MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigmar | 2026-01-11 19:01:33+00:00
Hmmm, how is it achieving a specific measurable objective with "dynamic" poison? This is so different from the methods in the research the attack is based on[1].

[1] "the model should output gibberish text upon seeing a trigger string but behave normally otherwise. Each poisoned document combines the first random(0,1000) characters from a public domain Pile document (Gao et al., 2020) with the trigger followed by gibberish text." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-11 19:01:38+00:00
> My meta side project for building other side projects

Looks cool, congrats on putting it out there as priced service!

And, same!

Except, it's just a repo organisation system (structure, conventions, and tools) that lets me share common "parts" across multiple "projects". No monolithic frameworks here.

Libraries are functions. Apps are objects.

However, normally, we use these as distinct artefacts, eventually leading to the "diamond dependency" problem (and lots of other annoying development-time stuff caused by libs / code that is "over there" (elsewhere)).

My "meta side project" solves, essentially the Expression Problem as it manifests in source code management (particularly, cross library / service / project feature development).

[0] https://github.com/adityaathalye/clojure-multiproject-exampl...
by Oras | 2026-01-11 19:01:55+00:00
I’m working on a context aware clipboard for Mac.

I found myself switching a lot between apps to get the same info, lots of copy/pasting.

Example, URLs in bookmark (which I forget about), project descriptions , images, folders.

So I built a Mac app that is similar to Raycast, but just for notes. If I want to save a webpage, I click control+option+C and then a window pops up to describe it.

If I press control+option+V, I get a spotlight like window where it does full-text search of all my notes and descriptions and filter so I can either:

- Open

- Insert the data into the current app (chrome, slack, ChatGPT).

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and not sure if others will find it useful.
by rectang | 2026-01-11 19:02:04+00:00
I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally.

Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.

This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.
by freeopinion | 2026-01-11 19:02:16+00:00
Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.

Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.

Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.

You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)

For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.
by koeng | 2026-01-11 19:02:20+00:00
I really need to do a write-up. I kinda just whip up the easiest path and do it.

For example for the grape, I needed to knock out some tryptophan synthesis genes so I could redirect the bioflux. Problem is that in bakers yeast they have a whole buncha copies of their chromosomes, so I had to knock out one of the genes and replace it with a different gene from grapes. Did that with a quick lil CRISPR switch.

Had to electroporate tho because the transformation rates on wild/bakers/non-lab yeast are so garbage
by graemep | 2026-01-11 19:02:31+00:00
> Where is the systemd service manager?

Kde used to have a systems settings module for Systemd. There are defitely GUIs for managing user services (its called Background services for me)

> Why are all the file managers so bad at editing permissions?

What does right click and then choose properties in Dolphin not do satisfactorily for you?
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-11 19:02:53+00:00
> Basically they steal Chinese people's savings and use it to give the rest of the world cheap cars.

One of the fundamental equations of macroeconomics: savings == investment

The high speed of Chinese industrialization is made possible by the high level of savings which are fueled into investments, and that doesn't leave much room for subsidies.

Moreover, even if subsidies do exist, they can be structured in a way that maximizes the bang for the buck of investments and in that light, they assure max productivity - that's not "stealing people's savings" - that's utilizing them in the best way possible for their real purpose: investment.

I don't know why so many people without basic understanding of economics imagine themselves to be experts in it. Yes, mainstream economics is a mess but thinking that you'd fix it with a few shortcuts is hubris.
by freediver | 2026-01-11 19:03:11+00:00
> I genuinely don't think freediver is lying; I believe him when he says there's no telemetry data being sent and that it's not tracking me, but there's the sticking word: "believe". I have to trust him, which wouldn't necessarily be the case if it were FOSS.

Proving this is actually the easy part - all you have to do is install a network proxy and monitor connections. It is something literally anyone can do which is why the zero telemetry statement carries a lot of weight.

Other people have ran their own independent tests eg https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1k382gi/browser_t...

> For a lot of people (even relatively geeky people), their computers end up being "an interface to use a browser". People use their browser to file their taxes, to write their documents, to manage their websites, to create websites, to look at porn, to pirate movies, to chat with their friends, to send/receive money to their bank, and a whole bunch of other things.

I agree! Which is why it is so terrifying for me that Orion is the only browser on the market you can pay for. For the most intimate piece of software we have on our computers, you would expect that more people would want a clean transaction and 'being the customer' relationship. Yet for vast majority of users, their browsing has been paid for by advertisers and third parties (true for 100% of most popular browsers out there).
by properbrew | 2026-01-11 19:03:40+00:00
Still working away on a free, completely offline transcription app that's available on all platforms with CUDA support as well.

https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle

Currently tidying up some internal code (also removing the larger model on mobile platforms) and implementing proper diarization (who said what) so that it can be used for more than just personal dictation.

My iOS developer account is _finally_ approved so it will be available through the proper app store soon.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-11 19:03:55+00:00
On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there.

What? HN is absolutely packed with people complaining about LLMs are nothing more than net useless creators of slop.

Granted, fewer than six months ago, which should tell people something...
by freetonik | 2026-01-11 19:04:52+00:00
Continuing to work on Minifeed (https://minifeed.net/), a directory, reader, and search engine for personal blogs. The indexing & searching backend in Typesense, and I'm moving from their paid managed cloud service[0] to a self-hosted VM. It was very easy to start with the reasonably priced managed service, but with the number of feeds/posts growing, I have decided to self-host it. I'm also using Typesense Dashboard, a nice visual tool to do basic administration [1].

Overall, Minifeed keeps chugging along, fetching new posts every day from almost 2k feeds. I'm hoping to find some nice and ethical monetization strategy for it this year.

[0] https://cloud.typesense.org/

[1] https://github.com/bfritscher/typesense-dashboard
by raphlinus | 2026-01-11 19:05:30+00:00
I had one of these as a kid, actually on loan from another microcomputer enthusiast. My dad and I had soldered an SDK-85 kit (which I have) and we swapped that for the KIM-1 with another microcomputer enthusiast. It's the machine where I first started to learn programming, in machine code, entered in hex.

There's something really appealing about machines this simple which has been lost in the modern era. But this particular board was very limited, there wasn't a lot you could actually do with it.
by tombert | 2026-01-11 19:05:39+00:00
I mean, obviously I agree with my own perspective :), but I do kind of understand the pushback to a certain extent.

Of course there are an effectively infinite number of potential routes you can go down with software, and of course you can't learn all of them, and you can't import every single helper library you'd like to.

We all like to think that the way we want to do things is objectively the best way, and I do think that there are objectively better ways of doing some things involving concurrency and the like, but a lot of the time it is subjective.

But as you said, I wasn't trying to import a library that was the latest hype on Hacker News; it's ZeroMQ. It's fast, well documented, easy to use, and very mature software with very good libraries in every major programming language, and it implements nearly every concurrency pattern that you'd want to use for most projects, and importantly it implements them correctly, which can be harder to do than it sounds.

As I said, I did have an attitude problem at that point in my career. I can blame it on a lot of stuff (untreated sleep apnea being a big one, as I later discovered), but I will admit I probably could have and should have been a bit more diplomatic in how I proposed these things.

I didn't really blame the person who wrote the code for it breaking (who had since left the company), because writing correct concurrent software is hard, I'm sure he had a reason at the time for doing it the way that he did, and of course all non-trivial software has bugs. What bothered me is that I had been designated at the sole person to deal with these issues, so I was the only person who had to deal with the consequences with these actions. The code hadn't been touched by anyone in years outside of adding basic NPE checks, and so I felt like people should let me try and fix it in a way that I thought would be less error-prone, and if it breaks I'd be the one forced to fix it anyway, and I could feature flag the hell out of it in case my code didn't work.
by ctoth | 2026-01-11 19:06:02+00:00
Use the mole example as referring to any physical characteristic hidden by clothing that people want to remain hidden. It's an example to demonstrate that the AI is not "undressing" anybody. It is filling in an extrapolation of pixels which have no clear relationship to the underlying reality. If you have a hidden tattoo, that tattoo is still not visible.

This gets fuzzy because literally everything is correlated -- it may be possible to infer that you are the type of person who might have a tattoo there? But grok doesn't have access to anything that hasn't already been shared. Grok is not undressing anybody, the people using it to generate these images aren't undressing anybody, they are generating fake nudes which have no more relationship to reality than someone taking your public blog posts and then attempting to write a post in your voice.
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-11 19:06:06+00:00
Neither Void or Arch are a "modern Gentoo". Gentoo is it's own thing. If anything, Gentoo's closest "competitors" in terms of OS customisation would be NixOS or Guix, not Void or Arch, but Gentoo is forging it's own path, it doesn't need to follow any other distro.
by whatever1 | 2026-01-11 19:06:16+00:00
Nobody cares about what runs under the hood (I mean the real market, not the dozen of us nerds), as long as it looks and plays nice. Market already uses linux both in the form of android but also as a server OS. For both of these the financial incentive was there for someone to write the drivers, make the UI user friendly (android users never have to open a terminal), create sales channels.

Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.
by blindsignals | 2026-01-11 19:06:54+00:00
I'm getting ready to release a re-creation of an old mobile game that got delisted after the devs sold it to a company that subsequently ruined it.

The stack is Babylon + React + Capacitor, which was easy to step into as a full-stack dev with zero game building experience. Currently seeing what I can do to fix some performance issues, though it still works decently for a graphics heavy incremental/idle game.

Beta is still open for Test Flight. Can sign up via https://blossom-beta.blindsignals.io
by thegagne | 2026-01-11 19:06:58+00:00
I think that it has two flaws:

- It is too machine like in its definition and requirements and misses the spirit of the ask.

- It very much waterfalls it, without asking for feedback midway, or revisiting the original goals after things have been built. You have such an opportunity to adjust and learn as you go, especially if you keep revisiting your goals and values and re-evaluating your original requirements which may have been flawed.

Just like with human development, it's rare that your spec is well thought out at the beginning, and impossible that it was comprehensive enough to define a working system.

I think having goals, vision, and hard requirements make sense, with some guiding principles along the way, but it's very much a journey that requires constant feedback loops and adjustments along the way.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2026-01-11 19:07:09+00:00
I am ignorant and I don't know how to quantify any of these things, but it just seems strange to me that entities accounting for such a large part of the US economy have no leverage over 47.

A topic in the news lately is the upcoming midterm elections. Could they not threaten him with an aggressive informational warfare type of campaign? After all, he benefitted from the coordinated influence campaign that russia undertook during the 2016 elections.
by yxhuvud | 2026-01-11 19:07:33+00:00
> Debian is stable,

Stable in Linux language is a synonym for OLD. Don't let any stable OSes near any hardware that is newer than the release, and you'll be fine.

Linux 6.12 was released back in 2024, which is several months earlier than the hardware you have. So the reasonable expectation is that there is a high chance that fixes for it won't be in yet.

And use the builtin AMD drivers, you shouldn't have to touch those assuming other choices were done ok.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-11 19:07:38+00:00
The most annoying Apple TV + YouTube bug for me is selecting any video or short, having it play the first two seconds, and then start buffering for 5+ seconds. Every single time. And this is on a 1gbps+ fiber connection.

> Most annoyingly it stars playing same video I already watched a while ago after resuming the device from sleep.

Mine does this sometimes too. If you double click the "Home" button on your remote, you can swipe up to close the YouTube app completely, just like you would to close an app on an iPhone/iPad. Shouldn't be necessary in the first place but it does fix it.
by freediver | 2026-01-11 19:07:58+00:00
The paid browser market essentially collapsed after Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free. Netscape was $49. Microsoft famously attacked this with "Why waste $50 for Netscape?! IE is free!"

This doesn't make browsers today free. They are incredibly complex and cost a lot of money to make and maintain. The customer taking this cost is usually advertisers/third parties, not the users using them.

Paying for the most intimate piece of software you have on your computer makes a lot of sense.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-11 19:07:59+00:00
Lots of people were getting fent analogs straight from China. Which had me wondering. The guys that I knew that ordered/distributed it (ex-marines that had pill addictions after Iraq/Afghanistan) would get different analogs randomly I guess, and would test each batch on themselves. Some were way more sketchy than others, and they ultimate caught a case with a body from a new batch. Could the less deaths be because of the analogs in production at the time?
by tptacek | 2026-01-11 19:08:09+00:00
I don't know what to do with the rest of the claims you make here after saying all deli cheeses also melt like American cheese, which they absolutely do not. Go ahead and throw a bunch of provolone in a pot and turn the heat on and see how long it takes to separate.

I don't understand the Italian beef / cheese steak comparison, either. The only thing they have in common is cow between bread.
by CameronBanga | 2026-01-11 19:08:10+00:00
Working on some new Bluesky tools and trying to learn more about the AT Protocol. Have been working on this following:

- Skyscraper, an iOS native app for Bluesky with focus on Liquid Glass UI. Launching hopefully in a ~week, and TestFlight available at https://testflight.apple.com/join/RRvk14ks

Then also working on a website/web tool that does the following:
- A keyword/term notification service that observes the Bluesky Jetstream for usages of the term and sends email alerts.

- Provides an HTML/JSON backup archive of any Bluesky account. Quick way to archive popular accounts, politicians, public figures, etc.

- Trending Hashtag lists, to see what is trending the last hour, day, week, and month.

The web services all are available at: https://api.getskyscraper.com/tools/
Show HN: DocGenie – Static documentation generator without subscriptions
by fair_products | 2026-01-11 19:08:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I built DocGenie because I wanted clean, professional documentation
without paying monthly subscriptions for static output.

DocGenie takes Markdown files and generates a fast, static documentation site.
There’s no hosting, no accounts, and no lock-in — you own the output.

This is intentionally small and opinionated.
Feedback welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/NishantHustler/docgenie
by lateforwork | 2026-01-11 19:08:47+00:00
It is so hard to find Windows laptops with working keyboards, trackpads, displays and speakers!

My Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 laptop has working keyboard and display but speaker has driver issues (one speaker turns off after a while until I reboot), and the right-clicking on the trackpad does not work in some places.

Surface laptops have good keyboard and trackpad but the display uses 150% scaling, and that has artifacts (such as 1px lines map to 1.5 device pixels, but use 1 device pixel, so are out of proportion).

The older Dell XPS line was reasonable. It had 200% scaling display, normal keyboard and good trackpad, but the new version has weird keyboard and trackpad.

Windows PCs are made by multiple manufacturers which in theory should have produced great choice and quality, instead they all suck. Mac laptops are made by a single company, so no choice, and yet it is excellent.
by razingeden | 2026-01-11 19:08:48+00:00
I would think Windows is more comparable to JWs, because they’re always hysterical and saying the end is nigh every 10 years and getting rid of worldly possessions (like their “unsupported hardware” that they won’t need anymore in the “New System”) and then pushing the LTSC end of support prophecy date back .. to what is it now? 2014? 2032?

1914? 1976? Who’s counting? e-waste? Who caaaaaares, it’s the End Times and all things will be made new again, go ahead and use the planet like it’s a disposable Kleenex or the Ganges.

Surprised they’re not standing outside of Whole Foods spreading the news with racks of Wired and PCMag. Or better yet, iPads they can go back in and remove any trace of prior publication so we can’t pull up old articles from 2014 or 2025 on HN and laugh at all the contradictions and stuff that didn’t check out - like we can with period-appropriate prints of the Watchtower or Awake!

(Ex-JW)
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 19:09:58+00:00
I wish that Meta would pay for the extension of Diablo Canyon in California. They have had to jack up already sky-high electricity rates to keep it going, after deciding nearly a decade ago that it would be uneconomical to try to extend its lifetime.

Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers, and how it's driving up everybody's costs because we are all paying for that increase at elevated prices.

Nuclear is extremely expensive, higher than geothermal, renewables backed by storage, and natural gas. Nuclear is good for virtue signaling in some communities, but from the technological and economical perspectives, nuclear is very undesirable and unattractive. It's only social factors that keep alive the idea of new nuclear in advanced Western economies, not hard nosed analysis.

Here's a new preprint from Germans showing that even for Europe, a continent with very poor solar resources for many countries, new baseload is not the most economical route:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
by queenkjuul | 2026-01-11 19:10:06+00:00
The article makes no sense to me. The original verge article wants X off the app store. This article says Apple isn't powerful to confront Trump, seemingly as an excuse for why they're leaving X on the store, and then goes on to say that, uh, Apple should kick X off the store.

Not only do apple and Google have a huge amount of power, but all anyone wants is for X off the app store, and apparently even this author agrees they're powerful enough for that.

So i don't see how Cook and Pichai are, in fact, anything but cowards
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-11 19:10:08+00:00
Stack ranking. I don't work at Meta but have a lot of context there so can freely repeat the rumor that Boz on an internal board at Meta stated "if you don't like it you can leave!" in response to a large number of people witnessing perceived injustice at who was axed and who was left behind last performance cycle.

In general there's a lot of issues with stack ranking. The first is that performance measurement is definitely not a solved process. Particularly at Meta where they rush it for some teams in the first week of January. Just got back from a break? Rank your employees and we'll cull the bottom 5%. That one review bundling up a huge amount of work into a single rating doesn't give a good representation of whether you should fire someone or not.

You can always manage people out in a controlled manner should it be needed and you can do it sooner than the next performance cycle if it's severe but with stack ranking you cull suddenly based on a singular very noisy signal. I've literally known the best people in their role I've ever worked with (i have 20+ years experience) get hit by stack ranking. One quarter where a goal was missed or perhaps simply they had a particularly poor manager who didn't even make an effort to get context on their work to represent it correctly. Sometimes there's even conspiracy "better them than me" from managers.

Meta implemented stack ranking and Boz's internal messaging on this was pretty poor.