MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by user34283 | 2026-01-03 11:24:57+00:00
I can only reproduce this by hovering the Windows icon with the mouse and having the finger on a character, in order to press it immediately after clicking. In that case most of the time the Start menu does not open at all, and sometimes it opens but does not have the letter.

When I use the Windows key to open the Start menu I cannot reproduce this, as eg. Win + E opens the Explorer instead of the Start menu.

It does not appear on my machine as if this could possibly happen when opening the Start menu during regular use. Can you reproduce this on your machine?
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-03 11:25:18+00:00
And I feel you're making the same category error that I was responding to, that is to say it may not be a rational/risk reward calculation, but people who indulge in a small bit of irrationality are having fun and people who indulge in large bits of irrationality significantly damaging their already damaged finances have a problem.

>Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game

I believe running the numbers was guaranteed never to pay out significantly because it was rigged, the lottery is just statistically against you.
Show HN: HackLens – A fast and clean Android/iOS Hacker News reader
by drop_dev | 2026-01-03 11:26:30+00:00
Hey everyone!

I built HackLens, a modern Android/IOS app for browsing Hacker News with a cleaner and smoother reading experience.

Why I built it
I love Hacker News, but wanted:

a cleaner reading experience

better topic discovery

modern UI

lightweight performance

So I built HackLens.

Key features

1. Clean, modern UI inspired by minimal reading apps

2. Fast browsing of Hacker News stories

3. AI-powered summaries to quickly grasp key points

4. Read full articles directly from the source

5. Trending stories (last 1h, 6h, or 24h)

6. Built-in search to find stories and topics

7. Topic discovery based on your interests and Get notified

8. Light & dark mode with adjustable font size

9. Bookmark stories to read later

10. Cross-device sync for bookmarks, topics, and preferences

Download
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.berranova....

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/hacklens-hacker-news-reader/id...

I’d love your feedback
If you have suggestions, find bugs, or want features, I’d genuinely appreciate it — I built HackLens to learn and improve.

Thanks for checking it out!
by BSTRhino | 2026-01-03 11:27:04+00:00
If you're asking why Easel is a new programming language and not an existing one, the biggest reason is that building our own programming language meant we could build multiplayer into the fabric of the programming language, making multiplayer 100% automatic. There is a big difference between 99% automatic and 100% automatic. When it's 100% automatic, you really can put it in the hands of a beginner programmer on their first day of coding and they can actually make a multiplayer game. Teenagers these days spend a lot of time playing online multiplayer games and we believe that give them a tool that lets them make them themselves is an attractive enough proposition for them to choose Easel over other choices.
by chronos00 | 2026-01-03 11:27:50+00:00
> the sum of the left two balances is minus five, and the sum of right three balances is 505.

Recheck your math the left two balances is actually 505.

5,000

-4,495

=====

0505

its (4,495) not (4,995)

So it all balances out, which is what accountant actually do but intstead of choosing any two disjoint sets. Specific nodes are grouped into either Assets or Liablities+Equity. Essentially group all the accounts with negative balances and all the accounts with positive balances into another set. Which in this case is 5008 and -5008.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-03 11:27:55+00:00
I believe that category was already handled by the comment I was responding to, which effectively said anyone who sneered at the lottery was like your brother without taking into account the subset of people I pointed to.

I'm not sure what percentage of people that talk about the lottery being a tax on stupidity do so because they have been personally traumatized by its effect on their family, or seen its effects on others, but I do believe it is the ones like your brother who seem to get most of the press.
Show HN: TikTask – schedule messages and automate follow-ups on Android
by johntalkstech | 2026-01-03 11:28:00+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the founder of TikTask. I launched it about 3 months ago.

TikTask started as a message scheduler, but I kept running into the same reality: people don’t just want “send later”, they want reliable follow-up routines for business and for daily life.

What TikTask is: a message scheduler + on-device automation app for Android. You schedule messages and routines, and the execution happens locally on your phone, not on my servers.

What “on-device automation” means (and why it matters):

On-device (TikTask): your phone executes the scheduled actions at the right time. No cloud worker sending messages, and no need to wire up official APIs for common personal workflows.

Official APIs: great for businesses at scale, but usually require a backend, verification/compliance, templates, and per-message costs, and they don’t fit many “personal phone” workflows.

Cloud automations: powerful, but your automation and often your content lives off-device, which can add cost and privacy considerations.

With on-device automation, the model is simple: private by design (your data stays on your phone) and cheap to operate (no per-message infrastructure), which is especially useful when you’re growing a small business and want to automate follow-ups without building a backend.

Use cases I built for:

Business: lead follow-ups, client reminders, appointment nudges, promo announcements

Daily life: birthdays, family reminders, recurring check-ins, routines you don’t want to forget

The hard part (and the part I’m proud of): reliability.
Android background limits and OEM battery managers can silently kill automations. A lot of the work went into a “System Monitor” style checklist that helps users enable the right settings so schedules actually run.

I’d love feedback from HN:

Does this positioning make sense, or does it confuse people (“message scheduler” vs “automation”)?

If you’ve built anything that depends on Android background execution, what reliability traps did you hit?

What would you want to see to trust a scheduler like this for business follow-ups?

If anyone wants to test premium/locked features and give blunt feedback, reply or DM and I’ll share a promo code.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-03 11:29:23+00:00
Americans are the most propagandized peoples on the planet. Those bullets can’t stop information, and there is a massive information war going on to keep the American people divided.

Those who could effectively field a real protest or uprising are either too busy trying to keep their credit cards from defaulting, or are living on the streets addicted to drugs. General strikes? Forget it, America doesn’t have the infrastructure in place (local food sources) to sustain such a thing…
by foldr | 2026-01-03 11:29:41+00:00
> how does one legally justify a was anyways

I see we’re now living in a world where many people genuinely don’t even remember the answer to this question.

Roughly, you can legally justify a war if (i) it’s in self defense or (ii) you get a UN Security Council resolution. That’s why GWB tried to get a security council resolution before going into Iraq, as the case for self defense was pretty shaky.

Is it common for actual wars to meet these legal requirements? No. But that’s just because wars are something that generally shouldn’t happen. It’s also not common for murders to meet the requirements on justifiable homicide.

Some of the discussion of the legality of the US invasion of Panama is relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
by ben_w | 2026-01-03 11:29:50+00:00
If you really care, ask a lawyer, not a tech forum.

I anticipate there will already be case law/prescident showing the shape of what is allowed/forbidden, and most of us won't know the legal jargon necessary to understand the answer.

Or answers, plural, because laws vary by jurisdiction.

Most of us here are likely to be worse at painting such boundaries than an LLM. LLMs can pass at least one of the bar exams, most of us probably cannot.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-03 11:29:58+00:00
> and it won't be the last

The current US administration seemed to prefer isolationism (at least up until today), and seems hellbent on destroying the US economy. If they're successful in their goals, this might very well be the last SA intervention from the US for a very long time. Maybe they're aware of this, and this is some sort of dead-cat bounce or whatnot.
by 2colours | 2026-01-03 11:30:06+00:00
It's a bit ironic that now we went down the static rabbit hole so much that we don't realize it's more the opposite: by adding more to your language and compiler to enforce static checks, you turn the compiler itself more and more into a runtime that you are just going to run ahead of time, according to a potentially vastly different set of rules compared to your real runtime. There is no reason why you couldn't do something like this by will but it's just not worth it after a certain point clearly.
by happymellon | 2026-01-03 11:30:38+00:00
If your Walmart training manual told all greeters to hit customers with sticks then they are liable because they trained employees to do bad things.

If you trained your AI on the persuasive skills of a death cult then you are responsible.

If the parking meter pulls out a chainsaw and kills someone then either the operator of the parking meter or the manufacturer is liable depending on whether the manufacturer waived responsibility of the parking meters actions *and* the operator accepted them. We wouldn't say the parking meter is liable, but we would ban chainsaw wielding parking meters as well.
by user34283 | 2026-01-03 11:31:33+00:00
After you typed a Search term, there is no menu button at the right on the same vertical row as the 'All / Apps / Documents' bar?

You can also launch that Settings page by running in powershell:

Start-Process "ms-settings:cortana-windowssearch"

Or just 'Settings' and in the left navigation 'Privacy & Security' -> 'Search'
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-03 11:32:27+00:00
The dollar is ascendant because the rest of the world is forced to use it for trading purposes, under threat of military incursions or other forms of massive civil undoing, courtesy of the American MIC.

And the point is, the American consumer market means less and less to a world that is sick and tired of the suffering the American people bring to it.

>two decades

Yes, that’s the point, the world is moving off the US Dollar as a global currency, and this is why America needs more endless, endless war, and its why we have endless, endless war. The rest of the world sees this all too clearly now.
by fuzztester | 2026-01-03 11:33:03+00:00
>But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)

Yeah, that trying to trick Indians into that thing (IIRC, it was also called Free Basics or something like, to sound attractive, prolly) became a big issue in India at the time, I remember, although I didn't delve deep into the matter. I think a group of leading Indian freedom activists took on FB in the media and petitioned the government, and it resulted in the whole scheme collapsing.
by deng | 2026-01-03 11:33:04+00:00
> NAT per se does not prevent an outside host from connecting to a host on your local network.

Yep, and a firewall per se does not prevent an outside host from connecting to a host on your local network. You can bang your head all day long, the side effect of a NAT is to only allow incoming traffic that refers to an established connection that was initiated from the local network. How is this different from a firewall that does

Allow established, related

Allow outbound

Deny inbound
by padjo | 2026-01-03 11:33:27+00:00
“The concern about whether or not it's right or wrong for the US to go and arrest Maduro depends largely on how one views the recent Venezuelan election results”

Again, no it doesn’t. It’s the unilateral extraterritorial interventionism that’s the problem. I have no time for Maduro or his administration.

And if you think this intervention is about protecting democracy I have a bridge to sell you.
by bschwindHN | 2026-01-03 11:34:13+00:00
> Other members of the group were quick to point out that sightings of ribbon fish in shallow water have historically been an omen of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, with one person even calling it a “doomsday fish.” But as it turns out, that legend concerns a very similar-looking cousin of the king-of-the-salmon: the oarfish.

So, not a doomsday fish. Still cool though.
by j1elo | 2026-01-03 11:34:16+00:00
Recent attacks on Ubisoft and Rainbow Six Siege have brought some interesting concern about the wisdom of having basically a kernel backdoor to the whole system installed and ready to be accessed in case of a company breach (not that this particular attack could allow that, but future scenarios might very well convert the user base into a botnet)

Not sure how much gamers with a modicum of awareness (already a minority) will care, but the risk is there. We could paraphrase that famous line to say that "The 'S' in 'Kernel anticheat' stands for Security".
by drysart | 2026-01-03 11:35:41+00:00
> However you look at it, the only real justification that’s consistent with observed behaviors is that pointing out security vulnerabilities in the development log helps attackers.

And on top of your other concerns, this quoted bit smells an awful lot like 'security through obscurity' to me.

The people we really need to worry about today, state actors, have plenty of manpower available to watch every commit going into the kernel and figure out which ones are correcting an exploitable flaw, and how; and they also have the resources to move quickly to take advantage of them before downstream distros finish their testing and integration of upstream changes into their kernels, and before responsible organizations finish their regression testing and let the kernel updates into their deployments -- especially given that the distro maintainers and sysadmins aren't going to be moving with any urgency to get a kernel containing a security-critical fix rolled out quickly because they don't know they need to because *nobody's warned them*.

Obscuring how fixes are impactful to security isn't a step to avoid helping the bad guys, because they don't need the help. Being loud and clear about them is to help the good guys; to allow them to fast-track (or even skip) testing and deploying fixes or to take more immediate mitigations like disabling vulnerable features pending tested fix rollouts.
Show HN: Stability First AI – Recovering memory without training data
by StabilityFirst | 2026-01-03 11:36:33+00:00
Hi HN, I'm researching the link between time and memory in neural dynamics.

This repo contains a proof-of-concept experiment ("The Lazarus Effect"):
1. I train a network until convergence.
2. I destabilize it (catastrophic forgetting).
3. I restore accuracy NOT by retraining on data, but by applying a stability operator to the recursive dynamics.

It suggests that memory can be treated as a stability parameter rather than just stored information. I'd love your feedback on the code and the approach.
by lukaslalinsky | 2026-01-03 11:36:42+00:00
Does your mother know how to install a device driver on Windows? None of the non-technical people I know can't fix anything on their computers.

I've been doing experiments over the last 10 or so years, I've been borrowing my Linux laptops to people, and to my surprise, they had absolutely no problem using it. Especially children, you just start using GNOME as if it's nothing. They are already used to different phones, different kinds of computers, it really makes no difference to them. Your mother is probably checking gmail, watching youtube, and maybe writing google docs, not much else.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-03 11:37:24+00:00
The first time I got paid to use rsync was nearly 25 years ago. It provided for reasonably space-efficient, remote, versioned backups of a mail server, using hard links.

That mail server used maildir, which...for those who are not familiar: With maildir, each email message is a separate file on the disk. Thus, there were a lot of folders that had many thousands of files in them. Plus hardlinks for daily/weekly/whatever versions of each of those files.

At the time there were those who were very vocal about their opinion of using maildir in this kind of capacity, as it likened to abuse of the filesystem. And if that was stupid, then my use of hard links certainly multiplied that stupidity.

Perhaps I was simply not very smart at that time.

But it was actually fun to fit that together, and it was kind of amazing to watch rsync perform this job both automatically and without complaint between a pair of particularly not-fast (256kbps?) DOCSIS connections from Roadrunner.

It worked fine. Whenever I needed to go back in time for some reason, the information was reliably present at the other end with adequate granularity -- with just a couple of cron jobs, rsync, and maybe a little bit of bash script to automate it all.
by regularfry | 2026-01-03 11:37:40+00:00
I patented something that had a countermeasure for this, which was a bit impractical but fun to think about. Basically you put the sensitive data in an eeprom layered with a chemical that emits UV when exposed to air or, optionally, visible light - chemically more entertaining, hard to manufacture. But it's a just an arms race at that point.
by JayHLee77 | 2026-01-03 11:38:06+00:00
Security is an essential feature for everyone, not just Enterprise. Can you trust the code your device is running? Can your device keep a secret? These capabilities are needed universally.

As to students being able to set the efuse so the device can't be reprogrammed, sure but they're $5 each so it's not like they're destroying a $500 Chromebook (which they do, look on YouTube). That risk is the cost of attempting to educate though (and it's worth it).
by jasode | 2026-01-03 11:39:09+00:00
Whitelisting doesn't work if one doesn't know the email domain name the service will use.

An Amazon verification email will be sent from "account-update@amazon.com". It's intuitive to predict "@amazon.com" so whitelisting works.

However, State Farm Insurance login verification codes are actually sent from "noreply@sfauthentication.com" instead of the "@statefarm.com"
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-03 11:39:50+00:00
FWIW, when the C compiler has access to the qsort implementation body and the comparer function like the C++ compiler has, it will also stamp out a specialized version that will in most cases be identical with the C++ compiler output for std::sort (assuming it implements the same sorting algorithm as C's qsort).

That whole 'zero cost abstraction' idea is not unique to C++ since all the important work to make the 'zero cost thing' happen is performed down in the optimizer passes, and those are identical between C and C++.
by 7bit | 2026-01-03 11:40:00+00:00
> mostly striking military targets

You are ok with Trump invading a neighbour country, kidnapping a person while accepting some civilian casualties?

I wonder what you would think if Canada would invade the USA and kidnapping Trump and other criminals.

This strike was not sanctioned by Venezuela. They are sovereign and they have the right to deal with their affairs in their own way. The USA -- as so often in history -- are playing judge, jury and executioner in foreign countries. They violated international law. The fact that you want to celebrate this says a lot about your attitude towards sovereignty , due process and human life.
by belorn | 2026-01-03 11:40:09+00:00
Practically every single device or program that is connected in that ipv4 network will have a built in tunnel into the garden, with nat traversal being standard practice for everything. Your fridge, car, door lock, light fixture, all the applications on the phone, everything can and likely is a whole into the garden where someone can get full access. There are quite a few companies who has lost millions because they assumed that the garden was safe from threats within.
by gwd | 2026-01-03 11:40:57+00:00
It's not clear to me what the target audience of this article is. It seems to assume everyone knows what greylisting and greytrapping are; but surely the people who know what those terms mean without explanation are already convinced?

I picked up from context the general idea behind "greylisting", although I'm sure there's a lot of details that aren't covered. (How do you chose what domain gets greylisted? How often, how long?). But what "greytrapping" is, I can't guess, even after reading the entirety of two of his articles.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-03 11:41:05+00:00
Actually, it is very common - the DAW is usually used as the master clock to external devices such as drum machines, sequencers and synths with onboard arpeggiators/sequencers, and the DAW is itself commonly synced to the high end clocks in a decent quality audio interface, which do not have as much jitter these days as most folks seem to think. Even in the 90’s, this was a feature of many audio interface and DAW rigs. Bangalter was not known for having cheap gear.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-03 11:41:08+00:00
It's not that simple at all. For one thing, having a v6 network doesn't mean you can't have a v4 network. You can run v4 in exactly the same way you currently do, with exactly the same software, and it'll work no worse than it already does.

But for another, the v4 space is available as a subset of the v6 space:

$ ping 64:ff9b::8.8.8.8
PING 64:ff9b::8.8.8.8(64:ff9b::808:808) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64:ff9b::808:808: icmp_seq=1 ttl=113 time=9.82 ms

That's from a machine on a network with no v4, and it works fine. I can reach v4-only sites from it too. I could even do this using v4 addresses if I wanted, but if I showed you the output from that you'd just claim I was using v4.
by yakalmar2048 | 2026-01-03 11:41:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I built AI Celebrity Models, an open-source collection of structured JSON knowledge bases created from podcasts, interviews, and public discussions of well-known personalities.

Instead of fine-tuning models, the idea is to use structured data + prompting to reproduce a person’s reasoning style, worldview, and communication patterns.

You load a JSON file, paste a short instruction prompt, and the AI responds using that mindset.

The project is still early, but everything already works.
I’d really appreciate feedback on:

whether this approach makes sense

potential use cases

obvious flaws or improvements

GitHub: https://github.com/FlDanyT/ai-celebrity-models

Thanks for taking a look.
by jama211 | 2026-01-03 11:42:03+00:00
I dislike windows 11 also and mostly use a mac these days and my gaming pc is dual booted with arch… but windows 10 and windows 11 for me are so very similar that I’m confused about the outrage between them. In both situations I turned off all the crap that was awful like the bloatware and so on, and then it’s kinda the same experience after that.
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-03 11:42:36+00:00
True, but once a capture needs to survive the parent function scope you'll need to store it somewhere, either via a std::function object which has opaque rules on whether a heap allocation happens or via your own std::function implementation where you define the heap allocation rules but then will have to face discussions about why you're rewriting the stdlib ;)

Any C implementation of capturing lambdas has the same problem of course, that's why the whole idea doesn't really fit into the C language IMHO.