MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2026-01-23 18:35:15+00:00
> I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.

Growing up I had a retired uncle who'd collected and restored a few classic cars of the 1950s to cherry condition. He kept them in a separate four car garage out back where he'd work on them in his spare time and then take them out for a drive on Sundays. Being a nerd kid, I couldn't really relate. Those old cars couldn't go very fast, weren't very comfortable and didn't have important features like an 8-track tape player (oh, and seat belts). Even the radio was only AM! I was more interested in the latest Amiga computer, so my Uncle's deep affection for these old old cars was just a quirky eccentricity.

Starting in the late 90s I gradually began acquiring classic 8 and 16-bit home computers of the 1980s when I'd hear of someone throwing one away. To me, that now-useless trash was still a treasure! At first I just "saved" the ones I'd actually owned but once I had those, I expanding to the models my teenage self had lusted over in Byte Magazine but could never dream of affording. eBay and thrift stores circa 2000 were overflowing with them for $5 or $10.

Once I had all those, I just kept going and picked up every model I'd ever even heard of and then a bunch of foreign ones from Europe, Japan, South America, Eastern Europe and Russia I'd never heard of. And I never paid more than $25 for any of them. They were just so interesting, I couldn't resist. Each platform was a unique evolutionary branch with its own opinionated design choices, operating system and vision of what 'personal' computing might be.

So... now I can finally understand my Uncle's fascination with his weird, old, not-very-good cars. :-)
by milleramp | 2026-01-23 18:35:55+00:00
The db scale is logarithmic but doesn't match how our eyes sense light. So small changes in db may result in large visible light changes, or vise versa. Have you ever looked at a raw image, it doesn't look correct untill a gamma is applied, even though roughly the same information exists in both raw and gamma images. This is a similar concept.
To do do this: db > linear > gamma
This can be precomputed into a lookup table with the number of entries being the number of current steps, 8-bit 256 entries.
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-23 18:36:02+00:00
It's...interesting but I feel like people keep forgetting that LLMs like Claude don't really...think(?). Or learn. Or know what 'corn' or a 'tractor' is. They don't really have any memory of past experiences or a working memory of some current state.

They're (very impressive) next word predictors. If you ask it 'is it time to order more seeds?' and the internet is full of someone answering 'no' - that's the answer it will provide. It can't actually understand how many there currently are, the season, how much land, etc, and do the math itself to determine whether it's actually needed or not.

You can babysit it and engineer the prompts to be as leading as possible to the answer you want it to give - but that's about it.
by gruez | 2026-01-23 18:36:02+00:00
>A finger slip, a bug in a Windows update, or even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory, could all lead to the key being accidentally uploaded.

This is absurd, because it's basically a generic argument about any sort of feature that vaguely reduces privacy. Sorry guys, we can't have automated backups in windows (even opt in!), because if the feature exists, a random bitflip can cause everything to be uploaded to microsoft against the user's will.
by dfabulich | 2026-01-23 18:36:21+00:00
I think the industry settled on pretty good answers, using lots of XML-like syntax (HTML, JSX) but rarely using XML™.

1. Following Postel's law, don't reject "invalid" third-party input; instead, standardize how to interpret weird syntax. This is what we did with HTML.

2. Use declarative schema definitions sparingly, only for first-party testing and as reference documentation, never to automatically reject third-party input.

3. Use XML-like syntax (like JSX) in a Turing-complete language for defining nested UI components.

Think of UI components as if they're functions, accepting a number of named, optional arguments/parameters (attributes!) and an array of child components with their own nested children. (In many UI frameworks, components literally are functions with opaque return types, exactly like this.)

Closing tags like `</article>` make sense when you're going to nest components 10+ layers deep, and when the closing tag will appear hundreds of lines of code later.

Most code shouldn't look like that, but UI code almost always does, which is why JSX is popular.
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 18:36:40+00:00
There is more than that. He needs to decide which corn seed to plant (he is behind here - seed companies run sales if you order in October for delivery in mid march). He needs to decide what fertilizer to apply, and when. He needs to monitor the crop - he might or might not need to buy and apply a fungicide. He needs to decide when to harvest - too early and he pays a lot of money to dry the corn (and likely money to someone you hired to work who doesn't do anything), but too late and a storm can blow the corn off the cob... Those are just a few of the things a farmer needs to figure out that the AI would need to do (but will it)
by travisgriggs | 2026-01-23 18:37:26+00:00
I'm waiting for the "Can it do Management?" experiment.

I do not have a positive impression/experience of most middle/low level management in corporate world. Over 30 years in the workforce, I've watched it evolve to a "secretary/clerk, usually male, who agrees to be responsible for something they know little about or not very good at doing, pretend at orchestrating".

Like growing corn, lots of literature has been written about it. So models have lots to work with and synthesize. Why not automate the meetings and metric gatherings and mindless hallucinations and short sighted decisions that drone-ish be-like-the-other-manager people do?
Show HN: Analog Reader – Turn newsletters into printable newspapers
by luskira | 2026-01-23 18:37:37+00:00
I absolutely hate what the internet does to my brain, to my capacity for focus, and to how little I retain information.

I've been slowly migrating away from reading online to offline. Started a few years ago with a reMarkable tablet, then an Onyx Boox for colored papers. But newsletters always fell off my radar. There's just too much going on in my inbox.

So I built a tool that takes any RSS feed (Substack, Ghost, etc.) and formats it as a printable newspaper.

Tech: Single HTML file, vanilla JS, no backend. Fetches feeds via CORS proxy (Cloudflare Worker). Renders into a 3-column A4 layout.

I don't own a printer, though, haha. I just send the PDF to my reMarkable. But I'm curious if there's interest in getting a personalized newspaper like this actually delivered to your door.

Would love feedback on the layout, and curious how others handle the "too many newsletters" problem.
by shykes | 2026-01-23 18:37:55+00:00
Yes, of course. I was also an avid user of vserver and openvz on Linux, back when they required patching the kernel, and lxc didn't exist yet.

When we open sourced Docker, we had considerable experience running openvz in production, as well as migrating to lxc - a miserable experience in the early days because the paint was still so fresh. To my knowledge we were the very first production deployment of managed databases and multi-tenant application servers on lxc, back in 2010.
by bildung | 2026-01-23 18:38:02+00:00
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.

People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by otterley | 2026-01-23 18:38:30+00:00
If they say they don't, and they do, then that's fraud, and they could be held liable for any damages that result. And, if word got out that they were defrauding customers, that would result in serious reputational damage to Apple (who uses their security practices as an industry differentiator) and possibly a significant customer shift away from them. They don't want that.
by walletdrainer | 2026-01-23 18:38:32+00:00
This is ridiculous.

There are a lot of people here criticising MSFT for implementing a perfectly reasonable encryption scheme.

This isn’t some secret backdoor, but a huge security improvement for end-users. This mechanism is what allows FDE to be on by default, just like (unencrypted) iCloud backups do for Apple users.

Calling bs on people trying to paint this as something it’s not is not “whiteknighting”.
by atilladeniz | 2026-01-23 18:38:40+00:00
I built this because existing K8s GUIs felt heavy (~500MB+ RAM) for what they do. Kubeli stays under 150MB idle.

Tech: Tauri 2.0 with Rust backend, Next.js frontend. Uses kube-rs for direct K8s API access.

Interesting bits: Real-time resource watching via K8s watch API, optional AI debugging assistant that runs locally through Claude Code or OpenAI Codex CLI, and an MCP server for querying clusters from your editor.

Currently macOS only. Looking for feedback, especially on the AI integration - useful or gimmick?
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-23 18:38:56+00:00
> Are we calling everyone who wants some control over their computers enemies of the state?

As of today at 00:00 UTC, no.

But there's an increasingly possible future
where authoritarian governments will brand users
who practice 'non-prescribed use' as enemies of the state.

And when we have a government who's leader
openly gifts deep, direct access to federal power
to unethical tech leaders who've funded elections (ex:Thiel),
that branding would be a powerful perk to have access to
(even if indirectly).
by JohnLeitch | 2026-01-23 18:38:58+00:00
Oh come on, the fact that the author was able to pull this off is surely indicative of some expertise. If the story started had started off with, "I asked the LLM how to capture network traffic," then yeah, what I said would not be applicable. But that's not how this was presented. tcpdump was used, profiling tools were mentioned, etc. It is not a stretch to expect somebody who develops networked applications knows a thing or two about protocol analysis.
by eddyg | 2026-01-23 18:39:00+00:00
You shouldn't include Apple in this.

As of macOS Tahoe, the FileVault key you (optionally) escrow with Apple is stored in the iCloud Keychain, which is cryptographically secured by HSM-backed, rate-limited protections.

You can (and should) watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&t=1993s for all the details about how iCloud is protected.
by at1as | 2026-01-23 18:39:15+00:00
It's a combination of a few things, and actually uncharacteristic of me.

Many of these purchases are replacements for 10+ year old devices (a Canon 6D, an absolutely brain-dead iRobot, a smaller hard drive that finally filled up, etc.).

I’ve made very few tech purchases over the past several years. Part of that was a general lack of inspiration inside Apple’s ecosystem stranglehold, and I tend to hold onto their hardware for a long time anyway (I’m hoping to skip from M1 straight to M6 or later)

A desire to spend less time purely in the software domain. Hardware can be fun. I originally studied electrical engineering but ended up spending all of my career in software; the 3D printer ties into a few side projects I’m working on, with mixed success.

A preference for narrow, purpose-driven devices. I now use the Android phone for "serious" things with minimal distractions, and the iPhone for everything else. And if Apple or Google ever become untenable, I have some optionality (and this is my first non-Apple phone since my Blackberry).

The programmable lights seemed kind of unavoidable. If you want lighting where you can change the color, the bundled software and ecosystem bloat is largely unavoidable.

The mechanical watches are tied to travel and circumstance: a Casio from Japan, a Mondaine from Switzerland, and the Interstellar Hamilton Murph as a gift. I’d honestly be happy with two or three watches, but they have a way of finding me. I do tend to match watch to outfit color, which admittedly opens the door for a few more options.
by epistasis | 2026-01-23 18:39:21+00:00
We also need to leave platforms with highly manipulated and unclear algorithms. Especially the former Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.

This is one of the great things about BlueSky, you can make your own feeds. The bad thing about BlueSky is that the default algorithms are pretty bad (except for the simple "following" feed). But choosing your own sets of feeds, each with their own algorithms, is a great way to keep up with highly focused news and also allow discovery of new information, without as much manipulation as you'll get on the past generation of social media.
by mrexcess | 2026-01-23 18:39:25+00:00
From my understanding of the Buddhist process described here, the ritual often begins days or weeks before death, and includes exclusive consumption of substances like plant tars that dramatically reduce the presence of gut bacteria, and that this effect rather than anything supernatural is what most attribute to the most significant decay processes being temporarily inhibited - there's no gut bacteria left to decompose the body from the inside out.
by cbeach | 2026-01-23 18:39:56+00:00
For someone who's a criminal and a failure, he seems to be doing a lot of good for the American people.

Inflation down, stock markets at record highs, real GDP growth up, energy prices stable and US energy production at record high levels.

Low unemployment, high wage growth, small-business optimism surveys improved, massive growth in foreign inward investment, illegal border crossings nearly completely eliminated,

Venezuela's evil narco-terrorist illegitimate leader in prison, Iran's nuclear threat eliminated, ceasefire achieved in Gaza, and a Trump-led, UN-approved Board of Peace established to continue the humanitarian aid and rebuild the Gaza strip.
by eYrKEC2 | 2026-01-23 18:40:02+00:00
My one experience with dev containers put me off of dev containers... but standard `docker compose` is just great for me.

I worked at a company where we were trying to test code with our product and, for a time, everyone on the team was given a mandate to go out and find X number of open source projects to test against, every week.

Independently, every member of the (small) team settled on only trying to test repos where you could do:

get clone repo && cd repo && docker compose up

Everything else was just a nightmare to boot up their environment in a reasonable amount of time.
by gruez | 2026-01-23 18:40:37+00:00
Yes, because object level facts matter, and it's intellectually dishonest to ignore the facts and go straight into analyzing which side is the most righteous, like:

>Microsoft is an evil corporation, so we must take all bad stories about them at face value. You're not some corpo bootlicker, now, are you? Now, in unrelated news, I heard Pfizer, another evil corporation with a dodgy history[1] is insisting their vaccines are safe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer#Legal_issues
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 18:40:38+00:00
> Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance.

Most of the comments are fire and resistance, but they commonly take ragebait and run with the assumptions built-in to clickbait headlines.

> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

I take it you've never worked at a company when law enforcement comes knocking for data?

The internet tough guy fantasy where you boldly refuse to provide the data doesn't last very long when you realize that it just means you're going to be crushed by the law and they're getting the data anyway.
by jcalvinowens | 2026-01-23 18:40:53+00:00
> Apple's solution is iCloud Keychain which is E2E encrypted, so would not be revealed with a court order.

Nope. For this threat model, E2E is a complete joke when both E's are controlled by the third party. Apple could be compelled by the government to insert code in the client to upload your decrypted data to another endpoint they control, and you'd never know.
by zer00eyz | 2026-01-23 18:41:02+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A ... Then, years later every one acts like Snowden had some big reveal.

There is the old password for candy bar study: https://blog.tmb.co.uk/passwords-for-chocolate

Do users care? I would posit that the bulk of them do not, because they just dont see how it applies to them, till they run into some type of problem.
by causalmodels | 2026-01-23 18:41:34+00:00
Fair point on the Elbonia comparison. But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. The reason is that open source developed its own trust mechanisms over decades. We don't have anything close to that with LLMs today. What those mechanisms might look like is an open question that is getting more important as AI generated code becomes more common.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-23 18:41:44+00:00
Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.

For example OnlyOffice looked pretty good, but unfortunately had ties to Russia. Not sure if they have fully distanced themselves. There's a zulip discussion linked above as well.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-23 18:41:53+00:00
These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-23 18:42:02+00:00
For reference, here are the supported motions:

case '0': return { type: 'ZERO' };
case '_': return { type: 'START_ROW' };

// --- SEARCH ---
case '/': return { type: 'START_SEARCH' };
case 'n': return { type: 'NEXT_MATCH' };
case 'N': return { type: 'PREV_MATCH' };

// --- MOVEMENT (WASD Removed) ---
case 'h': case 'ArrowLeft': return { type: 'MOVE_CURSOR', dx: -1, dy: 0 };
case 'j': case 'ArrowDown': return { type: 'MOVE_CURSOR', dx: 0, dy: 1 };
case 'k': case 'ArrowUp': return { type: 'MOVE_CURSOR', dx: 0, dy: -1 };
case 'l': case 'ArrowRight': return { type: 'MOVE_CURSOR', dx: 1, dy: 0 };

// --- SKIPS ---
case 'w': return { type: 'NEXT_UNREVEALED' };
case 'b': return { type: 'PREV_UNREVEALED' };

// --- ACTIONS ---
case 'i': case 'Enter': return { type: 'REVEAL' };
case ' ': return { type: 'SMART' };
case 'f': return { type: 'FLAG' };

// --- ADVANCED MOTIONS ---
case '$': return { type: 'MOVE_CURSOR', dx: 999, dy: 0 };
case 'G': return { type: 'GO_BOTTOM' };
case 'g': return { type: 'GO_TOP' };

No macros or block select yet, still fun! probably for the best that /mine doesn't work yet
by NRHuntoon | 2026-01-23 18:42:03+00:00
So... why? If you care about accurate visualization of propogation of light through a complex scene, why not just do a full wave simulation? There are multiple, well studied techniques (Finite Difference Time Domain, Finite Difference Frequency Domain, Finite Element, Method of Moments...). These will give you what the light will 'actually'[1] do, not a guess based off some small sample of training data.

[1] Like with all modeling, there are of course assumptions and approximations. Different techniques have different strengths and limits. Still, these are all well vetted, studied and used by people who care about accuracy.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-23 18:42:35+00:00
If its Motion for a Partial Stay is denied, or if it loses on appeal, then under this Final Judgement Google will be forced to offer syndicated "full web" search to Qualified Competitors

https://dn710204.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
by advisedwang | 2026-01-23 18:42:47+00:00
What quid pro quo? Is there an allegation that the FBI gave Microsoft something in exchange?

As far as I can see this particular case is a straightforward search warrant. A court absolutely has the power to compel Microsoft to hand over the keys.

The bigger question is why Microsoft has the recovery feature at all. But honestly I believe Microsoft cares so little about privacy and security that they would do it just to end the "help customers who lose their key" support tickets, with no shady government deal required. I'd want to see something more than speculation to convince me otherwise.
by Tenemo | 2026-01-23 18:42:54+00:00
I think it is true that it is a real problem (EDIT: but doesn't necessarily make "hosting untenable"), but you are correct to point out that modern pages tend to be horribly optimized (and that's the source of the problem). Even "dynamic" pages using React/Next.js etc. could be pre-rendered and/or cached and/or distributed via CDNs. A simple cache or a CDN should be enough to handle pretty much any scrapping traffic unless you need to do some crazy logic on every page visit – which should almost never be the case on public-facing sites. As an example, my personal site is technically written in React, but it's fully pre-rendered and doesn't even serve JS – it can handle huge amounts of bot/scrapping traffic via its CDN.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-23 18:43:24+00:00
As a business in our current age you are stuck in a valley between two wildly different risks.

1. AI disappears, goes up in price, etc. All the money you've spent goes up in smoke, or you have to spend a lot more money to keep the engine running.

2. AI does not disappear, becomes cheaper and eats your businesses primary revenue generation for lunch.

Number 1 could happen tomorrow. Number 1 could happen after number 2. Number 1 may never happen.

Also expect that even if the AI market crashes that AI has already massively changed the economy, and that at least some investment will go into making AI more efficient and at any point number 2 could spring out of nowhere yet again.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-23 18:43:38+00:00
These remind me of checked exceptions in Java. Ironically, Kotlin removed checked exceptions because they tend to be annoying more than useful: there's no clear guideline to whether an exception is checked or unchecked, some functions like IO and reflection have them while others don't, they're verbose especially when closures are involved, and lots of functions simply catch and rethrow checked exceptions in unchecked exceptions.

Which leads me to: why is Kotlin implementing this in a non-JVM compatible way, instead of introducing checked exceptions with better language support? All the problems stated above can be avoided while keeping the core idea of checked exceptions, which seems to be the same as this proposal.

From the GitHub discussion, I see this comment (https://github.com/Kotlin/KEEP/discussions/447#discussioncom...):

> The difference between checked exceptions from java and error unions in this proposal is how they are treated. Checked exceptions are exceptions and always interrupt the flow of execution. On the other hand, errors in this proposal are values and can be passed around as values or intentionally ignored or even aggregated enabling the ability to use them in async and awaitAll etc.

But is this a real difference or something that can be emulated mostly syntactically and no deeper than Kotlin's other features (e.g. nullables, getters and setters)? Checked exceptions are also values, and errors can be caught (then ignored or aggregated) but usually interrupt the flow of execution and get propagated like exceptions.