MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by newzino | 2026-01-31 23:24:27+00:00
I get the instinct to ban it, but I’m not convinced the evidence supports treating “social media” as a single public-health toxin.

1) The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny. That doesn’t mean “no one is harmed”; it means the “it’s wrecking a generation” story doesn’t fit the data very well.

2) “Social media” lumps together very different things:
- messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support
- infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay
People in this thread are mostly describing the second category (“attention media”). If that’s the problem, regulate that layer.

3) Blanket bans are easy to route around and may push kids to smaller/shadier apps with weaker controls. If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design:
- no targeted ads to minors
- default chronological/subscription feeds for minors
- disable autoplay/infinite scroll for minors by default
- limits on notifications (especially at night)
- transparency + researcher access to study effects
- device/school-hour phone restrictions (where enforcement is actually feasible)

If you want to “end the experiment,” change the rules of the lab (platform incentives + design), not prohibit the existence of teens talking online.
by lexandstuff | 2026-01-31 23:24:29+00:00
I'm a real user. I've found all sorts of uses for it, from calorie/fitness tracking to birthdays and gifts. I love how well it integrates with an existing Obsidian vault. I wrote a blog post about it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...
by dagmx | 2026-01-31 23:24:35+00:00
How would you hide that? Unless you’re assuming nobody ever has to try and fix bugs or audit code to find it, and there’s some kind of closed off area of code that nobody thinks is suspicious. Or you maintain a complete second set of the app core libs that a few clandestine folks can access, and then hope nobody notices that the binaries don’t line up and crash logs are happening in obscured places.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-31 23:24:42+00:00
I tried doing compiling a few of my Mac CLI tools to Linux. These days, it's faster to run them through an LLM and get quite excellent Go at the other end, and _that_ is much easier to cross-compile.

I have been looking at the new Android support (don't have the link handy) and it's tempting, but I know Kotlin and always developed for Android with a bare Makefile and the JDK, so I don't need any fancy tooling...
Show HN: Convertaverse – No-subscription file conversion and API
by HettyPatel | 2026-01-31 23:25:15+00:00
I built Convertaverse because I was tired of "free" file converters that were either buried in ads or required a $20/month subscription just to convert a single large file.

How it works:

Credits, Not Subscriptions: It uses a pay-as-you-go model. If you use it once a month, you shouldn't be on a recurring bill. Credits never expire.

API Access: I’ve exposed the engine via an API for anyone who wants to automate file workflows in their own projects without enterprise-level costs.

Tech Stack: Frontend is Next.js on Vercel; the heavy lifting is handled by Go/Python services on Railway.

Privacy: Files are processed securely and deleted immediately after conversion.

I currently have 75 tools live (video, audio, docs). I’d love feedback on the conversion speed and if there are any obscure formats you think I should add.
by haunter | 2026-01-31 23:25:26+00:00
All 3DS/2DS models can be hacked with software only and it's very easy https://3ds.hacks.guide/

Also all Switch models can be hacked too. It's only the matter of softmodding (early V1 models) or modchip installation (later V1 models, V2, Lite, OLED)

I have both a hacked New 3DS XL and a hacked Switch OLED and both are incredibly good. But I admit I use the latter only because of piracy...
by KlayLay | 2026-01-31 23:25:41+00:00
People still write applications in Objective-C (e.g., see Transmission [1]), and the language is still maintained to support the latest OS. If anything, Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift, since you can at least use the latter outside of Apple platforms (e.g., on a server).

[1]: https://github.com/transmission/transmission
by dikobraz | 2026-01-31 23:25:44+00:00
Over my ten-year tenure in Big Tech, I’ve witnessed conflicts that drove exceptional people out, hollowed out entire teams, and hardened rifts between massive organizations long after any business rationale, if there ever was one, had faded.

The conflicts I explore here are not about strategy, conflicts of interest, misaligned incentives, or structural failures. Nor are they about money, power, or other familiar human vices.

They are about identity. We shape and reinforce it over a lifetime. It becomes our strongest armor — and, just as often, our hardest cage.

My two previous reddits in the Tech Bro Saga series:
- Why Big Tech Turns Everything Into a Knife Fight - a noir-toned piece on how pressure, ambiguity, and internal competition turn routine decisions into zero-sum battles (https://medium.com/data-science-collective/why-big-tech-turn...)
- Big Tech Performance Review: How to Gaslight Employees at Scale - a sardonic look at why formal review systems often substitute process for real leadership and honest feedback (https://medium.com/data-science-collective/big-tech-performa...)

No prescriptions or grand theory. Just an attempt to give structure to a feeling many of us recognize but rarely articulate.
by toast0 | 2026-01-31 23:26:50+00:00
I like a lot of long films, but at nearly 4 hours, Lawrence of Arabia is a marathon of a film. I've not seen it, I did order a copy recently, but it was cancelled; and I missed the Fathom screening for some reason or another, but I'll see it eventually; I like long movies and movies involving sand, so it seems like an easy win.

I would think a film studies class might not want to spend so much time on a single film, so maybe several scenes would be more appropriate.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-31 23:26:54+00:00
> This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone older to buy you beer.

No, the analogy would be a kid walking into the liquor store to order beer with their mom’s ID and the system allowing you to do it because the store operator isn’t allowed to look at their face or the name on the ID.

> Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.

Some of you have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid around technology.

Every time the topic of web filtering comes up there is a chorus of people declaring it useless because as a kid they easily found ways around it, as kids do.

Now extend that analogy to these wishful thinking cryptographic ID checks, where you only need to circumvent the ID check literally once ever in your childhood and your account is approved for good.

It’s like if you could buy beer with your mom’s ID once and the liquor store owner couldn’t look at the ID or your face and then once you did it a single time you could access all the beer you wanted.
by kkfx | 2026-01-31 23:27:09+00:00
Yes and no. ZFS is for managing your data with simplicity and efficiency that isn't possible with other "storage systems" on GNU/Linux. Setting up a desktop with mdraid+LUKS+LVM+the chosen filesystem is a way longer job than creating a pool with the configuration you want and the volumes you want. Managing backups without snapshots that can be sent over a LAN is a major hassle.

Can it be done? Yes. Formally. But it's unlikely that anyone does it at home because between the long setup and maintaining it, there's simply too much work to do. Backing up the OS itself isn't very useful with declarative distros, but sometimes a rebuild fails because for example there's a broken package/derivation at that moment, so having a recent OS ready, a simple volume to send over LAN or pull from USB storage is definitely convenient. It's already happened to me a few times that I had to give up a rebuild for an update because something was broken upstream, few days and that's fixed but without an OS backup, if I'd had to do a restore at that moment, I would have been stuck.
by martchat | 2026-01-31 23:27:42+00:00
Poland receives subsidies in exchange for opening its market and for following the tax and labor regulations. All the poorer EU countries do. In the end, it is Germany that benefits the most from large markets for its goods. It would have probably been way more beneficial in the 90s for Poland to have a more closed economy, emulate South Korea and become a "small China in EU" with cheap labor and factories.
I believe it was a grave mistake of the Western Europe to invest so much in producing high-tech goods in China, when during a period of 1990-2005 they had access to cheap and educated labor force close in Eastern Europe. You should never transfer your strategic industries into countries that you cannot influence or control.
by theYipster | 2026-01-31 23:27:43+00:00
I’ve been trying out both DMS and Noctalia in separate VMs this week (both on Niri.) I like them both. Noctalia seems a bit more refined out of the box. DMS is more customizable. I foresee both taking over from .dotfile packs (and maybe even Omarchy) as better ways to bootstrap a Nir or Hyprland.
by ozim | 2026-01-31 23:28:09+00:00
Yeah it applies to government like local municipalities have to adhere to GDPR, they cannot just have your name on the register, they have to have a legal reason.

Way you could argue it doesn’t apply to government is that the government makes the law so they can make the law that makes data processing and having your name on some kind of registry required.

But still they have to show you the reason and you can escalate to EU bodies to fine your own country if they don’t follow the rules.
by tim333 | 2026-01-31 23:28:38+00:00
London just had the lowest annual murders for 11 years.

>Homicide rate now 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other UK city and major global cities including New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2) and Toronto (1.6)

I guess you'll praise Khan, as PCC, for that?
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-31 23:29:23+00:00
If an AI thinks for you, you're no longer "outsourcing" parts of your mind. What we call "AI" now is technically impressive but is not the end point for where AI is likely to end up. For example, imagine an AI that is smart enough to emotionally manipulate you, at what point in this interaction do you lose your agency to "outsource" yourself instead of acting as a conduit to "outsource" the thoughts of an artificial entity? It speaks to our collective hubris that we seek to create an intellectually superior entity and yet still think we'll maintain control over it instead of the other way around.
by godelski | 2026-01-31 23:30:02+00:00
To the best of my knowledge every major autonomous vehicle and robotics company is integrating these LVLMs into their systems in some form or another, and an LVLM is probably what you're interacting with these days rather than an LLM. If it can generate images or read images, it is an LVLM.

The problem is no different from LLMs though, there is no generalized understanding and thus they can not differentiate the more abstract notion of context. As an easy to understand example: if you see a stop sign with a sticker that says "for no one" below you might laugh to yourself and understand that in context that this does not override the actual sign. It's just a sticker. But the L(V)LMs cannot compartmentalize and "sandbox" information like that. All information is equally processed. The best you can do is add lots of adversarial examples and hope the machine learns the general pattern but there is no inherent mechanism in them to compartmentalize these types of information or no mechanism to differentiate this nuance of context.

I think the funny thing is that the more we adopt these systems the more accurate the depiction of hacking in the show Upload[0] looks.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziUqA7h-kQc
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-31 23:30:16+00:00
Pawn shops can sell to large online dealers almost instantly in normal times. They can also sell on eBay easier than you can, as an established business. You can do those things too but maybe you don't want to deal with shipping and other hassles. I've heard really atrocious numbers (second hand) from pawn shops. To give you an idea, one guy went to a pawn shop and basically got offered $35 per oz on silver rounds when it was at $65. The coin shop offered him more like $55 if I remember right. This was in December, well before any big buyers stopped taking it or locking in prices. Even at $65 it looked high, because it was a record high, but tell your friend try to buy it immediately after you and it will be significantly over spot!

PS: eBay charges 14% or something. I also know very well that Pawn Stars is scripted, but the business side is true to life.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-31 23:30:26+00:00
This line of argument is common. We use the term 'wiretap' because that is what it was, a physical tap on a physical wire and it took a real person there to do it. Even then it took a warrant to approve it. Wiretap laws were written when the technology made abuse extremely hard and were likely appropriate for the time. Now we live in an age where abuse of millions can be done in a single key-stroke and often doesn't require a warrant or oversight of any kind because the technology has changed and evolved to provide loopholes around the laws. The intent was emergency services but the mass use has been anything but. That is the key point and those that have abused this, weather on behalf of the government or for corporate profit, should be held responsible. We should have laws that criminalize breaking the intent of use in ways that harm individuals. You found a technical system rife for abuse and you use it that way? Go to jail. Pay a fine. It is that simple.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 23:33:06+00:00
For consequences, we need to do away with the notion of qualified immunity. Why should police officers, politicians, agents of the government have any immunity for their actions? They should carry personal liability for breaking the law and violating others’ rights. Otherwise, there is no reason they’ll change. Right now, at best you’ll sue the government and get some money, but all you’re doing is punishing other tax payers.
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-31 23:33:29+00:00
Meta storing WhatsApp messages requires one mental leap: they found a secret way to hoover up WhatsApp messages. Everything else is their MO, including breaking systems to their advantage and having absolutely no scruples.

On the other hand, Occam's razor can barely keep up with the mental gymnastics required to paint Bush (or even Cheney) as the mastermind behind 9/11.
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-31 23:33:45+00:00
Hello Professor Albrecht,

thank you for your work.

I’ve been looking for this everywhere the past few days but I couldn’t find any official information relating the use of https://signal.org/docs/specifications/pqxdh/ in the signal protocol version that WhatsApp is currently using.

Do you have any information if the protocol version they currently use provides post-quantum forward secrecy and SPQR or are the current e2ee chats vulnerable to harvest now, decrypt later attacks?

Thanks for your time.
by nullocator | 2026-01-31 23:34:02+00:00
I think this would be too heavy handed. Depending on how the supreme court case goes if it's ruled that mail in ballots cannot be counted after election day, then I think it would be trivial to quietly setup a scheme where mail from reliably blue postal codes is rerouted and delayed just enough to swing the outcomes. There are quite a few states that have mail in voting. That and intimidating "poll watchers" is probably enough.
by machomaster | 2026-01-31 23:34:54+00:00
Phone is a personal item. It doesn't disrupt anything by itself.

If a kid is using it during the class, then it is disrupting, but that can be dealt old-school way without the overall phone ban. If a kid starts stabbing others with a pencil, it will have to be dealt with, without the need for a pencil ban.

The phone disruption happens to the kids themselves and during the breaks (their free time).
by haunter | 2026-01-31 23:36:08+00:00
More or less only for the high end models. Basically you apply for a model through the dealership > they send it to Italy where they accept it or not. If they do not they will usually offer you a lesser model first as you said. If they do then you get your car but you also have to sign a contract with them that they always have 1st call if you ever want to sell your car (if you break that they will never sell you again).
by hedora | 2026-01-31 23:36:31+00:00
My one experience with swift involved calling a macos api not written in swift, but that had ergonomic swift bindings from Apple.

My code was data race free, but the underlying OS primitive wasn’t, so my program crashed out about 10% of the time.

This isn’t really a criticism of swift as a language, but I haven’t had this sort of problem with the rust ecosystem.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 23:36:58+00:00
Why are you even trying to argue this? You're repeatedly saying things like:

> Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good?

That's nonsense. You don't know if a movie is mediocre or consistently good until you watch it. Or it might be mostly very good with some not-so-good parts, in which it's better to watch it but watch the obviously not-so-good parts at 2x speed.

> But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end?

The fact that I've written screenplays, learned acting, done script analysis on literally hundreds of scenes from movies and television shows in educational contexts, lit scenes, shot scenes with actors, and edited them together?

I'm fast forwarding because I have a halfway decent knowledge of some of the craft and I don't feel like wasting my time with segments that exist purely for emotional heightening but little else. Empty calories, if you will.

There's no problem with my expectations, I assure you. I suggest you look in the mirror and ask why you feel so compelled to insist, judgmentally, that your way of watching movies is the right way, and speculate that a different way is somehow a sign of a problematic attention span. You're trying to insist you know some superior way of watching movies. Consider that, just maybe, you don't know as much as you think you do.
Nightmare Startup, or Bad Comms
by kidneedsadvic | 2026-01-31 23:37:43+00:00
My startup is in due diligence with a couple firms for seed. But I’m considering leaving. Why?

I am age 20.

I have three other cofounders. One is my best friend from childhood. The other two are in their 50s, industry veterans, former C-Suite. But in my
opinion these two “veterans” are just grossly incompetent.

For starters. They have forced me and my younger cofounder into an employee-boss relationship. And refuse to take our product feedback. They have built an out of scope, vibe-coded nightmare, that is market misaligned. Any attempt to improve or implement my product vision is met by harsh resistance, gaslighting, belittling. We wind up circling back to my ideas once they realize
I’m right (the iteration cycle is much slower than just trusting me).

Do I stick it out, and hope they raise. Can I steer things in the right direction once we have budget.
by meatmanek | 2026-01-31 23:40:00+00:00
Matrix exists and really isn't too bad to self-host if you just want a small number of people. (If you federate with other servers, then you have more things to worry about -- increased attack surface, more visibility leading to more potential attackers, and the risk of unintentionally storing illegal content (e.g. CSAM) sent by people from other servers.)

The UI of Element (the most popular Matrix client) is more or less in line with any other chat app, but I guess it depends what you mean by "on par to whatsapp". Biggest downside I've found is that you can't search your messages on the mobile clients.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-31 23:40:30+00:00
Grok does cite that claim as being from https://countrystudies.us/spain/30.htm a page in Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz, editors. Spain: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988.

The nice thing about grokipedia is that if you have counter examples like that you can provide it as evidence to change it and it will rewrite the article to be more clear.
by godelski | 2026-01-31 23:40:32+00:00
You are confidently wrong

> Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data. Trained and fine-tuned specifically for autonomous driving, EMMA leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand complex scenarios on the road.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-emma/
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-31 23:42:31+00:00
> While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins.

Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day.

At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom).

It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account.

In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium.

As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all.

[1] https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-upload...

[2] https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-ba...

[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

[4] https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-y...

[5] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html

[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
by mym1990 | 2026-01-31 23:43:11+00:00
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12401922/

"In contrast[to drug withdrawal], smartphone dependence is driven by digital stimuli and psychological-behavioral mechanisms, with almost no physical dependence; withdrawal mainly causes psychological discomfort (such as restlessness) without severe physical reactions. Its health risks are mostly indirect (like vision loss, sleep disorders), and withdrawal can generally be improved through behavioral adjustments."

I can find you 10 more but I doubt it would change your outlook.