MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-27 21:01:30+00:00
The other key element with Wayland is that the kernel does a ton of the work for you. There s GEM buffer management and DMA-BUF to manage and move around video & regular memory, there's kernel mode setting, there's incredibly good mesa drivers.

X didn't have any of that to build from. It basically was a second kernel, was the OS that dealt with the video card atop the OS actual. It talked to the PCI device & did everything.

Part of the glory of Wayland is that we have fantastic really good OS abstractions & drivers. When we go to make a display server, we start at such a different level now. Trying to layer X's abstractions atop is messy & ugly & painful, because it mostly inhibits devs from being able to use the hardware in neat efficient clean direct modern ways. You have to write an X extension that coexists with a patchwork of other extensions that slots into the X way, that can figure out how to leverage the hardware. With Wayland, most compositors just use the kernel objects. There's much less intermediary, much less cruft, much less wild indirection & accretion to cut a path for.

And as you beautifully state, competing libraries can decide what abstractions & techniques work for them. There's an ecosystem of ideas, a flux to optimize hone & improve, on a variety of different dimensions. The Bazaar free to find its way vs the one giant ancient Cathedral. It's just so so so good we're finally not all trapped inside.
by ashishb | 2026-01-27 21:02:01+00:00
Very few people understand the depth of what you just said.

$2K or even $20K is meaningless for a parent making $100K or more.

Kids have a negative value to a professional class member.

If you engage in agriculture or some similar activity, a child as old as 10 can be a helping hand in some way or the other. No surprises that Amish farmers have a high birth rate.

https://ashishb.net/parenting/pregnancy/
by cowpig | 2026-01-27 21:02:03+00:00
I find it completely crazy. If I wanted to launch a cyberattack on the western economy, I guess I would just need to:

* open-source a vulnerable vibe-coded assistant

* launch a viral marketing campaign with the help of some sophisticated crypto investors

* watch as hundreds of thousands of people in the western world voluntarily hand over their information infrastructure to me
by bri3d | 2026-01-27 21:02:04+00:00
I am fairly confident that this company is going to assure corporations that their own code is running on their own computers (ie - to secure datacenter workloads), to allow _you_ (or auditors) to assure that only _your_ asserted code is also running on their rented computers (to secure cloud workloads), or to assure that the code running on _their_ computers is what they say it is, which is actually pretty cool since it lets you use Somebody Else's Computer with some assurance that they aren't spying on you (see: Apple Private Cloud Compute). Maybe they will also try to use this to assert "deep" embedded devices which already lock the user out, although even this seems less likely given that these devices frequently already have such systems in place.

IMO it's pretty clear that this is a server play because the only place where Linux has enough of a foothold to make client / end-user attestation financially interesting is Android, where it already exists. And to me the server play actually gives me more capabilities than I had: it lets me run my code on cloud provided machines and/or use cloud services with some level of assurance that the provider hasn't backdoored me and my systems haven't been compromised.
by EternalAlgrthm | 2026-01-27 21:02:04+00:00
Creator here. MikeBrain came from building AI agents that kept going off the rails. We needed:

1. *Trust Ladder* - agents start sandboxed, earn permissions through demonstrated behavior
2. *LEASH Protocol* - hard boundaries (rate limits, kill switches, no-go zones)
3. *Hall Monitor* - self-reporting discipline where agents flag their own violations
4. *Baton Protocol* - clean handoffs between sessions with no context loss

Been running this in production for 6 months managing construction documentation. Zero unintended external actions.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or design decisions.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-27 21:02:32+00:00
On a slight tangent, I can see how many of these things - segregated quarters, obligation to wear distinctive dress, prohibitions against proselytizing and against inter-religious marriage etc. - could all have been demanded by the minority community themselves in those times, to protect themselves from "majoritarianism". Just look at some of the conservative Jewish communities in Israel today - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/1/who-are-the-haredim-... - who still practice some of these customs.

Note though that none of it can be termed antisemitic as everything in it was also applicable to other non-muslims (in whatever specific Islamic kingdom it happened). Right? That has been my whole point - muslims (other than religious fundamentalists ones) have never harboured any kind of ill-will or hatred for Jews (or other religions), till the west encouraged (sometimes forced) migrations of non-native, foreign-born Jews to the middle-east and tried to change the demographic of the whole region with nefarious political intentions.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-27 21:02:38+00:00
It's not exactly an unusual claim, and it was very much the loudly espoused position of the Republican Party until, well, last week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...

> In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how a federal army could be kept in check by the militia, "a standing army ... would be opposed [by] militia." He argued that State governments "would be able to repel the danger" of a federal army, "It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops." He contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he described as "afraid to trust the people with arms"...
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-01-27 21:02:46+00:00
I think software is about to become disposable and that’s uncharted territory. Furniture used to be carefully handcrafted and was meant to be passed on for generations. Now that’s a bit of a quaint idea and you probably don’t want your parents’ old couch. There’s a good chance it came flat packed and you assembled it yourself. At work there’s constant nail biting over generating low-quality code. I can’t help but wonder, why reuse any of it? What do you need libraries for? If it’s not hard to specify, it’s practically free to produce now.
by margalabargala | 2026-01-27 21:02:55+00:00
Headline is massively misleading.

The actual study cited by the article, measures this as 71% of food products offered for sale in the US, by count of unique items, are ultraprocessed.

Not that 71% of food products sold by weight or volume or dollar amount are ultraprocessed.

This is just observing that if you list all food products for sale in the US, "pear" appears on that list once but "Store Brand salty corn chips" appears 25 times.
by southerntofu | 2026-01-27 21:04:11+00:00
> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.

Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.

Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.

If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.

> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop

That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...
Show HN: Drift, an open source HRV reader
by cladamski79 | 2026-01-27 21:04:16+00:00
It all started with me wanting to measure my HRV and I tried many different apps but wasn't really impressed, either they came with an expensive subscription or they had a very cluttered interface, and the PPG (photoplethysmography (using the camera)) wasn't that accurate IMHO. A wearable like a smartring or a wristwatch would probably been better but I didn't wanna buy one...

So I started to build my own and it has been an interesting experience, I have been reading a lot about HRV, RR intervals and how to use the baevsky method for figuring out a stress index, fascinating reading.

Drift helps you understand your current capacity by looking at BPM, HRV, SI and amount of sleep per night. Without a wearable one have to manually start tracking sleep but it has a smart feature and will stop tracking after first unlock in the morning (it waits 2 hours for late night scrollers to make sure you're sleeping)

I didn't find any good open source apps for this so hopefully Drift gets some traction for the ones interested.

I'm a strong believer in OSS and I think users will like the openness of being able to see what's going on, and the convenience of getting it at the Play Store for a low price (no subscriptions or hidden fees).

GitHub (MIT open source): https://github.com/cladam/drift
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilseon.dri...

Thanks for checking it out.
by inetknght | 2026-01-27 21:04:20+00:00
> you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized

That's not censorship problems.

That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.

Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line is indeed there.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 21:04:22+00:00
> I don't think the Cursor thing was about replacing humans entirely.

I think how I saw things was that somehow Cursor was/is still targetted very heavily on vibe coding in a similar fashion of bolt.dev or lovable and I even saw some vibe coders youtube try to see the difference and honestly at the end Cursor had a preferable pricing than the other two and that's how I felt Cursor was.

Of course Cursor's for the more techie person as well but I feel as if they would shift more and more towards Claude Code or similar which are subsidized by the provider (Anthropic) itself, something not possible for Cursor to do unless burning big B's which it already has done.

So Cursor's growth was definitely towards the more vibe coders side.

Now coming to my main point which is that I had the feeling that what cursor was trying to achieve wasn't trying to replace humans entirely but replace humans from the loop Aka Vibe coding. Instead of having engineers, if suppose the Cursor experiment was sucessful, the idea (which people felt when it was first released instantly) was that the engineering itself would've been dead & instead the jobs would've turned into management from a bird's eye view (not managing agent's individually or being aware of what they did or being in any capacity within the loop)

I feel like this might've been the reason they were willing to burn 5 million$ for.

If you could've been able to convince engineers considering browsers are taken as the holy grail of hardness that they are better off being managers, then a vibe coding product like Cursor would be really lucrative.

Atleast that's my understanding, I can be wrong I usually am and I don't have anything against Cursor. (I actually used to use Cursor earlier)

But the embedding shapes project shows that engineering is very much still alive and beneficial net. He produced a better result with very minimal costs than 5 million$ inference costs project.

> embedding-shape's project here disproves that last bit - that you need parallel agents to build a competent web renderer - by achieving a more impressive result with just one Codex agent in a few days.

Simon, I think that browsers got the idea of this autonomous agents partially because of your really famous post about how independent tests can lead to easier ports via agents. Browsers have a lot of independent tests.

So Simon, perhaps I may have over-generalized but do you know of any ideas where the idea of parallel agents is actually good now that browsers are off, personally after this project, I can't really think of any. When the Cursor thing first launched or when I first heard of it recently, I thought that browsers did make sense for some reason but now that its out of the window, I am not sure if there are any other projects where massively parallel agents might be even net positive over 1 human + 1 agent as Emsh.
by psadauskas | 2026-01-27 21:04:52+00:00
I went to go see a Broncos game once about 10 years ago, it was $400 for a single ticket. I was in the top section, 3 rows from the back, I needed a Sherpa to help me get to my seat. I could tell there was a game of football being played down below me, but that was about it. I couldn't see the ball, I couldn't read any of the players' numbers, I couldn't see the refs hand signals. A beer and a hotdog was $30, and there was a 10-minute wait for the trough urinal in the bathroom. I was just watching the game on the jumbotron, which based on the distance was comparatively smaller than the TV in my living room.

The atmosphere was great, cheering with 75,000 other fans is exhilarating, but I haven't felt the need to go again. Soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, I've all been to multiple times, the Denver stadiums for them are great, and the tickets and concessions aren't too expensive. Football is the only sport I really follow, but I'll never go to another game. The local high school is within walking distance, and a ticket is $5.
by Bender | 2026-01-27 21:05:21+00:00
I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.
by westurner | 2026-01-27 21:05:44+00:00
"Optimizing Tetris Gameplay Using Reinforcement Learning Framework with Adaptive Genetic Algorithms" (2025) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5906702
.. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1615762352187216859...

"Outsmarting algorithms: A comparative battle between Reinforcement Learning and heuristics in Atari Tetris" (2025)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.127251
by thephyber | 2026-01-27 21:05:47+00:00
> Everything is done with value judgements.

Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to people/brands we trust.

When it comes to software licenses, we aren’t lawyers, so the informed people will use a primer created by a trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub’s “which license is right for me?” Page.

Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the newspaper/news source which recommended them.

Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most people require an overview of the article by an expert. Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion on how definitive or significant the findings are.
by bauldursdev | 2026-01-27 21:05:51+00:00
You don't have to think the AI is better than yourself. Many coding tasks are just repetitive boilerplate... pretty simple stuff. Sometimes you have to set 20 fields on an object, refactor 10 functions to return a default value, write a generic SQL statement that returns data in a specific shape, center a div, or any number of relatively simple tasks. I wouldn't use it for the high level architectural decisions. Just a fancy context-aware autocomplete. Even though I can spell just fine, I use autocomplete on my phone all the time just to save time. I think it's a similar thing for code, if you use it properly. Of course many do just offload all the thinking and do not critically review it's work, but I think that is the wrong approach.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-27 21:05:53+00:00
Yeah. It's notable they didn't crack the crypto. In the 90s when I was a young cypherpunk, I had this idea that when strong crypto was ubiquitous, certainly people would be smart enough to understand its role was only to force bad guys to attack the "higher levels" like attacking human expectations of privacy on a public channel. It was probably unrealistic to assume everyone would automatically understand subtle details of technology.

As a reminder... if you don't know all the people in your encrypted group chat, you could be talking to the man.
by jimbob45 | 2026-01-27 21:06:04+00:00
Bit silly considering the scoreboard typically has a TV that shows the most important bits that would have been seen at home anyway. His argument may have made sense in 1980 before TVs were introduced in stadiums.

For an actually interesting topic worthy of your time, check out how 1st down markers are calculated and shown on screen at home. It’s much more complicated than you’d think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_%26_Ten_(graphics_system)
by andreisavu | 2026-01-27 21:06:31+00:00
Hi HN — I’d love feedback on a starter repo for building unattended/background agents in Python:

https://github.com/weakincentives/starter

It’s built on top of WINK (Weak Incentives). The goal is to make the “agent definition” a first-class artifact: prompt structure + tools + policies + feedback/evals, separated from whatever runtime/harness drives the loop.

The demo is a toy “secret trivia” agent, but it showcases: prompt sections that bundle instructions + tools, progressive disclosure, tool policies (ordering constraints), feedback providers, and evaluators.

Questions:
- How are you approaching building agents that run unattended?
- Are these abstractions useful, or would you do this differently?
- What works? What doesn't? What feels weird?

Thanks for any critique.
by zrn900 | 2026-01-27 21:06:36+00:00
That's exactly what a lot of people said in 2003. Angloamerican propaganda does character assassination by reporting with double standards to demonize a target. After 5 to 10 years, those who feed on it are ripe for believing any 'bad deed' could have been done by Angloamerica's enemy because 'it is evil'.

Meanwhile, the US is censoring TikTok on behalf of a genocidal settler-colonial regime because its genocidal president asked for it in 2025. And that very US is the source of all these 'truths'.
by thot_experiment | 2026-01-27 21:06:38+00:00
Yeah it's just a matter of how you evaluate the threat model, I might get hit by a wormable zero day, but I also think even in that case there's a good chance I see people flipping out on HN before I actually get hit and run the update manually. I think the odds of a vuln that materially effects my LAN are low, and actually I could lose my whole computer right now and I think I would still be vastly up on time saved over the past 10 or so years that I've been strongly anti-update.

Also worth pointing out that disabling most kind of updates reduces your threat surface quite a lot. If your system isn't pulling updates there's a much lower chance of malicious code getting in that way.
by luxpir | 2026-01-27 21:06:39+00:00
I guess I should talk about some benefits to users, and who users should be.

For: localisation departments, dev teams who want AI translation with human polish (which persists into future projects), language service providers, translation agencies and solo translators or small teams who want access to LLM work at scale.

Does: traditional CAT tool jobs - fast TM matching across millions of segments, but also full QA (think Xbench, 35+ checks), full LQA (check every segment for linguistic issues), dubbing and subbing uploaded videos or YT links, voice cloning and full timing adjustments.

Innovations: use language assets from any language to improve LLM outcomes, use condensed versions of famous style guides, custom rules per client, connectors with previews and screenshot integration, content creation studio for multilingual inspiration.

I've tried to make the tool appeal to linguists, with speed and features they'll like, as well as the corporate side with detailed analysis, scoring, and maximal use of existing use (penalties, priorities, cross language).

Ask questions to find out more, I'll be around.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-27 21:06:47+00:00
I never complained about 60, then I went to 144 and 60 feels painful now. The latency is noticable in every interaction, not just gaming. It's immediately evident - the computer just feels more responsive, like you're in complete control.

Even phones have moved in this direction, and it's immediately noticable when using it for the first time.

I'm now on 240hz and the effect is very diminished, especially outside of gaming. But even then I notice it, although stepping down to 144 isn't the worst. 60, though, feels like ice on your teeth.
by James_K | 2026-01-27 21:07:17+00:00
Neither can most planes given the cockpit is sealed and locked. I suppose one could strategically try to take it down over a populated area, but that doesn't really seem reliable. The truth of the matter is that people can smuggle bombs onto aeroplanes relatively easily, and you don't see many blowing up. And it's not even entirely clear that planes can always take out buildings. The twin towers only collapsed because of the slow burn of jet fuel heating and weakening the structure. The impact alone wouldn't have been enough.
by dr_dshiv | 2026-01-27 21:07:18+00:00
It was a pain to set up, since I wanted it to use my oauth instead of api tokens. I think it is popular because many people don't know about claude code and it allows for integrations with telegram and whatsapp. Mac mini's let it run continuously -- although why not use a $5/m hetzner?

It wasn't really supported, but I finally got it to use gemini voice.

Internet is random sometimes.
by Kennel5527 | 2026-01-27 21:07:21+00:00
There are very clear and easy things that those governments can do to stop all of this.
Isolate the regime.
1. Declare irgc a terrorist organisation, establish sanctions for them and their families, mostly living abroad, block their assets abroad (like we did with some of the Russians involved with Ukraine)
2. Close all embassies in Iran
3. Cut all diplomatic ties with the regime.

This will completely isolate the current regime. Cut the safety net of the IRGC, and close the tap of money, effectively this will reduce close zero the money flows tha sustain all this and make the system very likely collapse.

Why we don’t do it? I guess oil sales to India and China are a good starting point. Then there’s the support to Russia with weapons and tech for Ukraine ‘special campaign’, and let’s not add the fact that a destabilised Middle East is so convenient to so many.