MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-27 21:13:44+00:00
If you aren't saving people's phone numbers in your own contacts, signal isn't storing them in group chats (and even if you are, it doesn't say which number, just that you have a contact with them).

Signal doesn't share numbers by default and hasn't for a few years now. And you can toggle a setting to remove your number from contact discovery/lookup entirely if you are so inclined.
by xp84 | 2026-01-27 21:13:50+00:00
Wow, it's refreshing to read that we maybe we don't have it the worst in the US, right here amongst everyone's beefs with TSA. Every airport domestically I've ever flown to has not just water fountains, but the convenient bottle-fillers (usually connected to the normal fountains). I always just bring an empty plain disposable plastic bottle, for its light weight, and security never bats an eye at it.
by dlahoda | 2026-01-27 21:14:10+00:00
first, one have to prove he is 24 not 40. taxes can tell 24 and tell you do 40 becauses they decided so.

add social security percentage. while one still need real insurance and pension saving on top. yes, one 6 figure person have to pay two times. once for self and other one unemployed local drunk.

and on top, when one buys anything, all things are taxed 2x compared to usa(but i guess trump tries fo equalize that).

on top. there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all.

and yeah, one is foreigner? does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
by adeebvaliulla | 2026-01-27 21:14:17+00:00
That makes a lot of sense, and I like that you’re being explicit about regret minimization rather than chasing local optima.

The Thompson Sampling + Wilson score combo is a pragmatic choice. In practice, most agent systems I see fail not because they lack metrics, but because they overreact to them. Noisy reward signals plus greedy selection is how teams end up whipsawing configs or freezing change altogether. Treating uncertainty as a first-class input instead of something to smooth away is the right move.

I also agree with your point on attribution. Perfect attribution is a trap. In real production environments, partial and imperfect outcome signals still dominate static configs if the system can reason probabilistically over time. This mirrors what we learned in reliability and delivery metrics years ago: trend dominance beats point accuracy.

One area I’d be curious about as this matures is organizational adoption rather than the math:

- How teams reason about defining outcomes without turning it into a governance bottleneck

- How you help users build intuition around uncertainty and regret so they trust the system when it routes “away” from what feels intuitively right

- Where humans still need to intervene, if anywhere, once the control plane is established

If this holds up across long-tail tasks and low-frequency failures, it feels like a real step toward agents that behave more like adaptive systems and less like fragile workflows with LLMs bolted on.

Appreciate the thoughtful reply.
by cxr | 2026-01-27 21:14:38+00:00
There are many places in the tax code, e.g. wrt a certain credit, where it simply says that you are not allowed to exercise that option if you elect to file separately. Rarely is it beneficial for a married couple to file separately. It's not unusual to see cases where opting to file separately results in a difference of thousands of dollars—i.e. a refund that's several thousands of dollars lower than the one a couple would receive if they filed jointly, or where one or both spouse actually end up owing.

The main benefit of filing jointly is when one spouse earns more than other, so filing jointly distributes their combined AGI evenly between the two spouses and together they fall in the lowest tax bracket possible for that amount of income, whereas if they file separately the one earning more has their income taxed at higher rates not offset by amount that the the lesser-earning spouse "saves" in their lower bracket. This is especially pronounced if one spouse earns so little that it comes in under the standard deduction or simply doesn't work at all. (That's almost $16,000 of tax-free income.)
by causalscience | 2026-01-27 21:14:43+00:00
Your point is correct but irrelevant to this conversation.

The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that.

The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.
by davnn | 2026-01-27 21:14:44+00:00
I would say uv provides quite a lot of additional features that can be used in various ways to create plain-old venvs. Note, however that uv-pack can also pack a subset of your uv-monorepo for a specific package (there are still some quirks I have to admit..).

My experience was that it‘s surprisingly painful to „just copy“ a venv and especially a uv-created venv. There are a lot of paths to be modified to get the venv working. Copying a venv felt hacky and wrong, that‘s why I built the tool :)
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 21:14:55+00:00
The timing is interesting. TikTok settles right as jury selection begins, Snap settled last week. Meta and YouTube are the ones staying in.

I wonder if the settlement amounts will ever become public. The Big Tobacco comparison keeps coming up, but those settlements were massive and included ongoing payments. Hard to imagine social media companies agreeing to anything similar without admitting some level of harm.

As a parent of two kids (8 and 6), I think about this constantly. We limit screen time pretty aggressively, but it's getting harder as they get older. The "attention-grabbing design" part isn't some conspiracy theory. These apps are explicitly optimized for engagement. The question is whether that optimization crosses a legal line.

Curious how the trial plays out with Zuckerberg on the stand.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-01-27 21:14:57+00:00
Unhinged.

You need to deeply reflect on what you wrote here. It's disgusting. You realise you are racist/sexist right?

If you dont like what they build, dont use it. Really, nobody can force them to use these guy's systems.

Likewise, if Women/POC have such an issue with white men, they are more than welcome to start & maintain their own projects (I would actually use it without complaining about them being Women/POC). Just build something useful and get on with it. Else just shutup if you cannot produce anything of value. I dont say it to be cruel.

White men are the least of your problems.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 21:15:01+00:00
I have a fun little tool which runs the year-2000-era sloccount algorithm (which is Perl and C so I run it in WebAssembly) to estimate the time and cost of a project here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount

If you paste https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser into the "GitHub Repository" tab it estimates 4.58 person-years and $618,599 by year-2000 standards, or 5.61 years and $1,381,079 according to my very non-trustworthy 2025 estimate upgrade.
by eth0up | 2026-01-27 21:15:13+00:00
Not stopping. Just clashing with that and a hundred other things that I never wanted managed by one guy. Systemd.timer, systemd.service, yes, trivial, but I don't catalog every thing that bothers me about systemd - I just stay away from it. There are plenty of better examples. So where ever I wrote 'stop', it should read hinder.
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 21:15:34+00:00
Nice writeup. The Exists subquery approach is definitely the cleanest.

One thing worth mentioning: if you're hitting this problem frequently, it might be worth reconsidering the query patterns themselves. We had a similar issue at work where we kept adding `.distinct()` everywhere, and eventually realized we were doing the filtering wrong upstream.

The PostgreSQL-specific `distinct(*fields)` with the ORDER BY restriction is one of those things that trips people up. The error message isn't great either. "SELECT DISTINCT ON expressions must match initial ORDER BY expressions" is technically correct but doesn't explain why or what to do about it.

Good call recommending Exists as the default approach. It's more explicit about intent too.
by bri3d | 2026-01-27 21:15:59+00:00
The technology needed to implement DRM has been there for 20+ years and has already evolved in the space where it makes sense from an "evil" standpoint (if you're on that particular side of the fence - Android client attestation), so someone implementing the flip side that might actually be useful doesn't particularly bother me. I remember the 1990s "cryptography is the weapon of evil" arguments too - it's funny how the tables have turned, but I still believe that in general these useful technologies can help people overall.
by LeakedCanary | 2026-01-27 21:16:00+00:00
I had similar questions when reading the original article. I’m also interested in how the agent is constructed. From my experience, it can be very difficult to implement exploits without access to debugging tools, so I’m curious whether pwndbg or similar tools are included in the agent’s toolset and, if so, how they are integrated. Existing open-source GDB MCPs don’t work very well unless further optimized, at least the last time I checked.
by olliepro | 2026-01-27 21:16:03+00:00
Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.
by bhadass | 2026-01-27 21:16:09+00:00
very impressive!

it's amazing how far we've come in 20 years. i was a (very minor) contributor to khtml/konqueror (before apple got involved w/ webkit) in the early 2000s, and back then it was such a labor intensive process to even create a halfway working engine. like, months of work just to get basic rendering somewhat correct on a very small portion of the web (which was obv much smaller)

in addition to agentic coding, i think for this specific task having css-spec/html-spec/web-platform-tests as machine readable test suites helps a LOT. the agent can actually validate against real specs.

back in the day, despite having gecko as an open source reference, in practice the "standards" were whatever IE was doing. so you'd spend weeks implementing something only to discover every site was coded for IE's quirks lmao. for all of their other faults, google/apple and other contributors helped bring in discipline to that.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-27 21:16:22+00:00
Codex Web actually lacks the most basic PR integration, it's so useless. Codex Web refuses to push any binary file to your PR (like images, jars, lock files, etc). It can't check your GH Actions' logs for failures to try to fix them. Replying to one of the PR comments to accept a fix requires replying to a different GitHub bot than the one that opens your PR. And though there's a "Secrets" configuration to add secret vars for a Codex repo, Codex can't access them, so you can't even work around these bugs by asking Codex to make API calls. It's like nobody at the company has tried their own product.
by BonitaPersona | 2026-01-27 21:16:36+00:00
I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.

What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith.

For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
by fudged71 | 2026-01-27 21:16:39+00:00
It's insane right now browsing tiktok and seeing every 3rd or 4th video on my feed have consistent glitches (in the same places of a video, as if my internet was slow which it isn't), on only the videos mentioning resistance topics from the US. Very black mirror. Feels like it's meant more to send a message that your content is flagged, and to watch what you say and do. Otherwise they would just block it or hide it from your feed.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-27 21:16:40+00:00
(2025) OP

More recently:

Ultra-processed foods make up more than 60% of us kids' diets

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823288

How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45605921

California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525041
by jleyank | 2026-01-27 21:16:42+00:00
the -ologists can be both, then. My academic experience in ancient times had them as medicine related PhD's, but I guess MD's can specialize in that area from a treatment rather than a research area. MD/PhD's are rare but quite valuable for research projects because they can see patient records wearing their MD hat, but interact with the research teams with their PhD hat. They tend to have mediocre bedside manners cuz they rarely see a bed, and they're sorta burned out coming of all that schooling.
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-27 21:17:15+00:00
That may be an intention, but the deal, as it is, does not cover mobility.

From the BBC article:

> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.

The Mobility Work is separate from the deal.

And you know what? Good that it includes it.

One of the major strengths of the US, one that I see as amazing that they are throwing away, is that they were always very capable to attract talent from abroad.

Having more skilled people around is never a bad thing. Only if you believe in a zero-sum economy.

More trade and more talented people generally result in economic growth and technological progress.
by dijit | 2026-01-27 21:17:19+00:00
Unfortunately the parent commenter is completely right.

The attestation portion of those systems is happening on locked down devices, and if you gain ownership of the devices they no longer attest themselves.

This is the curse of the duopoly of iOS and Android.

BankID in Sweden will only run with one of these devices, they used to offer a card system but getting one seems to be impossible these days. So you're really stuck with a mobile device as your primary means of identification for banking and such.

There's a reason that general purpose computers are locked to 720p on Netflix and Disney+; yet AppleTV's are not.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-27 21:17:33+00:00
It's not clear exactly what the number is, but if one observes individuals who manage to climb out of the low and middle classes and accrue a certain amount of wealth (somewhere in the ballpark of $600k-$1m net worth and up, maybe), pretty consistently not long after that achievement they've settled down and started a family.

I think for many the desire is there, but sufficient de-risking is required for them to be comfortable with acting upon it.
by striking | 2026-01-27 21:17:53+00:00
It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other.

This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever treadmill, always learning the vagaries of using the new shiny model (and paying for the privilege!)

I'm not going to make myself dependent, let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something I happen to rent and can't keep. If I wanted a cheap high that I didn't mind being dependent on, there's more fun ones out there.
by graemep | 2026-01-27 21:17:54+00:00
We have exactly this problem in the UK.

A couple each home earns x, each gets taxed on x. Each gets the tax free allowance on the fist £12.5k of the annual income. Each gets the full basic rate slice before they hit higher bands etc.

If one of the couple earns 2x and the other zero, then only one can use their tax free allowance and they get one slice of the basic rate band etc.

They still have the same pre-tax income for the same household.

Personally I think people should be allowed to opt in to sharing taxable income.
by watersb | 2026-01-27 21:18:05+00:00
Maybe it's no longer obvious:

This is an app that plays "MODs", a sampler-based chiptune format that originated with the Commodore Amiga.

Inspired by the technical limitations of a 40-year-old design, a demo scene community has created thousands of songs, annual competitions.

The Mod Archive:
https://modarchive.org/

MOD format history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file
by hypeatei | 2026-01-27 21:18:25+00:00
I'm convinced all this talk around Signal, including Hegseths fuckup, is to discourage "normies" (for lack of a better term) from using it. Even in this very HN thread, where you'd expect technical nuance, there are people spreading FUD around the phone number requirement as if that'd be your downfall... a timestamp and a phone number? How would that get someone convicted in court?
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-27 21:18:31+00:00
It's worth noting that the way Signal's architecture is set up, Signal the organisation doesn't have access to users' phone numbers.

They technically have logs from when verification happens (as that goes through an SMS verification service) but that just documents that you have an account/when you registered. And it's unclear whether those records are available anymore since no warrants have been issued since they moved to the new username system.

And the actual profile and contact discovery infra is all designed to be actively hostile to snooping on identifiable information even with hardware access (requiring compromise of secure enclaves + multiple levels of obfuscation and cryptographic anti-extraction techniques on top).
by hedgehog | 2026-01-27 21:18:34+00:00
This looks pretty solid. I think you can make this process more efficient by decomposing the problem into layers that are more easily testable, e.g. testing topological relationships of DOM elements after parse, then spatial after layout, then eventually pixels on things like ACID2 or whatever the modern equivalent is. The models can often come up with tests more accurately than they get the code right the first time. There are often also invariants that can be used to identify bugs without ground truth, e.g rendering the page with slightly different widths you can make some assertions about how far elements will move.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-01-27 21:18:37+00:00
HN should ban any discussion on “things I learned playing with AI” that don’t include direct artifacts of the thing built.

We’re about a year deep into “AI is changing everything” and I don’t see 10x software quality or output.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan of AI tooling and think it does meaningfully increase value. But I’m damn tired of all the talk with literally nothing to show for it or back it up.
by pedalpete | 2026-01-27 21:18:44+00:00
I don't understand who this is for?

How many software engineers are also cinematographers or directors?

I know that AI will democratize these roles and everyone can be a director, but why does it make sense to use JSX as the means to do that? It would require people to learn a new skill.

There must be a better abstraction for creating video that provides the granularity of providing direction to individual objects in a scene that doesn't require someone to understand JSX.
by mullingitover | 2026-01-27 21:18:48+00:00
There was a recent secret internal ICE memo stating that they determined they were free to essentially engage in unconstitutional home invasions[1]. If they decided to batter down the doors at Google there is nothing stopping them.

The only thing keeping them in check is the courts, and that practically operates in geologic timeframes compared to the rate they are breaking laws.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...
by danudey | 2026-01-27 21:18:50+00:00
They're not a networking company, they're an access control company. Their original product is based around networking, and now this new one is based around AI access and metrics.

This product isn't about managing and distributing API keys, it's about managing and distributing access to these services throughout the org. In fact, it's more about being able to avoid managing and distributing API keys, which is IMHO even better.
by ddtaylor | 2026-01-27 21:18:51+00:00
In past instances where Signal has complied with warrants, such as the 2021 and 2024 Santa Clara County cases, the records they provided included phone numbers to identify the specific accounts for which data was available. This was necessary to specify which requested accounts (identified by phone numbers in the warrants) had associated metadata, such as account creation timestamps and last connection dates.
by twa927 | 2026-01-27 21:18:54+00:00
I don't see the AI capacity jump in the recent months at all. For me it's more the opposite, CC works worse than a few months ago. Keeps forgetting the rules from CLAUDE.md, hallucinates function calls, generates tons of over-verbose plans, generates overengineered code. Where I find it a clear net-positive is pure frontend code (HTML + Tailwind), it's spaghetti but since it's just visualization, it's OK.
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-27 21:19:19+00:00
Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.

Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.

Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.
by scoofy | 2026-01-27 21:19:23+00:00
>If you let the government stomp on your constitutional rights and willingly go to jail on unconstitutional grounds, then that's not respect for the law. That's respect for injustice.

My point is about civil disobedience, not disobedience generally. The point of civil disobedience is to bring attention to unjust laws by forcing people to deal with the fact they they are imprisoning people for doing something that doesn't actually deserve prison.

Expecting to not end up in prison for engaging in civil disobedience misses the point. It's like when people go on a "hunger strike" by not eating solid foods. The point is self-sacrifice to build something better for others.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/11557246/san-francisco-hunger-stri...

If that's not what you're into -- and it's not something I'm into -- then I would suggest other forms of disobedience. Freedoms are rarely granted by asking for them.
by stopbulying | 2026-01-27 21:19:29+00:00
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada.

The Internet Research Agency worked to get Trump elected in the US. Putin paid them to push Trump here.

Has Russia won EU tech by foreign interference in the US?

FWIU Yandex is operating out of EU now?

"Russian Court Imposes $2.5 Decillion Fine on Google" (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD44zqhCnMo