MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2026-01-31 21:56:14+00:00
Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand,
I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any
of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news
is declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past,
is that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term
definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state
actors banning websites. I have no illusion about e. g. Zuckerberg
and others here; see the recent news how Facebook tried to "hook"
up young kids like a drug addict; Google via Youtube on the
"swiping" of videos (that one is hard to resist ... I keep on
scrolling down in the hope of finding better videos, fail, and
eventually realise how I am wasting my time swiping ...). But
even then ... I actually think I dislike censorship more than
those anti-social websites that I am not even using anyway.
This may be different for younger brains, so it is not that I
am not understanding the rational behind. But still ... I can't
get myself to want to like censorship either.
by rm30 | 2026-01-31 21:56:15+00:00
I've carefully read this interesting discussion: some political, mostly about full cloud services (AWS) vs partial EU providers, or lock-in vs indipendence.

I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud players isn't their individual services. It's seamless integration and simplicity.
We need a service integration standard for infrastructure that enables:

- Service discovery

- Networking

- Observability

- Configuration

This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services integrate regardless of who provides them.

Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
Show HN: I built a small OSS kernel for replaying and diffing AI decisions
by koistya | 2026-01-31 21:56:55+00:00
I’ve been hacking on a small open-source project called Verist and figured I’d share it here to get some early feedback.

What kept bothering me with AI features in production wasn’t really how to build them, but everything that comes after: explaining why something happened, reproducing it weeks later, or changing prompts/models without breaking things in subtle ways.

Logs helped a bit, but not enough.
Agent frameworks felt too implicit for my taste.
And model upgrades were honestly scary, outputs would change and it wasn’t always obvious where or why.

So I ended up building a very small, explicit kernel where each AI step can be replayed, diffed, and reviewed. Think something like Git-style workflows for AI decisions, but without trying to be a framework or a runtime.

It’s not an agent framework, not a chat UI, and not a platform, just a TypeScript library focused on explicit state, audit events, and replay + diff.

Repo: https://github.com/verist-ai/verist

I’m especially curious if others here have run into similar issues shipping AI features to prod, or if this feels like overkill. Happy to answer questions or hear criticism.
by camgunz | 2026-01-31 21:57:03+00:00
This list of things not to use AI for is so quaint. There's a story on the front page right now from The Atlantic: "Film students who can no longer sit through films". But why? Aren't they using social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc responsibly? Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI, even given the enormous economic and professional pressures to be irresponsible.
by mcnamtm1 | 2026-01-31 21:57:28+00:00
I am in Camp A. I verify AI-generated content closely. I am usually using AI to improve content that I have provided. Because I am knowledgeable about the information and topic, I can quickly recognize when AI is wrong or stupid.

I find a lot of errors and would never recommend Camp B as a smart way to use AI. It may seem efficient, but knowledgeably readers or listeners will lose trust in you.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-31 21:57:44+00:00
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.

> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.

Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.
by chrystalkey | 2026-01-31 21:58:16+00:00
Dont be too harsh on the first comment, I'm Sure he's a good guy.
Interesting to see that hossenfelder thing, I was'nt aware of it.
Her videos got recommended to me but title+thumb always felt like an over the top commentary with more drama than actual problem to be aware of.

So I never clicked and at some point youtube stopped.
by beagle3 | 2026-01-31 21:58:18+00:00
This was happening en masse, perhaps still does - the cloud backup was unencrypted. Originally it was encrypted. Then, one day, Google stopped counting it towards your storage quota, but it became unencrypted. But even before that, Meta had the encryption keys (and probably still does).

When you get a new phone, all you need is your phone number to retrieve the past chats from backup; nothing else. That proves, regardless of specifics, that Meta can read your chats - they can send it to any new phone.

So it doesn’t really matter that it is E2EE in transit - they just have to wait for the daily backup, and they can read it then.
by digiown | 2026-01-31 21:58:48+00:00
We probably can't make it free for all, but for something like a messaging app, we also need to recognize that it isn't optional to function in society. It should be regulated more like a utility:

- Facebook can still control the identity, but there needs to be a legal recourse for getting banned, and their policies can't discriminate against viewpoints, for example

- The client specs should be open so that an alternate client can be implemented (sort of like how Telegram is currently)
by mike_d | 2026-01-31 22:00:23+00:00
This is a tired trope. Depending exclusively on obfuscation (security by obscurity) is not safe. Maintaining confidentiality of things that could aid in attacks is absolutely a defensive layer and improves your overall security stance.

I love the Rob Joyce quote that explained why TAO was so successful: "In many cases we know networks better than the people who designed and run them."
by maqp | 2026-01-31 22:01:25+00:00
No I said signing keys. If you're doing MITM all the time because there's no alternative path to route ciphertexts, you get to generate all those double-ratchet keys. And then you have a separate ratchet for the other peer in the opposite direction.

Last time I checked, by default, WhatsApp features no fingerprint change warnings by default, so users will not even notice if you MITM them. The attack I described is for situations where the two users would enable non-blocking key change warnings and try to compare the fingerprints.

Not saying this attack happens by any means. Just that this is theoretically possible, and leaves the smallest trail. Which is why it helps that you can verify on Signal it's not exfiltrating your identity keys.
by abcd_f | 2026-01-31 22:01:41+00:00
I witnessed something recently that points unambiguously at Whatsapp chats being not private.

Not two months ago I sent a single photo to a friend of some random MacGyver kitchen contraption I made. Never described it, just a photo with the lol. He replied lol. He never reshared nor discussed it with anyone else. We never spoke about this before or after. Two days later he starts seeing ads on Facebook for a proper version of the same. There's virtually no other explanation except for Meta vacuuming and analyzing the photo. None.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-31 22:01:46+00:00
It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.

And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-31 22:02:42+00:00
They do, for the simple reason that I don't want to have to click through forms and pages and hunt things down manually to do a workflow. I won't use a cloud provider with a broken or half-functional cli for this reason, and if anybody in any space provides a better agent interface for doing stuff so I don't have to click through UIs, I will switch pretty much instantly.

Think of agent support sort of like food delivery. Once people get used to the convenience, places that don't offer it are at a huge disadvantage.
by tonymet | 2026-01-31 22:03:40+00:00
This is an asinine question. Even if you build agnostic solutions (like a docker image), you have storage resources, networks, configs, ACLs, snapshots and more all trapped inside GCP. we’re human — we forget to backup things, or push important commits . And we know cloud solutions quickly develop lock-in – even a simple cloud DB instance locks you into the vendors config .

So there are at least a dozen perfectly good reasons this guy is panicking that his account was suddenly revoked without warning.
by benSaiyen | 2026-01-31 22:03:44+00:00
It has!

In the 2010s I always got an AWS support team to help.

Now I get handed off to an external partner of AWS certified contractors.

They are often terrible. They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk". Basically trying to find an issue in my pipeline. Which they never do because it's the same TF scripts used for years.

Only once we waste time going through the motions do I get passed up to someone who can actually correct the backend issue in the AWS stack itself.

Tbf though I rarely ever have to contact AWS support at this point. The few times I have in the last 2-3 was due to issues after they rolled out an update or with a newer service we wanted to use.

Never have issues with stable services like S3, ECS, EKS, or RDS.
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-31 22:03:55+00:00
You're one of the rare people who understands Trump? Give me a break! Your whitewashing of the Trump administration is mindboggling.

Stop pretending ICE and the whole administration is acting lawfully. Their disregard and contempt for the law is all too obvious. ICE is patrolling cities, breaking into homes without warrants, kidnapping people without due process and throwing them into internment camps with horrible inhumane conditions. People are rightfully angry for being terrorized.

I did not mention Stephen Miller because he is relevant for the shooting, but for the assessment of the DHS as a whole. If you have actual confidence in the DHS to lead an independent investigation of its own agents, considering the people in charge, you must be very naive.

Your country has taken a sudden and deep authoritarian turn and is right on its way into fascism. We've seen this in our own countries 90-100 years ago, it looks and sounds all too familiar. The past few months have already shown that the democratic system is in fact very fragile and can fall apart faster than people would have thought. Better wake up until it's too late!
by mcnamtm1 | 2026-01-31 22:04:01+00:00
I think it matters how you define 'end-to-end'. Where are the endpoints? In a SaaS platform, WhatsApp could claim your device and its ingress server are the endpoints. With that definition, they can use TLS and claim E2EE.

But some people would expect the two endpoints to be their device and their human counterpart's device. Mobile app to mobile app and encrypted across all servers.
Ask HN: What about an LGBT programmer Discord?
by remy_boutonnet | 2026-01-31 22:04:38+00:00
I am Remy, I am 33 and the cofounder of TuringDB in London. I enjoy low level programming, C++, FPGAs and hardware design. Basically anything weird or arcane in programming.

After attending many LGBT and more specifically gay meetups & events in London in the UK, and many art events in various art galleries, I felt the need for something for us, passionate LGBT software people and programmers more specifically. By programmer here, I mean the technical person proudly enjoying their craft, writing software (for lack of a better word maybe).

Do you feel like you fit in the typical gay scene and artsy scene in London and in similar big cities around the world?

What about a Discord server? or something else?
by nonameiguess | 2026-01-31 22:04:57+00:00
I first heard of this thing yesterday and have no opinion on it, but the repo has existed for two months, usable for half of that. There are people saying it's revolutionized their lives in the span of two weeks. I'd urge people to hone their basic epistemology skills and think about what kinds of conclusions you can really draw from several weeks of doing anything whatsoever. So many people over the decades think trying the latest fad diet or exercise routine, waking up at a different time, starting a new drug, was the key to overhauling and fixing everything in their lives, only to find hope and placebo effect is a hell of a drug and a year later you've got a new normal that is still just normal.

Frankly, I don't really have major complaints about my life as it is. The things I'd like to do more of are mostly working out and cleaning my house. And I really wish I had kids but am about ready to give up after a half decade of trying and my wife being about ready to age out. Unfortunately, software can't do any of those things for me, no matter how intelligent or agentic it is. When the obstacle to a good life becomes not being able to control multiple computers from a chatroom, maybe I'll come back to this.
by ricktdotorg | 2026-01-31 22:04:57+00:00
i have been recently quite enamoured with using both the ChatGPT mobile app (specifically the Codex part) and the Github mobile app, along with Codex. with an appropriate workflow, i've been able to deploy features to some [simple] customer-facing apps while on the go. it's very liberating!

GP's setup sounds like the logical extension to what i'm doing. not just code, but sessions within servers? are sysadmins letting openclawd out and about on their boxes these days?
by zinodaur | 2026-01-31 22:05:37+00:00
We should ban dynamic feeds that aren't based on explicit user action. E.g., Youtube should only be able to show search results based on search term, not search context. The recommendations should only be videos from channels you have subscribed to.

The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it
by Havoc | 2026-01-31 22:05:41+00:00
Was a while back so bit fuzzy on what precisely we were measuring, but no wasn't something cached/CDN'd. Maybe a VPS or something not sure.

I was on a better connection (gigabit FTTC) and in a better peered location (central London).

>amsterdam

Don't know where precisely in NL they were or what connection type. I'd certainly expect a like for like amsterdam wired connection to win so this was probably something more pedestrian & rural
by maqp | 2026-01-31 22:05:48+00:00
>Not that I trust Facebook or anything but wouldn’t a motivated investigator be able to find this key exfiltration “function” or code by now?

Yeah I'd imagine it would have been found by know. Then again, who knows when they'd add it, and if some future update removes it. Google isn't scanning every line for every version. I prefer to eliminate this kind of 5D-guesswork categorically, and just use FOSS messaging apps.
by cedws | 2026-01-31 22:05:57+00:00
I said this in another recent HN thread but all encryption comes down to key management. If you don’t control the keys, something else does. Sometimes that’s a hardware enclave, sometimes it’s a key derivation algorithm, sometimes it’s just a locally generated key on the filesystem.

If you never give WhatsApp a cryptographic identity then what key is it using? How are your messages seamlessly showing up on another device when you authenticate? It’s not magic, and these convenience features always weaken the crypto in some way.

WhatsApp has a feature to verify the fingerprint of another party. How many people do you think use this feature, versus how many people just assume they're safe because they read that WhatsApp has E2EE?
Show HN: Gemini-image-MCP – Open-source MCP server for AI image generation
by PeeperFrog | 2026-01-31 22:06:11+00:00
Show HN: I built an MCP server that integrates Google's Gemini image generation models with Claude Desktop/Code.
I run a newsletter and needed to automate image generation as part of my content workflow. The existing options were either too manual or too tightly coupled to specific platforms, so I built this.
It supports batch processing with queue review, dual quality tiers (Gemini 3 Pro at 4K, Flash at 1K), up to 14 reference images, WebP conversion, and direct WordPress upload.
The batch system cuts API costs roughly in half compared to generating images one at a time. All configuration is JSON-based, and it can run as a systemd service.
MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or MCP implementation.
Show HN: I treated my back pain like a hardware bug
by usrfours | 2026-01-31 22:07:04+00:00
I’ve been a developer for years, but I also have 14 years of experience in calisthenics. I realized that "remembering" to take breaks rarely works when you are deep in a flow state. Willpower is a terrible mechanism for posture.

Instead, I started treating my back health like a debugging process. The recurring neck/back pain is usually a specific hardware bug: weak rhomboids and overactive chest muscles caused by the static typing position.

I built a daily maintenance checklist to patch this specific issue so I can code for long sessions without the performance hit. It’s effective because it removes the cognitive load—you don't have to "try" to sit straight, you just run the maintenance script.

I packaged the routine and the specific biomechanics here if you want to see the
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-31 22:07:38+00:00
For context, the U.S. is also currently investigating whether Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election (he didn’t), whether aspirin causes autism (it doesn’t), and whether transgenic research is woke (it’s not).

“The U.S. investigates” unfortunately does not mean as much as it used to. That said, I would rest easy in the knowledge that someone deep in the NSA already knows with absolute certainty whether the WhatsApp client app is doing anything weird. But they’re not likely to talk to a reporter or plaintiffs lawyer.
by econ | 2026-01-31 22:08:33+00:00
This guy really deserves a medal.

I can't count how many times I could have made an API that no one would use. I would also have to document it at which I'm exclusively terrible (I find out later trying to make sense of my own docs) I can now generate and test the docs which changes everything.

I wonder, could a spa (while still doable) now be the wrong approach? The logic will have to be in the API, why have it twice? It seems offloading work to the client might just add bloat. Could it be that if the website works with [dumb] queries the AI won't even need to read docs?
by calf | 2026-01-31 22:08:57+00:00
Yours is the first comment I strongly agree with; as a multilingual/bicultural Asian American, children don't have this supposed difficulty hearing tones.

Most of it is passively paying attention. It should not be a struggle, it's one of those the more you struggle and overintellectualize the less time you are focusing on paying attention and letting your hearing ability do its work it was evolved to do.

The other thing is this whole emphasis on accents is misdirected. Teachers do not place this excessive emphasis on accents, it is people who want to sound "authentic" which is not a very wise goal of language learning in the first place.

I do think that learning music can help a little, especially a sonically complex instrument like violin and the like.

(caveat: I'm way oversimplifying on my Saturday afternoon, but that's my tentative views on this that I would try to argue for.)
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-31 22:09:29+00:00
Musk’s “endorsed” statement is weak because it overgeneralizes, treats racial categories as coherent agents, and pessimistically assumes institutional failure. But none of that makes it unspeakable or uniquely dangerous.

What’s notable is what the statement doesn’t contain: no call to violence or illegal action, no dehumanization, no demand for exclusion, and no rejection of individual rights or constitutional order.

Those absences matter, because they’re the thresholds that normally justify treating speech as exceptional rather than refutable. Treating a contestable prediction as a moral emergency is exactly the reaction I was pointing at.

At that point the objection becomes about perceived ideological contamination.

Equivalent — and equivalently weak — arguments are accepted prima facie from others when they’re framed in the language of vulnerability and historical grievance. “White supremacy” has become a catch-all classifier that short-circuits analysis asymmetrically, while similar reasoning elsewhere passes without scrutiny.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-31 22:10:35+00:00
Temurin and others are "distributions" of OpenJDK, basically their compilation results of it, not their own codebase. They're not "forks" in terms of source code, but they have patches, build systems, QA, and everything else around it that they apply, then offer you their version of it.

OpenJDK: where Java is developed
Temurin / Zulu: where OpenJDK is built, tested, packaged, and supported
by Swizec | 2026-01-31 22:11:21+00:00
> > put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them

> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.

When I started uni (slovenia, 2007) the rules were simple: You are adults. The final exam (written + oral) is 100% of your grade. We don’t have the time or willingness to police what you do. Strongly recommend attending classes and doing homework but whatever it’s your life. If you get high enough scores on the optional midterms, you can skip the written portion of the exam.

It was pretty great. Yes we all tried to cram for exams at the last moment. No it didn’t work very well. Needing 2 or 3 tries to pass was common.

Then later we got the bologna system. Professors stopped bragging about fail rates. Students passing became an actual thing they were evaluated on. Homework became graded, midterms were mandatory and part of your grade, attendance was tracked, etc.

College became like high school. More people passed but I think something was lost about teaching adulthood.

For the record: I didn’t graduate. My freelance business got too busy and I could not keep up with both.
by mike_d | 2026-01-31 22:11:52+00:00
I have no doubt that that rank and file engineers were not aware of the underlying functionality that allowed for plain text content to be read.

Nobody would ever create a SendPlainTextToZuck() function that had to be called on every message.

It would be as simple as using a built in PRNG for client side key generation and then surreptitiously leaking the initial state (dozens of bytes) once in a nonce signing or something when authenticating with the server.