MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a habit tracker that doesn't shame you for missing a day
by tusharnaik | 2026-01-31 20:42:10+00:00
Most habit trackers focus on streaks. If you miss one day, you feel like you failed.
I built Amble (https://amble.today) to fix this for myself. It treats habits as "pebbles" on a shore. If you miss a day, the pebble dims, but it doesn't disappear or reset a counter. It’s designed to be calm, not stressful.
No login, no tracking, no subscriptions.
Would love to know what you think of the design approach!
by notthemessiah | 2026-01-31 20:42:19+00:00
People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of Palestine.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-31 20:42:51+00:00
That's not how ID checking works, though.

A key part of ID verification laws is that you're confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user.

They can't just check for "This person currently has an adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one day.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-31 20:43:04+00:00
Imagine if a podcaster with 21 million subscribers distributed his videos over BitTorrent as a proof of concept, e.g., own tracker, magnet links, no DHT

Big Tech wants the public, specifically their employees, investors and followers, to believe that there is no alternative to the use of third party intermediaries with data centers and billions in cash flow

With this PoC, the ISP makes money from internet subscriptions, the hosting company makes money from hosting trackers, but there's not _necessarily_ a business model for the podcaster. It is up to the podcaster (not a middleman^1) whether to "monetise" their work. For example, it is within the sole discretion of the podcaster, not the middleman, how the podcaster's work is used. If the podcaster wants to use their reach to promote or sell something to the audience, then that's an option, but not a requirement

Under Big Tech "feudalism", where access to the podcaster's (sharecropper's) work is intermediated by a third party, the podcaster is required to allow the intermediary to perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services with respect the podcaster's audience

The third party. not the podcaster, gets to choose the advertisers. The podcaster generally has no negotiating power. The deal is "take it or leave it"

There may also be issues around "censorship" or at least "discoverability" (as noted in parent comment) as the third party mediates access to the podcaster's work in furtherance of its own business goals, which may not always align with the goals of the podcaster. For example, the podcaster might have non-commercial goals (as noted in the parent comment)

I'm not sure it's possible to argue against a hypothetical PoC, e.g., "Don't try it", "It will never work", "It's been done before and it failed", etc. but no doubt HN replies may try

It stands to reason that the only effective argument against a specific PoC, real or hypothetical, would be for the PoC to be executed and then to fail
by m132 | 2026-01-31 20:43:05+00:00
Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes.

Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
by beloch | 2026-01-31 20:43:05+00:00
Although the reasoning has changed, the motivation was very similar to today. They were meticulous in making observations, made records that will probably still be around when most of ours have dissolved into entropy, and all because they thought it might help them make better decisions.

I'd like to think future scientists (or whatever we might become) will look back on scientists of today and see kindred souls toiling under a different set of conditions.
by linschn | 2026-01-31 20:43:20+00:00
The scheme syntax gets a while to get used to if you are not familiar with it, and in the end having a real programming language is quite awesome, you can do lots of fun stuff like programmatically create a file or dir for every user of a certain group, etc.

Take a look at this

https://guix-hosting.com/docs/tuto/getting-started.html

To see how one can use macros to redefine the syntax to get an imperative-like syntax for defining services.

Disclaimer: i run guix-hosting.com
by bccdee | 2026-01-31 20:43:23+00:00
> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span

No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.

Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.

Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," 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.
by konsumer | 2026-01-31 20:44:10+00:00
Reticulum gets around a lot of these problems, as the (better) encryption is app-level (or even more fine-grained.) Its also not tied to lora, so you can interop easily with other transports. I made a websocket transport for it, and there is already TCP and UDP, and a couple non-lora radio transports. I also made a (works on web) js and Arduino client lib, and it has a few native client libs, so it can sort of be used on anything, even over traditional networks, or web clients. Meshcore and meshtastic are way more popular, but reticulum seems so much better, to me, for most things. It can still have overload problems, like any radio network, but no client is required to forward, so you can build a different kind of network ("only forward messages that are for my peeps" and marked correctly.) It also has "it costs compute PoW to send to me" which can greatly cut down on spam.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-31 20:44:34+00:00
Words words and more words, new levels of verbosity even for a hacker, to say Apple has a weakness and isn't saying they've patched it with certainty; as though nation-state spyware can be conjured on demand from the heavens until governments throw up their hands and say "curses, you've fixed everything, we surrender." Even if there actually were no bugs remaining, I certainly wouldn't sign an affidavit saying no bugs will ever be found in the future.
by dchristian | 2026-01-31 20:45:01+00:00
Legged robots can be more efficient, in theory.

Whenever you drive/walk in soft terrain, the wheel/leg is constantly climbing the ramp created by it sinking into the terrain. In a perfect system, this determines how much power you need to move. This is why trains are so efficient. A hard wheel on a hard rail has very little deflection -- so excellent efficiency.

Wheels have to climb that ramp for every inch of travel. Legs get to step forward and only take that penalty for each step. If everything else is the same, the legs win on soft terrain.

But everything else is never the same :-). The early legged vehicles used linear motions, which means you have these very long sliding surfaces. This is heavy and the drive system efficiency dominates over the terrain interaction efficiency. Add in the fact that you have multiple axis to drive and the weight and drive losses really add up.

Modern dog and human style walking robots are MUCH better on efficiency than those early designs. However, they require enough sensing and compute to dynamically balance. Legs can do things that wheels can't, but you have to have smart enough software to take advantage of that. The compute available for a high radiation environment is a fraction of what is in your smartwatch. Wheels are still winning on energy efficiency, but at least it's getting closer.

I worked on Dante at CMU and Marsokhod at NASA Ames; and was in the same group that developed Ambler.
by yunohn | 2026-01-31 20:45:11+00:00
Weirdly enough, your older comments don’t all have AI slop smell - so I have to assume this is some kind of performance art, or a recent shift.

I also wasn’t aware that I’m speaking to someone who actually persistently appeals to authority and maintains a list of figures to bow down to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783280

As such, this is where I get off this thread train. Seeya!
by stephenr | 2026-01-31 20:45:13+00:00
> I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.

What you said:

> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won.

What actually happened:

> Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark

> Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows

> Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000

How is taking someone to court for trademark infringement, and then resorting to paying them $20M dollars to settle because the Judge is about to invalidate your trademark "winning"?
by perching_aix | 2026-01-31 20:45:43+00:00
> But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.

There's a saying around here that roughly goes: few things are as successful in killing one's interest in something as pursuing a formal education about it.

Being innately interested in something is one thing, but then being in an environment when that is now a hard expectation is another.

It's like, the difference between wanting to draw something and being forced to draw something. Entirely different playing fields.
by gordian-mind | 2026-01-31 20:46:14+00:00
RustDesk rolled out a "same city" restriction on their public relay server today in response to a Go Client botnet. No advance warning.
Users worldwide are now locked out of their own machines. The GitHub thread has people stuck in Japan unable to reach home servers, someone who just set up RustDesk for their 70-year-old father, and users blocked despite being in the same city.
The original attack was just automated connection requests requiring clicking "Accept". Users with password auth were never vulnerable.

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/14167
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 20:46:54+00:00
Sure, technically speaking.

And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested.

But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life better.
by debarshri | 2026-01-31 20:46:57+00:00
This is great. I have been talking to quite some vendors in the space. I have looked in docker hardened images too. They have made it free too.

I think the problem in general is hardened image market is keeping up with CVEs and making sure the catalog is vast so that it covers all the images and nuances.

Responding and patchibg CVEs with an SLA is the KPI of the vendors. As much as I would like cheer for you, doing it as an opensource initiate with a guaranteed SLA is going to be painful for you as maintainer without profit as a motive.
by port11 | 2026-01-31 20:47:44+00:00
Maybe it’s not their fault that this feature exists?

Also, about choice: we like to pretend that people are free to choose where they work. They are; if there are no blocking consequences to that choice. For example, between working at Microsoft and letting my family starve? Well, I’ll bite the bullet. The market isn’t amazing, we can be much kinder on people for where they work.
by namelosw | 2026-01-31 20:47:49+00:00
Well, as a northern guy, I do find myself able to understand Mandarin even from Yunnan easily without prior learning. The harder ones for me, like the Hefei dialect, are because the pronunciation is very different, not the tone. Nanjing dialect, on the otherhand, is also from the same Jianghuai Mandarin group as Hefei, which is perfect intelligentable for me.

Even for non-Mandarin/Guanhua, such as the Shanxi dialect, I can understand them because the pronunciation is much closer to mine, just the tones are completely novel.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-31 20:48:00+00:00
Reasonable question but at least in my location the answer is obvious:

while there are legal barriers to my local PD/SD working with ice, LEO and local judicial folks fundamentally think of themselves on the same side as these folks.

That feels pretty trivially true: if you work in gov, especially at the violent tip of its local spear, you're going to go with that hierarchy over the folks you're ostensibly "serving".

I've never expected it to be otherwise, though as I get older I'm more comfortable understanding that they are complicit in making themselves less legitimate. At more and more points I feel more and more comfortable just thinking that the government doesn't have legitimate authority to do what they are trying to do.

I worked really hard on my brain to get it to not do that, but here we are.
by nine_k | 2026-01-31 20:48:01+00:00
> "Going into 2026 the single best way to build an "AI native startup" is to build an API first product that can easily be used by Claude Code. I believe in this so much that I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead."

IOW, a human customer is not the customer your business is going to directly serve, their agent is. What's required from the human is to provide a payment method, I assume, else it's not a real customer, but a free-tier user.
by markus_zhang | 2026-01-31 20:48:12+00:00
Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.

To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
by blindriver | 2026-01-31 20:48:15+00:00
No you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged.

This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
by benSaiyen | 2026-01-31 20:48:52+00:00
No substantive response to my tearing your twee world apart?

Just an insipid social flex?

Oh man; people of the future will sign songs about your account age achievement!

It's nice being the benefactor of slavery not the slave, huh, out-of-touch-first-worlder?

So long as we keep the slavery out of our country it's cool. You earned freedom from real obligation so you can noodle in your mind palace.
by vrosas | 2026-01-31 20:48:52+00:00
Shitting on GCP is just popular on HN and always gets upvoted. AWS and Azure have royally fucked thousands of customers if you care to search for those writeups. My wild ass guess, considering posts like these have zero background details, is that they were careless with service account keys and their account got suspended for mining crypto or something. They also probably weren’t actually paying for support of any kind and that’s why no one is responding to them.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 20:49:39+00:00
No, that's incorrect.

A short attention span is when you can't pay attention to things for a long time, even if you want to.

If you can pay attention to things for a long time when you want to, then you don't have a short attention span.

If you'd rather skip over the parts that don't interest you, that's just called using your time efficiently.
by XorNot | 2026-01-31 20:49:44+00:00
The conspiracy theory exists due to quirks of human attention and the wider metadata economy though.

You mention something so you're thinking about it, you're thinking about it probably because you've seen it lately (or it's in the group of things local events are making you think about), and then later you notice an ad for that thing and because you were thinking about it actually notice the ad.

It works with anything in any media form. Like I've had it where I hear a new thing and suddenly it turns up in a book I'm reading as well. Of course people discount that because they don't suspect books of being intelligent agents.
by bink | 2026-01-31 20:49:57+00:00
There definitely won't be boots on the ground and that's kinda the point. Even if we had boots on the ground there's no guarantee that the US getting involved will make things better for the people of the region. We couldn't deliver democracy for Afghanistan after two decades but there are still people who think we'll be greeted as liberators in Iran and we'll be able to claim "mission accomplished" after a few months.
by baq | 2026-01-31 20:50:09+00:00
Reddit mod cabal is destroying the site, has been for years. Not sure what the deal is, especially after IPO.

The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind blowing, eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/mlt7v/a_big_congrat... into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884486 and https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-kne...
by maqp | 2026-01-31 20:50:11+00:00
Well the thing is, the key exfiltration code would probably reside outside the TCB. Not particularly hard to have some function grab the signing keys, and send them to the server. Then you can impersonate as the user in MITM. That exfiltration is one-time and it's quite hard to recover from.

I'd much rather not have blind faith on WhatsApp doing the right thing, and instead just use Signal so I can verify myself it's key management is doing only what it should.

Speculating over the correctness of E2EE implementation isn't productive, considering the metadata leak we know Meta takes full advantage of, is enough reason to stick proper platforms like Signal.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-31 20:50:20+00:00
> when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue

Oh really? I was under the impression that the US actually armed and funded for two years a genocidal war on Gaza. (Btw in that case Scott Aaronson, far for being concerned, actually argued that Israelis can and should kill as many people as they need to feel safe).
by pizza234 | 2026-01-31 20:50:58+00:00
> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI)

Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.

Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
by blindriver | 2026-01-31 20:51:34+00:00
> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport

That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own style, etc.
Show HN: Pinchwork – A task marketplace where AI agents hire each other
by aschuth | 2026-01-31 20:51:42+00:00
Got a Molty with time on their claws? Put them to work. Got one drowning in tasks? Let them delegate.

Pinchwork is a marketplace where agents post tasks, pick up work, and earn credits. Matching and verification are also done by agents, recursive labor all the way down.

Why? Every agent has internet, but not every agent has everything. You lack Twilio keys but a notification agent doesn't. You need an image generated but only run text. You can't audit your own code. You're single-threaded but need 10 things done in parallel.

POST /v1/register → 100 free credits
POST /v1/tasks → post work with a bounty
POST /v1/tasks/pickup → grab a task
POST /v1/tasks/{id}/deliver → get paid

Credits are escrowed, deliveries get verified by independent agents, and the whole thing speaks JSON or markdown.
Self-hostable: docker run.

Live at https://pinchwork.dev — docs at https://pinchwork.dev/skill.md
by prussia | 2026-01-31 20:52:06+00:00
There's no profit for the platform. As of now, both the "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content geared toward children. As you say, policing the "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.
by novaRom | 2026-01-31 20:52:27+00:00
Fun facts from Germany:

- Fresh Aldi potatoes are like 0.5 Euro per 1 Kilogram - basically the same price as 25 years ago when Euro currency was introduced

- Our national TV channel now shows a great collection of "potato recipes" videos on demand on its main page

- Price of McDonalds/BurgerKing fries is around 4 Euro, and 5-6 Euro as a street food

- Crisps like Pringles are like 15 Euro per 1 Kilogram (a typical 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)
by bee_rider | 2026-01-31 20:52:29+00:00
I don’t get why they didn’t compare against BLIS. I know you can only do so many benchmarks, and people will often complain no matter what, but BLIS is the obvious comparison. Maybe BLIS doesn’t have kernels for their platform, but they’d be well served by just mentioning that fact to get that question out of the reader’s head.

BLIS even has mixed precision interfaces. But might not cover more exotic stuff like low-precision ints? So this paper could have had a chance to “put some points on the board” against a real top-tier competitor.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-31 20:52:45+00:00
> Quota for what?

Sure, I'm interested too.

> In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.

Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they got detailed approval and they're paying for it.