MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Rtty-soda – CLI front end to NaCl (PyNaCl) for encrypting small files
by nett_ef | 2026-01-25 17:36:51+00:00
I tried to make the best CLI for interfacing with PyNaCl primitives, especially with KDF.

I don’t expect your trust; I focused on making the code readable for review. I haven’t reviewed the underlying libraries.

I included some silly examples in the README — I hope you enjoy them and have as much fun using it as I did while building it.

It’s focused on small files: not for large blobs, but great for keys, configs, and other secrets.

Thanks for your time. Please note that I’m not a security expert, and this is my first project in this space.

I actively use it myself and plan to maintain it long-term.
by jrowen | 2026-01-25 17:37:03+00:00
WhatsApp is a bizarre name, and I think that contributes to it occupying a "lower rent" space than the others (the goofy chat background also helps). But I think most people ultimately gloss over the joke and it just becomes kind of abstract.

With BirdyChat though, it feels like you'll be confronted by its silliness in perpetuity.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-25 17:37:10+00:00
They can't, they don't have a steering wheel or remote controller or anything. And this is supported by the fact that waymos are actually level 4 autonomous, and Tesla's are not.

This has nothing to do with Elon musk. From a purely technical standpoint, no - Tesla DOES NOT have autonomous vehicles to the level of their competitors. It's not a matter of opinion.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-25 17:37:15+00:00
Yeah, most of my computer use is with a properly adjusted desk setup with external monitors and while it doesn’t bother me to use a laptop to jot down some notes or for a short study session, if I try to do “real” work at all I quickly become uncomfortable. A cheap folding laptop stand (which elevates the laptop enough that the middle of its screen is eye level) and wireless KB+mouse dramatically improves comfort (and productivity) but the tradeoff is that you need a table or other sizable, stable flat surface.

The exception is if there happens to be a reclined-position chair (IKEA POÄNG or similar) around; this gives back support and reduces neck craning enough to make longer sessions more viable, but it’s far from a given that this kind of seating will be available.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 17:37:17+00:00
On the contrary. It's all too easy to dismiss as being the fault of a fatally flawed individual. In fact that's likely to be the bias of those involved - our system is good, our management is competent. Behead the sacrificial lamb and be done with it. Phrases such as "hirinng is never perfect" can themselves at times be an extremely tempting coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging inconvenient truths.

I'm not saying you shouldn't eventually arrive at the conclusion you're suggesting. I'm saying that it's extremely important not to start there and not to use the possibility of arriving there as an excuse to shirk asking difficult questions about the inner workings and performance of the broader organization.

> Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic

No, don't assume. Ask if it did. "No that does not appear to be the case" can sometimes be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to arrive at but it should never be an excuse to avoid confronting uncomfortable realities.
by agumonkey | 2026-01-25 17:37:20+00:00
What I never got was why MD were never pushed as main rw disc drives on PC. IIRC Rewritable MDs were mainstream long before CD-R and it would have filled an immense need to replace floppy disks at the time (I love vintage and nostalgia, but floppies had way too much io errors, and the speed was.. not really there).

Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-25 17:37:48+00:00
Races are not genetic groupings, they are social constructs whose boundaries evolve over time, which is particularly clear when they are formalized in a way which resista change and that formalization drifts increasingly far from the current common usage, such as the way the White racial category in common usage in America currently roughly corresponds to the the subset of the White racial category that excludes the Hispanic ethnicity in the US Census categorization.

The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics.

> e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia.

People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations.

While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-25 17:38:28+00:00
Segment uses MySQL as queue not even as DLQ. It works at their scale. So there are many (not all) systems that can tolerate this as queue.

I have simple flow: tasks are order of thousands an hour. I just use postgresql. High visibility, easy requeue, durable store. With appropriate index, it’s perfectly fine. LLM will write skip locked code right first time. Easy local dev. I always reach for Postgres for event bus in low volume system.
by salamanderman | 2026-01-25 17:38:33+00:00
Hey fellow nerds, never forget that your inventions will be turned into a weapon. We must always consider how dangerous that weapon will be.
And there you go, generative AI being used by an authoritarian government to slander and defame political opponents. It's not the first time, I'm sure, and they've been using it for propaganda memes and NFT trash for a while, but this is the most blatant I've seen. It's not obviously altered, it's very believable, and it's for a minor dissident, a protest organizer. I'm really scared.
by Calavar | 2026-01-25 17:38:53+00:00
Reza Pahlavi has also had recent interviews with CBS [1], the Economist [2], and CNN [3] (all within the last 30 days). So how is the existence of Reza Pahlavi interviews on Fox evidence that conservative media is covering this issue more than liberal media?

On the topic of Politicians, Democratic congressmen like Dave Min and Jim Hines have also spoken in favor of US intervention in Iran.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/video/full-interview-exiled-iranian-...

[2] https://youtu.be/jk6wfvje8Zo

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/23/world/video/iran-united-state...
by gpm | 2026-01-25 17:38:54+00:00
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (free) compute.

It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers to be able to make interesting games that took so little compute.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-25 17:39:02+00:00
Anything that can be compared or is comparable can be an analogy. That means any two things in existence can form an analogy. From a practical standpoint only things with at least one similar attribute needs to be picked as what is the point of comparison with no similar attributes?

Discarding practicality, the next line of demarcation is a good analogy versus a bad analogy. This is a very subjective thing but humans tend to agree on what this is. Typically it’s two things that on the surface sounds dissimilar but upon examinations reveals that that they are intricately connected. AKA: not obvious.

You would have to have next level brain damage if you can’t see why the analogies I presented analogies are too obvious. You obviously don’t have brain damage, so it’s more likely you’re just unaware of certain terminology and definitions related to the concept.

“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know which one you’re gonna get” is a famous analogy that fits what it means to be a “good analogy”.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-25 17:39:29+00:00
Well, Bluesky and Mastodon users can communicate with one another - as long as both parties opt in.

https://fed.brid.gy/

It works. The instructions on that site could be a bit more organized, though (example: I didn't have a profile picture so it wouldn't bridge my comments - it's listed on the page but you have to search for it).
by hashmap | 2026-01-25 17:39:32+00:00
I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few decades the better hardware has had to get to support it. Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked doing things they don't need to do.
by OrvalWintermute | 2026-01-25 17:39:37+00:00
You're not familiar with the german holiday & vacation system are you?

I lived in Europe and can explain it for you.

In Germany, particularly in Bavaria with its 13 gesetzliche Feiertage (holidays including regional ones like Heilige Drei Könige, Fronleichnam, and Allerheiligen), Urlaubstage can be maximized through smart planning. The rule is that weekends (Samstag and Sonntag) and Feiertage do not count against your Urlaubskonto; they don't deduct from your vacation days. With over 30 Urlaubstage (the legal minimum is 24 Werktage, but many collective agreements grant 30 or more), you achieve over 60 free days (calendar days of absence) by using Brückentage (Bridging days) and longer blocks.

If you have more than 30 Urlaubstage (e.g., 32), it rises to ~70 free days. It is possible—plan early, as Brückentage are popular!
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 17:39:51+00:00
Exactly. The above comment is an example of the kind of toxic blameless culture I was talking about: Deflecting every problem with a person into a problem with the organization.

It’s a good thing to take a look at where the process went wrong, but that’s literally just a postmortem. Going fully into blameless postmortems adds the precondition that you can’t blame people, you are obligated to transform the obvious into a problem with some process or policy.

Anyone who has hired at scale will eventually encounter an employee who seems lovely in interviews but turns out to be toxic and problematic in the job. The most toxic person I ever worked with, who culminated in dozens of peers quitting the company before he was caught red handed sabotaging company work, was actually one of the nicest and most compassionate people during interviews and when you initially met him. He, of course, was a big proponent of blameless postmortems and his toxicity thrived under blameless culture for longer than it should have.
by saghm | 2026-01-25 17:40:06+00:00
I don't think I agree with that. To me, how low-level something is makes more sense sense as a spectrum rather than a binary, and there are certainly other things that I'd consider to fit into the lower end than just OS kernels. Over the summer I contracted for a company making satellites working on software they had that facilitated interactions between various software and hardware components that had to run a 20 ms loop for processing everything, with delays cascading throughout those other components and causing systemic issues. This was all in userland (the OS stuff was managed by another team), but a tracing garbage collector would have been pretty much a non-starter due to the potential to miss the expected timing of a loop iteration.

You could handwave this objection by saying it's not "really" low level or that "nothing" was an exaggeration, but at that point it seems like we'd be back to the original question of why it's wrong to say that this isn't a primary use case for C++.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-25 17:40:34+00:00
The whole point is to sell more cars, the EREV Lightning will not be cheaper to produce or sell.

At current prices, the standard range battery in a Lightning (which is nominally about 107kWh or so) should cost under $10K. They will not be able to shrink the battery enough to offset the cost of putting in an engine and generator. For one, they have to stay competitive with the Dodge EREV pickup, which will have a ~90kWh battery.

My guess is they leave out one or two modules from the standard range pack and price the truck starting at $70K. They won't make a ton of money, but they might be able to get a nice boost in volume to make up for it.
by fsflover | 2026-01-25 17:40:46+00:00
Telegram desktop app works flawlessly on Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS though. Whatsapp web version can be used, too.

> So you need some way to run Android apps... which is totally possible, but at that point why not just use Android?

Perhaps for reasons like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-25 17:41:03+00:00
I can tell you based on your description that you did not do this. Subagents are completely different and cannot be used in this way.

No, it isn't how Claude Code works because Claude Code is designed to work with limited task queues, this is not what this feature is. Again, I would suggest you trying to actually build something like this. Why do you think Anthropic are doing this? They just don't understand anything about their product?

No, it doesn't work within that context. Again: sharing context between subagents, single instance running for months...I am not even sure why someone would think this could work. The constraints that I set are the ones that you require to build this...because I have done this. You are talking about having some CLAUDE.md files like you have invented the wheel, lol. HN is great.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-25 17:41:11+00:00
It depends how you do it. The conversion on my elderly Range Rover is not as efficient, being an old-fashioned "single point" system - this has a thing a bit like a cooker ring attached to the throttle, a stepper motor controlled valve driven by a third lambda sensor, and a thing to disconnect the petrol injectors when it switches to gas.

You can get ones with a complete set of LPG injectors and an ECU that takes its timing from the petrol injectors, and these are incredibly efficient. They're a bit harder to install (you need to drill holes in the intake manifold, it's a faff) but the engine can be mapped for even more power than on petrol and a tiny amount of pollution.

There's still a lot of CO2 and water vapour, but as previously discussed you're burning all this shit anyway so you might as well extract useful work from it.

The time to have done this was 25 or 30 years ago, when it was ridiculously cheap to buy gas and there were a lot of old-fashioned carburettor-fed cars that were incredibly badly polluting.
by unshah | 2026-01-25 17:41:31+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the creator.

The Background: I built SkyLaunch to solve the systemic inefficiencies I faced as a Part 61 flight student. While flexible training is great, it suffers from a total lack of data structure compared to Part 141 schools.

The Problem:

State Management: Instructor turnover is high. When I switched CFIs, my "training state" (proficiency in specific maneuvers) relied on paper logbooks or memory, leading to wasted hours re-demonstrating skills I had already mastered.

The "Black Box" of Costs: I was flying blind financially, with no way to forecast "Time-to-License" based on my actual learning velocity.

The Solution: SkyLaunch is an open-source flight assistant that acts as a progression engine. It maps your flight maneuvers to specific FAA Airman Certification Standards (ACS), visualizing your proficiency in real-time. It effectively decouples your training data from your instructor.

The Tech:

Frontend: React Native (optimized for iPad Mini).

Backend: Supabase (Postgres RLS for student privacy + Realtime for Student-CFI sync).

Logic: A custom scheduling engine that checks weather minimums (METARs) against your personal proficiency to issue "Go/No-Go" recommendations before you drive to the airport.

Feedback Request: I’m looking for feedback on the scheduler logic (lib/schedulerLogic.ts)—specifically how to better model "skill decay" for maneuvers that haven't been practiced in X weeks.

Links:

Repo: https://github.com/unshah/SkyLaunch.io

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skylaunch-flight-training-app/...
by kittikitti | 2026-01-25 17:41:55+00:00
The gatekeepers were able to convince the American public of such heinous things like circumcision at birth based on "science" and now they're having to deal with the corruption. People like RFK Jr. are able to be put into top positions because what they're spewing has no less scientific merit than what's accepted and recommended. The state of scientific literature is incredibly sad and mainly a factor of politics and money than of scientific evidence.
by WickyNilliams | 2026-01-25 17:42:10+00:00
Yes of course this could've been done in photoshop. But a convincing Photoshop effort takes someone with years of experience working for likely hours. AI can churn out this kind of image in seconds, operated entirely by someone with zero skill or experience. It lowers the bar significantly, increasing the scope and scale of the output.

For the same reason a fully automatic weapon is substantively different from a bolt action rifle, despite both being guns.

It's also a fundamentally different scenario. Photoshoot-style touchups - likely at the request of the subject himself - for pure vanity, versus doctored images of an unwilling citizen (who presumably hasn't been convicted yet and is therefore considered innocent) as propaganda
by netghost | 2026-01-25 17:42:34+00:00
I think it really depends on how teams use their estimates. If you're locking in an estimate and have to stick with it for a week or a month, you're right, that's terrible.

If you don't strictly work on a Sprint schedule, then I think it's reasonable to have high variance estimates, then as soon as you learn more, you update the estimate.

I've seen lots of different teams do lots of different things. If they work for you and you're shipping with reliable results then that's excellent.
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-25 17:42:41+00:00
> I think good advice is to keep your devices as cool as you can (ie don't leave your cars in sunlight when there's shade),

In some climates, such as where I live, the larger issue is the cold in the winter. From what I understand, Li-ion batteries don't like being charged below 0 C. And it is not uncommon for it to dip to -15 C or even -20 C here.

Really, from what I understand, batteries want to be kept above freezing but cool. So yeah, don't leave it in direct sunlight in the middle of summer. The more difficult problem is the winter (unless you happen to have a heated garage).
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-25 17:43:22+00:00
Actually it's considerably less explosive than petrol and far safer in a crash.

If a petrol-fuelled car goes on fire, the fuel tank will explode. The tanks are usually thin plastic and will split open in an accident, spilling fuel everywhere.

By contrast, the LPG tanks are pretty much indestructible and if you remove a tank from a car that's been on fire (a lot of taxis are LPG-powered and seem to go on fire late at night for some reason, especially if they're parked in the wrong part of town) you'll find the tank is still about as full as it was before the car got burnt.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-25 17:43:39+00:00
Oh, that's easy. You see people vote like this if they don't advance economically. So what you need is to create a decade or so of economic advancement for >50% of the US.

If that doesn't happen, odds are that even if a democrat president gets elected, they won't be much better. This is still the fallout of the GFC, of the decision to bail out the banks back then.

I know that sounds incredible, and I would have bitten off the head of anyone claiming this when I was 20 ... but it's how the world works.
Project Idea: Carbon and Attentional Footprint of False Urgency
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-25 17:43:44+00:00
I was thinking about the total CO2 and heat produced, maybe even a bit more detailed like estimations about server, network, grid load as well as the attentional and cognitive footprint ... of "Last Chance E-Mail Marketing" and other pointless "dark pattern" marketing that uses simple psychological triggers like "urgency" and "once-in-a-lifetime/year/month/day/hour/ opportunity" ...

Y'all like to data science and blog, don't ya? Any ideas, suggestions for a noob like me?
by majoe | 2026-01-25 17:43:46+00:00
I tried different LLMs with various languages so far: Python, C++, Julia, Elixir and JavaScript.

The SOTA models come do a great job for all of them, but if I had to rank the capabilities for each language it would look like this:

JavaScript, Julia > Elixir > Python > C++

That's just a sample size of one, but I suspect, that for all but the most esoteric programming languages there is more than enough code in the training data.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-25 17:44:42+00:00
Okay...and continue to work up the levels? Why do you think OAuth might be limiting? Why do you think they started building subagents first? What is the difference between subagents and products like Aider?

If they were able to wrap the API directly, this is relatively easy to implement but they have to do this within Claude Code which is based on giving a prompt/hiding API access. This is obvious if you think carefully about what Claude Code is, what requests it is sending to the API, etc.
by cloche | 2026-01-25 17:44:48+00:00
> Because published articles frequently omit key details

This is a frustrating aspect of studies. You have to contact the authors for full datasets. I can see why it would not be possible to publish them in the past due to limited space in printed publications. In today's world though every paper should be required to have their full datasets published to a website for others to have access to in order to verify and replicate.
by woleium | 2026-01-25 17:44:55+00:00
I think it’s more about picking your battles.

I don’t use google oauth, prefer user pass and email

I use google for email and docs, it’s convenient. i use my own domain though, and i backup my data nightly.

I feel like i have de-risked the relationship as much as is reasonable and am happy to move if i have to with minimal data or access loss (time to restore all data somewhere may be a bit of an issue, but there are workarounds)
by margalabargala | 2026-01-25 17:44:59+00:00
It's not a question of quantity but of distribution.

I'm not defending the waste of water that is growing alfalfa in the desert for export, but there are plenty of places datacenters are built where the water they use is impactful.

They can both be bad. Unlike the legal mess that is US irrigation water rights, data centers are also a lot easier to do something about.
by actionfromafar | 2026-01-25 17:46:24+00:00
That's because this is a pretty mainstream opinion now. I'd say... a quarter to a third of the population holds such beliefs.

If you ever shook your head at theocratic regimes such as Iran, well maybe look a little closer to home. "But... the people in charge of Iran are hypocrites, they do nasty stuff at home behind closed doors."

Again, may I point to Mom: "we have mullas at home".