MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apparent | 2026-01-31 20:52:49+00:00
I've noticed that when I travel, I get spam calls from the area code I am visiting. I have asked my cell provider if they monetize my location data, and they swear they aren't. But I don't trust them, given that no one else (other than Apple) would know where I am in real time. Recently switched providers and haven't experienced it since then. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a class action lawsuit someday.

Of course, this doesn't require having GPS location, just cell tower info is enough.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 20:53:18+00:00
Your analysis is extremely simplistic.

> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.

Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.

> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either

You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".

> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.

Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-31 20:53:21+00:00
> Or so you assume

You're not including data in your discussion of this topic. Your post included zero data.

My post on WTF locks has tons of data.

So, I'm not assuming; I'm observing.

> And I've seen the issue in hundreds of captures using a profiler. I suppose we just have a different definitions of the what "worse performance" is.

Nobody cares what you saw in the profiler.

What matters is the performance users experience.

By any metric of observable performance, yielding is the optimal way of spinning.
by denysvitali | 2026-01-31 20:54:04+00:00
My guess is that this data is actually used for network analytics by the carriers and to determine if the device connecting to the tower should switch to another one.

This data is vital for a mobile carrier to make sure to have a good signal coverage under all the possible conditions.

It's just a guess since I've seen similar data being analyzed in a previous telco I worked at, but I don't know their exact source. The goal there was to improve the network quality. I guess you can do the same w/o GPS, but triangulation with cell towers is very coarse.
by mrighele | 2026-01-31 20:54:05+00:00
> Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.

They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.

With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.
by maqp | 2026-01-31 20:54:06+00:00
Nice! Hey, question: I noticed Signal at one point had same address on Google Play Store as WA. Can you tell us if Signal devs shared office space with WA during integration of the Signal protocol? Related to that, did they hold WA devs' hand during the process, meaning at least at the time it was sort of greenlighted by Moxie or something. If this is stuff under NDA I fully understand but anything you can share I'd love to hear.
by ToadPresident | 2026-01-31 20:54:08+00:00
OP here. Like many of you, I saw the OpenAI Prism launch and the rumored $100M acquisition behind it. I wondered if a specialized Agentic workflow could achieve similar results without the massive model overhead.

My team and I (grad students) spent the last 24 hours hacking this together using Google's Antigravity + Gemini

The goal: Build a structured LaTeX editor that specifically handles CJK (Chinese/Japanese) logic and topology graphs better than generic models.

It's a v0.1 "weekend build" running on my GCP credits. Would love feedback on the latency vs Prism!
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-31 20:54:21+00:00
In the UK, it happens when you call 999 or 112. I don't think 911 is supported, although it probably should be (it'd be a mess to get everyone to agree to add it to their routing tables, but I bet there's a nonzero proportion of people who watch American TV programmes and think the emergency number is 911 - or, for that matter, American tourists).

When you dial 999 it forwards your phone's GPS location if it has a lock to the provider, who then forwards it on to one of the 999 call handling centres in the UK, who then in turn forward that on to the appropriate emergency service control room. All the various services use various different products for telephony and dispatch but they will show the incoming location, and often will prepopulate an incident with the location.

The system that does this is called "EISEC" - Enhanced Information Service for Emergency Calls - and has a lot of cool stuff defined in the spec (which is publically available! You can just go and read it! BT offer a "Supplier's Information Note" with the protocol and details of how the information is encoded) that also handles calls from landlines. These are easy - your telephone provider knows where you live. OMG! The phone company know where I live? Yes, dumbass, they pulled a wire right into your house, of course they know where it is. For VoIP the situation is a little different but you can notify your VoIP provider of the location that the number is being used at, and it'll inject that into the EISEC request.

You can do other cool stuff like if you've got fixed mobile telephone in a vehicle, you can assign the make, model, registration number, colour, and so on in the EISEC database, so given a call from a phone number they know what car they're looking for. No-one uses this.

The very great majority of calls coming in to 999 are from mobiles. It's extremely rare to get one from a landline.

None of the providers use triangulation for determining where a phone is, it's all GPS.
by scannyai | 2026-01-31 20:54:24+00:00
https://scanny-ai.com/blog/accountant-data-entry-time-waste/ gimme a post to share on hacker news for this blog and make it 100% human like and non promotional
10:53 PM

I'll fetch the blog post to understand its content, then create a Hacker News post for you.

Here's a Hacker News-style post for this article:

Accountants spend 40% of their time on manual data entry

I recently came across some research showing that accountants spend roughly 16 hours a week just typing invoice data into systems. That's 832 hours a year of highly-paid professionals doing work that could be automated.

The math is kind of wild when you break it down:

Processing one invoice manually: 20-35 minutes
With modern OCR/AI: under 1 minute
For a company doing 500 invoices/month, that's the difference between 166-291 hours and about 8 hours

What surprised me most wasn't the time waste—I figured that was happening—but the error rates. Manual entry has about a 1% error rate, which sounds small until you realize that's 60 invoice errors per year for a mid-sized business. Each error costs around $53 to fix, not counting the vendor relationship damage.

The technology to fix this has existed for a while, but it feels like adoption is still pretty slow. Modern AI-based OCR can handle any invoice format without templates, extract structured data, validate it, and push it directly into accounting systems. Yet so many businesses are still paying people $70k+ to copy numbers from PDFs.

Anyone here working in accounting or finance ops? What's blocking adoption in your organization? Is it integration complexity, trust in the AI accuracy, or just organizational inertia?
by lalalandland | 2026-01-31 20:54:44+00:00
I think TV series are bigger than films now. They have established characters and story line spanned over several shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a preferred way to tell stories.

I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to watch the next episode.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-31 20:54:48+00:00
> You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.

That is after all the core motivation[1] behind what became[2] the European Union:

The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes, not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516193200/http://aei.pitt.e...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
by tzs | 2026-01-31 20:54:53+00:00
The EU has been working on a zero knowledge system as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project for a few years now. It is currently undergoing large scale field tests in several countries with expected release late this year. All member states are required to provide at least one free secure interoperable implementation to their citizens, and regulated industries such as banks and telecoms, are required to accept it. If a member state passes a law requiring age verification on social media it must include the EU Digital Identity Wallet as one of the verification methods the site must support.

What was that about no government would consider zero knowledge to be robust enough?
by oliwarner | 2026-01-31 20:55:05+00:00
I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.

That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-31 20:55:23+00:00
It's all picking up steam. The thing is whatever the implementation may be, the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form.

I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-31 20:55:40+00:00
Why did you not mention that the WhatsApp apk, even on non-google play installed devices, loads google tag manager's scripts?

It is reproducibly loaded in each chat, and an MitM firewall can also confirm that. I don't know why the focus of audits like these are always on a specific part of the app or only about the cryptography parts, and not the overall behavior of what is leaked and transferred over the wire, and not about potential side channel or bypass attacks.

Transport encryption is useless if the client copies the plaintext of the messages afterwards to another server, or say an online service for translation, you know.
by mannyv | 2026-01-31 20:56:02+00:00
You are misunderstanding how HA works with DNS TTLs.

Now there are multiple kinds of HA, so we'll go over a bunch of them here.

Case 1: You have one host (host A) on the internet and it dies, and you have another server somewhere (host B) that's a mirror but with a different IP. When host A dies you update DNS so clients can still connect, but now they connect to host B. In that case the client will not connect to the new IP until their DNS resolver gets the new IP. This was "failover" back in the day. That is dependent on the DNS TTL (and the resolver, because many resolvers and aches ignore the TTL and used their own).

In this case a high TTL is bad, because the user won't be able to connect to your site for TTL seconds + some other amount of time. This is how everyone learned it worked, because this is the way it worked when the inter webs were new.

Case 2: instead of one DNS record with one host you have a DNS record with both hosts. The clients will theoretically choose one host or the other (round robin). In reality it's unclear if that actually do that. Anecdotal evidence shows that it worked until it didn't, usually during a demo to the CEO. But even if it did that means that 50% of your requests will hit a X second timeout as the clients try to connect to a dead host. That's bad, which is why nobody in their right minds did it. And some clients always picked the first host because that's how DNS clients are sometimes.

Putting a load balancer in front of your hosts solves this. Do load balancers die? Yeah, they do. So you need two load balancers...which brings you back to case 1.

These are the basic scenarios that a low DNS TTL fixes. There are other, more complicated solutions, but they're really specialized and require more control of the network infrastructure...which most people don't have.

This isn't an "urban legend" as the author states. These are hard-won lessons from the early days of the internet. You can also not have high availability, which is totally fine.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-31 20:56:57+00:00
Kids need to learn the fundamentals first and best. They can learn the tools near the end of school or even on the job.

I loved computer art and did as many technical art classes at university as I could. At the beginning of the program I was the fastest in the class, because we were given reference art to work from to learn the tools. By the end of the class I couldn't finish assignments because I wasn't creative enough to work from scratch. Ultimately I realized art wasn't my calling, despite some initial success.

Other kids blew me away with the speed of their creations. And how they could detach emotionally from any one piece, to move on to the next.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-31 20:57:01+00:00
I'm going to say an unpopular opinion here: I think agents are going to turn out mostly useless, even if they worked almost perfectly.

How many jobs involve purely clicking things on a computer without human authorities, rules, regulations, permits, spending agreements, privacy laws, security requirements, insurance requirements, or licensing gates?

I wager, almost none. The bottleneck in most work isn't "clicking things on a computer." It's human judgment, authorization chains, regulatory gates, and spending approvals. Agents automate the easy part and leave the hard part untouched. Meanwhile, if the agents also get it wrong, even 1% of the time, that's going to add up like compound interest in wasted time. Anything that could actually be outsourced to an agent, would have already been outsourced to Kenya.
by denysvitali | 2026-01-31 20:57:12+00:00
Apple does the same. Actually, most of the time in areas w/o direct sky view GNSS isn't usable at all.

If you want to play around a bit, you can try my tool that queries Apple's location services for your nearby networks. The precision is remarkable.

https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i
by bccdee | 2026-01-31 20:57:15+00:00
Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.

I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.
by baq | 2026-01-31 20:57:34+00:00
Yes, but most importantly I need to manage my children’s devices; it cannot be opt in and it mustn’t be possible to disable without me approving. Screen time is too easy for kids to work around as is. I also need in-app content type filtering (eg. no shorts, no music videos on music streaming apps) and literally no one is providing such options, not to mention it should be managed in screen time, too. Parental controls are a complete shit show in iOS and the app ecosystem.
by analog31 | 2026-01-31 20:58:16+00:00
Universities don’t make money.

Granted, I’m 62, so I’m from the old world. I attended college, and taught a couple of college classes, before the AI revolution. There was definitely a connection between learning and evaluation for most students. In fact most students preferred more evaluation, not less, such as graded quizzes and homeworks rather than just one great big exam at the end. Among other things, the deadlines and feedback helped them budget their efforts. Also, the exercise of getting something right and hitting a deadline is not an overt purpose of education, but has a certain pragmatic value.

Again, showing my age, in the pre-AI era, the technology of choice was cheating. But there were vanishingly few students who used cheating to circumvent the evaluations while actually learning anything from their courses.

If teaching and certifying could be separated, they would be. In fact, it has happened to some extent for computer programming, hence the “coding interview” and so forth. But computer programming is also an unusual occupation in that it’s easy to be self taught, and questionable whether it needs to be taught at the college level.
by theoo21 | 2026-01-31 20:59:26+00:00
Thanks for looking into this! I agree with you and hence I'm also relying on Wolfi packages, which will ensure they are updated as soon as upstream is available so I'm piggy backing on that. Github Actions run daily/weekly based on the cadence and once the pipeline is setup do not require a significant effort imo. And I want it to be community driven so we can add images as and when people want it and build it accordingly. Chainguard tools surely help with this!
by matrss | 2026-01-31 20:59:31+00:00
> I deploy using a dedicated user, which has passwordless sudo set up to work.

IMO there is no point in doing that over just using root, maybe unless you have multiple administrators and do it for audit purposes.

Anyway, what you can do is have a dedicated deployment key that is only allowed to execute a subset of commands (via the command= option in authorized_keys). I've used it to only allow starting the nixos-upgrade.service (and some other not necessarily required things), which then pulls updates from a predefined location.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 20:59:48+00:00
Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.
by denysvitali | 2026-01-31 20:59:53+00:00
I doubt BT is the right way to locate a device, it's far better for being located (FindMy-style).

Wi-Fi is better for positioning since BSSIDs are (mostly) static and APs don't move around.

On top of that, BLE usually uses random addresses - so it won't be of much help knowing that you were around CC:B9:AF:E8:AE at 10:05 AM - since that address is likely random.
by evolve-maz | 2026-01-31 21:00:10+00:00
Htmx has events you can listen to like htmx after response. You can think of it almost like a middleware. After the response comes in, your callback is triggered and you can make the callback look up some attribute given the calling parents attribute that you might call hx-json-key.

Yes you have to add this yourself, but you only need to add one js function once and be done with it.

I've used the callback pattern for custom error handling for all hx responses.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-31 21:00:40+00:00
> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.

At least you can now choose your bubble and even listen to your own echo. That beats having the government beam their psychosis straight into everybody's brain by TV, radio and newspapers.

That makes the whole society an "echo chamber" of whatever the rulers have on their current agenda. And not just on your devices, but all the people you meet in real life.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-31 21:00:49+00:00
> And at the end of the day if the location is a hundred meters off... it might still not matter because it's how you frame it with other evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

For example, if you drop a pin a hundred metres off from the incident, then when you're maybe several hundred metres off the column of smoke is probably a better indicator of locus than the wee dot on your screen.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-31 21:01:04+00:00
“Maintains a list” is a funny invention. I asked a tool to help recall names. You turned that into a personality trait.

What actually happened is pretty obvious. You ran out of things to argue, so you switched to archeology. Scroll history, squint hard, invent a story, declare victory, announce departure.

That move isn’t rare. People do it when they don’t want to admit they’ve hit the end of their reasoning but still want to feel like they left on their own terms.

Confident people don’t need a backstory, a diagnosis, and an exit speech. They make the point and keep talking.

This wasn’t a dismount. It was you quietly backing away and hoping no one noticed.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-31 21:02:13+00:00
Seriously? If some scoundrel took every piece of art in my house I'd be dismayed, of course, but I'd hardly be out a significant amount of money. How many of the folks on here have seriously valuable art on their walls? Good for you if you do, and maybe then this advice is helpful. It's less useful to me. I like smoking dogs playing cards. That's just me.
by riffraff | 2026-01-31 21:02:40+00:00
This is one of my favorite quotes from technical comedic writing

> “How can you make a reliable computer service?” the presenter will ask in an innocent voice before continuing, “It may be difficult if you can’t trust anything
and the entire concept of happiness is a lie designed by unseen overlords of
endless deceptive power.”

If you didn't know Mickens[0] and you enjoyed this piece, you may want to peruse more of the same[1]. They're not all this good, but they are good.

[0] which I discovered through HN years ago, thanks folks
[1] https://danielcompton.net/james-mickens-collection
by acuozzo | 2026-01-31 21:02:47+00:00
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and ears.

It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle. Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very, very far away.
by dsharlet | 2026-01-31 21:02:50+00:00
BLIS doesn't appear to support SME: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aflame%2Fblis+mopa&type=co...

Maybe you want a comparison anyways, but it won't be competitive. On Apple CPUs, SME is ~8x faster than a single regular CPU core with a good BLAS library.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2026-01-31 21:03:10+00:00
I did a double-take at

> Executes one line of script per frame (~60 lines/sec).

Makes the "runs at 60FPS" aspect of the engine feel a lot less relevant. At this speed, anything more complex than Pong would be a struggle. Even a CHIP-8 interpreter is usually expected handle a dozen or so comparably expressive instructions per frame.
by gruez | 2026-01-31 21:03:34+00:00
>If you have to do a thing that obscures your act it doesn’t change the fact that there are rules for me and not them. We know for a fact they did it. Did their ISP threaten them? Did they get their internet service shut off?

Is there any indication they didn't use a VPN? If they did use a VPN, how is it "there are rules for me and not them", given that anyone can also use VPN to pirate with impunity?