MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2026-01-31 18:41:22+00:00
I still recommend Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors as a refutation, describing why all of these precautions cannot protect you in a real-world security model: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

Unbreakable phones are coming. We’ll have to decide who controls the cockpit: The captain? Or the cabin?
by bitwize | 2026-01-31 18:41:23+00:00
Score a GE TermiNet 30 or similar teletypewriting terminal off eBay, hook it to your PC via USB-to-RS232, and Bob's your uncle. You can even do a getty to it, log in, and run shell commands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ul-f3hPJQM
by bombela | 2026-01-31 18:41:25+00:00
Immich is genuinely good.

I run it on a credit sized intel N100 board with a few spinning disks. There was nothing to do, it all just worked right away.

Everything is fast and smooth. The AI indexing and search just work™ and it is faster than google photo ever was. And there is no censorship on the AI search terms.

I also like that I can configure the filesystem hierarchy I prefer.
Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies
by andylizf | 2026-01-31 18:41:36+00:00
My Google account has been suspended from GCP since March 2024.

I have submitted multiple appeals through ts-consult@google.com over 2 years. Every time I get the same automated template asking me to explain, I reply with details, then nothing. No human ever responds.

Case: #1-8622000037271

Timeline:
- March 2024: Suspended, appeal submitted
- April 2024: Automated requests for info, I replied
- Nov 2024: More automated emails, I replied again
- Dec 2024 - now: Complete silence

I am a CS researcher at UC Berkeley. This has seriously impacted my work.

Has anyone successfully gotten Google to review a GCP suspension appeal? How do you reach a human?
by stevenjgarner | 2026-01-31 18:41:48+00:00
It is often argued that the US will grow its economy such that the debt is less significant. There is much confusion between the US debt being cited as a ratio of GDP (common among economists) vs net tangible assets (common among businesses and people). For example, after WWII, the U.S. faced its previous record debt-to-GDP ratio—roughly 106% in 1946. By 1974, that ratio had plummeted to just 23% largely through:

a) massive GDP growth with real consumption rising 22% between 1944 and 1947.

b) fiscal discipline where the U.S. actually ran primary budget surpluses in the late 1940s

c) financial repression with the Federal Reserve capping interest rates at around 2.5% while inflation averaged 6.5%. This meant the government was paying back debt with "cheaper" dollars, effectively "inflating away" the debt at the expense of bondholders.

Fast forward to today, there is an often stated belief that the US will grow the economy again, this time with a dramatic expansion into a space economy including orbiting data centers, solar power plants, asteroid mining, space manufacture - all leveraged with robotics and AI. Let's be generous and assume this actual happens and that it happens soon - what mandate is there that this massive space economy will be denominated in US dollars or even be part of the US economy? SpaceX has already launched numerous satellites for foreign countries. What is to stop them launching a space economy that will be owned under a "Flag of Convenience" from an offshore tax-free zone, perhaps even denominated in crypto? Will we then confront this massive off-planet economy with "space-tariffs" in order to import the value-added component back into the US? The U.S. debt can only be "grown away" if the value-added activities (mining, manufacturing, computing) remain registered in the U.S..
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-31 18:42:14+00:00
Hardware acceleration requires your device to have the requisite hardware support. Unlike AVC or HEVC, hardware support for AV1 has been quite limited and only recently has seen a slow uptick (for example, Intel CPUs now offer AV1 hardware decoding). Not sure if Apple supports it yet though. But yeah, if it requires special hardware support to be "smooth", in my mind, it is clearly inferior to its competitor codecs that work fine with software decoding (i.e. running on the CPU).
Show HN: Ctxbin – A deterministic CLI for reliable AI agent handoffs
by superlucky84 | 2026-01-31 18:42:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ctxbin, a minimal CLI that lets AI agents reliably save and load shared context using branch-scoped keys inferred from git.

The problem I kept hitting was that handoffs between AI agents (or even between sessions) were fragile and non-repeatable. ctxbin solves this by storing structured context, agents, and skills in Upstash Redis with deterministic keys.

Key ideas:
- Branch-scoped context ({repo}/{branch} inferred automatically)
- Explicit save/load semantics (no hidden state)
- Reusable agents and skills (string, directory bundles, or GitHub refs)
- Designed for agent-to-agent handoff, not humans

It works well with tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, or any AI agent workflow.
Feedback very welcome.

Docs: https://superlucky84.github.io/ctxbin/
by mceachen | 2026-01-31 18:42:32+00:00
I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax Google Takeouts into working: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/

FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic to live with): https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js
by bobjordan | 2026-01-31 18:42:36+00:00
Not yet, but I can tell you that producing "good" code is another layer altogether. I have custom linters, code standardization docs, custom prompts, strictly enforced test architecture (enforced by the custom linters in pre-commit hooks which run before an agent tries to commit). Ultimately, it's a lot of work to get all the agents with a limited context writing code in the way you want. In the main large complex project I am generally working on now, I have hand-held and struggled for over a year getting it all setup the way I need it. So I can't say its been a weekend setup for me. It's been a long arduous process to get where I am now in my 2-3 main repos that I work on. However, the workflow I just shared above, can help people get there a lot faster.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-31 18:43:21+00:00
You’ve agreed this isn’t revenge porn. The case for moderation must stand or fall under the correct classification.

Harm has not been demonstrated. Annoyance or offense is not injury, and discomfort is not exploitation. Without evidence of systematic, material harm -- and without showing that enforcement would not introduce greater error and speech suppression -- the justification for moderation fails. Vague claims of illegality are irrelevant. A non-explicit image edit is not criminal in any US jurisdiction absent additional elements such as explicit sexual content, fraud, extortion, or targeted harassment; invoking “illegal in some states” -- without naming conduct and statute -- is just noise.

"Put them in a bikini" is closer to low-effort mockery than to any recognized category of sexual harm. The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.
by majormajor | 2026-01-31 18:43:23+00:00
"it's nothing new and it's a lot of scams and garbage, but it's just bigger than before, but I still think there will be something transformative there eventually"

Seems like a Rorschach test. If you think this sort of thing is gonna change the world in a good way: here's evidence of it getting to scale. If you think it's gonna be scams, garbage, and destruction: here's evidence of that.
by ta9000 | 2026-01-31 18:43:29+00:00
Americans are absolutely not a fan of this administration and it will be severely neutered after the midterms. The Supreme Court is already doing some of that.

Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California, Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
by drdaeman | 2026-01-31 18:44:02+00:00
How do they even define “social media”? Do they just ban kids from participating in society using electronic communications? Or maintain a stoplist “here’s what we consider to be social media”? Or what?

I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called “social media” is crapware. I do get the intent.

But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly have.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2026-01-31 18:44:30+00:00
You can enable Advanced Data Protection to address that issue with iMessages.

Giving users an option between both paths is usually best. Most users care a lot more that they can’t restore a usable backup of their messages than they do that their messages are unreadable by the company storing them.

I used to work at a company where our products were built around encryption. Users here on HN are not the norm. You can’t trust that most users will save recovery codes, encryption seed phrases, etc in a manner that will be both available and usable when they need them, and then they tend to care a lot less about the privacy properties that provides and a lot more that they no longer have their messages with {deceased spouse, best friend, business partner, etc}.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-31 18:44:52+00:00
Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy.

Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions.

The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have one and good to destroy the concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
by Frost1x | 2026-01-31 18:45:28+00:00
We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.

But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.
by fakedang | 2026-01-31 18:45:43+00:00
LoL, the Mubadala and ADIA funds are the most corrupt of them all. There's obviously the stuff that happens over the table, but there's a shit ton that happens under the table. This doesn't translate into VC and the startup world directly, but indirectly as they follow a fund of funds model with VC investing, and those VC funds don't tend to do their due diligence.

I have yet to see one direct startup investment from Mubadala do well. Compare that to a regional fund like BECO or Wamda (both composed of ex founders).
by aaravchen | 2026-01-31 18:46:03+00:00
Actually you can double tap the home button on your remote to see all apps currently running, and can then click the close button on any one of them.

Google TV apps leak memory like a sieve, so it's pretty common to need to manually close all other apps to make the one you're trying to use work. Even !y wife just dies of now as soon as any one of the apps starts acting up.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-01-31 18:46:08+00:00
I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is just a fundamental misconception on your part.

> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet

As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.

The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually).
The worst it does to children is the attention algorithm that captures practically everybody.
by wildzzz | 2026-01-31 18:46:14+00:00
I spent about 15 minutes trying to determine where this photo was taken. The focal length used really obscures how far away the plane and the building behind it actually are. Eventually I figured it out based on the snippet of taxiway you can see touching the runway and verified it against your LinkedIn.

I used to have an office slightly offset from the final approach path of the local airport with a window that gave an amazing view. I'd leave my airband scanner on as background noise while I worked in a very quiet, mid-covid office.
by wefzyn | 2026-01-31 18:46:15+00:00
Very good idea and very interesting. Great use of AI. The next step in this project, if you were funded, would be to have human experts double check the accuracy of the information and images.

Since this isn't funded, you could have a frontier model evaluate all the information for inaccuracies and fix them it can't find any. Then have another frontier model do the same. Then go back to the first model and see if it finds any inaccuracies.

Keep at it. You are doing a great job, but there is more work to be done before you can productionize it.
by blm126 | 2026-01-31 18:46:42+00:00
For desktop usage, I would be absolutely shocked if ext4 isn't the most common filesystem by a pretty wide margin. Its the default on Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint. Those are the 3 leading desktop distros.

No one is going to write a blog post titled "Why I just used the default filesystem in the installer" but that is what most people do. Things like btrfs and zfs are useful, complicated technologies that are fun to write about, fun to read about, and fun to experiment with. I'd be careful about assuming that leads to more general use, though. Its a lot like Guix and NixOS, in fact. They get all the attention in a forum like this. Ubuntu is what gets all the people, though.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-31 18:47:12+00:00
>>That's when a huge bubble will collapse.

Maybe there will be a "huge bubble" in the future but it doesn't look that huge right now.
Forward P/E for S&P500 is about 22. That is 4.5% yearly return even if there is no growth beyond 2026. This is also real growth as earnings raise with inflation so nominal expected return is about 7% even if there is 0 growth beyond 2026.

Meanwhile risk-free rate (basically short term government bonds) is around 3.5% per year right now (nominal).
That 7% is quite pessimistic as some "net growth" (growth - costs of generating it) is expected beyond 2026 and you can only get 3.5% "risk-free" I am not sure why people call current valuations crazy or what their expectations for "fair valuations" are. Equity risk premium seems to be still above 4%. Maybe that's on the low side but far away from bubble territory, let alone "a huge bubble".
Show HN: Agent Tinman – Autonomous failure discovery for LLM systems
by oliveskin | 2026-01-31 18:47:22+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Tinman because finding LLM failures in production is a pain in the ass. Traditional testing checks what you've already thought of. Tinman tries to find what you haven't.

It's an autonomous research agent that:
- Generates hypotheses about potential failure modes
- Designs and runs experiments to test them
- Classifies failures (reasoning errors, tool use, context issues, etc.)
- Proposes interventions and validates them via simulation

The core loop runs continuously. Each cycle informs the next.

Why now: With tools like OpenClaw/ClawdBot giving agents real system access, the failure surface is way bigger than "bad chatbot response." Tinman has a gateway adapter that connects to OpenClaw's WebSocket stream for real-time analysis as requests flow through.

Three modes:
- LAB: unrestricted research against dev
- SHADOW: observe production, flag issues
- PRODUCTION: human approval required

Tech:
- Python, async throughout
- Extensible GatewayAdapter ABC for any proxy/gateway
- Memory graph for tracking what was known when
- Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, Groq, OpenRouter, Together

pip install AgentTinman
tinman init && tinman tui

GitHub: https://github.com/oliveskin/Agent-Tinman
Docs: https://oliveskin.github.io/Agent-Tinman/
OpenClaw adapter: https://github.com/oliveskin/tinman-openclaw-eval

Apache 2.0. No telemetry, no paid tier. Feedback and contributions welcome.
by V99 | 2026-01-31 18:47:27+00:00
When all you have is AI everything looks like a model, but this is trivially done with basic text parsing...

This info is in the automated weather broadcast (ATIS) audio for any towered airport.

Most large airports provide a textual version (D-ATIS), so suitably equipped pilots don't have to listen to it and scribble it down.

E.g. Heathrow now from random unofficial website: https://atis.guru/atis/EGLL

EGLL ARR ATIS T 1820Z
LANDING RWY 27L…

EGLL DEP ATIS U 1427Z PILOTS ARE EXPECTED TO CHANGE TO RWY 27R AT AT 15:00 HOURS… DEPARTURE RWY 27L…
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-31 18:47:28+00:00
Just today I wanted to get a list of locations of various art events around the city which are all located on the same website, but which does not provide a page with all events happening this month on a map. I need a single map to figure out what I want to visit based on distance I have to travel, unfortunately that's not an option - only option is to go through hundreds of items and hope whatever I picked is near me.

Do you think this is such a horrible thing to scrape? I can't do it manually since there are few hundred locations. I could write some python script which uses playwrite to scrape things using my desktop browser in order to avoid CloudFlare. Or, which I am much more familiar with, I could write a python script that uses BeautifulSoup to extract all the relevant locations once for me. I would have been perfectly happy fetching 1 page/sec or even 1 page/2 seconds and would still be done within 20 minutes if only there was no anti-scraping protection.

Scraping is a perfectly legal activity, after all. Except thanks to overly-eager scraping bots and clueless/malicious people who run them there's very little chance for anyone trying to compete with Google or even do small scale scraping to make their life and life of local art enthusiasts easier. Google owns search. Google IS search and no competition is allowed, it seems.
by dragoncrab | 2026-01-31 18:47:36+00:00
I think the heat dissipation relative to volume of the ISS is way lower than these satellites, yet that already needs sizable thermal radiators to cool:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/150004

GPUs are also very power hungry, I need about 2 square meter of solar panels on my room to feed a single RTX 5090 during summer. How many do you want to send up in a single satellite?

What about the data link? Real world Starlink speeds are capping around 300 Mbps. I understand that is a shared link with plenty of peers but what is a realistic bandwidth between these satellites and some fixed, earth receiving stations?
by gruez | 2026-01-31 18:47:54+00:00
>And if ever that comes to light, precisely nobody will be surprised.

The amount of ambient cynicism on the internet basically makes this a meaningless statement. You could plausibly make the same claim for tons of other conspiracy theories, eg. JFK was assassinated by the CIA/FBI, Bush did 9/11, covid was intentionally engineered by the chinese/US government, etc.
by giant_loser | 2026-01-31 18:48:15+00:00
So a high latency connection that is also susceptible to atmospheric effects and run by a madman is okay?

I am still on DSL because there is no fiber or 5g internet here yet*. And I live on the edge of an area with 500k people. DSL is good enough for 4k streaming video and anything else I need and costs me $65.

Why on earth would I want to make things worse by using starlink?

Of course, if I lived 50 miles from a gas station, that is different. But living rural has many risks and downsides that the people out there accept.

*This is the real issue. If corporations had to put its customers(and employees) on the same level as shareholders(very few actually benefit the corporation directly because they don't buy stock directly from the company) a lot of problems would be solved. Or, if companies realized that taking care of the customer and employees first means that everything else will follow.
by out_of_protocol | 2026-01-31 18:48:49+00:00
1. It's VERY common, sometimes pretending to be a .gif file. Many major image hosters are serving .webm even if users upload gif files.

2. AVIF is not a codec but a container. Webm also can contain AV1 video (but usually contains VP9). Also, difference between VP9 and AV1 is not that huge to be noticable on small gif-like animated pictures
by __turbobrew__ | 2026-01-31 18:49:12+00:00
I have been trying to upstream patches to kubernetes and etcd for about a year and ended up giving up. It is impossible to get someone from the project to review my PRs, and since I cannot get PRs under my belt I can not become a maintainer either.

My suspicion is that you get ghosted if you don’t have a @google or @redhat email address and really the only way to become a contributor is to be buddies with someone who works on the project already.

I have considered going to one of the CNCF committee meetings and being like, hey you guys are not accepting new contributions which goes against your mandate. But in the end I just maintain local patches that don’t get upstreamed which is easier.
Show HN: Rechain – A daily word puzzle about semantic bridges
by dammdanyal | 2026-01-31 18:49:12+00:00
Hi HN! I built Rechain (https://rechain.me), a daily word puzzle where you connect two seemingly unrelated words through a chain of logical associations.
Example: OCEAN → WAVE → HEAT → GLASS. Each word relates to the one before it (ocean wave, heat wave, heat + glass = melting, etc.).
Stack: React, Firebase, Gemini API for puzzle generation, Vercel hosting. No login required—you can play anonymously and optionally sign in to preserve stats.
Why I built it: I wanted a word game that felt more like solving a logic puzzle than a vocabulary test. The challenge isn't knowing obscure words—it's finding the conceptual path between two ideas.
Looking for feedback on:

Puzzle difficulty curve (too easy? frustrating?)
Mobile UX
The "reveal letter" hint system—useful or too hand-holdy?

This is a solo side project and I'm iterating quickly based on feedback. Code isn't open source yet but happy to discuss the architecture.
by bombela | 2026-01-31 18:49:27+00:00
For what is worth, google takeout can export in 50GB tgz.

Downloading the takeout files is miserable through, the download link is only valid when being downloaded via human interaction in a web browser.

There is a silly trick. Start the download, pause it. Get the cookies from the page (only need to do that once for the session). Then copy the download link. Now you can curl on your server. When the file is downloaded, you can then cancel the download in your web browser. And do the same for the next file. One at a time.

Warning: google will cancel downloads if you run more than one or two at a time. After 3 download (failed or not) of a file google will delete the whole takeout.

The amount of engineering they must have deployed to purposefully crimple takeout with plausible deniability must be significant.
by eddyg | 2026-01-31 18:50:14+00:00
Krstić: “Here’s how we reduce the chance that even Apple can access or alter X, and here’s how we can make that credible.”

Ross: “Even if you make X cryptographically airtight, the real fight becomes political/physical coercion: ‘ship this or else.’”

Those can both be true at the same time.