MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wiseowise | 2026-01-25 10:11:13+00:00
> browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less

That's precisely the OP's point. They gimped their browser so there's bigger incentive to use their proprietary system frameworks.

> iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation

That's nonsense. What year are you from? I've heard this like 10 years ago when there only 1 or 2 current iPhone models in circulation.

> on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.

If you offer subscription service, like Netflix/HBO/Nest or whatever, your main goal is volume, not how wealthy your demographic is.

> easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)

Easier integration with what?

> unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)

That's like Android's moat from the start, not bolted on during some 10+ major versions like on iOS. And it works much better, Android apps are truly the same apps. Not gimped, cut off things like Instagram on iOS (is it even fixed now?).

> apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)

Both are shit these days due to volume of shovelware produced.
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 10:11:14+00:00
>What it does not reliably buy are large increments in the goods that dominate most people’s objective function once comfort is secured: healthy life-years, sustained energy, and preserved cognition

It's not just physical health. What if you feel you cannot trust anyone who is close to you because they only want your money (especially when you're sick, but even normally)? What if you get addicted to cocaine or whatever drug is running in your circle?

It's not just me (not being a billionaire, I have no personal experience). A British therapist says his billionaire clients are often miserable from a psychological standpoint for many reasons (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/therap...).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-25 10:11:15+00:00
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.

Well no, Chinese phones are above Apple material-wise (better battery, better cameras, better cooling) and on par SoC-wise since last year. That's what makes Google's strategy so baffling.

> Apple has better app selection (for most people).

It's entirely the same. I have gone back and forth regularly for the past 10 years. Android is completely on par app-wise. Apple has the iMessage lock-in in the US obviously but not in the rest of the world. Apple might have a slight advantage on the pro segment with the iPad but I don't think it has a huge impact on phones.

The really baffling thing to me is that while they lock down Android, they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.

It's clear to me that they are two companies fighting each other inside Google: the ex-Motorola who wants to be Apple and the service side who wants to be Microsoft.

I personally fear that they are making the bed of the regulators who will probably come for Play Protect at some point to open the door for alternative OS providers at least in Europe. But maybe they think it's coming anyway and are strengthening their position and trying to milk what they can in the meantime.
by brynx97 | 2026-01-25 10:11:40+00:00
We have many BGP workarounds to avoid interconnection points with some of our tier 1 providers and DT because as our providers tell us, discussions with DT to add capacity are a non-starter. We've been relatively stable through a tier 2 provider through Lumen to DT though... for now. Very similar to Cogent in some regions.
by dabaja | 2026-01-25 10:11:48+00:00
We hit something similar building document processing agents. What helped was treating memory as typed knowledge rather than flat text.
Three buckets: (1) constraints -- hard rules that should always apply, (2) decisions -- past choices with context on why, (3) heuristics -- soft preferences that can be overridden.
Retrieval then becomes: constraints always injected, decisions pulled by similarity to current task, heuristics only when ambiguity is high. Still experimenting with how to detect "ambiguity" reliably -- right now it's a cheap classifier on the task description.
The deduplication problem is real. We ended up hashing on (topic, decision_type) and forcing manual review when collision detected. Brutal but necessary. TBH we are not home yet but that's the path we walking.
by kybernetyk | 2026-01-25 10:11:52+00:00
Meh, the threat vector to me as a resident of Germany is the German government - not some dude at the other end of the world. What is Musk going to do? Ban me from Twitter? Not sell me a Tesla?

That's nothing compared to what German authorities can do to me. Germany is a country where you get police searching your home for torrenting movies or making stupid jokes on Facebook. So yeah.

Also about enshittification - one could argue that our local ISPs never left that phase to begin with.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-25 10:12:37+00:00
> I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.

And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.

Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
by Revolution1120 | 2026-01-25 10:12:55+00:00
It's unclear whether the perpetrators of sexual assault and pedophilia were Palantir or the CCP and Prince Holding Group. The latter has long established a very thorough surveillance system in China. While Western leaders and business figures frequently have close contact with China, the world's second-largest economy, Western society consistently overlooks both China's power and its potential for malicious activity. The correct approach is to consider both.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-25 10:12:58+00:00
AI translations are getting good. I've been working on our company website in the last month. It's a static website. So, I use Agentic coding tools to implement both content and technical changes. A simple prompt "align the translations with the English version for all pages" and some guard rails in the form of skills and AGENTS.md instructions are doing most of the heavy lifting. To be clear.

These translations are not perfect, yet. But good enough for my needs. Any professional translator services would in any case be beyond our budget. The advantage of using agentic coding tools here (enabled by using a site generator rather than a CMS) is that I can get systematic about dealing with jargon, SEO, and frequently used phrases. I simply document all that and instruct the tool to refer to that. The funny thing is that most of the models are pretty good at fixing their own mistakes if you just ask them too. I asked it to look for examples of "denglish" (German English) in its own German translations and then to fix it. It found a few examples and the suggested fixes were fine.

A lot of people are focusing on the negative here. I like to look at the positive. We're approaching the moment where any person on this planet will be able to communicate directly with any other person on this planet without the need for translators. The tools already exist for this. But they need a lot of work on quality.

A second point here is that the role of English as the most popular intermediary language is disappearing as well. I'm not a native speaker. When I talk to foreigners from wherever, it's mostly in (bad) English. By definition that limits me to talking to people that have had enough education and exposure to English. This is very limiting. A lot of the people we need to talk to here in Germany aren't all that comfortable speaking English.
by tomhow | 2026-01-25 10:13:52+00:00
We’re really just asking you to read the room. HN has existed for nearly two decades and the guidelines had been in place and stable for the most of that time. We’re asking you to learn and respect our norms in the same way you would if you were visiting someone’s home.

As for Wikipedia; it’s criticized plenty here. It’s a mistake to stereotype the HN community as being homogeneously for or against anything. It’s a large community with a bell curve of opinion about most topics.
by uxhacker | 2026-01-25 10:14:00+00:00
Persona’s is not the same thing as a role. The point of the role is to limit what the work of the agent, and to focus it on one or two behaviors.

What the paper is really addressing is does key words like you are a helpful assistant give better results.

The paper is not addressing a role such as you are system designer, or you are security engineer which will produce completely different results and focus the results of the LLM.
by jstanley | 2026-01-25 10:14:07+00:00
Pencils are awful because if it has been dropped once in its history then the lead inside is cracked into many pieces, and will randomly break off without warning, then you need to sharpen it all the way to the next piece of lead, which then has a fair chance of breaking off almost immediately, and so on until you run out of pencil or patience.

And that's if you have a pencil sharpener handy, which is extra paraphernalia the pencil requires of you. Or else a sharp knife and a steady hand, and then the temptation is always to end up with a blunt tip because at the margin making the point blunter allows you to expose more lead with a minimum of cutting through the wood.

An utterly infuriating instrument. The best writing and drawing instrument is the Mitsubishi Uni-ball Eye UB-150 pen. It always works and it lays down a high-contrast line very smoothly every time. I'm never without one.

The main downside of the UB-150 is that everybody who sees it instantly recognises it and they are liable to grow legs. I recommend buying them in large quantities and sprinkling them all around your house and workplace so that there is such obvious abundance that nobody feels compelled to take one. And if they do, well there are plenty more for everybody else anyway.
by valyala | 2026-01-25 10:14:07+00:00
There is no need in the operating system to run Unikernels. Every Unikernel includes parts of operating system needed for interacting with the underlying hardware. So Unikernels can run on bare metal if they know how to interact with the underlying hardware (i.e. if they have drivers for that hardware). Usually Unikernels are targeted to run on virtual machines because virtual machines have unified virtualised hardware. This allows running the same Unikernel on virtual machines across multiple cloud providers, since they have similar virtual hardware.
by necovek | 2026-01-25 10:15:28+00:00
There is no doubt that sideloading by uninformed users can be used as a backdoor.

It's also not a surprise that banks/industry that's accountable to recover the losses for tricked customers is looking to someone else to solve it for them.

However, if this was "piloted", do we have the numbers of how much has it decreased the number of scams or their impact?

I wouldn't go as far as to say that it is impossible to "educate the public", but it is indeed extremely hard. But click-through pop-ups have succeeded when?
by nairboon | 2026-01-25 10:15:54+00:00
Nowadays high citation numbers don't mean anymore what they used to. I've seen too many highly cited papers with issues that keep getting referenced, probably because people don't really read the sources anymore and just copy-paste the citations.

On my side-project todo list, I have an idea for a scientific service that overlays a "trust" network over the citation graph. Papers that uncritically cite other work that contains well-known issues should get tagged as "potentially tainted". Authors and institutions that accumulate too many of such sketchy works should be labeled equally. Over time this would provide an additional useful signal vs. just raw citation numbers. You could also look for citation rings and tag them. I think that could be quite useful but requires a bit of work.
by madduci | 2026-01-25 10:16:09+00:00
I own a FTTH connection to Telekom since 2018, as the only provider in my street, allowed to install an internet connection (only glass fiber).

Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b...

I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.

The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-25 10:16:20+00:00
i just replied and then saw the comment was flagged LOL. For those that missed it the flagged comment said something stupid like “don’t obstruct ICE and you’ll be fine.”

They are misinformed i’m afraid. This is the BEST case scenario:
https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-us-citizen-...

worst case scenario is you’re sent to another country, or killed.
by xg15 | 2026-01-25 10:16:23+00:00
I like the subtle bit of trolling they did with the page color: DT had registered that shade of magenta as a trademark, made it a core part of their brand and generally was VERY vocal in public about "owning" that color. [1, 2]

Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3]

So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own.

[1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl...

[2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German)

[3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...
by AlexRST | 2026-01-25 10:16:40+00:00
Hey HN,
I built Rekko because I was tired of manually chasing customers when their subscription payments failed on my gym SaaS.

Stripe's built-in dunning emails have a pretty low recovery rate (most customers ignore them). So I built a system that sends personalized SMS and emails on each Stripe retry attempt.

Would love feedback from anyone who's dealt with involuntary churn.

How do you handle it today?
by Applejinx | 2026-01-25 10:16:44+00:00
Yes, and it's successfully got to where his people are able to dismantle American infrastructure at scale, deliver IT systems to Russian hackers directly and coordinate death squads on the streets. I figure the primary reason we're not seeing 'little green men' in Minnesota, for instance, is that Russia cannot spare them. But the war here is arguably as important or MORE important to Russian war aims than the war in Ukraine.

Certainly more successful here than in Ukraine, for what that's worth. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion but they've certainly succeeded here a lot more than in Ukraine.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-25 10:17:03+00:00
> Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again

FYI, if you want to search for this, it is called "The long tailpipe" theory (1) or "long tailpipe fallacy".

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe

And it is a fallacy for obvious reasons, including

a) electricity generation is more flexible, and rapidly shifting to solar and other non-polluting sources.

b) Moving pollution away from people is better. Cars are inherently around people, streets, residences etc.

c) One centralised plant with no weight restrictions is easier to control for emissions and efficiency than many thousands of mobile, weight-constrained power plants.

d) Wikipedia: "The extraction and refining of carbon based fuels and its distribution is in itself an energy intensive industry contributing to CO2 emissions."
by deepbluev7 | 2026-01-25 10:17:22+00:00
You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.
by shortishly | 2026-01-25 10:17:45+00:00
Yes: with a schema backed topic (AVRO, JSON or Protocol buffer) Tansu can write to Apache Iceberg, Delta or Parquet. You can use a Sink topic to write directly to an open table format (including Parquet) skipping (most of) the Kafka metadata.

https://blog.tansu.io/articles/parquet
by decimalenough | 2026-01-25 10:17:47+00:00
Every single survey that I'm aware has concluded that by any measure EVs are more environmentally friendly than ICEs. The only caveat is that the "startup" footprint of an EV is higher (because batteries), but the ongoing cost is far lower, even with polluting electricity sources like coal, because it's still way more efficient to burn coal in a proper power plant than it is to ship around gasoline and burn it badly in ICEs. The breakeven point (depending on your assumptions and driving habits) is a couple of years in, and after that EVs wipe the floor with ICEs.

Here's a bunch of those surveys: https://evcentral.com.au/which-is-best-for-the-environment-e...

Keen to hear your expert opinion on what (eg) the International Energy Agency got wrong.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 10:17:55+00:00
For the millionth time, piracy isn't theft. It's copyright violation, not copyright theft.

No, a reduction in traffic is not sufficient to conclude that a copyright violation has occurred. Sure, it might have. Alternatively it might have produced a lossy summary in which case the reduction in traffic raises some difficult questions about the value of the original work.

In other cases an LLM can synthesize a genuinely useful explanation of a subject that is precisely tailored to the needs of the asker. In those cases the machine output might well prove more useful to the asker than any single original reference would have.

For something like news where what you're paying for is timely delivery it makes sense to restrict automated (not just LLM) access for the first few days because a similarly timely summary will capture the majority of the value proposition of your service.

That's not typical though. For example, I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with a summary of the plot of a book I'm interested in. Would you want to watch a 10 minute highlights reel in place of a 2 hour feature length film?
by renewiltord | 2026-01-25 10:18:08+00:00
Family member tried to do work relying on previous results from a biotech lab. Couldn’t do it. Tried to reproduce. Doesn’t work. Checked work carefully. Faked. Switched labs and research subject. Risky career move, but. Now has a career. Old lab is in mental black box. Never to be touched again.

Talked about it years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867

Others said they’d never seen it. So maybe it’s rare. But no one will tell you even if they encounter. Guaranteed career blackball.
by ulfw | 2026-01-25 10:18:27+00:00
Thinking Apple hardware is better is utterly laughable when you look at non-US Android devices.

Much better camera sensors, much better silicon carbon batteries etc in Oppo, Vivo, Honor and Xiaomi devices than anything Apple produces. Form factors Apple still hasn't figured out, such as 7th gen Foldables, Flip foldable phones etc, Camera zoom lenses that can be attached...
by necovek | 2026-01-25 10:19:22+00:00
I was expecting Google has stopped doing most of the business in Russia due to sanctions. Do you still see Russian-company ads in Google Search results or Youtube? Similarly, I thought they were not selling apps or ads in Google Play store in Russia either (they might be showing ads from non-Russian companies because, well, that just increases the show-count and absolute number of clicks).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-25 10:19:22+00:00
The issue is obviously one of trade-off.

Google pays content creators so little they have all started including ads in their videos. Si technically as long as you are counted they get paid. Meanwhile, Google is more and more aggressive with their own ads interrupting videos and pushing you to subscribe to their expensive offer.

Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.

It's the usual tug of war between revenues and UX but I don't think consumers have to feel bad about not playing by Google's rules.
by SloppyDrive | 2026-01-25 10:19:41+00:00
They moved to a purely extractive mindset; the goal seems to be extract as much as possible out of the inertia they have built, while almost (but not quite) killing the brand.

Its not even an uncommon story; to the point where it seems like a signal; when shareholders bring in an Indian CEO, innovation is done, and its time to try to eat all the seedcorn.
by latexr | 2026-01-25 10:19:43+00:00
I find the conclusion and justification nonsensical.

If anyone is “vibe coding without even knowing it”, which is highly dubious to begin with, that person will be terribly inexperienced anyway. They will not make mistakes which are “very hard to notice during a code review”. They will in fact be trivial to detect, if not by the code then by the description of the changes.

There’s no point to you spending the time adding the “guardrails” that will only in fact make your review harder. If 100% vibe-code is “nightmare fuel” to you, then making it harder to detect makes zero sense.
by looshch | 2026-01-25 10:19:43+00:00
> being posted by Americans
> Americans with vested interests

proofs, please?

> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech

it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government

> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"

again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
by chmod775 | 2026-01-25 10:20:04+00:00
If a plan was made to repatriate it, chances are this will happens slowly over years, possibly decades. A lot of it might not even be "moved", but rather "swapped" for gold physically in the EU by means of various vehicles: such as selling gold at a slight loss in the US, and buying gold in the EU. Doing so might be cheaper than arranging for physical transport of large quantities.

When large quantities of gold are actually transported "at once", it usually happens in secret on warships. Maybe military planes would be used nowadays? Who knows. Good luck anyhow.