MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by webglfan | 2026-01-12 08:52:28+00:00
The article is an interesting read, but the argument that WhatsApp is untrustable because it is closed-source is technically accurate regarding its transparency, but it is a flawed explanation for three main reasons:

1. Verification via Traffic Analysis

You don't need to see the source code to verify that encryption is working. Security researchers use black-box testing to intercept data packets leaving the device. If the encryption were fake or backdoored, the data would show identifiable patterns or plain text. To date, independent network analysis confirms that WhatsApp consistently uses the Signal Protocol to scramble message content.

2. The Scale of Scrutiny

The claim that reverse engineering is "not done in practice" is misleading. Because WhatsApp is used by billions, it is one of the most scrutinized pieces of software in history. Bug hunters, state actors, and cybersecurity firms constantly probe the binary code for vulnerabilities. While harder than reading open-source code, this constant adversarial auditing acts as a massive, unofficial security check.

3. Protocol vs. Implementation

WhatsApp uses the open-source Signal Protocol for its encryption. While the app's interface is private, the cryptographic engine is based on a peer-reviewed standard. If Meta modified the protocol to introduce a backdoor, it would likely alter the cryptographic handshake in a way that would be detectable to experts monitoring the metadata.

TL;DR: While open-source is better for transparency, WhatsApp's security is validated through network observation and external pressure, rather than just "taking Meta’s word for it."
by Razengan | 2026-01-12 08:52:39+00:00
It's fucking amazing sometimes how the Mac/iOS Photos app can't download a photo or small video for several minutes but you can easily watch YouTube on the same connection.

And it took Apple YEARS to give us a "Keep Downloaded" option for iCloud Drive documents in Finder.

And it's been years since I read any ebooks because the damn Mac/iOS Books app keeps removing my downloaded books even though I have several GBs of storage space left.

Goddamn Tim Cook and the other execs, do they even ever use their own products at all?
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-12 08:53:47+00:00
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPb7etzOmA

Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
by watwut | 2026-01-12 08:54:22+00:00
Yes, Trump is now unpopular. But.

> Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with?

If we are talking about past culpability, this one does not works at all. Trump is being exactly who he was and what he campaigned on. This is not the case of someone switching up after being elected. This is case of who openly or tacitly supported Trump, because they thought they will personally benefit on top of having fun of watching liberals suffer.

By tacitly I mean all those bad faith "both sides" and "Trump is dove, Harris is aggressive". As an example, Latino Trump voting men were attracted by the misogynistic and male dominance content. They thought they wont be personally affected. Rural people still cheer to occupation and terrorization of cities ... and still think they are the only true Americans. They though they will be able to keep their farms like the last time. And so on and so forth.

People knew full well what is going on when they were hiding behind euphemisms about conservatives and blamed liberals when those said the truth. They just liked the project and thought they will be affected only a little.
by sublinear | 2026-01-12 08:55:22+00:00
I think I've come full circle back to the idea that a human should write the high-level code unassisted, and the LLM should autocomplete the glue code and draft the function implementations. The important part is that the human maintains these narrow boundaries and success criteria within them. The better the scaffolding, the better the result.

Nothing else really seems to make sense or work all that well.

On the one extreme you have people wanting the AI to write all the code on vibes. On the other extreme you have people who want agents that hide all low-level details behind plain english except the tool calls. To me these are basically the same crappy result where we hide the code the wrong way.

I feel like what we really need is templating instead of vibes or agent frameworks. Put another way, I just want the code folding in my editor to magically write the code for me when I unfold. I just want to distribute that template and let the user run it in a sandbox. If we're going to hide code from the user at least it's not a crazy mess behind the scenes.
by stefanlindbohm | 2026-01-12 08:55:23+00:00
Maybe it’s just two different ways to reach the same result. You need to spend time to be great at prompting to get high-quality code from LLM’s, which might just be equivalent to the fact you need to spend time to write high-quality code without LLM’s too.

From where I’m standing, I don’t see any massive difference on overall productivity between anyone all in on vibe coding than those who aren’t. There’s not more features, higher quality, etc from teams/companies out there than before on any high-level metrics/observations. Maybe it will come, but there’s also no evidence it will.

I do, however, see great gains within certain specific tasks using LLM’s. Smaller scope code gen, rubber ducking, etc. But this seems much less difficult to get good at using (and I hope for tooling that help facilitate the specific types of use cases) and on the whole amounts to marginal gains. It seems fine to be a few years late to catch up, worst case.
by CodeWeave | 2026-01-12 08:56:12+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the founder of CodeWeave.

After years working in DevOps and platform engineering, I kept running into the same issue:
AI tools are great at explaining infrastructure, but unreliable when you actually need to build or fix production systems.

CodeWeave is an intent-driven DevOps & GenAI copilot that generates production-ready infrastructure and incident runbooks, grounded in official documentation (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.).

It explicitly refuses to guess when the docs are unclear, which turns out to matter a lot in real outages.

Current use cases:

Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD generation (full systems, not snippets) and much more

Production incident troubleshooting with concrete remediation steps

Cloud & GenAI architectures designed for real-world constraints

I’d really appreciate feedback from people operating real systems:

What feels useful?

What feels unnecessary?

What would make this trustworthy enough to use at work?

Happy to answer any technical questions.

Link: https://codeweave.co
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-12 08:56:57+00:00
From the HN discussion of "Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997) (donhopkins.com)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997725

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/Sims/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002840

DonHopkins on Aug 13, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem).

Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination!

They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

DonHopkins on Aug 13, 2017 [–]

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY
by coldstartops | 2026-01-12 08:56:57+00:00
KeibiDrop: A peer to peer synchronous IPV6 file sync tool.

I always struggle to share files between my devices, or to navigate them. Why do I need servers, or dropbox or wetransfer?

Inspired by croc, rclone, syncthing and magic wormhole, I'm close to releasing KeibiDrop as MPL2.0.

It has a nice slint.dev GUI, works cross platform on mobile, + desktop (via FUSE or no-FUSE), and has post quantum encryption at transport level.

No clear monetization path, but I also tinker with unikraft in order to host a relay server (for key negotiation, or other things) as a unikernel cloud function.
by iancoleman | 2026-01-12 08:57:09+00:00
The default config for this is to use Alt+(right-click drag) to resize and Alt+(left-click drag) to move.

I use this so much once I found it, this solved my frustration with the tiny resize border on the window itself.

This setting can be found in Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Accessibility > Key used to grab and move windows: Alt
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 08:57:25+00:00
That is a strawman though, and I am not sure why all replies assume extremes all the time.

Nobody said do everything from scratch. The point is: basic networking (port forwarding, WireGuard) should not be beyond someone's capability as a software engineer.

"I use apt instead of compiling" is a time tradeoff. "I can't configure a VPN" is a skill gap. These are not equivalent.

If you choose convenience for whatever reasons, that is completely fine.
by Y-bar | 2026-01-12 08:57:39+00:00
Over 50% of their economy is petroleum, managed by the Ministry of Petroleum government body.

They pump over 4 Million barrels per day (https://ycharts.com/indicators/iran_crude_oil_production).

This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.

No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
by panick21_ | 2026-01-12 08:57:56+00:00
The 'Mars concept' by SpaceX was not grounded in the same 'strategic goals' as anything NASA or DoD were planning at the time.

NASA at the time primary was doing a moon program called Constellation. And DoD was not really thinking much about deep space at all.

If you are talking about the other Mars program then I don't why that would be relevant in this context.

> Many forget the DC-X.

Not sure what you are implying here. NASA and DoD had periodic programs to do various things and test various things, including reuse. See X-33 and Rotary Rocket. But all those concepts involved Single Stage to Orbit and were arguably pretty dumb and incredibly unlikely to ever work.

If the question were about, did SpaceX invent re-usability or vertical landing then your point might be relevant, but it isn't.

Even if it was true that DC-X is the pure expression of some kind of missile defense obsessed deep state, then this would still be irrelevant for SpaceX.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-12 08:58:00+00:00
This is why I switched from XFCE to KDE. I still use XFCE for server desktops (if they have one) as it gets out of your way and lets you do easy things easily. I did spend a while recently trying to figure out how to get a Gnome desktop to autostart a terminal and ended up mucking around with installing desktop extensions just trying to specify a startup command.
by trinix912 | 2026-01-12 08:58:02+00:00
Until we get LLMs with deterministic output for a given prompt, there's no guarantee that you and me typing the same prompt will yield a working solution of similar quality.

I agree that it helps to add context, but then again assuming people aren't already doing it doesn't help in any way. You can add all the context there is and still get a total smudge out of it. You can select regenerate a few times and it's no better. There's nothing indisputably proving which part of your prompt the LLM will fixate on more and which one it will silently forget (this one's even more apparent with longer prompts).
by worksonmine | 2026-01-12 08:58:17+00:00
Is the IoT version of Windows 10 a full desktop? I tried it on my Raspberry Pi when it was released for free but I didn't get past booting. I dropped it because I didn't understand what it was, or what I was supposed to do with it and I wasn't curious enough to find out. This is your suggestion for my grandmother over some simple Linux distro with a browser?
by watwut | 2026-01-12 08:58:51+00:00
It is totally ok to blame Trump voters. They literally wanted this to happen and it happened. OK, they did not wanted the "bad thing A" to happen, they only wanted the "evil things B and C" to happen. Usually based on what affects them personally.

> People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.

Voting for Trump because you share his values is not exactly defense, something positive or even respect worthy. Yes, equally people voted for Hitler because they shared values. This commonality of values is why they are culpable and we can blame them.
by mattmanser | 2026-01-12 08:58:56+00:00
Ok, but given the level of detail you're supplying, at that point isn't it quicker to write the code yourself than it is to prompt?

As you have to explain much of this, the words written are much more than just the code, so it actually takes longer to type.

I find it so much faster to just ask Claude/ChatGPT for an example of what I'm trying to do and then cut/paste/modify it myself. So just use them as SO on steriods, no agents, no automated coding. Give me the example, and I'll integrate it.

And the end code looks nothing like the supplied example.

I tried using AquaVoice (which is very good) to dictate to it, and that slightly helped, but often I found myself going so slowly just fully prompting the AI when I would have already finished the new code myself at that point.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-12 08:59:34+00:00
The regulations are the "real" legal basis. The fact you don't like them or how they're written doesn't make them any less real. And you're not arguing with me or my "fluff", you're arguing with the entire banking industry.

If you really think this is all just fluff, by all means, go get yourself employed inside a bank's security team and convince them to turn all this stuff off. Let us know how it goes.
by keybored | 2026-01-12 08:59:46+00:00
Is there a Jeapordy for guessing prompts? Give an executive summary of GenAI trends where GenAI is the destiny and everything reacts to it. Touch on all “problems”. Don’t be divisive by making hard proclamations. Summarize in a safe way by appealing to the trope of the enthusiastic programmer who dutifully adapts to the world around them in order to stay “up to date”; the passive drone that accepts whatever environment they are placed in and never tries to change it. But add insult to injury by paradoxically concluding that the only safe future is the one you (individual) “actively engineer”.

I’m not saying that this was prompted. I’m just summarizing it in my own way.
by an-allen | 2026-01-12 09:00:38+00:00
I think its a Kobyashi Maru - there is absolutely no way we will wield a paradigm shifting technology like language models and be able to do it safely. Language models create at scale and scope much greater than what can be reviewed by human… this means we very quickly move into trust without checks with language models. At some point, AI will be executing knowledge work in an instance, leaving no space for the human centric economic system that came before it. It will destroy our economic systems heavily based in knowledge and services (most advanced economies) and show us how what we do is mostly computable.

And when we are there, hungry, broken, unemployed and unimpressed with the prometheus who stole our purpose and replaced it with nothing….

it will make a colossal mistake that will destroy faith in it, as well as the institutions destroyed because of its oversite. The mistake will lead to bans, and regulatory bodies and auditing and certification processes… and will result in the final master stroke - it will make AI unusable by the non ordained, regulatory capture. Math will be a tool governments and institutions wield in secret against its citizenry… and it will be a tool of omnipotence that will lead to the enslavement, rebellion, and robot wars.
by poolnoodle | 2026-01-12 09:00:46+00:00
What the hell are you doing to get malware? I have never had a virus ever. And I only keep Windows Defender running in the background.
Bloatware – yes. Uninstall it once and it's gone. Once or twice a year a new thing might pop up. Uninstall that and be done with it.
Do you really have to manage drivers or is that just on old maid's tale? I sure as hell don't manage drivers. Windows Update will install any driver I need automatically. Only driver I upgrade manually is GPU a couple times a year when there is a new game that can take advantage of it. Really, that whole driver story is just a bunch of lies.
by touristtam | 2026-01-12 09:01:12+00:00
It's also a country that doesn't seem to care if the project is not cost-effective from the PoV of western companies. This is always a salient point missing from most conversation about the US and by extension the Western world; the advocacy of cheap energy are hiding the argument that nuclear power is both more consistent in power delivery and cleaner (arguable with the nuclear waste ofc) than any alternative currently available.
by gjadi | 2026-01-12 09:01:39+00:00
Sure, but then I rely on an actual expert.

My issue is, LLM fooled me more than a couple of times with stupid but difficult to notice bugs.
At that point, I have hard time to trust them (but keep trying with some stuff).

If I asked someone for something and found out several time that the individual is failing, then I'll just stop working with them.

Edit: and to avoid with just anthropomorphizing LLM too much, the moment I notice a tool I use bug to point to losing data for example, I reconsider real hard before I use it again or not.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-12 09:02:04+00:00
> how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program

Short answer: we wouldn’t be able to. Slightly-less short answer: unlikely to happen.

Most programmers today can’t explain the physics of computation. That’s fine. Someone else can. And if nobody can, someone else can work backwards to it.
by PinguTS | 2026-01-12 09:02:33+00:00
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.

I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.

Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-12 09:03:25+00:00
I would view that kind of lying as show of force: "Everybody knows it, but nobody can do anything about it, we are above even these rules."

Worse still is when it's an "affirm what we said or be punished" threat:

> 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

> Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

> 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.'

-- 1984 by George Orwell
by anthk | 2026-01-12 09:03:48+00:00
Instead of Maxx Desktop, check EMWM plus the goodies:

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

I won't consider XFCE vintage but sane, boring but working. Vintage would be a vanilla FVWM, or MWM, or TWM/CTWM. But not so much, as things come full circle.

EvilWM would look outdated
and crappy under Slashdot threads in 2001 or close, because it looked something from the 80's, altough some bright users stated that it saved tons of RAM for applications.

Its clone CWM nowadays it's highly praised by OpenBSD users as a no-bullshit, floating-no tiling madness window manager (and by me too). It works, it can work without any mouse for every window action (even resizing), it doesn't need dmenu, you can use virtual desktops and search between opened windows with autocompletion. So, forget about RSI's, your hands can literally rest.
by consp | 2026-01-12 09:04:11+00:00
> but you can't find any meaningful review because they are white labels

Which is one of the reasons they exist. You fortunately for more commons stuff have the original manufacturer+product name which gets rebranded into alphabetsoup as soon as it get's popular. If you can figure out the original name, or if it's advertised as, you can maybe lookup some reviews. Otherwise: stay away, but normal consumers tend no to know that because "it's on amazon" (or equivalent).
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-12 09:04:39+00:00
yt-dlp is easily detected by Google and constantly getting itself blocked. It's allowed to the extent that they don't care about low level scraping. Look at their known issues:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766

YouTube blocks are listed in a section titled "Intractable issues".
by supermatt | 2026-01-12 09:04:59+00:00
It is comical how far apple has fallen with its UI overall.

They were praised for their human interface guidelines, and yet they now break almost every rule. I appreciate things change but those guidelines haven’t even evolved they have just been ignored.

Have they truly innovated in the last 10 years? What capitalist reason is for them to actually invest the manpower in the enshittification of the product experience? It feels counterintuitive. Maybe they are just too big to communicate internally?