MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ibizaman | 2026-01-12 18:14:12+00:00
I’m working on introducing this kind of protocol in NixOS. I called it contracts. https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/189

The idea is a contract is defined saying which options exist and what they mean. For backups, you’d get the Unix user doing the backup, what folders to backup and what patterns to exclude. But also what script can be run to create a backup and restore from a backup.

Then you’d get a contract consumer, the application to be backup, which declares what folders to backup either which users.

On the other side you have a contract provider, like Restic or Borgbackup which understand this contract and know thanks to it how to backup the application.

As the user, your role is just to plug-in a contract provider with a consumer. To choose which application backs up which application.

This can be applied to LDAP, SSO, secrets and more!
by stronglikedan | 2026-01-12 18:14:58+00:00
> Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence.

They have always been a premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence, except that "intelligence" was always IP until now. They have always polished existing (i.e., not theirs) ideas and made them bulletproof and accessible to the masses. Seems like they intend to just do more of the same for AI "intelligence". And good for them, as it is their specialty and it works.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-12 18:15:11+00:00
Having looked up the text, I can now answer my own questions.

1. As "the production of an individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness" is not Illustrator's "primary purpose or function", Adobe are off the hook. So is anyone else if they argue that the "primary purpose or function" is not the production of an individual's photograph, voice, or likeness. So if Grok can be prompted to produce any image, including porn of individuals, provided it's not the primary purpose of Grok, they're untouchable.

2. Even if the bill weren't worded that way, a legal person in Ireland allows for corporate personhood (https://legalguide.ie/corporate-identity/#separate-legal-per...), so Adobe Corporation, as the legal person who "distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service, or device" (Illustrator) would not be subject to "imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years", but it would be subject to "a fine" (maximum amount not specified)

3. Misrepresenting someone or not is irrelevant. The offense is when you either use the depicted person without their consent (regardless of how you represent them) or you intend to harm them (or recklessly don't consider the harm you might cause them), whether you have their consent or not. Harm specifically is {interfering "with the other person’s peace and privacy" or causing "alarm or distress" to them} _AND_ "a reasonable person would realise" that. It would be pretty difficult for a reasonable person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person) to think misrepresenting a politician would cause them "alarm or distress" or interfere with their "peace and privacy", so you'd probably be fine producing images of politician XYZ saying they hate freedom, want to take your guns away, eat babies, etc., as they get that day-in, day-out and it hasn't stopped them yet.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-12 18:15:37+00:00
That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're in-media-res watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality software are all theater. We have no altruists defending these principles for us at Apple or Google.

Apple won't switch Google out as a provider for the same reason Google is your default search provider. They don't give a shit about how many advertisements you're shown. You are actually detached from 2026 software trends if you think Apple is going to give users significant backend choices. They're perfectly fine selling your attention to the highest bidder.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-12 18:15:50+00:00
It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins.

It's too soon to tell if that's true or not.

One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless
by ibizaman | 2026-01-12 18:16:00+00:00
You might be interested in checking out my project SelfHostBlocks which allows you to declaratively setup quite a few services with declarative LDAP and SSO integration with LLDAP and Authelia. Even if you don’t end up using it, it might inspire you. Also, all integrations are tested with NixOS VM tests using playwright to ensure no breakage.

https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks
by zahlman | 2026-01-12 18:16:14+00:00
> That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time.

No, it doesn't. Saying that people lack an ability is not the same as claiming that the problem is a simple matter of instilling that ability.

> Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue?

It also isn't the same as shaming people or making a moral issue out of it.

> Or is that too scientific?

The snark is uncalled for. "Science" doesn't require ignoring obviously true proximate causes in search of ultimate causes.
by mlyle | 2026-01-12 18:16:27+00:00
I really wish I could make myself listen.

The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.

But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.

The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.
by brewdad | 2026-01-12 18:17:04+00:00
It sounds like an older version of the app. I used to see all kinds of similar issues with Peacock on my Apple 4k device. NBC has put work in to make the app better over the years unlike say, Paramount+. I would check to see if you can manually update the app or try the 4k device and see if it works better. It could be the older chip and more limited memory of the HD device are hitting up against their limits too.
by nashashmi | 2026-01-12 18:17:30+00:00
I don't understand why Apple cannot implement their own LLM at the user phone level for easy pickings? like settings control? or app-specific shortcuts? or local data searching?

I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia information, etc require external data sets, and transferring over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.
by dktp | 2026-01-12 18:17:31+00:00
My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on paper.

Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors that asked for more money (Anthropic)

Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a different provider.

For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual improvement
by chaztaubelman | 2026-01-12 18:17:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I often felt that AI answers given by ChatGPT or else felt not engaging and hard to memorize — long text, lots of detail, little structure, low or no visuals.

So I built Holospark, an experiment that lets you ask a question and get a visual storyboard answer instead: short explanations broken into scenes, each paired with a relevant visual explanation.

Why ?

The goal isn’t to replace depth, but to make understanding faster and more memorable for certain use cases where visuals are needed — especially for people who think visually.

Interesting fact : humans retain up to 72% more information through visuals.

It’s early and opinionated, but live: https://holospark.ai

I’d genuinely love feedback:

Is this useful for you ?

What types of questions would you try?

Happy to answer any technical or product questions.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-12 18:17:52+00:00
This happened to me an hour ago, and I thought it would be an interesting thing for the HN crowd to see - I had a transient DNS failure and OpenCode (which is running inside Toad, a TUI ACP front-end I prefer) decided to go get via a Chinese proxy. Fortunately I was using it inside a container (https://github.com/rcarmo/toadbox).

Now, this is interesting for several reasons--the first is that even with tool whitelisting this kind of thing might happen, and the second is the _why_. I happen to know about how popular Go is in China and that the proxy approach is... well... kinda official, but it's also a great demonstration of how LLMs leverage "knowledge" in a completely non-linear way.

I'm also _very_ curious as to what model OpenCode is invoking by default for this (I know they have several--I was just using it out of the box, and deleted the container, so we'll probably never know...).
by dpark | 2026-01-12 18:18:06+00:00
The problem is that your starting point seems to be that LLMs can check in garbage to your code base with no human oversight.

If your engineering culture is such that an engineer could prompt an LLM to produce a bunch of code that contains a bunch of weird nonsense, and they can check that weird nonsense in with no comments and no will say “what the hell are you doing?”, then the LLM is not the problem. Your engineering culture is. There is no reason anyone should be checking in some obtuse code that solves BIG_CORP_PROBLEM without a comment to that effect, regardless of whether they used AI to generate the code or not.

Are you just arguing that LLM’s should not be allowed to check in code without human oversight? Because yeah, I one hundred percent agree and I think most people in favor of AI use for coding would also agree.
by zahlman | 2026-01-12 18:18:17+00:00
> but really it hints towards obesity being more than just “fixing your relationship with food”

No, it doesn't. It points towards that task being too difficult to hand-wave at.

> acknowledging that there is more we don’t understand about why some people are fatter than others despite similar lifestyles.

Such effects are greatly overstated, unless you're counting diet as a product of lifestyle rather than a component.
by lkbm | 2026-01-12 18:18:27+00:00
A bit of an aside, but the importance ranking seems...utterly insane? Pope Francis is one of 266 Popes, and is more important than the other 265? Really? Just so happens that the Pope who served the past few years beats out literally every other Pope, including Leo X, Paul III, and Peter, and also Jesus (who is in turn outranked by Mary)?
by rdtsc | 2026-01-12 18:18:42+00:00
> I wonder what Tolkien would say of so much of the symbolism from his novels being used to bootstrap a horrible dystopian control grid?

What is that referring to? Some new LotR adaptation or some new game?

> The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.

Why would they be humanized, they are not human?
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 18:18:58+00:00
That is certainly true. But now I feel like we need to talk about beer in America. Because as much as I love a real German beer, the variety and quality of beers we have to choose from in America is pretty astonishing. At least it seems that way in my bubble (and it certainly helps that I live in an area of the PNW that has a high per-capita number of breweries).
by jscottmiller | 2026-01-12 18:19:04+00:00
I don’t believe this will cause the collapse in the economy (short to mid term) that you are expecting, where I am defining “this” as a federal funds rate that is politically driven and lower than what Chair Powell would have otherwise set. On the contrary, I think it will largely benefit the kinds of affluent asset holders that comprise the top say 5% of the country, which probably accounts for most members of congress and the senate. I think those people will look around them and think this is ugly but otherwise fine. The inflation that follows will be painful to the rest of the country and, with any luck, an opposition party will be able to create a political narrative out of some solution to that pain.
by stackghost | 2026-01-12 18:19:08+00:00
You're afoul of these, from the HN guidelines:

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Complaining about the license falls under this. Someone asked my it was flagged, I answered. One flag isn't enough to kill a comment, btw. I was far from the only one who flagged.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Complaining about why I flagged is discouraged.

Do better.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-12 18:19:15+00:00
Oh for fuck's sake.

HN: "Ireland fast tracks Bill to criminalise harmful voice or image misuse"

TFA: "Calls to fast track Bill to criminalise harmful misuse of someone’s voice or image"

Call to action. Not action. And the call is coming from the bill's proposer! He would say that, wouldn't he? But what matters is if the actual government takes that bill further. If they don't, we don't need to care about what this guy thinks.

HN headline (possibly an earlier headline of TFA) is fundamentally misrepresenting the situation.
by Tanoc | 2026-01-12 18:19:19+00:00
It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.
by bdcravens | 2026-01-12 18:19:31+00:00
Text being a challenge is a symptom of the bigger problem: most people have a hard time thinking spatially, and so struggle to communicate their ideas (and that's before you add on modeling vocabulary like "extrude", "chamfer", etc)

LLMs struggle because I think there's a lot of work to be done with translating colloquial speech. For example, someone might describe a creating a tube is fairly ambiguous language, even though they can see it in their head: "Draw a circle and go up 100mm, 5mm thick" as opposed to "Place a circle on the XY plane, offset the circle by 5mm, and extrude 100mm in the z-plane"
by rjrjrjrj | 2026-01-12 18:19:32+00:00
Yeah, it effectively became a typed wrapper of a long epoch millis value. Generally treated as immutable by convention in my experience, although of course it technically wasn't as the setters were never removed.

It was hopelessly wrong initially, and got even worse when they added the horrible sql Date/Timestamp/etc classes.

With java.time though, it is the gold standard as far as I've seen.
by al_borland | 2026-01-12 18:20:52+00:00
20 years ago I was saying this about video games. However, when I go back and look at video games from 20 years ago, I now see why they kept pushing things forward. Graphics were serviceable, but they're so much better now. That said, the game (or movie) still needs to be the most important thing. When a studio tries to lean on graphics as the selling point, it always ends up poorly.
Ask HN: Variable Trace
by thangalin | 2026-01-12 18:20:58+00:00
A large (2.7 million loc), complex legacy C++ code base has a labyrinthine setup, configuration, and calculation process. I'm looking to trace the usage of a single variable down through the call stack to determine each of its touch points.

Ideally, this would entail launching a visual tool, pointing it to the source code (or importing solution files), right-clicking on the variable, and selecting "trace" (or similar). I've tried SciTools' Understand, but it also graphs ancillary variables related to the variable of interest, rendering the trace effectively useless, being time-consuming to produce (~30 minutes), unreadable (too big), and riddled with numerous unrelated call stacks.

I'm looking to graph the call stack for one variable, preferably using static, on-prem source code analysis using a standalone desktop application. Other tools include joern, SVF, and CodeQL, which I haven't tried yet. A command-line tool would be fine, as long as it is trivial to trace a specific variable.

What has been your experience with tracing variables through code? Are there any tools you'd recommend to generate a focused graph?
by lateforwork | 2026-01-12 18:21:20+00:00
Summary: In a seismic shift that runs counter to the its mission, the EPA plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry.

Long-term exposure to both pollutants is linked to asthma, heart and lung disease, and premature death. Even moderate exposure to PM2.5 can damage the lungs about as much as smoking.
by bartread | 2026-01-12 18:21:49+00:00
I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.

I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.

As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.

I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
by dpoloncsak | 2026-01-12 18:22:01+00:00
>Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name

I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of governments and service providers, while iMessage gives them some wiggle room.

Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw
by dfxm12 | 2026-01-12 18:22:05+00:00
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with?

I'm having a hard time thinking of things this admin and their party has done but hasn't directly campaigned on, directly praised someone else doing, etc. On the flip side of that, which empty promise, if fulfilled, would be worth the situation we're otherwise in?
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 18:22:12+00:00
> You know what is expensive, though? Meat.

This is no joke. I picked up a 3 pound package of garden variety 80/20 ground beef last week and it was over $20. Maybe I just don't buy it often enough to notice, but that seems far higher than even a few months ago. I would have expected to buy a modest cut of steak for that price.
by joselpolo | 2026-01-12 18:22:14+00:00
Durante años he usado apps de deporte para revisar mis rutas, pero muchas requieren suscripción o suben los datos a la nube. Quería algo más simple y privado, así que construí una herramienta que procesa archivos de rutas directamente en el navegador, sin backend.

Acepta GPX, KML, TCX, JSON y CSV. Todo el análisis (desnivel, esfuerzo, estadísticas, etc.) se hace localmente usando JavaScript y WebAssembly. No hay cuentas, no hay tracking y no se envía nada a ningún servidor.

La última versión incluye un sistema de logros generado también en local.

Mi objetivo era tener una forma rápida y privada de revisar rutas sin depender de servicios externos. Si a alguien le interesa la parte técnica (parsing, rendimiento, WASM, manejo de archivos grandes, etc.), puedo compartir detalles.
by rerdavies | 2026-01-12 18:23:01+00:00
Depends on platform. But yes.

It is also the job of the operating system or its supporting parts to allow applications to configure audio devices to specific sample rates if that's what the application needs.

It's fine to just take whatever you get if you are a game app, and either allow the OS to resample, or do the resampling yourself on the fly.

Not so fine if you are authoring audio, where the audio device rate ABSOLUTELY has to match the rate of content that's being created. It is NOT acceptable to have the OS doing resampling when that's the case.

Audacity allows you to force the sample rate of the input and output devices on both Windows and Linux. Much easier on Windows; utterly chaotic and bug-filled and miserable and unpredictable on Linux (although up-to-date versions of Pipewire can almost mostly sometimes do the right thing, usually).
by marcusverus | 2026-01-12 18:23:01+00:00
He's clearly alluding the fact that the Biden admin did far worse.

The great sin of Trump's FCC was a single ill-advised tweet by FCC chair Brendan Carr... in which he threatened to enforce the law as written. For comparison, the Biden admin's FBI actively engaged in purely political media manipulation in service of the sitting president's campaign, such as when they lied to Facebook (and presumably others) to "prebunk" the Hunter's Laptop story, which directly lead to a near-total ban of a factual news story.
by zitterbewegung | 2026-01-12 18:23:41+00:00
I rather have a product that is only good at one single thing than mid for everything else especially when the developer experience for me is much more consistent than using gemini and chatgpt to the point that I only have chatgpt for productivity reasons and also sometimes making better prompts to claude (when I don't use claude to make a better prompt). After realizing that Anthropic is discounting token usages for claude code they should have made that more explicit and also the API key (but hindsight is 20/20) they should already have been blocking third party apps or just have you make another API key that has no discount but even then this could have pissed off developers.
by munificent | 2026-01-12 18:23:56+00:00
> When an immutable value is assigned to a variable, the JavaScript engine creates a copy of that value and stores the copy in memory

Not exactly. The language doesn't specify whether the value is copied or not and, precisely because values are immutable, there's no way for a user to tell if it was or wasn't.

For example, strings are also immutable value types, but you can be certain that no JS engine is fully copying the entire string every time you assign one to a variable or pass it to a parameter.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-12 18:23:57+00:00
> Now, you made a statement without even anecdotal evidence.

Kind of...as I said rpeviosuly your evidence actually supports my point, but even if you disagreed, I'm refuting your positive claim, not making a positice claim of my own. The onus is on you alone to support your claim.

> I received quite a few upvotes for that comments, indicating that people do care. Nobody said they didn't care.

Sure - the point was most people don't care.

> You are free to count how many other people commented on Librem 5 yourself and disprove my claim.

Pretty easy, just look at the ratio of votes in the last 10 threads you advocate for those phones in, where you maybe get 2 or 3 which is very low compared to the amount of comments and commenters, and then look at the amount of comments you get expressing a negative opinion. You get more negative and neutral feedback combined than positive feedback, indicating people don't care generally or if they do, it's to disagree with you.

This is what the evidence shows.