MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-25 22:26:12+00:00
Their low-level bootloader code contains a vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to boot an OS of their choice.

Android's normal bootloader unlock procedure allows for doing so, but ensures that the data partition (or the encryption keys therefore) are wiped so that a border guard at the airport can't just Cellebrite the phone open.

Without downgrade protection, the low-level recovery protocol built into Qualcomm chips would permit the attacker to load an old, vulnerable version of the software, which has been properly signed and everything, and still exploit it. By preventing downgrades through eFuses, this avenue of attack can be prevented.

This does not actually prevent running custom ROMs, necessarily. This does prevent older custom ROMs. Custom ROMs developed with the new bootloader/firmware/etc should still boot fine.

This is why the linked article states:

> The community recommendation is that users who have updated should not flash any custom ROM until developers explicitly announce support for fused devices with the new firmware base.

Once ROM developers update their ROMs, the custom ROM situation should be fine again.
by jstimpfle | 2026-01-25 22:26:16+00:00
First, because of existing constraints like mutability though direct buffer access, a hypothetical codepoints_size() would require recomputation each time which would be prohibitively expensive, in particular because std::string is virtually unbounded.

Second, there is also no way to be able to guarantee that a string encodes valid UTF-8, it could just be whatever.

You can still just use std::string to store valid encoded UTF-8, you just have to be a little bit careful. And functions like codepoints_size() are pretty fringe -- unless you're not doing specialized Unicode transformations, it's more typical to just treat strings as opaque byte slices in a typical C++ application.
by Jach | 2026-01-25 22:27:05+00:00
I think for a lot of people, simply having "Author: Gwern" (or some other author they like) is the sufficient bit of information to make them care, it's generic on the content. I've read a lot of not very stylish writing simply because of who wrote it. Or in other words, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." Whatever quirks of bad style there are will get a pass because I already care -- style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.
by mistermaster1 | 2026-01-25 22:27:11+00:00
Can you point out how I was defending a party? I’m simply saying that the US isn’t a fascist state yet. We can engage, debate and discuss. People are actively out in the streets of MSP and watching and confronting these agents and the incidents are being documented, spread widely and analyzed. Calling it fascism isn’t productive nor is it even front running.
I am willing to bet against any of you that this insanity perpetrated by poorly trained or untrained agents running amok in the midwest will be old news by the end of the year and no not because it has been subsumed by some worse class of atrocities. It will have ended, ICE will have ceased these sort of unchecked “operarions” and largely due to public outrage and scrutiny. Actual outrage, scrutiny and genuine activism, not writing articles from an armchair that mischaracterize this as fascism or racism. That sort of thing only perpetuates and makes the rabid crazies who actually support these actions in light of the tragedies sink their jackboots in even harder and empowers them more despite them being in the minority.
by tavavex | 2026-01-25 22:27:37+00:00
My less cynical side hopes for that too, because English and my first language are worlds apart compared to how similar in some ways English is to French. I also live in a more bilingual area than others and get plenty of exposure to French. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem - to permanently live there for the immersion, you need to have a job there, and to have a job there you need to have perfect French.
by jjmarr | 2026-01-25 22:27:42+00:00
Virtually all of the top performers at my school left for the USA immediately after graduation.

I think somewhere between 70-90% of Waterloo graduates in CS leave every year.

Turns out doubling or tripling your take home compensation is absolutely worth it.

You can buy a house instead of renting an apartment with roommates. You can afford to marry and have children. You can buy all the things the government would've provided you had it not been dysfunctional.

Plus, there are just more jobs in SWE in the USA. Many of my classmates graduating last year in June are still unemployed since you have to be exceptional to get a job here.

Pretty much anyone who can get TN1/H1B/L1B does, unless you were born wealthy, have an extreme sense of patriotism, or have a very strong attachment to family.
Show HN: AI-powered natural language video editor – seeking feedback
by hhossain | 2026-01-25 22:28:26+00:00
I've been working on a video editor where you can edit by typing commands in plain English instead of using traditional timeline tools. The idea came from making tutorial videos and getting frustrated with how many clicks it takes to do simple things.
Right now it handles commands like:

"Zoom into this area smoothly"
"Speed up the next 5 seconds by 2x"
"Highlight this button for 3 seconds"
"Remove the zoom at 10 seconds"

You can render videos locally for free (single-threaded on your CPU), or use cloud rendering for faster processing.
I'm trying to figure out if this approach actually saves time for people or if it's just a novelty. My main questions:

For folks who make tutorial/demo videos - what editing tasks eat up most of your time? What features would actually make you switch tools?
Would you trust AI to correctly interpret your editing commands, or does that feel too unpredictable?
What types of effects or edits would be most handy to control with natural language?

Curious to hear what would make this genuinely useful for your workflow vs just an interesting demo.
by nairboon | 2026-01-25 22:29:24+00:00
That's one of the issues that causes a bit of work.
Citations would need to be judged with context. Let's say paper X is nowadays known to be tainted. If a tainted work is cited just for completeness, it's not an issue, e.g. "the method has been used in [a,b,c,d,x]"
If the tainted work is cited critically, even better: e.g. "X claimed to show that..., but y and z could not replicate the results".
But if it is just taken for granted at face value, then the taint-label should propagate: e.g. ".. has been previously proved by x and thus our results are very important...".
by klustregrif | 2026-01-25 22:29:32+00:00
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever

That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.
by throwworhtthrow | 2026-01-25 22:29:40+00:00
It's not just Trump. Look at how even the weak Republican pushback is framed. They have no moral objection to his actions, only for the risk of blowback.

See Ted Cruz's remarks on Jimmy Kimmel: "[W]hen it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it."

Or Brett Kavanaugh on Lisa Cook: that Trump shouldn't dismiss her because "what goes around comes around [...] if there's a Democrat president".

This is the moderate Republican position: no concern for the harm caused to people on the political left, only concern that they on the right might not get away with it. The MAGA position is, as this article shows, much worse.
by johng | 2026-01-25 22:29:40+00:00
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Especially when the lies were so obvious. You can't get COVID if you get the vaccine (A lie), You can't spread COVID if you get the vaccine (A lie). If they would have been honest from the start -- that you are less likely to need to take up limited hospital beds if you got the vaccine, I think people would have responded better.

Then there were the obviously stupid mask rules.... wear a mask, stand in lane, separate... but as soon as you sit down at a table, you can take off the mask and now all of the sudden the disease magically can't spread.

No gathering outside, no going to church, even outside if you provide plenty of space or we will arrest you.

However, riots lining up body to body for the cause of the week is perfectly fine without masks.

The hypocrisy of the whole situation was obvious and undeniable. I'm sure you are partly true with some of the Trump hard core lover people.... but there are a LOT of silent majority in the middle that don't like Trump but dislike the lies and hypocricy much much more.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-25 22:29:45+00:00
> logic would indicate that its either (or both) (1) its not about immigration (it's about power and control thru fear) or (2) they're idiots

Let's not forgot and/or (3) going after Minnesota voter roles (per this letter from Pam Bondi):

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/...

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bondi-minnesota-voter-rolls-wel...
Show HN: vr.dev – AI coding assistant beta for XR/VR
by vrdev | 2026-01-25 22:30:09+00:00
Hey HN,

Launching an AI coding assistant built specifically for VR/AR/XR development: https://vr.dev

The problem: Generic LLMs give confidently wrong answers about XR development. The APIs change constantly (Meta ships SDK updates monthly), training data is stale, and XR knowledge is sparse in general-purpose models. Developers end up with deprecated method signatures and patterns that broke two versions ago.

The solution: RAG over actual XR documentation, updated regularly.

Free to use during beta. Looking for feedback from anyone building XR applications.

What's the XR development question that AI has never gotten right for you? Drop it in the comments or email chat@vr.dev and I’ll post some bake-off comparison shots.

What it doesn't do (yet): index your own codebase/docs, IDE plugin, MCP tool set. Those are on the roadmap.

Feedback welcome here or at chat@vr.dev — especially on answer quality, missing doc sources, or features that would make this useful for XR workflows.
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-25 22:31:08+00:00
Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread).

It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?

A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.

Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.
by aaplok | 2026-01-25 22:31:11+00:00
> Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?

Probably not? People are not "being told" what to read, they are given some opinionated advice which they can then decide to follow or not.

According to Wikipedia, 275,000 books are published each year in the US alone [0]. Most people (even excluding the many that don't read) will read well under 0.01% of that. Deciding which books to read without taking advice from someone more informed would not be optimal.

Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to rely of expert advice than to just make all decisions on your own.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...
by Yodel0914 | 2026-01-25 22:31:35+00:00
I agree. I’m using copilot more and more as it gets better and better, but it is getting better at the fun stuff and leaves me to do the less fun stuff. I’m in a role where I need to review code across multiple teams, and as their output is increasing, so is my review load. The biggest issue is that the people who lean on copilot the most are the least skilled at writing/reviewing code in the first place, so not only do I have more to review, it’s worse(1).

My medium term concern is that the tasks where we want a human in the loop (esp review) are predicated on skills that come from actually writing code. If LLMs stagnate, in a generation we’re not going to have anyone who grew up writing code.

1: not that LLMs write objectively bad code, but it doesn’t follow our standards and patterns. Like, we have an internal library of common UI components and CSS, but the LLM will pump out custom stuff.

There is some stuff that we can pick up with analysers and fail the build, but a lot of things just come down to taste and corporate knowledge.
by tombert | 2026-01-25 22:32:13+00:00
Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought the CD for.

The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.

With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-25 22:32:27+00:00
> the market needs to catch up with that

By that token, touchscreen laptops will replace the iPad any day now.

I think the preeminent issue is that touch-native UIs are very imprecise and clunky by nature. The iPad makes a great MIDI controller; it's an awful mixer or plugin host compared to a regular laptop running regular PC plugins. Buying a mouse or keyboard won't port Omnisphere or the U-He plugins to iPad. I doubt the market will ever "catch up" in that regard.
Show HN: Zopamind. A B2B Negotiation Sidekick
by iamasuperuser | 2026-01-25 22:32:41+00:00
I create a free mobile-first tool to help you close better deals; Zopamind.com . It can be used both to help you understand your boundaries (ZOPA, BATNA) and as a tool during negotiations (Monte Carlo Decision Tree).

More details:
It uses 200+ signals to calculate your actual odds of winning a deal, helping you spot risks before you walk into the room.

Why use it?
Data-Driven: Analyzes your deal across 10 dimensions.
100% Private: Data lives in your browser, not my servers.
100% Free: No paywall.

Perfect for prep, in-session management, and debriefing.

Try it here: https://zopamind.com
by stevenwoo | 2026-01-25 22:32:48+00:00
So there were 323 events investigated but there's some criteria that should be taken into account for violent resistances that is not - for instance zero of the resistances to the Nazi occupations during World War 2 succeeded by their definition, and off the top of my head only the Yugoslavian resistance really put up a substantial dent in the occupation and still required the Soviet army invasion to kick the Nazis out.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-25 22:32:55+00:00
They patched a low-level vulnerability in their boot process. Their phones' debug features would allow attackers to load an old, unpatched version of their (signed) software and exploit it if they didn't do some kind of downgrade prevention.

Using eFuses is a popular way of implementing downgrade prevention, but also for permanently disabling debug flags/interfaces in production hardware.

Some vendors (AMD) also use eFuses to permanently bond a CPU to a specific motherboard (think EPYC chips for certain enterprise vendors).
by mindslight | 2026-01-25 22:33:16+00:00
Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. The way I characterize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism, where that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of one demented career criminal.
by shantara | 2026-01-25 22:33:18+00:00
What I see today on HN mirrors the processes I've witnessed in Russian speaking parts of the net during the 2010s. Despite the escalation of totalitarianism in Russia, the growing internet censorship and military operations in nearby countries, which left the posters on the same websites on the different sides of military conflicts, some sites have stuck to their "no politics" rule. Both to avoid upsetting people in power and out of their owners' naïve beliefs.

Reading them was like living in an alternate reality where nothing more notable happens than a release of new version X of a framework Y. Large portions of the tech community had exactly the same attitude that could be seen here and now - refusal to consider the societal implications of their daily work, adherence to technical solutions over the real world ones ("I'll just work remotely and use a VPN, who cares") and just simple willful ignorance.

It was around that time that I started to frequent English speaking discussions, which were much more vibrant and open. It saddens me to see the same kind of process repeat itself here.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-01-25 22:33:31+00:00
Why is it that right now there is still on the frontpage of an "article being found flawed after 6k citations " ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/ ) but this random article coming out of nowhere makes the front page on the same day?

People really should get it and stop sharing newly published papers to the general public. The value of one single academic paper is exactly 0. Even a handful of such articles still has 0 value to the general public. This is only of interest to other academics (or labs, countries, etc.) who may have the power to reproduce it in a controlled environment.

Be very skeptical of correlations like this that have dubious or poorly understood causation. Be even more skeptical if they are about day-to-day stuff that would likely have large swaths of people able to reproduce something like it on huge scales yet they haven't. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
by lxgr | 2026-01-25 22:33:33+00:00
It actually seems to work pretty well for iPhones.

Thieves these days seem to really be struggling to even use them for parts, since these are also largely Apple DRMed, and are often resorting to threatening the previous owner to remove the activation lock remotely.

Of course theft often isn't preceded by a diligent cost-benefit analysis, but once there's a critical mass of unusable – even for parts – stolen phones, I believe it can make a difference.
by tptacek | 2026-01-25 22:33:36+00:00
This is a category error. Our definition of "race" is, to the extent it's genetically constructed at all (it's at least as much social as genetic), based on a small, superficial subset of the whole genome, mostly selected ages ago in response to climate. The idea that the rest of the genome would be strongly correlated to these phenotypical traits is in fact the extraordinary claim; not only is there not extraordinary evidence for it, but the evidence we have is mostly countervailing.
by mirsadm | 2026-01-25 22:33:56+00:00
I've used Claude Code to do the same (large refactor). It has worked fairly well but it tends to introduce really subtle changes in behaviour (almost always negative) which are very difficult to identify. Even worse if you use it to fix those issues it can get stuck in a loop of constantly reintroducing issues which are slightly different leading to fixing things over and over again.

Overall I like using it still but I can also see my mental model of the codebase has significantly degraded which means I am no longer as effective in stopping it from doing silly things. That in itself is a serious problem I think.
by rlt | 2026-01-25 22:33:59+00:00
How would they target people using voter rolls? Is the concern that it includes party affiliation? Couldn't they just provide the rolls without party affiliation?

Honestly it seems crazy even state governments know party affiliation. I know it's so they know who can vote in primaries etc, but it seems like you should just be able to register to vote with your party directly.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-25 22:34:07+00:00
Pipepipe stopped downloading audio or video when I was using it a couple of years back.

I switched over to NewPipe as it was better maintained and worked well.

Since past few months, NewPipe is not automatically showing latest YT videos, but it opens the video if I type in the video's source url. Downloads are working fine though, which is what I mainly use it for.

Will try Pipepipe again next weekend if it fares better.

Google is trying to suppress all these FOSS alternatives to its ads-overloaded apps.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-25 22:34:25+00:00
You can’t disclaim your legal obligations.

HIPPA is a privacy obligation for healthcare providers.

Other service providers and professionals (legal, accounting, medical, etc.) have obligations, duties and responsibilities to maintain a reasonably competent level of service.

Using "pretend intelligence" opens the door to liability and claims of negligence when (not if) things go wrong.
by mistermaster1 | 2026-01-25 22:35:01+00:00
No they could write it in another state, anonymously, or on more underground/less mainstream established platforms than one of the oldest publications in the history of the republic.
More like what’s happening with regards to Iran.
Also, front-running also implies that there’s an order for fascism coming up. So the intent of establishing fascism is preceded by a bungled and visibly brutal and horribly implemented performative “operation” that this massacre by ICE is? That makes no sense. This is not an order for fascism that an article is sort of front-running protectively. The better analogy is a media entity predictably calling one extremely messed up thing another extremely messed up thing, and leaving a massive vulnerability for their side. Messed-up-thing-promoting folks will use articles like this a year from now after ICE ceases operations, effectively issuing a silent “apology” of sorts and curtailing the violence, to promote the next messed up thing they want to do (which may be less messed up than the ICE massacres but still would be quite messed up and avoidable).

Every pessimistic approximation isnt always good. We lose credibility when we keep doing it.
by apsec112 | 2026-01-25 22:35:02+00:00
It's not like Americans are all buying X so they can't afford to buy Y - there isn't really a major category of consumption where the US median is below the OECD median. If the US had a higher savings rate, then people could smooth out consumption more (build up savings some years, draw them down in bad years or in retirement), and maybe enjoy more psychological security. But it doesn't really make sense to say that Americans are unusually "bogged down in expenses" and yet have more goods and services in every significant category.