MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-25 16:07:54+00:00
That's a blue state being targeted for revenge and for practice and so they can spin stories for their voters in other states. They'd probably target blue cities in swing states if they wanted to impact votes.

They have people who are experts in this. Before the latest wave of open fascism, many of the rising stars in the Republican party where people who were experts at removing people with Democrat sounding names off voter registration databases shortly before elections.

They have the data to target this effectively if they want to do it.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-25 16:07:55+00:00
Technology has been increasingly pushing towards advertising and media consumption over productivity, and productivity features have been left to degrade or outright removed.

Apple may not offer a photo app with advertising but the photo apps it offers are clearly inferior with less information density and less powerful features, because there is no longer incentive to offer a powerful photography tool.

In fact since a lot of software "success" is measured with "engagement" (regardless of the presence of ads), making a productive tool isn't incentivized as it would reduce engagement if the tool allows one to complete their task faster.
by Twirrim | 2026-01-25 16:08:03+00:00
Sony's history of media formats and devices is fascinating. I keep thinking that at some stage they're going to stop creating new ones, but somehow never seems to happen.

This goes into just 6 of the media formats, but there are so many more.

https://www.slashgear.com/1675900/discontinued-sony-formats-...

A more recent example: Archival Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc
by nicoburns | 2026-01-25 16:08:20+00:00
I haven't used it in a decade, but when I last did need this kind of software IdImager's Photo Supreme came out top of my research.

The photo editing capabilities were relatively weak (but it would integrate nicely with the editing software of your choice), but the cataloging capabilities were fantastic, and it had a lot of flexibility about how the files were stored on disk (have it organise that for you or not) and the option to store the metadata it created directly in the metadata of photo files themselves where much of it could be read by other software.

https://www.idimager.com/
by rm445 | 2026-01-25 16:08:22+00:00
Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.

I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 16:08:37+00:00
> I don't really know how to bridge the moral gap with this sort of viewpoint, honestly. It's like you're telling me to sympathise with the arsonist whilst he's still running around with gasoline

That wasn't how I read it. Neither sympathize nor sit around doing nothing. Figure out what you can do that's productive. Yelling at the arsonist while he continues to burn more things down isn't going to be useful.

Assuming good faith tends to be an important thing to start with if the goal is an objective assessment. Of course you should be open to an eventual determination of bad faith. But if you start from an assumption of bad faith your judgment will almost certainly be clouded and thus there is a very real possibility that you will miss useful courses of action.

The above is on an individual level. From an organizational perspective if participants know that a process could result in a bad faith determination against them they are much more likely to actively resist the process. So it can be useful to provide a guarantee that won't happen (at least to some extent) in order to ensure that you can reliably get to the bottom of things. This is what we see in the aviation world and it seems to work extremely well.
by jorvi | 2026-01-25 16:08:59+00:00
Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.

I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.

Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.

Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.
by a1j9o94 | 2026-01-25 16:09:41+00:00
Hey HN,

I spent the last few weeks exploring whether AI systems could benefit from generating video predictions before making decisions—like how humans mentally simulate "what happens if I pour this coffee?" before acting.

The idea: Show an AI an image, ask "what happens if I push this?", have it generate a video prediction, then compare that prediction to reality. If the prediction looks wrong, maybe the AI could catch its own mistakes.

The result: Current models can't do this. But I learned some interesting things along the way.

What I tested:
- 7 different architectures for predicting future video frames from VLM latent space
- Whether perceptual similarity (LPIPS) between predicted and actual video correlates with correctness
- Self-correction loops where the model gets feedback on its predictions

Key findings:

1. VLMs can't predict the future – Every architecture I tried performed worse than just copying the current frame as the "prediction." The model understands what's in an image but can't predict what will change.
2. Visual similarity ≠ semantic correctness – This one surprised me. Wrong predictions often looked MORE similar to reality than correct ones (LPIPS correlation: 0.106). You can't use "does it look right?" to catch mistakes.
3. Some things worked – Hybrid encoders (DINOv2 + VLM) preserve spatial information that VLMs lose. VLMs understand generated video well (93% semantic retention). Small adapters (10M params) work better than large ones (100M).

I'm releasing this as a benchmark proposal. Video generation is improving fast—capabilities that don't exist today might emerge in future models. Seems worth tracking.

Links:
- Demo video: https://youtu.be/YJxDt_zCrUI
- Code + paper: https://github.com/a1j9o94/foresight
- Live demo: https://foresight-demo-kappa.vercel.app

Built with Qwen2.5-VL, LTX-Video, Modal (GPUs), and the Something-Something v2 dataset.

Happy to answer questions about the experiments or methodology.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-01-25 16:10:09+00:00
> Tone policing isn’t helpful.

Yes it is, these are YC alums. A significant portion of that program is learning how to pitch to investors. Are you saying that YC wastes this effort? The goal of this post might be to recruit engineers to hire, but it is public facing and part of their image that anyone might read, including future customers. It doesn’t help to recruit good engineers but be unable to sell because the industry expects strict professionalism.
by Insanity | 2026-01-25 16:10:11+00:00
John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I’d say given his own investment there, he’s probably positive about it.

Just speculation on my part of course.

Also, “masters of doom” is such a good book. Recommend it for anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack, Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).
by ottah | 2026-01-25 16:10:24+00:00
I have struggled with getting anything functional on a Fairphone running Ubuntu Touch. The problem is you can't really run any Linux app, it has to be written to support their specific display manager. Running regular Linux apps is possible but not properly documented and I haven't gotten it to work. Android apps through Waydroid sort of works, but is unstable and not suitable for daily use.

I really want Linux on mobile to be a thing, but I haven't found it yet. PinePhone is abandoned, Purism just isn't a finished product, Planet Computers doesn't even build a phone with Linux support anymore.

The only thing that's current and active I've seen is a Hong Kong startup https://furilabs.com/. I've got one on my desk to try, hoping it will be something usable as a daily driver.
by gruez | 2026-01-25 16:10:47+00:00
>Why should the rest of us be punished?

Exactly. I'm sick and tired of all the apps/websites that mandate 2fa. All of that adds friction when I'm a big boy who knows how to choose secure passwords. For that matter, why even invest resources into fraud detection or law enforcement? All of that money is coming out of somewhere, and why should my tax dollars go toward catching fake nigerian princes when it's just helping idiots anyways?

/s
by smitty1e | 2026-01-25 16:10:50+00:00
The Narrative is used as a truth suppository.

I'm skeptical regarding there being two distinct political parties. That seems a happy façade papering over much deeper issues.

Here on HN, one can relate the Constitution as a script that has not scaled well when put on a globally facing server.

The question is how to keep the "good" individual liberty parts while migrating toward something that is more stable in an international setting.

All the while having diabolically false mainstream media plays occurring continuously.

And no, I don't believe a godforsaken thing pertaining to the 2020 election.
by xantronix | 2026-01-25 16:10:54+00:00
> The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.

This expressed expectation of "how the world works" is the perception of a monolith, however. There is no divine right or reason for things to be designed online-first, except for incentives to the service providers. When somebody designs an app to be online-first, they are choosing to be a service provider, and not an app author. This distinction may not be clear to developers who came to be in a culture where online-first is a first order concern, but it is immediately clear to anybody who "owns" the "app" in question when the service is either neglected or decommissioned in a few years, or is otherwise made inaccessible via the internet.
by dismalaf | 2026-01-25 16:11:27+00:00
> core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS

It's obvious you've never used Android if you think these are core features LMAO. No one cares that much about connector type, more the fact it's using an industry standard versus proprietary. No one cares about RCS, everyone uses WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Line, etc...

Core features are stuff like being able to search for a business through the phone app, Maps telling you where you parked your car, unprompted, compatibility with the casting protocol, the ability to make ANY app the default for a particular task, the ability to sideload, the fact you can switch phone brands and get whatever hardware you want but your core OS with all your accounts stays the same. Basically the ability to do what you want win your OS and no one restricting your phone's features.

As for Google's strategy, it's the same as Valve's. Having a platform they can't be locked out of since both MS and Apple have shown they'll abuse their market power.
by titzer | 2026-01-25 16:11:35+00:00
I'm curious if some of the bits in your data types are "control bits" that determine what the format of the other bits are. If that's the case, then it sounds like an algebraic data type would be a natural way to express it. If you read the linked paper, algebraic datatypes in Virgil can have different encodings for the cases. As long as the cases are distinguishable via a decision tree, it should be possible to just describe the formats declaratively and have the compiler do all the encoding/decoding/matching.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-25 16:13:31+00:00
It was definitely more of a stick than carrot situation.

The issue with multiple dialogs is that the operator could claim that they were confused with conflicting wording and the implications of things like "Confirm" vs "Cancel" in certain contexts of use. This provides some degree of cover for moving with less care. With no dialog at all, the operator has nothing to point to but their own actions. There is nothing to hide behind.

The fact that this was also a heavily multi-lingual/cultural environment amplified the effect of poorly designed safety mechanisms dramatically.
by arkh | 2026-01-25 16:13:39+00:00
> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.

Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.
by user_7832 | 2026-01-25 16:13:48+00:00
> You're going to use your devices, so you won't control the temperature or, largely, the charge percentage.

> I think good advice is to keep your devices as cool as you can (...), and keep the battery between 20% and 80% as much as possible.

Yeah that's kinda what I meant. Where it's easy or possible to do so (for eg lots of modern laptops & phones allow charge limits), it's better to follow these guidelines.

> Batteries are ultimately consumables, so don't stress too much. Just care for them as much as convenient, and that's it.

Yeah I agree (and that's what I meant by my last sentence), however, a lot of people (including eg my dad!) end up having battery issues while being unaware that they can do things to protect their hardware.

For example, my phone has enough capacity to last the whole day even at 60% of it's capacity. I've set it to stop charging at 80% (the lowest possible SOC) for this reason. On my laptop, I frequently reduce it to 60% as I use it plugged in.

> I don't think this advice is useful.

I'm afraid I don't get what's not helpful? We're probably talking across each other.
by bobmcnamara | 2026-01-25 16:14:04+00:00
Oof.

I was the second person to not get a plaque after they stopped the 10-years at work. Instead I got an email.

I knew one of the last people to get one, so was expecting mine two weeks later.

And I knew Sarah, who started a week before me, and had printed out her 10-year email and a picture of the clock. I found mine at a thrift store. When I left I set it on her desk on the way out. Hope she liked it.
by gruez | 2026-01-25 16:14:11+00:00
>Sideloading is a neologism to scare users and lawmakers, it just means "Installing software" and should be a basic right.

No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source. You might not agree the restriction should exist, or that even the concept of first party source at all, but for communication purposes it's worth having a simple word to describe that concept, rather than something like "installing from a non-first party app store".
by nik282000 | 2026-01-25 16:14:48+00:00
I work at a plant with a site wide SCADA/HMI (Siemens WinCC) system, every alarm is displayed on every HMI regardless of its proximity to the machine or even its ability to address the issue. And any given minute a hundred or more alarms can be generated, the majority being nuisance messages like "air pressure almost low" or my favorite " " (no message set) but scattered among those is the occasional "no cooling water - explosion risk".

This plant is operated and deigned to the spec of an international corp with more than 20 factories, it's not a mom-and-pop operation. No one seems to think the excessive, useless, alarms are an issue and that any damage caused by missed warnings is the fault of the operator. When approaching management and engineering about this the responses range from "it's not in the budget" to " you're maintenance, fix all the problems and the alarms will go away".

The only way for this kind of issue to be resolved is with regulation and safety standards. An operator can't safely operate equipment when alarms are not filtered or sorted in some way. It's like forcing your IT guy to watch web server access logs live to spot vulnerabilities being exploited.
by SonOfKyuss | 2026-01-25 16:15:00+00:00
> Your line of argument is an interesting one though. You're tacitly admitting that western protesters don't actually care about innocent Palestinians. They're just using Palestine as an excuse to undermine their governments.

That’s not true and definitely not the “gotcha” you’re looking for. Americans protesting on American soil, the actions of the American government supporting atrocities against lives they do care about seems perfectly reasonable. We’re not protesting against Iran in America because there’s no government action we want to stop. The administration already opposes Irans actions and has publicly stated that military intervention is being considered. There’s just a lot less for Americans to be mad at their government in this situation. That doesn’t mean people aren’t upset. They’re just not taking to the streets because there is less of a reason to ask the government to change direction they’re already going in. I’m not sure what is so hard to understand about that unless you’re intentionally being obtuse.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-25 16:15:09+00:00
First of all, knowing well that the US has been looking for excuses to attack Iran for the past, I don't know, twenty years at least, I am extremely suspicious of information about the numbers of these massacres. I know perfectly well that a media campaign filled with horrific reports is going to precede an attack by the US to either reduce the country in ruins or to a puppet state. I am also quite suspicious that these protests might be somehow encouraged by the US precisely for the same purpose. I mean, if Russian propaganda can influence foreign countries, I can't put a limit to what USA's power in the IT and social media space can do.

Besides this, of course when atrocities are perpetrated by an ally with whom you entertain friendly diplomatic, commercial and military relationships, it makes a lot of sense to protest: you have some leverage. When they are committed by an enemy country with which you have already severed any relationship, protests are pointless.
Show HN: MCP Security Documentation with Code Examples
by finktech | 2026-01-25 16:15:34+00:00
Hi everyone! I'm the author.

A few months ago, a friend's MCP server accidentally deleted his database. That stuck
with me. We're building AI systems that can modify data and execute commands, but we
don't have practical tools to validate they're safe.

So I built mcp-security (security documentation with real code examples) and started
mcp-verify (an automated auditor).

What makes mcp-security different:
- 12 actionable rules mapped to OWASP Top 10
- Real vulnerable and secure code implementations (Node.js)
- Compliance mapping (SOC2, HIPAA, PCI DSS)
- Bilingual (English + Spanish)
- Free, MIT licensed

mcp-verify (still in development) will test MCP servers for security vulnerabilities,
load capacity, and protocol compliance. But the interesting part: it's also an MCP
server itself, so Claude can use it to audit other servers.

Happy to answer questions about MCP security or the roadmap!
by pjc50 | 2026-01-25 16:16:09+00:00
On some of my cover letters I wrote "full stack from the transistors upwards", because at one point or another I have shipped code in:

- IC design software (at a startup bought by Cadence)

- an IC (contract out of Dallas semi)

- FPGA HFT acceleration

- fixing some OS drivers for Windows CE

- finding a compiler bug

- various bits of embedded firmware in C and assembly for various platforms

- debugging with a scope

- desktop applications

- a web server (defunct ZWS)

- web apps (Perl. Long time ago)

Somehow I've never written a react app.
by midlander | 2026-01-25 16:16:22+00:00
But the protests weren’t limited to Ameica, there were protests all over the world, including in Muslim countries.

And the outrage wasn’t always directed at the government. We don’t see Iranian students in the US being attacked. We don’t see Iranian places of worship in the US being attacked. We don’t see as much outrage in the comments on HN - there were some event justifying it.
by benesch | 2026-01-25 16:16:40+00:00
For local dev + testing, we recommend just hitting the production turbopuffer service directly, but with a separate test org/API key: https://turbopuffer.com/docs/testing

Works well for the vast majority of our customers (although we get the very occasional complaint about wanting a dev environment that works offline). The dataset sizes for local dev are usually so small that the cost rounds to free.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-25 16:17:31+00:00
I am running the latest version of Firefox, but I said it was better than version 60 of Firefox (years old). I am certainly not suggesting that Ladybird is more feature complete than modern Firefox. Ladybird is pre—Alpha.

But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.

When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-25 16:17:39+00:00
I don't think being human is inherently bad. But you have to draw the line to consider someone as "bad" somewhere, right? If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?

You guys are saying that drink driving does not make someone a bad person. Ok. Let's say I grant you that. Where do you draw the line for someone being a bad person?

I mean with this line of reasoning you can "explain way" every bad deed and then nobody is a bad person. So do you guys consider someone to be actually a bad person and what did they have to do to cross that line where you can't explain away their bad deed anymore and you really consider them to be bad?
by c_prompt | 2026-01-25 16:17:43+00:00
The biggest issue I have with BookLore is it doesn't have an Android app that syncs automatically where you last left when reading on desktop. (And KOReader - at least from the app stores - can't be used on Android 15, is an incredibly ugly UI/UX, and the latest version doesn't seem to even work with BookLore.) Without that, I don't see the reason to switch from calibre.

Edit: An Android app without an account. There appears to be Kobo integration but Kobo requires an account.
by auslegung | 2026-01-25 16:18:12+00:00
A codebase search for "claude" only has 1 hit in the code (the markdown that you referenced) and 4 commits which include the word in the commit message, or one commit includes .claude/ in the git ignore. See https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atldev%2Fposturr+claude&ty...

Same with a codebase search for "anthropic"
by gruez | 2026-01-25 16:18:21+00:00
>A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.

You should look at the CVE list that's fixed every month. Surely you agree it's important to have those exploits patched, especially since baddies can reverse engineer the patches to find the original exploits?
by throw310822 | 2026-01-25 16:19:06+00:00
The US was not inactive in Gaza. It was actively supporting, funding and and arming a genocide. Currently the Trump administration is actively engaged in a process to clean up the Gaza strip, rebuild it with the money of other countries, and finally hand it over to Israel for free (for who do you think those nice skyscrapers would be built, for the Palestinians? Lol).