MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ToddlerLock – An iPhone app that shows a fake home screen for toddlers
by zilvinassebeika | 2026-01-08 18:36:29+00:00
Hi HN,
I built ToddlerLock for a very practical reason: my toddler kept grabbing my phone. I tried a bunch of kids apps, but they didn’t really work — he was too young for games. What he actually wanted was to tap on the same things he sees adults use every day.

So I made a fake version of the iPhone home screen with familiar icons like Phone, Messages, and Settings. It looks and feels native, but everything is safe to tap and nothing real can be opened or changed. It also works nicely with iOS Guided Access.

This is honestly the only thing that’s worked for my son so far. I’m sharing it here in case it’s useful to others, and I’d really appreciate any feedback.
by DicIfTEx | 2026-01-08 18:36:44+00:00
NB: On looking into this, it appears to be one Lemkin relative (who claims to be working on behalf of the family) and a collection of Zionist organisations who take issue with the Institute's accurate description of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, in agreement with just about every competent national and international body you can think of from the International Association of Genocide Scholars and Israeli human rights orgs to the UN, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemkin_Institute_for_Genocide_...
by didibus | 2026-01-08 18:37:08+00:00
One thing I think we should better emphasize is that it's best to avoid foods that are bad for you, than to eat foods that are good for you. If you can't do both, you should focus on cutting out bad foods over eating healthier foods.

Meat (non-processed, no sugary sauce or gravy), and dairy (plain, fermented, no added sugar). Those are kind of "neutral" foods. If that's all you eat, meaning you don't eat any crap, you're much better off health wise than if you eat crap and try to also eat a bunch of veggies, fish, fruits, legumes, etc.
by dfee | 2026-01-08 18:37:37+00:00
California is, for the first time in 25 years, drought free: https://www.drought.gov/states/california#current-conditions

In commentary on the article, a photo gallery of nine images, I didn’t get much out of it. Maybe because it didn’t show much actual change (aside from one side by side 5 years apart, and another one days or weeks apart?).

Pretty pictures, not compelling. But, seeing the shipmap post from yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527161) and the inframap today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866) were more so.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-08 18:37:53+00:00
I wonder what conclusion the FBI's investigation will come to because it sure doesn't look good for ICE to me. Best case, those two agents get sentenced to life for murder but the damage is done and a life taken. If the officer fired two shots and she died at the scene then it seems reasonable to me the bullets didn't go through the windshield and, instead, went through her rolled down window while she was turning away from the officer. If that's the case then I'm predicting riots everywhere over the next couple weeks.

// i know pretty much zero details of what happened and it will be impossible to get any actual facts that are not politicized for weeks
by georgeecollins | 2026-01-08 18:38:15+00:00
This is something I learned from one of my (frankly fairly effective and powerful) parents. My wife, who is super conscientious just thinks its procrastinating, or worse, doing nothing until she does something. From experience in my own family acting like this can seem very selfish because usually if someone brings a problem to your attention they want you to show you are also concerned by acting and solving. Doing nothing can look bad.

But it can be smart! It's not just that problems solve themselves, it's also that the best course of action becomes clear with time. The optics of inaction can be terrible, which is why junior people managing upward nearly always start trying to tackle a problem immediately. For senior people, you need to acknowledge you are aware of a problem and will do something. I think this is one of the reasons managers implement process that seems kind of useless. Like meetings to discuss a decision without making the decision. To participants it can be frustrating but it is a way for the person in charge to show they know a problem exists that also lets them put off doing anything.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-08 18:38:41+00:00
Vehicle regs require passenger restraints for safety reasons. That's only analogous to a very specific kind of hotel room. The bus exemption kicks in for vehicles designed to carry more than 10 people.

Also, hotel rooms tend to offer privacy. If you do that in a vehicle people get motion sickness.

To be clear, I do think there's interesting stuff in this general area. I'm just not sure it's as a sleeper bus. The big OEMs have loads of interesting concept designs buried in their basements about similar vehicles that I wish could see the light of day.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-08 18:39:17+00:00
The dynamics. Discovery benefits all parties, and the middle man can take a cut in several ways (Google chose ads). The middleman never had to open up but that tube spread value instead of extracting it (at least, until they started renting seeking with the tube).

Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.
by tptacek | 2026-01-08 18:39:34+00:00
The subtlety missed in these conversations is that almost all the information there is for typical error handling --- that is, all the information that would be present in a typical Rust error handling scenario as well --- is encoded in the type tree of the errors.

(Rust then improves drastically on the situation with pattern matching, which would simply improve Go with no tradeoffs I can really discern, just so we're clear that I'm not saying Go's error story is at parity with Go. But I'd also point out that Rust error handling at a type level is kind of a painful mess as well.)
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-08 18:39:40+00:00
> america is huge and nothing really changed for them within the decade.

People don't necessarily notice gradual changes. We have objective measures to show things have changed.

> I can't really speak for decades, none of us have been alive that long to live that difference

There's plenty of 50 and 60, even 70 year olds on this site...

> people generally live wealthier lives than 2 decades ago

Some people do. One of the biggest changes has been the continued erosion of the middle class.

> What I am really trying to say is that I believe in time everything will be okay as long as we manage to survive the hardest challenge we have right now: AI causing major distruption in every single business causing further imbalance between people and coorperations.

AI is nothing but a distraction. The problem is the ignorance of half the voting population who continually votes against their own interests out fear fueled by misinformation.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-08 18:40:09+00:00
Having the capacity to do credibly threaten violence back acts as a check on abuse because nobody will stand for cops occasionally getting clapped over stuff they should never have been doing in the first place.

Look at how cops roll up on "is armed because you can't not be at his level" drug criminals. There's reconnaissance, preparation, checklists, etc, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's generally orders of magnitude more professional than the sort of slapdash thuggery ICE is up to. And it's also much more expensive so they don't just target it at entire demographics, they prioritize.

While it's not a silver bullet. Being able to make credible threat of taking one or two of them with you really does force the government side to behave better, maybe not categorically, but enough to matter.

A nearly identical "force them to do better" argument applies to being able to film police, open records, and many other things.
by doom2 | 2026-01-08 18:40:25+00:00
Unfortunately, that path back for Germany required holding those responsible accountable, in some cases fatally so. I don't see that happening here. Nothing will prevent or dissuade Trump's political allies from continuing his movement. Yes they may lose an election here or there, but I don't see any indication that MAGA is anywhere close to becoming politically toxic. Until a post-WWII style reckoning can be had, I am not optimistic that reputational repair can happen.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-08 18:40:30+00:00
great news! this old shoulder mount with a strap mounted VHS recorder will finally be able to come out of storage and find a new life! /s

not sure why you feel analog recording is necessary. just need a camera that isn't part of a phone. any DSLR, MFT, Mirrorless cameras would be just as good.

however, there's something to be said about live streaming so that even if the camera is confiscated the images are already publicly available.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-08 18:40:55+00:00
> It can be simultaneously possible to admit that the leader of one party is more sane than the other, and to observe that both parties are engaging in cycles of retaliation when they get in power, and that egging on even more retaliation is going to make the situation worse.

Then I suppose the situation will get worse? I don't understand the point of your analysis. This isn't a situation where people are swatting away olive branches - the Trump administration works hard to ensure that their political opponents are furious at them. They repeatedly state, in a variety of contexts, that they have no interest in finding common ground with the other party: it's good that you're miserable if you don't agree with their political objectives, and if you get in their way you deserve to be shot.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-08 18:40:57+00:00
There’s millions of people who have been dealing with this daily for the last few decades. The sim swap networks and VPN/TOR users across the world live like this.

When I was in Iraq it was basically expected that all of your communications are totally pwnd, if you live in China you’re totally pwnd.

Cell trackers like described in the article have been in use for the last 15 years by police and law-enforcement inside the US.

why you think its eerie?
by geocar | 2026-01-08 18:41:11+00:00
> Please let me know of the scenario where route A is preferred, undesirable, long-path route B is advertised/leaked, and as a result traffic flows over route C.

> ... I'm really curious what you're thinking

That the actor actually wanted the traffic to flow over route C.

> You know what's really toxic? Not explaining what you mean and just sending some introductory lab documentation about what the other person has already clearly shown they understand.

I think perhaps you and I have different ideas of what is "clear", for example when you said something that is totally covered in introductory lab documentation, I thought it was clear that you did not understand.

> I don't even know what you mean by a lot of these things

That is clear! But confusing! How can you clearly understand but not know what I mean?

> Peering means to give your own routes (and your transit customers' routes) to someone else.

That's exactly what's happening here: Not every transit customer peers with every other transit customer.
by the-rc | 2026-01-08 18:41:13+00:00
There was a variant of this that occurred later. By that time there might not have been a dependency on Jeff's workstation anymore, but the DB, or at least one of its replicas, was getting copied to... /gfs/cg/home/sanjay/ — I don't believe it was Jeff this time. At some point, there was a very long PCR in the Oregon datacenter, perhaps even the same one that happened a few weeks after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. With the CG cluster powered off for multiple days, a bunch of stuff broke, but in this case the issue might have been solved by dumping the data and/or reading it from elsewhere.
I've maintained a OS local-first task manager for 8 years
by johannesjo | 2026-01-08 18:41:39+00:00
I started building Super Productivity in late 2016 because I needed to log time against my Jira tickets. Ironically, I've never had to do that again on any project since.

But I kept building it anyway and for some reason I couldn't stop doing it. 8 years later it's a local-first task manager with time tracking and integrations for Jira, GitHub, GitLab, and others. Everything runs on your device - no cloud, no account required.

Why local-first? Three reasons:
- I didn't want to run servers or deal with auth systems
- I care about not having my work habits tracked
- I needed something that works offline
- Most of the companies I worked for would not allow for putting that kind of data into a random cloud service

Biggest lesson from 8 years: saying no is sometimes harder than building features. Every "quick addition" someone requests has hidden complexity and long term costs. I know how much effort goes into drafting ideas, so I often had a very hard time saying no to new additions, especially if people already provided the code and even more if it was good clean and tested code.

Now there is a plugin system with community plugins and this makes it much easier.

Still figuring out: sustainable funding without ads or selling data. Currently, it's donations + my own time. Would love to hear how others approach this.

Repo: https://github.com/johannesjo/super-productivity
Try it: https://super-productivity.com
by TheNewsIsHere | 2026-01-08 18:41:46+00:00
I used to host my own email, but eventually moved to Fastmail. I have to communicate with a number of professionals that work for companies using fairly aggressive third party archiving and filtering solutions (for example, Proofpoint). Keeping my email server on long-term clean IPs in ranges where one other customer didn’t ruin the entire range became a real hassle.

Several such of the larger providers in that space won’t allowlist single IPs if you can’t prove administrative control of the subnet. Alas, I don’t have my own network allocation.

Part of me misses self-hosting. Part of me is glad that I don’t have to manage that anymore, given the growing number of other services, hosts, and network space I manage.
by fusslo | 2026-01-08 18:41:55+00:00
> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?

I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.

It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.

A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.

There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.
by epistasis | 2026-01-08 18:42:12+00:00
> This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.

I'm not "ignoring" that, and a retrained workforce is also a revolving workforce.

When I run teams or companies I invest heavily in giving employees opportunities to train for new skills, level up on their existing skills, and grow into greater responsibility and knowledge domains. But that always needs to be balanced with the rest of the needs. When my runway is uncertain, that reduces the ability to plan for adding training for existing employees rather than bringing in a consultant or a new hire.
by volkk | 2026-01-08 18:42:12+00:00
There's nothing naive about it. Most doctors work off of statistics and probabilities stemming from population based studies. Literally the entire field of medicine is probabilistic and that's what angers people. Yes, 95% chance you're not suffering from something horrible but a lot of people would want to continue diagnostics to rule out that 5% that you now have cancer and the doctor sent you home with antibiotics thinking it's just some infection, or whatever.
Show HN: Offline Deterministic Security Gate
by EldorZ | 2026-01-08 18:42:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on a security tool born out of frustration with how most security controls work today.

In many environments, security happens after the fact: scan later, alert louder, hope someone reacts in time.
Most tools also assume network access, dynamic updates, and trust in external services — which breaks down in regulated, air-gapped, or high-assurance environments.

I decided to explore a different approach.

Sentinel Gate

Sentinel Gate is a deterministic security gate that runs before code leaves the developer machine or CI boundary.

Key design choices:

Offline by design
No call-home, no cloud dependency, no remote APIs. Can run fully air-gapped.

Deterministic outcomes
The gate does not score or recommend. Artifacts either pass or are blocked.

Immutable ruleset
No dynamic rule updates, no remote plugins. The ruleset is versioned and explicitly managed to avoid supply-chain surprises.

Pre-commit and CI enforcement
Focused on preventing secrets leakage, CI/CD injection risks, and certain classes of logic/configuration flaws before they propagate.

The goal is simple:
answer with certainty whether an artifact is allowed to exist outside a defined boundary.

This is intentionally a hard control, not a flexible scanner.

Auditor Core (related but separate)

Alongside the gate, I’m building Auditor Core, which serves a different purpose.

Auditor Core focuses on understanding and explaining systems, not blocking them:

Repository and infrastructure topology mapping

Baseline drift detection

Analysis across IaC, CI/CD pipelines, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud configs

Evidence-driven reports aimed at engineers and auditors

I keep these as two separate engines on purpose:

Gates prevent mistakes

Audits explain reality

Trying to merge both usually compromises one of them.

Trade-offs & limitations

This approach is not for everyone:

Deterministic rules mean less flexibility

Offline mode means no shared intelligence feeds

It will block things — sometimes inconveniently — by design

It’s not a replacement for dynamic testing or runtime protection

The target audience is environments where predictability and control matter more than coverage breadth.

Code

The gate engine is open source here:
https://github.com/DataWizual/sentinel-core.git

This is still evolving, and I’m actively validating assumptions.

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people working in:

regulated or air-gapped environments

CI/CD security

supply-chain security

or anyone who has strong opinions about deterministic vs adaptive controls

Happy to answer technical questions and criticism.
by twosdai | 2026-01-08 18:42:24+00:00
If youre able to do some networking and tell people verbatim what you just wrote. I think that will help a lot more than grinding kernel logic or whatever.

If youre not considering it, I would reccomend trying to find a local hacker club like defcon or 2600. There are usually a few embedded folks who go or are affiliated with those.
by SoleilAbsolu | 2026-01-08 18:42:34+00:00
Well, Bose has a long history of continually hyping whatever they're selling as the complete & utter pinnacle of sound reproduction technology, whether or not that's actually the case. Before the internet it was through their print media ads, starting with their Direct/Reflecting home speaker tech, continued through the 800 series PA speakers, Acoustic Wave tabletop radio, etc. Not to say there were not benefits, but that the choices they made -- single driver size, requiring certain room boundaries/geometry for optimal sound, need for active EQ/processing to get full-range response before the tech was really there to do so optimally -- did not always equal great trouble-free sound as advertised.

That said their implementation of noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds was a legit game-changer. And good on them for open-sourcing these speakers!
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-08 18:42:44+00:00
It's not. I was a "90 day fiance" immigrant (the concept, not the show).

We had a sincere relationship, but we both agreed that our marriage, while genuine, was earlier than it would have otherwise been other than logistics of an trans-Pacific romance.

We stayed together 5 years, then separated/divorced, amicably. In the midst of all that I missed a USCIS filing date.

I was out of status briefly, but also in a situation where I was ostensibly entitled to stay (USCIS would have to demonstrate a belief that the marriage was under false pretences), so I hired an immigration attorney to straighten things out (which basically involved filing paperwork that I needed to file, and a letter from her and one from me explaining why I missed it.

She did make the comment to me during all that though that I had no cause for concern above and beyond that, quote:

"I hate that I can say it, but the reality is you're both 'the right color' and a high-earning male. USCIS has you so far down the list of their priorities for reconciliation you could stay here decades before them calling you to account".
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-08 18:42:44+00:00
I never understood the argument for Boston not being part of the tech-heavy landscape. Conveniently not present in these arguments are non-biotech and non-health companies with giant presence, massive earnings, or massive potential earnings: Boston Dynamics, Akami, Wayfair, IBM, Rapid 7, Datadog, DraftKings, Commonwealth Fusion, Raytheon ..

Ergo, if you look at the tech GDP of Boston metro area, its one of the biggest in the entire world. On the entire east coast, only NYC consistently beats it. Boston just doesn't play the same hotdog/not a hotdog AI moonshot games that Silicon Valley falls in love with. And the reason they don't compete is because they choose to stay busy advancing existing tech.
by mothballed | 2026-01-08 18:43:30+00:00
I mean look at Bundy V1. Law enforcement did not want to die over a few cows, so they said fuck it. Bundy (senior) is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.

Law enforcement is not any braver than you or I, if they don't have overwhelming firepower they fall back on their first commandment which is "the policeman goes home safe to his family at the cost of absolutely everyone else including defenseless children."
by tavavex | 2026-01-08 18:44:33+00:00
But those comments weren't just about location - everyone knows that triangulation based on cell towers is a viable option as long as you're connected to some. But they also claimed that airplane mode, which is supposed to disable most communications modules in your phone, including the cellular modem, would be ineffective at doing that. To me that seems to reach into "the US government can remotely turn your phone on" and similar kind of theories.

As for burning - if they really possessed these extra special exploits that allowed monitoring of even supposedly disconnected or disabled devices, each instance of its use would expose them to a slim, but nonzero chance of that exploit being discovered, especially if it required communicating with that phone directly. In this situation it would be wise to limit the use of this to actually important targets, to avoid revealing their advantage by using these unconventional methods (as opposed to normal cellular, wifi or GPS-based tracking) on random protestors.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-08 18:44:40+00:00
>If you're referring to a specific school then name the school instead of making lame low-effort comments about a state.

You're fucking right. I should've named the specific school. (And I didn't make a comment about the state I made a comment about school(s) in the state which is not about all schools in the state.)

That's would I should do. What you should do is: Don't accuse me of lying and then lie yourself. Read the comment more carefully. Don't assume shit.

No point in continue this. We both get it and this thread is going nowhere.