MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2026-01-29 18:00:52+00:00
RC4 is actually broken. It's fundamentally broken. As you run it, it's face melts off like the guy at the end of Raiders. It's genuinely weird nobody noticed how bad it was, in a practical sense, until the late aughts.

The 64 bit block size in 3DES (and Blowfish and IDEA) limits how much data you can encrypt under a single key. I think the real "tell" that this isn't hair-splitting is that people don't ever generally talk about Blowfish being "broken", just obsoleted.
by dlisboa | 2026-01-29 18:01:14+00:00
I think it's fair to say they tried using SQLite but apparently had to bail out. Their use case is a distributed DBaaS with local-first semantics, they started out with SQLite and only now seem to be pivoting to "SQLite-compatible".

Building off of that into a SQLite-compatible DB doesn't seem to me as trying to piggyback on the brand. They have no other option as their product was SQLite to begin with.
by jerf | 2026-01-29 18:01:16+00:00
Yes, it absolutely can.

I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.

A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.
by anonymousiam | 2026-01-29 18:01:34+00:00
I purchased a copy of OSF Motif for Linux (x86) sometime in the early 1990's (before it was free). I had used it before on SunOS and I liked it.

One of the most annoying things about it was that it did not address the endianness of the arguments to the library functions. So it worked fine on big endian platforms, but not so fine on little endian ones (such as Intel).

It would still work okay if you byte swapped the arguments in and out of the library functions, but it just seemed silly to need to do that, and it made it more difficult to write portable code.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-29 18:01:59+00:00
I've started naming my scripts directory "run/" instead of "_scripts/" because it's been easier to type... favoring over the discoverability of the _scripts at the top of my editor's file sidebar. Also, VS Code will now look at the shebang for ts-node or deno and load it as .ts without a file extension... (yay).. so I can drop the .ts now.

So will generally just reference ./run/dbup, etc... where dbup will start the db via docker-compose.dev.yaml, then wait for the db to be ready, then run/up the grate task via compose as well and check/wait for that to succeed or fail. Usually have other dependencies load after db is ready (redis, mailhog, etc) ...

Definitely been favoring Deno for a while now... really easy to use with a shebang and direct module references over many/most other options that may require separate install steps. Me ~/bin/ is also full of them.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-29 18:02:44+00:00
> That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea.

No it doesn't. It says the UN came up with a different estimate, which the UN wound up not adopting. There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.

> I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.

I am strictly arguing against "a lot" being fake, and specifically that an isolated example is not evidence of "a lot."
by zdragnar | 2026-01-29 18:02:54+00:00
Most US states cap speed limits around schools at 15mph when children are present. There may also be blinking lights above these signs during times that will be likely.

I'm not sure how much of that Waymo's cars take into account, as the law technically takes into account line of sight things that a person could see but Waymo's sensors might not, such as children present on a sidewalk.
by Projectiboga | 2026-01-29 18:03:09+00:00
Here are the three simultanious things targeted in this experment.

Triple inhibition strategy
Pancreatic cancer remains notoriously difficult to treat, with very poor survival rates and limited effective therapies. The new research aims to combat this by targeting RAF1, EGFR family receptors and STAT3 signalling – nodes that are crucial for tumour growth and survival.
by buildsjets | 2026-01-29 18:03:18+00:00
Anecdotally, I've been taking a 5,000 IU vitamin E supplement this winter. Seattle area, indoor desk job, I am a vampire. It does seem to help, I would rate it as going from a C to a B grade. I'd prefer not to use antidepressant medications to fix a problem that for me is mostly caused by living at a different latitude than I grew up in.

Do be aware that not all vitamin E supplements actually contain the dosage that they are labeled at, and that inclues both no-name brands and some big name brands. I'm having trouble finding a good reference on google due to AI and SEO pollution. But I recall Nature Made was labelled accurately and that is what I buy.

My wife on the other hand has struggled with life-long anxiety/depression even when living in Atlanta. For her a fairly low dose of lexapro enables her to live her life like a normal person. We wish we could get her mother to give it a shot for a few weeks, as she now can see a lot of similarities in both their personality traits that were affected by a life of untreated anxiety.

We also have cat that would probably have been put down for fear-biting of people and attacking our mild and mellow dog until we got his aggression under control with kitty prozac. I kid you not, it's a transdermal fluoxetine cream we put in his ear each day. Without the constant anxiety stimulus in the way, his real personality came through and he is actually very sweet. To me at least. Still bites my wife, but not hard anymore, just enough to keep her alert.
by xnx | 2026-01-29 18:03:24+00:00
> they also surely realize how much worse it would be if they tried to deny or downplay it.

Indeed. Waymo is a much more thoughtful and responsible company than Cruise, Uber, or Tesla.

"Cruise admits to criminal cover-up of pedestrian dragging in SF, will pay $500K penalty"
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-fine-criminal-cov...
by Kreutzer | 2026-01-29 18:03:26+00:00
Yeah, I was like your friend, fumbling through the game and texting him to receive some hints on how to proceed further, as I lost patience with the repetitive nature of the game. Still fun though.

>I keep wondering if there's a way to have that baked into the game.

Demon Souls' system of leaving little messages behind for other players is sort of similar.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-29 18:03:56+00:00
> The results demonstrated the therapy not only reduced tumour size but also entirely stopped tumour growth with no evidence of tumour resistance for more than 200 days after treatment.

More details in https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2523039122/suppl... See page 25

In mice, N=12.

1 survived 200 days without cancer and was euthanized for 'ocular ulcers'.

5 survived 50-150 days, without cancer but were euthanized for other health problems

6 survived 50-150 days, and still had a smaller tumor and were euthanized for other health problems

My take away: Interesting, but the press article is overselling the result by a lot.
by QuantumGood | 2026-01-29 18:04:18+00:00
Saffron extract standardized to crocin content (typically 2-3% crocin, dosed at 20-30 mg/day) has an antidepressant effect size around 1.2-1.6 , and unlike pharmaceutical antidepressants, saffron with standardized crocin has no well-documented or commonly reported withdrawal syndrome in clinical studies or reviews.

I personally take:

• 14-21 x Kirkland Signature Krill Oil, 60/30 EPA/DHA (with a lipase supplement)
• 1 x Nootropics Depot High Potency 30mg Saffron Extract (7.5% Crocins and 1% Safranals)
• 2 x DEAL SUPPLEMENT Vitamin D3 5,000 IU + K2
• CalMag with Boron and Zinc
by mikelevins | 2026-01-29 18:04:47+00:00
I've been experimenting with that from a slightly different angle: teaching Claude how to play and referee a pencil-and-paper RPG that I developed over about 20 years starting in the mid 1970s. Claude can't quite do it yet for reasons related to permanence and learning over time, but it can do surprisingly well up until it runs into those problems, and it's possible to help it past some obstacles.

The game is called "Explorers' Guild", or "xg" for short. It's easier for Claude to act as a player than a director (xg's version of a dungeon master or game master), again mainly because of permance and learning issues, but to the extent that I can help it past those issues it's also fairly good at acting as a director. It does require some pretty specific stuff in the system prompt to, for example, avoid confabulating stuff that doesn't fit the world or the scenario.

But to really build a version of xg on Claude it needs better ways to remember and improve what it has learned about playing the game, and what it has learned about a specific group of players in a specific scenario as it develops over time.
by sjhuda | 2026-01-29 18:04:59+00:00
It's based on the Centre for Cities report: "How productive are the UK's big cities?" which mentions Liverpool's, Leed's and Manchester's productivity growth and The State of London Report 2025 which reports London's productivity decline

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/how-productive-a...

https://data.london.gov.uk/blog/the-state-of-london-report-2...
by ge96 | 2026-01-29 18:05:21+00:00
A side/tangent note, I wonder if it says something about myself/character, I choose the faster print than the surface finish, so I'll have this rough surface finish due to the supports. But it goes from 20hrs+ to 13.5hrs so it's like I'll take the faster option. What I printed was a shell with internal screw mounts, it was a big piece about 5.5x4x2.5" with 20% infill, regular temp/speed and the structure support for overhang.
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-29 18:05:23+00:00
I'd see Chinese RAM manufacturers like CXMT filling the void left in the market for consumer-grade RAM modules, I appreciate they face challenges (like lack of access to cutting edge EUV machines), but the RAM just needs to be fast enough and affordable enough for the average user for these companies to make significant inroads into the market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-29 18:05:36+00:00
something's fucking my hydro balance. i've done my fair share of psychedelics, and i have to keep drinking water on shrooms too. i dont know, something highly idiomatic haha. i also sweat more in other places, but my feet are the moistest. right now i just change socks often, it's hardly a debilitating side effect...
by Sugimot0 | 2026-01-29 18:05:49+00:00
Honestly I've noticed this with political content on Instagram. Random bugs occur where I can't post, or can't comment or repost, and it's usually posts that aren't in line with US foreign policy on Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, etc. I'll go about fine looking at normal stuff, memes, etc but whenever some big geopolitical event occurs is usually when I hit those bugs on IG. I probably experienced more bugs post 10/7 then my entire history using the app prior. Also had lots of posts removed that I contested and won later but it doesn't matter if the moments already passed and that wave of information was repressed on the algorithm.
by mlyle | 2026-01-29 18:06:08+00:00
Many states in the US have the Basic Speed Law, e.g. California:

> No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.

The speed limit isn't supposed to be a carte blanche to drive at that speed no matter what; the basic speed law is supposed to "win." In practice, enforcement is a lot more clear cut at the posted speed limit and officers don't want to write tickets that are hard to argue in court.
by mdemare | 2026-01-29 18:06:27+00:00
No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.

The equations are:
nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.

In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.

Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.
by mannyv | 2026-01-29 18:07:06+00:00
Lot of data is "fake."

I remember my political economy prof talking about when he was in the Prime Minister's office of some African country and they were "estimating" the GDP numbers for the OECD.

Collecting statistics is hard when your basic systems don't function well and there are plenty of incentives for "optimistic projections." And in many countries statistics collection doesn't occur or are inaccurate because cheating is rampant. I mean, why tell the government your income when they're just going to tax you on it?

You can see that in the US' import values. Everyone who imports knows that you can ask the shipper to fudge the invoiced amounts so the importer pays less in customs fees/taxes. The assumption by the statistics people is that it all "averages out." But they have no way to prove that assumption. And it's well known that transfer pricing is a total fantasy.

So - lots of numbers are fake. In the West fewer numbers are fake, probably.
by bdbdbdb | 2026-01-29 18:07:07+00:00
It's very impressive tech but subject to the same limitations as other generative AI: Inconsistency, inaccurate physics, limited time, lag, massively expensive computation.

You COULD create a sailing sim but after ten minutes you might be walking on water, or in the bath, and it would use more power than a small ferry.

There's no way this tech can run on a PS5 or anything close to it.
by gpm | 2026-01-29 18:07:35+00:00
I upvoted, but

> Edit: Before you downvote, can you explain how the model could degrade WITHOUT changes to the prompts?

The article actually links to this fine postmortem by anthropic that demonstrates one way this is possible - software bugs affecting inference: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

Another way this is possible is the model reacting to "stimuli", e.g. the hypothesis at the end of 2023 that the (then current) ChatGPT was getting lazy because it was finding out the date was in december and it associated winter with shorter lazier responses.

A third way this is possible is the actual conspiracy version - Anthropic might make changes to make inference cheaper at the expense of the quality of the responses. E.g. quantizing weights further or certain changes to the sampling procedure.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-29 18:07:58+00:00
> I don't think they'd be that stupid.

We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
by mrandish | 2026-01-29 18:08:02+00:00
> people typically support foundations

While I agree with the general point that non-profit donors have a legitimate interest in the use of funds, in the particular case of the Mozilla Foundation, I believe the vast majority of that money is from placement fees Google paid to be the default search engine in Firefox. As the pay-for-placement market has evolved and Firefox's browser share has fallen, this income has also fallen dramatically.

On the general point about non-profit donations, legally non-profit's use of funds are governed by their board of directors and charter, which often are not constrained in ways donors may assume, hence the need for due diligence prior to giving.
by jakewins | 2026-01-29 18:08:04+00:00
Aye, and to always look for feet under and by the front wheel of vehicles like that.

Stopped buses similarly, people get off the bus, whip around the front of them and straight into the streets, so many times I’ve spotted someone’s feet under the front before they come around and into the street.

Not to take away from Waymo here, agree with thread sentiment that they seem to have acted exemplary
Ask HN: Share your favorite digital bookshelves
by surprisetalk | 2026-01-29 18:08:40+00:00
I want to create a site like http://blogs.hn but for booklists and reviews!

Please share any personal book directories that you curate or follow :)

Random examples:

• https://encapsulate.me/reading

• https://tavro.se/explore/reading.html

• https://sive.rs/book

• https://jordangonen.com/bookshelf

• https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
by wkusnierczyk | 2026-01-29 18:09:08+00:00
Hello,

I'd like to share a newly published module implementing an MCP SDK for the Raku (aka Perl6) programming language.

Source code: https://github.com/wkusnierczyk/raku-mcp-sdk
Installation: `zef install MCP`

The SDK lets you build MCP servers and clients in Raku. A server exposes tools, resources, and prompts that AI applications can discover and use.

The implementation covers the full MCP spec (2025-11-25) including Streamable HTTP transport, OAuth 2.1, sampling, elicitation, and async tasks. Raku's concurrency primitives (Promises, Supplies) and introspection made it a natural fit for the protocol's async, event-driven architecture.

The repo's `README.md` file provides details about the implementation, MCP specification coverage, usage examples, and much more.

Feedback and contributions are much welcome.

Any questions or comments, just let me know!
Best, Wacek
by bjt | 2026-01-29 18:09:50+00:00
From the Patreon FAQ:

> Can I opt out of the App Store Fee?

> For U.S. fans, there’s still a way to avoid Apple’s fee. When signing up in the iOS app, they can choose web checkout instead of Apple’s in-app purchase system. Apple’s rules require that any paid content shown in the iOS app is also available to purchase through Apple’s in-app system.

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/28801582599181...
by mlyle | 2026-01-29 18:09:57+00:00
> How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?

How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.

> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.

It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.

I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"
by samus | 2026-01-29 18:10:13+00:00
Those rely on a strong centralized government that can somehow penalize people for not keeping records up to date. Not necessarily by direct checks, but maybe via inconveniences caused by inaccuracies. They are probably using other data (aggregate statistics from health system, tax records, social services) to conduct cross checks.

A few years back in Austria there was a small scandal as a newly introduced government app to notify about changing residence was used by a member of parliament to declare they moved into the Parliament.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-29 18:10:25+00:00
Our neighborhood park maintenance volunteers are 80% old ladies in their 70s and 80s. Without things to do, body and mind atrophies. While it’s true that increasing number of people are having to work longer than they need to, a lot of them don’t do it out of necessity and is probably the reason why they’re still alive and kicking at that age.
by rekabis | 2026-01-29 18:10:33+00:00
Also keep in mind that it’s not just RAM that can have issues, but also the slots it sits in.

I once had a server-grade workstation (dual-socket AMD Athlon MP, 8 slots with 4Gb ECC REG apiece). Each piece of RAM tested perfectly OK by itself in the default primary slot, but failed consistently in one secondary slot and intermittently in another. The slot hardware (pins) were fine, but something elsewhere in the motherboard had broke.

Which is why you also test each slot with a known good stick of RAM, just to be absolutely sure.
by sparcpile | 2026-01-29 18:10:40+00:00
OpenAI and Anthropic are bleeding money and both need hundreds of billions of dollars in the next couple of years to break even.
Oracle is highly overleveraged and I am hoping that the bubble takes them out.
You can find the gory details at Ed Zitron's blog.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts...
by AutoJanitor | 2026-01-29 18:11:06+00:00
Claude Code running natively on Mac OS X Leopard (2007) – no proxy

I built a custom JavaScript runtime (QuickJS + mbedTLS) that lets Anthropic's Claude Code CLI run natively on a 2003 Power Mac G5 Dual running Mac OS X
Leopard 10.5.

The hard part: Leopard ships with OpenSSL 0.9.7, which tops out at TLS 1.0. The Anthropic API requires TLS 1.2. For 18 years the answer has been
"upgrade" or "use a proxy." Instead I compiled mbedTLS directly into the JS runtime, bypassing the OS crypto stack entirely. The G5 negotiates TLS 1.2
handshakes itself — no relay, no intermediary machine.

It's not just a chat client. The full tool execution loop works: Claude reads files, writes code, runs shell commands, greps through source trees — all
executing on big-endian PowerPC hardware. The agentic coding workflow runs on a machine from 2003 talking to a frontier AI model in 2026.

The runtime (node_ppc) is QuickJS for ES2020 JavaScript + mbedTLS 2.28 for TLS 1.2, compiled with GCC 10 on the G5 itself. Total binary is about 1MB. The
CLI is a single 972-line JS file.

Key technical details:
- mbedTLS is portable C with no architecture assumptions — handles big-endian correctly
- Must compile with -O1 not -O2 (GCC alignment optimizations cause bus errors on PPC)
- fetch() is synchronous — blocks until full response, no streaming needed for a CLI
- Connection pooling keeps TLS sessions alive across API calls
- Uses bash read builtin for REPL input since QuickJS lacks a prompt() function
Code: https://github.com/Scottcjn/node-ppc
Architecture doc: https://github.com/Scottcjn/node-ppc/blob/main/CLAUDE_G5_ARCHITECTURE.md