MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by as1mov | 2026-01-26 10:42:54+00:00
> There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security

That's only one side of it. Flash was the precursor to the indie/mobile gamedev industry we have today (Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games), before smartphones become ubiquitous. Not to mention some rather creative websites, albeit at the cost of accessibility .

Flash's only fault was it's creators were gobbled up by Adobe, who left it in the shitter and ignored the complaints people had about it's security issues.
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 10:43:12+00:00
> LLMs are actually quite neutral and don't have preferences, wants, or needs.

Yeah they do. Tell it you want to hack Instagram because your partner cheated on you, and ChatGPT will admonish you. Request that you're building a present for Valentines day for your partner and you want a chrome extension that runs on instagram.com; word it just right, and it'll oblige.
by Arnt | 2026-01-26 10:44:48+00:00
When I had a job at a power plant near where I live, one of the engineers there pointed at the big chimneys and said (I translate:) "what comes out of those chimneys is cleaner than the air around us". They filter out everything except CO₂ with good efficiency and have big, heavy, expensive machinery and engineers onside 24/7 to monitor that it works.

A 5kg motor, optimised for portability, isn't going to be like that.
by ljm | 2026-01-26 10:44:51+00:00
If I had a compact Linux laptop for work rather than a MacBook I'd be raw dogging NixOS already rather than using nix-darwin. There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.

The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.

Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.

All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 10:45:23+00:00
Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime.

But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
by xiaodong112400 | 2026-01-26 10:45:34+00:00
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by alibarber | 2026-01-26 10:45:47+00:00
No I am absolutely not saying that.

I am saying that there is evidence that the amount of media (and I am including X/Twitter and other social media) attention given to various causes around the world is actively manipulated. This is in response to a comment querying the perceived disparity in media coverage of events. Not that these events are or are not occurring or a more 'worthy' cause than one another.

I very much understand the history around Scottish independence, but unfortunately it will take me a lot of convincing to genuinely believe that twitter accounts in Iran sharing news that Balmoral castle has been taken over by protestors [1] are well meaning.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260117184736/https://www.teleg...
by padolsey | 2026-01-26 10:46:50+00:00
Agree! And this is why it is a bad idea IMHO for agents to sit at the abstraction layer of browser or below (OS). Even at the browser-addon level it's dangerous. It runs with the user’s authority across contexts and erodes zero-trust by becoming a confused deputy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem
by c0balt | 2026-01-26 10:47:43+00:00
Depends on the license and the specific piece of software. Redistribution of commercial software is may be restricted or require explicit approval.

You generally still also have to abide by license obligations for OSS too, e. G., GPL.

To be specific for the exampls, Nvidia has historically been quite restrictive (only on approval) here. Firmware has only recently been opened up a bit and drivers continue to be an issue iirc.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-26 10:47:47+00:00
> An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further.

I agree that it does not need to do more than inform you - but that doesn't mean it won't do more. Please show me a single advertisement for a game that doesn't use bombastic language, show highly selective graphics, or appeal to a sense of nostalgia. I for one haven't seen one, even ones for the niche indie games I respect the most. Sure, not all commercials are equally deceitful, but they are all meant to be persuasive more than informative.
by imtringued | 2026-01-26 10:47:52+00:00
This patch in particular is about implementation differences between Microsoft's XML implementation and libxml2 and the emulation of Internet Explorer quirks. [0], [1]

>And how much of it is simply better emulating the Windows API in general?

It depends on your definition of "Windows API". If you think Internet Explorer is part of the "Windows API", then this patch is 100% about better emulating the "Windows API".

>How much of these sorts of patches are specifically checking if a certain application is running, and then changing behavior to match what that application expects?

Probably near zero, because there is not much point in doing so. If you need to get a specific application to run on Wine that doesn't work out of the box, you're expected to follow an application specific recipe (installing particular versions of Windows libraries or selecting the version of Windows to be compatible with) rather than Wine itself special casing application support. There were plenty of ways to get Photoshop running on Wine in the past, the practical problem was that they were too reliant on already having a full Windows installation, which defeats the point of using Wine.

[0] https://github.com/PhialsBasement/wine-adobe-installers/comm...

[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine-staging/-/commit/8090aa9...
by theothertimcook | 2026-01-26 10:48:22+00:00
I suspect its something like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu....

The windows thing is very interesting but samsung and motorola have fairly polished desktop frontends and are available with much snapoier hardwear.

I believe somenifbthe newer pixels are starting to verge on useable docked also.
Tell HN: Aden, A YC company, is growth hacking by luring devs with paid work
by theblazehen | 2026-01-26 10:49:14+00:00
I received the following message on YC's workatastartup program

> Looking to Hire Contributors for an Open-Source Project

> Hi [Name], I just reviewed your experience and background, and I think you might be a good fit for our open-source project (github.com/adenhq/hive). It’s a development platform for self-evolving AI agents that run business processes autonomously.

> If you’re interested, please star, fork, and watch the repo, and please create issues and submit pull requests. We’ll review your contributions and follow up with a contract. We pay $25–$55/hour, paid weekly.

> Best,

> Vincent

Today I saw their repo on GitHub's trending repositories page. I checked their star history, and the repo star count more than doubled in the past day.

https://www.star-history.com/#adenhq/hive&type=date&legend=top-left
by netsharc | 2026-01-26 10:49:28+00:00
But defending the arrest of the man with "Plasticine Action" t-shirt as a mistake (only realized after a "few" hours, god damn!), is god damn ridiculous.

About 2 decades ago I read an article about how bureucracies don't even allow for humor any more, e.g. even clearly joking about having a bomb in the airport is now taboo. Something about rigid inhumane inflexible rules, in my vague memory of that article.

Where airport security has to examine babies for terrorist motives, because it's written in the rules, fuck human reasoning!

Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 10:50:08+00:00
I mean it's still a Virtual Private network between you and the VPS (which is rented by VPS provider)

So technically if you are from UK, they might come at your VPS provider if they find that you use them as a VPN (law's kinda vague from what I can gather)

Your VPS provider wouldn't really protect your privacy for 4 $ so a snitch.

My point which fucking scares me if I were a UK citizen is that they just have to do it once to scare you to your guts.

Maybe I am paranoid but I couldn't see this shit happen 2-3 years ago & UK is atleast moving at a very dystopian rate and I am not sure if other countries might move in similar direction too if UK experiment turns out to be helpful to the people in power or helps in curbing out protests/real change in any capacity.

I know the law hasn't passed but chances are unless osmething very unlikley happens, its gonna get passed

What's up with democracies trying to imprison their own citizens in such sense, whether digitally or in person. Some countries feel like prisons rather than free land now.

These were the best benefits of democracies over authoritarianism.

I genuinely question with such points if democracy actually just becomes a dual party authoritarianism. Sure people vote but just scare them for real change just once. If a person speaks online, even if they use a VPN, just catch one extreme and scare the moderates from even ever saying something different than what govt says

Say it with me, 2+2=5 (1984 reference)
by DhirajKadam27 | 2026-01-26 10:51:16+00:00
Good questions.

The .txt file is never executed directly. We pass the text to our system, generate backend code in PHP from it, and save that as a separate file. When someone calls the API, they’re actually hitting the generated .php endpoint behind the scenes, not the text file.

Right now this is a beta, so security hardening is still in progress. The plan is to run generated APIs in a restricted environment, isolate them from the main system, and limit filesystem and external operations. Those guardrails aren’t fully in place yet.

At the moment, this is best suited for simple prototypes, internal tools, and basic APIs. We’re intentionally starting there and pushing the limits gradually as we tighten security and execution boundaries, with the long-term goal of supporting more serious and eventually enterprise-level use cases.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-26 10:51:25+00:00
> Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file?

Yes. But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time. Mullvad have a specific policy relating to what is stored and retention time (I am not affiliated with Mullvad, I just use their service).

https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy#payments

> Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.

Or you can use Tor. I will just use a VPN that lets me pay with Monero or some other crypto currency. None of this will stop savvy people.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 10:51:55+00:00
Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1]

Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and sorta gets the product thing. But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.

[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.
by namibj | 2026-01-26 10:52:13+00:00
Do you have any opinions on the use of frequency-domain/harmonics-based SPICE for high-frequency (relative to the transition frequency of the power and their pre-amp devices involved) fixed-frequency converters, particularly the resonant kinds?

At some point the gate signals become digital pre-distortion for the pre-amps ("gate drivers") and come out of a wave table like synthesizer, and sure, system-level behavior still matters...
Zero-Knowledge Encrypted Notebook
by thesecurenote | 2026-01-26 10:52:53+00:00
Every note app can read your notes. All of them. They have to, that's how sync works. But what if you don't want that? What if you want notes that are actually private? That's why we built TheSecureNote. When you write something, it gets encrypted in your browser before it ever leaves your device. Your password never touches our servers. We never see what you write. If you forget your password, we can't help you recover it. Not because we're being difficult, but because we literally can't. Your notes are encrypted with a key that only exists in your browser. Nobody can read them without your password. Not us, not hackers, not governments. You pick a username, start writing, and that's it. No email required. No account setup. No tracking pixels. Free forever at thesecurenote.com/yourname. Want a custom domain? Pay once, own it forever. No subscriptions.

Try here: https://thesecurenote.com
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-26 10:53:03+00:00
It's useful to rewind and see the tests people put in place before the thing happened.

Like this VOX article surveying experts on fascism in 2015 and then revisiting in 2020:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fas...

> But there is still no state management of the economy here (as there was to a degree in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). Trump is content to aid business by reducing government protections of the environment and of workers … and his economic policy is mainly just to let businessmen do what they want.

Well, we can check that one off the list with 2024 hindsight.

>He’s never actually done a Putin and tried to make himself a permanent president, let alone suggest any coherent plan for overthrowing the constitutional system. And I don’t even think that’s in his mind

And another one bites the dust.

Note that all the scholars who get very technical on what they want to call Fascist all compare him to Marcos, Erdogan, Milosovic. That's still not a good review.
by dodos | 2026-01-26 10:53:24+00:00
Everytime I upload a package with altool, it makes a copy of the package somewhere in /var/folders. Luckily rebooting the computer cleans this up so it's not the issue you are running into, but if I'm not careful about rebooting the systems, our CI/CD stops working until I get physical access to the machines for a reboot.
by nindalf | 2026-01-26 10:53:28+00:00
Those websites aren't easy to update. I have a website of my own too, and even though I've set it up to be as painless as possible, it's always going to be easier for me to open a social media app and post.

Now imagine that the local government has a website that can only be changed by contacting a web developer, who takes 1-2 business days to reply. It might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the ballpark.
by RansomStark | 2026-01-26 10:53:37+00:00
political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative.

A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0].

Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/uk-government...
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-01-26 10:53:49+00:00
That runs out of steam eventually. Hence need a leader with Vision that is filling the pipeline for next few years.

Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse.

Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision.

Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
by Nursie | 2026-01-26 10:53:53+00:00
This feels disingenuous on your part now and is in fact exhibiting the exact problem brought up in the thread.

You’re not being asked to feel better about the UK! If you didn’t know about this stuff and you feel worse about the UK, good, you probably should!

But you are being asked to see a difference in degree between:

Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, then later released with an apology.

Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, their arrest is denied by the state and they turn up several years later in a mass grave.

You’re telling me those are the same thing?

> I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?

“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.

So currently it’s illegal to show support for that specific group.

There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.

But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you’re just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
by HumanOstrich | 2026-01-26 10:54:10+00:00
Bluesky also randomly bans new accounts saying they violated the ToS. Like right after signup before you do anything. It says you'll receive an email with details (never happens) and offers a form to appeal. The form goes nowhere and you never hear anything again. This happened to me a couple months ago so it's probably still an issue. It seems more like sloppy, careless engineering than malice, however.
by apignotti | 2026-01-26 10:54:14+00:00
The browser is the most effective environment to distribute and isolate applications. We have built technologies for years to leverage these capabilities to run legacy Java (CheerpJ) and x86 binaries (Cheerpx / WebVM).

We are soon going to release a new technology, built on top of the same stack, to allow full-stack development completely in the browser. It's called BrowserPod and we think it will be a perfect fit for agents as well.

https://browserpod.io
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-26 10:54:16+00:00
I surmise that you already have a general rec in mind so I'm just reiterating here for your review:

Point the user^W dev towards better "tools of thought" that decouple problem-refinements from solutions.

TLA, proof assistants, AIDEs, etc

Outside HN, I've been mostly refining my examples "by hand"..

(Hope you guys made it to the CNSOER prequals but if not, I suspect you already know the 10 guys that you need to call :)
by phatfish | 2026-01-26 10:54:21+00:00
You are over thinking. This is to enforce age restrictions online which parents are overwhelmingly in favour of.

Make the friction high enough for evading age restrictions and it will stop most kids. Not all but most. Same as most shops stop under age kids buying alcohol and most cinemas enforce age ratings.

If you want to roll your own VPN go ahead.

As far as the "dystopian" state of the UK goes. Even if the UK was a "distopia" the internet won't save you, even though people of a certain age like to think they can stop an authoritarian government from their keyboard. Take the US as a recent example, the bastion of free speech, but US citizens are being murdered by a government organisation. Posting memes from your VPN won't help.
by supernes | 2026-01-26 10:55:21+00:00
> Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?

I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now.

Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.
by iamcalledrob | 2026-01-26 10:56:11+00:00
Where does this end? Turtles all the way down.

If VPNs require age verification, then people will shift to running a VPN on a cheap VPS. Probably via a popular single-click setup script.

Or people will just get drawn to more seedy providers that do no KYC or have ulterior motives. If I was Russia, I'd consider operating a free VPN or VPS service that MITMs the traffic.
by Fricken | 2026-01-26 10:56:49+00:00
Video games are far too derivative to be taken seriously as art. People saying that with a straight face are suffering some serious Dunning-Kruger. Video games at least ought to produce examples of great design, but even those examples are few and far between.

The games industry is an aesthetic wasteland, and like many genre ghettoes, it is bound by negative feedback loops between an uninformed consumers and uncaring producers.

Video game curation is broken, reviews can't be trusted, and decidated gamers are far too inured to eating shit for their opinions to mean much.