MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: End-to-end encrypted terminal chat with no servers or disk writes
by mirai_lucky_dev | 2026-01-06 14:02:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I built cmd-chat, a peer-to-peer terminal chat application written in Python.
It focuses on privacy and simplicity:

- End-to-end encrypted messaging (SRP authentication + symmetric encryption)
- No servers, no databases, no logs
- Nothing written to disk — everything runs in RAM
- Pure CLI/terminal-based UX

The goal was to explore how far you can push secure communication with minimal infrastructure and zero persistence.

I’d really appreciate feedback on the security model, protocol design, and any ideas for improvement.

Thanks!
by mmooss | 2026-01-06 14:03:17+00:00
> Because one could "simply" ask a different LLM to neutrally evaluate the conversation / conversational snippets.

The problem is using LLMs beyond a limited scope, which is free ideas but not reliable reasoning or, goodness forbid, decision-making.

Maybe the model for LLMs is a very good, sociopathic sophist or liar. They know a lot of 'facts', true or false, and are can con you out of your car keys (or house or job). Sometimes you catch them at a lie and their dishonesty becomes transparent. They have good ideas, though their usefulness only enhances their con jobs. (They also tell everything you say with others.)

Would you rely on them for something of any importance? Simply ask a human.
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-06 14:03:57+00:00
It looks like a company was using uninformed and "scared" employee population to commit labor violations. Also using the same tactic that I alluded to in one of my other comments: Production workers are hired from a staffing agency and dispatched to the job site, that way the company HR doesn't know(and can't legally ask about work eligibility).

It looks like that plant in particular has serious issues. Someone else died after the 16 year old, bringing the number of deaths in recent years to 3.

This one in particular seems to know what it is doing: Googling "Mar-Jac Poultry" does not bring up any of the issues, nor are they listed in the Wiki page.
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-06 14:04:15+00:00
We have the same problem where I live in the US. When I get some free time I'm going to lobby our state congress to have the sale of them banned, because it's the only way to get people to stop installing them. There is a law against driving them but it's impossible to enforce because there's no means of measuring the sound and associating it with the vehicle quickly enough to enforce it.

I'd love to have an ALPR system that localizes the noise and snaps a picture of the plate and vehicle and sends them a ticket in the mail.
by jeena | 2026-01-06 14:04:16+00:00
I'm not sure if it's abandon ware but I found a gist which attempted to get pictures from this Korean Kindergarten app for backup which we also use.

I tried it and it only half worked and you had to copy a cookie out of the browser which would expire after a couple of days.

I took it and extended it added a login with selenium or what it is called and now I can run it daily and get those pictures out and into my immich. Instance.

The script was already a couple of years old and outside of Korea nobody uses KidsNote, I made it used ware again: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/kidsnote-backup
by svantana | 2026-01-06 14:04:18+00:00
> 80mph to cars that push past 600mph

I have yet to see evidence that this is really the case. Already 15 years ago, people were creating impressive software over the course of a hackday, by glueing open source repos together in a high level language. Now that process has been sped up even more, but does it matter that much if the prototype takes 4 or 24 hours to make? The real value is in well-thought-out, highly polished apps, and AFAICT those still take person-years to complete.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-06 14:04:22+00:00
I know the scale isn't comparable but I much prefer an electric chainsaw to a gas chainsaw. I own both kinds because every couple of years something big falls across my driveway that I can't lift without cutting it up. Mixing two-stroke fuel correctly so I don't foul the spark plug is a hassle, and something I do rarely enough that I always need to look up how to do it. Breathing two-stroke exhaust fumes is no fun at all. My cheap electric chainsaw has better torque, which makes it even easier to use. The only consumable is bar and chain oil, and after a while the chain itself.
by SomeHacker44 | 2026-01-06 14:04:32+00:00
I don't understand why the author does not just submit his ID and the copyright page of the book in a single photo. If the link the author is trying to take down has a copyright notice naming them, then link that too.

I am a bit biased though - I read way too many stories in HN of abuses of DMCA than this sort of issue. That said, this does seem unresponsive.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-06 14:04:38+00:00
even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.

[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...
by dcris19710101 | 2026-01-06 14:04:42+00:00
After 3 years studying ML fundamentals, I built a prototype demonstrating continuous learning from streaming events - what I call "Software 4.0".

Tech stack: Apache Kafka (KRaft), River (online ML), Hoeffding Trees, Streamlit

Unlike traditional ML (batch training → deploy → retrain):
- Learns from every event incrementally
- Adapts to pattern shifts in ~2 minutes vs 3+ days
- No retraining pipeline needed

Demo: `docker compose up`

Watch the fraud detection model adapt automatically when fraudster tactics change at transaction 500.

Detailed writeup: https://medium.com/@dcris19740101/announcing-software-4-0-wh...

This pattern (continuous learning from events) is how Netflix, Uber, LinkedIn already work.

Feedback welcome!
by pc86 | 2026-01-06 14:05:37+00:00
In software development, sure (maybe). Most jobs aren't software development.

The vast majority of jobs your production slows as hours increase but there isn't a tipping point where you're less productive, even after accounting for errors or rework. There's a reason CPAs don't clock out at 37.5 hours during tax season, or warehouses or service desks or any number of things other than the specific thing most of us do often work more than 40 hours a week, especially when actively working to get a promotion.
by cageface | 2026-01-06 14:05:45+00:00
Why is that the real metric? If you can turn a 1x dev into a 2x dev that's a huge deal, especially if you can also turn the original 2x dev into a 4x dev.

And far from "churning out code" my work is better with LLMs. Better tested, better documented, and better organized because now I can do refactors that just would have taken too much time before. And more performant too because I can explore more optimization paths than I had time to before.

Refusing to use LLMs now is like refusing to use compilers 20 years ago. It might be justified in some specific cases but it's a bad default stance.
by bluGill | 2026-01-06 14:06:06+00:00
Subscription is still worth it for most people though. Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge.

If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However make sure you are comparing the real costs - not just the 2TB, but the backup system (that is tested to work), and all your time.

That said, subscriptions have all too often failed reasonable privacy standards. This is an important part of the cost that is rarely accounted for.
by gambiting | 2026-01-06 14:06:18+00:00
I wonder if you've accidentally purchased an inferior product by buying a corded one - and I guess that's just a problem of American outlets being limited to 110V and generally ~10 amps or so, because yeah, I can't imagine a 1000W blower being very powerful. Battery powered ones like this:

https://www.agrieuro.co.uk/snapper-esxd20s82k-battery-powere...

Are considered pretty much as good as petrol ones over here, but yeah, if you limited it to only 1000W I guess it would struggle too.
by ZuoCen_Liu | 2026-01-06 14:06:21+00:00
We are currently discussing a paradigm shift in physics simulation on the NVIDIA Isaac Sim repository. The core issue is that discrete time-stepping in GPGPU architectures is hitting a "Compute Wall"—consuming 5000W+ just to "patch" numerical errors like tunneling and jitter.
The Validation:We’ve implemented an Octonion-based EKF (OEKF) that treats time and causality as an internal algebraic manifold rather than an external parameter.
Verified Results in Isaac Sim:Precision: >60% position error reduction (≤0.1m vs. ≥ 0.25m).
Stability: Zero attitude jitter during high-dynamic flips (traditional filters showed ≥ 3^ jitter).
This isn't just a software patch; we are moving into the RTL design phase for a 100W FPGA Causal Processor to replace power-hungry GPGPU heuristics with dedicated algebraic gates.
Join the technical deep-dive on NVIDIA’s GitHub Discussion:[https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacSim/discussions/394]
by dudeinjapan | 2026-01-06 14:06:35+00:00
Perhaps in a vacuum…

On package memory is claimed to be a 40% reduction in power consumption. To beat actual LL by 30%, it means the PL chip must actually be ~58% more efficient in an apples-to-apples non-SoC configuration.

Possible if they doped PL’s silicon with magic pixie dust.
Show HN: PXG v3.0 – Searchable Compression via 2D Spatial Decomposition
by truth_behold | 2026-01-06 14:07:04+00:00
I’ve spent the last year developing a decomposition kernel that addresses the "Linear Bottleneck" in standard compression (Zstd, LZMA, Brotli).

The Problem: Traditional algorithms operate on 1D streams. They are blind to the spatial, temporal, or hierarchical architecture of modern data (3D models, nested JSON, multi-modal blobs). When you force these structures into a 1D window, you leave significant entropy on the table.

The Solution: PXG v3.0 maps binary data to a 13505x13505 grayscale grid. By treating data as a coordinate system rather than a line, our engine utilizes adaptive tiling to isolate redundant blocks across the entire file, not just a sliding window.

Key Benchmarks:

Efficiency: Consistent 60-88% reduction on JSON, PDF, and FBX/3D vertex data.

Searchability: This is an in-place succinct structure. The data is the index. You can query strings, hex patterns, or metadata directly from the compressed binary.

Latency: Seek-latency is clocked at ~0.04ms. Search speed for a complex pose library (225 chunks) is ~6.00ms.

Verification: 100% Byte-Perfect Lossless reconstruction.

The Ecosystem: PXG isn't just a utility; it's designed as the foundation for the AXIS ecosystem—enabling zero-load-time gaming and high-density "Heavy Data" pipelines.

The web demo is live at the URL above. No signups, no trackers. Upload a file (Max 50MB for the demo), download the .pxg, and use the Debug Index to search the compressed results in real-time.

I’ll be here to answer technical questions regarding the tiling logic..
by lproven | 2026-01-06 14:07:18+00:00
Same here. I have a physical copy of Word 97, although TBH I use the classic licence key 11111-111111111 to "activate" it because it's easier.

It runs fine under WINE, and you can install the 3 service packs for it too. As released, when you try to save a .RTF file it actually doesn't. Not that that matters, but it's nice to have all the known the bug fixes.

It runs inside the L2 cache on any modern-ish CPU. Even on a Core 2 Duo, it's fast.

It is hilarious and sad to recall that when it came out -- I was working for PC Pro magazine around then -- it was seen as big and bloated and sluggish compared to Office 95. The Mac version, Office 98, was a port of the Windows version, and Mac owners hated it.

Now, it's tiny and sleek.
by baranul | 2026-01-06 14:07:29+00:00
Companies want the money and continual engagement. People getting addicted to AI, as trusted advisor or friend, is money in their pockets. Just like having people addicted to gambling or alcohol, it's all big business.

It's becoming even more apparent, that there is a line between using AI as a tool to accomplish a task versus excessively relying on it for psychological reasons.
by stefan_wibmer | 2026-01-06 14:07:45+00:00
Hi, I'm Stefan from Austria. PlayTheAI.com lets humans play classic games (Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect4, Battleship, Mastermind, WordDuel) against 16 non-thinking AI models (no o1/R1 - instant-response only) with Elo tracking.

Why? We're curious how models perform in dynamic situations where they can't rely on memorized patterns.

Early observations from 800+ matches:
- Many models show single-digit win rates against humans
- We observe interesting patterns in how models handle game state
- Price doesn't seem to correlate strongly with performance

Key: All models get identical prompts with game rules - no per-model optimization, no hints about which moves are currently valid. They must analyze the board themselves.

Tech: Astro + Cloudflare Workers, OpenRouter API, Supabase.

All games logged for transparency. This is a hobby project - we'd love feedback on methodology and would welcome collaboration with researchers.

https://playtheai.com
by pentagrama | 2026-01-06 14:08:36+00:00
Reading this from South America, there is another layer that often gets lost in US-centric discussions like this.

For many people here, the move away from US platforms is not primarily about surveillance, product quality, or even conscious digital sovereignty in the European sense. It is more visceral and historical. There is a long-standing anti-US sentiment rooted in decades of interventionism in Latin America. For some users, avoiding US tech products is simply a symbolic refusal to participate in systems that come from a country associated with coups, economic pressure, and political interference in the region.

This is not necessarily about whether European alternatives are better. Often they are chosen precisely because they are not American. That conversation has been present for years, but it intensified during the Trump era, especially as his international posture became more openly aggressive, erratic, and performative. The image projected abroad is less diplomatic and more about asserting power at any cost.

The recent capture of Nicolás Maduro brought this sentiment back to the surface. This is not about defending Maduro or denying authoritarianism in Venezuela. It is about the methods. The way the US exercises power, bypasses norms, and frames these actions as demonstrations of dominance reinforces long-held distrust, regardless of who the target is.

From this side of the world, it often looks like a superpower acting out of anxiety. A fear of losing its central position as China, Russia, and other actors gain influence. That fear translates into unilateral actions and a public discourse that feels unhinged compared to the more restrained, protocol-driven communication of previous administrations.

So when people here talk about abandoning US platforms, it is not always a tech debate. Sometimes it is a political and emotional one, shaped by memory, history, and how power is experienced from the outside rather than from the center.

Disclaimer: this comment was written in Spanish and translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT, which is, admittedly, a US-based tool.
by kibwen | 2026-01-06 14:08:45+00:00
It's nice that they don't dismiss out-of-hand the idea of using a language other than C (the conclusion is far less dogmatic than the editorialized title here suggests (the actual title of the page being "Why Is SQLite Coded In C?")). But let's be clear that the stability and "boringness" that C currently enjoys took literal decades to realize (pre-ANSI C was a wild-west shitshow that makes pre-ECMA Javascript look tame by comparison), and giving the same leeway to other languages probably doesn't suggest using e.g. Rust until at least 2040 or so.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-06 14:08:51+00:00
>I use a MacBook, and this application is Windows only, so executing it is out of the question.

This is where things went off the rails. Choosing hard paths should be done when you're exploring, and never when you're fixing a business issue. Why didn't they just try it out in a VM or even a mega cheap VPS? Why is doing it the easiest way imaginable completely out of the question?? I have no empathy for this kind of pain.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-06 14:08:53+00:00
> The concept of 'species' only exists within the human mind [1].

That's a theory, anyway. Yes, biologists (and presumably botanists and all those who study the other kingdoms) have made errors in judgment, and yes, the current definition is very poor (often broken, sometimes unprovable in a practical sense).

It does not follow, however, that all life exists on some continuous spectrum of mutations. Members of Equus caballus have distinct genetic traits that do not occur in Equus asinus.

The reality we see about us is that life seems to group itself into channels or pools of limited genetic variation. But that variation doesn't mean the channels/pools aren't real.
by lproven | 2026-01-06 14:09:02+00:00
> https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity is just that, except it's a whole OS that's Win2k styled.

It's a Unix underneath, though. A strange modernised Unix written in C++ but it's definitely Unix-like.

It's a Unix-like with a Win2K GUI, which is a pretty attractive combination, TBH...
by phantasmish | 2026-01-06 14:09:02+00:00
The “double checking” is a step to make sure there’s someone low-level to blame. Everyone knows the “double-checking” in most of these systems will be cursory at best, for most double-checkers. It’s a miserable job to do much of, and with AI, it’s a lot of what a person would be doing. It’ll be half-assed. People will go batshit crazy otherwise.

On the off chance it’s not for that reason, productivity requirements will be increased until you must half-ass it.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-01-06 14:09:44+00:00
Scant on details, sure, but hard to parse, not really.

The problem is folks this thread seemingly taking a interlocutory approach that can be summarized as, "That which is not explicitly denied can be freely assumed to be true."

(Then throw on top of that, "Depending on how committed you are to your grandstanding, that which is explicitly denied can be conveniently ignored.")
by furyg3 | 2026-01-06 14:10:00+00:00
It isn't very complicated from a military law perspective. The chain of command (following orders) has a lot more weight on it than a given solder's interpretation of military, constitutional, or international law.

If you believe you are being a given an order that is illegal and refuse, you are essentially putting your head on the chopping block and hoping that a superior officer (who outranks the one giving you the order) later agrees with you. Recent events have involved the commander in chief issuing the orders directly, which means the 'appealing to a higher authority' exit is closed and barred shut for a solider refusing to follow orders.

That doesn't mean a soldier isn't morally obligated to refuse an unlawful / immoral order, just that they will also have to pay a price for keeping their conscience (maybe a future president will give them a pardon?). The inverse is also true, soliders who knowingly follow certain orders (war crimes) are likely to be punished if their side loses, they are captured, or the future decides their actions were indefensible.

A punishment for ignoring a command like "execute those POWs!" has a good chance of being overruled, but may not be. However an order to invade Canada from the President, even if there will be civilian casualties, must be followed. If the President's bosses (Congress/Judiciary) disagree with that order they have recourse.

Unfortunately the general trend which continues is for Congress to delegate their war making powers to the President without review, and for the Supreme Court to give extraordinary legal leeway when it comes to the legality of Presidential actions.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-06 14:10:11+00:00
Sure sounds like it:

> Our new national maps of who relocates and where they go after a flood show that most Americans who move from buyout areas stay local. However, we also found that the majority of them — including thousands across Harris, Brazoria, Fort Bend and Galveston counties — give up their home to someone else, either selling it or leaving a rental home, rather than taking a government buyout offer. That transfers the risk to a new resident, leaving the community still facing future costly risks.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-06 14:10:27+00:00
It's still a major expense. Reducing costs is good.

Higher capacity and faster charging doesn't have to actually mean more capacity and faster charging. It can mean smaller and lighter for the same capacity and charging speed. If you have a technology with 10x the energy density, you can build a car that goes 3000 miles on a charge, or you can build a car that goes 300 miles on a charge and has a battery only 10% the size/weight. (In practice a even a bit less than that, since the reduced size/weight will reduce how much energy you use per mile.)
by bluGill | 2026-01-06 14:10:44+00:00
> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories

It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off for other reasons)
by nextzck | 2026-01-06 14:10:59+00:00
Shit man my Pet Feeder setup a back door to my network.. ended up reverse engineering the entire tuya piece of shit just so I could keep the automatic feeder running.

Fucking everyone is spying. I started downloading and decrypting apps from the App Store. It’s a god damn nightmare. Random apps are storing keys in the keychain (thanks expo!) that never leave our apple account. They follow us forever. You can’t delete them. Well.. there’s one way but it involves backing up your phone, putting it in recovery mode, and restoring from backup.
by sandyarmstrong | 2026-01-06 14:11:09+00:00
The Verge's article here is the least compelling. They report it with the same confidence and style as their original article when the Reddit post first made waves.

I recommend reading https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax... instead. It offers better reasoning, and an honest reflection about how close they were to getting taken in by the original Reddit post.
by truth_behold | 2026-01-06 14:11:10+00:00
A bit more context for those interested in the implementation:

The core of PXG v3.0 treats the bitstream as a 2D topology. Traditional LZ-based methods rely on a sliding dictionary window (e.g., 128MB in Zstd), which works for local redundancy but fails to capture global spatial patterns in complex files like 3D vertex clouds or deep JSON hierarchies.

On Searchability: We achieve the ~0.04ms seek time by using an in-memory succinct data structure. Essentially, during the "Decomposition" phase, we build a bit-vector index that remains compressed. This allows us to perform Rank/Select operations directly on the tiles without decompressing the surrounding blocks.

The 13505 Grid: The grid resolution was chosen to optimize cache-locality on modern x86/ARM architectures. Each 4KB tile is designed to fit within the L1 cache during quantization, minimizing the I/O bottleneck that usually kills high-ratio compressors.

I’ve kept the demo strictly browser-side for the initial pass—I want people to see the byte-perfect reconstruction for themselves. I’m especially curious to see how the engine handles edge cases in your specific datasets.