MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eftychis | 2026-01-21 18:52:21+00:00
In some (EU) countries, as a public officer/agent you can actually get prosecuted (civil or criminal proceedings per case), in cases of blatant or willful incompetence. (Think of the levels of gross wanton disregard/negligence.)
(There is also the legal vehicle of insubordination.)

For instance, in Greece https://www.lawspot.gr/nomothesia/pk/arthro-259-poinikos-kod... (N.B. the bar of wilfulness in this section in the Greek criminal code is much lower than the corresponding notion of wilfulness in the U.S.)

The bar is high, of course, and yet people have historically managed to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and go to prison.

I think the problem in the U.S. is, ironically, the power of police unions in a fragmented police force (city, territory, county, etc.) ecosystem, coupled with the lack of unified, express state and federal statutes to enforce a standard of care and competence.

Add to that that peace officer-specific state statutes (e.g., describing manslaughter while on duty) are written in such a way that, as a matter of law, it becomes a herculean task to tick all the boxes to successfully preserve a conviction on appeal. It is truly troubling. (I am hopeful, as this can be solved by the U.S. legislature, which I think we have a lot of reasons to demand to be done.)
by psadauskas | 2026-01-21 18:52:26+00:00
I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses.

The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.

Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.

They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".

Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-21 18:52:47+00:00
"Security" is just another Trumpism (aka a lie to most sensible people).

Here is what it is really about:

Tech moguls in the front row of his [Trump's] inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom.

https://portside.org/2026-01-17/tech-billionaires-behind-tru...

And this:

a Reuters investigation reported that a group of wealthy U.S. investors and political actors had explored the idea of building a privately governed “freedom city” in Greenland.

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/can-greenland-bec...
Show HN: What I learned building a local-only password manager (PassForgePro)
by can-deliktas | 2026-01-21 18:52:53+00:00
Show HN: What I learned building a local-only password manager (PassForgePro)

Hi HN,

I built PassForgePro as a learning project to better understand password manager design, local-first security, and common cryptographic pitfalls.

The goal was not to replace mature tools like Bitwarden or KeePass, but to explore:

* how a local-only, zero-knowledge style design can work
* key derivation with PBKDF2 and encrypted SQLite vaults (AES-256-GCM)
* handling sensitive data in memory and clipboard cleanup
* defining a realistic threat model and its limitations

This project is experimental and unaudited. I’m sharing it mainly to get feedback on the architecture, crypto choices, and overall approach, and to discuss what I got wrong or could improve (audits, reproducible builds, testing, etc.).

I’d really appreciate feedback, especially from people with security or cryptography experience.

Repo: https://github.com/can-deliktas/PassForgePro
Docs / demo: https://can-deliktas.github.io/PassForgePro
by insuranceguru | 2026-01-21 18:53:00+00:00
It sounds like you hit a keyword filter. Even if you edit the listing, the word 'Samsung' in the title or description probably has a hard-coded weight that flags it as counterfeit, regardless of context (like 'compatible with').

Have you tried escalating via jeff@amazon.com? It used to be a meme, but people still report getting actual human eyes on their case that way when the automated Seller Central loop fails.
by klaff | 2026-01-21 18:53:08+00:00
As a hardware engineer I've been primarily using metric for over three decades, and like the machinist quoted in the article have had to deal with bullshit of converting back and forth. It's not just about inches and centimeters.

If you're working with small motors, the Ke (back-EMF constant) and Kt (torque constant) have different and crazy Reagan units (e.g. V/krpm, inch-ounces/A) but in SI they have units of V/(rd/s) and N-m/A, which if you crunch them down to kg, m, etc. are identical and so have the same numerical value (because they represent the same transformation from electric to mechanical or vice-versa). Power is the product of voltage and current or torque and speed - if you use the SI units no conversion required. Inertia was confusing as hell, some vendors specified it in MOISS, or milli-ounce-inches-seconds-squared, not only involving different unit but you can also get balled up in the mass vs force confusions.

Converting a drawing from one system to the other perfectly is practically impossible. Conversions can't always be exact and because tolerances are commonly specified in round numbers within a system.

In my garage I still have both metric and Reagan-unit tools. Even though my cars, even the American ones have been metric since the '80s, I have to have the other tools for other household things like the garage doors!

And then there's the tire size abomination - an unholy union - a 255R70-14 is 255 mm wide at the bulge, the sidewall height is 70% of that, and the rim diameter is 14 inches.

I agree that 1 °C is too big a step when dealing with thermostats but that's easily solved by using 0.5 °C resolution.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-21 18:53:17+00:00
Even when they're spending most of their income on luxury holidays, designer bags, clothes and shoes? In my experience that better reflects the typical lifestyle of an higher-end escort.

Someone who's good can relatively easily manage a 20 year career at well above $500k/pa, it's really not that unattractive gig. A big chunk of that will also tend to go unreported and remain tax-free.

I don't believe for a second that any high-end escorts are doing the job to "survive", those girls will be charging far less.
by ilvez | 2026-01-21 18:53:20+00:00
For me it started as simple way to play music on your phone. It had very direct intuitive navigation and control. Now if I look at it, it's complex over-designed and I remember struggling with doing simple things like navigation. Sorry for not being too specific, I haven't used it much over past years and haven't got it installed anymore. When I need to play stuff on my phone directly, I just use VLC.

Probably the profile of user just changed and I'm not falling into one anymore.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-21 18:53:49+00:00
I've done this in the parallel post, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705625 (and a couple of other replies in that thread)

TLDR; the code is not a valid POC but throw-away level quality that could never support a functioning web engine. It's actually very clear hallucinated AI BS, which is what you get when you don't have a human expert in the loop.

I actually like using AI, but only to save me the typing.
by hkh | 2026-01-21 18:53:49+00:00
Totally - something I've been thinking a lot about...
I got pulled into these diets at one point in my life - I remember doing atkins, then went full vegas for a while, then went only meat lol

The diets were meh. But the cool thing was that I learnt so much about food in general! I honestly didn't know much about food growing up. I feel like I still don't know that much, but I know the basics, and i'm not afraid of digging into some of the details.
by 9x39 | 2026-01-21 18:53:53+00:00
They do refer to Claude as a model and not a person, at least. If you squint, you could stretch it to like an asynchronous consciousness - there’s inputs like the prompts and training and outputs like the model-assisted training texts which suggest will be self-referential.

Depends whether you see an updated model as a new thing or a change to itself, Ship of Theseus-style.
by staplung | 2026-01-21 18:54:05+00:00
I think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long before that). De-silting the reservoir is not a realistic option.

Hopefully, we'll have alternate means of power generation that nullify the dam's economic viability long before then but water supply and flood mitigation are other functions that need consideration. Silt will eventually destroy those functions as well however.
by twosdai | 2026-01-21 18:54:09+00:00
One of the things I find interesting as well, is that among many of my friends outside the western world, they typically see: "knowing how something is made" as a western cultural thing. Many of them adopt a "why do you care how it's made, you are a not a manufacturer" type of response. Which i find very interesting.

They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-21 18:54:14+00:00
They've been doing this for a long time. Their whole "AI security" and "AI ethics" schtick has been a thinly-veiled PR stunt from the beginning. "Look at how intelligent our model is, it would probably become Skynet and take over the world if we weren't working so hard to keep it contained!". The regular human name "Claude" itself was clearly chosen for the purpose of anthromorphizing the model as much as possible, as well.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-21 18:54:24+00:00
Presumably it's not meant for the entire town. Just the people who are already in town nearby who have enough advance warning. It makes sense to be in a church since that's in the center of town and you can lock the doors to give enough time for people to get into it and cover the entrance.

If your family were at home in the nearby countryside they'd flee into the forest or something instead.
by 0x457 | 2026-01-21 18:55:20+00:00
OpenSolaris was an official OSS version of Solaris which was essentially Solaris, but developed in the open by Sun.

Illumos started as "remove all close source bits and replace with OSS", after Oracle closed down OpenSolaris, Illumos became a full-on fork and Solaris-like rather than another version of Solaris.

From there, multiple distros were born (because Illumos didn't want to be distro), notably OpenIndiana and SmartOS. OpenIndiana being a general purpose distro of Illumos. While SmartOS went with something like "OS for HCI datacenters"

So it's Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos.
by mmooss | 2026-01-21 18:55:54+00:00
The use of broadly - "Broadly safe" and "Broadly ethical" - is interesting. Why not commit to just safe and ethical?

* Do they have some higher priority, such the 'welfare of Claude'[0], power, or profit?

* Is it legalese to give themselves an out? That seems to signal a lack of commitment.

* something else?

Imagine any other product advertised as 'broadly safe' - that would raise more concern than make people feel confident.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-21 18:56:02+00:00
Well, if you want complex things like nested code blocks, then a kind of "tag" approach can be just the solution needed. Input-wise it doesn't really make a difference, whether I have to type "[[[" and "]]]" or "```" and again "```". Whether or not my idea is more like a tag doesn't seem to have any repercussions. Outsourcing ever more complexity into the parser, with bad design decisions however has a significant cost, which is making development of parsers and grammars difficult.
by obsfx | 2026-01-21 18:56:07+00:00
I was using beads with Claude Code for long-running tasks and it worked well in principle. Giving an agent a task tracker helps a lot with focus and continuity. Over time, the project direction no longer matched what I needed (https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/#:~:text=...), so I built a simpler alternative that only includes the parts I actually use.

Trekker is intentionally minimal. It integrates with Claude Code as a plugin and comes with a lightweight dashboard to track what the agent is doing and how tasks progress over time. No extra abstraction or workflow layers.
by themafia | 2026-01-21 18:56:31+00:00
> it isn't much of a serious technical project either

How have you reached this qualification?

> I suppose you could call it a low-effort meme of the typical 4chan variety.

Time will tell. I think there's a lot of love for X11 that people offhandedly discount. I'm sure I'll end up using it shortly as I genuinely dislike wayland.
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-01-21 18:56:51+00:00
Those Mac minis are a pain in the ass of a server box that auto-enable FileVault after annual releases, and getting LaunchDaemons just right compared to a Linux OS feels like perpetual iterations. trying to figure out why my apache didn't start after the last reboot. Oh, must have been the Mac log rotator messing with the file permissions again

It's a shame, because I love how efficiently MacOS runs and the form factor/design language of a Mac mini is not something I feel the need to hide in a dark corner

You'll have to leave virtual desktop enabled, and will definitely be using it semi-regularly aside SSH
by plagiarist | 2026-01-21 18:56:52+00:00
Yes, definitely. I would use a TPM on a Pi device regardless of the imperfections if I could find one for a normal price. My threat model is that I don't store anything sensitive on the device but as a guardrail it also cannot be trivially decrypted without the hardware token.

I am using TMP for this on x86 machines that I want to boot headless. If I need to replace the disk I can just do a regular wipe and feel pretty comfortable.

I'd use a Yubikey or other security token with the Pi, but the device needs to boot without user intervention and the decryption code I'm aware of forces user presence whether or not the Yubikey requires that.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-21 18:57:02+00:00
In addition to that the blog post lays out pretty clearly it’s for training:

> We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

> Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

As for why it’s more impactful in training, that’s by design of their training pipeline. There’s only so much you can do with a better prompt vs actually learning something and in training the model can be trained to reject prompts that violate its training which a prompt can’t really do as prompt injection attacks trivially thwart those techniques.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-21 18:57:11+00:00
I think "for work" is very definitely the reason for me. I've run Linux at home since 1994 or so.

As a sysadmin/devops person 90% of my life is emacs, a browser, and collection of terminals. When I get a job I get offered a choice between a windows laptop or a macbook. Sometimes, rarely, I'm allowed Linux, but usually they say "compliance" or that their security scanning software won't support it.

So I use macbooks for work, but I wouldn't pay for one personally. But they allow me to run terraform, git, shells, and similar things in the way that I'm comfortable with.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-01-21 18:57:18+00:00
I don’t think it’s comparable to today’s AI race.

Google has a monopoly, an entrenched customer base, and stable revenue from a proven business model. Anyone trying to compete would have to pour massive money into infrastructure and then fight Google for users. In that game, Google already won.

The current AI landscape is different. Multiple players are competing in an emerging field with an uncertain business model. We’re still in the phase of building better products, where companies started from more similar footing and aren’t primarily battling for customers yet. In that context, investing heavily in the core technology can still make financial sense. A better comparison might be the early days of car makers, or the web browser wars before the market settled.
by zzzeek | 2026-01-21 18:57:47+00:00
> If the argument is sustainability of training,

that is the argument, yes.

Claude clearly got an enormous amount of its content from Stackoverflow. Which has mostly ceased to be a source of new content. However unlike the author I dont see any way to fix this; stackoverflow was only there because people had technical questions that needed answers.

Maybe if the LLMs do indeed start going stale as there's not enough training data for new technologies, Q&A sites like Stackoverflow would still have a place, since people would still resort to asking each other questions rather than LLMs that dont have training data for a newer technology.
by xvxvx | 2026-01-21 18:58:02+00:00
This seems to be an issue of 2nd terms, amongst other things. Trump doesn’t have to worry about running again so went mask-off. I remember W Bush acting the same way, but less insane. We need the ability to shut this nonsense down when it appears, which it will continue to do. ICE shouldn’t be out there doing whatever they want until a judge tells them it’s illegal or unconstitutional. They should have prior approval before stepping foot in the street.

The US has a white supremacist problem. We’ve been told that for decades BUT this past decade has shown many of us that we’ve been underestimating it, and flagging it as a problem with older generations who are dying off anyway.

Attacking countries without congressional approval, and kidnapping their leader, should have seen Trump and his team in handcuffs within hours.

We can fix this but we need to be aggressive and unforgiving. We’re dealing with people who think only whites can be American. And they’re in power.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-21 18:58:03+00:00
> they actually act like its a person.

Meh. If it works, it works. I think it works because it draws on bajillion of stories it has seen in its training data. Stories where what comes before guides what comes after. Good intentions -> good outcomes. Good character defeats bad character. And so on. (hopefully your prompts don't get it into Kafka territory)..

No matter what these companies publish, or how they market stuff, or how the hype machine mangles their messages, at the end of the day what works sticks around. And it is slowly replicated in other labs.
by sgjohnson | 2026-01-21 18:58:05+00:00
> Here’s our first problem, as those are located in the Signed System Volume (SSV), so we can’t change them in any way. The same applies to the other 417 LaunchDaemons and 460 LaunchAgents that account for most of the processes listed by Activity Monitor. In the days before the SSV it was possible to edit their property lists to prevent them from being launched, but that isn’t possible any more when running modern macOS.

SSV can be disabled. It would be ill-advised to do so, but Apple intentionally allows you to do that.
by dekhn | 2026-01-21 18:58:40+00:00
I work across both english and metric all the time (CAD, 3d printing, science, woodworking in the US) - I just mentally switched (age 52) to metric first in my head (specifically, I think "that's 10cm" not "that's 4 inches" when I look at something.

Woodworking became a lot more enjoyable- I don't know why- when I started to think "I need to shave off 1mm" instead of "shave off 3/64 inch" or whatever.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-21 18:58:45+00:00
No, this is the state where the vast vast vast majority of water is used in incredibly inefficient agricultural practices because those consumers were allocated water "Rights" in a stupid system over a hundred years ago and have never had to pay market rates for water and are therefore not incentivized to do anything to not waste water.

Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.

The state needs to reform those water rights.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-21 18:59:02+00:00
Reddit is growing because they introduced automatic machine translation and Indians have been joining at an increasing rate. That content is mixed into the English language content, but is of very low quality and irrelevant to many native English speakers. Similarly they mix the English content in with the Indian content.

Essentially, Reddit is also eating it's own tail to survive as the flood of low quality irrelevant content is making the platform worse for speakers of all languages but nobody cares because "line go up."
by shagie | 2026-01-21 18:59:19+00:00
StackOverflow as built back in the days of Web 2.0 where the idea was that user generated content formed in the days of the (relatively) altruistic web.

There isn't any clean way to do "contributor gets paid" without adding in an entire mess of "ok, where is the money coming from? Paywalls? Advertising? Subscriptions?" and then also get into the mess of international money transfers (how do you pay someone in Iran from the US?)

And then add in the "ok, now the company is holding payment information of everyone(?) ..." and data breaches and account hacking is now so much more of an issue.

Once you add money to it, the financial inceptives and gamification collide to make it simply awful.
by sakjur | 2026-01-21 18:59:24+00:00
The fund sold off most of their US bonds, some journalist heard about it and considered it newsworthy and published an article. DI.se’s readers are largely also benefactors/owners of Alecta’s, so that seems fair.

Someone else considered it worthy of sharing here and enough people here found it interesting enough to get it to the front page. I don’t quite understand why, but it seems like it’s striking some sort of chord.
by jorvi | 2026-01-21 18:59:30+00:00
I hate thumbs up/down. 2 values is too little. I understand that 5 was maybe too much, but thumbs up/down systems need an explicit third "eh, it's okay" value for things I don't hate, don't want to save to my library, but I would like the system to know I have an opinion on.

I know that consuming something and not thumbing it up/down sort-of does that, but it's a vague enough signal (that could also mean "not close enough to keyboard / remote to thumbs up/down) that recommendation systems can't count it as an explicit choice.