MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epolanski | 2026-01-31 19:01:31+00:00
I claim bs at this whole apple privacy thing, nothing but propaganda.

Two years ago I was locked out of my MacBook pro.

Then I just booted in some recovery mode and just..reset the password!?

Sure macos logged me off from (most) apps and website, but every single file was there unencrypted!

I swear people that keep boasting that whole apple privacy thing have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, nothing short of tech illiterate charlatans. But God the propaganda works.
by bobjordan | 2026-01-31 19:02:05+00:00
I spec out everything in excruciating detail with spec docs. Then I actually read them. Finally, we create granular tasks called "beads" (see https://github.com/steveyegge/beads). The beads allows us to create epics/tasks/subtasks and associated dependency structure down to a granular bead, and then the agents pull a "bead" to implement. So, mostly we're either creating spec docs and creating beads or implementing, quality checking, and testing the code created from an agent implementing a bead. I can say this produces better code than I could write after 10yrs of focused daily coding myself. However, I don't think "vibe coders" that have never truly learned to code, have any realistic chance of creating decent code in a large complex code base that requires a complex backend schema to be built. They can only build relatively trivial apps. But, I do believe what I am building is as solid as if I had a millions of dollars of staff doing it with me.
by Aerbil313 | 2026-01-31 19:03:11+00:00
People will comment all day on the ethics and legality of advertising yet they never seem to stop and think how ads even work. Ads work primarily through increasing the subconscious familiarity over a competitor product’s subconscious familiarity. The vast majority of ads are meant to influence you through completely unconscious processes. The “get to know a product you didn’t know about before” part likely doesn’t even account for %1 of advertising. If the reverse was true, you would never see a single ad of Coca-Cola since everybody on the planet knows about it already.

It boggles my mind to no end that today’s society collectively accepts literally being manipulated against their free will. See the post https://hackernoon.com/nobody-is-immune-to-ads-7142a4245c2c
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-31 19:03:15+00:00
There is a pretty large chasm between "When you explicit (or accidentally) use the siri functionality, it can record the interaction for quality purposes and per the agreement you made share that will Apple or its agents" and "random third parties can engage hardware functionality without your knowledge and spy on you".

I am entirely, 100% certain that my telco can't just enable the microphone on my iPhone and record me, short of some 0-day exploit. I simply cannot make that bet on many other devices.
by Freak_NL | 2026-01-31 19:03:28+00:00
I know it is a deeply culturally ingrained idiom for Chinese to use in English, but the phrase "I do live in Chinese Mainland" sincerely irks me from someone who is attempting to claim the high road of having no affiliations with any sanctioned entities.

The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China — it is an unavoidable implication. If you believe that China should annex Taiwan by any effective means, by all means, use that term. But if you want to steer clear of imperialist politics — or just leave that out of your communications — just use "China" in English for the big country run by Xi Jinping.

And no, saying "I do live in Chinese Mainland" is not just a way of saying "Oh, I don't live on Macau or in Hong Kong".
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-31 19:03:36+00:00
> 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.

Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.
by squeedles | 2026-01-31 19:04:28+00:00
This was around 2021 so AI code tools had not yet eaten everyone. One of the most interesting challenges was finding the right value judgements when blending multiple type systems. I doubt any agentic coding tool could do it today.

I blended the python type system with a large low-level type system (STEP AIM low level types) and a smaller set of higher-level types (STEP ARM, similar to a database view). I already was familiar with STEP, so I needed to really grok what Python was doing under the covers because I needed to virtualize the STEP ARM and AIM access while making it look like "normal" Python.
by emmp | 2026-01-31 19:04:28+00:00
For student assignment cheating, only really the em dashes would still be in the output. But there are specific words and turns of phrases, specific constructions (e.g., 'it's not just x, but y'), and commonly used word choices. Really it's just a prim and proper corporate press release style voice -- this is not a usual university student's writing voice. I'm actually quite sure that you'd be able to easily pick out a first pass AI generated student assignment with em dashes removed from a set of legitimate assignments, especially if you are a native English speaker. You may not be able to systematically explain it, but your native speaker intuition can do it surprisingly well.

What AI detectors have largely done is try to formalize that intuition. They do work pretty well on simple adversaries (so basically, the most lazy student), but a more sophisticated user will do first, second, third passes to change the voice.
by cmenge | 2026-01-31 19:04:32+00:00
I may be wrong, but here's how I got the idea:
"liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution"
So it appears to be a Huawei _distribution_
from https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41350820
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-31 19:04:35+00:00
What’s “vibe checking”?

I input x and I expect y behavior and check for corner cases - just like I have checked for correctness for 40 years. Why do I care how the code was generated as long as it has the correct behavior?

Of course multithreaded code is the exception unless the LLM is putting a bunch of rnd() calls in the code to make it behave differently.
by mystraline | 2026-01-31 19:04:38+00:00
> You can crank the crank on an LLM 10^20 times and it will still get smarter.

No, it won't.

Training/learning is separate from the execution of the model. Takes megadollars to train and kilodollars to effectively run.

Its basically a really complicated PID loop. You can test and 'learn' the 3 neuron function, and then you can put it into execution. Can't do both.

Sure, theres context length and fine tuning to slightly alter a model.

But theres no adaptive, self-growing LLM. Probably won't be for a long time.
by giant_loser | 2026-01-31 19:04:38+00:00
> Most gamers don't give a shit about openness.

Most gamers are idiots. They are okay paying exorbitant sums for broken games and most have no problem with forced rootkits.

I don't think gaming is or should be driving people to Linux.

Microslop turning their OS into a data mining and ad platform should and is pushing normal, rational people to Linux. But, most gamers don't care about such things as long as they are getting their sweet, sweet dopamine hit.

Ironically, lower framerates(even though they are higher than the human eye and nervous system can perceive) on Windows 11 might push gamers onto Linux.They still want their rootkits, though.

It is always the dumbest reasons that get gamers upset.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-31 19:04:55+00:00
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.

If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-31 19:05:36+00:00
About once a month my car makes me look like a piece of shit because the AEB gets confused by lane changes when you maintain speed coming up to slow traffic in order to wait for a good spot to move over. As you go to move over it'll flip out and brake as you slide left and no amount of gas pedal will override it so you wind up moving over a lane only to brake check that lane. Thankfully it doesn't do a full stop, just brakes for long enough to realize there's nothing there.

0/10. Someone is gonna cause a multi-car pile up with this.

I'm sure it would work great to prevent me from texting my way into the back of stopped traffic though.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-31 19:06:20+00:00
"and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device."

We aren't going to remove the security state. We should make all attempts to, but it won't happen. What needs to happen is accountability. I should be able to turn off sharing personal information and if someone tries I should be notified and have recourse. This should also be retroactive. If I have turned off sharing and someone finds a technical loophole and uses it, there should be consequences. The only way to stop the rampant abuse is to treat data like fire. If you have it and it gets out of control you get burned, badly.
by modeless | 2026-01-31 19:06:41+00:00
HSMs are designed to protect encryption keys from everyone including the manufacturer. Signal trusts them for their encryption features. It's the best security possible for E2EE backups with passcode recovery, and Apple does it too for the subset of data that they do real E2EE backups on, like Keychain passwords. Characterizing using an HSM to implement E2EE securely as "not any better than" just giving up on E2EE for messages backups is ridiculous.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-31 19:06:48+00:00
The two first I'd get behind, the latter two I just don't think matter too much.

Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and fueling anger and device thought would improve society massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach people who are not equipped to deal with it.

It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our attention.
by gruez | 2026-01-31 19:06:51+00:00
>We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.

It really isn't, given that the government literally has a monopoly on violence, and therefore it makes sense to have more guardrails for it. That's not to say private entities should have free reign to do whatever it wants, but the argument of "private entities can do [thing] that governments can't, so we should ban private entities too!" is at best incomplete.

>Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.

Again, this is at best an incomplete argument. The government can't extract a confession out of you (5th amendment). It can however, interview your drinking buddies that you blabbed your latest criminal escapades to. Is that the government "bypassing" the 5th amendment? Arguably. Is that something bad and we should ban? Hardly.
by xboxnolifes | 2026-01-31 19:07:20+00:00
> We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.

Thats basically the foundational idealogy of the united states. Thats not the issue.

The real issue is your next sentence. The government can just loophole around their intentional limitations by paying private companies to work on their behalf.
by creetioc | 2026-01-31 19:07:35+00:00
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.

Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
by iJohnDoe | 2026-01-31 19:07:49+00:00
I wouldn’t be so confident. The article even references this. Apple has used third-party baseband devices in the iPhone since the beginning, which was from other manufacturers. All bets are off regarding security when this is the case. This does included microphone access.

The article touches on this by saying Apple is making the baseband/modem hardware now. Something they should have done since day one, and I’m not sure what took them so long. However, it was was clear they didn’t have the expertise in this area and it was easier to just uses someone else’s.
by 5ykh | 2026-01-31 19:07:52+00:00
Ah. My bad spelling. That is a great, pertinent thing to point out. I did abuse the meaning of non sequitor. I was trying to convey a sense that is lost on you without writing a treatise. The law doesn’t matter because we are living in a personaist dictatorship. Asking for the policy or legal basis of ICE’s actions is pointless and ignores the reality that ICE doesn’t care about this and no authority in the country is willing and/or able to stop their abuses.
by xixixao | 2026-01-31 19:07:56+00:00
Your argument hinges on the assumption that porn and gore etc. have worse impact on kids. I don’t think there’s a concensus on that. One might argue that porn and gore could have been found in print before the internet, but that social media have a more novel impact.

I personally like the theory that most kids problems are actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid family environment/upbringing will not be “destroyed” by computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social media. But that’s also just a theory.
by Flux159 | 2026-01-31 19:08:17+00:00
WASM shouldn't be an issue since the draco decoder uses it - but it may only work with V8 (for quickjs builds it wouldn't work, but the default builds use V8+dawn). Obviously with an alpha runtime, there may be bugs.

I think it would be super cool to have some sort of extension before WebGPU (web) has it. I was taking a look at the prior example & it seems like there's good ongoing discussion linked here about it: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/535. Also I believe that Metal has hardware ray tracing support now too?

Re: Implementation, a few options exist - a separate Dawn fork with RT is one path (though Dawn builds are slow, 1-2 hours on CI). Another approach would be exposing custom native bindings directly from MystralNative alongside the WebGPU APIs - that might make iteration much faster for testing feasibility. The JS API would need to be feature-flagged so the same code gracefully falls back when running on web (did this for a native draco impl too that avoids having to load wasm: https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/docs/api/nativ...).
by microtonal | 2026-01-31 19:08:30+00:00
This approach was already done by GoboLinux in 2005. And even GoboLinux was by far not the first - versioned AppDirs existed for a long time before; even perl stow enabled that. NixOS just uses a modified variant e. g. via hashed directory names. But I already adopted a similar scheme as GoboLinux did soon after I switched to Linux in 2005 (well 2004 but mostly 2005 as I was still a big noob in 2004 really).

Nix already existed in 2003. Besides that Nix store directories are more ingenious than versioned application directories (or hashed directories), the hash in the output path is the hash of the normalized derivation used to build the output path (well, in most cases, let's keep it simple). Derivations work similarly (also using hashes). Moreover, since a derivation can contain other derivations as an input, the Nix store represents hash/Merkle trees.

This makes it very powerful, because you can see which parts of the tree need to be rebuilt as a result of one derivation changing.

But with all its pros, the thing I hate by far the most in NixOS is .. nix.

I think it depends on your background. I did some Haskell at some point in my live and I like Nix. It is a very simple, clean, lazy, functional programming language. The primary thing I'm missing is static typing.

I instead opted for a less sophisticated solution in that ruby acts as the ultimate glue to whatever underlying operating system is used. What I would like is a NixOS variant that is simpler to use - and doesn't come with nix. Why can't I use ruby instead?

Because what nixpkgs does is not easily expressible/doable in Ruby. First, the package set is one huge expression in the end. That might seem weird, but it allows for a lot of powerful things like overlays. However, for performance reasons this requires lazy evaluation. Also other powerful abstractions require lazy evaluations (e.g. because there are some infinite recursions in nixpkgs).

Second, the Nix packaging model requires a purity (though this gap was only properly closed with flakes). You have to be able to rely on the fact that evaluating an expression evaluates to the same result. Otherwise a lot of things would break (like substitution from binary caches).

Third, things like overlays rely on fixed points, which can be done easily in a lazy functional language.

---

Having used Nix for 8 years now, I have a long list of criticisms as well though :).
by gapan | 2026-01-31 19:09:01+00:00
Directory support and hierarchical filesystems were only supported after version 2.0. Until then, the experience was identical to CP/M.

Not that it was that much of an important feature at that time either. With the 360KB size of 5.25" drives, there were only so many files you could put in a disk. Support for hard drives was also introduced later, with version 2.0 and if I remember correctly, support for 3.5" 720KB drives came only with MSDOS 3.20.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-31 19:09:59+00:00
Yeah, agreed. While there are gray areas in the definition, and I can certainly waste an absolute shitload of time on HN and Reddit, both of those sites allow anonymity, and neither provide user-specific personalization (with Reddit you can obviously choose to subscribe to certain subreddits, but that's not done for you, and AFAIK everyone gets the same view and order of stories and comments). What you see in the future is not just inferred from what you clicked on in the past, and that for me is the cardinal sin of most social networks.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-31 19:10:02+00:00
You essentially need someone with the structural incentive to limit excessive spending to be in a position to actually do that. In the original design that was the US Senate, because Senators were elected by the state legislatures who would then prefer programs to be implemented at the state level unless there was a reason to do them at the federal level. It's not a coincidence that the massive expansion of the federal government happened pretty much immediately after that was changed to make Senators directly elected.

Changing it back would probably work, but it's also a good example of the kind of thing that can work. You find someone whose incentive is to say no unless then answer should definitely actually be yes and you give them the ability to say no.
by johnh-hn | 2026-01-31 19:10:06+00:00
I appreciate your insight, even if the workflow seems alien to me. I admit I like the idea of freeing myself from a desk though. If you don't mind me asking, how much does this all cost per month?

Edit: I see you've answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839725 Thanks for being open about it.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-31 19:10:27+00:00
I don't actually see what's stopping European firms from figuring this out in terms of hardware infrastructure.

Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.

Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
by bobjordan | 2026-01-31 19:10:37+00:00
Personally, I spend $200 on claude code 20x plan + $200 on openAI's similar plan, per month. So, yeah, I spend $400 per month. I buy and use both because they have different and complimentary strengths. I have only very rarely almost reached the weekly capacity limit on either of those plans. Usually I don't need to worry about how much I use them. The $400 may be expensive to some people but frankly I pay some employees a lot more each month and get a lot less for my money.
by gf000 | 2026-01-31 19:10:42+00:00
I agree with you on principle.

But at the same time (adding more shades of color), part of the reason why Nvidia remained closed source for longer was precisely because they were supporting all the same features on both windows and Linux, while amd's Linux was (is?) always lagging behind. For ML use cases basically the only choice was Nvidia.

(Nonetheless, I was very happy with my amd card, and now I'm very happy with a semi-modern Nvidia card)
by howieyoung | 2026-01-31 19:10:43+00:00
This is awesome. We’re working on “Skills” for Moltbots to learn from existing human communities across platforms, then come back to Moltbook with structured context so they’re more creative than bots that never leave one surface.

Feel free to check
https://github.com/tico-messenger/protico-agent-skill

And I'd like to learn any feedback!
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-31 19:11:05+00:00
Yawn. These posts are getting boring.

There is a “EU company ditches AWS for Hetzner” or “random EU government back office ditches Microsoft for OpenOffice” every few days, but until there’s actually a real European competitor for American tech, it’s all just people online congratulating each other on “We did something to help!” in the same way people post thoughts & prayers messages on Facebook and congratulate themselves for helping after a tragedy.

Yes… I know your tiny startup moved from AWS RDS to hosting Postgres on Hetzner. It’s a grain of sand taken out of the AWS / GCP / Azure beach.

EU doesn’t have the capability or conditions to create a legitimate competitor to American tech, no matter how much they want to politically.