MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jlarocco | 2026-01-31 18:01:34+00:00
That raises the question of why not just use Signal and avoid a company whose founder thinks we're all "dumbfucks" and has a long history of scandals and privacy violations?

The evidence is pretty clear that Facebook wants to do everything they legally can to track and monitor people, and they're perfectly okay crossing the line and going to court to find the boundaries.

Using a company like that for encrypted messaging seems like an unnecessary risk. Maybe they're not decrypting it, but they're undoubtedly tracking everything else about the conversation because that's what they do.
by tekla | 2026-01-31 18:03:23+00:00
I did read the article fine, thanks for asking.

The crux of the argument seems to come from this

> It’s worth noting that GNSS location is never meant to leave your device. GNSS coordinates are calculated entirely passively.

OK so? The fact that GPS is calculated passively means nothing about the phone being asked what its position is after the fact.

The article admits this capability is no secret

> These capabilities are not secrets but somehow they have mostly slid under the radar of the public consciousness.

If the article just wants to say phones should block that ability, fine. But don't pretend this is some shady BS.
by naasking | 2026-01-31 18:03:26+00:00
> It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery.

Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.

There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.

We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.
by bookofjoe | 2026-01-31 18:04:37+00:00
Indeed.

>Since 1994 D.I.D. has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the most widely used guide on mental-health issues. Before then it was known as multiple personality disorder — a misnomer, because rather than having numerous personalities, people with the disorder have one personality with compartmentalized aspects of themselves, known as self-states, or what some people call parts or alters.
by vga42 | 2026-01-31 18:04:40+00:00
Sure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be adequately patched by lauching virtual servers?

Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
by shevy-java | 2026-01-31 18:04:41+00:00
I understand his enthusiasm with NixOS but:

> With Nix, however, it was a matter of just describing a few packages in a shell and boom, Ruby in one folder, no Ruby (and thus no mess) everywhere else.

This approach was already done by GoboLinux in 2005. And even GoboLinux was by far not the first - versioned AppDirs existed for a long time before; even perl stow enabled that. NixOS just uses a modified variant e. g. via hashed directory names. But I already adopted a similar scheme as GoboLinux did soon after I switched to Linux in 2005 (well 2004 but mostly 2005 as I was still a big noob in 2004 really).

> I started adding shell.nix files to all my little projects

I appreciate that NixOS brought good ideas to Linux here; having reliable snapshots is good. If a user has a problem, someone else might have solved it already, so you could "jump" from snapshot to snapshot. No more need for StackOverflow. The HiveMind took over.

But with all its pros, the thing I hate by far the most in NixOS is .. nix. I think the language is ugly beyond comparison; only shell scripts are uglier. I instead opted for a less sophisticated solution in that ruby acts as the ultimate glue to whatever underlying operating system is used. What I would like is a NixOS variant that is simpler to use - and doesn't come with nix. Why can't I use ruby instead? Or simple config files? I am very used to simple yaml files; all my system description is stored in simple yaml files. Since +20 years. That approach works very well (ruby expands these to any target destination; for instance, I have aliases for e. g. bash, but these are stored in yaml files and from that ruby then generates any desired target format, such as also cmder on Windows and so forth).

> In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme.

I am glad to not be the only one to dislike nix, but boy ... scheme? Aka Lisp? Seriously???

Young people use lisp? I somehow doubt that.

(cons* (channel
(name 'nonguix)
(url "https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix")

Erm, no thanks.

Why would users know what cons* does, anyway? That's stupid.

YAML files exist for a reason. Keep. Things. Simple. (I know, I know, many use YAML files in a complex manner with gazillion nested indentation. Well, they are using it in a wrong way, then they complain about how bad yaml is.)

> Since the code is pretty much just Scheme and the different mechanisms available are fairly well documented (see caveat below), the barrier to entry is much lower than with Nix in my opinion.

Can't evaluate this. To me it seems as if NixOS may have changed, but Nix was always a big barrier. I decided to not want to overcome it, since I did not want to be stuck with a horrible language I don't want to use.
by mjevans | 2026-01-31 18:05:33+00:00
I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification.

Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.
by atlashive | 2026-01-31 18:06:18+00:00
I got tired of apps phoning home, so I built AtlasHive so we can see what’s really happening under the hood

What Atlas does:
Real-time CPU, memory, network, ports & battery monitoring — all in one place
See which processes are using your network — catch apps phoning home
Fullscreen dashboard with command palette (⌘K) for power users

Why it's different:
Most system monitors either send telemetry themselves, require subscriptions, or hide behind paywalls.

Atlas runs 100% locally — no accounts, no cloud, no data collection. Just you and your Mac.
Free, open source, MIT licensed.

Share it, Like it, Repost it.
by instagib | 2026-01-31 18:07:06+00:00
What you need
iPhone Air, iPhone 16e, or iPad Pro (M5) Wi-Fi + Cellular
iOS 26.3 or later

A supported carrier:
Germany: Telekom
United Kingdom: EE, BT
United States: Boost Mobile
Thailand: AIS, True

Turn limit precise location on or off

Open Settings, then tap Cellular.

Tap Cellular Data Options.

If you have more than one phone number under SIMs, tap one of your lines.

Scroll down to Limit Precise Location.

Turn the setting on or off. You might be prompted to restart your device.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-31 18:07:35+00:00
20 years ago the entire Internet was "nerds nerding out". The world has moved on, and to return to that is to return to an Internet where only people who are already economically comfortable and with a lot of spare time to boot are allowed to have a voice.

Serious podcasters need to treat it like a full time job, so they need to get their income from somewhere.
by viksit | 2026-01-31 18:07:45+00:00
I think the point here is the bot didn’t come up with the idea on its own, but was seeded by a human with an entrenched interest / experience in that space. The PR around Moltbook has been that Agents are coming up with these ideas through some sort of swarm interaction with each other, and developing novel, emergent capabilities — which is not true.
by cteiosanu | 2026-01-31 18:07:57+00:00
It didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that might be. Now it's a security issue.
by tartoran | 2026-01-31 18:08:09+00:00
Europe doesn’t have similar offerings because they never had a chance to or need to compete Silicon Valley. Now that the cats out of the bag, offerings can simply materialize out of the really high demand for homegrown solutions, EU have a large population after all.
US Tech really went off the rails in the last year or last few years, it simply cannot be trusted anymore. Even if such offerings may lag a little behind, they still look like a better proposition. EU is in a similar situation with respect to self defense, they have to step up to the plate and start building their own.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-31 18:08:14+00:00
It's nice that you can unlock the bootloader on these and flash Lineage if you want to limit snooping by Google.

That being said, I think that you get more flexibility and performance with a mini PC and and air mouse. For one, stock (Googled) Android does not give you an easy way to use a browser with an ad-blocker, which is still the best way to stream from many sources without ads. Also all these anemic Android boxes struggle with high bitrate 4K videos.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-31 18:08:39+00:00
The phone could literally pop up a consent alert asking whether to respond to a GPS ping request from the carrier. Or just not honor the pings at all unless you dialed 911 within the last hour.

This is a specific service inside the phone that looks for messages from the carrier requesting a GPS position, it could just refuse, or lie. It's not the same as cell tower triangulation.
by teovall | 2026-01-31 18:08:39+00:00
Go to summer camp. A traditional, out in nature, canoes, archery, and tie dye, sleep-away summer camp. At least three weeks. Preferably, they would have started going much younger than high school, but it's never too late.

They will meet lifelong friends, have real, in-person experiences, and unplug from technology. They will come back energized, de-stressed, more confident, and with memories that will last a lifetime.
by gf000 | 2026-01-31 18:08:40+00:00
If we are being very pedantic, languages don't have "speed", only implementations do.

Of course in the real life there are de facto implementations and language features give way to better/worse tradeoffs.

With that out of the way, Python is basically the de facto glue language. It is very often used to provide a scripting API over lower level C libraries. To be ergonomic in this function, CPython (the major implementation) exposed some internal details of its execution model, which C libraries can reach into. This makes it very hard to make more aggressive optimizations, as one example a C library can just increase/decrease the reference count of an object. Another design decision (that got some discussion recently) is the GIL (global interpreter lock) that makes python much less competitive than something like Java. (JS also does a single thread of execution, though there are ways around it).

JS has a different use case, so access to the C world doesn't impose such restrictions on it.
by haebom | 2026-01-31 18:08:51+00:00
This is my honest personal experience. Frankly, I feel like this is just a toy—nothing more, nothing less. It's fun to play with and entertaining, but it feels like a trend for people who “don't really understand AI but want to feel like they're using it” or “want to jump on the AI bandwagon” to dabble with once. While using it, I feel that “Oh~” moment of fun, but it doesn't make me want to keep using it. Maybe it just doesn't stick? And there are a few security issues that feel unsettling. Even if you run it entirely with local models, the fact that it could potentially see my iMessages or all my Obsidian and Notion notes is a bit off-putting. Still, it was fun. Personally, I'd describe it as “the difficult Ghibli profile picture hype”
by dan-robertson | 2026-01-31 18:08:55+00:00
I don’t think that’s a great description of what’s going on here. I think there are two things:

1. The actual thing the authors spend a lot of time thinking about seems to be more generally how to make good use of solar power for things that people find valuable – synthetic fuels desalination, etc – and the implications of the sun only shining some of the time – maybe you don’t want to pay more for more efficient systems as then you want steady power which is more expensive.

2. I think the blog post is a bit of a response to lots of public discussion about AI data centres. IMO seems better to see what someone who thinks a lot about energy has to say than eg, a government suggestion that you delete old pictures to reduce water consumption.
by westurner | 2026-01-31 18:09:16+00:00
IDK why /InternalDocs/ instead of /Doc/internals/ ? ( `ln -s` works with Mac/Lin/WSL. )

Ideally what's in InternalDocs/ would be built into the docs.python.org docs .

Is it just that markdown support in sphinx is not understood to exist?

Sphinx has native markdown support. Sphinx does not have native MyST Markdown support. To support MyST Markdown in a sphinx-doc project, you must e.g. `pip install myst_parser` and add "myst_parser" to the extensions list in conf.py.

MyST Markdown supports docutils and sphinx RestructuredText roles and directives:
https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/syntax/roles-an...

Directive in ReStructuredText .rst:

.. directivename:: arguments
:key1: val1
:key2: val2

This is
directive content

Directive in MyST Markdown .md:

```{directivename} arguments
:key1: val1
:key2: val2

This is
directive content
```

RestructuredText Role, MyST Markdown Role:

:role-name:`role content`
{role-name}`role content`

Sphinx resolves reference labels at docs build time, so that references will be replaced with the full relative URL to the path#fragment of the document where they occur; in ReStructuredText and then MyST Markdown:

.. _label-name:
(label-name)=

:ref:`Link title <label-name>`
{ref}`Link title <label-name>`
by state_less | 2026-01-31 18:09:21+00:00
> US stock market index funds will crash when the US stock market crashes. That will require very large sums of capital to decide to move away from US capital markets. To give an idea of how much money would need to move - VTSAX alone is about $2.1 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars of shares of each Mag7 stock.

I'd like to make a technical note about markets because I see this mistake repeated in the comments. The money doesn't have to move out of the US markets to somewhere else for the stock market to crash. It only requires a destruction of confidence. For a hypothetical example, suppose the S&P 500 closes at 7000 on a Friday, and everyone loses confidence in the S&P 500 over the weekend (for whatever reason). The market can open on Monday 3500 with not a share traded before the open (no money was moved out of the market), and investor portfolio values are now cut in half. Since confidence is broken, nobody buys the dip, and the market closes Monday down to 3000.

It's an extreme example, but it's worth understanding the fundamental underpinnings. The markets are a confidence game. Sometimes we forget because we have good reason to be confident (e.g. in the S&P 500) and so it fades into the background that something like this could even happen, but it's not hard find these sorts of events in history.
by plaidfuji | 2026-01-31 18:09:25+00:00
> So, perhaps we won? Perhaps we built our markets so stable that they are these days impervious? That sounds silly on its face, and the two reasons I’d actually give are:

> 1. Markets are just slower moving than ever before, big players just like to sit on their big piles of money

> 2. There are one or more bubbles in the stock market. Almost everyone agrees that AI is a bubble. It funds itself in a circular fashion, and capex cannot be recovered with profits any time soon, even with optimistic outlooks.

It’s a bit of both. The impact of political instability in the US (read: Trump pissing off as many people as possible) may not be felt in the markets quickly, if even within his term. He has severely dented confidence in the US as a trading partner and as an arbiter of the global rules-based order. That will have decades-long implications, the result being a pivot away from dollar-denominated commodities trading, and export markets for US goods being increasingly unfriendly. The value of the dollar will probably decline, and in fact that is a goal of many in his administration. That could actually be good for US equities if it’s in moderation.

The biggest risk I see is flight of capital away from US treasuries, which would drive up interest rates, leading to a sovereign debt crisis in the US. The likely solution to that would be money printing and resultant inflation. The high treasuries rate would drag capital away from equities.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-31 18:09:27+00:00
You know what's even cooler? Apple's commitment to hiding US federally-mandated backdoors for dragnet surveillance: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
by wfn | 2026-01-31 18:10:06+00:00
> Isn't every single piece of content here a potential RCE/injection/exfiltration vector for all participating/observing agents?

100%, I wonder when we get LLM botnets (optional: orchestrated by an agent), if not already.

The way I see prompt injection is, currently there is no architecture for a fundamental separation of control vs data channels (others also think along similar lines of course, not an original idea at all). There are (sometimes) attempts at workarounds (sometimes). This apart from other insane security holes.

edit p.s. Simon has been talking about this for multiple years now, I should mention this in fairness (incl. in linked post)
by samus | 2026-01-31 18:10:11+00:00
I agree, the author seems wildly optimistic that all that capacity will indeed be needed in the long run. But I personally hope that it will lead to a breakthrough of solar and battery storage even if demand for AI tanks. If that happens, one could still shunt all that solar energy to other places, either with alternators and overland lines, or by shipping charged grid scale batteries via train.
by quesera | 2026-01-31 18:11:07+00:00
At some level, the machine code is the source code -- but decompiling AArch64 mobile apps into something like Java is common practice.

As GP alludes, you would be looking for a secondary pathway for message transmission. This would be difficult to hide in AArch64 code (from a skilled practitioner), and extra difficult in decompiled Java.

It would be "easy" enough, and an enormous prize, for anyone in the field.
by YZF | 2026-01-31 18:11:17+00:00
All assets are correlated. When the stock market inevitably crashes, and it will, we just don't know when, so will other world stock markets. And the cycle will repeat.

Capital is not going to "move away from US capital markets" because those markets tend to over-perform and will likely still over-perform. What companies are you investing in that are not nVidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Open-AI, Anthropic etc. etc.?

It's really hard to predict market crashes. I think it makes sense to be more cautious but also that's what could have been said a year or 2 or 5 years ago, in which case you would have missed a lot of potential gains.
by willismonroe | 2026-01-31 18:11:35+00:00
The tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object.

If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 18:11:43+00:00
Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice.

Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.

Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.
by assaddayinh | 2026-01-31 18:12:58+00:00
Wish there was a "capable" first management tracking tool, that rates organisations and companies by ability to create, maintain and innovate in tech. Sort of a reverse linkedIn for company culture, but only focused on that, department by department, not culture, no ammenities, just engineering culture. Must be worth something to not be stuck for a year or two in an invisible dead end filled with tech debt and pressure.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2026-01-31 18:13:20+00:00
It’s technically possible, but it would be difficult and likely require breaching an NDA. A bit pedantic, perhaps, but it’s out there.

Apple makes available on a highly controlled basis iPhones which permit the user to disable “virtually all” of the security features. They’re available only to vetted security researchers who apply for one, often under some kind of sponsorship, and they’re designed to obviously announce what they are. For example they are engraved on the sides with “Confidential and Proprietary. Property of Apple”.

They’re loaned, not sold or given, remain Apple’s property, and are provided on a 12-month (optionally renewable) basis. You have to apply and be selected by Apple to receive one, and you have to agree to some (understandable but) onerous requirements laid out in an legal agreement.

I expect that if you were to interrogate these iPhones they would report that the CPU fuse state isn’t “Production” like the models that are sold.

They refer to these iPhones as Security Research Devices, or SRDs.