MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buildfocus | 2026-01-24 19:55:32+00:00
> Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-24 19:55:43+00:00
> Isn't it ironic that many world cultures wear garments that Westerners mock and belittle as feminine "dresses"? I mean, even kilts for Scotsmen?

Especially when Eastern and Balkan Europeans were wearing similar clothes barely 60-70 years ago.

Doesn't matter - now they want an FTA [0] and Defense Pact [1] with those same non-western countries, and solicit non-western funding for infrastructure [2] and defense [3].

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/india-...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...

[2] - https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-...

[3] - https://geetha.mil.gr/kyklos-synomilion-staff-talks-kai-ypog...
by numitus | 2026-01-24 19:55:53+00:00
Incorrect analogy. Bridge construction is a clearly algorithmic process. All bridges resemble each other, and from an engineering perspective, designing one is not rocket science. Construction itself is a set of well-studied steps that can be easily calculated. If I were to write my operating system 100 times, I could give an estimate accurate to within 10%, but every task I’ve ever done in life is unique, and I have nothing to compare it to except intuitive judgments. Returning to bridges: there is 1% of projects that are unique, and their design can take decades, while construction might not even begin
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-24 19:56:02+00:00
First: very nice project, kudos!

But:

> It’s way more efficient, I ran a benchmark rendering 10k rectangles on a canvas and the difference was huge: Emscripten hit around 40 FPS, while my setup hit 100 FPS.

This sounds a bit suspicious tbh.

For instance in this Emscripten WebGL2 sample I can move the instance slider to about 25000 before the frame rate drops below 120 fps on my M1 Mac in Chrome:

https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/drawcallperf-sapp.html

Each 'instance' is doing one glUniform4iv and one glDrawElements calls via Emscripten's regular WebGL2 shim, e.g. 50k calls across the WASM/JS boundary, and I'm pretty sure the bulk of the execution time is inside WebGL2 and the actual call overhead from WASM to JS is negligible (also see: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-a... - e.g. wasm-to-js call overhead is in the nanoseconds area).

Still, pretty cool idea to have this command batching, but I doubt that the performance improvement can be explained with the WASM-JS call overhead alone, there must be something else going on.
by slg | 2026-01-24 19:56:33+00:00
If you're not doing anything about this, you're ignoring it. I don't say this as an insult. I say it as a wakeup call. I'm right there with you, only maybe a few degrees closer to not ignoring it. I have been to protests. I have been tear-gassed and seen people within a few yards of me bloodied up by the authorities, but in comparison to this man that is now dead, I have been ignoring this. For those of us that see that this is wrong, we all need to do more, for your children and mine.
by 9rx | 2026-01-24 19:56:55+00:00
It is, rather, that managing a manager is like training a dog. As in, if you take a day off later in the week after feeling slighted, the manager will never realize that your absenteeism is a result of what they did and not just some other random life event that came your way, such as becoming sick. Much like training a dog, it posits that you need to give the feedback immediately in order for the association to become recognizable by the manager.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-24 19:57:01+00:00
I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe.

The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.
by 6510 | 2026-01-24 19:57:36+00:00
The discussion is actually more funny than it would seem. Corn existed long before humans. We aren't required for growing corn, the corn grows all by it self. It's like saying I grow your hair after serving you a cup of your favorite tea. We do know what people refer to when they say they are growing corn. When AI grows the corn we also know what is referred to.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-24 19:58:05+00:00
I am rooting for Europe. Even after the current administration ends its term, USA is going to continue to be an oligarchy (thanks to Citizens United [1] and also because of people like Elon Musk buying elections). EU certainly makes some dumb decisions (such as the cookie popup now universal on all websites) but for the most part EU will be democratic for the foreseeable future. I am looking forward to European products such as BirdyChat that will prioritize citizens' needs over oligarchs'. EU will be the shining city on the hill that the USA used to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-24 19:58:05+00:00
> same as I am atheist and know the Bible better than all but about 3 so-called christians I've met in 6 decades. Know your enemy.

I missed this the first time around. The fact that you see Christians as enemies (your words btw) is quite telling about this entire interaction/conversation we've had.

I honestly think that if you haven't learned why this attitude of your is a problem at almost 60 years old, I don't think you ever will.

I won't be responding to you again on any topic.
by colbyn | 2026-01-24 19:58:31+00:00
A while ago I figured out how to extend my native TextKit 2 based markdown renderer to support full blown markdown tables with full text selection support. At the time this was quite novel.

I'm now working on a fresh rewrite with iOS support... But as someone who's wasted a lot of time on side projects, could this be profitable?

I almost had a sponsor but he ghosted me. Since then other libraries and commercial apps like ChatGPT and Grok have improved their markdown UI/UX.

I'm thinking about abandoning this endeavor. However it feels wasteful to just drop this and all the experience I accumulated in the meantime. Moreover this proof of concept prototype is still superior in a few ways, notably with regard to text selection and typesetting.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-24 19:58:32+00:00
To offer a counter-point:

I come here -because- this is the one bit of social media where I still am able to interact with the folks who are infavor of this.

Consider that HN doesn't "suck" for this, it's just a place where it's easy to see the very real authoritarian bend of comfortable professionals who are smart but also in favor of, say, summary execution of people for protesting. I find it useful for gauging the political weather.
by testdelacc1 | 2026-01-24 19:59:29+00:00
It is what it is, I accept that’s where the industry is heading.

But if I have to produce reams of code I’d much rather have it be reviewed by rustc than clang. rustc may take longer to satisfy, but it’ll be worth it because I won’t be responsible for horrors in production.

You’re happy to be responsible for buffer overflows written by an LLM? I’m not, which is why I prefer a language where it’s not possible.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-24 19:59:37+00:00
Interesting. It appears this doesn't use AI itself (though it's probably vibe coded). Figma in dev mode already gives react components and css styles [1] and this seems like a more automated way to pull that functionality. It's unfortunate figma paywalls dev mode and this might be a good way to work around the limitation.

1: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/15023124644247-Guid...
by Freedom2 | 2026-01-24 19:59:39+00:00
I agree we should generally accommodate as many people as possible for the greater good of our communities, regardless of how we may feel at the time.

What is your view when they don't extend the same courtesy? We convince them to vaccinate to protect those who cannot be vaccinated, however they still dig their heels in the "got mine, forget you" mentality until it affects them personally? (Abortion rights, school lunches, walkable neighborhoods, food shelters and donation centers)
by TZubiri | 2026-01-24 20:00:02+00:00
I can confirm that you don't know.

I can count 3 mistakes here:

1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)

2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.

3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.
by richardhawthorn | 2026-01-24 20:00:11+00:00
We switched to a matrix partly for price, partly for improved reliability.

Regular RGB LEDs are a lot cheaper than the WS2812, around 6x cheaper when we made the decision to switch, which adds up when you have 768 of them.

WS2812 LEDs are much easier to route, but if one dies then every LED routed after that one stops lighting up.
by godelski | 2026-01-24 20:01:20+00:00
Two things can be true at the same time. It's not just China. Russia does it. So does Israel, many countries, as well as many institutions in the US, both public and private.

It's no secret they do this, they openly discuss it. The things they want can differ but they want to convince you of things. That's obvious.

What makes the game easy for political adversaries (both foreign and domestic) is they don't need to convince the public of a certain thing, they just drive contention. What many people call "engagement". You can see this in 2016 with Russia doing things like forming Facebook groups to spur on protests along with groups to organize counter protests to the protest they helped create. They're not trying to make you pro Russia or pro communist so much as just cause America to be chaotic, ensuring people care less when they do things like invade Ukraine. You also see it in the current administration which, developing the belief in a deep state and saying crazy things left and right so that nothing is to be believed and you're constantly distracted. While we're all talking about Greenland we're not talking about Epstein. Every week it's something new. Even Bannon discussed this strategy early on: throw a million things at them and they'll only be able to focus on a few. It's no surprise this creates chaos and confusion. We argue about the things not being discussed as if it's hidden information rather than logistic overload but there's also not a meaningful difference
Ask HN: Rust and AI builders interested in local-first, multi-agent systems?
by cajazzer | 2026-01-24 20:01:30+00:00
I’m a founder exploring a local-first personal AI system built around multi-agent architecture and on-device intelligence.

This is not a cloud chatbot or a hosted-LLM wrapper. The focus is on building an assistant that lives with the user — understands personal context, reasons over local data, and can act autonomously without exporting private information off the device.

I’m interested in connecting with senior engineers who enjoy building AI systems in Rust, think in terms of orchestration and state, and care deeply about correctness, performance, and privacy.

San Francisco Bay Area preferred, as I believe early in-person collaboration matters.

Posting anonymously for privacy reasons — happy to share more in 1:1 conversations.

— Founder, SF Bay Area
Contact: localai-founder@proton.me
by akersten | 2026-01-24 20:01:34+00:00
The most confusing part of terraform for me is that terraform's view of the infrastructure is a singleton config file that is often stored in that very infrastructure. And then you have to share that somehow with your team and be very careful that no one gets it out of sync.

Why don't cloud providers have a nice way for tools like TF to query the current state of the infra? Maybe they do and I'm doing IaC wrong?
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 20:02:13+00:00
What about the trillions of dangerous and live viruses that are cultured in order to make vaccines in the first place? Would those be harmful if they escaped into the wild? Or what about if they were ... deliberately released somehow?

Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?
by kelnos | 2026-01-24 20:02:53+00:00
What's wrong with the name? "WhatsApp" sounds pretty dumb to me, too, but it's entrenched in the social consciousness, so we don't really think about it.

(The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)
by noelwelsh | 2026-01-24 20:03:07+00:00
Here's Types and Programming Languages on union types. My take away is that the preferred terminology is union types for non-disjoint unions and sum types for disjoint unions.

"Sum and variant types are sometimes called disjoint unions. The type T1+T2 is
a “union” of T1 and T2 in the sense that its elements include all the elements
from T1 and T2. This union is disjoint because the sets of elements of T1 or
T2 are tagged with inl or inr,respectively, before they are combined, so that
it is always clear whether a given element of the union comes from T1 or T2.
The phrase union type is also used to refer to untagged (non-disjoint) union
types, described in §15.7." p142

"The dual notion of union types, T1 ∨ T2, also turns out to be quite useful.
Unlike sum and variant types (which, confusingly, are sometimes also called
“unions”), T1 ∨T2 denotes the ordinary union of the set of values belonging
to T1 and the set of values belonging to T2, with no added tag to identify the
origin of a given element." p207
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-24 20:03:34+00:00
Why is this a weak fallback?

Since we’re speaking anecdotally: I’ve also worked in service industry, and I have personally observed employers/managers abusing their power to elevate themselves at the expense of their employees. Does that make you reconsider? I would hazard to guess it doesn’t.

My point being that anecdotal evidence isn’t particularly useful.

> I’m not even sure it’s that common in most modern workplaces.

I don’t know what to tell you honestly. This is an incredibly naive take

Edit:

I feel I’ve been uncharitable in responding to you. I think we are likely talking past each other and what an “extractive” relationship is. I don’t think people are malicious. Most people (IMO) are essentially good and maliciousness is relatively rare. That said, if you work for an employer, you will always be resisting pressure from above to do more work for less pay. Maybe you’re lucky and you have an excellent middle manager (I have had some) who are skilled at preventing shit from rolling downhill. The fact remains the pressure exists and eventually, someone breaks. Maybe they have a bad day, or fall into financial distress, or the economy sucks. It doesn’t really matter. The people who pay the highest cost are the people at closer to the bottom of that hierarchy.
by topherhaddad | 2026-01-24 20:03:39+00:00
Founder/CEO of Albedo here. We published a detailed write-up of our first VLEO satellite mission (Clarity-1) — including imagery, what worked, what broke, and learnings we're taking forward. Happy to answer questions.

https://albedo.com/post/clarity-1-what-worked-and-where-we-g...
by metalman | 2026-01-24 20:03:51+00:00
there is nothing in Greenland worth "overrunning", not to mention that there are vast untapped resources all across the northern reaches of our planet, siberia, mongolia, manitoba, ontario, quebec,nunivut, etc.
greenland is another distraction till the mid epstien files elections
and hey!, it's cold out there, dont get shot in the face.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-24 20:04:10+00:00
This only applies to spam which requires significant follow-up effort from the spammer to respond to potential victims; effectively just 419 "advance-fee" fraud scams.

For spam which only does not require manual effort on the other side, there is no reason to filter out potential victims and all the more reason to make it look as legit as possible to maximize conversion rates.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-24 20:04:52+00:00
I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other:

- The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W.

- The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT).

- The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B).

The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B. For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+. For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it.

If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more expensive. The 3A+ is still cheap (~$25) and available, with the downside of the higher power draw and larger form factor.

(disabling HDMI, LEDs, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc reduces power draw more. in testing, the 3A+ drew less power than the Zero 2 W with everything disabled. all of them draw ~0.1W when powered off)
by kelnos | 2026-01-24 20:05:19+00:00
You're confusing two different things, though I don't blame you for it, as it is confusing. "iMessage" is the OTT E2E-encrypted chat protocol. "Messages" note the lack of the leading "i" and trailing "s") is an iOS app that lets you send and receive messages using both the iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS protocols.

iMessage is not open, and Apple fights efforts by other companies (e.g. Beeper) to interoperate with it.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 20:05:28+00:00
Not a single mention of planning poker and story points?

They're not perfect (nothing is), but they're actually pretty good. Every task has to be completable within a sprint. If it's not, you break it down until you have a part that you expect is. Everyone has to unanimously agree on how many points a particular story (task) is worth. The process of coming to unanimous agreement is the difficult part, and where the real value lies. Someone says "3 points", and someone points out they haven't thought about how it will require X, Y, and Z. Someone else says "40 points" and they're asked to explain and it turns out they misunderstood the feature entirely. After somewhere from 2 to 20 minutes, everyone has tried to think about all the gotchas and all the ways it might be done more easily, and you come up with an estimate. History tells you how many points you usually deliver per sprint, and after a few months the team usually gets pretty accurate to within +/- 10% or so, since underestimation on one story gets balanced by overestimation on another.

It's not magic. It prevents you from estimating things longer than a sprint, because it assumes that's impossible. But it does ensure that you're constantly delivering value at a steady pace, and that you revisit the cost/benefit tradeoff of each new piece of work at every sprint, so you're not blindsided by everything being 10x or 20x slower than expected after 3 or 6 months.
by mmcnl | 2026-01-24 20:06:04+00:00
I don't get the fight against estimates. An estimate is an estimate. An estimate can be wrong. It likely is wrong, that's fine, it doesn't have to be perfect. There is a confidence interval. You can communicate that.

Very often something like "6-12 months" is a good enough estimate. I've worked in software a long time and I really don't get why many people think it's impossible to give such an estimate. Most of us are developing glorified CRUD apps, it's not rocket science. And even rocket science can be estimated to a usable degree.

Really you have no idea if feature X is going to take 1 day or 1 year?
by echelon | 2026-01-24 20:06:09+00:00
Every single one of these wasn't originally a problem until it became politicized.

Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.

Churches used to be food banks in the 80's, then "welfare" became political.

People got vaccinated until it became a political issue in the 2020s. Many of the elder anti-vaxxers remember getting vaccinated for Polio and how scary that was.
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-24 20:06:29+00:00
Yeah... 2W is just not that much energy.

Enough energy to run that thing for an entire year in under 1/2 a gallon of gasoline.

When you can pretty easily offset the entire yearly energy use by skipping a mow of your yard once, or even just driving slightly more conservatively for a few days... I'm not so worried about the power use.

In my region - it's about $3.50 in yearly power costs.
by 9rx | 2026-01-24 20:06:33+00:00
> And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field.

As was I. 10% loss is considered typical, but that amortizes to only ~4% and ~2% for two and five acre fields respectively. So you suggest that 2% is "terrible" and "pretty significant", but I say it is essentially imperceptible from normal field variability. If you pick a random five acre plot out in the middle of a 100 acre field, there is a decent chance that it will 2% or more below the field average too.
by chatmasta | 2026-01-24 20:06:37+00:00
I'd also like to know what "based in the EEA" means:

> For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.

Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?
by Retric | 2026-01-24 20:07:23+00:00
Never means the specifics are irrelevant, you’re making the sad argument on the worst possible case and the best one.

So why should customers entrust their data to the company? It’s a transactional relationship and the less you do the less reason someone has to pay you.

Further, our legal system is adversarial it assumes someone is going to defend you. Without that there’s effectively zero protection for individuals.
by mothballed | 2026-01-24 20:07:50+00:00
Watch this at the 5 secod mark[].

It looks like the agent that picked up the disarmed gun had his finger on it and ND'd the initial shot. He jolts his arm right as the first shot goes off. Then all the other officer panic and fire.

Edit: ND = negligent discharge

[] https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2015145197965881786
by altern8 | 2026-01-24 20:07:57+00:00
It just sounds—let's say—too playful.

Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.

That might just be me, not sure.