MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zh3 | 2026-01-28 16:58:11+00:00
Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a raspberry Pi).

For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.

[0] https://www.loper-os.org/?p=752
by leadingthenet | 2026-01-28 16:58:12+00:00
If the last couple of weeks are anything to go by, I'd strongly argue the quality of discourse on any ICE/Trump/Tariffs-related topics have been at exactly Reddit-level, along with the most upvoted opinions mirroring those on Reddit almost to a tee.

I vaguely remember checking one of those ICE posts out the other day, and there was not a single comment going against the grain that was neither flagged nor heavily downvoted, out of over a hundred. Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.

I don't know what your definition of Reddit-like is, but that's mine.
by davydm | 2026-01-28 16:58:16+00:00
specifically, when I talk about authorisation, I want to avoid this: https://johncodes.com/archive/2026/01-28-there-is-no-secure-...

because that's a valid concern I have with automating all the things - when one of those things does something I don't want because someone else managed to slip it a command to do so, or when that thing's data is breached.
by arjie | 2026-01-28 16:58:46+00:00
The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting 1% of its workforce in an attempt to "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy" is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a sign of the company failing.
by volkk | 2026-01-28 16:59:05+00:00
i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
by dkarl | 2026-01-28 16:59:08+00:00
> Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing".

I think that's exactly the problem: the assumption that philosophers should assume, by default, that self-help is unworthy of their time, and only pay attention to the rare cases that happen to have philosophical merit.

They could take a more active interest to questions such as, how can philosophy improve self-help literature? What kinds of ideas should ordinary people with low to average education consume? The wide array of values, goals, and philosophical approaches would make it a contentious and lively conversation.

But philosophers tend to vacate the field and leave it to mercenaries, culture warriors, and amateurs. When they do speak about it, it tends to be in symposiums or on podcasts aimed at college-educated people with a special interest in philosophy. That's as far down as they're willing to dumb it.
Show HN: A private, PQ-secure, infinitely scalable blockchain[fully open-source]
by Nerv_b | 2026-01-28 16:59:17+00:00
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a new Layer 1 blockchain designed to solve what I see as the fundamental trilemma in the space: achieving strong privacy, infinite scalability, and post-quantum security simultaneously.
The result is NERV: a private-by-default, horizontally scalable blockchain that replaces Merkle trees with 512-byte neural state embeddings, proven inside Halo2 circuits and attested in hardware enclaves.

Key technical innovations:

Neural State Embeddings
Instead of Merkle trees, the entire state of a shard is compressed into a 512-byte vector using a transformer encoder. Transfers are homomorphic updates in this space—no decompression needed. This reduces inclusion proofs by ~900× compared to zkEVMs.
Blind Validation & TEE-Bound Privacy
Transactions are routed through a 5-hop onion mixer running inside remotely attested enclaves (SGX/SEV/TrustZone). No addresses, amounts, or metadata are ever visible on-chain.
Dynamic Neural Sharding
Shards split and merge autonomously based on an LSTM load predictor, updated via federated learning. This allows >1M sustained TPS with no theoretical ceiling.
AI-Native Consensus
Validators predict the next embedding hash using a distilled transformer. Disagreements are resolved via Monte Carlo simulations in TEEs, achieving sub-second finality.
Useful-Work Economy
Nodes earn tokens by contributing gradients to improve the network’s own encoder via differentially private federated learning—replacing PoW/PoS with useful computation.
Why this might be interesting to HN:
The system is fully open-source (MIT/Apache 2.0), with all code, circuits, and tests already public.
No pre-mine, no VC allocation, no foundation treasury. Fair launch is scheduled for October 2027.
Built with post-quantum primitives from genesis (Dilithium-3, ML-KEM, SPHINCS+).
Implements formal privacy guarantees (ProVerif models included).
The core ZK circuit (LatentLedger) is ~7.9M constraints—far smaller than equivalent zkEVM proofs.

Current status:
~85-90% of the code is complete, including core circuits, TEE attestation pipelines, sharding simulations, and federated learning incentives. Testnet is targeted for Q4 2026.
I’m sharing this here not to promote a token, but to invite technical feedback, cryptographic review, and collaboration from the community to help make that crucial leap from being a strong prototype to being a fully-realized, live, ever-evolving private money .
If you’re into ZK, TEEs, federated learning, or post-quantum crypto, I’d love your thoughts.

Links:
Whitepaper: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv/blob/main/NERV_Whitepaper_v...
GitHub repo: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv
Code & tests: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv/tree/main/NERVCodeV2

Happy to answer any technical questions or discuss design trade-offs.
by kburman | 2026-01-28 16:59:25+00:00
I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.

Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.
by skinnymuch | 2026-01-28 16:59:30+00:00
The US has done those stuff since world war 2 ended. Continuously. Trump has hurt things but if anything bringing up things the US has always done as if it is novel under Trump shows how well US hegemony works and will continue to work.

Another thing no one is bringing up is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
by dijit | 2026-01-28 16:59:50+00:00
Yes, I paid for Windows 11. It came bundled with the £1,900 laptop I bought. The fact that the licence cost is hidden in the hardware price doesn't make it free.

And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free. Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system UI.

Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year. They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away with it, not because they need to.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-28 16:59:53+00:00
Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.
by jsheard | 2026-01-28 17:00:28+00:00
> which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.

They couldn't if they wanted to really, emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, running the AC inside a sandbox would be indistinguishable from attempting to bypass it and would likely result in bans.
by SomeHacker44 | 2026-01-28 17:00:30+00:00
My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too) is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...
by benterix | 2026-01-28 17:00:33+00:00
OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux used but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism to Gnome. I don't believe there was any hidden agenda, it was just more logical for them. However, this caused huge headache for package maintainers of non-Systemd distros. There was the whole drama with voting, Debian project leader leaving, Devuan appearing and so on.

I believe most people moved on, but the way it was all done somehow didn't feel right.
by wk_end | 2026-01-28 17:00:38+00:00
Wario Land VB is really, really good. It's a bit slight but seriously one of my favourite Nintendo platformers.

There's always been a very very small and intense VB fandom, but outside of them I don't think there's a ton of real nostalgia for it. The thing sold less than a million units; most people at the time either never played it or maybe tried it at a K-Mart demo kiosk for a few minutes.

To whatever extent that people are getting excited about the Virtual Boy now, I'd pin it on its very unique retro-future aesthetic. In the same way that people who weren't even alive for the 80s got really into synthwave, there's something about visions of the future from a time when the future was actually exciting that people find aesthetically compelling.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 17:01:34+00:00
How it went down was while the gun was taken away, somebody yelled "gun", then guns were drawn, then the victims gun went off which triggered police starting shooting. If this were the events, the first shot was what unfortunately triggered the tragedy that followed, as the law enforcement officers probably thought that the person being arrested was shooting.

To me this looks like an unfortunate sequence of events rather than your judgement from the high horse of perfect information.

If you go to a protest, best leave your (legal) weapons at home, don't interfere nor resist law enforcement.

Also, if you want a better government, you should vote one in the office and not fuel these events after the fact.
by jcgl | 2026-01-28 17:01:36+00:00
I think you misunderstood the tooling I was asking about. This is what was mentioned:

> at my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).

That's not covered by git itself. And it's not covered by Gitlab, GitHub, or any other web-based forge.

> Alternatively you actually, you know, _collaborate_ with the PR author, work it out, run tests locally and/or on another pushed branch, and someone then pushes a change directly to the PR.

Of course you should collaborate with the author. This tooling is a specific means to do that. You yourself are of course free to not like such tooling for whatever reason.

> The complaints about nitpicks slowing things down too much or breaking things sound like solo-hero devs who assume their god-like PRs should be effectively auto-approved because how could their code even contain problems... No wonder they love working with "Dr Flattery the Always Wrong Bot".

Did you maybe respond to the wrong person? I'm not sure how that relates to my comment at all.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-28 17:01:43+00:00
Trump 45 had "adults in the room". Trump 47 has nothing but sycophants. The end of Trump 45 started eliminating the adults in the room, but there wasn't enough time left for him to do much drastic. Trump 45 felt like even Trump was shocked he won and there was no real game plan. The transition team was woefully unprepared. Trump 47 had 4 years of prepping with the aide of things like Project 2025. Trump 47 hit the ground running.
by simgoh | 2026-01-28 17:02:14+00:00
Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
by cultofmetatron | 2026-01-28 17:02:31+00:00
> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals.

Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.
by rsanek | 2026-01-28 17:02:44+00:00
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR

>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)

This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-28 17:03:23+00:00
Reminder when left to it's ways Capitalism reverts to company towns paying in scrip to make sure workers can't move away, so manipulating financial payout is very much within the Capitalist model and fair game in their ideology (only stopped by Government interference).

Capitalism's final form is a dystopian hellscape of rivers that can be lit on fire, unbreathable air, leaded gasoline, asbestos ceilings, company towns paying scrip, strike break private militias, opioid epidemics (wild this isn't a one time thing for Capitalism, but then the model for Capitalism seems to endpoint with getting people addicted to the product).

Everyone can agree pure Capitalism is a miserable failure that creates an unsafe environment and product landscape based on addictiveness. Time after time when left to their own choice, Capitalists chose making a worse world. The Capitalism model requires tight constraints from society to prevent Capitalists from creating an horrific, awful world like they have every time in the past when left unregulated.

The question is why do we make sure Capitalism can't destroy our rivers anymore, or pay workers in scrip (creating their end goal ideal of an inescapable labor system) but when they economically destroy the civil fabric with unequal wealth distribution we somehow refuse to step in? Capitalists long term will NEVER chose societal benefit, yet somehow we keep hoping they will and under regulating them. I remember when extremely liberal friends started getting their vested options and them excitedly talking about the whole loan model to not have to pay taxes, even though they 'supported' high taxes and knew the societal benefit.
by al_borland | 2026-01-28 17:03:40+00:00
I found out last year I have AuDHD. I've tried a bunch of gamified apps over the years, and seemingly every system that's crossed my path. None of it seems to really work well for me. Most of them seem like they add more work to the work. The "game" isn't fun or the "rewards" aren't anything I care about. The various systems can work while they're novel, but once the novelty fades, they too fade into the background.

Intrinsic motivation is what really makes me work well, along with some novelty. If it's a new problem I'm interested in, I'll work non-stop. Extrinsic motivation only works in short bursts, after procrastination, if it has teeth... "get this done today or you're fired!" These apps tend to be extrinsic motivators without teeth, which makes them easy to ignore.

I wish I had a solution for this problem to offer up some ideas on what could help, but I'm still searching for that myself.

Congrats on shipping the update and if it's helpful for your friends, that's a big win.

> Smart task assists

This seems like a neat feature that could be pretty helpful, but I think I'd need to take it a step further. In many cases I've spent hours watching videos and chatting with AI to breakdown and fully understand what should be fairly easy things, before I feel somewhat comfortable moving forward. Getting just enough to move forward works for some things, but for others, if I don't understand the full thing up front, what can go wrong, and how to mitigate those issues, I can be left in a bad spot. This is where a lot of the procrastination comes from. Doing this much research on something people say should take 5 minutes is exhausting. Even with AI, it can take a lot of effort to get the right information out of it, which it skips over until you really get into the weeds with it and call out the questions that lead to important answers.
by andrewla | 2026-01-28 17:03:44+00:00
But every airfoil has an equilibrium angle of attack (not always stable with velocity) where it generates zero lift. The chordal angle of attack is for convenience because it depends only on airfoil geometry and not ambient velocity, but it isn't a fundamental physical property of the airfoil.

If we treat the angle where zero lift is generated as the base angle for an airfoil, then all airfoils generate lift depending on their angle relative to that, including a flat plane. As the GP says, other properties are the dominant factor in airfoil geometry.

When introducing airfoils I think it is more useful to start from a plane than a traditional airfoil shape; the math and intuitions are much clearer from there.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-28 17:04:02+00:00
It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.

In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.

My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-28 17:04:12+00:00
"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them."

A screenshot later on shows he was a manager who spent his entire career in Houston. So... he didn't move and I associate "untangling difficult problems" as something an engineer should brag about not a manager.

Reads like AI generated slop that doesn't correlate with the actual situation.
by tapoxi | 2026-01-28 17:04:38+00:00
This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine.

I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.

Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
by nosianu | 2026-01-28 17:04:54+00:00
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!

Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?

But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
by pimeys | 2026-01-28 17:05:17+00:00
I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).

Suspend: works always.
Battery life: great, the whole day.
Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.

The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 17:05:23+00:00
The value is being able to easily and robustly verify that my device hasn't been compromised. Binding disk encryption keys to the TPM such that I don't need to enter a password but an adversary still can't get at the contents without a zero day.

Of course you can already do the above with secure boot coupled with a CPU that implements an fTPM. So I can't speak to the value of this project specifically, only build and boot integrity in general. For example I have no idea what they mean by the bullet "runtime integrity".
Ask HN: Need for AI usage disclosure system?
by seagram | 2026-01-28 17:06:05+00:00
With the influx of AI-generated code in open source repos, would there be any need/interest in creating a standard to disclose AI usage?

Something like a markdown document in the project root (like LICENSE or CONTRIBUTING) that explains:

- what level of AI was used (None, Assisted, Fully Generated)
- which components used UI (core logic, test, etc.)
- what A.I tools were used
- who reviewed it (human vs. AI reviewed & tested)
- contribution guidelines with AI (may be stepping on the toes of CONTRIBUTION)

I'm sure some repos have this already and each can implement it in their own way. But could a standard that defines a structure to disclose this be helpful?

From the perspective of someone quite inexperienced in open source contribution, not sure if this would be of any help (and to who).

Interested to hear your thoughts on this.
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-28 17:06:12+00:00
My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.

Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-28 17:06:17+00:00
None of those suggest "heavily intertwined". More like the US military has decided that it's a smart move to take advantage of Musk's technology.

As for the Ukraine thing, I read that Musk was trying to comply with US law in avoiding making foreign policy.

It's no surprise that the military uses Starlink, just like they use cars.

As for grok, of course the military is going to buy what they want.