MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 20:42:35+00:00
That was my first impression, but reading the original story from 2019 has a much less one-side pictures: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/how-a...

My other comment has more details, but a summary is that they the pentesters had been drinking before breaking into the building, were doing things that could be interpreted as being forbidden by their own contract, and the big one: The person listed on their authorization letter denied that they were approved to enter the building when called.

That last one is a big deal. If your own authorization contacts start telling the police you're not authorized to be in the building, you're in trouble.
by lbreakjai | 2026-01-29 20:43:17+00:00
The crowd is perhaps due to the concentration of world class museums and historical sights. I know it's hip to play blasé and so much cooler than the mindless drones, but there's a reason people are flocking to zone 1 instead of Peckham Rye.

> Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.

As opposed to London, where you famously are as likely to see people of all walks of life and income comingle in a tesco in Dagenham as you are in Kensington.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-29 20:43:21+00:00
I had a comment a few days ago about my freshly installing, configuring, and A/B testing W10 and W11 on a not-too-old HP laptop, using both HDD and NVMe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

That was then.

Now last night my partner comes back from the dumpster with a Toshiba laptop that's in great shape, its 20 full years old, came with Windows Vista, had been upgraded to Windows 7, has 1GB of memory, 120GB SATA2 HDD (slower than modern SATA), dual-core 1.73GHz CPU.

Seems to work perfectly and With W7 it's snappier than the 2019 HP booted to old or new Windows 10 or Windows 11 even more. All comparisons at baseline without the internet.

When you try W11 on a HDD it really emphasizes the difference from W10 on the same hardware.

But when this kind of W7 thing just falls in your lap, it really hits you how much better performance could have been available by now from Windows if they really tried.

Or didn't drop the ball every time they were at bat, depending on the general manager ;)
by Qwertious | 2026-01-29 20:44:06+00:00
AI isn't the only bottleneck - even if the software problem was solved today, a robot arm competitive with human arms simply doesn't exist (and the only ones that have a hope of competing cost $16k each) - it turns out all those degrees of freedom makes the arm super fragile, and the human arm is filled to the brim with sensors (e.g. to figure out the weight of the item you're holding, or to tell when the teatowel is slipping or if you're gripping it tight enough).

(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 20:44:13+00:00
> reviewed and even verified their documents (called the numbers on the form to confirm their authorization)

Apparently there's more to this story. From the original article https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/how-a...

> Another reason for doubt: one of the people listed as a contact on the get-out-of-jail-free letter didn’t answer the deputies’ calls, while another said he didn’t believe the men had permission to conduct physical intrusions.

It's actually kind of amazing that the police first let them go after the official contact on the form said they were not authorized to intrude in the building.
by phil21 | 2026-01-29 20:44:24+00:00
Yeah, I rented a Corolla recently which was about as basic as it got - and within less than 90 seconds of entering the vehicle/driving I had everything I needed figured out.

CarPlay was trivial to pair up. Screen resolution was meh, but otherwise it Just Worked(tm).

Adaptive cruise was trivial to turn on and read the indicators for.

Lane keep assist was also overtly obvious - both if it was on, and how to turn it on/off.

The A/C controls were nice easily understood knobs and buttons.

Blindspot detection was standard, worked great.

Overall just a very intuitive vehicle.
by al_borland | 2026-01-29 20:44:46+00:00
Wouldn't the problem be if the car can take 800V and they go to a 400V charger? This would make charging take longer and be a bad experience. Assuming the car is smart enough to not set itself on fire from trying to charge faster than it's capable, using a faster charger shouldn't be an issue at all.

I'd rather have all chargers be faster than the cars, so we don't need to upgrade the infrastructure as often and people who have cars capable of fast charging don't have to hunt for a charger that supports it.
Show HN: Liminal Shift: Personalized audio visualizations
by tylersavery | 2026-01-29 20:45:18+00:00
Hey HN. I built a tool that generates personalized audio visualizations for goals and stress release.

The idea came from a manual workflow I was doing for myself — using AI conversations to clarify goals, generating scripts based on my specific context, then running them through text-to-speech. I stitched it together into an actual product.

The underlying philosophy is based on Reality Transurfing (a book about visualization/manifestation), but from a technical standpoint:

- Conversational AI extracts and structures user goals and context
- Script generation creates personalized visualization text (~2-10 min)
- ElevenLabs TTS with configurable voice, pace, and background audio mixing
- Also includes a journaling system for tracking "pendulums" (recurring stressors/energy drains)

Stack: Django backend, Next.js frontend, Anthropic Claude for conversations, ElevenLabs for voice, Cloudflare R2 for audio storage, Stripe for credits.

Business model is credits to cover AI costs (ElevenLabs adds up). One free credit to try the full flow.

Happy to answer questions about the build or the concept.
by aksss | 2026-01-29 20:45:21+00:00
Definitely some things could have been done a bit differently. I get that they want to keep staff in the dark, and even beat cops, but it seems reasonable and prudent to have the highest level of local law enforcement brought into the loop in planning red team exercises. The likelihood is high that the team will interface with law enforcement. The escalation path within the enforcement side of the state regulatory machine should be cleared in advance.

I think the takeaway for security teams is that you shouldn't let the customer "authorize" what is otherwise criminal activity warranting a police response without getting some air cover from the enforcement side. Coordinating that is the customer's burden to bear and that cover should be secured before letting them hand-wave away the risks with a "just have the police call me and I'll clear it all up". In hindsight only, when you look at it like that, the security team was not covering their ass appropriately. In a perfect world, you'd assume there's some better planning and communication going on behind the curtain. In the real world, you need more than the flimsy "guarantee" of calling a guy who knows a guy in the middle of the night. At the very least, that get out of jail free card should have had as signatories judiciary representation and enforcement representation (e.g. sheriff).
by lostmsu | 2026-01-29 20:45:53+00:00
Legally speaking it probably depends on law enforcement actually being in their right to grab the other protestor in the first place?

In practice I had experience of protests in 2010s Russia, and legitimacy is another huge factor there. E.g. even if the law enforcement was in the legal right to grab the other protestor, is it ok that they had the right in the first place.

I'm not saying either of these apply, but that because legality and legitimacy of grabbing a protestor is often unclear this de facto is a normal behavior at a protest and should not have any severe punishment attached to it.
by dwaite | 2026-01-29 20:45:58+00:00
I've long believes that the requirement to use in-app purchasing was to make such revenue sharing easier to audit - if you can only use Apple's payment system to do certain things (or else your app isn't approved), then Apple doesn't have to worry about things like audits.

Since various countries have regulated the ability to do third party payments from apps, Apple has since added API to launch said payments, to help generate statistics on use so that they can then demand third party auditing that the commissions are still being properly paid.

In the US there was a court decision that they couldn't meter or charge commission, which may very well be walked back and will lead to lots of fun future articles.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 20:46:22+00:00
>Do people not have shame

The only person in the world you know can have shame is yourself. As for anyone else, you can only assume they do not have it, or are trying to trick you to feel shame to take advantage of you.

If you want said articles to feel ashamed, then they'll have to stop getting upvoted on HN. Otherwise they are here to stay.
by 3rodents | 2026-01-29 20:46:43+00:00
You're right, they have 2 versions, desktop and mobile:

Desktop, correct prompt: https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/5EoAd2fIvVRf8V51LN...

Mobile, wrong prompt: https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/2tMhL5Www2vA6I62DV...
by wat10000 | 2026-01-29 20:46:44+00:00
If the sheriff had found out what was going on and then let them go, this wouldn't be news.

If the sheriff had arrested them and found out in the morning what was going on and then let them go, this wouldn't be news.

If the sheriff had arrested them and brought them before a judge who let them go, this wouldn't be news.

What actually happened is the sheriff found out what was going on, decided it was still criminal anyway, arrested them, and then the county charged and prosecuted them. The charges were eventually dismissed. That is why it's news.

And icing on the cake, the current county attorney disagrees with the dismissal done by his predecessor, and says that he will prosecute any future incidents of this nature. https://www.kcci.com/article/coalfire-contractors-settle-dal...
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 20:46:46+00:00
> I'm not saying it's the most professional choice, but if I were about to burgle a courthouse as part of my work, I'd like a beer or two to calm my nerves beforehand.

This is a job where having impaired judgment is a terrible idea.

If someone needs alcohol to do a job that involves taking the role of a criminal and summoning the police, drinking alcohol before it is a terrible choice no matter how you look at it. If they can't do the job without alcohol, they shouldn't be doing the job at all. Maintaining unimpaired judgment is a baseline expectation for a job like this.
by RansomStark | 2026-01-29 20:46:56+00:00
No, this is exactly how Amazon management works.

Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.

This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.

These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.

Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.

The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.

I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.

And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.

Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).

It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.

The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-29 20:47:05+00:00
> one of graph theory’s most central questions. The “MaxCut” problem is about the optimal way to cut a graph into two parts so that there are as many edges as possible connecting the parts.

Wikipedia agrees with this definition of the max-cut problem. But it surprises me, since the max-flow min-cut theorem refers to cuts in a weighted graph. (Where the min-cut is the cut of minimum weight.)

This is the same thing as minimum edge count if you apply it to an unweighted graph. But as far as wikipedia says, the "max-cut" problem is specifically about edge count, and the generalization to a weighted graph is called the "weighted max-cut problem". Why the difference?
by kstrauser | 2026-01-29 20:47:48+00:00
I'd have more "eager" than "anxious" nerves, and I wouldn't need a beer for that. The fun thing about pentesting is that it doesn't matter if you get caught, although it's more fun if you don't.

Hard agree about "forcing", though. The very word implies, you know, non-trivial amounts of force. Like technically walking toward a door in a normal human room at standard temperature and pressure means you're applying non-zero amounts of force to it, so arguments like "they applied any force at all" can be ignored as goofy.
by lovlar | 2026-01-29 20:47:50+00:00
Making a good mechanical design is difficult, it usually involves making several iterations which in the physical world takes a lot more effort than iterating on software.

One thing that always bothered me is that most people with 3d printers seem to design things on their own from scratch and rarely take on others designs, improve them and share them. There is little collaboration going on for 3d prints in comparison to software. Except from maybe ~10 widely successful projects that now have healthy communities improving them.

Why is GitHub and similar sites not used more among makers?
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-29 20:48:01+00:00
Defaults matter way more than many think. More often than not, defaults are what inspire distro hopping.

Why? Because the path to the desired result from a big-name distro is frequently non-intuitive, often to the point that the user may not even realize it's possible. When something doesn't work as expected, the response isn't "I need to figure out which packages to install and what config files to change," it's "oh I guess this distro isn't what I'm looking for".

I think it would do an immense amount of good if the big distros did more to address this. If they made it such that a fresh install could be made to fit any remotely common use case and hardware combination with no more than 1-3 clicks that would make tiny distros much less appealing.

A handful of distros have the right idea by offering an install ISO with preconfigured proprietary Nvidia drivers for example, but even that could be improved upon by just rolling some heuristics into the stock install ISO to figure out if the user needs Nvidia drivers or not.
by dlubarov | 2026-01-29 20:48:04+00:00
While you're correct, it's worth noting that this only happened because the judge in the Epic lawsuit ordered an injunction forcing Apple to allow it.

Apple then "maliciously complied", allowing it while demanding a 27% fee on any web-based payments, which was found to be a violation of the injunction.

https://technologylaw.fkks.com/post/102ka4o/apple-violated-u...
by scblock | 2026-01-29 20:48:11+00:00
Yes. As you say it maps to a key sequence, not a scancode. Additionally, it maps as a rapid key-down sequence followed immediately by key-up, so it cannot be remapped to a modifier key, such as right control (which it often takes over from on laptops).

There are ways, which involve using a software trap to capture it and then emit right control for a set period of time, but that's a workaround rather than a real fix.

https://github.com/m-bartlett/remap-copilot has a good writeup in the README
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-29 20:48:16+00:00
Like LLMs, though: Do you really think a simulation will get them to all the corner cases robots/AI needs to know about, or will it be largely the same problem -- they'll be just good enough to fool the engineers and make the business ops drool and they'll be put into production and suddenly we'll see in a year or two stories about robots crushing peoples hands, stepping in drains and falling over or falling off roofs cause of some bizarre miscommunication between training and reality.

So, like, it's very important to understand the lineage of training and not just the "this is it"
by crote | 2026-01-29 20:48:49+00:00
When one of the main arguments people use to stick to C++ is that it "runs everywhere", it actually is. After all, what use is there for a C++ where the vast majority of the library ecosystem only works with the handful of major compilers? If compatibility with a broad legacy ecosystem isn't important, there are far more attractive languages these days!

Just like Python was to blame for the horrible 2-to-3 switch, C++ is to blame for the poor handling of modules. They shouldn't have pushed through a significant backwards-incompatible change if the wide variety of vendor toolchains wasn't willing to adopt it.
by noitpmeder | 2026-01-29 20:48:52+00:00
Appointments are a whole other issue (see the extreme turnover in the American executive branch every 4 years). Id rather the head of my local police dept be significantly supported by the populating instead of an appointment from a governor, mayor, ... whose entire schtick can change on a dime.

Independent elections are a good thing. Bundling offices together under a single election that appoints the rest of the world is terrible and only leans further into the two party see-saw that exists in the USA.

I really wish for proportional representation. Not that it really applies to your local police force, but we need to break apart the complete A-or-B nature of American politics. Form coalitions, not monoliths that trade off earning 51% of the electorate every cycle.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-29 20:49:02+00:00
Recently YouTube again started recommending to me channels of people who died of cancer.

I looked at a clip of a man just a few years my senior where he was describing the symptoms that in his view should have made him go see a doctor earlier, because maybe then his pancreatic cancer wouldn't have been fatal.

Truth be told they wouldn't raise any red flags if I had them.

Only thing that I'm doing differently is having blood tests done on an annual basis, but those only show anything when e.g. the cancer has spread to the liver, which is typically too late anyway. It's an incredibly insidious disease, and if the tumor is growing on the wrong end of the organ, it won't give any symptoms whatsoever.
by vel0city | 2026-01-29 20:49:05+00:00
Model X wasn't a 4-person car. It was designed to be a 6-7 seater, far bigger than the Model Y. The Model Y's optional third row is practically useless.

Its like arguing the Honda CR-V is the same kind of vehicle as the Honda Odyssey.

The real question is why continue having the Model Y and the Model 3, when those are so incredibly close in dimensions. The 3 is only 2" smaller than the Y in length. Just kill the 3 and make a cheaper trim level of the Y. $10k more to have a 7" higher roof and more features in the base model.
by pcarroll | 2026-01-29 20:49:14+00:00
The need is real. You are a service provider. You need to manage equipment at customer sites. You need to access them simultaneously. But all the customers are using the same subnet...
If Bell gave out cellphones with the same phone number, how can you call anybody? But they still do.
Many devices have cloud access, but every manufacturer is different. It is a nightmare at scale.
by kristianp | 2026-01-29 20:49:33+00:00
Open weights models such as GPT-OSS, Kimi K2.x are trained with 4 bit layers. So it wouldn't come as a surprise if the closed models do similar things. If I compare Kimi K2.5 and Opus 4.5 on openrouter, output tokens are about 8x more expensive for Opus, which might indicate Opus is much larger and doesn't quantize, but the claude subscription plans muddy the waters on price comparison a lot.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-29 20:49:52+00:00
What if you wrote something more like:

# terrible code, never use ty
def cleanup(dir):
system("rm -rf {dir}")

def main():
work_dir = os.env["WORK_DIR"]
cleanup(work_dir)

and then due to a misconfiguration "$WORK_DIR" was truncated to be just "/"?

At what point is it negligent?
by craftkiller | 2026-01-29 20:50:11+00:00
While I get your point, you are missing a big player: NixOS. It is not based on any of those distros, it is not similar to any of those distros, and it offers significantly more than just a package set and wallpapers.

My NixOS install is immutable, so I can trivially roll back any changes to my system/software/configs.

It has a lockfile so the versions of all of my software do not change _at all_ unless I tell it to. That lockfile doesn't just extend to the software I have installed but all the software that is used to build the software on my machine, so I can perfectly reproduce the same system with the same version of software compiled by the same exact versions of the compilers.

On NixOS you can trivially have many versions of any software or library installed on your system and use them all (for example, foo can depend on python 3.7.2, bar can depend on python 2.7.1, and baz can depend on python 3.14. They can all happily live on my machine. You can even have multiple copies of the same version of python but compiled with different flags if you want. On arch linux your only option for python right now is 3.14.2.)

On NixOS I can trivially run 1 command and generate a bootable ISO that has exactly the same software and configs that I have installed on my computer. This has been rather nice for repair/debugging USBs and for running virtual machines off the ISOs.

You're also missing:

- Gentoo (not based on any of the distros you listed)
- Chimera Linux which brings in the FreeBSD userland, musl libc, and Dinit
by phoe-krk | 2026-01-29 20:50:41+00:00
> "I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to refute with current architectures.

If one decided to paint a school's interior with toxic paint, it's not "the paint poisoned them on its own", it's "someone chose to use a paint that can poison people".

Somebody was responsible for choosing to use a tool that has this class of risks and explicitly did not follow known and established protocol for securing against such risk. Consequences are that person's to bear - otherwise the concept of responsibility loses all value.
by wolfi1 | 2026-01-29 20:50:48+00:00
if that holds true in humans that would be a huge win. but it would be interesting at which stage those drugs still help. btw, it is said Chris Rea was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 33, he died last year at he age of 74. it would be interesting to know what circumstance helped him to fight the cancer for such a long time
by repiret | 2026-01-29 20:50:49+00:00
I'm reminded of the monologue from Terminator 2:

> Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

The AI doctor will always have enough time for you, and always be at the top of their game with you. It becomes useful when it works better than an overworked midlevel, not when it competes with the best doctor on their best day. If we're not there already, we're darn close.