MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamnothere | 2026-01-09 17:20:54+00:00
In case people can’t/don’t want to read something on X, here is the statement:

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.

That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme. We, of course, will now fight the unjust fine. Not just because it’s wrong for us but because it is wrong for democratic values.

In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers.

I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials and I’ll be meeting with the IOC in Lausanne shortly after to outline the risk to the Olympic Games if @Cloudflare withdraws our cyber security protection.

In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines. We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders.

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FIGHT AND WE WILL WIN!!!
by bsimpson | 2026-01-09 17:20:58+00:00
I have a cache of old devices, largely the freebies Google gave out at I/O in the early days of Android. Was prepping them to sell last week and saw most are running Cyanogen (the first big community Android fork). Even then, root was a popular way to gain more functionality and add features that haven't been released for a device.

Incidentally, if anyone wants some collector's edition Google/Android devices...
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-09 17:21:05+00:00
To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.
by supern0va | 2026-01-09 17:21:08+00:00
>I'm trying to square this guy's experience with all of the homeless people who don't seem nearly so lucky. Or perhaps they are being helped and supported and I don't see it?

I get that, but I do witness a lot of compassion and help directed to homeless folks. However, even if they're regularly gifted by strangers, it's likely not enough to materially change their situation.

I would suggest that the staggering efficacy of panhandling does demonstrate how remarkably willing strangers are willing to help a rough looking homeless person on a street. And beyond that, there are a lot of invisible homeless (the ones not struggling with mental health or drug issues) that remain off the streets because people in their community will give them a few days on a couch here or there, or help fix their car, give them a place to park a trailer, etc.

In my neighborhood, there's a homeless man that lives in a camper trailer in the back yard of some neighbors. They just met him one day and offered him a stable piece of land to be and help him out as they can. He comes around asking us neighbors for lawn care work and such to earn some money, which is how I learned about the situation.
by tux3 | 2026-01-09 17:21:09+00:00
There's a trend of online banks forcing the use of an app. I can't login to one of my banks' website since last year without using a QR code from their app.

Of course they slathered the app with tracking, 'security', and analytics SDKs, so rooted devices are rejected. I had no way to log into this bank account after they made that change, which is simply wonderful.

Anyways, they're not yet at the point where they've learned to do the checks server-side. For now it's a one line patch to skip the root screen. But the Play Integrity API is designed correctly, if they learn to use it, there will be no workaround without someone finding a hardware vulnerability somewhere.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-09 17:21:51+00:00
Everything you said here is selfish, do you understand that?

"From my experience (60+ years now) the best times of my life have involved taking those "chances"."

You are not focused on giving, it is all about getting. And why is staying at home your whole life something looked down on? Just think of all the carbon it saves going into the atmosphere, if you can that is.
by polishdude20 | 2026-01-09 17:22:04+00:00
To be fair, you don't know if that couple is just out for dinner because they didn't make anything at home that day. You don't know if they've been around eachother and off their phones for the past 24 hours.
I have the opposite anecdotal experience to yours. Lots of people at restaurants are not on their phones but I've also stopped caring to look honestly.
by robertfw | 2026-01-09 17:22:20+00:00
I feel like the special parts have eased off, it was pretty bad with the bionicle stuff (which ironically are apparently what saved lego from financial difficulties), but I'd say all of the recent sets I've got (I get one a year for Christmas) going back at least 5 years have been made up of relatively generic parts, with the odd little special bit for flair.
by superkuh | 2026-01-09 17:22:40+00:00
I see your point and it's valid in this context. But both ends of non-ownership contribute. One doesn't own the smartphone and one doesn't own the bank account.

The National Credit Union Federation of Korea (NACUFOK) represents over 800 member-owned unions (https://www.cu.co.kr/english/main.do), and then there is the even larger Saemaul Geumgo (MG) network which operates as community credit cooperatives with millions of members. These people ostensibly own their "bank" accounts.
by azakai | 2026-01-09 17:22:40+00:00
Performance. JS can be as fast as wasm, but generally isn't on huge, complex applications. Wasm was designed for things like Unity games, Adobe Photoshop, and Figma - that is why they all use it. Benchmarks on such applications usually show a 2x speedup for wasm, and much faster startup (by avoiding JS tiering).

Also, the ability to recompile existing code to wasm is often important. Unity or Photoshop could, in theory, write a new codebase for the Web, but recompiling their existing applications is much more appealing, and it also reuses all their existing performance work there.
by dunham | 2026-01-09 17:22:43+00:00
Yeah, I was concerned about the creativity thing early one, but both of my kids build random stuff from a sea of parts. Occasionally my older kid would decide to build a set again and be frustrated when they couldn't find the part they needed.

As a family, we have a couple of the ninjago city sets, those are largely intact, but the kids play with them.

The minifigures can be a little bit of a problem, they seem to trigger an instinct to collect unique items. My kid will ask for a set so they can get one (or more) of the minifigures in it.
by nailer | 2026-01-09 17:22:46+00:00
Technic used to do these cool books of isntructions only - they were 14 dollars around 1992 - which if you owned Technic set X and Technic set Y you could build Z.

You could build the ALIENS PNEUMATIC LOADER in Lego Technic. Coolest thing ever.

Anyway yes creativity is great but also official instructions are great too.
by mise_en_place | 2026-01-09 17:23:27+00:00
It's a distinct possibility. What's more likely is that this person is an example of someone robbed of their own agency, either intentionally or not.

It leads to becoming dependent on others, a true Last Man in the original sense. That's where the resentment starts on the part of the giver, especially when enabling people such as this repeatedly and on long enough timescales.

What's become clear to me is that there isn't anything inherently wrong (morally speaking) with these people, but they need to be moved out of the way so to speak. They cannot be allowed to escape their various containment zones, and the mechanism for their containment must be strengthened.
by NiloCK | 2026-01-09 17:23:32+00:00
A rooted phone is more capable of modifying the banking app itself and has 'freer reign' over the APIs that the app uses to interact with the bank.

Whereas previously the app displays a 'whitelisted' set of UI options to the user, the rooted user could use employee only methods. Somewhere or other every bank has methods that set balances on accounts.

To be honest a law like this makes security by the extremely modest obscurity of not having an "increase your balance" button on the app UI much more tempting.
by elAhmo | 2026-01-09 17:23:57+00:00
I had respect for Cloudflare in the past, but the CEO is obviously an idiot praising Vance's and Elon's actions. Talking about free speech on X, is quite hypocritical.

This is just a sign that top management of Cloudflare cannot be trusted with anything of importance, especially if you are not in bed with Vance/Musk & co.
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 17:24:01+00:00
If they publicly state that the house is a "town square" (he has said that of twitter), and they say that they are a "free speech absolutist" (he has said this of himself in the context of this house/town square/website), and state that "By 'free speech,' I simply mean that which matches the law.", then yes, if they don't let you spray-paint (tweet) whatever you want that's not strictly unlawful (like, ah, calling for civil disorder in the UK?), they are indeed a hypocrite.

When the house is digital (twitter is), why even use spray paint as the analogy?
by lnsru | 2026-01-09 17:24:26+00:00
We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.
Show HN: Discover and fund the open source projects your code depends on
by jshchnz | 2026-01-09 17:24:42+00:00
Built a Claude Code skill to run on your repo, figure out your dependencies and provide links to donate to the OSS your project relies on

Just run in your Terminal

curl -o ~/.claude/commands/tribute.md \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jshchnz/tribute/main/tribu...

Then run in your Claude Code

/tribute
by heywoods | 2026-01-09 17:24:45+00:00
“They’re wirelessly charged, with a pad that can charge multiple bricks at a time.."

Did LEGO solve this problem and Apple didn’t? The Apple AirPower is what I’m referring to and it was a matter of physics that was the mighty hurdle Apple had to contend with. But they were also trying to pump out ~15w per device. These bricks will be measured in milliwatts per brick. But I’m curious if there is any additional information about this? How many bricks can be charged at a time? Can they be placed anywhere on the pad? (I hope so.) It would be great if specs were released. I would buy the pad alone just for charging other IoT devices.

https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/incoming/tech-news-apple-s-a...

Edit: It will not be usable by anything other than Lego Smart Bricks. It will use a proprietary or highly customized inductive standard designed specifically for the new Lego Smart Bricks.
by u8080 | 2026-01-09 17:25:11+00:00
I am sorry for good people genuinely trying. I understand that it is a hard problem to solve - but private companies chose their contractors and suppliers and as well facing similar issues. Somehow private companies are managing to evaluate results and found accountable persons while governments are known for being very undemanding customers.

"We have tried hard, but failed" is still failure despite any good will. Good will with courage and having skills with competence are very different things and often govt employees have neither because otherwise they will be more successful using this skillset in private companies.
by nextaccountic | 2026-01-09 17:25:18+00:00
> Robust security against agent actions going haywire can be achieved via command runners like just or make. These tools provide everything that MCP does - command specifications, descriptions, arguments. Agents allow you to specify what command prefixes can be invoked without approval - put your agent commands in a justfile, and only auto-allow shell commands prefixed with just.

Shell scripting isn't easily sandboxed like that, just by checking a string to see if it beings with "just". If you want security you need to run commands inside an actual sandbox, and get data in/out of the sandbox in a well thought manner. See how browsers manage to run untrusted Javascript and wasm from actual malicious sites, and do exactly the same.

In this sense, MCP is much better than running commands in the local machine because all MCP does is an HTTP request. I don't need to run a MCP server that runs LLM-provided commands in my local machine, like, at all.
by vunderba | 2026-01-09 17:25:27+00:00
I’ve been putting together a rather silly slide-puzzle game for MENSA-level players: things like arranging the tiles by chemical element name according to atomic number, arranging countries by surface area, etc.

It’s absurd and will probably appeal only to descendants of Ken Jennings. Feedback welcome.

https://slide-puzzles.specr.net
by Aleklart | 2026-01-09 17:25:33+00:00
Of course if you have root, you can make other programs work as you please.

They need to go further to outlaw hide root apps, and then install special app to track the status of the phone to make sure it is not rooted. Then allow police to randomly check the presence of this app on people phones. Every phone needs to be registered and pass hardware inspection every year. Even better, make so called offices where people can come and deposit or transfer money, it will be super safe.
by krapp | 2026-01-09 17:25:36+00:00
The problem with a religion where all it takes is one weird ritual to remain blameless in the eyes of God forever is that it's easy to let a lot of shit slide. Christians always say "we're not perfect, we're just forgiven."

So even though that is Christianity's message, Christianity's metagame means if you take it seriously, you don't actually have to put in the work. You're still going to Heaven because grace is through faith and not works.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-09 17:25:42+00:00
>I remember 20-30 years ago when you’d just get a bucket containing an assortment of pieces and if you were inclined to build a house then you’d have to get creative with the pieces that you had.

You are remembering wrong. The kits about building specific models existed back then, and the kits that are just a bucket of blocks are still sold today.

Lego has been selling specific "build a house" sets for like 50 years.

Whether you only build models and display them or tear everything down and make what you want has always been a choice, and most people do both some amount.

There's even the entire world of designing your own "Models". When I was a kid I would build models that represented real things like planes even though I didn't always have the right parts, but nowadays you can digitally design such a model and bulk order the pieces and instructions yourself!
by griffzhowl | 2026-01-09 17:25:43+00:00
The wiki article doesn't say domestication occurred roughly 14k years ago, it says at least 14k years ago, because that's the earliest definitive evidence of a domesticated dog. Here are the next two sentences from the wiki article:

"The remains of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog, buried alongside humans between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago, are the earliest to be conclusively identified as a domesticated dog.[9][7] Genetic studies show that dogs likely diverged from wolves between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago."
by grayhatter | 2026-01-09 17:25:44+00:00
No? In a disagreement with Italy, cloudflare is definitely going to need the intervention of the US administration. This (angry Twitter post) is how you're expected to ask for help in this timeline. I was expecting to annoyed with the faux allegiance. But here, I think they communicated their distain over the behavior as best as they could, while still asking for help.

I might not like it, but I understand it.

I might be wrong, but it feels to me like the post tries to as subtly as possible communicate that they have problems with the administration (my expectations for anyone who is at all ethical) While still also needing their help. And if I'm wildly incorrect; and cloudflare is actually in love with the administration, then it's still a master class in rhetoric, because they tricked me, which was probably the point?
by dangus | 2026-01-09 17:25:49+00:00
I think there is a slight distaste in how the article conveys concern, almost like a light xenophobia on the issue.

With the one year and done nature of college basketball, that must mean that the US has its fair share of elite high school programs. And college basketball is also still a major pipeline (and don’t forget that foreign players play at NCAA schools).

And that brings me to my next point, which is “of course there are more international stars,” because basketball is more popular internationally than ever. Europe has double the population of the United States and China has triple, both with large middle to upper middle classes that support sending kids to school based on arts and sports.
by account42 | 2026-01-09 17:25:55+00:00
> Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.

The time he spends on Valve day to day is irrelevant to the question of what would happen if those actually running the company decided to do something stupid like taking games away from people vs. what would happen in the same scenario without Gabe around.

> Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.

Rich people are largely the kind that can never have enough money.

> From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company.

And there is no reason to believe his heirs will want to keep the company rather than cash out for the right offer just because Gabe wouldn't have.

> It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.

That has never been an a showstopper for vulture capitalists.
by torginus | 2026-01-09 17:25:57+00:00
My personal gripe is that they did away with the studded beams in Technic and everything is smooth beams now with axles and pins.

While it might look marginally better, everything is 3x the parts and the building time, and you can just sit down and slap stuff together any more, in fact with the rise of things like Arduino, and 3D printing, I think it's easier to just do electronics + CAD (even with kids) than to work with this stuff.

Which is a shame, because older sets used to be cheaper and contain much less parts for the same amount of functionality, and something like a crane truck set that could do all the tilting and motor stuff was categorized as suitable for kids 2-3 years younger.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-09 17:26:09+00:00
> Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures

Celebrating failures has become a very confusing concept. When someone shares their stories of trying and failing, the part we're celebrating is that they tried something. We're not celebrating the failure or validating everything they did.

The value in sharing failure stories is that others can learn from them. The person sharing the failure story also gets valid feedback.

If everyone just rolled over and applauded everything that led up to the failure, that's not helpful to anyone. It may feel good for some, but it's really unhelpful. Evaluating the situation and what went wrong is important.

The second aspect is a desire for "blameless" postmortems where we all pretend like the human element was not a factor to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. However, in cases like this, the human factor appears to be at the root of a lot of the discord. I don't think it's unfair at all to discuss that honestly.
by edent | 2026-01-09 17:26:22+00:00
This isn't about the bank's security - it is about the users'.

Users are losing billions worldwide due to fraudulent apps. If a user has root and runs a malicious app, it can intercept what a legitimate banking app does. A scam app with root can draw over the screen and tell users to transfer money, or it can run a series of actions when the banking app is running, or do any of a hundred things to steal money.
by legitster | 2026-01-09 17:26:28+00:00
> And that was a deliberate decision made by Lego.

A prime example of this are the flower sets they sell. You'll get, like, 90 purple flippers. What are you supposed to do with that besides make flowers? It's an excessively overengineered and wasteful jigsaw puzzle.

Even their line of Technic stuff is super watered-down. It's really hard to get useful components, and they have changed the design of their motors and controllers several times (no cross compatibility, obviously). People are moving to buying bootleg components.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-09 17:26:49+00:00
This covers the data center resource green-washing rhetoric, and most taxpayers will be paying more for energy now regardless of what they think:

'"Generative AI" is not what you think it is'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo

And this paper proved the absurd outcome of the bubble is hype:

'Researchers Built a Tiny Economy. AIs Broke It Immediately'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME

It is true bubbles driven by the irrational can't be stopped, but one may profit from peoples delusions... and likely get discount GPUs when the economic fiction inevitably implodes. Best of luck =3
by deadbabe | 2026-01-09 17:27:04+00:00
It really doesn’t matter what administration is in charge, at a certain level you have to curry favor with whatever administration is in power and hold your true motives close to your chest. People seem to think what people say in public is perfect knowledge of their true intentions. No. What they say is what they want someone to hear them say. There is nothing to gain by saying what you really feel, no one can prove it’s what you really feel anyway.