MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-25 14:31:07+00:00
Immediately makes me remember what happened in Cuba back in 2016, where there were some theories about a "sonic" or "directed-energy" weapon being used, could this in any way be related? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

Here's a paper reviewing and collating other papers: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/reveh-20...

> Since 2016, numerous American and Canadian diplomats and secret (intelligence) agents in Cuba, China, and other places in the world have experienced an abrupt onset of unusual clinical symptoms including, tinnitus, vertigo, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties, after they encountered strange sounds or sensations; this has been called “Havana syndrome”

> In a comprehensive report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that the most plausible mechanism for HS is a directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy source
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-25 14:33:33+00:00
This is nonsense.

You can't understand the tao because there is nothing to "understand".

That is the whole point. If you walk in the woods on a beautiful day and hear birds chirping, there is nothing to "understand". It isn't an intellectual exercise.

Quibbling about translations of the Tao Te Ching is really quite comical. A better taoist "teaching" would be to throw your copy in the garbage and go for a walk in the woods. This is where the cultural problems come in though. That is not really what is meant by the English word "teaching". Then you are expecting to "learn" some kind of new symbolic representation when the whole point is to get rid of symbolic representation.

The idea you can't understand concepts from other humans because you were born into a different cultures is really stupid.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-25 14:34:48+00:00
The biggest reason for not leaving is that I understand that perfect things don't exist and everything is about tradeoffs. My current work is complete dogshit - borderline retarded coworkers, hilariously incompetent management. But on the other hand they pay me okay salary while having very little expectations, which means that if I spend entire day watching porn instead of working, nobody cares. That's a huge perk, because it makes the de facto salary per hour insanely huge. Moreover, I found a few people from other teams I enjoy talking to, which means it's a rare opportunity for me to build a social life. Once they start requiring me to actually put in the effort, I'll bounce.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-25 14:35:00+00:00
> Try to set up a hotspot, there is no button to turn the hotspot on/off.

There is. You can even put it on the settings drawer. Look for "personal hotspot".

I don't have a mac anymore, but IIRC you could even turn it on from the paired mac. This definitely still works between iphones. When I take out my old iphone from the drawer to use as a GPS on my bike, with no sim card, it will connect to my regular iphone's hotspot automatically.
by tomhow | 2026-01-25 14:35:47+00:00
You've cited one example and claimed it to be evidence of a trend. But you haven't shown evidence of a trend. One-offs happen all the time on HN for all kinds of reasons – randomness as much as anything else. I've provided five examples I could find quickly. I'm not getting further into a debate about the definition of “inflammatory”. When discussions turn into debates about definitions of inherently subjective terms it's definitely time to stop.
by fuzzy2 | 2026-01-25 14:36:02+00:00
Sure. Highly successful even, I would say. I can deliver to Microsoft and Google.

Not sure though what the magic ingredient is. I've had the IP address for 7 years before I decided to use it for mail, after one quick mail to Cisco's Talos stuff everything was fine. Software is Mailcow. Hosted at Hetzner in Germany.

And still, I cannot deliver to T-Online, so there's that.
by redeeman | 2026-01-25 14:36:32+00:00
okay, so you think just attaching PLCs to an rs485-to-ethernet adapter and connecting it straight unauthenticated to the internet, and then calling it a day is simply perfectly reasonable, since "well.. cant expect to harden against cyber warfare!! no defect!!!" ?

because this is the kind of stuff infrastructure things do, along with MANY other things. Im sure not all infrastructure does it, but plenty do.

This is not hardening, its BASIC security. any scriptkiddie from same country could find it and cause problems.

How far would you say they should go to stop domestic script kiddies from messing with it? and if script kiddies from other countries mess with it, is it now cyber warfare?
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-25 14:36:48+00:00
They may not have power to push back on KPIs, but even just sticking to regulatory compliance would be good enough. Nobody in management will say in writing that marketing should ignore GDPR, for example. And that means that if you, say, introduce a new category, everyone is supposed to be unsubscribed by default. So non-compliance is always a choice.
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 14:36:57+00:00
I'm just saying that if they use a traditional IP VPN over the Internet, traffic is of course encrypted, but the two endpoints terminating the VPN must have a public IP.

Of course, this is not necessary if they simply use UHF radio signals encoding bits with pulse modulation, or whatever.

Indeed, that's indeed what I was curious about (Internet vs other channels), since at least part of their tech stack in orbit is relatively straightforward (e.g. linux with preempt_rt).
by danaris | 2026-01-25 14:36:59+00:00
I mean, we've been making it really easy on them.

It's not like the government has been carefully introducing new, strict regulations on the things they were doing that got us into the crash once we've recovered from it. We just...let things stay as they are. Because half of Congress is white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel trying doggedly to keep us pointed toward the cliff, and the other half is dithering about wondering if it's too rude and partisan to gently take the wheel and try to turn it away from certain doom.
by mgfist | 2026-01-25 14:37:55+00:00
In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".

A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
by gcr | 2026-01-25 14:38:48+00:00
There seems to be some electronic component and some biophysical component. The article describes a RADAR system suddenly failing and “buttons pressed” that stop working, which makes me think of EMP.

The article also mentions a (different?) weapon with physical effects

> At one point, they [the USA] launched something; I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the witness said.

> “We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon — or whatever it was.”
by echelon | 2026-01-25 14:38:50+00:00
As is the supercomputer.

It's the Thinking Machine Connection Machine CM-5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/cm-5-thinking-machine/

The LED panel is gorgeous:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM

A lot of people have replicated or restored these:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ

https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/

---

I've always hoped the film series would be rebooted back to the original novel. The first film was a masterpiece, and everything that's followed has been increasingly awful. Dinosaurs and cloning are way too cool for that amount of disrespect.

I'd kill for an R-rated horror film (think Alien) based on the book, especially if it were set in 1980 and deeply scientific like the original. That was the only film in the series with believably smart characters, each pursuing complex motivations, with fulfilling character arcs. The plot focused on the people, and dinosaurs were the dressing.
by tucnak | 2026-01-25 14:39:45+00:00
I'm not OP, but perhaps you, or somebody else here, could answer my question, albeit one that is slightly off-topic. In the recent years, in part courtesy of cryptoindustry investment, there were many advancements in zero-knowledge mathematics and applied cryptography. I've been on-and-off researching computational approaches to liquid democracy[1], on the off-chance that we may one day apply it in my country, Ukraine, and I came to conclusion that open hardware-as-public good are table stakes to that end. The modern computers are way too complex, and the trust in them is at an all-time low. To bring computation into politics—it's a tall order. However, if we could buy a fab, design some hardware transparently, allow inspections from civil groups and scientists, maybe that could work... What kind of costs are we looking at for establishing something like 130nm process, and would it be possible to buy out the necessary IP, too, so that everything could be done in the open?

Does this even work longterm? I'd like to think transparent-by-design hardware manufacturing is not a pipe dream, but if that's the case, I would hate to give it too much thought.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
by publicdebates | 2026-01-25 14:40:17+00:00
This is excessively beautiful, both the website and the library's UI.

But I have to ask: what's the rationale on dedicating such an elaborate and gorgeous website for just a library? Are you hoping to get hired for web design? Are you seeking fame and repute? Do you merely do it for the love of the game? Why, for the love of all that's good, pray tell why put all this effort into mere documentation?
by api | 2026-01-25 14:40:48+00:00
People think of it all the time. But there’s a giant system full of people whose careers and incomes are linked to the complexity, not just government bureaucrats but also lawyers, accounting firms, expensive consultancies, etc. It’s a hard sell because it would decimate whole industries that revolving around servicing the complexity.

But it’s one of the thing the EU could do to win in new industries.

Honestly if the EU became more innovation and entrepreneur friendly I think they’d kick America’s ass. Tons of smart people, and the positive side of the social safely net is that it derisks entrepreneurship. America is full of would be founders who can’t afford to take the leap since they could lose their health care, etc.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-25 14:41:35+00:00
I’ve been an iPhone owner for a while, but recently was required to get an Android phone to be a secondary work device. I got a Pixel 10 Pro—- brand-new, Google’s flagship device—- and within about a week there was a rattling noise from the camera module any time the phone moved.

The consensus online appears to be “oh, yeah, that’s the OIS module, you have to expect it, they all do that”. Well, iPhones also have OIS and they don’t do this.

Android might be “good enough” in hardware now but it’s definitely still behind.
by mbivert | 2026-01-25 14:41:37+00:00
depends where; in France you can get unlimited SMS/MMS/calls, plus 350Go of data, for 20€/month [0]. it's surprising the market hasn't developed likewise in other (European) countries; I (genuinely) wonder why − perhaps legal issues of some sort?

edit: okay, sending MMS isn't always free, depends on the countries[1]. still free for USA, Europe, Canada, etc.

[0]: https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free

[1]: https://mobile.free.fr/docs/bt/tarifs.pdf
by ejs | 2026-01-25 14:41:39+00:00
I always thought it was an interesting story, drove out there one day many years ago when I lived nearby. It was a dreary day, which added to the strangeness of the place.

It's an interesting place because it's not that far from other towns, and you can drive right through it on a normal, maintained road. If you turn off and drive just a minute or two it's very different though.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-25 14:42:00+00:00
Well, sure, but how does this tool help in any way with that? Since if you're using Git LFS, the tool just says it's broken, rather than actually pulling down the blobs and checking those. It wouldn't prevent "malicious weights".

Besides, pickle is the data format that introduces the possibility for vulnerabilities, if the model weights are in .safetensor you're safe regardless.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-25 14:42:00+00:00
> Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.

I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen.

At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle.

Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage).

I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-25 14:42:14+00:00
I definitely would do that if I could. I would absolutely love to tell it to only charge to 66% (or whatever, even 50% would work). I rarely use the phone for multiple hours at a time without access to power, and when I do, I usually know beforehand (like during a trip or something) so I could tell it to charge all the way. My battery rarely goes below 80%, even now that the phone is 3.5 years old.

I understand newer iphones now have the option to only charge up to a certain percentage. Mine doesn't have that, it only has the "smart charging", which tries not to charge it too quickly and only is full by the time it expects you'll use it (usually in the morning). It's very hit and miss for my use patterns, so it ends up at 100% most of the time...
by dns_snek | 2026-01-25 14:42:15+00:00
> So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not?

Because having "big tech" is a sign that the government has completely failed to enforce anti-trust laws and allowed dangerous concentration of power to occur. It's a symptom of a disease not some desirable goal.

The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech". It needs generous public funding for infrastructure, open source, and it should aim to build upon open standards whenever possible.

We don't need domestic monopolies that are just going to fuck us in the same way that US corporations fuck Americans while we all pretend to enjoy it for the sake of looking superior to the other camp.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-25 14:42:22+00:00
Sure. The hard part of iOS is the JIT ban, Native Image can make macOS binaries just fine.

> The Android ecosystem became Kotlin ecosystem because Google said so, not because it was successful

This is not how I remember events unfolding. I used Kotlin before Google ever talked about it and it was doing fine as a language for desktop and backend JVM apps. When Google started officially supporting it, it was just recognizing that Android developers were already organically adopting it at scale.
by Levitz | 2026-01-25 14:43:15+00:00
I used to think like this, and it does seem morally sound at first glance, but it has the big underlying problem of creating an excellent context in which to be a selfish asshole.

Turns out that calling someone on their bullshit can be a perfectly productive thing to do, it not only deals with that specific incident, but also promotes a culture in which it's fine to keep each other accountable.
by jesprenj | 2026-01-25 14:43:30+00:00
Telemach is also funny in net-neutrality regard:

Article 7.2 of their terms of service https://telemach.si/download/terms/splosni-pogoji-poslovanja...

> Naročnik se obvezuje, da po priključitvi na omrežje izvajalca:
> ...
> * ne bo postavljal strežnikov na svoji lokaciji, razen v primeru sklenitve ustreznega dogovora z izvajalcem,
> ...

It states that customers are bound not to setup servers on their internet connection point without prior aproval by the ISP. It sounds against the law to forbid this, albeit ianal.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-25 14:43:54+00:00
This is exactly how I felt when studying management as part of ostensibly an Engineering / Econ / Management degree.

When you added it up, most of the hard parts were Engineering, and a bit Econ. You would really struggle to work through tough questions in engineering, spend a lot of time on economic theory, and then read the management stuff like you were reading a newspaper.

Management you could spot a mile away as being soft. There's certainly some interesting ideas, but even as students we could smell it was lacking something. It's just a bit too much like a History Channel documentary. Entertaining, certainly, but it felt like false enlightenment.
by justvugg | 2026-01-25 14:44:25+00:00
Hi Thanks for the comment,
The unified agent doesn’t execute untrusted code — it orchestrates.
Side effects only happen at explicit execution boundaries (remote tools or the CodeAgent). The CodeAgent is sandboxed in Docker; the planner/router isn’t, because it never executes arbitrary code. Least-privilege and auditing are enforced at the execution boundary, not per function.
Do you have any suggestions for making PolyMCP better?
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-25 14:44:57+00:00
I'm with Google on this one. Idiots and old people (the public) use these devices daily. These are the very same people that send money to Nigerian royalty and expect to hear back about a great reward. This is mostly a CYA move with hard data behind it. If they completely removed side load, that would be a different story.
by Bender | 2026-01-25 14:45:01+00:00
I guess this will be a difficult question to ask. I have no doubt the numbers are high but there is something odd about the videos that leak out. The sound of the guns are enhanced for psychological effect? and in the cases where a gunner on a truck is moving down a road purportedly mowing people down there is no blood on the road where the protestors had been standing, no bodies and we never see the people being shot. It's not like I want to see people being shot but I've also seen a lot of fake mass shooting videos in the past decade. There's no shortage of real uncensored footage of killing in Ukraine. Why is everything censored for Iran?
by foldr | 2026-01-25 14:45:18+00:00
The point is that we are both basing our point of view on our accumulated experience of reading HN and then looking for examples to illustrate that point of view. It's a misreading of the discourse to complain that these examples aren't strong 'evidence' for the points of view in question. Of course they are not; they are merely illustrative examples. And realistically, you don't even really want me to send you a 100 page evidence dossier, do you?

Your specific examples are not very convincing, but as I said, anyone reading can compare the headlines and judge for themselves on that point.
Show HN: Ask CLI – A simple, open-source tool to get command-line help
by david-minaya | 2026-01-25 14:45:22+00:00
I want to share Ask CLI, a tool I developed to get help with commands and coding directly from the terminal. It is a simple app designed to do one thing well: provide instant command assistance. This isn't a complex coding agent like Claude Code; it is built specifically to get short, fast answers without context switching.

As a developer, I’ve always struggled to remember every command and its specific options. Whenever I need to use tools like Docker, Git, or psql, I find myself leaving the terminal to check documentation or scrolling through verbose --help text just to recall a specific flag. I usually know what I want to do, but I forget the exact syntax. I didn't want to waste time switching to Google or ChatGPT just to find a one-line command.

I developed Ask CLI to solve this. It has been a game-changer for my workflow. Now, when I forget a command, I simply ask my terminal. It gives me a fast, precise answer—exactly what I need—without breaking my flow.

It is incredibly easy to use: just select an AI model, set your API key, and start chatting naturally with your terminal.

Examples:

$ ask how to run a docker container with env variables

$ ask how to setup my local git account

You can also use the "what" and "how" aliases for a more natural feel:

$ what is chmod

$ how to print all the env variables

You can use Ask CLI with popular hosted models (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT) or with local models and external providers that support OpenAI-compatible APIs (Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, etc.).

Ask CLI is free and open-source. Check it out here:

https://github.com/david-minaya/ask
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-25 14:46:06+00:00
> I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.

I live in one such country, and indeed, the bulk of my usage is to coordinate with local groups based in the same city.

But tend to meet many people from the US who don't live here, and they all straight up ask for my whatsapp.

I'm also a heavy telegram and signal user, and can't recall a single instance of anybody mentioning these.
by firejake308 | 2026-01-25 14:46:15+00:00
> As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.

The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health. It seems the UN number also aligns with the new 30,000 number. This is much worse than the 3,000 that was reported earlier. But it also seems like the crackdown is over now, and we're still just counting deaths from Jan 8 and 9.

I compare this to the recent protests in Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina ordered the military to shoot the protesters and the military refused. The difference between these two countries is proof that people do have the ability to disobey orders from authoritarian leaders, and that decision can have a huge impact.