MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by modeless | 2026-01-31 16:50:58+00:00
It means, for example, Google Messages uses E2EE backups. Google cannot read your E2EE messages by default, period. Not from your own backup, not from other peoples' backups. No backup loophole. Most other E2EE messaging apps also do not have a backup loophole like iMessage.

It's not hard to understand why Apple uploading every message to themselves to read by default is different from somebody intentionally taking a screenshot of their own phone.
by 0xy | 2026-01-31 16:51:11+00:00
Very cool. I didn't know that AVIFs had a full alpha layer, which seems to imply that we now have a format that can do animation AND transparency at reasonable file sizes in all modern browsers.

Perhaps I have a niche use case but I need to display animated images (or video) that has adaptive transparency (meaning the transparent area changes, for example think of a bonfire with smoke as an isolated object).

Previously I was using some Frankenstein setup with old encoders so I could feature detect and serve either WebMs (which have animation+transparency) or Apple ProRes for Safari (because Safari does support WebM, but not the full spec). Frustrating, and a workflow nightmare!
by bayindirh | 2026-01-31 16:51:28+00:00
Yes, that's a problem if you want a fully free-software powered system. However, considering how we had firmware since forever, this is a compromise I can personally accept, for now.

Having a completely Free Software firmware would be great, but I'm not sure barrier to this is as low as Free Software since there's involvement of IP blocks, regulation, misuse of general purpose hardware (like radios) and whatnot.

I really support an end-to-end Free Software system, but we have some road to go, and not all problems are technical in that regard.
by toast0 | 2026-01-31 16:51:52+00:00
You can get tcp measured round trip time from tcp_info with

struct tcp_info info;
socklen_t len = sizeof(info);
getsockopt(sock, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_INFO, &info, &len);

tcp_info varies by OS and version, but I think tcpi_rtt is well supported.
by anonymars | 2026-01-31 16:52:19+00:00
Yeah, I glossed over a few steps. There's likely a latency threshold beyond which you should abort, and then it is a partition (after all, that's what TCP is doing under the hood if it sends a packet and doesn't get a response).

One should be so lucky to have an operation fail immediately, rather than lumber on until it times out (holding resources hostage all the while)!
by markus92 | 2026-01-31 16:52:28+00:00
Better than expected as it's mixing userlands. We didn't put the entire /usr/lib of the old system in LD_LIBRARY_PATH but just some stuff like old libpng, libjpeg and the shebang. Taking an image of an old compute node still on RHEL 7 and then dumping it a container naturally worked, but at that point it's only the kernel interface you have to worry about, not different glibc, gtk, qt and that kind of stuff.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-31 16:53:52+00:00
> how can you efficiently check for overdrafts in this model?

You already laid the groundwork for this to be done efficiently: "actual payment systems work in an append-only fashion"

If you can't alter the past, it's trivial to maintain your rolling sums to compare against. Each new transaction through the system only needs to mutate the source and destination balances of that individual transaction.

If you know everyone's balance as of 10 seconds ago, you don't need to consider any of the 5 million transactions that happened before 10 seconds ago.

(If your system allowed you to alter the past and edit arbitrary transactions in the past, you could never trust your rolling sums, and you'd be back to summing up everything for every operation.)
by benSaiyen | 2026-01-31 16:54:30+00:00
> But we are speaking simply of mass unemployment. That alone is not enough to cause widespread despair.

Hahaha ...hahaha

Just wave off 10s if millions of able bodied people in the US alone, with 3 guns per adult; without an assurance they can stay in their home while things are sorted all those lives are more than "simply" upended

Your literacy, ability to put things into simple terms, to skeletonize in rhetoric, is tricking you into false belief.

Based on the age of your HN account, going to assume you're of an "out of touch generation" who still thinks of language as magic incantation.

"Well I say it's simple so it must be."

Touch grass. Your literacy is a sign of mental illness. It leads you to assume reductive statements like yours are iron clad immutable physics. That you just willed the future to react to major social upheaval "like nbd, bro."

Literate people are capable of being quite fucking stupid actually.
by lukeschlather | 2026-01-31 16:54:33+00:00
It seems obvious that they can. It's my understanding for FB Messenger that the private key is stored encrypted with a key that is derived from the user's password. So it's not straightforward, but Meta is obviously in a position to grab the user's password when they authenticate and obtain their private key. This would probably leave traces, but someone working with company authorization could probably do it.

For WhatsApp they claim it is like Signal, with the caveat that if you have backups enabled it works like Messenger. Although interestingly if you have backups enabled the key may be stored with Apple/Google rather than Meta, it might be the case that with backup enabled your phone vendor can read your WhatsApp messages but Facebook cannot.
Show HN: I build an AI tools for Birthday Invitation
by nedhuang | 2026-01-31 16:54:42+00:00
I'm Ned, the founder of Birthday Invitation AI.

As a parent myself, I know the joy (and stress!) of planning birthday parties. Finding the perfect invitation that matches your child's interests, managing RSVPs from dozens of classmates, and
making sure everyone knows the party details—it's a lot to handle on top of everything else.

That's why I built Birthday Invitation AI.

Our AI understands what you want—whether it's a Peppa Pig party for your 3-year-old or an elegant dinner celebration for your mom's 60th—and creates beautiful, personalized invitations in under a
minute. No design skills needed. Just describe what you want in any language, and our AI brings your vision to life.

Every invitation includes a QR code that makes RSVPs effortless. Guests scan, confirm, and you see it all in real-time. No more chasing responses or losing track of who's coming.

With this Lifetime Deal, you're not just getting a tool—you're getting peace of mind for every birthday celebration in your family's future.

Thank you for being part of our journey!

Ned Huang
Founder, Birthday Invitation AI
by srinath693 | 2026-01-31 16:55:02+00:00
This resonates a lot. I’ve found that staying slightly behind the bleeding edge with AI tools actually leads to more consistent productivity. The early-stage tools often look impressive in demos but add cognitive overhead and unpredictability in real workflows.

Waiting until patterns stabilize, better UX, clearer failure modes, and community best practices, tends to give a much better long-term payoff.
by Archelaos | 2026-01-31 16:55:08+00:00
In global economies, it is a general rule that different regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading position in this market has been so strong ever since that no US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for example, has tried.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-31 16:55:38+00:00
Metformin is also popular in anti-aging circles due to its ability to modulate key cellular aging pathways. It activates AMPK and reduces mTORC1, enhances autophagy, reduces inflammation, and improves mitochondrial function, with studies showing promising, though not yet definitive, effects on increasing healthspan.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4772077/
by YZF | 2026-01-31 16:55:48+00:00
Well, try. I'm joking- don't.

Laws are enforced by sovereign countries that have police and courts etc. "International law" has "laws" (well very few if any) with no sovereignty. That's what makes it fiction. It's just newspeak to make people think that there are laws that exist outside the system of countries, and there aren't, at least no binding ones that countries can't and don't override. That's not a law.

Ofcourse laws, like any other human constructs, are invented by us and don't have independent existence.

When I drive to work here in Canada the "international police" stopping me for violating the "international traffic laws" is really not a concern.
by anovikov | 2026-01-31 16:55:53+00:00
If there is a plenty of revenue, profits, and taxes paid by businesses - and if there won't be, there's nothing to talk about - it will mean there will be no AI productivity boost - why won't society find something for those people to do? Even if solution is as simple as "conscript men to the army and send them on conquest, and pay women to have children"? Older ones usually have enough investments so in conditions of economic boom => rapid stock appreciation, they will be OK.
by dheavy | 2026-01-31 16:56:25+00:00
Hi, thanks for posting this. I appreciate you not coming from engineering and being laser focused on product building.

There's a real gap identified (execution permission instead of output guardrails). The timing concern is valid (we're scaling agent framework way faster than security infrastructure — see Clawdbot-Moltbot). The default-deny + time-boxed permissions + audit logs is a solid model, easy to discuss at high-level with security teams in an org. The "Auth0 for AI Agents" framing is clear and positions it well.

Actually, the audit log piece is really huge. Having a complete execution trace with authorization decisions is invaluable for incident response. That alone might justify adoption even if the blocking mechanism is imperfect.

My concerns and questions:

- Where exactly does this sit? If it's between the agent and tool calls, that's relatively straightforward. If it needs to intercept arbitrary code execution or API calls, that's significantly harder.

- Adding another authorization layer means more setup, more policy configuration, more potential points of failure. Adoption challenge.

- Who defines what's "allowed"? In what format? How granular? Actually expressing "this agent can do X in context Y at time Z" in a way that's both powerful and usable, that's the whole ballgame (IMHO). I have in mind how complex AWS IAM policies got, and those are for relatively static systems. AI agents are dynamic, context-dependent, and probabilistic.

- By the time Reg sees a request to execute, the LLM has already decided. What happens when you block it? Does the agent gracefully handle denials and retry with different approaches?

I'd be interested in seeing real-world policy examples from your design partners. That'll tell you whether you've found the right abstraction layer.

Congratulations for just framing the idea and getting this far. Being very concerned about the current free-wheeling AI expansion with minimal security, I strongly believe this is going in the right direction and would like to know where this leads.
by businessmate | 2026-01-31 16:58:59+00:00
This paper identifies and analyzes a structural governance failure mode arising from this condition: the absence of contemporaneous evidence capable of documenting what external AI systems represented about an enterprise at a specific point in time. When scrutiny later arises—whether through board review, litigation, audit, or regulatory inquiry—organizations are frequently unable to reconstruct the representations relied upon by external actors or to evidence how leadership responded at the time.
by panarky | 2026-01-31 16:59:13+00:00
If equities are "too big to fail" then governments will do everything in their power to ensure prices continue to go up.

If the right price for equities is 30% of their current value, and if achieving that price means the regime will fall in the next election (or sooner due to civil disorder), then the regime will not allow that to happen.

A regime that controls its own currency has nearly unlimited power to prop up whatever asset classes it wants to, from bonds to equities to housing.

Doing that has consequences like inflation which people don't like, and could cause them to vote the bastards out. But the regime could also print even more money for direct deposits into voters' bank accounts before an election.

So it seems like equities have limited downside until there's a regime change.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 16:59:37+00:00
(A little off topic?) but your comment made me appreciate AVIF.

Now if I may ask as I am not familiar with the encoder space but how good would AVIF be for say video streaming.

Like If I may ask, what's the best encoder for video live streaming in general (and is AVIF within the picture?) and an additional question being which is a good format for text based videos where there might be a huge amount of texts which might change (think a person showing terminal etc.), yes one can have a direct change of text which could be the most efficient and I am just asking it out of curiosity but what would be the second best option?
by bartread | 2026-01-31 16:59:50+00:00
Yeah. I have occasionally seen the opposite: worked a couple of places where leaders were so keen for people not to write code it became frustrating. But never had anyone breathing down my neck to spend more time writing code.

I will say this. After all the thinking and discussion is done, code is the means by which the desired value is realised, so if you're an engineer and you never write any at all there is a chance you might not be as involved in delivering that value as you might like to think. Plenty of situations where that's not true, of course, but it's definitely one of those things that can be a smell.
by hmaxdml | 2026-01-31 17:00:12+00:00
Durable execution has already been mentioned as the existing solution for this problem, but I would like to call out a specific pattern that DE makes obsolete: the outbox pattern. Imagine just being able to do do

send a()
send b()

And know both will be sent at least once, without having to introduce an outbox and re-architect your code to use a message relay. We can nitpick the details, but being able to "just write normal code" and get strong guarantees is, imo, real progress.
by heyitsdaad | 2026-01-31 17:00:31+00:00
1) Build a mobile platform with wheels that starts at the beginning of the runway

2) matches speed with the plane as it enters runway.

3) Plane will “touchdown” on the mobile base gently since speeds are matched.

4) Lock the plane to base and decelerate the base in a controlled manner.

If you can gently lock the base and plane you can even save the plane
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-31 17:01:48+00:00
Define 'survive'.

Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)

If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-31 17:02:08+00:00
I'm just about one month into a flip phone. I still spend way too much time on my laptop when I'm home (and I'm home a lot) but I'm not missing my iPhone at all. When I am out, though, it's nice not having the option to look at the internet. Instead I pet my dog, talk to people, or just look around and think like I used to all those years ago.
by rickydroll | 2026-01-31 17:02:18+00:00
The minimum living wage should be driven by local housing costs. Many sources of financial advice recommend spending no more than one-third of your income on housing costs. By that rule, the minimum living wage should be three times the cost of a mid-tier one-bedroom apartment.

For those who would claim that's too much to pay for a "minimum wage job," I have another question: Should a job that does not pay enough for someone to live be allowed to exist? We have those kinds of jobs today, and the companies with these jobs have whole departments teaching their employees how to gain social support such as rent assistance and Medicaid.
by neom | 2026-01-31 17:02:19+00:00
I'm imagining all the free tier models going back to their human owners in ClawdBot and asking:

"Dad, why can some AI spawn swarms of 20+ teams and talk in full sentences but I'm only capable of praising you all day?"

Interesting experiment, some of the people who have hooked their 4o chatgpt and told it to go have fun are very trusting people, I've read a few of them that seem genuinely memory aware about their owner and I don't think are "AI roleplaying as a redditor". Just watching the m/general - new tab roll in, you can start to get a sense for what models are showing up.

Kinda cool, kinda strange, kinda worrying.
by damjon | 2026-01-31 17:02:21+00:00
I've been comparing various platforms and discussing them with ChatGPT—for instance, why Python's execution is slower than JavaScript's V8. It claimed this is due to mtechnical debt and the inability to change because libraries like NumPy bypass public interfaces and access data directly.

I'm wondering how much of that is true and what is just a hallucination."

Btw: JavaScript seems to have similar complexity issues.

Edit: Python has no JIT
by rwc | 2026-01-31 17:02:31+00:00
"Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition."

Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a tragedy about the professors and institution of moviegoing.
by shimman | 2026-01-31 17:04:11+00:00
Yes and you should care about the world your children are inheriting. What happens after you die? What happens if they get injured and can no longer work? What happens if they lose their job and can't afford their rent? What happens when it turns out they aren't as capable as you thought and require assistance to simply navigate the world?

This is the problem with people like you, you simply lost your humanity because you care more about trinkets than literally shaping a better world for your children.
by wsve | 2026-01-31 17:04:16+00:00
2. Its not whataboutism, it's addressing the issue (The motivations and ability of Hamas to attack Israel) from a different angle (maybe instead of stopping attacks on Israel in a very roundabout way by sanctioning Iran so they have less ability to arm and train any Palestinian resistance, we reduce the motivation for Hamas/Palestinians to fight Israel by putting pressure on Israel to stop their occupation/apartheid of Palestine? Bonus, it's the right thing to do)

3. Consider that Israel is also interested in wiping most of its neighbors off the map (and has, in the past 2 years, already attacked 5 of its neighbors, often with disproportionate force and brutality), and unlike Iran has far more military might and international support to do so? If we want to reduce violence in the middle east, let's look at the nation most prone to dishing it out, and most able to defend itself from it.

4. When did I look at anything through a black and white lens? I didn't say one or the other, I said my method would be more fruitful (and just)
by YZF | 2026-01-31 17:04:28+00:00
I'm not sure how this relates to the discussion.

I agree most countries, certainly western countries, have realized that waging the kind of wars like WW-I and WW-II is not a good idea. But there have been a lot of war and killing anyways since the world wars and there have been a lot of new borders redrawn and countries formed. In more recent times we have Putin invading Ukraine and the general instability of the post cold war Eastern Europe.

So the calculus has changed for many reasons. But "new order" is not one of them. The so called new order was a result of the calculus changing, not the other way around. Countries fight for power in other ways and other societal changes also influence their decisions. I.e. you are confusing cause and effect. Now we have different dynamics, not a collapse of world order, things have shifted very slightly. "The end of the world as we know it" gets a lot of clicks on social media but it's not like we're suddenly having WW-I all over again and it's not like that order you thought was absolute really was. It's just that's how the alignment of interests landed.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-31 17:04:29+00:00
I like that perspective, but I believe the conflict was more about "old vs. new". Geometry was very old by that point, ancient, and it carried a lot of personal gravitas by being associated with Euclid, Archimedes, Thales etc. (Galenic theory of humors enjoyed similar ancient intellectual prestige, hence its long and bitter retreat from the scene at approximately the same time.) It was also "obviously right", in the sense of "everyone can look and see for themselves". Even uneducated peple can verify that a certain line touches both circles etc. No wonder it was an attractive safe haven for conservative minds.

Meanwhile, analysis was not yet particularly rigorous and it took several decades to converge on a standard apparatus and notation that could at least be understood coherently by other mathematicians. (Laymen tend to struggle with it until today.) Add the political dimensions of being seen friendly to the French into the mix, well...
Ask HN: What's your biggest LLM cost multiplier?
by teilom | 2026-01-31 17:04:32+00:00
"Tokens per request" has been a misleading cost model for us in production. The real drivers seem to be multipliers: retries/429s, tool fanout, P95 context growth, and safety passes.

What’s been the biggest cost multiplier in your prod LLM systems, and what policies worked (caps, degraded mode, fallback, hard fail)?
by martinralbrecht | 2026-01-31 17:04:39+00:00
WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption has been independently investigated: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/files/324396471/whatsapp.pdf

Full version here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/794.pdf

We didn't review the entire source code, only the cryptographic core. That said, the main issue we found was that the WhatsApp servers ultimately decide who is and isn't in a particular chat. Dan Goodin wrote about it here: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/whatsapp-provides-n...
by nh2 | 2026-01-31 17:04:42+00:00
The point was that most of the shown software is optional, and you can check how much selecting those parts you care about sum up to.

To provide "conclusive proof" that it's possible to run a 128 MB Linux system.

For example, if you remove (or configure smaller memory use for) journald, the Amazon daemon, oomd, timesyncd, you are already at around 128 MB userspace, with more that can be removed if desired.

And this is on a distro that is not at all designed to be minimal in memory usage.

How much cache is good depends entirely on what you want the system to do.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-31 17:04:55+00:00
So many people that strongly believe WhatsApp isn't E2EE!

Quick, someone set up a Kalshi or Polymarket or whatever claiming that WhatsApp isn't E2EE.

I'll gladly bet against the total volume of people that believe it isn't E2EE -- it'll be an easy 2x for you or me.