MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Foxboron | 2026-01-09 17:27:19+00:00
So blocking Kiwifarms took.. months of activism and loud complaining. Heraled by Matthew as "this is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with".

However a fine that amounts to ~0.7% of the annual revenue and they threaten to block an entire country?
by abe_m | 2026-01-09 17:27:44+00:00
I think the main complaint is that the percentage of the kits dedicated to specialty parts limits their usefulness for free-form play. Sets of the 80's had fewer block types, which forced Lego to be more creative in how the sets were put together, which subsequently allowed more freedom in using the blocks for other designs. The sets my kids are playing with look much more "realistic" to what the set is trying to model, but very difficult to build something entirely different, such as building a house from a car kit.
by Retric | 2026-01-09 17:27:45+00:00
What these indexes are and how they behave is definitely on topic. Some of the indexes we can point to have in the past seen outsized returns, but many haven’t especially over specific timeframes. Currency fluctuations play a huge role, as does perception of risk etc.

Your previous statement about why in general they would have an advantage was inaccurate. As you have seemingly realized.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-09 17:28:03+00:00
This is what will happen sooner or later. One cheap, non-rooted, Googled Android phone at home for 2FA and other official nonsense, powered off when not in use.

All other business, including personal communications, conducted on a GrapheneOS device. These days you don't even need a phone number for your everyday device, a data-only roaming plan like silent.link is enough. This is not yet necessary in the U.S., but we are dangerously close.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-09 17:28:24+00:00
The announcement video I saw was bizarre.

It spent a bunch of time showing the very classic, simple lego blocks being used to make imaginative things kids make like dinosaurs and trains and planes. It was heartfelt and got me thinking warmly about how Lego has always been this tool for your imagination to become tangible. I spent countless hours with my brother on the basement carpet floor playing Lego. And I've been doing the same with my kids and it's been an enormous facilitator of joy for us.

And then they revealed a brick that shits all over that fundamental concept. A brick that significantly narrows the imagination space by focusing on pre-defined motion behaviours that trigger pre-recorded sound effects from all your favourite intellectual properties.

Does a child exist who thinks, "damn... I wish I didn't have to make all these sounds myself"?!

They're trying to compete with your imagination because your imagination is a factory from which free, unmerchandizable, non-franchise creations emerge.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-09 17:28:54+00:00
> Incidentally, if anyone wants some collector's edition Google/Android devices...

Please get in touch with the postmarketOS folks, since any phone old enough to be running CyanogenMod proper is most likely not supported there yet. (It would be super nice to even have a proper list of all devices where old CyanogenMod was officially supported at some point, with device specs for each. We're lacking even that at present because the transition from the CyanogenMod name to LineageOS was so messy.)

Of course, the combination of extremely limited hardware specs (512MB RAM + 512MB built-in storage was a common spec), old ARM32 SoCs and the ongoing 3G/2G mobile network phaseout means that many such devices will only really be useful as glorified palmtops or for even more minimal uses. But it might be worth experimenting with nonetheless.
by elric | 2026-01-09 17:29:00+00:00
You jest, but an actual "digital wallet" device is something I'd quite like to see. Something that's actually secure (like not running an ancient android version that never sees security updates). That only deals with money, without any garbage running on it. That displays and verifies the amount before processing any contactless payments. That supports multiple banks, multiple bank accounts, multiple payment cards etc.

I utterly detest the idea of having to use a phone for anything that I'd like to be secure. I browse Reddig on that thing. I watch porn on that thing, I don't want my porn anywhere near my bank account.
by dangus | 2026-01-09 17:29:07+00:00
Let me clarify my statement: one government agency’s election to use an app for a single purpose isn’t an indicator of much.

It’s not like the UK sent out a mandate to private banks or any other private industry on this issue. It’s also only one small country of hundreds.

I’d have to question this idea that this is how things “already look.” I can think of very few businesses that I interact with that force me to use an app.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-09 17:29:47+00:00
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict.

IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.
by qwery | 2026-01-09 17:29:47+00:00
later, ... there are 14 competing jargon files.

"Free software" is a fine descriptor. It's needlessly confusing to repeat that "beer as in slurred speech" thing, though. Free software can be free "as in beer"[0], but the way it gets said makes it sound like it zero cost software is an anti-goal, rather than pointing out that it's not the true goal. Then the "free as in speech" thing is kind of pointless because you can just say "free as in freedom".

Free software is about fundamental computer freedom -- freedom to own your computer, inspect and modify, etc. -- we already have this word.

[0] where who why free beer ever? 0% relatable, 0/10 would still like a free beer though
by mothballed | 2026-01-09 17:30:07+00:00
Would make a lot of sense for banks just to shut off online/mobile access and switch to in person only. That seems to be the way things are moving with KYC/AML and ensuring there is a material presence of the person in the banking jurisdiction in which they operate. Knowing the password / keys and providing a video 'proof of life' is no longer sufficient to presume you're dealing with the person you think you are and not just sold 'darks'.

I've heard 3rd hand of some banks already doing this in i.e. Armenia where a foreigner can come in and open account easily but they block any online access to lock the control of funds in country to make it harder for the FATF psychopaths to find fodder to clamp down on them.
by alanfranz | 2026-01-09 17:30:45+00:00
Italian here.

If somebody wants to read the full document about the fine (in italian) it's here: https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib...

Part of this doc states:

```
The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing
certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported
domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended to infringe the
copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events
and similar events covered by the reports.
```

So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.

Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.
by Almondsetat | 2026-01-09 17:30:54+00:00
Here's the backstory:

A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
by tpmoney | 2026-01-09 17:30:56+00:00
Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer.
by ygra | 2026-01-09 17:31:16+00:00
Rebrickable is awesome. One of my children loves building with instructions and will do relatively little free building with Lego, and Rebrickable makes it very easy to find alternative models (often with questionable stability, though) that can be built from the same set. It also features a search of alternative models you can build with all the sets (and bricks) you have.
by liamph | 2026-01-09 17:31:23+00:00
Great article. I appreciate the recognition that there are other software- development models which may make more sense for specific scenarios. Some projects do not need 99.999% uptime if it's going to double the cost, and some do.

The name "mono-environment" might be misleading for some, as "mono" might be understood to mean that there is only one environment in total.

The practice of "development-in-production" is becoming increasingly rare but it is worth mentioning. That would be where there is no separate development environment at all. I'm not recommending it in 2026! This method is sometimes chosen because the cost of setting up a development environment that is a good match with production is too high. Similar to what the article says about the downsides of staging, sometimes the cost of creating and maintaining a separate dev environment is high, and the risk of breaking production is acceptable.

An example is when a small team inherits a complex but stable legacy project, they only need to make a few cosmetic changes, it is nearing its end of life, and some outages are tolerable. If there is no dev environment already, why invest in creating it?

Returning to my point about "mono" meaning "one" - naming is hard. I would prefer to use names which more clearly distinguish between these environment topologies. I would suggest "dev-in-prod" and "dev-plus-prod".
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-09 17:31:23+00:00
> the average monthly new-car loan payment in the United States ticked up to $748. Says who? Some random finance company you’ve never heard of? Ah, no. This time, it’s from Experian—the folks who can see your credit reports. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say their data on this sort of thing is probably pretty good.

Why would anyone write like this? Why couldn't the first paragraph just be:

> The average monthly new-car loan payment in the United States ticked up to $748, according to Experian.
by mlyle | 2026-01-09 17:32:00+00:00
OK, so you've never actually been involved in peering between providers. That explains things.

If you are buying transit for multihomed site, you just mostly need to worry about advertising your few local routes and receiving a table.

These words mean specific things in a provider environment. Peering between providers is not transitive. You should not give a peer's routes to another peer-- else you are offering to provide transit to that peer.

None of the three parties involved (the peer the route came from, the peer the route would go to, or you), generally, want this.

> As soon as I peer with two big sites that don't peer directly with each-other, they both gotta let me forward announcements unfiltered across them.

So -- this is true for neither scenario. If you buy transit from two people, you don't want to "forward" routes between them. Likewise for two peers. You only want to pass on your own routes, plus routes for your downstream customers or to your downstream customers.

The other topic that causes confusion: leaking a route to somewhere won't change where traffic goes unless that new leaked route wins. If it wins, the traffic will come to you (regardless of AS path). If it doesn't win, the existing route will still be used.

I'm retired-ish now, too (now I'm a high school teacher). But if you find yourself with BGP infrastructure in HE.NET Fremont, or somewhere that can peer with FREMIX, or somewhere that can access KCIX, feel free to send me a peering request. I currently have 2 direct upstream transit providers and 55 peers across 3 sites :P
by aiiotnoodle | 2026-01-09 17:32:31+00:00
Practically, verified boot is hard to not have a "this phone has been tampered with" message on boot, the backups generated often have encrypted user data that is usually wiped on boot-loader unlock, you'd also need to unlock the phone or have the user give the pin over and most of the apps that implement root checking SDKs would prevent them from working.

I'm not saying its impossible but it is hard to do at present in a way where if I came and picked up my phone again, I'd not know something happened to it.
by nasmorn | 2026-01-09 17:32:35+00:00
Every second doctor is a below average doctor. Some are outright idiots that just became doctors because their parents expected it of them. They somehow finished med school and now they sick at their job.
Have you ever interacted with doctors? In a hospital rotation where you see a different one every week. And they all tell you entirely different things with absolute confidence of a prophet after looking at your file for 2 min and talking another 3?

Even good doctors have a real hard time convincing the bad doctors to do their job right. Never mind some random patient with a slightly less obvious diagnosis.

This is nothing like anti vax, because it is not implying a failing of medical science. It just states that enough doctors are bad enough at their job that user research is useful. To realize you need to go to a better doctor
by hinkley | 2026-01-09 17:32:47+00:00
Orange boys are outspoken, sometimes to their own detriment.

Orange is overrepresented in house cats and underrepresented in feral cats. The interpretation of this is that what selects for a kitten at a shelter is an evolutionary disadvantage when in the wild.

I have owned a yellow girl (dilute orange) who was too clever by half, an orange boy who was very sweet but dumb as a post, and an orange boy with 3 brain cells most days, except he loans them out occasionally and without notice.
by 12_throw_away | 2026-01-09 17:33:19+00:00
> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting

Right? We don't store nuclear waste, BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options, and the engineers evaluated the options before purchasing _and_ checked what we received before installing it. There wasn't even a formal process, it's just ... how you do your job?

Obviously organizational dysfunction is a real thing, particularly at LANL, but you'd really want requirements verification to be a rigorously enforced formal procedure before storing nuclear waste in perpetuity.
by Ancapistani | 2026-01-09 17:33:30+00:00
Hey, this one got me too!

The DM came from an old gaming friend of mine that actually was a developer. I’d known him for years and had playtested for him before - though it was years prior. Literally nothing about it seemed fishy.

As soon as the game “crashed on load” and Discord took its focus, I realized what had happened. I managed to change my Discord password, revoke all session tokens, and lock them out while they were buying things from the Discord store. Then I went through, changed my critical passwords, froze all the cards that are in my Bitwarden vault except one with a very low limit I kept alive as a canary, and started my post-mortem.

Turns out the malware did in fact attempt to exfil my Bitwarden vault. Thankfully, I have it configured to remain locked always and to require a security token to use, so they didn’t get anything unencrypted.

Between my initial response, analysis, dealing with changing passwords, and wiping my desktop out of an abundance of caution, I lost a total of about 12 hours. The attacker managed to buy about $60 of stuff on Discord before I shut them down there. Oh, and I got extortion messages from various accounts claiming to be them for months.

One thing that did surprise me was that while I was revoking access, they were trying to convince me they had all my credentials. They sent a screenshot logged in to my Autodesk account, of all things. That freaked me out, but I quickly realized that that particular email/password had been leaked and that the attacker was using it to try to convince me they had much more damaging information than they really did.
by NiloCK | 2026-01-09 17:33:35+00:00
Quite a contrast from the quote about civilization advancing in proportion to the size and scope of things it can achieve automatically.

Dug it up. Alfred Whitehead:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-09 17:34:07+00:00
> Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well.

I've worked in several "flat" startups and one big company.

None of them were actually flat. There's always a hierarchy. There's always an understand chain of command.

> Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.

This is a good example of how "flat" companies aren't really flat. Assembly line workers can stop production because the assembly line is part of their job. They can't fire anyone or give their peers raises, though. If you ask anyone in the comapny, they can point to the person who can fire them and can give them raises. That's the hierarchy. It always exists.
by hypercube33 | 2026-01-09 17:34:11+00:00
I am quite sure some technics sets from the 1990s had at least two builds with them. Fondly remember a similar thing you described to three in one, smaller set for a motorcycle that could be other things and my cousin having an absolutely huge crane truck set that could be something else.

edit nevermind I can't find anything on the second one, maybe my cousin combined two or more sets to build something custom but it speaks to other points about parts being more universal in the past.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-09 17:34:15+00:00
In this case, you verify whether the knowledge was made up by comparing the virtual waiter behaviour to the actual waiter. Having a strong test suite like that is actually the ideal scenario for agentic development.

(It still incredibly hard to pull off for real, because of complex stateful protocols and edge cases around timing and transfer sizes. Samba did take 12 years to develop, so even with LLM help you'd probably still be looking at several years.)
by philipkglass | 2026-01-09 17:34:23+00:00
The materials are still full of potential energy, but it's much more expensive to reprocess them than to mine fresh uranium. It's even more expensive to reprocess them without incidentally releasing more radioactive contamination into the environment. (Several countries reprocessed fuel now or in the past, but the facilities have always released more radioactive material into the environment than simple storage.)

It's kind of like why old and broken polyvinyl chloride pipes go to landfills instead of being burned as fuel in power plants. Even though PVC is flammable, the cost of burning PVC and capturing its carcinogenic combustion byproducts is a lot greater than burying waste PVC and burning fossil hydrocarbons.

In the far future, uranium mining costs might rise enough that it makes economic sense to reprocess old spent nuclear fuel. In the early days of the atomic age people thought that reprocessing and breeder reactors would be necessary because uranium was believed to be very rare on Earth. Vigorous exploration programs and new mining techniques proved this belief to be false by the end of the 1960s, and the situation hasn't changed since then. It's safer and cheaper to mine fresh fuel and just store the old fuel without any sort of reprocessing.

See e.g.

Bunn, Matthew G., Steve Fetter, John P. Holdren, and Bob van der Zwaan. 2003. The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel (PDF):

https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037d...
by alphawhisky | 2026-01-09 17:34:23+00:00
This is well understood by the outliers on both sides. Those having success gaming hot markets are doing so by manipulating these principles, and those suffering from it notice the difference in their bottom line and are adjusting rapidly towards learned helplessness. Both parties are encouraged to engage in unethical behavior as the risk/reward (or risk/risk for poor folks) gap widens.
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-09 17:34:34+00:00
I think it's kind of hard to understand what these are without more experience with them, but imagine lego bricks as a mesh network of smart devices... it's not just "brick plays a sound when you press it" but can almost start to be like a block programming language... if x block is near some minifig then y block makes a sound

if this catches on it can have a big unlocking effect for novel creation, kind of like redstone and switches did in minecraft
by sillyfluke | 2026-01-09 17:34:51+00:00
As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.

What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".

The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.

That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.