MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why does macOS still lack focus stealing prevention in 2025?
by joshuak | 2026-01-08 23:21:33+00:00
Been dealing with this forever and finally went down the rabbit hole to understand it properly.

The issue: macOS lets any app steal your keyboard focus whenever it wants. Technically, apps just call [NSApp activateIgnoringOtherApps:YES] and boom - your keystrokes are going somewhere else.

Why I care:
- I've typed passwords into the wrong window more than once
- Constant interruptions kill flow
- VoiceOver users have it way worse - they lose their whole navigation context

Here's the frustrating part: this has been solved everywhere else for ages. Windows added ForegroundLockTimeout back in XP (2001). X11 window managers have had this forever. GNOME and KDE have had settings for it for decades. There's literally a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing

Jeff Atwood nailed it back in 2007: "Stealing focus from the user is never acceptable."

I've tried everything - defaults write tricks, Hammerspoon scripts, random third-party apps. Nothing works reliably.

All we need is one checkbox in System Settings. Apps that want attention bounce in the Dock instead of hijacking your keyboard. That's it.

The accessibility angle is what gets me - Apple talks a big game about accessibility, but this is a real gap. What's a 2-second annoyance for me is a 30+ second disruption for screen reader users.

Filed feedback (FB21568202). Curious if anyone's found workarounds that actually stick.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-08 23:21:49+00:00
That article says "at least 19 protesters and one member of the security forces have been killed", although that was as of a few days ago.

The numbers you quoted are from the end of the article, which is about the previous demonstrations in 2022.

(In fairness, it's confusing because BBC News articles put almost every sentence into its own paragraph, which I think is intended to help low literacy people read them. But it does make it hard to follow the connections between sentences that really ought to be together in a paragraph, like in this case.)
by alphadatavault | 2026-01-08 23:22:00+00:00
Phage lambda is essentially the "Hello World" of molecular biology. The fact that a "viral micro-manager" like PreS remained hidden in such a heavily sequenced and scrutinized organism is a great reminder of how much "dark matter" there is in the non-coding regions of viral genomes.

We often think of viral infection as a blunt-force destruction of the host, but this shows it's much more of a delicate, timed choreography. Upregulating the host's DnaN via RNA folding rather than just killing the host immediately is a clever survival strategy that we could potentially co-opt for more stable bioreactors.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-08 23:22:13+00:00
After raising $125 million Rampart failed with their much-hyped non-viral gene therapy. This is a big deal because non-viral gene therapy has been pitched as the next big thing (cheaper, safer than AAV, etc), yet this is the fourth well-funded non-viral gene therapy company (SalioGen $135 mil, Intergalactic $100 mil, Generation Bio $235mil) to fail in the last couple of years. Commercial reality continues to hit hard for these pre-clinical biotechs.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-01-08 23:22:24+00:00
I think the point is that a subjective experience, without accompanying data, is useless for making any factual claims wrt both ghosts and reported productivity-boosts from LLM usage.

Getting photos of ghosts is one thing, but productivity increases are omething that we should be able to quantify at some level to demonstrate the efficacy of these tools.

That's a silly thing to request from random people in the comments of an HN thread though ha
by protocolture | 2026-01-08 23:22:32+00:00
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?

Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.

But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
by m463 | 2026-01-08 23:22:52+00:00
I would suggest you check your eyes as well.

Age progressively adds deposits in the lenses in your eyes, and at some point cataract surgery replaces the lens with a clear one.

Thing is, these deposits work like a dirty windshield in sunlight - you can't see because of the glare. The glare is just off-axis light hitting a surface and scattering - it illuminates the entire surface reducing contrast.

The more deposits and/or the brighter the light, the more it behaves like an completely fogged windshield.

(there is also another kind of glare that affects young eyes - a very bright point of light can cause pain in the retina where it focuses)
by sophacles | 2026-01-08 23:23:12+00:00
It would be massively simplified.

Simple isn't always good.

By analogy: i could massively simplify google maps direction algorithm by getting rid of all that annoying and unnecessary traffic information, annoyingly complex labels about speed limits and lane count, and all the data points about stop signs, traffic lights, and so on. Its just a path-finding algorithm after all and all that extra info just makes for more computation and complexity. Who cares if it mean all the traffic for a major metro goes across a 1-lane bridge and leaves all the other roads empty.... its the shortest path, what could go wrong?
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-08 23:23:15+00:00
> "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product, Kevin Terwilliger says with a smile. "So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC."

> "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

He's talking about marketing. They're still gonna shove it into anything and everything they can. They just aren't gonna tell you about it.
Show HN: TrustTune Network – open-source music player with quality-ranked search
by fcavalcantirj | 2026-01-08 23:24:46+00:00
Open source desktop music player with quality-ranked search and dual download modes (torrents + YouTube).
Current features (Phase 0.5):
Quality-ranked search (DSD > FLAC 24-bit > FLAC > MP3 320)
Dual downloads: high-quality torrents or quick YouTube conversion
Built-in player and library organization
Cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Linux
Tech stack: Python (FastAPI/gRPC), Flutter, Transmission daemon (bundled).
Vision: Permanent storage on Arweave ("pressing") for 200-year libraries with cryptographic quality verification and transparent artist payouts (70-85%) — planned for Phase 2, 2026, not implemented yet.
GitHub: https://github.com/trust-tune-net/karma-player
Architecture: See white paper on site
MIT licensed. Feedback welcome.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-08 23:25:21+00:00
This is at the center of a friction point in embedded rust: most of the OSS ecosystem has shifted to this framework, and as a result, is incompatible with, or is high friction if you don't want to make your firmware and control flow Async. This is notable because Rust embedded is nascent and small, so I think splitting the ecosystem along with Async is not ideal. It's also confused some people new to embedded: I regularly hear this dichotomy: "Async vs blocking"; the assumption being if you are not using Embassy, your code blocks the CPU when waiting for I/O, etc.

If you enjoy Async PC rust programming, I think this will be a good starting point. I like how it has unified hardware access to different MCUs, and its hardware support for STM32, for example, is a step up from the initial generation of Trait-based HALs. I seem to be the odd one out as an embedded rust programmer (Personally and professionally) for whom Async is not my cup of tea.
Show HN: Research-Backed Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Development
by slogansand | 2026-01-08 23:25:22+00:00
Hey HN, author here.
Loki Mode orchestrates specialized AI agents to take a PRD to deployed product with zero human intervention. But what I'm most proud of is the research foundation - we implemented virtually every scientifically proven pattern from the 2025-2026 AI agent literature.
From Anthropic:

Constitutional AI self-critique against principles
Building Effective Agents evaluator-optimizer pattern
Claude Code Best Practices explore-plan-code workflow
Visible Extended Thinking (think, think hard, ultrathink levels)
Effective Harnesses one-feature-at-a-time pattern

From DeepMind:

SIMA 2 self-improvement loops
Gemini Robotics hierarchical reasoning (planner + executor)
Scalable AI Safety debate-based verification

From OpenAI:

Agents SDK tracing, guardrails, tripwires
Deep Research adaptive planning with backtracking
AGENTS.md standardized instructions

From Academic Research:

CONSENSAGENT (ACL 2025): Blind review + Devil's Advocate when unanimous. 30% false positive reduction.
GoalAct: Global planning → skill decomposition → local execution. 12%+ success rate improvement.
A-Mem: Zettelkasten-style memory linking for episodic→semantic consolidation.
Multi-Agent Reflexion: Structured debate (Implementer → Skeptic → Advocate → Synthesizer).
Iter-VF: Verify answer only, not reasoning chain. Prevents context overflow.

From Industry:

NVIDIA ToolOrchestra: Three-reward signal (outcome/efficiency/preference), dynamic agent selection
AWS Bedrock: Routing mode for simple tasks, supervisor mode for complex
Boris Cherny's self-verification loop (2-3x quality improvement)
Simon Willison's sub-agents for context isolation

From HN discussions:

"Zero companies without human in the loop" → confidence-based escalation
Context curation beats automatic RAG
Fresh contexts yield better results
LLM-as-judge has shared blind spots → deterministic validation

The full acknowledgements with links to every paper/resource: https://github.com/asklokesh/claudeskill-loki-mode/blob/main...
Run: claude --dangerously-skip-permissions then "Loki Mode with PRD at path/to/prd"
Happy to discuss any of the research or architecture decisions.
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-08 23:25:30+00:00
> Zero-shot doesn't make sense anyway, as how would the model know what voice it should sound like (unless it's a celebrity voice or similar included in the training data where it's enough to specify a name).

It makes perfect sense; you are simply confusing training samples with inference context. "Zero-shot" refers to zero gradient updates (retraining) required to handle a new class. It does not mean "zero input information."

> how would the model know what voice it should sound like

It uses the reference audio just like a text based model uses a prompt.

> unless it's a celebrity voice or similar included in the training data where it's enough to specify a name

If the voice is in the training data, that is literally the opposite of zero-shot. The entire point of zero-shot is that the model has never encountered the speaker before.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-08 23:26:56+00:00
The only involvement Israel or any nation should have here is arming or protecting the protesters. Anything beyond that would end in disaster. And by protecting protesters, I mean granting them asylum if they need it, not sending in troops.

The last thing we need is Israel or any other nation deciding they want to be the new rulers of Iran. That will work out just as well as the US's involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq.
by alphadatavault | 2026-01-08 23:27:00+00:00
This is a perfect example of the tension between Apple’s HIG (which explicitly discourages focus stealing) and the actual implementation of AppKit. activateIgnoringOtherApps:YES is effectively a "selfish" API—it assumes the developer's intent is more important than the user's current context.

The fact that we have to rely on Hammerspoon or defaults write hacks in 2026 is a testament to the "black box" nature of WindowServer. It’s one of the few areas where macOS feels significantly less mature than Linux/X11, where "Focus Stealing Prevention" has been a standard toggle for decades.
by TehCorwiz | 2026-01-08 23:27:29+00:00
How about reference and textbooks? Latest law books, oops you didn’t actually understand that law because it changed. How about latest books on political theory and current events?

Libraries democratize knowledge and ensure that everyone has access. It’s not purely entertainment, libraries literally save lives and there are efforts in this country to erode them, vilify them, and defund them.
by al_borland | 2026-01-08 23:27:31+00:00
I went through a phase of consuming a bunch of productivity and personal development books. After a while I came to realize, like most others, that they all pretty much say the same things. I imagine this niche has a constant supply of new customers who buy a bunch of stuff, then move on. I’ve moved on to begin exploring fiction, which I’ve always avoided in the past.

The tech tools books seemed dead before AI. A former co-worker of mine bought a book on Go, because that was what he had done for the last 30 years when looking to learn a language. He quickly found out that the resources online were better and more up to date, leaving his book to collect dust. I think the same would be true for most books on AI, unless it’s foundational text.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 23:28:10+00:00
Kashmir has such a bloody history with its kashmiri pandits and wars and even recent events that really shock its nation.

Kashmir has been the most unstable part of India and Article 370 although with flaws wanted to give Kashmir the stability it deserves but Kashmir had even its own flags and state etc. and thats why it got really messy and why the internet used to be shut down

Kashmir still requires people to specifically get a sim just for Kashmir. But you can get any large carrier to do such. There are even ways of generating e-sim and such, but there is genuinely lots of concerns and complaints in doing so and its very time consuming in a way but internet access has stabilized for the most part, you just require a special sim verification again to do such or perhaps buying a new sim specifically for kashmir but you can port the number as well but as I said, its really time consuming but possible to even do this without entering kashmir itself
by lmeyerov | 2026-01-08 23:28:21+00:00
yep! So all repos get a (.gitignore'd) folder of `plans/<task>/plan.md` work histories . That ends up being quite helpful in practice: calculating billable hours of work, forking/auditing/retrying, easier replanning, etc. At the same time, I rather be with-the-grain of the agentic coder's native systems for plans + todos, eg, alignment with the models & prompts. We've been doing this way b/c we find the native to be weaker than what these achieve, and to hard to add these kind of things to them.

RE:Other note, yes, we have 2 basic goals:

1. Louie to make graphs / graphistry easier. Especially when connected to operational databases (splunk, kusto, elastic, big query, ...). V1 was generating graphistry viz & GFQL queries. We're now working on louie inside of graphistry, for more dynamic control of the visual analysis environment ("filter to X and color Y as Z"), and as you say, to go straight to the answer too ("what's going on with account/topic X"). We spent years trying to bring jupyter notebooks etc to operational teams as a way to get graph insights to their various data, and while good for a few "data 1%'ers", too hard for most, and Louie has been a chance to rethink that.

2. Louie has been seeing wider market interest beyond graph, basically "AI that investigates" across those operational DBs (& live systems). You can think of it as vibe coding is code-oriented, while louie is vibe investigating that is more data-oriented. Ex: Native plans don't think in unit tests but cross-validation, and instead of grepping 1,000 files, we get back a dataframe of 1M query results and pass that between the agents for localized agentic retrieval on that vs rehammering db. The CCC talk gives a feel for this in the interactive setting.
by graemefawcett | 2026-01-08 23:28:27+00:00
We propose SyneState: a communication prosthetic built on DeepSeek's Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) architecture. By parameterizing cross-channel mixing as a doubly-stochastic matrix constrained to the Birkhoff polytope, we can: (1) induce machine synesthesia—stable, tunable cross-modal binding between latent streams; (2) learn personalized binding matrices that approximate individual cognitive architectures; and (3) translate between compression levels—expanding high-compression encodings into explicit single-channel representations and vice versa.

For mHC implementers, SyneState is a direct application of manifold-constrained mixing to cross-modal binding. For cognitive science and clinical researchers, it offers a candidate prosthetic for the double-empathy problem: bridging communication gaps not by "fixing" either party, but by learning the translation between different cognitive compression schemes.

All required components—multi-stream residuals, Sinkhorn projection, multimodal attention heads—exist in production stacks today. This is integration work, not research.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 23:30:03+00:00
> Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.

In fact, Social medias can make the co-ordination of protests and other information rather quickly. Its one of the few benefits of social medias. Social media with all its flaws still helps protests
by NikolaNovak | 2026-01-08 23:30:22+00:00
That is a lot less binary than angry evil people would like to portray.

If we say there are ~~11 million under documented immigrants, there are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions that e.g. Were legal until the orange orangutan decided otherwise. There are people under ambiguous laws and people in tricky cases.

This is the equivalent to saying everybody who went 57mph in 55mph zone is a criminal and should be executed.

Life has nuance.
by Alupis | 2026-01-08 23:30:34+00:00
Unfortunately we've seen protests like this before in Iran (perhaps not this widespread, however).

Shouting in the streets won't end the regime. The regime will either just wait it out, or clamp down with violence. The people will need to take more direct action if they hope for any change to come out of this - which unfortunately likely means more death.

Without weapons, the people of Iran will have a difficult time overthrowing the regime. This may highlight to some folks abroad the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment, and an armed civilian population - things we take for granted in the US, and some wish to abolish.

It's a nasty, depressing situation. The regime needs to end. The people of Iran, and the people of the world will be far better off without this regime.

I hope the best for the people of Iran.
by fmeyer | 2026-01-08 23:30:34+00:00
My notes are never long-form, and I envy people whose notes look publication-ready. I think in lists and mnemonics.

My work involves so much context-switching that I ended up building a weird system just to keep continuity. It’s basically an outliner inspired by MaxThink for DOS. At its core, it’s text plus structure: a tree you can revisit non-sequentially, with time anchors when they matter. It helps me survive interruptions and gaps without losing decisions, context, or long-running threads, and it helps me correlate my digital notes with my paper notebooks.

To support the “thinking” part, it also has some goodies for shuffling, sorting, splitting, and joining lists in place to help with ideation. I’m working on the fourth incarnation now.

I recorded a demo a few months ago to share with a friend. It’s not my best recording because I was recovering from hand surgery so typing was weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9HX3G69Xdo

I may open-source it once I’ve worked the bugs out.
by teycirb | 2026-01-08 23:30:55+00:00
Built this after realizing traditional encryption fails under physical coercion ($5 wrench attack).

Key features:
- 3-layer architecture: decoy/hidden/panic
- Cryptographically indistinguishable layers (like VeraCrypt hidden volumes)
- Client-side XChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption
- IPFS decentralized storage
- RAM-only key storage (forensics-resistant)
- 100% free, open source

Real use cases: journalists protecting sources, activists in authoritarian regimes, crypto holders preventing theft.

Tech stack: Next.js 15, Cloudflare Pages/D1, @noble/ciphers, IPFS (Pinata/Filebase)
by strken | 2026-01-08 23:31:30+00:00
It's just beef. I go to the supermarket and buy steaks and then I cook them. Sometimes they're finished on grain if the farmer didn't have enough feed, and otherwise they're finished on grass or silage or hay.

I don't understand why you would write something like that in response to a pretty normal discussion. The whole point was that I don't care what feed the beef was finished on.
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-08 23:31:48+00:00
> So if you get your target to record (say) 1 hour of audio, that's a one-shot.

No, that would still be zero shot. Providing inference-time context (in this case, audio) is no different than giving a prompt to an LLM. Think of it as analogous to an AGENTS.md included in a prompt. You're not retraining the model, you're simply putting the rest of the prompt into context.

If you actually stopped and fine-tuned the model weights on that single clip, that would be one-shot learning.
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-08 23:32:21+00:00
Providing inference-time context (in this case, audio) is no different than giving a prompt to an LLM. Think of it as analogous to an AGENTS.md included in a prompt. You're not retraining the model, you're simply putting the rest of the prompt into context.

If you actually stopped and fine-tuned the model weights on that single clip, that would be one-shot learning.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-08 23:33:22+00:00
> when stores complete they become visible to all other cores and all cores agree on the exact same list of completed stores.

Not that they agree on what completed but on the order they completed in. That is the "o" in TSO. You inadvertently proved my point.

.

> so I'd say those get to be unspecified.

* CRASH *

You left something unspecified that mattered. Ordering of accesses to mappings with differing permissions matters, and whether they are seen in-program-order or not by other cores will break x86 emulators (main use cases for TSO).

.

That's the point here :) This is the usual "i am sure we can all agree what X means" argument - it does not work when it comes to precise things like memory models.
by w-m | 2026-01-08 23:33:53+00:00
The password and pwbuf arrays are declared one right after the other. Will they appear consecutive in memory, i.e. will you overwrite pwbuf when writing past password?

If so, could you type the same password that’s exactly 100 bytes twice and then hit enter to gain root? With only clobbering one additional byte, of ttybuf?

Edit: no, silly, password is overwritten with its hash before the comparison.