MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nik282000 | 2026-01-26 13:42:04+00:00
Factory reset an old phone and leave it in airplane mode.

If it get "lost" or "stolen" you aren't out much, and it doesn't contain any personal information. If "law enforcement" gets their hands on it the only data it has is the IMEI and maybe wireless MACs, enough to ID you based on previous use but they would have to contact telecos and request the info. Current "law enforcement" seems too chaotic to spend time tracing the owner of an empty phone.
by mystraline | 2026-01-26 13:42:08+00:00
"Subtle energy" and "vibrational frequency" are dead giveaways of metaphysics instead of science.

I'm not adverse to that, as I do believe that much of metaphysics does have real physical backing that we haven't uncovered yet.

But I also asked a strong scientific question. First, with the human electric field, how far does it extend outside the body and at what strength? Secondly, can drugs or practices modify this, and how so?
by mothballed | 2026-01-26 13:42:17+00:00
You can buy black powder guns over the counter in france and easily make or import the black powder from elsewhere in the EU. A black powder revolver is damn good for self defense, just needs maintained more frequently so the powder doesn't go bad.

Also note of sale (underground, also trivially made on one's own) in france is also FGC-9 pistols (modern gun + ammo easily made in short time in france, all with unregulated components), and attackers in france have also used re-activated decommissioned rifles.

Your country is awash in guns for anyone who wants it.
by adolph | 2026-01-26 13:42:30+00:00
Vervaeke makes a claim of parasitism explicit in the Meaning Crisis series.

We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it
takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to
lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This
capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using,
complexify, to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities,
has a downside to it.

This is a complex, self-organising, adaptive system! If you try and intervene
here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted
intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you tried to destroy it.
Why? Because it's making use of the very machinery by which You adapt, and
make use of the things that are trying to destroy You!

https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-13-awakening-from-the-meanin...
by furyofantares | 2026-01-26 13:42:47+00:00
For small games I work on I make sure claude (well, codex cli) can produce screenshots of whatever screen it's working on and evaluate them. It has some instructions on using codex exec (claude -p) to use a clean instance for evaluation, so it can pass a screenshot and description of expectation and get a pass/fail and description of the failure. The main agent can also just view the image but for things with a clear pass/fail I prefer it invoke a clean context.
by shalmanese | 2026-01-26 13:42:56+00:00
Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.

Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-01-26 13:42:58+00:00
Photoshop (and, to the lesser extent, the rest of the CC suite) is a bloated abomination.

>5 web view processes, some "IPC broker", CCXProcess that launches a long-lived node instance, some system services. Most of it runs after you close the main application. Nothing of it all is really to any benefit of the user, some of the processes can (and commonly are) substituted with dummy binaries.

About ten to fifteen years ago I had hopes the development direction was aiming for true platform independence and we might get a Linux version. Since then it deteriorated into a telemetry-ridden dumpster fire of a graphics-processing OS with the same symptoms as their hosts (duplicated dialogues with different generation UIs for the same action, hello Windows!).

Makes sense achieving it work under Wine is a worthy goal, as long as it depends on implementing obscure parts of the API, and not just making hacks for the specific programs to work.

It's appalling to think Adobe CC is forcing so many people keep Windows installed, considering how hostile the software itself is. Hope it all implodes and the industry moves to something more sensible (no way).
by expedition32 | 2026-01-26 13:43:33+00:00
The difference is that people in my country get to vote. A lot.

In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).

If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament.
Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
by simion314 | 2026-01-26 13:43:40+00:00
>The Uk could force the OS to have that toggle instead of censoring the internet

I know, and my point is if Big Tech would have added that toggle (or add it now before even more countries or USA states make more laws with different requierments ), made it easy to setup when you turn on a device for the first time to give it to your child then you could tell the politicians that the solution exists already. Now using the think of the children some governments will implement more invasive laws.
by ktallett | 2026-01-26 13:44:00+00:00
I think vibe coding would greatly struggle with large open source projects unless your planning was exceptional and your comments on optimal coding style was exceptional, however...... For those small open source tools that many of us use daily and find invaluable, I actually think vibe coding is ideal for that. It can make a functional version quickly and you can iterate and improve it, and feel no loss for making it free to use.

I was very sceptical but I will admit I think vibe coding has a place in society, just what it is yet is still to be determined. It can't help most for sure but it can help some in some situations.
by zbentley | 2026-01-26 13:44:31+00:00
I've heard this many times, and while there might be data out there in support of it, I've never seen that, and my anecdotal experience is more complicated.

In the most security-forward roles I've worked in, the vast, vast majority of vulnerabilities identified in static binaries, Docker images, Flatpaks, Snaps, and VM appliance images fell into these categories:

1. The vendor of a given piece of software based their container image on an outdated version of e.g. Debian, and the vulnerabilities were coming from that, not the software I cared about. This seems like it supports your point, but consider: the overwhelming majority of these required a distro upgrade, rather than a point dependency upgrade of e.g. libcurl or whatnot, to patch the vulnerabilities. Countless times, I took a normal long-lived Debian test VM and tried to upgrade it to the patched version and then install whatever piece of software I was running in a docker image, and had the upgrade fail in some way (everything from the less-common "doesn't boot" to the very-common "software I wanted didn't have a distribution on its website for the very latest Debian yet, so I was back to hand-building it with all of the dependencies and accumulated cruft that entails").

2. Vulnerabilities that were unpatched or barely patched upstream (as in: a patch had merged but hadn't been baked into released artifacts yet--this applied equally to vulns in things I used directly, and vulns in their underlying OSes).

3. Massive quantities of vulnerabilities reported in "static" languages' standard libraries. Golang is particularly bad here, both because they habitually over-weight the severity of their CVEs and because most of the stdlib is packaged with each Golang binary (at least as far as SBOM scanners are concerned).

That puts me somewhat between a rock and a hard place. A dynamic-link-everything world with e.g. a "libgolang" versioned separately from apps would address the 3rd item in that list, but would make the 1st item worse. "Updates are far quicker and easier" is something of a fantasy in the realm of mainstream Linux distros (or copies of the userlands of those distros packaged into container images); it's certainly easier to mechanically perform an update of dependency components of a distro, but whether or not it actually works is another question.

And I'm not coming at this from a pro-container-all-the-things background. I was a Linux sysadmin long before all this stuff got popular, and it used to be a little easier to do patch cycles and point updates before container/immutable-image-of-userland systems established the convention of depending on extremely specific characteristics of a specific revision of a distro. But it was never truly easy, and isn't easy today.
by Ian_Kerins | 2026-01-26 13:44:45+00:00
One of the main ideas, we explored here is how scraping has shifted from being mainly a technical challenge to an economic one:

- Infrastructure and proxies have gotten cheaper, but anti-bot defenses have evolved fast.

- Because of that, the real cost of scraping is now the cost per successful result, and spikes of 5x–20x can happen when defenses tighten.

- The bottleneck today isn’t just “can you scrape it?”, it’s whether you can do it profitably and efficiently.

I’d love to hear how folks here are dealing with rising scraping costs or what strategies have worked when data value doesn’t obviously outweigh defense costs.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-26 13:44:49+00:00
>people don't really read the sources anymore and just copy-paste the citations.

That's reference-stealing, some other paper I read cited this so it should be OK, I'll steal their reference. I always make sure I read the cited paper before citing it myself, it's scary how often it says something rather different to what the citation implies. That's not necessarily bad research, more that the author of the citing paper was looking for effect A in the cited reference and I'm looking for effect B, so their reason for citing differs from mine, and it's a valid reference in their paper but wouldn't be in mine.
by k1m | 2026-01-26 13:46:46+00:00
Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to.

> You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures.

If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering. I'm not sure why you'd expect to see people out on the streets asking for more of that.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.

True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.

I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing."

https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
by encrogram | 2026-01-26 13:47:00+00:00
I built EncroGram because I'm tired of "encrypted" messengers that still store everything on corporate servers.

Key difference: Our servers literally cannot decrypt your messages. When governments demand access, we have nothing to give them.

Technical highlights:
- Messages deleted immediately after relay (no server storage)
- Perfect Forward Secrecy with automatic key rotation
- No phone numbers, email, or personal data required
- Emergency wipe code (0000) instantly destroys all device data
- Custom Erebus encryption with sealed sender architecture

Unlike Signal/WhatsApp that store encrypted messages, our relay servers are stateless. Messages exist only during transmission, then vanish forever.

Built this after seeing too many "secure" platforms cave to pressure. Sometimes the only way to protect user privacy is to make surveillance technically impossible.

Feedback welcome! Especially from crypto/security folks.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-26 13:47:20+00:00
> UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.

If you are going to post shit like that, at least get your fucking facts right.

Namely that you are three weeks out of date sushine.

The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
by fidansin | 2026-01-26 13:47:36+00:00
I'm not fully convinced scraping has actually gotten harder.. It feels more like the average approach has gotten softer.

Lately everything gets framed as rising costs or unstoppable anti-bot systems, but most sites didn't suddenly become impenetrable. What changed is how people react to friction.

We're in an AI-autopilot phase now. Hit a block and the instinct is to buy more credits, switch vendors,, or let an API abstract the problem away. Meanwhile, teams still doing basic engineering work around sessions, behavior, pacing, and retries are often scraping the same targets just fine.

Honest question: have scraping costs really exploded, or have engineering standards quietly dropped as abstraction layers piled up?
by v_CodeSentinal | 2026-01-26 13:48:55+00:00
The point about 'no such thing as a free lunch with processes' is something I wish more junior EMs understood.

I've seen so many teams treat process as a pure 'fix', ignoring that it's always a trade-off: you are explicitly trading velocity for consistency. Sometimes that trade is worth it (e.g., payments), but often for internal tools, you're just paying a tax for consistency you don't actually need.
by dewey | 2026-01-26 13:48:57+00:00
> What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!

I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)
by spockz | 2026-01-26 13:49:08+00:00
Since you are developing in this domain. Our challenge with both lambdas and cloud run type managed solutions is that they seem incompatible with our service mesh. Cloud run and lambdas can not be incorporated with gcp service mesh, but only if it is managed through gcp as well. Anything custom is out of the question. Since we require end to end mTLS in our setup we cannot use cloud run.

To me this shows that cloud run is more of an end product than a building block and it hinders the adoption as basically we need to replicate most of cloud run ourselves just to add that tiny bit of also running our Sidecar.

How do you see this going in your new solution?
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-26 13:49:18+00:00
I don't know sorry. For debugging GL I usually switch to Windows with RenderDoc (or some current NVIDIA tool - does Nsight still exist?).

RenderDoc on Linux appears to work fine for X11 apps via XWayland btw (just testing here via the sokol-samples with the sokol-gfx GL backend: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples, just another reason to not have a native Wayland backend but instead rely on the XWayland shim I guess...
by tosh | 2026-01-26 13:50:17+00:00
generative ai increases ambition, lowers barriers

more open source, better open source

perhaps also more forking (not only absolute but also relative)

contribution dynamics are also changing

I'm fairly optimistic that generative ai is good for open source and the commons

what I'm also seeing is open source projects that had not so great ergonomics or user interfaces in general are now getting better thanks to generative ai

this might be the most directly noticeable change for users of niche open source
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-26 13:50:20+00:00
male, lives in this region, has an income between X to X+40000, and has used the following terms in chat or email, regardless of context, in the last 6 months: touchdown, home run, punt, etc. etc.

the ad game is not about profiling you specifically, it's about how many people in a group are likely to click and convert to a sale; they're targeting 6 million people, not you specifically, and that's balanced by how much the people who want the ads are willing to pay.

palantir or chinese social credit, etc., is targeting you specifically, and they don't care about costs if it means they can control the system, forever.
by ericmay | 2026-01-26 13:50:21+00:00
> I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there

(Just a reminder that the above is what I responded to)

> But what can you do for iran?

You can encourage your governments to take action against Iran as well. Further sanctions, diplomatic pressure, providing support to the Iranian people, &c. In my case as an American I am encouraging my government to take the toughest action possible to stop Iran. Much of the blood of dead Palestinians can be placed at their feet too since they arm and support Hezbollah and Hamas who are doing what they can to keep killing people and keep the conflict active.

Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.

Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-26 13:50:57+00:00
This is true, to supply software you can build it once and replicate endlessly, to supply email you need to run servers. That's commoditised and the team just sees a slider controlling number of servers.

But to provide power or internet you need to dig up the roads and lay a wire to every house. It's a totally different kind of business to which a tech person is completely unaccustomed. It would be more likely for a plumber or electrician to do such a thing. It's true a tech company could buy wholesale fiber access and provide internet on top of that, like they provide email on top of wholesale servers, but that's only one part of the business.

Tech companies are struggling to even build datacenters right now because of underestimating the work involved. They're really not used to things that don't scale by themselves.
by azertify | 2026-01-26 13:51:13+00:00
I think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse.

Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.
by everdrive | 2026-01-26 13:51:16+00:00
One of the worst trends for video games as art has been "movie games" -- the belief that be art, games need facial capture, celebrities, extended voice acting and cut scenes. No matter how good the technology gets, these remain an uncanny valley. And, for the most part, the games are never more deep than a Marvel movie for similar reasons: huge budgets, so they must have broad appeal and not really touch on any "real" controversial or fringe topics. Just like a marvel movie, the cut scene is a break in a bunch of bombastic action, and you can't get killing dudes with an axe for 30 minutes and then switch and have a meaningful conversation about political philosophy.

I do believe games can be art, but the high-budget movie games are terrible.
Show HN: A Self-Hosted MP3 Player with 80s Retro Vibes
by hilti | 2026-01-26 13:51:21+00:00
I built NeonAMP, a browser-based MP3 player that runs as a single PHP file.

You drop index.php into a folder of MP3s and it auto-scans the library, reads full ID3 tags, and stores metadata in SQLite. Playback uses the Web Audio API, including DJ-style crossfading between tracks.

The UI is keyboard-driven and intentionally retro. No frameworks on the frontend, no build step, and the whole thing is under 100KB.

Tech: PHP 8.3+, Vanilla JS, SQLite.

Demo: https://github.com/marchildmann/NeonAMP

Curious what people think and where this could be improved.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-26 13:51:37+00:00
So you're comfortable with the current situation for citizens?

I.e. one must carry paperwork at all times, risk getting detained and beaten for going out in public (especially if not white or speaking non-English), masked men may enter your property or home with no identification and take whomever they like, no accountability for ICE abuses/mistakes, etc.

What about migrants who are legal? Or tourists who just want to visit on a visa?

Does the US really want a country with no migration nor tourism?

You also seem to think this problem is solved elsewhere, but Europe continues to struggle with surges of migration from other countries both from conflict zones and poorer countries.
by lukan | 2026-01-26 13:52:13+00:00
"Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns."

I think the title is clickbait.

The conclusion is:

"Vibe coding represents a fundamental shift in how software is produced and consumed. The productivity gains are real and large. But so is the threat to the open source ecosystem that underpins modern software infrastructure. The model shows that these gains and threats are not independent: the same technology that lowers costs also erodes the engagement that sustains voluntary contribution."

The dangers I see rather in projects drowning in LLM slop PR's, instead of less engagement.

And the benefits of LLMs to open source in lowering the cost to revive and maintain (abandoned) projects.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-26 13:52:54+00:00
I have been trying to use Claude code to help improve my opensource Java NLP location library.

However trying to get it to do anything other than optimise code or fix issues it struggles.

For example I currently have an issue with ambiguity collisions e.g.

Input: "California"

Output: "California, Missouri"

California is a state but also city in Missouri - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j/issues/44

I asked Claude several times to resolve this ambiguity and it suggested various prioritisation strategies etc. however the resulting changes broke other functionality in my library.

In the end I am redesigning my library from scratch with minimal AI input. Why? because I started the project without the help of AI a few years back, I designed it to solve a problem but that problem and nuanced programming decisions seem to not be respected by LLMs (LLMs dont care about the story, they just care about the current state of the code)
by akmarinov | 2026-01-26 13:52:57+00:00
YouTube is consumption only, you don't really have a lot of discussions, also it's stale, because it takes quite a bit to reflect the latest.

As a Reddit user - Reddit's tech talk quality is quite lower than X. Don't know about TikTok, haven't used it, I imagine it's the same as Youtube.

X is a dumpster fire for sure, but there's still quality people on there that push the latest on what's happening. It's where the tech companies first announce things and it's where the discussion around those gets picked up.