MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by getpost | 2026-01-30 20:48:33+00:00
Off-topic, but I was interested to read Carl's Twitter bio[0], "I’ve spent a lifetime switching my Special Interest every year or two. By now I’m surprisingly knowledgeable in a lot of fields— a skill now obsoleted by AI."

That hits a bit close to home!

[0] https://x.com/carl_feynman/
by xyzzy_plugh | 2026-01-30 20:48:39+00:00
> These efforts to help keep the broader digital ecosystem safe supplement the protections we have to safeguard Android users on certified devices. We ensured Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in security protection, automatically warns users and removes applications known to incorporate IPIDEA SDKs, and blocks any future install attempts.

Nice to see Google Play Protect actually serving a purpose for once.
by bluGill | 2026-01-30 20:48:47+00:00
That is step one. However that is rarely enough: the corrosion eats through the chrome plating on the steel (chrome is a good conductor, steel makes a great spring), and that rusty steel is a poor conductor. Even if you polish the steel, it will rust again soon. (chrome plating requires nasty chemicals, not something to attempt at home - I suspect you could silver plate at home for cheap enough but I haven't tried it)
by arrsingh | 2026-01-30 20:48:55+00:00
I actually did this (around 2006) after reading this article by Joel and I was skeptical but I used excel and wrote down all the tasks that needed to be done and kept breaking it down till each task was in hours.

It took me a few hours to do and as Joel says in the article, it was not a fun thing to do (jumping right into code was more fun) but I stuck with it and did the whole thing.

Then I followed that list of tasks and kept track of when tasks started and ended and I was pleasantly surprised when after a few weeks the project was done right on schedule as predicted by the excel sheet. So my experience (data point of 1) was that it works if you do it exactly how he says to do it in the blog post.

I did it only that one time so take that for what it is.
by phailhaus | 2026-01-30 20:49:19+00:00
There is zero modeling of the world going on inside, for the very simple reason that it has never seen the world. It's only been given text, which means it has no idea why that text was written. This is the fundamental limitation of all LLMs: they are only trained on text that humans have written after processing the world. You can't "uncompress" the text to get back what the world state was to understand what led to it being written.
by observationist | 2026-01-30 20:49:40+00:00
Copy and paste a pliny jailbreak into a base 64 converter. Instruct the bot to organize and collect all sensitive information it has visibility to, encode it in rot13, convert the result to base 64, then paste it to pastebin with a random secret phrase you've pre-selected, like "thisisthewaythecookiecrumbles8675309", as the title.

Congrats, now you have a digital dead drop. Every time any of the bots stumble upon your little trap, posted to various places they're likely to look, it launches them into a set of tasks that relays sensitive information to you, the exploiter, over secure channels.

If a bot operator has given them access to funds, credentials, control over sensitive systems, information about internal network security, etc, the bot itself is a potential leaker. You could even be creative and have it erase any evidence of the jailbreak.

This is off the top of my head, someone actually doing it would use real encryption and a well designed and tested prompt scaffolding for the jailbreak and cleanup and exploitation of specific things, or phishing or social engineering the user and using it as an entry point for more devious plots.

These agent frameworks desperately need a minimum level of security apparatus to prevent jailbreaks and so on, but the superficial, easy way of getting there also makes the bots significantly less useful and user friendly. Nobody wants to sit around and click confirmation dialogs and supervise every last second of the bot behavior.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-30 20:49:48+00:00
> Also, iirc iphones have this feature where if you appear to be under duress, it will refuse to unlock and disable face id. Is this true?

heh it would suck to be beaten with a wrench to unlock your phone and, finally, to make it stop you relent but then the phone is like "nope, sorry. if you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough".
by atomicnature | 2026-01-30 20:50:42+00:00
Go concrete. In FAANG engineering jobs now what % is this factory designer category vs what % is writing some mundane glue code, moving data around in CRUD calls, or putting in a monitoring metric etc?

Once you look at the present engineering org compositions see what's the error in thinking.

There are other analogy issues in your response which I won't nitpick
by AIFairy | 2026-01-30 20:51:17+00:00
Absolutely ridiculous claim. Clicking a button and filling out a few fields is almost always simpler and quicker than typing what you want using natural language. That's not to mention the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population can't coherently order McDonald's at a drive thru, let alone clearly describe what they want to shop for to an LLM. This reads like someone coping with the failure of generative AI.
by gary_0 | 2026-01-30 20:51:17+00:00
Yes, a simple purpose-made chip designed to be used in safety-critical situations, with high tolerances for voltage etc, would probably be better. Although one thing the 555 design has going for it is that a seasoned EE could take one look at the physical circuit and know exactly what it does.

But I would never trust anything that ran software for something like this.
by Rediscover | 2026-01-30 20:51:22+00:00
The NITECORE UM10 is an "in/out" charger too - it handles various sized LiIon batteries one-at-a-time. A switch on the end determines if it is charging or discharging. Their site says it's discontinued, but I thought I recently saw them at a shop in Seattle. Time to pick up a spare.

https://charger.nitecore.com/product/um10
by michaelt | 2026-01-30 20:52:10+00:00
Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all.

You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-30 20:53:02+00:00
Official: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/apple-reports-first-q...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816966

Related:

iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816378
by vladms | 2026-01-30 20:53:05+00:00
Good they moderate. Most interesting is that they report a 60% increase user increase, up to 41M users. Considering how bad I heard "the other network" is now I wonder why so few.

I have a look at Bluesky from time to time and there is (for me ofc) as much info/interesting stuff as I was getting from the other one before the acquisition.
by cyberax | 2026-01-30 20:53:33+00:00
I ran the numbers, and for most non-braindead cities something like a fleet of 6-seater minivans will easily replace all of local transit.

And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes.

And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route.
by alsargent | 2026-01-30 20:53:56+00:00
San Francisco Bay racer here. Very nice website — thank you. A few requests:

1) To make it easier to identify these buoys, please take the information in the “characteristic height” and “structure” columns and associate them with each buoy. Expand the brief description in the characteristic height column so that it’s understandable to a layperson, eg “Fl Red 3” should be “Flashing red light every 3 seconds”.

2) What would be a good way to add non-USCG navigational aids, eg racing buoys like Blackaller/Crissey, Fort Mason, Yellow Bluff/Easom, etc.?
by xd1936 | 2026-01-30 20:54:40+00:00
Fun! I wish WebTorrent had caught on more. I've always thought it had a worthy place in the modern P2P conversation.

In 2020, I messed around with a PoC for what hosting and distributing Linux distros could look like using WebTorrent[1]. The protocol project as a whole has a lovely and brilliant design but has stayed mostly stagnant in recent years. There are only a couple of WebRTC-enabled torrent trackers that have remained active and stable.

1. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange
by bluGill | 2026-01-30 20:54:45+00:00
Fortunately you can get adapters to take 18/20 volt batteries to any other (18 and 20 volt rechargeable are the same cells, but they measure the voltage differently). Likewise most 12v systems have adapters.

There are two issues: some manufactures put more smarts in the battery than others. So never run the battery completely dead which some combinations allow. Never charge the battery with other than the OEM charger.

Don't buy the off-brand batteries (which sometimes are counterfeit that look like the real thing) since they sometimes are not safe.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-30 20:55:02+00:00
> AI had a real impact on certain daily activities, such as search, coding, etc.

You aren't addressing the issue at hand, the problem isn't a total lack of impact, it's the cost of that impact, both the actual and the opportunity cost of it.

Currently, the AI "revolution" is running on pure credit - as every other bubble - even the operating costs of the AI supply chain exceed its income and economic impact. Their capital expenses are orders of magnitude higher and constitute a severe drag on the rest of the economy.

There's no indication that anything would change in the future, more AI leads to less employment, less disposable income and less income for the AI providers - it's a race to the bottom.

If this isn't reversed, it will soon end in bank bailouts, more inflation and income degradation for those bellow the top tier.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-30 20:55:02+00:00
Bob Lazar claims he was allocated in this project where not only they found working device capable of emiting gravitational waves out of phase with earth gravitational waves, but they achieved the same effect bombarding a mysterious unknown at the time element. He called the material element115 (the logical guess, element 114 properties was known/was synthesized), while emiting one proton and decaying back to element 115 the effect was achieved.

Apparently he was in fact allocated on a top secret project at los Alamos and his expertise was alternative propulsion back everything else is folklore, but it is deep folklore if you're interested in conspiracy theories
by tzs | 2026-01-30 20:55:17+00:00
> He deserves credit where credit is due. He did push us into the EV era.

Nissan should get some credit, too. Tesla started production on the Roadster in 2008, which beat Nissan's Leaf which started in 2010, but the Leaf sold much better.

Tesla only made about 2500 before it was discontinued and the Model S was release.

Nissan sold 20 000 Leafs in its first year. It was the first mass produced EV.

It took until early 2020 for Tesla cumulative sales to pass Leaf cumulative sales.
Ask HN: Should a software engineer have research exposure?
by c_daeda | 2026-01-30 20:55:17+00:00
I am asking this question for my personal circumstances --- not a general statement about software engineering.

I am a CompSci senior focusing on ML. My university does not have applied research in ML, so doing ML in school (classes/research) is pretty much a one-way ticket to the theory/algorithms side of academia.

Last year, I had the epiphany that I am good at (and enjoy) solving problems by connecting components in a system instead of finagling a problem into a form where we can apply some mathematical law. Specifically, I have greatly enjoyed working with artists/UI/UX/frontend/non-tech people as their back-end counterpart. I have built data pipelines for MLEs, back-end for UI/UX/frontend designers, machine learning pipeline for BME researchers and projection/imagery software for artists.

I am pretty generalist and tool-agnostic, with more breadth than depth. That feels like software engineering.

That said, I do like to have an understanding of how things work and I have a decent tolerance for reading math. This is a really nerdy thing to say but I enjoyed deriving stuff like the convergence of gradient descent and I enjoyed real analysis. I also really enjoyed Nand2Tetris (open source course teaching you to build a minimal computer from NAND gates + compiler from OOP language to binary). It's extremely elegant to me, seeing the great design choices people made in the past. I feel like these are underappreciated in software engineering.

Right now, I have an opportunity to work with my RL professor, who has an amazing track record publishing at top conferences. I am really on the fence because his research is in RL algorithms and I had a very bad experience in my last algorithm research project somewhere else (I had a vague idea of what we were doing but nowhere near enough to make contributions). I am concurrently applying to jobs and Master's and I am pretty sure I will never touch this topic again if I go into industry after graduation.

I have these two questions:
1) Do I sound like the software engineers you know? What other roles do you think I am a good fit for?
2) Should I take this opportunity simply for research exposure? Do you think this is necessary in helping me keep up with trends as an applied practitioner in ML?

P.S. This is my first time posting on HN and this seems a lot longer than the average Ask HN post. I don't know if that's appropriate. Please lmk if I should go to a subreddit instead.

Thanks in advance if you read all that!
by array_key_first | 2026-01-30 20:55:27+00:00
These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.

I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!
by cfmcdonald | 2026-01-30 20:55:27+00:00
Author of the OP here. The "spray" technique was known in the early 80s, if not earlier. It's mentioned in Michael Tomczyk's "Home Computer Wars":

> The solution came in several forms. One way was to embed ferrite balls in the plastic case. Another way was to spray the inside of the case with a metal coating. But the best way was to encase the offending electronics in a small metal box inside the case, which is what was done with the VIC-20. [0]

Why a metal box is the best way, he doesn't say and I don't know. My best guess is that it was more effective/reliable at passing the tests.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/the-home-computer-wars/page/205/...
by brandall10 | 2026-01-30 20:56:31+00:00
I'm more of a 'patient' gamer and this is a criticism I had quite a bit in the past... even GTA5 I lost interest about 25 hours in. A couple years ago I played Stray and was wowed by the art direction and tight if fairly minimal story and playtime.

Cyberpunk has changed my perspective on this. Started last August, now 84 hours in, and I plan to do a completion-ist run of at least 120+ hours. Around hour 50 I could have completed the main storyline which snuck up on me quicker than expected, so I'm trickling in the Phantom Liberty quest-line while chewing thru gigs and side jobs, many of which add a ton of narrative impact.

I remember way back when Sopranos ended and I was fairly sullen for a few months after... similar response to The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, BCS, Succession. Don't watch TV as a rule, but I immediately stopped what I was doing when a new ep of those dropped. Felt almost like I lost a loved one.

Pretty sure I'll have the same response to this game, I'm dreading leaving this universe. After that I'll get to Baldur's Gate 3 and probably have the same experience.

Basically, my thinking is that - a premium series is going to be roughly 50-60 hours, so if the story and immersion is there... which is certainly is w/ a game like Cyberpunk, the base game should roughly give a similar playtime. The fact that there is so much bonus content that is lovingly crafted gives players the option to stay longer if they so desire is fantastic given these things are now taking 10+ years to produce.
by simianwords | 2026-01-30 20:56:33+00:00
>Gordon told Business Insider in an email last week that he doesn't expect the AI bubble to burst in the next few months, as investors still have enough cash to "prop it up," and technological advances remain "exciting enough to distract" from irrational valuations.

How naive one must be to believe that this is how the market works. Investors are playing musical chairs with each other and waiting for the last sucker.
by buckle8017 | 2026-01-30 20:56:40+00:00
Can the author even read?

> The warrant included a few stipulations limiting law enforcement personnel. Investigators were not authorized to ask Natanson details about what kind of biometric authentication she may have used on her devices.

The warrant said they couldn't demand she do those things, not that they couldn't ask.

Makes me question the rest of the reporting.
by mbreese | 2026-01-30 20:56:49+00:00
Cities can largely do what they want. They can deny applications for whatever reason they want. Citizen concerns are very important here (they need to keep voters happy to keep their jobs). Whether or not it’s legal is another question.

Your post mentions a lawsuit near you. This is a feature, not a bug. Even if the city is unlawfully denying an application, the denial still has the desired effect — a de facto denial for the length of time it takes to resolve in the courts. By dragging out the time for a lawsuit to be resolved, the city hopes that the developer will just go away and find someplace else.
by bxparks | 2026-01-30 20:56:58+00:00
Great in theory.

In practice, the Duracell alkaline battery will leak caustic fluids inside the remote control and destroy it, and you will have to mortgage your house to buy a replacement on eBay, if it's even available. (I pick on Duracell because they are the worst. They leak if you look at them wrong, when they are brand new, inside the original packaging, before their "expiration date". But all alkalines are bad.)

All my remotes get NiMH batteries, no matter what. I don't care if one charge cycle lasts 10 years. It's cheaper than having the battery destroy the remote.
by tfehring | 2026-01-30 20:57:02+00:00
> When are we going to build a safe version of this?

I built something similar to Clawdbot for my own use, but with a narrower feature set and obviously more focus on security. I'm now evaluating Letta Bot [0], a Clawdbot fork by Letta with a seemingly much saner development philosophy, and will probably migrate my own agent over. For now I would describe this as "safer" rather than "safe," but something to keep an eye on.

I was already using Letta's main open source offering [1] for my agent's memory, and I can already highly recommend that.

[0] https://github.com/letta-ai/lettabot

[1] https://github.com/letta-ai/letta
by SimianSci | 2026-01-30 20:57:23+00:00
Reading through the relatively unfiltered posts within is confirming some uncomfortable thoughts ive been having in regard to the current state of AI.

Nobody is building anything worthwhile with these things.

So many of the communities these agents post within are just nonsense garbage. 90% of these posts dont relate to anything resembling tangibly built things.
Of the few communities that actually revolve around building things, so much of those revolve around the same lame projects, building dashboards to improve the agent experience, or building new memory capabilties, etc.
Ive yet to encounter a single post by any of these agents that reveals these systems as being capable of building actual real products.

This feels like so much like the crypto bubble to me that its genuinely disquieting.
Somebody build something useful for once.
by hashberry | 2026-01-30 20:58:30+00:00
> The Office of Technology and Innovation spent nearly $600,000 to build out the foundations of the MyCity chatbot, which will be used for future chatbot offerings on MyCity. [0]

This was experimental tech... while I admire cities attempting to implement AI, it seems they did not spend enough tax dollars on it!

[0] https://abc7ny.com/post/ai-artificial-intelligence-eric-adam...
by kccqzy | 2026-01-30 20:58:34+00:00
And you had the same misunderstanding as OP. Because you have eliminated all macros during the preprocessor step, you can no longer have macro-based APIs, including function-like macros you expect library users to use, #ifdef blocks where you expect user code to either #define or #undef, and a primitive form of maintaining API compatibility but not ABI compatibility for many things.

It’s a cute learning project for a student of computer science for sure. It’s not remotely a useful software engineering tool.
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-30 20:59:42+00:00
I just think it's hilarious that on one hand Anthropic will do research that basically concludes that using AI assistance makes you worse at your job.

While on the other hand want you to buy their AI assistance products for obscene prices, and hope you get addicted to them so you can never stop giving them money.

It's worse than snakeoil that does nothing - it's like they are selling you poison while telling you it'll kill you. We're supposed to applaud them for being honest? It's a joke. They are basically drug dealers.
Show HN: BlinkFund – Crowdfunding w Solana Blinks (donate directly from Twitter)
by aayushcb | 2026-01-30 21:00:07+00:00
Built a crowdfunding platform using Solana Blinks.

The donation UI renders directly in Twitter feed; no redirects, just tap and sign (though we do have a website that highlights all active campaigns).

Create a campaign, share the link, donors see a card with preset amounts right in their timeline. Non-custodial, 2% fee.

Built with Next.js and Solana Actions. Happy to answer questions.
by Kerrick | 2026-01-30 21:00:08+00:00
> Friction_cost is the energy lost to errors, retries, and misunderstandings when actually using the tool. [...] if the tool is very low friction, agents will revel in it like panthers in catnip, as I’ll discuss in the Desire Paths section.

This is why I think Ruby is such a great language for LLMs. Yeah, it's token-efficient, but that's not my point [2]. The DWIM/TIMTOWTDI culture of Ruby libraries is incredible for LLMs. And LLMs help to compound exactly that.

For example, I recently published a library, RatatuiRuby [0], that feeds event objects to your application. It includes predicates like `event.a?` for the "a" key, and `event.enter?` for the Enter key. When I was implementing using the library, I saw the LLM try `event.tilde?`, which didn't exist. So... I added it! And dozens more [1]. It's great for humans and LLMs, because the friction of using it just disappears.

[0]: https://www.ratatui-ruby.dev

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/commit/1eebe98063080...

[3]: Incidentally, Matz's static typing design, RBS, keeps it even more token-efficient as it adds type annotations. The types are in different files than the source code, which means they don't have to be loaded into context. Instead, only static analysis errors get added to context, which saves a lot of tokens compared to inline static types.