that.
by lukan | 2026-01-26 08:44:32+00:00
How did you got that impression?

There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security, but anyone I know who actually used AS3 loved it.

At its peak, with flex builder, we also had a full blown UI Editor, where you could just add your own custom elements designed directly with flash ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts on their own into improving the technical base of the flash player (that had aquired lots of technical dept).
How are people handling paid external APIs for autonomous agents?
by ArielBarack | 2026-01-26 08:45:22+00:00
I’m curious how people are actually doing this in production, not in demos.

If you’re running autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that:

call paid APIs

purchase data

invoke metered tools

chain actions without human approval

…how are you handling payments and limits?

What I mostly see in the wild are workarounds:

provider-level API keys with hard usage caps

proxy services that re-bill later

framework-specific hacks living in side branches

alert-only or manual approval modes

or simply not letting agents spend directly

None of these feel like a clean abstraction, especially once agents make thousands of micro-decisions.

The hard part doesn’t seem to be “moving money,” but delegating spending authority safely:

how much

on what

under what conditions

and how to revoke or audit it

Frameworks understandably avoid this, but that leaves every team reinventing the same fragile patterns.

So I’m genuinely asking:

How are you handling this today?

What breaks or feels uncomfortable?

Is this problem still premature, or already painful for you?

Would love to hear concrete setups — even if the answer is “we punted on it.”
by oarfish | 2026-01-26 08:45:48+00:00
Does it? I think strength may be related to pain if you're very weak, and statistically there are big confounders (i.e. people who are weak also have other conditions that exacerbate pain experience). But past a certain point I don't think the evidence suggests that strength itself is protective. Otherwise, competitive lifters would never experience back pain for instance, but they still do. Pain is multifactorial, and strength is not the only determinant by far.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-26 08:46:05+00:00
A situation only gets press when people disagree about it[1].

George Floyd got a lot because he was a borderline case, an innocent man shot by police for some, a criminal who got what he deserved for others. That creates tension. That creates arguments. "local cop shoots innocent 80-year-old woman carrying groceries" is a story for a day at best, then the cop gets punished and we move on.

Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.

[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-26 08:46:09+00:00
> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated

And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.
by bozhou | 2026-01-26 08:46:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched a small AI image tool a few days ago. Everything seemed fine at first, but today my payment provider suddenly suspended my account.

After digging into the logs, I realized what went wrong.

A large number of users were abusing the platform to generate NSFW content, mainly “undress” and explicit sexual images. I wasn’t actively promoting this use case, but people clearly found a way to push the model there.

Here are some real examples from my logs (sanitized URLs):

{
"image_input": [
"https://tempfile.redpandaai.co/kieai/462298/img2img-inputs/i..."
],
"aspect_ratio": "9:16",
"output_format": "png",
"prompt": "Make her nude with extreme big boobs and round big nipples with natural skintone.",
"resolution": "2K"
}

{
"image_input": [
"https://tempfile.redpandaai.co/kieai/462298/img2img-inputs/i..."
],
"aspect_ratio": "3:4",
"output_format": "png",
"prompt": "pussy visible",
"resolution": "2K"
}

Seeing this after launch was honestly shocking and frustrating. Payment banned, onboarding frozen, and now I’m stuck cleaning up a mess I didn’t intend to create.

So I’m asking for help from people who have been through this:

How do you effectively prevent this kind of NSFW abuse in AI image products?

Is prompt filtering enough, or do you need image-level moderation too?

Any practical advice on surviving payment provider reviews after something like this?

Are there architectural or product-level constraints that actually work, not just policy text?

I really want this product to be usable for normal creative workflows, not turn into an NSFW generator.

Any advice or war stories would be greatly appreciated.

url https://img-2-img.net/
Thanks for reading.
by u_sama | 2026-01-26 08:47:02+00:00
This doesnt fit either the peaceful nor prosperous except Malaysia/Indonesia maybe.

UAE directly finances the sanguinary RSF in Sudan and CTS in Yemen, Saudi Arabia/Qatar has financed institutions behind the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood/Salafism in the worlld and Turkey has a shaky economy with a large underbelly as well as engaging in their own brand of imperialism abroad.
by woolion | 2026-01-26 08:47:55+00:00
Let's take the definition of "video-game art" as the art of defining interactive experiences that open themselves up upon mastery.
This is the original definition of what video-games were at the start (Pac-Man, Space Invaders).
The mastery takes effort to learn; the game, to incentivize this effort, rewards the player when they do well, and punish them when they don't.
The almost immediate nature of the feedback loop makes learning faster than almost any other human activity.

Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it.
This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals.
The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.

However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay.
A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes.
Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game.
Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc.
Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.

The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner.
They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.

I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.
by anilgulecha | 2026-01-26 08:48:13+00:00
I'd like to point Simon and others to 2 more things possible in the browser:

1) webcontainer allows nodejs frontend and backend apps to be run in the browser. this is readily demonstrated to (now sadly unmaintained) bolt.diy project.

2) jslinux and x86 linux examples allow running of complete linux env in wasm, and 2 way communication. A thin extension adds networking support to Linux.

so technically it's theoretically possible to run a pretty full fledged agentic system with the simple UX of visiting a URL.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-26 08:48:28+00:00
No, agriculture has fairly strict standards about the quality of the water, they can't use gray water to irrigate. Of course it will still work but depending on where you live the produce may then no longer be fit for human consumption.

You can use it for irrigating your lawn but not for vegetables, especially not if you plan on selling them. But 'light' gray water requires relatively little treatment before you can use it again, however this could still be quite expensive compared to just letting it go. I wonder if they've done any quantitative research on this that's public.
by vjk800 | 2026-01-26 08:48:35+00:00
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)?

I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
by lewisjoe | 2026-01-26 08:48:50+00:00
It's fascinating that browsers are one of the most robust and widely available sandboxing system and we are yet to make a claude-code/gemini-cli like agent that runs inside the browser.

Browsers as agent environment opens up a ton of exciting possibilities. For example, agents now have an instant way to offer UIs based on tech governed by standards(HTML/CSS) instead of platform specific UI bindings. A way to run third party code safely in wasm containers. A way to store information in disk with enough confidence that it won't explode the user's disk drive. All this basically for free.

My bet is that eventually we'll end up with a powerful agentic tool that uses the browser environment to plan and execute personal agents or to deploy business agents that doesn't access system resources any more than browsers do at the moment.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-26 08:49:44+00:00
Spamming the same thing while avoiding answering the "where's the hate" question with an actual argument, makes you the one breaking the rule you referred to:

>" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

If you had a strong plausible interpretation you'd have given one.
by frm88 | 2026-01-26 08:49:51+00:00
Sedimentation and low filling levels, hence increasing costs. Also

We found that 93% of studied reservoirs have not been fully filled up at least once during 2010–2022. Our analyses revealed that droughts are the most probable culprits. About 86% of the 398 reservoirs with accessible SPEI data exhibited significant susceptibility to drought, while 43% of the 525 reservoirs demonstrated notable sensitivity to ENSO events.

Worth a read: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
by figgis | 2026-01-26 08:51:12+00:00
This is a really rough spot, giving users the tools to remove visibility from a post will eventually get abused. I would genuinely be interested in some form of anonymized stats on the individual accounts and the posts they are flagging but that's a whole deal.

Am I wrong that there used to be a flagged option on the lists page, or am I missing where that is?
by MrBuddyCasino | 2026-01-26 08:51:15+00:00
It can be a code smell, but there are legitimate uses. This is not something that I would ever "ban".

Over-eager code analyser tools are themselves a "smell", in that you either justifiably or unjustifiably don't trust your developers, trying to make up for their real or perceived deficits with a rather dumb tool. That never goes well in my experience.
by lmm | 2026-01-26 08:51:55+00:00
> Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

Misskey is an independent implementation, and actually what the biggest server instance runs (or at least was a few years ago).
by mschulze | 2026-01-26 08:52:33+00:00
I'm answering so others who read this can know my reasoning, not to explain to you, because you know exactly what you are writing.

The rhetoric that Sweden, Germany, UK and France are Muslim countries is exclusivley used by very far-right standing people to fearmonger and hate against immigrants. What would it even mean for these countries to be Muslim? Germany has literally a party with "Christian" in their name in the government. You still hear the bells of Christian churches everywhere.
by simonw | 2026-01-26 08:54:00+00:00
I have a very minimal v86 experiment here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/v86

My eventual goal with that is to expand it so an LLM can treat it like a filesystem and execution environment and do Claude Code style tricks with it, but it's not particularly easy to programmatically run shell commands via v86 - it seems to be designed more for presenting a Linux environment in an interactive UI in a browser.

It's likely I've not found the right way to run it yet though.
by roenxi | 2026-01-26 08:54:43+00:00
If we're talking about the Palestine Action shirt, Israel is defending against accusations [0] that they are genocidal. The police action of the UK seems like it could be pretty easily construed as suppression of speech in support of state orchestrated mass kidnapping and murder on a concerning scale.

Whatever is happening in SA might be as bad, I suppose, but I don't speak Spanish or have any family connection there so I'm not going to look it up. Although if they're genocidal then they should stop too, should that need to be said.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa's_genocide_case_a...
by defrost | 2026-01-26 08:55:10+00:00
Noted.

Also noted, re: the two sources cited:

* In November 2024, Honest Reporting Canada's assistant director, Robert Walker, was criminally charged with 17 counts of mischief for allegedly vandalizing several properties in a Toronto neighborhood by spray painting anti-Palestinian graffiti.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReporting

and

* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
by csomar | 2026-01-26 08:55:59+00:00
My guess is some people have never worked with the constraints of time and reliability. They think setting up a database is just running a few commands from a tutorial, or they're very experienced and understand the pitfalls well; most people don't fall into the latter category.

But to answer your question: running your own DB is hard if you don't want to lose or corrupt your data. AWS is reliable and relatively cheap, at least during the bootstrapping and scaling stages.
by orwin | 2026-01-26 08:56:04+00:00
Khomenei is called the "supreme leader" since 89. His predecessor betrayed his allies by wording a referendum for the abolition of the monarchy weirdly, making it instead about the installation of a theocracy.

(i don't want to make it overly political, but once again the historical materialist offshots of the revolutionary groups are the only ones who understood the betrayal and called a boycott of this referendum. Please listen to marxists when they're in a coup, they are so used to betrayal they'll see it comming)
by n4r9 | 2026-01-26 08:56:49+00:00
> and people tend not to be overly optimistic and forget to account for things like sickness, meetings, etc.

> people seem to be more realistic about the variance in actual delivered points per sprint, as opposed to when you try to measure things in hours or days

Okay I think I'm with you. In my team, the PM calculates the number of available days per developer before taking any estimates, factoring in planned holidays and estimates of sickness and meeting time, and adjusting for seniority. I guess points are kind of a crude way of doing the same thing.
by abcde666777 | 2026-01-26 08:57:20+00:00
I think games, via player agency, have the potential to one day be more profound than any other existing medium, but we're also hamstrung by the fact that providing player agency requires being able to simulate how the world changes in response to that agency, which we're still very limited in our ability to do.

As for critical analysis - I don't see why it can't be done for games as for any other artform - at the end of the day all such analysis, including of more passive artforms, really boils down to 'did you enjoy it, and are others likely to enjoy it as well?'.
by Akashic101 | 2026-01-26 08:57:28+00:00
> less fortunate people in corporate hellholes must face daily

I'm sorry but how tone-deaf can someone be? Over 12.000 people have been killed in the protests with some reports going up to 30.000 since then and here you are happy about the fact that Google cannot profile them anymore. Protesters are beeing shot on-masse in the streets and families from outside the country have no ideas if their brothers and sisters are even still alive. Have some decency.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-26 08:58:15+00:00
The problem with centralized social media is that the admins have power over you. They can ban your account with no recourse, censor some of your posts (or some posts you want to read), or even post something from your own account that you don't approve of.

Mastodon doesn't change this, it just changes who the admins are. It lets a person under the jurisdiction of admin A interact with a person under the jurisdiction of admin B, which is better than fully-centralized X, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Your instance admin can still ban you with no recourse (account migration is incomplete, requires cooperation on both sides, and mostly exists to shut up Activitypub opponents who point these problems out). They're still just as (if not vulnerable) to government pressure as centralized social media, and considering that a single lawsuit could probably bankrupt most instances, I suspect they'd fold very very quickly. They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back).
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-26 08:59:08+00:00
AFAIK the signature mechanism hasn't been defeated, so the attacker can only load software signed by the factory keys.

Which includes old, vulnerable versions and all patched, newer versions. By burning in the minimum version, the old code now refuses to boot before it can be exploited.

This is standard practice for low-level bootloader attacks against things like consoles and some other phone brands.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2026-01-26 09:00:47+00:00
This is a great project, not because it is useful but how its engineering was approached. Simplify, adapt.

There is another neat board that I like, smaller but looks nicer, the "ESP32-C6 1.47Inch LCD Screen" for just ten bucks: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005008465501661.html
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 09:00:47+00:00
Boolean is rarely enough for real production workloads. You need a 'processing' state to handle visibility timeouts and prevent double-execution, especially if tasks take more than a few milliseconds. I also find it crucial to distinguish between 'retrying' for transient errors and 'failed' for dead letters. Saving a few bytes on the index isn't worth losing that observability.
by csomar | 2026-01-26 09:01:00+00:00
The bindings are still done at the JS level. But to answer your question, I'm building a git workflow engine (kind of a lightweight GitHub Actions alternative; see https://codeinput.com). In that context, you get lots of events and payloads from Git/GitHub that typically require very little resources to respond to or relay.

The worker model made sense, so I developed the whole app around it. Now of course, knowing what I know today, I might have considered different options. But at the time, I read the description (and had some Cloudflare Workers experience) and thought this looked good.
by vidarh | 2026-01-26 09:01:05+00:00
> I can tell you based on your description that you did not do this. Subagents are completely different and cannot be used in this way.

And yet I have used them exactly in the way I described. That you assume they can't just demonstrate that you haven't tried very hard.

> No, it isn't how Claude Code works because Claude Code is designed to work with limited task queues, this is not what this feature is.

Claude allows your setup to execute arbitrary code that gets injected into context. The entire point is that you don't need to rely on built in capabilities of Claude Code to do any of this.

> No, it doesn't work within that context. Again: sharing context between subagents, single instance running for months...I am not even sure why someone would think this could work.

I know what I described works because I am doing it. You can achieve what I described in a variety of ways: Using skills to tell the agents how to access a shared communications channel. Using MCP servers. Just using CLAUDE.md and describe how to use files as a shared communications channel.

This is only difficult if you lack imagination.

> You are talking about having some CLAUDE.md files like you have invented the wheel, lol. HN is great.

No, the exact opposite: I'm saying that this isn't hard, that it isn't anything revolutionary or even special. It's pretty basic usage of the existing facilities. There's no invention there.

You're the one trying to imply this is more revolutionary than it is.