MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xyst | 2026-01-31 19:47:32+00:00
I am not arguing for AWS.

It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.

Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.

Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?

Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.

And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.

But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.

Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.

It’s a huge joke.
by microtonal | 2026-01-31 19:47:54+00:00
This shadow device would have it's own keys to read messages sent to your iCloud account. To my knowledge, there's nothing in the security model to prevent this.

Matthew Green has some great posts about iMessage security. This one describes the key lookup issue:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/09/09/lets-tal...

Looking at the linked Apple Platform Security, it seems like the Apple Identity Service is still used as a public key directory.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-31 19:48:07+00:00
Not really.

C took off because it was free, shipped alongside with an operating system that initially was available for a symbolic price, as AT&T was forbidden to take advantage of UNIX.

Had UNIX been a commercial operating system, with additional licenses for the C compiler, like every other operating systems outside Bell Labs, we would not be even talking about C in 2026.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-31 19:48:09+00:00
I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.

I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.

Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-31 19:48:34+00:00
That article doesn’t contradict the point. The relevant laws hinge on explicit sexual content, nudity, or sexual acts, plus specific elements like intent or reckless facilitation. A non-explicit "put them in a bikini" image does not meet that threshold on its own. If prosecutors continue to argue otherwise, that theory will have to survive First Amendment scrutiny. I wish them the best of luck in that endeavor and look forward to its resolution.

>> The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.

> I don't know why I am, but I'm surprised people are going to bat for this. Where is your line, exactly? Is it legality? Is it further along?

If something is illegal, that’s a clear boundary and the appropriate place for enforcement. If it’s legal, the burden is on anyone arguing for restriction to explain why speech controls are justified despite that -- what concrete harm exists, why existing law is insufficient, and why the remedy won’t create more error or suppression than it prevents.

Absent that showing, "this feels bad" or "this is alarming" isn’t a standard.
Show HN: Timestampconverter.net – Auto-detecting timestamp converter
by ravikmd | 2026-01-31 19:49:24+00:00
I got tired of timestamp converters that make you click through dropdowns to select formats or are buried in ads, so I built one that auto-detects the input and shows all formats at once.

Just paste any timestamp: Unix (seconds/ms), ISO 8601, RFC 2822, whatever, and it instantly converts to 7 common formats with one-click copy. No dropdowns, no ads, no tracking.

Features:

Auto-detection of input format
400+ timezone support with search
Date math (add/subtract time units)
Duration calculator between two timestamps
Bulk conversion (paste multiple, convert all)
URL parameters for sharing (?ts=1706745600)
Dark mode default

Tech: Pure vanilla JS + day.js (~50KB total), hosted on Cloudflare Pages for free.

I use it daily when debugging API logs or working with different timezone databases. Built it over a weekend to scratch my own itch.

Live: https://timestampconverter.net
by foooorsyth | 2026-01-31 19:49:29+00:00
The reality that most encryption enthusiasts need to accept is that true E2EE where keys don’t leave on-device HSMs leads to terrible UX — your messages are bound to individual devices. You’re forced to do local backups. If you lose your phone, your important messages are gone. Lay users don’t like this and don’t want this, generally.

Everything regarding encrypted messaging is downstream of the reality that it’s better for UX for the app developer to own the keys. Once developers have the keys, they’re going to be compelled by governments to provide them when warrants are issued. Force and violence, not mathematical proofs, are the ultimate authority.

It’s fun to get into the “conspiratorial” discussions, like where the P-256 curve constants came from or whether the HSMs have backdoors. Ultimately, none of that stuff matters. Users don’t want their messages to go poof when their phone breaks, and governments will compel you to change whatever bulletproof architecture you have to better serve their warrants.
by griffzhowl | 2026-01-31 19:49:40+00:00
Yeah, soon after I posted this it became clear it's nonsense, a few people in the thread have referred to studies that trees underneath the landslide have been carbon dated to 9400BP, while the book this article's based on claims 5500BP for an "impact"

I mainly posted this because I was beguiled by the images of the disk. I hadn't seen it before, so even these shoddy images were impressive, with the circular form, radially arranged characters and lines looking both ancient and technical. Would you recommend a source for some proper information on it? I'm curious about what it says. Googling I keep coming up with rehashings of this meteor story from websites with "Atlantis" in their names and suchlike.
by aaomidi | 2026-01-31 19:49:58+00:00
Good video. Ending wasn’t too annoying but I wish there was an acknowledgement of the drop off of the youth vote in 2024.

Israel and Gaza and the genocide taking place there will be an active point of discussion in the upcoming midterms. If the democratic candidates don’t distance themselves from the leadership of the party we’re going to see another major win for republicans.

The outcome of the recent smaller special elections is not really indicative of what’s going to happen on the national scale, since smaller special elections are not having the media attention with tough questions asked from them.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-31 19:50:20+00:00
This country isn't one that respects mandates over the laws, and even within the laws there are a lot of mechanisms that are meant to force the building of consensus between both parties (or rather, across congress as a whole, since they didn't assume a two party system). These have fallen apart to a significant degree with the rise of unitary executive power over the past half century, but that obviously was outside of the framers' intent.

What people call a mandate has been when a position actually has been popular enough that it could be acted on quickly without opposition. The very fact that there is so much opposition to this, that the polling is so bad, that the protests are so widespread, that the negative feedback is so frequent even within the Republican party quite explicitly shows that there is no mandate here.

But again:
If Trump's victory was enough to secure a mandate, why didn't a similar EV victory and significantly larger popular vote victory secure one for Biden?
Why would a mandate based on deporting violent criminals apply to people without convictions? To people showing up at their court cases as they go through a legal process where they did follow all the rules?
by hypeatei | 2026-01-31 19:50:37+00:00
> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate

I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.

Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-31 19:51:50+00:00
> It's not the law.

Indeed. But some common fucking sense would have prevented everyone in the Epstein Files to be named in these. Like, it's bad enough if you notice that someone is hooking up with questionably legal women or girls and don't say anything... but it's even worse to actively participate.

"I thought they were 18" is not a good defense and people have gone to jail despite claiming that.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-31 19:51:54+00:00
I don't believe there is a way to intentionally break this system, nor to detect with 100% certainty that it's happening.

You'd need to run an open source baseband modem with settings and logs in all the right places. I don't think those exist.

Someone might be able to exploit the Linux kernel running on Qualcomm modems and build a tool for rooted Android phones after reverse engineering the baseband, but I imagine a lot of copyright lawyers and probably law enforcement people will send you very scary letters if you document remote location tracking features like these.

Also, if you have any 4G or 5G modem, your carrier already has a pretty good idea where you are. They probably log your location too. The advanced precision and timing information necessary for high speed cellular broadband is enough to get a decent location log. That also includes other connected devices such as cars, of course.
by alkonaut | 2026-01-31 19:52:15+00:00
Are you saying it would be impossible to have a service where the site (social media, say) would issue some sort of random token and ask me to sign it using a centralized ID service. Then I log in to the centralized id service and use it to sign the random token and bring it back to the service.

The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm proving my age for. The social media or other site see that I have signed their token so would have the appropriate age, but not who I am.

What's impossible about this?
Show HN: Pack-repo-4ai – CLI to pack Git repos for LLM context (XML-optimized)
by allenwowo2015 | 2026-01-31 19:52:40+00:00
OP here.

I built this yesterday because I kept hitting the "context wall" when trying to feed my whole src folder into DeepSeek R1 for refactoring.

Most copy-paste tools I found were either too heavy or didn't handle node_modules correctly (I once accidentally pasted a 5mb lockfile into Claude and burned my limit instantly).

This CLI (pack-repo-4ai) is pretty simple:

Scans your repo (ignoring junk like __pycache__, .venv, and binaries).

Wraps each file in <file path="..."> XML tags. I've found Reasoning Models follow directory structure much better with XML boundaries than standard markdown.

Dumps it to your clipboard.

It's a simple Python script, but it saves me about 10 minutes a day. Would love to know if the XML format helps your R1 outputs as much as it helped mine.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-31 19:52:46+00:00
They don't ask you to "acknowledge that your website is not related to cats at all", they're asking you to confirm that the website "serve(s) the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet" by entering what the intended use is. Signed, owner of emsh.cat.

One could say by having the websites become popular and viral, and offering versions of the their websites in Catalan, they are spreading Catalan culture to more parts of the internet. We're having a discussiong about it right now, others are reading, pretty big impact from just the TLD choice :)
by Dzugaru | 2026-01-31 19:53:07+00:00
But how is that less work and allows you to do that in Disneyland with your kids? For me, personally, there is little difference between "speccing out everything in excruciating detail in spec docs" and "writing actual implementation in high-level code". Speccing in detail requires deep thought, whiteboard, experimentation etc. All of this cannot be done in Disneyland, and no AI can do this at good level (that's why you "spec out everything in detail", create "beads" and so on?)
by bobjordan | 2026-01-31 19:53:07+00:00
They make it easy to spin up parallel agents. Managing them efficiently through a shared tmux instance isn't banned anywhere in the TOS, AFAIK. I'd worry more about it if I had to use multiple accounts or something using round-the-clock "automated" work flow. I'm using one account. Hell, the workflow I described, I am even actively logged in to my dev workstation with tmux and able to see and interact with each instance and "micro-manage" them myself, individually. The main benefit of this workflow is that I also have a single shared LLM instance that also has access to all the instances, together with me. I have plenty of other things to worry about besides a banned account from an efficient workflow I've set up.
by idle_zealot | 2026-01-31 19:53:21+00:00
This is the obvious solution, but implementing it would be a herculean effort. Not because it's technically difficult, of course.

Consider the incentives of all involved powerful groups.

You have social media giants who want to addict and advertise to users. The hate your solution, obviously. With the ID checks they lose out on their younger users, but they also get cover for even more aggressive behavior as nobody can credibly yell "think of the children!" at them.

Then you have government officials who are nervous about their lack of effective control over modern media. Your solution offers them nothing and loses them points with those powerful business leaders. It opens them up to attack from the right for being "too hard on business and stifling innovation." The ID checks, on the other hand, give them a mechanism and lever to crack down on any sentiment in the public that runs counter to their or their friends' interests. It even polls pretty well with an increasingly large number of paranoid and distrusting voters.

There's no contest at all between the routes before us. Only a huge political upheaval could divert the world from this path. The indicator to look for in a representative is a willingness to champion policy that hurts entrenched political and economic power while providing straightforward utility to average citizens.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-31 19:53:40+00:00
LLMs work best when the user has considerable domain knowledge of their own that they can use to guide the LLM. I don't think it's impossible to develop that experience if you've only used LLMs, but it requires a very unusual level of personal discipline. I wouldn't bet on a random new grad having that. Whereas it's pretty easy to teach people to use LLMs.
by mindslight | 2026-01-31 19:53:47+00:00
Seconded. I've used those exact cartridges. Not for as long of shifts as you, but I'd say the face mask fit is much more important for that.

My DIY-perspective tip is that when you're getting to know the respirator, you can take the filter cartridges off and put your hands over the input ports to feel what fully restricted breathing feels like, so that it's a known sensation if it ends up happening. Likewise you can cover the output port and breathe out to do a kind of rough fit test.
Show HN: Magpie – my self-hosted replacement for Google/Yahoo email aggregation
by bigtech | 2026-01-31 19:53:50+00:00
I built Magpie, a self-hosted email aggregator that pulls multiple IMAP/SMTP accounts into a single inbox.

I started it because Google is dropping support for pulling emails from my Yahoo accounts (Gmailify), and I wanted a private, self-hosted solution.

Key points:
* Unified inbox with search and threading
* Lightweight backend + modern web UI
* Easy to deploy (Docker or manual)
* Privacy-first, fully open source

This is the baseline release and it’s meant to be simple, functional, and easy to extend. I’d love feedback, bug reports, and contributions from anyone interested in email tooling or self-hosted software.

https://github.com/FynleyMsg/Magpie
by SivaKernx | 2026-01-31 19:54:17+00:00
Show HN: Kernx – A deterministic Java 25 runtime (66k req/s, <1ms latency)

Hello HN,

I’m Siva. I spent the last few months building Kernx, a high-performance Java runtime designed for deterministic AI agent workloads.

The Problem:
Most "Agent Frameworks" are just Python wrappers around API calls. They suffer from unpredictable latency (GC pauses), context switching overhead, and "queue bloat."

The Solution:
Kernx is a specialized kernel built on Java 25 (Preview) that treats compute as a deterministic pipeline.
- Architecture: Single-process, multi-tenant.
- Concurrency: 100% Virtual Threads (Project Loom). No reactive callbacks.
- Memory: Foreign Function & Memory API (Panama) to bypass the Java Heap for data buffers. Zero GC pressure on the hot path.

The Results:
On a standard local machine (MacBook Air M1), it sustains ~66,000 requests/second with sub-1ms p99 latency. It doesn't orchestrate containers; it just executes logic.

It is currently v1.0. I am looking for feedback on the architecture and the decision to use Scoped Values for memory safety.

Repo: https://github.com/Kernx-io/kernx
Docs: https://kernx.io

Roast my code.
by SleepyMyroslav | 2026-01-31 19:54:43+00:00
(Not a GP) I think you can see how poorly the string abstraction argument looks in context of a team-based project. Instead of dismissing it completely I would like to provide an example of a context where C is perfectly fine now.

Consider data compression library like Oodle. Even with closed source and use of dangerous things like multiple threads it is perfectly reasonable deal if game project's budget has money to be spent on performance.

The thing is if game project have money it is not likely to be interested in written in C game engines or core middleware libraries (like physics, sound or occlusion culling). Because after buying a license your team is still expected to work in that code even if official support is very active.

Disclaimer, I work in gamedev and never needed to touch C code.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-31 19:54:53+00:00
> Ones which you pay for and which are running legitimately, with the knowledge (and compensation) of those who run them.

The problem is, it is by default unethical to have residential users be exit nodes for VPNs - unless these users are lawyers or technical experts.

No matter what you do as a "residential proxy" company - you cannot prevent your service being used by CSAM peddlers, and thus you cannot prevent that your exit nodes aren't the ones whose IP addresses show up when the FBI comes knocking.
by solatic | 2026-01-31 19:54:54+00:00
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners

Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).

If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
by rendall | 2026-01-31 19:55:07+00:00
The impression that one might get from this article is that the ban is essentially a done deal, but it’s not. What exists right now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and agencies, but no enacted legislation. There’s still a big gap between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".

The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20204177
by SquareWheel | 2026-01-31 19:55:08+00:00
Just in case you missed it, your quote was referring to encoding requirements. Decoding (eg. Netflix users) will have a different set of requirements. The situation will also improve over time as dedicated hardware encoders and decoders become available.

For the moment, I don't really mind if it requires more GPU power to encode media, since it only needs to happen once. I expect it will still be possible on a weaker card, but it would just take longer.
by Turfie | 2026-01-31 19:55:22+00:00
> There's only so much information in the world and we've largely downloaded it all, so it can't get better there.

What about all the input data into LLMs and the conversations we're having?
That must be able to produce a better next gen model, no?

> it's ridiculously easy for anyone to fine-tune training, we don't need frontier companies for that.

Not for me. It'll take me days, and then I'm pretty sure it won't be better than Gemini 3 pro for my coding needs, especially in reasoning.

> For doing math you'll use one model, for intelligence you'll use a different model, for coding a different model, for health a different model, etc, and the reason is simple: it's faster, lower memory, and more accurate.

Why wouldn't e.g. Gemini just add a triage step?
And are you sure it's that much easier to get a better model for math than the big ones?

I think you underestimate the friction this causes regular users by handpicking and/or training specific models, whilst the big vendors are good enough for their needs.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-31 19:56:03+00:00
While the vertical integration is definitely the best way to get it done, it's not strictly required as long as there is good enough documentation for a platform. Linux originally supported Intel without any Intel engineers even knowing it existed.

Also consider Apple's chips, which have gotten Linux support without Apple ever submitting a single line of code.

While Qualcomm's behaviour is definitely a massive bummer (not to mention Qualcomm's competitors), it doesn't stop manufacturers from supporting their devices. It merely stops maintaining support from being cheap and easy.
by ahmedtd | 2026-01-31 19:56:55+00:00
Can you link your PRs here?

Kubernetes is such a huge project that there are few reviewers who would feel comfortable signing off an an arbitrary PR in a part of the codebase they are not very familiar with.

It's more like Linux, where you need to find the working group (Kubernetes SIG) who would be a good sponsor for a patch, and they can then assign a good reviewer.

(This is true even if you work for Google or Red Hat)
by armadyl | 2026-01-31 19:57:54+00:00
I was just watching a video on this yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McB6-2r-ds

Apple’s implementation of MTE is relatively limited in scope compared to GrapheneOS (and even stock Android with advanced security enabled) as it’s hardware intensive and degrades performance. I imagine once things get fast enough we could see synchronous MTE enabled everywhere.

It is curious at the moment though that enabling something like Lockdown Mode doesn’t force MTE everywhere, which imo it should. I think the people who are willing to accept the compromises of enabling that would likely also be willing to tolerate the app crashes, worse performance etc that would come with globally enabled MTE.