MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-28 02:50:51+00:00
This changed about two years ago, when they added usernames. ( https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/ )

Signal can still tell law enforcement (1) whether a phone number is registered with Signal, and (2) when that phone number signed up and (3) when it was last active. That's all, and not very concerning to me.
To prevent an enumeration attack (e.g. an attacker who adds every phone number to their system contacts), you can also disable discovery my phone number.

While Session prevents that, Session lacks forward secrecy. This is very serious- it's silly to compare Session to Signal when Session is flawed in its cryptography. (Details and further reading here https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ ). Session has recently claimed they will be upgrading their cryptography in V2 to be up to Signal's standard (forward secrecy and post-quantum security), but until then, I don't think it's worth considering.

I agree that Briar is better, but unfortunately, it can't run on iPhones. I'm in the United States and that excludes 59% of the general population, and about 90% of my generation. It's not at fault of the Briar project, but it's a moot point when I can't use it to talk to people I know.
by bluerooibos | 2026-01-28 02:51:01+00:00
Agreed. When I heard about this project I assumed it was taking off because it was all local LLM powered, able to run offline and be super secure or have a read only mode when accessing emails/calendar etc.

I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with how much access these companies are getting to our data so I'm really looking forward to the open source/local/private versions taking off.
by giardini | 2026-01-28 02:51:10+00:00
More likely he was curious and didn't understand the vitriolic nature of the interactions. Kinda like a drunken Irishman stumbling into a bar fight in Istanbul.

FWIW ICE agents will probably face charges for what happened to Pretti, so cool off on that.

I don't think criticizing anyone for what they did before/after a particular event that they were not a party to is justifiable. Let's give everyone, including Cook, the right to free choice in use of their own time.
by kaitai | 2026-01-28 02:51:14+00:00
They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)
by andreygrehov | 2026-01-28 02:52:11+00:00
But that's not the end of the analysis. The legal line isn't 'force or nothing'; it's intent + conduct. Speech and observation are protected, but coordinated action intended to impede enforcement is not.

If "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody go there" is followed by mobbing vehicles, blocking movement, inducing agents to disengage, or warning targets to evade arrest, that crosses from protected speech into actionable conduct.
by saghm | 2026-01-28 02:52:12+00:00
> I tried to create a refund r request but its not allowing to create one since the date of the transaction is out of our refund p policy as we can only process refunds for up to 120 days only after the transaction was charged.

In other words, any Google Play app is allowed to just pull the plug on features after four months and pocket the money. Wonderful...
by kube-system | 2026-01-28 02:52:20+00:00
By the time a lawsuit is filed you are already deep into a civil dispute, and very few civil disputes ever go to trial. Filing a lawsuit at all is the nuclear option for when all reasonableness has already broken down. You only go to court as the nuclear option after both parties reach an impasse.

15M is almost certainly just a result of mathematically adding up the damages the law provides for. That's how going to court generally works -- your lawyer will ask the court for everything the law provides for. Going to court is very expensive, and it is why ~99% of cases settle before going to court.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-28 02:52:26+00:00
I've seen the multiple techniques becoming more popular (Wabie shorts), it really showcases a dominance of your craft when you can use multiple techniques instead of overrelying on a simple one. Great comedic/expressive technique as well.

I imagine how it would be with software, you have a whole ass huge website, but out of the blue you download a .jar for Nokia and you have to run it in a nokia or a very niche VM,(Or just in a JVM). Maybe to get a 6 digit verification code so you can log in to an account.
by Scrounger | 2026-01-28 02:52:29+00:00
I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:

> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your
internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and
commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your
organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
by mycall | 2026-01-28 02:52:51+00:00
I saw a Second Brain demo [0] using no-code with using AI inside the widgets to do the work. It took a little handholding, but it turned out to be very flexible, showing me a new way to look at the whole industry.

[0] https://youtu.be/gLaMDOrDGHA?si=CIWVD-TLJrPju1RO
by retsibsi | 2026-01-28 02:53:12+00:00
> Now, it is a reality.

What are the details of this? I'm not playing dumb, and of course I've noticed the decline, but I thought it was a combination of losing the battle with SEO shite and leaning further and further into a 'give the user what you think they want, rather than what they actually asked for' philosophy.
Where are all of the big tech competitors?
by cadabrabra | 2026-01-28 02:53:35+00:00
We were told that AI would usher an era of small teams building enterprise grade products in weeks. Where are they? Where is Excel’s competitor? Where is Outlook’s competitor? Where is Jira’s competitor?

It never happened. It was a total myth. Big tech reigns supreme, and that alone proves the impotence and futility of our current models.
by triceratops | 2026-01-28 02:53:40+00:00
> Why is taxing households together the correct thing

Hypothetically if the household splits up due to a divorce its assets are divided 50:50 (this varies by jurisdiction). Usually (again depending on the jurisdiction) the lower-earning spouse also gets alimony to even up the difference in income resulting from the new situation, at least for a few years.

Clearly then the state believes assets owned and income earned by either one of the couple belong equally to both (something I agree with personally: it's called a partnership). If that's the case, how could it be wrong to tax the household as a single entity?
by crazygringo | 2026-01-28 02:54:32+00:00
There's no expectation that sites ought to work perfectly with 500% zoom, even though a browser supports that as a zoom value. The same way there's no expectation they work with a horizontal viewport size of 50px. Because they're the same thing, and when you push any design too far it breaks. That's just reality.

And with page overlays, text zoom isn't necessarily going to fix anything. Sometimes the button to dismiss is at the bottom, and the larger text will just push that off-screen downwards. (I do agree that pop-ups/overlays designed for a screen larger than yours are a problem, but that's often less about zoom than just assuming small/short phone screens no longer exist.)
by dwd | 2026-01-28 02:55:19+00:00
There are a lot of sports that are much better in person. Football is made for TV as the action is confined. Types of play that would require viewing player movements outside the "set" are discouraged like lateral passes.

Basketball is similar as the action is very much confined to the video frame.

Non-US sports like Australian Rules or Gaelic football are an in person spectacle. They're free flowing (like ice hockey), constant action, and the ball can move 50+ metres up/down or across the field in a few seconds so you need to see the player movements off the ball. There's also something about a very large arena with 100,000+ spectators and a constant murmur of sound that can erupt in a moment.
by letmevoteplease | 2026-01-28 02:55:46+00:00
The author commented on their ko-fi: "there isn't much to say that would require a big writeup - a lot of the code is already reversed, and anything that's missing can be yoinked from ghidra decomp output and cleaned up, so it's just a matter of transpiling to a different language. plus much of the game's proprietary formats are thoroughly documented by the modding community. time consuming but quite easy if you're just patient haha"
by jwilliams | 2026-01-28 02:56:05+00:00
> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later.

This is true... Equally I've seen it dive into a rabbit hole, make some changes that probably aren't the right direction... and then keep digging.

This is way more likely with Sonnet, Opus seems to be better at avoiding it. Sonnet would happily modify every file in the codebase trying to get a type error to go away. If I prompt "wait, are you off track?" it can usually course correct. Again, Opus seems way better at that part too.

Admittedly this has improved a lot lately overall.
by Sophira | 2026-01-28 02:56:23+00:00
> Go back a few years and this same logic says "The trick is, just use Windows and do whatever it wants and don't fight."

This is basically exactly what I saw people saying in Windows subreddits. There's one post that particularly sticks out in my memory[0] that basically had everybody telling the OP to just not make any of the changes that they wanted to make. The advice seemed to revolve around adapting to the OS rather than adapting the OS to you, and it made me sad at the time.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/hehrqe/what_are_...
by mc32 | 2026-01-28 02:56:23+00:00
Authorities have to conduct investigations. Their voters demand that as part of a civilized society those deputized to keep the peace pursue and solve violations to the public order. Since investigators can't consult a magic ball, their investigations will necessarily involve people who are later cleared. One can attempt the ideal, knowing the ideal is not attainable and that reality is messy. It's a balance. It's not perfect. Some innocent people get caught up in the messy parts.
by CuriousRose | 2026-01-28 02:57:56+00:00
The GTA Vice City in browser was also really impressive, but it seems it has been taken down. How much of an advantage has AI got on decompilation projects? Complex assembly seems to be still done to some degree by hand these days (see - ffmpeg), and I wonder how big of a training set you could provide. I have wondered if it was possible to take the re3/reVC code and the assembly and use it for training data to get GTA San Andreas on macOS.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-28 02:58:07+00:00
John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, mentioned at the end of his autiobiography The Whole Story that that there wasn't much collaboration within the higher-ups at Amazon. From the gist of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the internal retail division was trying to outshine the Whole Foods division by throwing technology at everything, useful or not, because that's what Amazon corporate appreciates.
by tonyww | 2026-01-28 02:58:33+00:00
A quick clarification on intent, since “browser automation” means different things to different people:

This isn’t about making scripts smarter or replacing Playwright/Selenium. The problem I’m exploring is reliability: how to make agent-driven browser execution fail deterministically and explainably instead of half-working when layouts change.

Concretely, the agent doesn’t just “click and hope”. Each step is gated by explicit post-conditions, similar to how tests assert outcomes:

----
## Python Code Example:

ready = runtime.assert_(
all_of(url_contains("checkout"), exists("role=button")),
"checkout_ready",
required=True
)

----

If the condition isn’t met, the run stops with artifacts instead of drifting forward. Vision models are optional fallbacks, not the primary control signal.

Happy to answer questions about the design tradeoffs or where this approach falls short
by saghm | 2026-01-28 02:59:15+00:00
I think the hardest part of connections is that there are intentionally overlaps between most (if not all) of the categories. When my wife and I would do them daily, she would steadfastly refuse to make a single guess until she was fairly confident in the entire solution because in practice it was hard to be sure of the current four for a given category even with high confidence of what the category is. (I agreed with her but in practice have both less patience and more trouble figuring out certain categories, so I would often guess and either take a few misses before figuring it out or sometimes completely fail).
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-28 02:59:43+00:00
> Anonymous-attestation protocols are well known in cryptography, and some are standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation

Which does exactly what I said. Full zero knowledge attestation isn't practical as a single compromised key would give rise to a service that would serve everyone.

The solution first adopted by the TCG (TPM specification v1.1) required a trusted third-party, namely a privacy certificate authority (privacy CA). Each TPM has an embedded RSA key pair called an Endorsement Key (EK) which the privacy CA is assumed to know. In order to attest the TPM generates a second RSA key pair called an Attestation Identity Key (AIK). It sends the public AIK, signed by EK, to the privacy CA who checks its validity and issues a certificate for the AIK. (For this to work, either a) the privacy CA must know the TPM's public EK a priori, or b) the TPM's manufacturer must have provided an endorsement certificate.) The host/TPM is now able to authenticate itself with respect to the certificate. This approach permits two possibilities to detecting rogue TPMs: firstly the privacy CA should maintain a list of TPMs identified by their EK known to be rogue and reject requests from them, secondly if a privacy CA receives too many requests from a particular TPM it may reject them and blocklist the TPMs EK. The number of permitted requests should be subject to a risk management exercise. This solution is problematic since the privacy CA must take part in every transaction and thus must provide high availability whilst remaining secure. Furthermore, privacy requirements may be violated if the privacy CA and verifier collude. Although the latter issue can probably be resolved using blind signatures, the first remains.
by mh2266 | 2026-01-28 03:00:05+00:00
> I've been trying to implement a multiplayer game with server authoritative networking in Rust with Bevy. I specifically chose Bevy as the latest version was after Claude's cut off, it had a number of breaking changes, and there aren't a lot of deep examples online.

I am interested in doing something similar (Bevy. not multiplayer).

I had the thought that you ought be able to provide a cargo doc or rust-analyzer equivalent over MCP? This... must exist?

I'm also curious how you test if the game is, um... fun? Maybe it doesn't apply so much for a multiplayer game, I'm thinking of stuff like the enemy patterns and timings in a soulslike, Zelda, etc.

I did use ChatGPT to get some rendering code for a retro RCT/SimCity-style terrain mesh in Bevy and it basically worked, though several times I had to tell it "yeah uh nothing shows up", at which point is said "of course! the problem is..." and then I learned about mesh winding, fine, okay... felt like I was in over my head and decided to go to a 2D game instead so didn't pursue that further.
by com2kid | 2026-01-28 03:02:45+00:00
Microsoft was like that in many orgs.

There was a real problem of QA becoming bloated and filled with less than qualified people. The really good engineered would transfers out to SDE orgs and so the senior ranks of QA tended to be either true believers are people who weren't good enough to move to SDE orgs.

Especially with QA outside of Microsoft at the time paying so much less, it was a wise long term career move to move to SDE as soon as possible.
by mrandish | 2026-01-28 03:04:18+00:00
In case you didn't know, the NFL releases game video on their website which can be downloaded as part of their basic NFL+ subscription ($7.99/mo). It's not the broadcast feed, it's the "all-22" views where you can see all the players on the field from above and each end zone. This is the same footage you see on many game analysis videos by football YouTubers.

Now that every NFL player wears a tracking beacon between their shoulder pads, there's an unbelievable amount of automated metadata available from a variety of third-party data services. The data can include breakdowns segmented per team, unit, player, drive, down-and-distance, etc and the costs can be quite reasonable depending the depth and sophistication of analysis. There is also some data available free on ad-supported sites or on free-to-join sites, including on fantasy football and sports betting sites who use the free data to attract sign-ups.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-28 03:05:00+00:00
I called out the E as one of numerous obvious similarities in the styling of the motto, not specifically. You are choosing to focus on just the E instead of the other similar elements taken as a whole. We can drop the disagreement over that specific letter and my argument as a whole still stands.

Here’s the only context I
Mentioned the E:

“The entire business is branded like Eggo waffles. The colors used, the font and stylistic “E” are the same, the white outlining of red letters on a yellow field is copied. It isn’t just the name and phrase, the entire brand is copied over.”

If it were just the E it wouldn’t be much of a claim. But it is clear to even a casual observer that the food truck business’ entire brand is based exclusively on recognizable elements of the Eggo brand.

You keep acting like Kellog’s is a villain here, but according to both parties Kellog’s attempted to resolve this amicably out of court. They went so far as to offer to pay for the cost of rebranding the truck as a goodwill effort and contacted the lawyer representing the food truck’s corporation over the course of months in attempts to solve it out of court.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-28 03:06:49+00:00
The more-expensive stores sometimes do. My friend's wife works for one, and the store is closing because it's too close to a discount grocery to get enough traffic to stay open.
The union is making her transfer to a much further location or lose her seniority, for some nonsense reason involving the closer locations historically being part of a different union, despite them now all being the same one.
by saghm | 2026-01-28 03:08:04+00:00
If I'm understandinf correctly, I don't think what you're saying is quite right. They had a mental model of the algorithms, and then the code they "produced" was completely generated by AI, and they had no knowledge of how the code actually modeled the algorithm.

Knowing the complexity of bubble sort is one skill, being able to write code that performs bubble sort is a second, and being able to look at a function with the signature `void do_thing(int[] items)`and determine that it's bubble sort and the time complexity of it in terms of the input array is a third. It sounds like they had the first skill, used an AI to fake the second, but had no way of doing the third.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-28 03:08:33+00:00
He signed a secret agreement to help develop China's technology [1], lobbied against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China [2], and blocked the Hong Kong protest app [3], the New York Times app [4], and many others [5] in China.

This is less than negligible.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-apple-i...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/business/media/new-york-t...

[5] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/apple_appstore_china_cen...
by sublinear | 2026-01-28 03:08:46+00:00
Yes, but the experience you're describing is just getting stuck due to insufficient experience architecting a solution.

Not saying this is you, but it's so easy for people to give up and sour into hyper-pragmatists competing to become the world's worst management. Their insecurities take over and they actively suppress anyone trying to do their job by insisting everything be rewritten by AI, or push hard for no-code solutions.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-28 03:08:47+00:00
Thank you, what a lovely thing to say!

I keep the memory of the early Internet, the late 80s and 90s, when we were more optimistic, less cynical, and more innocent, as an inspiring fire in my heart

That you see it blaze up here and can say so clearly? I’m so happy

Thanks for giving me some words to remember and connect with clarity
by blibble | 2026-01-28 03:10:05+00:00
> Finding a genuine security flaw in OpenSSL is extraordinarily difficult.

history suggests otherwise

> The fact that 12 previously unknown vulnerabilities could still be found there, including issues dating back to 1998, suggests that manual review faces significant limits, even in mature, heavily audited codebases.

no, the code is simply beyond horrible to read, not to mention diabolically bad

if you've never tried it, have a go, but bring plenty of eyebleach
by mh2266 | 2026-01-28 03:10:47+00:00
are LLM codebases not messy?

Claude by default, unless I tell it not to, will write stuff like:

// we need something to be true
somethingPasses = something()
if (!somethingPasses) {
return false
}

// we need somethingElse to be true
somethingElsePasses = somethingElse()
if (!somethingElsePasses) {
return false
}

return true

instead of the very simple boolean logic that could express this in one line, with the "this code does what it obviously does" comments added all over the place.

generally unless you tell it not to, it does things in very verbose ways that most humans would never do, and since there's an infinite number of ways that it can invent absurd verbosity, it is hard to preemptively prompt against all of them.

to be clear, I am getting a huge amount of value out of it for executing a bunch of large refactors and "modernization" of a (really) big legacy codebase at scale and in parallel. but it's not outputting the sort of code that I see when someone prompts it "build a new feature ...", and a big part of my prompts is screaming at it not to do certain things or to refuse the task if it at any point becomes unsure.