MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2026-01-09 17:42:53+00:00
> I have noticed that the self-directed part has been deemphasized in favor of selling to adults (with more money than they'd spend on plastic toys for kids),

LEGO has over 500 sets available every year. It's a crazy number, coming from someone who grew up reading every LEGO catalog I could find.

You're probably only seeing those few flagship sets because they get advertised and shared on social media. There are literally hundreds of small sets out there now.

For the adults here, the number of LEGO sets available to us as kids was a fraction of what's available today. The number of sets out there is staggering.

On the plus side, there are so many sets that it's now easier to find sales. As a kid saving up money it felt like sales never happened. Now I grab small sets on sale for 30-40% off all the time to keep as easy gifts or for my own kids.
by kannanvijayan | 2026-01-09 17:43:13+00:00
I think you can capture that constraint as "anything that requires finely deterministic high performance is out of reach of JIT-compiled outputs".

Obviously JITting means you'll have a compiler executing sometimes along with the program which implies a runtime by construction, and some notion of warmup to get to a steady state.

Where I think there's probably untapped opportunity is in identifying these meta-stable situations in program execution. My expectation is that there are execution "modes" that cluster together more finely than static typing would allow you to infer. This would apply to runtimes like wasm too - where the modes of execution would be characterized by the actual clusters of numeric values flowing to different code locations and influencing different code-paths to pick different control flows.

You're right that on the balance of things, trying to say.. allocate registers at runtime will necessarily allow for less optimization scope than doing it prior.

But, if you can be clever enough to identify, at runtime, preferred code-paths with higher resolution than what (generic) PGO allows (because now you can respond to temporal changes in those code-path profiles), then you can actually eliminate entire codepaths from the compiler's consideration. That tends to greatly affect the register pressure (for the better).

It might be interesting just to profile some wasm executions of common programs. If there are transient clusterings of control flow paths that manifest during execution. It'd be a fun exercise...
by bityard | 2026-01-09 17:43:47+00:00
Well, you're not wrong about novelty being a much rarer thing in the past but people rarely drove alone in total silence. 8-tracks and cassettes came along eventually but even before then, people listened to the radio which had a wide variety of music, news, sports, and call-in shows. Truckers had CB radios and would talk to other truckers and drivers to pass the time.

Those who didn't see much of the world before the last two decades have this impression that everyone was far less connected to the world and each other before the Internet. That's not strictly true... the Internet made long-distance connections and access to content easier, but the ease of access to entertainment (namely, social media) has greatly weakened local connections.
by gruez | 2026-01-09 17:43:49+00:00
>because a disappointingly large fraction of the public is unable to acknowledge facts of reality. the video is speaking, but some people just ain't listening.

If something really does "speak for themselves", but also "disappointingly large fraction" (1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%?) refuse to accept it, is that a meaningful statement? Is it the epistemic equivalent of "80% of the time, it works every time"?
by kenrik | 2026-01-09 17:44:13+00:00
I’m a startup founder raising a seed round. I have a few doors I can open myself, but I know there are doors I don’t even know exist yet.

If anyone here is open to a small act of kindness: I’d really appreciate warm intros to people who invest in are interested in on device AI inference, or to founders building something adjacent so we can compare notes.

I’m not asking anyone to sell this for me. Just to help me get in the right rooms and meet the right people. If you’re willing, comment or DM and I’ll share a 2–3 sentence blurb + deck/one-pager. Grateful either way.

Kenrik.

https://x.com/KenrikMarch
Show HN: Playwright MCP, but for TUI Apps
by michaellee8 | 2026-01-09 17:44:21+00:00
I made a Playwright MCP for TUI apps so now you can vibe code terminal apps with a lot of features like code mode and session recordings.

Already vibe coded a nice reddis viewer/editor with it https://github.com/michaellee8/redis-nav.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-09 17:44:27+00:00
If the banking apps have a Terms of Service, you are free not to use the banking app.

To give a specific example, suppose a banking app wants to require location services in order to try to login. Some users can bypass or spoof this, (in fact that's what the thread is about entirely, and for that they root the phones.

Not all users who root the phones violate ToS, but it's a majority, or even a possibility, so they choose to disallow such usage.

Pretty sensible stuff to me.
by ky3 | 2026-01-09 17:44:39+00:00
re: Chapter 15.8 on the so-called pigeonhole principle

Following Dijkstra’s EWD1094, here’s a way to solve the hairs-on-heads problem eschewing the language of pigeonholes and employing the fact that the mean is at most the maximum of a non-empty bag of numbers.

We are given that Boston has 500,000 non-bald people. The human head has at most 200,000 hairs. Show that there must be at least 3 people in Boston who have the same number of hairs on their head.

Each non-bald Bostonian must have a hair count between 1 and 200,000. The average number of such people per hair count is 500,000 / 200,000 = 2.5. The maximum is at least that; moreover, it must be a round number. So the maximum >= 3. QED.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-09 17:44:41+00:00
No, it shouldn't tell us everything, but if someone makes a very data-oriented claim ("millenials will be the first generation poorer than their parents") and you return with data that shows the opposite, you can make a claim that the data is poorly gathered, etc.

But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.

If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.
by lucb1e | 2026-01-09 17:44:50+00:00
It's not to protect the user; it's DRM. Using a non-rooted phone means all apps get DRM for free. You can't simply press 'record screen' when the software sets a flag; you can't view the data that the app processes about you or make backups thereof; you can't control what the device does such as skipping any checks. Fraud detection and CAPTCHAs rely on security through obscurity.

> if someone is technical enough to root his phone he understands the risks

You're looking at this from the user's perspective. Indeed, the narrative is "for your safety, you cannot export your security tokens from your device's storage" or "software that runs as root can bypass all permissions!", as though users can't make that choice themselves on purchased-to-own hardware. Dropping privileges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_separation) has been a thing since as long as I'm alive. Don't be fooled that this "protection" is for you :(
by lutusp | 2026-01-09 17:45:08+00:00
> Pretty sure in the USA you can patent mathematics if it is an integral part of the realisation of a physical system.

Yes, that's true. In that example, you're not patenting mathematics, you're patenting a specific application, which can be patented. In my reading I see that mathematics per se is an abstract intellectual concept, thus not patentable (reference: https://ghbintellect.com/can-you-patent-a-formula/).

There is plenty of case law in modern times where a distinction between an abstract mathematical idea, and an application of that idea, were the issues under discussion.

An obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/435/

And IANAL also.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-09 17:45:13+00:00
1. Don't people on HN realize Vietnam is an authoritarian state?

2. Vietnam has been in the process of rolling out national biometric identification for years now as part of the VNeID [0] project, and unifying that with banking and mobile phone identification is an important part of that such as with the recent FPT Telecom announcement [1]

[0] - https://vneid.gov.vn/

[1] - https://tuoitre.vn/vneid-mo-rong-dich-vu-so-dang-ky-internet...
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-09 17:45:18+00:00
It is just the usual vice vs. virtue approach to things where 'the right' tends to point at vices which are in need of curtailing while 'the left' points at the virtue in those turning away from such vices. This also relates closely to 'the right' tending to voice support for punishing those who commit vices in some way while 'the left' voices support for rewarding those who turn away from committing them. Deeper down it points down to the preference for personal agency and responsibility on 'the right' versus collective responsibility and a related lack of personal agency on 'the left'.
by Aspos | 2026-01-09 17:46:03+00:00
Well, I've built a bunch of mobile banking apps and we did detect if the phone was rooted, was in dev mode, etc. and it is not because we were "stupid, consumer-hostile, and anti-competitive".

If someone steals the secrets from a rooted phone and steals customer's money the bank is on the hook, so banks do everything they can to minimize this risk.

There is no way to store customer's secrets in a PC browser securely, so all the "dangerous" transactions were outright prohibited in the web app or made available only via temporary QR login.

All this is just is a negative side effect of customer protection laws.
by bflesch | 2026-01-09 17:46:23+00:00
I also wonder why he felt emboldened to escalate like this. Maybe he thinks Italy is so small it can be slapped around by a rage post on Twitter?

There's a DNS blocklist from media industry applied by German ISPs and I assume Cloudflare was also asked to block these websites, so why didn't I read a story about Cloudflare making a big stir about the German DNS blocking?
by TZubiri | 2026-01-09 17:46:38+00:00
I'm assuming you would do this out of a political reason, or as a very technical and privacy aware user.

But you are providing an alibi for malicious users who, for example, might try to brute force logins from unidentified devices.

That would be one reason aside from the law. You are essentially positioning yourself on the same side as intruders.
by miningape | 2026-01-09 17:47:19+00:00
> My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want

Got that exact impression from this article. No doubt the leadership has issues, but I also get the feeling he wouldn't have been happy with this direction even if a group elected it - although, to his credit, it sounds like he probably would've stuck with it longer.

Also not knocking the author, I hope he finds something more fulfilling to work on - and he's probably awesome to work with.
by switchbak | 2026-01-09 17:47:24+00:00
I dunno, I've picked up my share of hitchhikers and to me it wasn't about being a trade, it's about sharing presence and our stories. Not a transaction, but just sharing.

One time I was stopped on a single lane highway in the mountains, in driving rain, as a power pole was blocking the road. A fellow commuter was in the same boat, but he was on a motorcycle. I invited him in my car and we just chilled and shared some light conversation. No trade, nothing gained besides someone offering a little shelter to another.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-09 17:47:59+00:00
> Why would a government care

Viet Nam is in the process of rolling out mandatory biometric identification and verification as part of the VNeID project [0], and mobile operators are in the process of rolling out identity stamping if mobile devices using VNeID [1]

Viet Nam is also an authoritarian state who's current leader (To Lam) spent his entire career in Viet Nam's KGB (MPS/BCA). Unlike Westerners, Vietnamese know the red lines - this is why I and my SO never travel back to VN with my personal accounts or devices, and why we keep some friends of friends on speed dial.

[0] - https://vneid.gov.vn/

[1] - https://vtv.vn/nha-mang-ho-tro-kich-hoat-sim-truc-tuyen-bang...
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-09 17:48:09+00:00
It's so weird that cats are still so feline, basically miniature tigers/lions but that dogs went so much off the rails compared to majestic wolves. Sure, some dogs are wolves-like but many just lot the plot: chihuahuas, daschhunds (my mom always had those: friendly but... not wolves-like), pugs, sharpeis, etc.

So many are just... Not badass? A wolf is badass. Cats are totally badass: they're natural born killers, hunting billions of poor preys yearly.

My parents are divorced. Father always had huge dogs (St. Bernard, Leonberg, Newfoundland, etc.) while mother always had tiny dogs (daschunds). I loved these dogs but I really hate having to take care of dog poo. So I'm a cat person.

As a bonus my miniature tiger takes care of itself and goes shitting where nobody can see it.
by Helmut10001 | 2026-01-09 17:48:19+00:00
As I mentioned in another post: By 2026, you'll need two phones. My current setup:

1) An unmodified iPhone SE (2022 model) with OS support until 2032. This runs all my authentication, banking, health, etc. It is in airplane mode 99% of the time unless I need it.

2) The second is a Pixel 9a with Graphene OS for daily use, routing and internet access.

This is expensive, but I found it to be the only viable solution to this problem.
by alphadatavault | 2026-01-09 17:48:24+00:00
Interesting to see the mechanisms finally being pinned down to micro-clots and mTOR signaling. The 41% risk reduction with Metformin is a significant signal regarding the metabolic nature of the condition.
The critical takeaway for anyone reading this for personal management is the section on rehabilitation: "exercise that is not carefully supervised can worsen inflammation." The shift from "graded exercise therapy" to "pacing" is a massive clinical pivot that likely prevents a lot of patients from getting worse.
by 76SlashDolphin | 2026-01-09 17:48:59+00:00
I have a Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS and it does most of the above:
- slightly lesser build quality than my iPhone 15 Pro but comparable
- doesn't funnel data to Google unless you explicitly let it, you can circumvent a lot of the Google Play stuff by restricting permissions and using Aurora Store
- is backed by, well, Google and the Graphene team porting over security updated. They have a fairly good track record by now.
- can use any of the N backup services that already exist unlike the iPhone's silly restriction on background apps
- don't notice performance differences between it and my iPhone 15 Pro in day to day use. If anything, biometrics are way faster on the Pixel since iOS 26 made FaceID slow as molasses for me
- the default camera is pretty good (uses all the Pixel fancy processing hardware) but if it's not good enough you can just install the stock Google camera which works fine. You can turn off network access if you don't want it snooping. Photos are neck and neck with the iPhone but the iPhone is way better at videos, no Android phone has cracked that yet IMO.
- Yeah, but no other brand can give you an AppleCare experience. Best option is phone insurance and just getting a new Pixel if that happens. Graphene can do full device backups via Seedvault and it's not that much more of a pain to restore compared to an iPhone backup. Granted, it's jankier but it's not impossible. The other issue is that Pixels are not a thing in a lot of countries, Apple really has the edge here but I'd take that risk over the UX shenanigans they pull nowadays with their latest updates (god is it awful)
by whs | 2026-01-09 17:49:02+00:00
Thai banks are required by regulation to have facial recognition when transferring over 50k THB in one transaction or cumulative in a day. I believe most banks have shutdown their internet banking as it's not worth it for the low number of users to implement web-based secure facial recognition that don't allow you to feed spoofed video input. One of the bank that I use will send a push notification to their mobile app for you to confirm the transaction.

I believe that previously internet banking, even before mobile banking, will limit the number of transfer recipients you can add per day/month. With the rise of QR payment I could see this limit being regularly hit if you scrape the web-based banking.

Since the Bank of Thailand claims that they technically don't block many things (mobile banking technical requirements seems to also require blocking root, but they never banned internet banking), I wish there's a new bank that try to disrupt the existing players. But the latest "branchless" banking license were only acquired by existing banking groups, so API-first personal banking remain impossible.
by bflesch | 2026-01-09 17:49:05+00:00
I cannot believe this is the first time that Cloudflare has been confronted by a local government which asked to perform "global" filtering of content. It is clear for anyone who has worked with bureaucrats that their "global" means "within our jurisdiction". It is extremely weird that he feels emboldened to publicly lash out like this and pull in people who are extremely unpopular in Europe.
by Breza | 2026-01-09 17:50:06+00:00
I've worked in all three sectors. My experience in the federal government suggests that government jobs are clearly defined, but not necessarily easier than a corporate job. If you want to do a specific thing for the next decade, you're better of going gov. But if you want to make a lot of money and don't mind your job changing with every CEO transition, go corporate. And if you want somewhere in the middle, go non-profit.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-09 17:50:32+00:00
> The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.

Yeah this seems political, and it is, but it's really about cognitive bias. Reframing the thing in terms of daily workplace dynamics is pretty easy: just convert "legally consequential facts" to "technically consequential facts" and convert "cultural outlook" to "preferred tech-stack". Now you're in a planning and architecture meeting which is theoretically easier to conduct but where everyone is still working hard to confirm their bias.

How to "fix" this in other people / society at large is a difficult question, but in principle you can imagine decision-systems (like data-driven policies and a kind of double-blind experimental politics) that's starting to chip away at the problem. Even assuming that was a tractable approach with a feasible transition plan, there's another question. What to do in the meanwhile?

IOW, assuming the existence of citizens/co-workers that have more persistent non-situational goals and stable values that are fairly unbothered by "group commitments".. how should they participate in group dynamics that are still going to basically be dominated by tribalism? There's really only a few strategies, including stuff like "check out completely", "become a single issue voter", or "give up all other goals and dedicate your entire life to educating others". All options seem quite bad for individuals and the whole. If group-commitment is fundamentally problematic, maybe a way to recognize a "good" faction is by looking for one that is implicitly dedicated to eliminating itself as well as the rival factions.
by kg | 2026-01-09 17:50:36+00:00
I think you're understating the cost of having to ship your own standard library with every wasm application - the chunk of stdlib used by a real app is bigger than 10kb. ICU data files are in the tens of megabytes, TZDB is a chunk of data too.

Lots of people pretend they don't need ICU or TZDB but that means leaving non-english-speakers or people outside of the US in the cold without support, which isn't the case for JS applications.

I still think this is a major unsolved problem for WebAssembly and I've previously raised it. I understand why it's not solved though - specifying and freezing the bitstream for ICU databases is a big task, etc.
by withinboredom | 2026-01-09 17:51:06+00:00
Probably. I know a guy who roots phones for older people or friends parents, installs pirated games and such for them and making sure it is locked down in certain ways for the older generation.

In other words, the correlation is that older people are more likely to have a rooted phone and are more susceptible to fraud.

Dunno how widespread this is, just something to keep in mind.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-09 17:51:34+00:00
That's a good point.

I think they meet the definition of "terrorists" by their stated goals and acts. But it seems there's reticence by the CPS to break out the Terrorism Act.

Palestine Action is already a proscribed group because of spraypainting RAF planes. I would say this raid seems more terroristic than base invasion, but what do I know? I'm not the Home Secretary.

It raises questions, because while the Terrorism Act is heavily criticised for being overbroad and making a number of otherwise innocuous things crimes, the CPS haven't used it against this group of people, who'd face prison just for being a member, or claiming to be a member of Palestine Action. Maybe the CPS can't reliably prove they are?
by renewiltord | 2026-01-09 17:51:35+00:00
Yeah that makes sense to me. If you come up to me and say “you have to arrest that guy; he’s stealing from me” I have to do a lot of research to make sure that everything is correct.

On the other hand, if I see you steal from me, I don’t have to do a lot of research. I am a first party to the thing. I can be sure.

It’s the difference between a policeman arriving on the scene of an assault and someone actually assaulting the policeman.

The acting party being the affected party simplifies things because you know you’re not a “confused deputy”.
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-09 17:51:51+00:00
I did some research on if the transistor budget for the NPU was spent on something else in the SoC/CPU, what could you get?

You could have 4-10 additional CPU cores, or 30-100MB more L3 cache. I would definitely rather have more cores or cache, than a slightly more efficient background blurring engine.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-09 17:51:58+00:00
> you are locked out of the economy?

Not that it excuses the withdrawal of user agency. But I've never used a banking app on my phone before. Anything important I still like to do on a desktop.

Though how much longer that's safe, who knows. Apple's model of requiring their permission to run code on your own device will probably spread to everything given enough time.
by roadside_picnic | 2026-01-09 17:52:01+00:00
> negligible odds of death or assault?

Negligible odds of death I'll buy, but a very large number of my women friends over my life have been sexually assaulted (and probably far more than I realize, it's not like it's something you bring up during holiday dinner). I'm often shocked by how few men realize how prevalent this is.

The idea that "women who aren't comfortably traveling the world alone depending on the kindness of strangers are living a life ruled by fear" seems naive at best.

Even back in the days when hitchhiking was much more common you would almost never see a single woman by herself, for good reason.