MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matthewdgreen | 2026-01-28 01:59:51+00:00
I mostly focused on the cryptographic parts of the files. Here's what I wrote after the first details of cryptographic attacks were released: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/

What I learned in that revelation was that the NSA was deliberately tampering with the design of products and standards to make them more vulnerable to NOBUS decryption. This surprised everyone I knew at the time, because we (perhaps naively) thought this was out of bounds. Google "SIGINT Enabling" and "Bullrun".

But there were many other revelations demonstrating large scale surveillance. One we saw involved monitoring the Google infra by tapping inter-DC fiber connections after SSL was added. Google MUSCULAR, or "SSL added and removed here". We also saw projects to tap unencrypted messaging services and read every message sent. This was "surprising" because it was indiscriminate and large-scale. No doubt these projects (over a decade old) have accelerated in the meantime.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-01-28 02:01:01+00:00
The level of delusion here is too voluminous to enumerate.

> the transition to EVs has stalled

EVs have stalled because 1) there is no infrastructure 2) they are inconvenient, too many corner cases 3) no one wants them outside a small group of enthusiasts.

Yeah let's continue to decimate our manufacturing base and light a match to what's left. Just learn to code bro.

Trump got elected on a promise to bring back manufacturing, which he seems to be doing.
by deaux | 2026-01-28 02:02:04+00:00
It gained a massive shift in thinking that would not have been possible without it. Tens of millions people now have very different opinions about the events and parties than they would've without it. In the long run, that matters.

If you think this is meaningless, take a look at countries like Saudi Arabia pouring tens of billions of dollars in trying to achieve the exact opposite - cultivating a positive opinion/view of the country among those in the West. They wouldn't be doing this if it didn't matter. The US hegemony has thrived largely on this kind of soft power. If the whole world (instead of just half the world) had already hated the US decades ago, it would've become nowhere near as powerful.
by theandrewbailey | 2026-01-28 02:02:27+00:00
What if our economy has more than the maximum amount of participants? There appears to be a housing shortage, and other daily necessities feel more expensive every day. Not to mention that AI is already here and is being used as an excuse to destroy jobs that people once had. How can one meaningfully participate in an economy when their job is gone? Gig work? Unemployment? That doesn't feel like the building blocks of a 'vibrant' economy.
by fassssst | 2026-01-28 02:03:02+00:00
> This is already how it works on Windows, and it is definitely the best path to happiness for all.

Actually Windows has a newish independent text scale accessibility setting that is different than display scale.

Yea, sometimes you have to update your UI to account for that, but it’s not a big deal most of the time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/input...
by jakereps | 2026-01-28 02:03:45+00:00
My old local brewery had a Leggo My Ego[1] beer they also were served a cease and desist by Kellogg over... they still make it, it's just now called the Unlawful Waffle[2] which is a bit funnier if you happen to know the lore/reason.

1. https://untappd.com/b/arizona-wilderness-brewing-co-leggo-my...

2. https://untappd.com/b/arizona-wilderness-brewing-co-unlawful...
by kshri24 | 2026-01-28 02:04:16+00:00
Agree with Karpathy's take. Finally a down to Earth analysis from a respected source in the AI space. I guess I'll be using slopocalypse a lot more now :)

> I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media

It has arrived. Github will be most affected thanks to git-terrorists at Apna College refusing to take down that stupid tutorial. IYKYK.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-28 02:04:35+00:00
The fact it was released a month later and only after large internal and external pressure (including a Canadian station just airing it anyway since it was already complete and ready to air) is the problem. These large fights are the sign of a huge change in how it's run, which includes a purposeful political shift. Changes at an organization are slow (all of us software engineers should know this by now) but this is going to be a continual battle and there isn't going to be this fight for every story. We can't see everything an organization is doing as CBS is mostly opaque but from these few public fights (also previous work by these people) we can tell a lot
by mindslight | 2026-01-28 02:05:49+00:00
> how much conservative propaganda has warped the liberal mind

Maybe? I feel like my only real assumption is that there is some coherent set of values that describe conservatism. But maybe that is still falling into a trap of applying a liberal value of intellectual consistency to the "conservative" position (cf "Wilholt's law").

I would often read conservative media / forums from about 2008-2016, and saw merit to many of their arguments. And for others I could at least put on my empathy hat and see where they were coming from. At the same time I would see plenty of excesses and blind spots in progressive media and forums. So it really did feel like a "both sides" dynamic, where they both earnestly wanted freedom but always failed to catch the roadrunner (thanks to corrupt politicians).

But sure, with the whole-hog rise of Trumpism I'm now confronted with the possibility that perhaps the kernel of conservatism isn't based on any sort of lofty ideals at all, but rather the starting point is always the ingroup-outgroup thing - even if locally-coherent logical arguments branch off of it.

But even if this is true for the vast majority of conservatives, surely it is not true for at least some "liberal minded" conservatives who do apply those values consistently? And even if they're only a small segment, with the way elections get decided isn't it still worthwhile to try and reach them by pointing out the failings in what they're ultimately supporting? (eg flagrant rejection of the 2nd amendment, previously with Breonna Taylor and now with Alex Pretti)

> Consistently throughout this country's history, conservatives rally to oppose rights being shared with a broader group of people. Conservatives fought a civil war to maintain slavery. They fought for Jim Crow laws. They fought against anti-miscegenation laws. They fought against women's right to vote. They fought and are still fighting against gay rights and recognizing trans people as humans. Literally every single time there is a minority "at risk" of having a better lot in life, there are conservatives turning out to fight against it.

Let me explicitly state that I agree with where you're coming from morally on these specific points - I'm certainly not trying to whitewash or defend these things. But I don't see how these points support your main point - they're all instances of trying to prevent social change. But before Trump, it doesn't seem like they were openly trying to turn the clock back (at least more than one lifetime). Now perhaps that's just me viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. But it really feels like there was a sea change with Trump, and I think it makes sense to try and appeal to people for whom the reality distortion field may be fading - especially as the Trumpists continue to shamelessly murder American citizens.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-28 02:05:57+00:00
> To me Linux is not a technological object, it is also a political statement. It is about choice, personal freedom ...

I use Linux since the Slackware day. Poettering is the worse thing that happened to the Linux ecosystem and, of course, he went on to work for Microsoft. Just to add a huge insult to the already painful injury.

This is not about security for the users. It's about control.

At least many in this thread are criticizing the project.

And, once again of course, it's from a private company.

Full of ex-Microsofties.

I don't know why anyone interested in hacking would cheer for this. But then maybe HN should be renamed "CN" (Corporate News) or "MN" (Microsoft News).
by deaux | 2026-01-28 02:06:25+00:00
Why would they be the ones cutting deals to gain access to data? The Party is cutting those deals and has been for ages. Deals like these:

> Spyware delivered by text
> In August, the Trump administration revived a previously paused contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded company that makes spyware. A Paragon tool called Graphite was used in Europe earlier this year to target journalists and civil society members, according to The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto with expertise in spyware.

> Little is known about how ICE is using Paragon Solutions technology and legal groups recently sued DHS for records about it and tools made by the company Cellebrite. ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about its Paragon Solutions contract and whether it is for Graphite or another tool.

> Graphite can start monitoring a phone — including encrypted messages — just by sending a message to the number. The user doesn't have to click on a link or a message.

> "It has essentially complete access to your phone," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a legal and policy group focused on privacy. "It's an extremely dangerous surveillance tech that really goes against our Fourth Amendment protections."

Deals with Flock, and so on. It makes no sense for Palantir to be the one doing those deals rather than the Party. They've been doing so for a long time now. That's the whole point of data brokers, on this site alone there are hundreds of comments and posts about how the Party abuses those to get around laws on mass surveillance - can't legally (or are too incompetent to) gather data ourselves? Just buy it off a data broker. And Snowden showed us more than a decade ago that even without them they can just.. not care about the "legal" part.
by germinalphrase | 2026-01-28 02:07:17+00:00
Your causality is reversed.

The dude was literally just standing there on a public sidewalk with his hands up. He never initiated the altercation or otherwise impeded any lawful investigation.

The agent chose to initiate the altercation during which the victim was pepper sprayed, pinned to the ground by six people, disarmed, and then shot ten times.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-28 02:07:30+00:00
The Archer BE3600 Pro you linked definitely has a stateful packet inspection firewall (SPI) https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/arche... and the capabilities go well beyond state tracking (HomeShield Security enabled more on it + a few userspace tools). The Archer BE3600 Pro is also not a particularly cheap device in the first place, certainly well out of reach of the poorest in the world, it's just low cost for having such a high speed

Regardless, even with actually cheap devices, you'll find they also have the same. This is because nearly everyone, particularly the cheapest piece of crap CPU forwarding 100 Mbit routers, implement NAT using netfilter https://www.netfilter.org/ on Linux. Netfilter is most commonly known for being the firewall backend of iptables/nftables rules, but the conntrack database of nf_netfilter is also what drives the NAT state of nf_nat. It's a similar story in BSD, but it's all contained in what's called "pf" (packet filter) instead of netfilter.

I.e. one, literally, cannot implement NAT on these types of devices without first invoking a firewall and populating said firewall with the connection state. The _only_ difference in defaults between IPv4 and IPv6, on even the cheapest home routers, is whether or not the NAT is enabled on top of the stateful firewall. In no case is NAT able to be enabled on these types of boxes without having the stateful firewall functionality in place. The port forwarding is also done via netfilter. I.e., an entry in the firewall.

High end devices (most people in the US do not have home routers better than the one you linked) tend to have hardware offloads for these systems (i.e. the netfilter rules can be accelerated by dedicated hardware in either the SoC or the NIC) but otherwise are identical in implementation to the cheap ones, barring the additional crap they might bundle with the device too. It's not until you get into enterprise firewalls from companies like Fortinet you start seeing truly unique custom implementations, and even then they build it the same way at the end of the day (because why would you implement state tracking twice just to be able to build NAT with less security than normal?).

There is a common conflation that a firewall is this big beefy high end appliance which has all sorts of high end features and a dedicated config interface because it's so honkin' complex. The reality is a firewall is just a network stack implementation which tracks connection state and lets you perform actions on that (drop, deny, rewrite, send to userspace for an app to handle). NAT relies on the rewrite capabilities combined with the state table, and ticking NAT just implements a bunch of firewall rules on your behalf. Similarly, a port forward is just another rule entry which gets added to the firewall. The same ruleset which gets you NAT on home routers, minus the address & port rewriting, is what gets you a normal firewall which denies inbound.
by sinuhe69 | 2026-01-28 02:07:50+00:00
It’s so hard to understand that the foreign staff are now afraid for their safety and their lives?

After the killing of Pretti (execution is probably the more correct word), I guess even some US staff can not be so sure about what would happen to them.

__“But are there not many fascists in your country?"

"There are many who do not know – but will find it out when the time comes.”__
Show HN: A free online video compression tool for instant compression
by Katherine603 | 2026-01-28 02:07:56+00:00
I developed a simple AI-based tool for compressing videos. You upload a video, which can reduce the file size while maintaining quality and optimizing your video. It supports formats such as MP4, MOV, AVI, etc., compressing file size without losing picture quality.
All programs run in the browser.
I mainly want to hear feedback on output quality, user experience, and any technical improvements worth exploring.
A verification layer for browser agents: Amazon case study
by tonyww | 2026-01-28 02:08:14+00:00
A common approach to automating Amazon shopping or similar complex websites is to reach for large cloud models (often vision-capable). I wanted to test a contradiction: can a ~3B parameter local LLM model complete the flow using only structural page data (DOM) plus deterministic assertions?

This post summarizes four runs of the same task (search → first product → add to cart → checkout on Amazon). The key comparison is Demo 0 (cloud baseline) vs Demo 3 (local autonomy); Demos 1–2 are intermediate controls.

More technical detail (architecture, code excerpts, additional log snippets):

https://www.sentienceapi.com/blog/verification-layer-amazon-...

Demo 0 vs Demo 3:

Demo 0 (cloud, GLM‑4.6 + structured snapshots)
success: 1/1 run
tokens: 19,956 (~43% reduction vs ~35k estimate)
time: ~60,000ms
cost: cloud API (varies)
vision: not required

Demo 3 (local, DeepSeek R1 planner + Qwen ~3B executor)
success: 7/7 steps (re-run)
tokens: 11,114
time: 405,740ms
cost: $0.00 incremental (local inference)
vision: not required

Latency note: the local stack is slower end-to-end here largely because inference runs on local hardware (Mac Studio with M4); the cloud baseline benefits from hosted inference, but has per-token API cost.

Architecture

This worked because we changed the control plane and added a verification loop.

1) Constrain what the model sees (DOM pruning).
We don’t feed the entire DOM or screenshots. We collect raw elements, then run a WASM pass to produce a compact “semantic snapshot” (roles/text/geometry) and prune the rest (often on the order of ~95% of nodes).

2) Split reasoning from acting (planner vs executor).

Planner (reasoning): DeepSeek R1 (local) generates step intent + what must be true afterward.
Executor (action): Qwen ~3B (local) selects concrete DOM actions like CLICK(id) / TYPE(text).
3) Gate every step with Jest‑style verification.
After each action, we assert state changes (URL changed, element exists/doesn’t exist, modal/drawer appeared). If a required assertion fails, the step fails with artifacts and bounded retries.

Minimal shape:

ok = await runtime.check(
exists("role=textbox"),
label="search_box_visible",
required=True,
).eventually(timeout_s=10.0, poll_s=0.25, max_snapshot_attempts=3)

What changed between “agents that look smart” and agents that work
Two examples from the logs:

Deterministic override to enforce “first result” intent: “Executor decision … [override] first_product_link -> CLICK(1022)”

Drawer handling that verifies and forces the correct branch: “result: PASS | add_to_cart_verified_after_drawer”

The important point is that these are not post‑hoc analytics. They are inline gates: the system either proves it made progress or it stops and recovers.

Takeaway
If you’re trying to make browser agents reliable, the highest‑leverage move isn’t a bigger model. It’s constraining the state space and making success/failure explicit with per-step assertions.

Reliability in agents comes from verification (assertions on structured snapshots), not just scaling model size.
by NoPicklez | 2026-01-28 02:08:32+00:00
There could be so many reasons for this past just whether we retain more reading on a screen or a page.

They aren't reading on e-readers, but usually laptops or tablets that have all manner of distractive apps, messaging services and notifications potentially drawing kids attention away.

A book doesn't have a popup that your friend sent you a message, or that you got a new snapchat.

Thats just one anecdote I can think of
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-28 02:08:36+00:00
Yes it has to be. LLMs are getting to the point they can do everything else. What they can’t do, cheaper non US labor can.

For context, the software developer market in the US is very bimodal, most developers are on the enterprise dev side (including most startups like YC companies). I’m referring to this side - not FAANG and equivalent

By commoditization back then, I knew there was nothing I could do on that side of the market that would let me make more than around $150K-$165K. My plan then was to get on the other side of the market in 2020 after my youngest graduated and out of enterprise dev.

“Commodization” now means too many people chasing too few job. In 2016, I could throw my resume up in the air and get three or four random enterprise dev job offers within less than a month - now not so much.

I discovered AWS belatedly later that year and my thesis was changed to I want to do #1 that you said above - customer focused, using AWS as a tool, and bringing a developer mindset to cloud implementations.

It just magically happened in June 2020 that both felt into my lap - cloud consulting full time opportunity at BigTech (no longer there thankfully).
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-28 02:08:39+00:00
Good old VLC couldn't be much simpler (or popular). Audio singles, drag-on. Folders of audio files, drag-on. Whatever's in the window can be easily saved as a named playlist. Including internet radio stations (there are thousands). Sort playlists into folders.

Oh yeah, and also handles almost ALL video formats in the same way.
by card_zero | 2026-01-28 02:08:43+00:00
But if things interest you, does that not also provide dopamine? If the interesting things are easily available, are they "free" and addictive and bad? If they're good because they're interesting, is TikTok not interesting to those who like it? If you had a pinball machine and it distracted you, would that be bad, or a hobby? Is TikTok more compelling than pinball because of the algorithm? Is the algorithm not merely providing things that will likely interest you? Is interest bad now?
by wmorgan | 2026-01-28 02:08:47+00:00
18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.
by cmurf | 2026-01-28 02:10:04+00:00
Hold on. That ballroom is ostensibly funded by private investors including Apple, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Palantir, Booz Allen Lockheed Martin, Zoom, Coinbase, Ripple ...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/01/trump-ballroom-dono...

Therefore the customers of these companies are contributing some of their hard earned money to help these companies grovel to a would-be dictator, and build his precious ballroom.

I'm not a big fan of the general strike idea whereby people forego income to send a message. Why not stop spending money with these companies for some period of time? I think telling these companies to go fuck themselves will put more money in everyday people's pockets than not showing up for work.

Apple consumers would be on more ethical grounds paying a tariff than what Tim Cook has committed them to. He showed up at the White House on Saturday well after the reporting that the government had murdered a law abiding citizen, while that government protected the assailants, and smeared the victims.

It's disgusting. I find him disgusting. I find all of these companies disgusting.
by wlesieutre | 2026-01-28 02:11:14+00:00
Page zoom is fine for relatively minor adjustments, but if you're browsing with a high page zoom setting you'll still run into a ton of problems.

Stuff like "page overlays become so large that they overflow the bounds of the screen, but are fixed position so you can't even scroll them to make the X button visible."

Or in the slightly better case, "most of the screen is obscured by the enlarged floating header, the layout of which is totally broken by the relatively narrow viewport relative to content size, and with your large page zoom setting the remaining half of the screen can fit about five words on it at a time."

Either way websites need to do accessibility testing and clearly most of them don't.

Safari has a setting for "Never use font sizes smaller than __" which used in combination with a not as high page zoom setting is a little less likely to make pages completely fucked, because it's only acting on text that was small to begin with.
by echelon | 2026-01-28 02:12:08+00:00
> a device you're now forced to use in daily life (bank/2fa/messaging apps).

Restaurants with only QR code menus.

"Let me scan your LinkedIn app."

Verify your government ID on our app.

"Zelle me."

"Scan this code to pay."

My favorite: "Scan this code for parking or you will be towed. Also, if you leave without paying, we'll tow you next time you enter any of our properties in any state because we scanned your license plate." There's no other way to pay.

Apartment / condo door keys and entry systems.

My battery is always at 10%. I don't know how y'all do it.

This is also one of the many reasons why I think it's criminal that two private businesses are allowed to own this modern life necessity so completely.