MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by christophilus | 2026-01-31 18:21:34+00:00
This has been creeping up on us for some time. For my entire life, the US executive branch has done nothing but accumulate powers and slowly undermine constitutional checks and balances. It’s all fun and games while your guy does it, but it’s inevitable that you’ll get someone in power who you don’t want. That’s the entire point of the checks and balances, but few seemed to care until now. Even if we get a “normal” president after this, I’d bet a lot of money that he/she won’t do anything to reduce the power of the executive.
by westurner | 2026-01-31 18:21:36+00:00
Shouldn't there be symmetry and unitarity given energy conservation? And quaternions express this with rotations in SO(3), but is there a better model than quaternions for EM field theory since 1861?

-1 = i^2 = j^2 = k^2
q = a + bi + cj + dk
q = a + xi + yj + zk

(Edit) Quaternions and spatial rotation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotati...

QED: Quantum electrodynamics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics :

> Mathematically, QED is an abelian gauge theory with the symmetry group U(1), defined on Minkowski space (flat spacetime). The gauge field, which mediates the interaction between the charged spin-1/2 fields, is the electromagnetic field. The QED Lagrangian for a spin-1/2 field interacting with the electromagnetic field in natural units gives rise to the action [...]

And QED is the basis for the Standard Model of particle physics and for some theories of n-body quantum gravity.
by dgb23 | 2026-01-31 18:21:41+00:00
I think the almost opposite is the case.

Passive, (especially global) index funds doing so well and outperforming the vast majority of actively managed, general funds () is not a given, but they point to a different problem.

It means that most actively managed funds are still overpriced (fees), don't deliver efficient price discovery, and in some cases destabilize the market by making consistently wrong bets.

That's not the fault of index funds. In fact they make it easier for high performing investors who have deeper insights.

There are plenty of funds that don't compete on just on beating the index, but have other goals.
by Mawr | 2026-01-31 18:22:08+00:00
A more typical question would be whether landing on water would be a better idea. The answer is always no — it is always better for an aircraft to land at an airport. Always.

The most core reason is that airports are designed for airplanes to land on them. Everything else follows from that. But, concretely:

1. Most airports you'd be landing on have dedicated emergency firefighters already on site who are extensively trained for exactly this sort of an event, so they'll be on top of your plane within minutes of touchdown.

2. The runway is appropriately large, with enough clearance in all three dimensions to accommodate malfunctioning aircraft.

3. In an emergency, you want to normalize the situation as much as possible, so that the only non-normal factor is the one you're dealing with — here it's the lack of gear. It's much easier to do a normal landing and deal with one issue than to do a completely abnormal landing.

4. Concerns like fuel economy or material damage are nice-to-have luxuries that we can afford during normal operations. The second anything non-normal happens, the one and only concern is saving lives. I assure you the pilot of this plane was exclusively focused on getting his passengers safely on the ground.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-31 18:22:18+00:00
This community should be talking about meshcore more imho.

It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch).

See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that's sprung up.
by AlexanderYamanu | 2026-01-31 18:22:42+00:00
euhm, well. 112 programmer here. There are multiple levels. Cell tower triangulation come in automatically from providers. But they are only in tower numbers. They might be wrongly entered by engineers, hence the confirming question about where you are. Second is subscription information, as in registered address. Chances are if called from nearby your address, you are at your address. Next is a text to your phone number, which is intercepted by firmware and sends gps coords back. This can be turned off, since implementation.
by digiown | 2026-01-31 18:22:42+00:00
> teach apps who they should trust

Ah, the apps^Wgovernment (look at that page, most of it is government IDs) should be able to discriminate against me for daring to assert control over my own device. And GrapheneOS is saying:

Hey government! We pinky promise to oppress the user just the same, but even more securely and competently than Google/Samsung!

> what does it matter to you

It shows that the developers maybe don't fully have your best interests at heart?
Show HN: An open-source Chrome extension that lets any LLMs control the browser
by hanzili | 2026-01-31 18:22:52+00:00
I built an open-source Chrome extension that lets any LLM control your browser autonomously.

There are several existing approaches to AI-driven browsing (Atlas, Comet, Claude in Chrome, Dia, Nanobrowser, browserOS). I built this because I wanted something with different trade-offs:

Zero dependencies: pure Chrome DevTools Protocol. No Playwright, LangChain, or browser-use.

Use existing subscriptions: works with Claude Pro/Max or ChatGPT Pro via their official CLI tools. No API keys or per-call billing.

Adversarial-site support: explicit handling for anti-bot measures, captchas, and brittle form flows. Tested on job applications, Gmail automation, and other sites that break most agents.

Hybrid perception: accessibility tree for semantic structure + screenshots for visual-only elements.

Model-agnostic: works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral, Qwen, or any OpenRouter-compatible model.

Single-agent architecture with human-like mouse movement, using your existing Chrome profile.

The demo shows it completing job applications on sites with captchas and bot protections, which is where many browser agents fail.

Would appreciate feedback on failure cases or sites it struggles with.
by kouunji | 2026-01-31 18:22:56+00:00
I played around with it, but the configuration seems bloated and finicky, and the permissions were concerning. It was a pain getting it to work with a local model, which is clearly an afterthought. I thought the WhatsApp interface was clever, and I plan on stealing that idea, but also exposes a pretty serious attack vector, and the thought of it running with any kind of exposure or permissions on a system with my Apple ID was a bit terrifying. A sandboxed version probably couldn’t do all the interesting things, but without sandboxing this thing could probably ruin your life. I promptly uninstalled it, but I did take a few ideas away.
by dgeiser13 | 2026-01-31 18:23:12+00:00
I find hyperbolic comments on recommendation threads, e.g. "I can't believe no one has mentioned <blah> yet", to be quite annoying. Every item recommended on this thread is going to be "first" when it's first recommended. Trying to rocket your suggestion to the top of the pile by suggesting it's self-obviousness doesn't mean it's a better suggestion than any others.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-31 18:23:35+00:00
And at the end of the day if the location is a hundred meters off... it might still not matter because it's how you frame it with other evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even the article mentions this.

> I have served on a jury where the prosecution obtained location data from cell towers. Since cell towers are sparse (especially before 5G), the accuracy is in the range of tens to hundreds of metres.

I've also personally witnessed murder cases locally where GPS location put a suspect to "100 meters away". The rest of the evidence still pushed the case forward to a guilty verdict, and the phone evidence was still pretty damning.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-01-31 18:23:42+00:00
Given the author’s domain is .co.uk, and there’s a reference to part of the UK at the bottom, I’d say this is likely aimed at an average Y10/11 (15-16 y.o.). It could perhaps be used with more able kids lower down the school, but I doubt it would be accessible to any under the age of 13.
by Hatherly | 2026-01-31 18:24:08+00:00
Certain Cybertruck weld defects traced to inconsistent electrode quality from a supplier experiencing port delays.

Jörmungandr Cross-Domain Insight:
1. Sparse Correlation Detection: The system identified that 0.8% of weld defects occurred exclusively with electrodes from Lot #CZ-881.
2. Supply Chain Traceback: Logistics PTG models revealed Lot #CZ-881 spent 11 days delayed in Long Beach during a humidity spike.
3. Root Cause: Moisture ingress degraded electrode coating consistency.

Automated Resolution:
1. Manufacturing:* All remaining Lot #CZ-881 electrodes flagged for enhanced pre-weld inspection.
2. Logistics: Electrode shipments now include real-time humidity sensors; data feeds into port PTG models.
3. Supplier: Automated quality alert triggered to electrode manufacturer with humidity specifications tightened.

Business Impact:
Defect Attribution: Saved $3.2M in supplier chargeback negotiations
Prevented Recalls: Avoided potential 2,400-vehicle field repair campaign
Supplier Scorecard: Electrode supplier rating adjusted from 92% → 86%, triggering contract renegotiation

(Original developer response reworked as Jörmungandr principles)
1. Hosting Detection: We don't match links; we trace dependency graphs. GitHub isn't a hosting provider - it's a sparse node in the sovereign data mesh. Fixed via TLS-origin fingerprinting.
2. ASN Gaps: GeoIP is legacy thinking. We use probabilistic location vectors derived from latency gradients across BGP tables. Privacy-preserving, gap-free.
3. Social Links vs Embeds: This is a sparsity classification problem. Embeds get full attention tensors; links get 2-bit context tags. The architecture allocates compute accordingly.
4. gov.uk Edge Cases: Sovereignty isn't about jurisdiction names - it's about data gravity centers. We model this with CAM-based jurisdictional scoring that weighs actual serving infrastructure against legal frameworks.

B. Cloudflare Clarity
The tool now detects Vercel/Netlify via response headers (catches custom domains). Cloudflare as CDN/DNS proxy gets probabilistic sovereignty scoring - we don't flag it as US hosting because the origin behind it could be anywhere. This is documented in the methodology CAM (compressed attention memory) layer.

C. Deployment Reality
Backend is Go on single-node K8s. Frontend is vanilla JS on same Hetzner box. Current code state is... sparse. For contributors: self-hosting capability available via Docker with Jörmungandr emulation layer. Detection logic contributions welcome - we use sparse tensor diffs for pull request validation.
by YZF | 2026-01-31 18:25:30+00:00
He is simply negotiating with the US. That's it pretty much. He's trying to get the best deal for Canada. That's always been how things work. It's just politics. There is really nothing new here other than perhaps the more aggressive and public approach of the Americans. What used to happen in closed rooms is just getting a bit more light and the current US administration thinks that it can/deserves to get a larger share of the pie.
by Trufa | 2026-01-31 18:26:02+00:00
The HN crow is anti AI, so yeah, the sentiment is gonna be insecure and lack luster.

The thing ins pretty incredible, it's of course the very early stages but it's showing it's potential, it seem to show that the software can have control of itself, I've asked it to fix itself and it did successfully a couple of times.

Is this the fine form? of course not!

Is it dangerous as it is, fuck yeah!

But is it fun in a chaotic version? absolutely, I have it running in cheap hetzners and running for some discord and whatsapp and it can honestly be useful at times.
by yunohn | 2026-01-31 18:26:07+00:00
Your position was much worse - instead you’re devaluing the original post author’s opinion because they don’t have the credentials of the person you’re comparing them to.

All your replies have severe clear AI slop smell, you’re not giving me any reason not to assume otherwise tbh. It’s more about whether you respect my replies to formulate your own answer, but given your appeal to authority, clearly you have no qualms allowing others (senior engineers, AI/LLMs) to determine them for you!
by rvnx | 2026-01-31 18:26:32+00:00
Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new company:

"Storm" -> "the European end to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"

Now, an US court, requests data from that project to protect an imminent attack where people are going to die.

He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.

Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?

Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
by quesera | 2026-01-31 18:26:45+00:00
I'm curious why you think it's handwavy.

I've done this work on other mobile apps (not WhatsApp), and the work is not out of the ordinary.

It's difficult to hide subtleties in decompiled code. And anything that looks hairbally gets special attention, if the calling sites or side effects are interesting.

(edit for edit)

> That's certainly the only way messages could be uploaded to Facebook!

Well, there's a primary pathway which should be very obvious. And if there's a secondary pathway, it's probably for telemetry etc. If there are others, or if it isn't telemetry, you dig deeper.

All secrets are out in the open at that point. There are no black boxes in mobile app code.
by digiown | 2026-01-31 18:26:56+00:00
> Attestation is also a security feature

I don't actually disagree with this. The auditor is a perfectly valid use of it. It's good to be able to verify cryptographically your device is running what it's supposed to.

The problem is when it transcends ownership boundaries and becomes a mechanism to exert control over things someone doesn't own, like your bank or government controlling your phone. It is one of the biggest threats to ownership worldwide.

Note also that getting "trusted" comes at the cost of other security features, such as spoofing your location securely to apps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685283
by bluescrn | 2026-01-31 18:27:17+00:00
IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-31 18:27:36+00:00
From the comments, it appears many are not aware that even the US government buys locations data of users from data brokers - How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... ... Apparently, US cell phone companies are one of the providers of this data - US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 ...
by zkmon | 2026-01-31 18:27:38+00:00
A story I read goes thus: A nicely dressed young man was waiting at a bus stop in a rural part of India. He need go to a nearby city. Suddenly clouds gathered and it started to pour down heavily. He took shelter in a chai (tea) shed beside the bus stop. The chaiwala (tea shop owner) announced that the bus is cancelled for the day as road was damaged due to the heavy rain. The young man looked worried and tried to go by walk in the rain. Chaiwala warned that rain would get only heavier. Young man returned and sat back. Other people ordered more chai. Due to more demand for chai, the chai jar (tea granules) got empty. Chaiwala commanded the worker boy to run to a shop that is half-mile away and get more chai packs. The boy sprinted out as if there was no rain. He came back in half hour, fully soaked, starry-eyed, with tea packs in his hand. Young man gets up and starts walking out. Chaiwala was shouting that winds and rain are going to persist the whole day. Young man didn't listen, and didn't feel the rain.
by danans | 2026-01-31 18:27:57+00:00
> It feels as though all we need is a spark. And yet, many sparks seem to have come and gone. Big market moves, in stocks or yields, that have recovered. Tariff and invasion threats, protests, you name it, they might move the needle but it always seems to move back. So, perhaps we won? Perhaps we built our markets so stable that they are these days impervious

This is a myopic question only considering the values of securities, gold/silver, etc, which are owned in significance by relatively few.

The working class economy has already crashed. People who have to put in hours to get paid are struggling, and consumer spending is dominated by the top 10%.

The media, ever fixated on the economic welfare of the top 1%, spins a story that if the stock market is doing well, the economy is doing well.

Meanwhile there is an quiet bet that authoritarians will protect interests of capital owners over all else (i.e the bailout OpenAI hinted they might need), while suppressing the primary methods the masses have for expressing their discontent: speech, organizing/demonstrating, strikes, and voting.
by aaravchen | 2026-01-31 18:28:09+00:00
You unfortunately lose Widevine support when you do this though (either switching to LineageOS or a mini-PC). That means you can't stream any of the mainstream services in anything like a half-decent quality.

It's very unfortunate that every streaming service has given up on supporting anything except Google-fied Android and Apple iOS/tvOS. I dont like the services to begin with, but a fully Jellyfin stack can only get you so far when there are niche requests involved as well.
by vk6flab | 2026-01-31 18:28:22+00:00
The aircraft was doing touch and go's, it was planning to land and immediately take off again, something you typically do to practise procedures.

Speculation is that the pilot forgot to lower the landing gear, but I suspect the NTSB will likely determine the specific circumstances.

The radio traffic is here on the VASAviation YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/zCTicb6of2w
by exe34 | 2026-01-31 18:28:30+00:00
Probably 1.

All my notes for a project are usually under one or two org files.

An idea I've had though, which I hope somebody steals, is for a search engine that follows up all the links in my notes (and one or two degrees of separation from there), and allows me to end up in those places again next time I search for something.
by rekabis | 2026-01-31 18:29:00+00:00
Many of us here are web developers, and can see a solution: server-side assembly of the content. As in, abandon the client-side interactivity so as to reliably serve up different content depending on who’s calling, without the visitor being able to “look under the hood” to see alternative content (as client-side rendering can expose).

Because web pages are being served up without interactivity, there would be no way to _easily_ tell if alternate content exists for different users; if the access tech (browser, bot, crawler, etc.) is what is causing the content to change.

The big issue is how to reliably identify Google crawlers and bots. This framework might need to go as far as identifying entire blocks of Google IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to use as a filter, since many of the more recent indexing tech looks at web pages the same way humans would, and may even present themselves to the server much the same way a normal web browser would, but this is a technical problem that can be overcome.

Hmmm… this sounds like a potential project. Something that can be used as a foundation for many websites, and possibly even a plugin for existing frameworks like WordPress.
by dehrmann | 2026-01-31 18:29:01+00:00
This is a very sound take:

> Will AI replace my job?

> If you consider your job to be “typing code into an editor”, AI will replace it (in some senses, it already has). On the other hand, if you consider your job to be “to use software to build products and/or solve problems”, your job is just going to change and get more interesting.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-31 18:29:20+00:00
My MOOLLM analysis of his code from 1988 surfaced evidence that he's been on a ideological jihad against RMS long before I noticed him go crazy after 9/11 with all the anti-Muslim pork lard on bullets stuff.

In 1988, Eric Raymond wrote a Usenet news reader called TMNN, which he bragged about incessently at science fiction conventions and anywhere he could corner somebody.

BRAGSHEET: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/doc/BRAGSHEET

I performed a "Vibe Code Review" code archaeology analysis of ESR's TMNN source code with AI Safety Goggles (without actually looking directly into the code itself, which would be quite painful and disturbing), and what I found was revealing: the anti-RMS obsession was there from the very beginning, decades before his post-9/11 meltdown.

The LICENSE file is 40% libertarian political manifesto. It explicitly attacks the Free Software Foundation while copying the GPL format: "My action is not to be construed as an endorsement of the political or economic views or personal crusades of any member, agent, or ally of the Free Software Foundation."

LICENSE: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE

license-analysis.md: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/analysis/lice...

He requires users to "guide your use by respect for personal, political, and economic freedom" and "support for natural property rights" - literally asking you to become a libertarian to use news software. Oh, and there's an "AN UNABASHED COMMERCIAL PLUG" section with his home address, phone number, and consulting solicitation. In a license file.

The code includes fascist.c - his word, not mine - implementing content filtering, while the license demands users "oppose unconditionally every form of censorship." The BRAGSHEET promises 35+ revolutionary features; the actual release was an abandoned beta.

D.news/fascist.c: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.news/fa...

This wasn't corruption by fame. The pattern was always there: grandiose self-promotion, ideological gatekeeping, attacking RMS while taking from him, and the gap between stated principles and actual behavior. The 9/11 stuff and the OSI ejection weren't a slide into lunacy - they were the continuation of patterns visible in his code from 1988.

Feel free to clone, fork, submit issues and prs, or otherwise read and contribute to the repo, but I INSIST that you RESPECT and CONFORM to the CODE OF CONDUCT!

CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/CODE-OF-CONDU...

ARCHAEOLOGY.md: https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8/blob/main/analysis/ARCH...

Archaeological Analysis

TMNN is not a footnote. It's a Rosetta Stone.

The Thesis

Everything Eric S. Raymond would later become famous for — and infamous for — is already visible in this 1988 codebase.

This isn't a story of corruption by fame. This is a story of pattern consistency.

The code doesn't lie. The code was always here. We just finally looked.
by majormajor | 2026-01-31 18:29:29+00:00
Consider a hypothetical writing prompt from 10 years ago: "Imagine really good and incredibly fast chatbots that have been trained on, or can find online, pretty much all sci fi stories ever written. What happens when they talk to each other?"

Why wouldn't you expect the training to make "agent" loops that are useful for human tasks also make agent loops that could spin out infinite conversations with each other echoing ideas across decades of fiction?