MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-25 01:19:27+00:00
that solves the problem of "stomping on things" in the short term but it might not be trivial to merge these later. depending on what kind of tasks you're giving them and the style in which they do them it could be anything from "no problems" to "lots of headaches" -- the same is true for human developers.

(I've definitely seen 20 developer teams that were spinning their wheels because they were stomping on each other despite using version control as well as teams that had code rot because they had a "no refactoring/don't touch a file you can possible avoid touching" policy)
by jolmg | 2026-01-25 01:20:13+00:00
> Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format?

> I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

That doesn't fix anything, does it?

Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.

The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".
by my_throwaway23 | 2026-01-25 01:21:22+00:00
I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.

The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.

Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.

There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

https://github.com/mautrix/meta
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-25 01:22:50+00:00
> Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU

The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.

I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.

That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-25 01:22:53+00:00
> Is it working if it's not actually doing anything?

Yes, because unvaccinated humans lack immunity. A single imported case could spread rapidly through an unvaccinated population.

I found this informative ECDC page: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts

Quotes:

- Poliovirus can survive at room temperature for a few weeks in soil, sewage, and water

- It's highly infectious with sero-conversion rates of 90–100% among household contacts

- Factors like poor sanitation, high population density, and low vaccine coverage all fuel transmission

Yellow fever needs mosquitoes to spread and has animal reservoirs. Once you reduce/eliminate transmission in those reservoirs, the virus basically can't circulate even with low human vaccination coverage. For polio, humans are the only reservoir, and it spreads directly person-to-person. That's why you can't just rely on vaccinating travelers.

Plus, vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV) is actively circulating in Nigeria and Chad right now. In 2025 alone Nigeria reported 62 cVDPV2 cases. This happens when vaccination coverage drops low enough for the weakened vaccine virus itself to mutate and spread. So it's not just reintroduction risk, the virus is actively evolving in low-coverage areas.

If a huge cluster were to emerge, you'd need rapid mass vaccination campaigns to stop it. That's way riskier than maintaining routine childhood vaccination.
by rchaud | 2026-01-25 01:24:04+00:00
2A is a historical relic of the settler colonial era when communities had to create their own security forces. It's strongest proponents today are those who want to create their own laws and have private militias to enforce it, in obvious contravention of state and federal laws which are decided through a democratic process with checks and balances (elections, legislatures and independent judiciaries).

The present federal government has co-opted the militia strategy and filled its ranks with the 2A absolutists, and given them a budget that rivals most countries' militaries.
by gyomu | 2026-01-25 01:24:18+00:00
They're both pointless filler, but because stock photos are from the real world, they don't suffer from "detail collapse" - sure, there's not much meaning to be found, but the detail stays coherent as you keep looking at them for longer so your brain quickly realizes they can be safely skimmed.

Your visual system looks for detail, it's consistent with your world model but empty of meaning, it doesn't trigger your attention network, you can ignore it and keep going.

AI images do suffer from detail collapse - the longer you look at them, the less sense it makes. Look at the image in the linked post - the sculpture makes no sense, the code inscribed on it looks like real code - oh wait no it's not, the characters quickly blur into garbled scratches, and oh ? there's a smaller block of even more "meaningless" code nested into the first?

Your visual system looks for detail, it's inconsistent with your world model, so it triggers your attention network in search of the meaning behind it (things that are not consistent with our internal world model are of utmost importance to our attention), but there's none to be found. You've just wasted mental cycles on slop, whether you consciously realize it or not.

In either case shitty MSPaint drawings would be much better as they would express personality, and there'd only be the level of detail that their author judges useful, but that would require actual effort.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-25 01:24:43+00:00
Which is why he sold weapons to Ukraine that the Obama administration refused, allows Starlink internet to be provided to Ukraine, orders the navy to seize Russian oil tankers, and allows US provided weapons systems to be fired into Russian territory? Maybe Trump isn't supporting Ukraine as much as you would like him too (and I feel the same), but this conspiracy is childish bullshit.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-25 01:25:36+00:00
"In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude."

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.

I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!

Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-25 01:26:08+00:00
> If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime ...

Dunno about Berlin but walking in Paris as opposed to 20 years ago totally feels like an invasion happened and the country has been conquered. Same in Brussels. Same in several EU cities.

And I'm pretty sure Iran and the muslim brotherhood, and their allies from Russia, have something to do with it.

They're hard at work destabilizing the west and the left doesn't see what wrong with it: for example France just voted to classify the muslim brotherhood as the terrorist organization it is despite 100% of the french politicians at the left, all of them, voting against it.

We, literally, have left-wing politicians in the west encouraging islamism.

It's sickening.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-25 01:26:24+00:00
I don't use any of the other features (in fact, I actively avoid them and would disable them if they ever came to Signal), but:

> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...

> backup is still marked as beta

Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-25 01:26:51+00:00
There are also some things in C that do not work or work differently in C++, such as (void*), empty structures (which in C++ are not really empty), etc; and there is also such C++ stuff such as name mangling, the C++ standard library, etc, even if those things are not a part of your program, which is another reason why you might prefer C.
by mooracle | 2026-01-25 01:26:52+00:00
Pi 5 pricing gets harder to justify when you add up the extras. 8GB board + active cooler + good SD card + case + power supply = $150+ easily.

Used 1L mini PCs (EliteDesk, ThinkCentre Tiny, etc.) with i5-8400T/8GB/256GB go for $50-100 on eBay. You get x86 compatibility, NVMe support, real Ethernet, and no thermal throttling.
Running an EliteDesk 800 G4 with 2.5GbE adapter and 2x2TB NVMe for home server duties. Draws ~15W idle, handles everything I threw at it. The Pi would need USB adapters for any of that.
Pi still wins for GPIO projects and actual embedded use. But for "small Linux box" use cases, the used business mini PC market is tough to beat.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-25 01:27:53+00:00
You won't ever have the exact same set of initial conditions in any experiment. You drop two balls from the tower of pisa and do it again you have different air conditions, the planet has moved, the tower may have leaned slightly more, etc. You either control for these variables or assume they don't matter. The value of science is that even if you drop two balls on the moon, you're still going to get the same result after controlling for differences - the results are broadly applicable. It's exactly the same in the social sciences. If you're looking at something real, it will show up consistently in repeated experiments with proper controls despite variation in irrelevant initial conditions. The phenomena that social sciences try to understand may have many more variables, but there's nothing inherently special about humanity that makes us impossible to describe.
by zoom6628 | 2026-01-25 01:28:03+00:00
Please share as I would like to see what you have built.

What I like about this is that ides of a catalog which is what most business systems have in the form of their records and objects. Giving an AI accessible structure to this gets AI into the realm of the various 4GLs back in late 90s which made user created forms so much easier. Anybody remember that Informix 4GL for building simple apps from the db schema?
by snorbleck | 2026-01-25 01:28:26+00:00
Awesome resource. I recently (in the past week) created a maze game. I used Claude (sonnet 4.5) for the most part, but some things, like images, were created with ChatGPT. I may do a blog about it if anyone is interested in the inner-workings and my thought process from concept to vibecoded. I am by no means a game dev, was just curious about what it would take to create unique single solution mazes with some game-like components thrown in, and trying it with the assistance of AI. It turned out somewhat retro. Now go get lost!

https://lorelabyrinth.entropicsystems.net/weekly
by SolubleSnake | 2026-01-25 01:28:53+00:00
The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous.

This is kind of how it translates in English:

'Light light moon
green grass mountain
snow sun together'

For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-25 01:29:01+00:00
They're not doing them a favor. They're providing them a service.

Trust is a fundamental aspect of how the world works. It's a feature, not a bug.

Consider that e.g. your car mechanic, or domestic service (if you employ it), or housekeeping in hotel you stay, all have unsupervised access to some or all of your critical information and hardware. Yet, these people are not seen as threat actors by most people, because we trust them to not abuse that access, and we know there are factors at play to ensure that trust.

In this context, I see Microsoft as belonging to the cohort above for most people. Both MS and your house cleaner will turn over your things to police should they come knocking, but otherwise you can trust them to not snoop through your stuff with malicious intent. And if you don't trust them enough - don't buy their services.
by smt88 | 2026-01-25 01:29:52+00:00
> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).

You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-25 01:30:33+00:00
If your agent is reasoning across service boundaries you should be giving it whatever you'd normally use when you reason across service boundaries, whether that's an openapi spec or documentation or a client library or anything else. I don't see it as any different than a human reasoning across service boundaries. If it's too hard for your human to do that, or there isn't any actual structured/reusable way for human developers to do that, that's more a problem with how you're doing microservices/developing in general.

> they have to do language translation on the fly in the generation, which is going to degrade attention 100%,

I'm not completely sure what you're alluding to but if you don't have an existing client for your target service, microservices/developers going to have to do that anyway because they're serializing data to call one microservice from another. The only exception would be if you starting calling the other application's code directly from the other's in which case again you're doing microservices wrong or shouldn't even be doing microservices at all (or a lead engineer/other developers deliberately wanted to prevent you from directly integrating those two applciations outside of the API layer and it's WAI).

None of these seem like "microservices are bad for agents" problems to me, just "what I'm doing was already not a good fit for microservices/I should just not do microservices anymore". Forcing integration against service boundaries that are independently built/managed is almost the entire point as far as I'm concerned
by uyzstvqs | 2026-01-25 01:31:37+00:00
A custom API is the only way for a platform to extend its native E2EE sessions and features to other platforms. Making those APIs completely open would become a major spam problem, which would likely end them up in the same situation as SMTP, where small servers are blocked-by-default by big providers.

Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.
by mncharity | 2026-01-25 01:31:50+00:00
As with genes, duplication creates opportunity for specialization. Regardless of what drives the duplication and early divergence.

AIchat "compare and contrast the subtle implications of phrase/X with phrase/Y" suggests using "ad spend" for a number (like "budget"), and "ad spending" for activity and trend ("act of spending").

"Learns" has implications of discovery, smaller size, iterative, informality, individual/team scale, messy, and more. For illustration, to my ear, "Don't be stupid" fits as a "lesson", but not as a "learn" or a "takeaway". Nor as a "lesson learned", with its implication of formality and reflection. "Software X is flaky" fits better "learn" than "lesson". And "unmonitored vendor excursions are biting us" more a "takeaway" (actionable; practical vs process).
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-25 01:33:10+00:00
I beg to differ. Calling going out to a gym, cafe, club or a bar during wartime, as anything other than enjoying life, diminishes the real tragedy of those who are fighting on the front line and don't enjoy such leisure activities. Some people are fortunate enough that they can still get to enjoy life even if their country is in a war, as just like in every war ever, not everyone is affected equally.
by bitwize | 2026-01-25 01:33:26+00:00
I feel most like I'm sculpting code when I'm working in Lisp. I can sort of feel the shape and contour of the procedure I'm creating as I work. Even when writing in something like C, I feel the feeling of "filling out a tax form". Making sure all the things in Section 1 boxes A through E are correct, because Section 6 box D depends on them being so.

Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.
by fragmede | 2026-01-25 01:37:24+00:00
The beauty of ACC is it lets your disengage mentally. You can be aggro if you want to with it on, but I found it's just not emotionally worth it to get mad at being cut off anymore in a car with ACC. ACC just handles going forwards and I'm not having to touch gas nor brake. If I'm not touching either, I don't have to panic react to getting cut-off, just make sure the ACC is handling it, and if that's all I need to check, vs slam on the brakes, then eh.
by netghost | 2026-01-25 01:38:00+00:00
I worked on a product that was built around planning an estimation with ranged estimates (2-4h, 1-3d, etc)

2-12d conveys a very different story than 6-8d. Are the ranges precise? Nope, but they're useful in conveying uncertainty, which is something that gets dropped in any system that collapses estimates to a single point.

That said, people tend to just collapse ranges, so I guess we all lose in the end.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-25 01:38:00+00:00
I found when I tried out using SES, Sendgrid, Brevo, etc to send emails for my self-hosted exim instance, that my deliverability actually went down compared to sending the mail directly. I believe it was because for the free/low cost tiers they dump you onto IP addresses where they're also playing wack-a-mole with spammers. SMTP2GO was the only one I found that had decent deliverability at a free/low cost for low volumes. Still, I only use it for my personal email. For my business, I host our mail on Fastmail.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-25 01:38:28+00:00
You are ignoring the big picture outcome of the resultant culture that develops in a society in which criminals can easily flee and not be chased. Culture shifts for the worse in an environment that is less likely to catch, arrest, or prosecute criminals. Trust and norms erode.

The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.

High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.

At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
by a_t48 | 2026-01-25 01:38:49+00:00
It is a bit cursed, but you can do this in C/C++.

https://godbolt.org/z/vPKEdnjan

union Dang
{
uint64_t : 64; // set total width
uint8_t foo : 5;
uint8_t bar : 5;
struct __attribute__((packed)) {
uint8_t : 4;
uint16_t baz : 16;
};
struct __attribute__((packed)) {
uint32_t : 32;
uint16_t tom : 11;
};
};

The member types don't actually matter here so we can have a little fun and macro it without having to resort to templates to get "correct" types.

#define OFFSET_BITFIELD_DECLARE(NAME, SIZE) \
union NAME { \
uint64_t : SIZE

#define BITFIELD_MEMBER(NAME, SIZE, OFFSET) \
struct __attribute__((packed)) { \
uint64_t : OFFSET; \
uint64_t NAME : SIZE; \
}

#define OFFSET_BITFIELD_END() }

OFFSET_BITFIELD_DECLARE(Dang, 64);
BITFIELD_MEMBER(foo, 5, 0);
BITFIELD_MEMBER(bar, 5, 0);
BITFIELD_MEMBER(baz, 16, 4);
BITFIELD_MEMBER(tom, 11, 32);
OFFSET_BITFIELD_END();

Highly recommend not doing this in production code. If nothing else, there's no compiler protection against offset+size being > total size, but one could add it with a static assert! (I've done so in the godbolt link)

Edit: if you're talking about Zig, sorry!
by tzs | 2026-01-25 01:39:02+00:00
I had Home Assistant on an RPi 3 with 1 GB RAM and a USB thumb drive until sometime maybe 7-10 days ago when I switched to an RPi 5 with 8 GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD and NVME had sold by the RPi company.

The 3 was and the 5 is plugged into an energy monitoring smart outlet. Here's a graph of power for that outlet [1] for the last 30 days.

HA uses long term statistics for older than 10 days, which is why the 2/3 to the left shows much less variation. The switch from the 3 to the 5 is somewhere a little way into the right 1/3, where it is using shorter term data which has a much higher sample rate.

It does look like the average power goes up with the 5, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. The left 2/3 which was definitely all RPi 3, averages 2.48 W. From Jan 17 to the present, which was definitely all RPi 5, it averages 2.64 W.

If those reports of 2.8 W for an idle 4 are accurate I'm curious why my HA 5 is lower. I've got an unused energy monitoring smart plug of the same kind my HA Pi is on. I'll have to put the 4 on that and see how it compares.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/qa7SD2O