MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Thoughts on maintaining anonymity against state-level actors?
by adamanteye | 2026-01-14 08:22:51+00:00
It has been nearly five years since Ruan Xiaohuan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruan_Xiaohuan) was arrested by Chinese authorities in May 2021. For those unfamiliar, he ran the legendary anonymous blog Program-Think (https://program-think.blogspot.com/) for over a decade.

What haunts me is that his identity was compromised despite his elite background. He was the chief engineer for the 2008 Beijing Olympics network security system. His OPSEC was rigorous: he operated on a cash-only basis, avoided all e-commerce, and never discussed his digital life with anyone, including his wife, who only learned of his "second life" after his disappearance.

Despite his expertise, it's still a mystery how his anonymous persona was deanonymized.

As a hacker in China, I’m interested in your thoughts on the feasibility of maintaining a truly anonymous identity long-term. Is it even possible to win a "battle" where you have to be perfect 100% of the time, while the adversary only needs to find one leak?

What are the most likely failure points in a high-level threat model like this?
by zingar | 2026-01-14 08:23:05+00:00
The people who gathered stats professionally are correct.

I’m twitchy about this because I’m hearing from relatives in far more dangerous countries and cities about how London is under siege from immigrant criminals and sharia law is being imposed in the streets. Their news bubble is full of current articles that use as “evidence” pictures of riots from a decade ago where the violence was not committed by immigrants.

This would be laughable if not for how completely these folks have swallowed this nonsense.

It’s at best unscrupulous journalists desperate for eyeballs but given how pervasive this is it feels naive to assume anything but a paid, coordinated campaign.

“Are you ok in the UK?” Yes, I’m right here in London. London is fine.
by anthk | 2026-01-14 08:25:37+00:00
>The sky and the landmass

That hapenned for PC users in 1998, literally the same you described, but with Unreal. You got out from a techy base, and then open nature in front of your eyes, "open" compared OFC to the limited outdoors environment from every FPS since Doom. With the exception of RPG's of course, but:

- RPG's reussed assets like crazy. Cities were almost a copy of each other.

- Because of that, the details weren't as high as an FPS. Landscapes felt a bit
empty because of that.

- "Open world" RPG's where a thing... in 2D/2.5D days because it was cheap. No first view
beside of a fake 3D dungeon. Then 3D environments happened with Might and Magic and the like, but the worlds paled against the details from an FPS.

Unreal changed that a little, and the first Deus Ex (same engine) it's almost an open world game with slight gaps. Even more with GMDX, where they might be new doors between areas. Is not a secret that in DX you could jump between further sections from the game by exploring around, and even bypass complete sections (and the game predicted that too).
by csomar | 2026-01-14 08:25:48+00:00
Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours. When I asked the concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back with this system hosted on AWS. Absolute nightmare.
by xkbarkar | 2026-01-14 08:26:08+00:00
I have experienced both.

I d argue its not the manager that motivates people that can only be found inbooks.
Its the manager that can come in and mend a toxic and dysfunctional team.

The toxic teams end up breaking good managers in the end and they either become part of the problem or leave.

The hero manager described in the phoenix project is a myth.

The motivational one imho is very real but they need a good platform just like everyone else.
ChatGPT Voice While Driving
by smarri | 2026-01-14 08:26:35+00:00
Tldr: we are living in the future.

I tried for the first time, having a conversation with ChatGPT using voice mode, while I was driving (handsfree of course).

It was on of those moments where I take a beat and really consider what was happening. The same like when I tried VR for the first time. Or when I got off a train in London quite a few years back and saw a no vaping sign (instead of a no smoking sign). Or when I first saw a mobile phone that was playing a video natively in the device (showing my age here...).

It dawned on me, that here I was talking to an artificial intelligence about an idea, with nearly no latency, over about 20 minutes as I drove. It seemed like I was talking to a smart friend who could have just as easily been riding along as a passenger. It's amazing to think of all of the technological advances required to make this happen.

It feels like we are living in the future, yet, we so easily accept the changes. It's fascinating.
by seec | 2026-01-14 08:26:48+00:00
That's basically the problem of today's Apple, and it won't get fixed because they have an incentive to let the 3rd parties fix those problems (they win both by taking a cut of software sales in the app store and selling more Macs while costing less dev money).

I doubt anything is going to get fixed, and Apple's hardware crown isn't as strong as before. But they like selling "services," so...
by somenameforme | 2026-01-14 08:26:52+00:00
I wonder if YouTube is next; not just AI music, but videos. My recommendations are getting completely hijacked by AI generated garbage filled with comments complaining about the exact same thing. Ironically their algorithm is probably currently promoting that as 'engagement.' I see no way that this isn't greatly diminishing the overall 'value' of YouTube. At the minimum they're going to need to start downranking AI generated stuff hard.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-14 08:27:02+00:00
No need to use Claude Sonnet here. Here's much cheaper solution in Python3:

import sys
import random
import re

print('> ',end='', flush=True)
input_text = sys.stdin.readline().strip()

text = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z ]', '', input_text)
words = text.split()
random.shuffle(words)

mixed_words = []
for word in words:
n = random.randint(10, 500)
mixed_words.append(word + ' ' + '' * n)

print(' '.join(mixed_words))
by berkes | 2026-01-14 08:28:02+00:00
Same here.

I remember a large part of the fun was that we couldn't just look something up on the web - it didn't exist in our home in the eighties.
Instead we'd pore over BASIC on floppies. Changing a thing, for example GRAVITY=0.1, and finding out the banana now flies almost straight up.

Or meticulously typing over the source code printed in hand-me-down magazines. Evenings of me and friend one typing the other reading out loud. Then way more evenings of finding all the typos and bugs. And then one or two evenings running the game we just "wrote" and get bored immediately. And start changing things.

This is how I learned programming and what has paid my bills for over 25 years now. There were few university careers for programming, but mostly, young-arrogant-me was like "well, I have learned myself programming, so I'd better follow a university program that teaches me stuff I don't already know XD".

The tinkering and creative part has been lost by now for me. I lament that. So I've put aside a fund, finishing off some contracts now and from this summer on, will do unpaid work of "creative coding". Making "art" with software - something I now do in spare time, fulltime. Because that tinkering is what drew me in. Not the scrum-rituals, spagetti-code-wrangling or layers of architectural enterprise abstractions. But the fun of nesting nested loops and seeing my name fly over the screen in weird patterns, or the joy of making the matrix printer play a "song" by letting it print weird ascii strings.
by anthk | 2026-01-14 08:28:04+00:00
Ditto, I said the same about Unreal. Also, Deus Ex, it almost was an open world game, even more with GMDX where you might get new entrances to previously locked areas. As the game it's a clusterfuck of typical urban legends (not so legend with mole people, as they appeared in real life news) and conspiracy theories, interlinking levels and the like in Deus Ex it's almost mandatory in order to depict a network of secret societies controlled by a bad entitiy.
by eru | 2026-01-14 08:28:10+00:00
Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?

(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.

Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.

Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-14 08:28:30+00:00
You'll still get interleaved commits. If I work on a branch for a week, committing daily and merging daily from main, when I merge to main, git log will show one commit of mine, then 3 from someone else, then another of mine, etc. The real history of the main branch is that all my commits went in at the same time, after seven days, even if some of them were much older. Rebase tells the real story in this case, merge does not.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-14 08:28:43+00:00
How do you search for applications you don't remember the name of?

And Apple's categorization is trash, a huge regression. There is absolutely no advantage to anything offered now over Spotlight, which not only allowed FASTER search (because it only searched applications), but allowed you to group applications as you saw fit (which didn't preclude an OPTION to have Apple do it).

It also allowed you to launch several applications faster, because it kept your last-used group open. For example, if I sat down to do some development, I opened my Dev Tools group and could launch the four applications I typically use together with only eight clicks.
by michaelt | 2026-01-14 08:29:00+00:00
> I still love it, but can't play it any more since people rarely have attention to detuct the hidden rules.

I have a theory you can only induct a new player 'properly' (i.e. without them getting out their phone and consulting wikipedia) when you've got at least 3-4 experienced players.

Fewer than that and the new player won't see enough plays to figure out what the pattern is before they're buried in penalty cards. I've found this to be true even if the new player is a veteran board game player, used to paying attention to long games with complicated rules.
by diffeomorphism | 2026-01-14 08:29:15+00:00
Because they are a fire hazard:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o

Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.

Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.
by larodi | 2026-01-14 08:29:29+00:00
Precisely - every reverb is impulse response, lots of other effects are effectively some sort of convolution with neural networks that we otherwise call AI. Arpegiattors are AI and the random jumps between patterns in Ableton are a Markov Chain.

What does Bandcamp really mean? Perhaps sampling others voices and music is barred, not these mini-AIs that are everywhere ?
by zxexz | 2026-01-14 08:30:00+00:00
As a kid I played something similar to this, and monetary value (A=0; J=11; Q=12; K=13) was introduced as a rule. Someone played a card they wrote on a 10 that forced me to eat a worm to destroy the card (and get $10). I never got my $10 and felt guilty for months after, and guiltier when I realized I felt guilty for eating a worm without compensation. The fact I felt I would not feel guilty otherwise confused me.

Would play again.
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-01-14 08:30:32+00:00
> We no longer have Google, effectively

Veering offtopic a bit... Google lost its (search) way years ago. See the "The Man who Killed Google Search" [1], and the room they left for alternatives like DuckDuckGo.

At work, we have full access to Claude, and I find that I now use that instead of doing a search. Sure it's not 100% reliable, but neither is search anyhow, and at least I save time from sifting through a dozen crappy content farms.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
by Ygg2 | 2026-01-14 08:30:35+00:00
> Come on. The majority of Rust programs use the GC.

This part is false. You make a ridiculous statement and expect everyone to just nod along.

I could see this being true iff you say all Rust UI programs use "RC".

> This is simply not true. There are and have always been types of software that, for whatever reason, need low-level control over memory usage, but the overall number of such cases has been steadily decreasing over the past decades

Without ever increasing memory/CPU, you're going to have to squeeze more performance out of the stone (more or less unchanging memory/CPUs).

GC will be a mostly unacceptable overhead in numerous instances. I'm not saying it will be fully gone, but I don't think the current crop of C-likes is accidental either.

> I understand that's something you believe, but it's not supported empirically

It's supported by Google's usage of Rust.

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

> Stable and high-quality changes differentiate Rust. DORA uses rollback rate for evaluating change stability. Rust's rollback rate is very low and continues to decrease, even as its adoption in Android surpasses C++.

So for similar patches, you see fewer errors in new code. And the overall error rate still favors Rust.
Ask HN: Why does Google still provide an open redirect for phishers?
by throwaway89201 | 2026-01-14 08:30:45+00:00
Google offers a page on https://google.com/url?q=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613684 that works as an open redirect to any site since at least March 2025 [1].

As such, it often gets used by phishers to piggy-back on the domain reputation of Google by either human actors safety-squinting the domain name or systems that allowlist Google.

Google has often had open redirect problems, for example around AMP, but these seemed to be unintentional and were removed after some time. However, this google.com/url naming scheme almost seems intentional.

This is in contradiction with their own advice (2009) around open redirects [2].

Does anyone know why Google keeps this working, thereby facilitating phishers?

[1] https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/scammers-using-new-trick-in-phishing-text-messages-google-redirects/

[2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/01/open-redirect-urls-is-your-site-being
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-14 08:31:21+00:00
Exactly, so why would you want to make users scroll through all of them?

Mac OS comes with something like 80 apps out of the box. I have over 200 on my system, and I'm pretty stingy with space. I immediately delete stuff I try and don't like.

So the noobs who know nothing about Spotlight typically come back with some absurd suggestion like "put a shortcut to the Applications folder in your dock."

Um.. no. Not even close.
by Animats | 2026-01-14 08:31:33+00:00
Imagine if there were programs that let you write HTML like using a word processor. And then they let you upload that file to a server.

I'm still using Dreamweaver 8 from 2004 to edit some sites. I paid for it as a boxed product, including the right to transfer it to a replacement computer.
It's on its fourth replacement computer now, running under Wine emulation on Linux.

The sites load really fast.

There were a few attempts to build open source tools like Dreamweaver, but they all seem to have been abandoned.
by jrflowers | 2026-01-14 08:31:39+00:00
> Dear mods and admins, could we please get twitter links off the site? It is shameful that HN is supporting a site that produces and condones CSAM by driving more traffic to it.

> I am fully aware of this, as I attended a meetup at the YC office in Cambridge in 2006 where I met Alexis and Steve, but thank you for the irrelevant comment!

> I am fully aware of this historical information, thanks.

Sorry I misunderstood! You were aware of Reddit being a CSAM hub back in 2011 and were asking folks not to link to that site back in the day despite having been to a meetup! You could have just linked to your posts asking HN not to link to Reddit in 2009-2011.

Otherwise if I am wrong about that, can you clarify what exactly you meant to communicate by saying “I know that Reddit was a CSAM hub” and “I’ve met Alexis and Steve” in response to my post? Why did you bring them up specifically by name? How does that make my comment about the culture on HN irrelevant despite the fact that there isn’t anything that we disagree about?

Like you said (to paraphrase for brevity) “this twitter CSAM shit is bad and shouldn’t be on HN” and I said “this sort of complaint has been a thing about HN for a long time” and then you said “Yes, I know that. It is irrelevant. I have met Alexis and Steve”

What on earth is happening in this conversation. You agreed with me, got snippy, name dropped Alexis and Steve, agreed with me again, and then said I didn’t read what you wrote

???
by renewiltord | 2026-01-14 08:32:30+00:00
Browsed OP's website. Zero open-source content.

Browsed top commenters' site. Only outlier is abetusk here who has his hobbyist stuff available openly, but nothing professional.

I don't get it. Why don't any of you guys do the thing you want others to do? Be the change you want to see in the world.
by librasteve | 2026-01-14 08:33:05+00:00
thought I’d try the showcase example in Raku (https://raku.org), so this Gleam

import gleam/io

pub fn main() {
io.println("hello, friend!")
}

becomes this Raku

say “hello, friend!”

well maybe you really want to have a main() so you can pass in name from the command line

#!/usr/bin/env raku

sub MAIN($name) {
say "hello, $name!”
}
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-14 08:33:24+00:00
Yes, because of simply going to my Utils folder in Launchpad, I want to launch Spotlight (someday) and type in:

"Open the SD-card data-recovery application I installed a few years ago"

So elegant!

Oh look, right now on the HN front page is an article about why this sucks: https://tidepool.leaflet.pub/3mcbegnuf2k2i
by german_dong | 2026-01-14 08:33:59+00:00
The buffer is the UI, rendered by Emacs's extremely optimised text display machinery

The author is known in the community as a mere packager whose knowledge of the nitty-gritty derives entirely from hearsay. Perhaps he read the long-winded preamble to xdisp.c written in 1995 boasting of all manner of optimisations. But they were written so long ago, almost no one believes most of them matter anymore, what with thirty years of bitrot.
by duskdozer | 2026-01-14 08:34:42+00:00
I think it's called "quick settings" (top right on https://www.gamingonlinux.com/uploads/articles/tagline_image... ) where the power, internet, etc menus are. I think that's mostly just the thing that I remembered most aside from the shortcuts menu changes, but it was mainly the fact that I couldn't patch in my need for customization with extensions well enough anymore that made me realize GNOME wasn't my thing. It was just what was there when I started and I worked around it.
by Ndymium | 2026-01-14 08:35:01+00:00
Gleam is technically as suitable for distributed computing as Erlang: since it compiles to Erlang, it can do anything that Erlang can. You can use Erlang and Elixir libraries and write FFI code to do things that would be unergonomic to do in Gleam. Sure the experience is different and if you want to embrace the guarantees of static typing, then the APIs will look different, like gleam_otp.

If you compile it to JS, then the guarantees change to JS's guarantees.

Personally I've felt that the JS target is a big plus and hasn't detracted from Gleam. Writing a full stack app with both sides being in Gleam and sharing common code is something I've enjoyed a lot. The most visible impact is that there's no target specific functions in the stdlib or the language itself, so Erlang related things are in gleam_erlang and gleam_otp, and e.g. filesystem access is a package instead of being in the stdlib. If you're just into Erlang, you don't need to interact with the JS target at all.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-14 08:35:56+00:00
Hrrrm, nope, can't be bottom up programmers either. I'm a bit more towards the bottom-up exploratory style at the moment, and have quite a lot of fun with Opus 4.5 providing power steering.

I should probably try a test project top-down to see if I can get more out of it though.

Either way, if you just sit on your hands and expect the LLM to magically do all the work for you, you're a little bit mistaken, yet. (With certain exceptions proving the rule) .
by keybored | 2026-01-14 08:35:56+00:00
> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.

As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.

Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.

> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.

Think harder then.

The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
by neilv | 2026-01-14 08:36:24+00:00
It sounded good, up until the examples for:

> I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for

All will be gamed by interviewees, by the afternoon this hits the HN front page.

(And, for example, tech interview prep has already been telling people to fake passion and curiosity, for many years now.)

Here's what you do:

1. Consider that the early startup also belongs to the early hires. It's their startup too. You're the last-word decider, but it's not only your startup. You want it to also be theirs. Believe this, and act like it.

2. Reflect that in the equity sharing. "0.5%", to be diluted, as options, with ISO rules that discourage exercising at all... while co-founders divide up 70% of founder real shares between themselves... is nonsense, for that founding engineer, who you should want to be as motivated as you, and contributing as much as you do.

3. With equity like you're serious, make the salaries low-ish. Not so low that it's nonviable for modest family cost of living, but low enough to self-select out the people who aren't committed to the company being successful, or who don't actually believe in the company.

4. Have an actually promising company and founding team, or you won't get many experienced people biting.