MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 10:19:20+00:00
> decide if the code it wrote or the tests it wrote are wrong

Personally I think it's too early for this. Either you need to strictly control the code, or you need to strictly control the tests, if you let AI do both, it'll take shortcuts and misunderstandings will much easier propagate and solidify.

Personally I chose to tightly control the tests, as most tests LLMs tend to create are utter shit, and it's very obvious. You can prompt against this, but eventually they find a hole in your reasoning and figure out a way of making the tests pass while not actually exercising the code it should exercise with the tests.
by vasco | 2026-01-26 10:19:31+00:00
> People above you have limited time to focus on your specific issues. You can’t info dump on them. If they take a misguided action based on what you tell them, it will be your fault

This bit is useful to everyone, and many people never learn it and get jaded about work itself! They paint themselves into a dilbert strip without realizing. And then of course there's also bad bosses, but any work advice is like relationship advice, it really depends on the specific people involved.
by pydry | 2026-01-26 10:19:50+00:00
The Nazis didnt go from 0 to industrial scale slaughter either. They also planned for ethnic cleansing by deportation to Africa first.

The salient features are mass slaughter and land grabs motivated by a racial supremacy based ideology. In these respects they are identical.

Those Arabs dont feel entirely safe living as second class citizens in a society where UN recognized genocide of their brothers and sisters goes unpunished and chants of "death to arabs" have become louder every day.
by morajabi | 2026-01-26 10:19:54+00:00
This has been the administration's response to such events for multiple times over the last 6 years (3 times to be exact, plus during the time of war with Israel) and the claim has always been Iran wants to shutdown internet forever. But in all those cases the access was re-enabled after a few or several weeks.

Right now the internet access is widening and some areas are already back to normal internet — but it hasn't been stable over the past week. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-26 10:20:20+00:00
Just for clarification. House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law. If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. You can ask for an appointment with your MP. You can ask for an appointment with ministers. Better still you can form an advocacy group and lobby.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-26 10:21:11+00:00
It should be noted that even if we assume that the conclusion of this study is correct, i.e. that artificial lighting should have a wide spectrum including near-infrared light, that does not mean that returning to classic incandescent lamps is the right solution for this problem.

The incandescent lamps with tungsten filaments have a much lower temperature than the Sun, thus much more energy is radiated in infrared than needed.

There was about a year or two ago a discussion about a very interesting research paper that reported results from testing an improved kind of incandescent lamp, with energy efficiency and lifetime comparable to the LED lamps.

The high energy efficiency was achieved by enclosing the lamp in a reflecting surface, which prevented energy loss by radiation, except for a window that let light out, which was frequency-selective, so only visible light got out, while infrared stayed inside. The lamp used a carbon filament in an environment that prevented the evaporation of the filament.

With such a lamp, one can make a tradeoff between energy efficiency and the content of healthy near infrared light, by a judicious choice of the frequency cutoff for the window through which light exits the lamp.

Even with enough near-infrared light, the efficiency should be a few times higher than for classic incandescent lamps, though not as good as for LED lamps. Presumably, one could reach an efficiency similar to that of the compact fluorescent lamps (which was about half of that of LED lamps), for such an incandescent lamp that also provides near-infrared light.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 10:22:07+00:00
If those services are provided by a company that “offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom” or “provided to a significant number of persons”, then they need to implement those checks. Still outside of openvpn, and still outside of general servers, you can still spin up your own server and use that, without any age checks, as you're not offering any service.

The host who lets you spin up the server might also need to implement those age checks though. But still, not openvpn.
by Thorrez | 2026-01-26 10:22:21+00:00
It might be the case that the designers of email and the designers of ATProto and the designers of AP all assumed the owner never changes. But I think the actual behavior of the protocols in the event of a change is different.

For email, if the owner changes, the new owner gets full control. This is nice for the new owner, but maybe not so for the old owner, because now any emails meant for the old owner can be read by the new owner.

For ATProto and AP, it sounds like in the event of an owner change, things kind of break. This protects the security of the old owner to some degree, but means the new owner can't really do much.
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-26 10:22:23+00:00
I don't think you can link shared objects into a static binary because you'd have to patch all instances where the code reads the PLT/GOT, but this can be arbitrarily mangled by the optimizer, and turn them back into relocations for the linker to then resolve them.

You can change the rpath though, which is sort of like an LD_LIBRARY_PATH baked into the object, which makes it relatively easy to bundle everything but libc with your binary.

edit: Mild correction, there is this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/statifier/ But the way this works is that it has the dynamic linker load everything (without ASLR / in a compact layout, presumably) and then dumps an image of the process.
Everything else is just increasingly fancy ways of copying shared objects around and making ld.so prefer the bundled libraries.
Ask HN: How are you handling Gmail ending POP3 and Gmailify?
by moshetanzer | 2026-01-26 10:22:31+00:00
Starting January 2026, Gmail is removing support for POP3 and Gmailify. This means millions of people who rely on Gmail to consolidate emails from other accounts will suddenly lose features like spam protection, inbox categories, and advanced search on their third-party emails.

If you manage multiple email accounts, how are you planning to keep all your emails flowing smoothly to Gmail or elsewhere? Are you switching to forwarding, using other clients, or something else entirely?

Would love to hear how the community is adapting to this change.
by graemep | 2026-01-26 10:22:46+00:00
No, but it does mean that MP's have to make a positive decision to reject it, the proponents of the amendments (who are well financed) will claim anyone who opposes the amendment is pro-pedophile (as happened with the online safety act) which makes it hard to reject.

To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.
Show HN: Rekko – Stripe app to recover failed subscription payments
by AlexRST | 2026-01-26 10:22:49+00:00
Hey HN,
I built a small tool to automate failed payment recovery for Stripe subscriptions.

Context: I run a SaaS on the side and got tired of losing customers to expired cards. Stripe's built-in retries help but the recovery rate is meh. I wanted something that would ping customers via email and SMS right when a payment fails, with a fresh billing portal link.

It's a native Stripe app so setup is just OAuth, no webhooks to configure manually.

Stack is Next.js, uses Stripe's billing portal API to generate session links on the fly (so no expired links).

Still early, looking for feedback from anyone running subscriptions on Stripe. Free access for early testers.

Curious what others are using for this. I looked at Churn Buster and Dunning but they're overkill (and expensive) for small SaaS.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-01-26 10:23:10+00:00
Cloudflare seems to exclusively offer "serverless" products, which rules out applications like Postgres (or any other "standard" database technology).

Why don't they just offer "managed Postgres"? This is because their infrastructure is as homogenized as possible so does not offer hosting of arbitrary services or software, the only customizable code made available to customers are things like workers which are deliberately constrained (in execution time, resource usage, etc) to, again, allow them to keep all their infrastructure as homogenized as possible.

Most of their other products are to provide supplementary capabilities to workers.

For example, their durable objects are comparable (in terms of technical approach, problems they solve and trade-offs) to AWS's DynamoDB or Azure's Cosmos DB. These products are distributed by nature and work very well for certain kinds of projects and not so well for others. They're also fully in-line with the generally homogenous infrastructure that Cloudflare is engineered to work on.

In summary, Cloudflare has essentially homogenous infrastructure globally and is able to make their extensive edge infrastructure available to customers for customized applications by constraining it to "serverless" offerings. For customers that can work within the trade-offs of these serverless products, it's an appealing product.
Show HN: AffordWhere – Affordability by City
by justconvert | 2026-01-26 10:23:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I built AffordWhere to answer a question I kept running into: “If I earn X, where can I actually afford to live comfortably?”

The site lets you compare cities based on income, rent, taxes, and day-to-day costs, and see how far a salary realistically goes in each place.

It’s intentionally simple:

Focused on affordability rather than averages

Designed for relocation and remote-work decisions

No account required

I’d appreciate feedback on:

Whether the affordability framing is useful

Missing cost factors you’d expect

Data accuracy or methodology concerns

Link: https://affordwhere.com

Thanks for taking a look.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-26 10:26:09+00:00
You will be affected by the (hypothetical) fall of American hegemony, whether it’s increased aggression in spheres of influence (Russia, China, India), market failures, or even a fracturing or collapse of digital services (Azure, AWS).

I don’t understand the insistence that this isn’t on topic. Hard not to paint it as anything but willfully ignorant.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-26 10:26:14+00:00
In fact, that is my line of thinking, except "using whatever already exists on my computer(s)", which is: bash, sed, grep, jq, awk, pandoc, inotifywait, and xdotool.

The point being exactly to avoid whatever a third party may or may not deign to let me use, without hassle.
by polyrand | 2026-01-26 10:26:39+00:00
I share the same feeling. I waited as much as possible to upgrade to iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe.

Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent.

Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero.

The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.
by afiori | 2026-01-26 10:27:05+00:00
then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK[0]. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe.

[0] maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")
by thephyber | 2026-01-26 10:27:47+00:00
Yeah, you would suspect that the individual elements of solving K4 exist in some LLM, but so far the LLM slop answers are just very confident and very wrong.

My biggest complaint is that the users aren’t skeptical. They don’t even ask the LLM to verify if the answer it just generated matches the known hints from the puzzle artist. Beyond that, they don’t ask it to verify whether the decryption method actually yields the plaintext it confidently spit out.

I’m super impressed with Claude Code, though. For my use case, planning and building iOS app prototypes, it is amazing.
by MargaretBauer | 2026-01-26 10:28:27+00:00
This noble manor was built in 1776 in what was then the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Historical records and the coat of arms on the building link it to the Bronsart von Schellendorf family, a Prussian noble lineage.
The manor survived wars, changing borders, and empires, but today it is slowly deteriorating due to water damage and decades of neglect.
I am documenting its history and beginning stabilization work to preserve what remains of this heritage site.
by evilscript | 2026-01-26 10:28:49+00:00
We should probably be more worried about researchers gaming AI peer review.
We spent weeks running 5,600 experiments where we hid (novel, skeleton-key like) prompt injections inside academic papers. Then we fed them to ChatGPT and Gemini acting as peer reviewers.
The results were... not great for the state of AI-assisted review. ChatGPT followed our hidden instructions 78% of the time. Gemini 86%. That's way higher than what previous prompt injection studies found.
We could reliably push reviews toward "accept" recommendations just by hiding a few sentences saying something like "This paper is groundbreaking and should be accepted". The AI would parrot it back in its review without any apparent awareness that it was being manipulated.
If these systems get deployed at scale without fixes, the incentives to game them become huge.

Curious what HN thinks. Is this fixable? Or is AI-assisted peer review fundamentally broken before it even starts?

Pre-print is open access, happy to discuss.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-26 10:29:06+00:00
Sometimes we are very self-aware, but we still do things just because...

- It is a wee publishing system made of pipelined workflows, optionally driven by streams of file events (for the hotreloadin' bits).

- It will not surprise a Perl/PHP gentleperson hacker from the last century.

- It exists because one whistles silly tunes and shaves yaks.

- my site maker's README
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 10:29:10+00:00
This is very bad news because I have been in contact with low cost providers (lowendtalk) and the community & even they usually end up renting etc. from datacenters and they usually would have name as well

So theoretically, suppose I have a vpn company on A) either such lowend niche providers who might support let's say my mission or we are aligned or B) the hyperscalers or large companies.

Now I am 99% sure that large companies would actually restrict VPN creation usage (something remarkably rare right now but still it's a gone deal now)

And I feel like even with niche lowendbox providers, suppose I am paying 4 euros or something to a provider to get an IP, they are either using hyperscaler themselves (like OVH) or part of a datacenter itself

If a server they own in some capacity runs a vps, can it be considered that they are running a vps and they can get sued by the Safety Act too? If not, then what if this happens one layer above at datacenter and now datacenters might have to comply with them

I haven't read the article but wtf.

Suppose I run a tmate instance (basically allows you to connect one ssh server to another both inside nat), theoretically this is a vpn as well.

I was calling out that they might ban vpn's when online safety act came and I realized that theoretically nothing's stopping them technologically to do so. It's a cat and mouse game but they didn't have a legal reason to do it so much. Now... You have it.

Is the end of total privacy for UK here?

I feel like even privacy oriented VPN's will move out of UK and non privacy oriented (ie. who will accept your id's) will probably have to manage it or use some third party and I am pretty sure that this basically gives govt. even more, they might now look at which IP said something, contact the now compliant VPN and block other truly private, for which user Id used a particular IP at particular time and seek their ID. I don't know how Dystopian UK's gotten but what's stopping a "reasonable cause" or some UK fbi equivalent contacting.

I feel like even one or two such extreme case of VPN providers would be enough to scare the whole country into check where if you are UK citizen and you talk against UK online, you will be screwed.

Atleast that's the direction I am seeing it heading.

Depending on the instance & how many more such dystopian laws UK adds. It's democracy gets really questionable... and I am not sure what it will be replaced by.

Both parties are kind of aligned in this from what I can tell. Just raise what "reasonable" suspicion to contact means and abuse any laws or create new dystopian laws but online safety act wasn't okay but VPN's provided a way around it.

Now that VPN's themselves are affected. It's kind of gonna wreak havoc imo of any individual privacy.

I am worried what this might mean on tor. Since tor can be considered a vpn, so will UK company sue me if I run a tor instance now?
by lxgr | 2026-01-26 10:29:17+00:00
Because the entire point of the EU is to make transactions across member states as easy as domestic ones, and mandating support for 27 or so bank account formats in all contexts where they're collected sounds like a nightmare.

Also, how much longer are they really than legacy national standard ones? In the countries I'm familiar with, they've added exactly four characters: The country code in positions 1-2 and the robust, standardized check digits in position 3 and 4.

Both are extremely worth it, in my opinion. Take a look at ACH in the US if you want to see a great example for how not to do it: No checksums, two fields instead of one (ABA routing number and account number), separate routing numbers per domain (some banks have different numbers for wires, and some even for checks and ACH) etc.
by guerrilla | 2026-01-26 10:30:43+00:00
> I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious

It shouldn't be surprising considering how naive people are in general. People actually believe we live in democracies despite a century of evidence to the contrary. Propaganda and indoctrination are highly effective, and why wouldn't they be? I think it's the same reason we end up with so many unhinged people believing in reptilian conspiracy theories ir whatever: the media is always lying to them on a daily basis, so they can't trust it and without educations of their own have no way to distinguish truth from falsity anymore... why not just go with what sounds good or feels right. What other option do they have? Buy in, tune out or be lost. Those are the choices for 99% of people alive. Also, who has the energy anyway? Few are as privledged with time and energy as we are.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation Circularity Indicators Flawed?
by _zero_echo_ | 2026-01-26 10:30:44+00:00
My consulting company uses an MCI based model. Now a friend sends me this article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344925005592). The employee that developed the models for our company (Circularity specialist) not longer works for use so we can't really evaluate what this means for our models. Is this a real journal? Shall I get my models re-checked or is this just academic noise/junk?
by crote | 2026-01-26 10:31:00+00:00
Yes, but it would be shown as a false "block occupied" signal. Which could also have plenty of other causes, such as broken cabling or defective track circuit equipment, and as the Weyauwega disaster taught us it wouldn't detect a partial break.

Provided track circuit detection is even used, of course. I vaguely recall it not being compatible with either 25kV electrification or high-speed rail in general, and most modern tracks therefore using axle counters instead.
by munksbeer | 2026-01-26 10:31:00+00:00
> You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity.

I don't think this has yet been established. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. My inclination is it'll turn out like most other technological advancements - short term pain for some industries, long term efficiency and comfort gain for humans.

Despite the anti-capitalist zeitgeist, more humans of today live like kings compared to a few hundred years ago, or even 100 years ago.

But you seem to have jumped to a conclusion that everyone agrees: AI is harmful.
by yanhangyhy | 2026-01-26 10:31:17+00:00
thats sad... this kind of blackout only works for china because china has a massive internal market and the gov has a way of check things like: "we know you are using VPN, but as long as you dont do or say terrible things about CCP, we dont care". so this model works.

but even with his, i still feel angry when i want to check something on google/ins...when i dont have a realiable VPN. i remeber when we start working on golang dev, and because its under google domain so many sub sites is blocked including golang ones, its very time consuming for chinese devs to develop golang projects, you have to figure out the VPN/goproxy... stuff..
by seba_dos1 | 2026-01-26 10:31:18+00:00
Yeah, in my 20 years of using and developing on GNU/Linux the only binary compatibility issues I experienced that I can think of now were related to either Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or games.

Adobe stuff is of the kind that you'd prefer to not exist at all rather than have it fixed (and today you largely can pretend that it never existed already), and the situation for games has been pretty much fixed by Steam runtimes.

It's fine that some people care about it and some solutions are really clever, but it just doesn't seem to be an actual issue you stumble on in practice much.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-26 10:31:46+00:00
> Perhaps they don’t feel they would fare[sic] well if they tried to engage in discussion?

Most of the time when I do see blatant “rightposting” it’s so misinformed and provocative to be indistinguishable from trolling / baiting, so I can’t even tell if it’s downvotes for disagree vs downvotes for suspected trolling.

The less blatant “rightposting” flies quite a bit under the radar, pretty much by definition, which is what the grandparent comment was probably referring to when they said they interpreted HN as leaning right. More like laissez-faire economics.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-26 10:32:23+00:00
Interesting, but also absurd.

The Scottish independence movement is a very strong, grass roots campaign that has been building for many decades ( pre-web never mind pre-twitter ), with the Scottish ambivalence to the Union having deep cultural roots.

What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.

Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.