MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-31 21:25:36+00:00
Frankly, your particular interest is completely irrelevant.

Scientific research is of societal interest, even if your particular interest differ. The best you can do is vote for parties that promise to shut down scientific research, or find another group of likeminded morons and form such a party with them.

If you disagree with the concept of taxes, well, sucks to be you. May your desires never come to fruition, because life would be hell.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2026-01-31 21:26:27+00:00
What do you mean? There was never any question of attacking Russia and fighting any war on their soil. Nobody in their right mind would attack a country with the 2nd largest army and nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine definitely made this army still very weak, but, except Ukraine defending itself, I don't see anyone rushing to attack Russia anytime soon. It makes no sense now and made no sense before they invaded Ukraine. There is nothing to win by attacking Russia and a lot to lose.
by strcat | 2026-01-31 21:26:49+00:00
GrapheneOS only supports devices with isolated radios including but not limited to cellular. It's one of the hardware requirements:

https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

The radios on the supported devices can't access the microphone, GNSS, etc.

GrapheneOS has never supported a device without an isolated cellular radio since that isolation was in place even with the initial Nexus 5 and Galaxy S4. However, some of the devices prior to Pixels did have Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth without proper isolation similar to laptops/desktops. Nexus 5X was the initial device with proper isolation for Wi-Fi/Bluetooth due to having SoC provided Wi-Fi from Qualcomm. Pixels have avoided this issue for integrating Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. Nexus devices left this up to companies like LG, Huawei, etc. and anything not done for them by Qualcomm tended to have security neglected. Qualcomm has taken security a lot more seriously than other SoC vendors and typical Android OEMs for a long time and provides good isolation for most of the SoC components.

Don't believe everything you read about smartphone security and especially cellular radios. There are many products with far less secure cellular radios which are far less isolated but rather connected via extremely high attack surface approaches including USB which are claiming those are better. A lot of the misconceptions about cellular come from how companies market supposedly more secure products which are in reality far worse than an iPhone.
by cyberax | 2026-01-31 21:27:22+00:00
> This community should be talking about meshcore more imho.

The fundamental problem of distributed networks is that you can either have centralized control of the endpoints, or your network becomes vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. So meshcore/meshtastic are great because they are used only by well-meaning people. If they become more popular, we'll start getting tons of spam :(
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-01-31 21:27:42+00:00
It's largely fans of Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel, where some years ago sadly she shifted into just being a grifter selling conspiracy theories about the funding of particle physics.

The audience here tends to vastly overweight contrarian near conspiracy theory style stuff, so this sort of comment shows up on literally every damn post about physics research.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-31 21:28:04+00:00
One problem is people selling their home to pay for snake oil, so their children now are not only orphan but also homeless.

Imagina an evil bank clerk on the door of a cancer center that says:

fake quote> There is a new promising [unverified] treatment that can save the life of your S.O. It's very expensive so you have to take a double mortgage on your home. You are very lucky, because today we are offering it with only a 49.99% interest rate. Do you love him/her?
by TZubiri | 2026-01-31 21:28:21+00:00
With all due respect to Stallman, you can actually study binaries.

The claim Stallman would make (after punishing you for using Open Source instead of Free Software for an hour) is that Closed Software (Proprietary Software) is unjust. but in the context of security, the claim would be limited to Free Software being capable of being secure too.

You may be able to argue that Open Source reduces risk in threat models where the manufacturer is the attacker, but in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source. It's automatic obfuscation.

There's a lot of advantages to Free Software, you don't need to make up some.
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-01-31 21:29:03+00:00
Man I miss the days when forums were hopping. They all really had their own "character," too, often informed by whatever interest group they were catering to.

It feels like by including everything on one site, Reddit et al just end up as a bland "soup." But they're so useful by the sheer mass of population that they end up drowning out everything else.
by shepherdjerred | 2026-01-31 21:29:05+00:00
Apple's ad revenue was 1% of its total in 2024. It was estimated to be 2-3% in 2025.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q4/FY24_Q4_Consol...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/30/apple-4q-2025-earnings/
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 21:29:47+00:00
So much information is missing from this.

What Google account? Is it personal Gmail? Or your academic account? Are you using this for personal reasons or professional or commercial reasons? What kind of payment method is attached? What was your level of usage? Any idea why you were suspended initially?

Because it could be that Google is reviewing your appeal and simply shadow-denying it, and you haven't provided the right information to make it look legit. E.g. if they think you're a spammer or mining crypto or they think you're creating additional free accounts to use free credits, they're obviously not going to tell you what makes them think that.

But if this is for university-related work, and your university purchases IT+cloud services from Google (as they probably do), talk to your IT department so they can get you in touch with their institution-level support. Obviously, for the attached Google sales rep, the last thing they want is a CS researcher losing access to GCP.
by gruez | 2026-01-31 21:30:04+00:00
>> allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.

>Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/

Is there some context I'm missing? Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company) it shows they might have perpetrated some war crimes, but that alone doesn't really make them worse than the US military. For instance, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri....
by shushpanchik | 2026-01-31 21:30:06+00:00
To add to that, most of the events described in the article - hitting cyclist, hit when reversing, hit stationary item on parking etc - happen during low speed city driving, but most miles for average driver are driven on highways. So, taxis, that are driven most of the time in city, would definitely get more crashes per mile than average driver. So 500,000/200,000 miles number could not be really applied to a taxi. I exect that number for taxis could be much lower.

Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.
by eek2121 | 2026-01-31 21:30:15+00:00
I did not read the article. Reason: My response is "No shit, Sherlock."

Mobile carriers have so much information about you. They know exactly where you are, what you are doing (location combined with mapping tools) combined with who you are talking to.

They know when you are at home depot, when you are the grocery store, when you are at home, when you are awake, when you are asleep, etc.

In the U.S. there are very few laws stopping them from using all your data. In the E.U. you should definitely read up, as you aren't as protected as you think you are.

Forget Nation/State nonsense. You have an active relationship with a company who, by it's very existence and your business relationship, knows what you do all day long.

Don't even get me started about the rabbit hole surrounding 'incognito'/anonymous browsing.

EDIT: You've probably heard of Man-in-the-Middle attacks, right? They are the man in the middle. They will exploit this as best they legally can (and in certain cases, without regard to legality)

The best way to protect yourself is not to play the game at all. The same goes for your ISP, FWIW.
by donatj | 2026-01-31 21:30:45+00:00
Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats?

I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.

I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.

Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.
by risyachka | 2026-01-31 21:30:54+00:00
All websites had all incentives to be api-first for 2 decades now.

They aren't API first not because they can't - but because customers will use whatever GUI website supports to use it.

Unless your product has no value - users will fill out those forms manually if you don't provide API if they need your product.

Agents don't change this.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-31 21:31:06+00:00
This comment comes across as unnecessarily aggressive and out of nowhere (Stallman?), it's really hard to parse.

Does this rewording reflect it's meaning?

"You don't actually need code to evaluate security, you can analyze a binary just as well."

Because that doesn't sound correct?

But that's just my first pass, at a high level. Don't wanna overinterpret until I'm on surer ground about what the dispute is. (i.e. don't want to mind read :) )

Steelman for my current understanding is limited to "you can check if it writes files/accesses network, and if it doesn't, then by definition the chats are private and its secure", which sounds facile. (presumably something is being written to somewhere for the whole chat thing to work, can't do P2P because someone's app might not be open when you send)
by parhamn | 2026-01-31 21:31:53+00:00
Expalin how you detect a branched/flaged sendKey (or whatever it would be called) call in the compiled WhatsApp iOS app?

It could be interleaved in any of the many analytics tools in there too.

You have to trust the client in E2E encryption. There's literally no way around that. You need to trust the client's OS (and in some cases, other processes) too.
by TheCraiggers | 2026-01-31 21:31:58+00:00
> Our devices should generate _noise_. Huge crazy amounts of noise. Extraneous data to a level that pollutes the system beyond any utility. They accept all this data without filtering. They should suffer for that choice.

I like the idea on principle, but I'll like it far less when I'm getting charged with computer fraud or some other over-reaching bullshit law.
by themafia | 2026-01-31 21:32:11+00:00
Corporations love open source when it delivers working code to their doorstep. They hate open source when it comes to actually maintaining and managing a community of developers who really do care about and use the core product.

So they create draconian "agreements" and "codes" to tilt the playing field entirely in their favor. It's entirely antithetical to the whole idea of open source.

These projects should be ruthlessly forked and all corporate development efforts ignored.
by Aerbil313 | 2026-01-31 21:33:17+00:00
No, governments are not meant to be able to fund atrocities half a world away. Just as your body is not meant to sit at a chair and your eyes are not meant to look at a distance of 50cm for 8 hours a day.

The entire current human existence right now is at odds with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-31 21:33:36+00:00
Does it apply to the government like it applies to people? Is it enforced against governments like it is enforced against people and corporations? A core issue here is that laws, and the application and enforcement of laws, generally do not. Having said that I applaud the attempt and encourage pushing forward on the anti-surveillance aspects of GDPR while recognizing all laws are flawed.
by teilom | 2026-01-31 21:34:03+00:00
+1 on interaction terms + tails : fanout × retries × context growth is where linear token math dies.

One thing we do in enzu is make “budget as constraint” executable: we clamp `max_output_tokens` from the budget before the call, and in multi-step/RLM runs we adapt output caps downward as the budget depletes (so it naturally gets shorter/cheaper instead of spiraling). When token counting is unavailable we explicitly enter a “budget degraded” mode rather than pretending estimates are exact.

Also agree p90/p95 cost/run matters more than averages; max-output caps are crude but effective.

Docs: https://github.com/teilomillet/enzu/blob/main/docs/PROD_MULT... and https://github.com/teilomillet/enzu/blob/main/docs/BUDGET_CO...
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-31 21:35:06+00:00
I seemingly went what I consider simple, others might consider barebones: I have a Makefile, define all the hosts there, and then use scp to copy over all files into the right hosts, and then run `nixos-rebuild switch` on them once copied over. Some have extra "restart-service-X" as some services have their configuration managed outside NixOS (but still in my source repository) so those as well are scp'd into the right place, then the service restarted after the nixos-rebuild switch. Otherwise it's all .nix files and service-specific configuration files.
Ask HN: Gmail/Draft Problems?
by sanj | 2026-01-31 21:36:06+00:00
I've been using GMail for many years both privately and inside Workspace.

Recently I've had mulitple problems where drafts disappear, sometimes even after I send them. My partner's seen this as well on a completely unrelated workspace enterprise account.

On top of that,I've noticed that my "Drafts" are conspicuously missing entries since mid-November. I've got a pretty good rate of leaving drafts and ideas half formed in email.

(I'm not looking for advice, guidance, or berating for this behavior – I've already gotten an earful from my team.)

Has anyone else seen this? Perhaps take a look in drafts and see what's missing!
by palata | 2026-01-31 21:36:31+00:00
Is he pro-tivoization, or is he not against it?

I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.

Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
by M95D | 2026-01-31 21:36:52+00:00
From what you know about WA, is it possible for the servers to MitM the connection between two clients? Is there a way for a client to independently verify the identity of the other client, such as by comparing keys (is it even possible to view them?), or comparing the contents of data packets sent from one client with the ones received on the other side?

Thanks.
by figassis | 2026-01-31 21:37:09+00:00
When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).

I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.

Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.

I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.

But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.
by jmathai | 2026-01-31 21:37:19+00:00
I did say it was robust…

I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF.

For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic EXIF.

I don’t want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset. The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too high. It’s a conscious decision and not an oversight.

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1...

[2] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a...

[3] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...
by refulgentis | 2026-01-31 21:37:36+00:00
Agents are sort of irrelevant to this discussion, no?

Like, it's assuredly harder for an agent than having access to the code, if only because there's a theoratical opportunity to misunderstand the decompile.

Alternatively, it's assuredly easier for an agent because given execution time approaches infinity, they can try all possible interpretations.
by palata | 2026-01-31 21:39:00+00:00
Right, I get what you mean.

But in a way, I feel like sometimes it makes sense to not completely open everything. Say a messaging app, it makes sense to not just make it free for all. As a company, if I let you interoperate with my servers that I pay and maintain, I guess it makes sense that I may want to check who you are before. I think?
by pqtyw | 2026-01-31 21:39:07+00:00
>Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins?

Because it became self evident in the 1800s and first half of the 20th century that a commodity backed currently is not a good idea in any non static economy with a reasonably stable government?

Deflation and constant boom and bust cycles (something like the 2008 crisis would have been pretty mild back in the gold standard days) are somewhat of a drag on economic productivity.
by detroitwebsites | 2026-01-31 21:39:10+00:00
I've been running OpenClaw for about 2 weeks now. Here's my honest take:

What's great:
- Having Claude in WhatsApp/Telegram is actually life-changing for quick tasks
- The skills ecosystem is clever (basically plugins for AI)
- Self-hosted means full control over data

What's not:
- Token usage can get expensive fast if you're not careful
- Setup is intimidating for non-technical folks
- The rebrand drama (Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw) didn't help trust

My setup:
- Running in Docker on a cheap VPS
- Using Anthropic API (not unofficial/scraped)
- Strict rate limiting to avoid bill shock
- Sandbox mode enabled

Is it worth it? For me, yes. But I wouldn't recommend it to my non-technical friends without a solid setup guide.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-01-31 21:39:45+00:00
This. Closed source doesn't stop people from finding exploits in the same way that open source doesn't magically make people find them. The Windows kernel is proprietary and closed source, but people constantly find exploits in it anyways. What matters is that there is a large audience that cares about auditing. OTOH if Microsoft really wanted to sneak in a super hard to detect spyware exploit, they probably could - but so could the Linux kernel devs. Some exploits have been openly sitting in the Linux kernel for more than a decade despite everyone being able to audit it in theory. Who's to say they weren't planted by some three letter agency who coerced a developer. Relying on either approach is pointless anyways. IT security is not a single means to all ends. It's a constant struggle between safety and usability at every single level from raw silicon all the way to user-land.
Ask HN: Are retries the wrong abstraction under rate limits?
by rjpruitt16 | 2026-01-31 21:39:45+00:00
Over the last few years, I’ve watched a lot of production systems fail in ways that feel… strangely predictable.

When services hit 429s or timeouts, the standard response is almost always the same: retries with backoff, sleep loops, jitter, etc. This is treated as a best practice across languages and platforms.

But in systems with high concurrency, fan-out, or shared downstream dependencies, retries often seem to amplify load instead of smoothing it. What starts as localized failure can turn into retry storms, thundering herds, and cascading outages.

It’s made me wonder whether retries are solving the wrong problem at the wrong layer — treating a coordination issue as an application-level error-handling concern.

I wrote up a longer piece exploring this idea and arguing for making failure boring again by handling it at a different layer:
https://www.ezthrottle.network/blog/making-failure-boring-again

Curious how this matches others’ experience:

Have retries actually improved stability for you under sustained rate limiting?

Have you seen cases where they clearly made things worse?

If retries aren’t the right abstraction, what is?

Interested in war stories, counterexamples, and alternative approaches.
by raincole | 2026-01-31 21:39:46+00:00
I wonder how much it can be automated? Like to tell the model to

1. read the first 5 pages of HN

2. if there is a common theme, use a search engine to 'do your own research' and collect references

3. read your existing blog posts

4. write a new article with the same theme but in your style

5. post the link back to HN
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 21:40:37+00:00
> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.

That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.

> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.

Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed it up and improve your experience.

There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-01-31 21:40:41+00:00
Now I am curious what is the realistic price a business would expect to put down for a full rack. Say UPS, switch, 4-8U storage, and the rest CPU compute. Without entertaining GPUs, I bet you can get very respectably speced 1-2U servers for $5k a pop. So few hundred thousand probably gets you just an unbelievable amount of horsepower.