MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sshine | 2026-01-20 14:01:09+00:00
That's a valid perspective, but claudebox isn't my own take. It's Linux user namespaces using bubblewrap to achieve VM-grade sandboxing and near native-level DX with the ability to express your environment using Nix.

Most of those dime-a-dozen solutions employ Docker, so if you like to work inside a container, that's great.
by pkphilip | 2026-01-20 14:01:21+00:00
I believe the new P16 Gen 3 is quite a beast and the design returns to some of those things which made Thinkpads great.

"Lenovo Finally Listened: The Most "ThinkPad" ThinkPad Ever?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVqQD8a38YQ
Show HN: Oauth2-forwarder – web oauth2 for dev containers
by sam256 | 2026-01-20 14:01:46+00:00
tl;dr - typing /login in claude code in a docker container will do auth in your host's browser :)

My team and I develop almost exclusively in dev containers. If you initiate an oauth2 auth from inside the dev container (for claude, azure cli, etc) you either (a) have some annoying copy and pasting to do or (b) you are using VS Code which magically makes it work with your host browser.

This utility makes the VS Code magic into a standalone utility so you don't need to be using VS Code but still get automatic proxying of your oauth2 requests to your hosts browser.

The basic idea (which is what VS Code does under the hood I believe) is to set up a server<->client relationship between host<->container that grabs your container-based cli tools browser open request, forwards out to the host, does oauth, forwards it back into the container.

We've been using it for a while and it works great. Thought I'd share.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-20 14:02:43+00:00
Here is what I'm confused about: There is no published protocol/spec. It's nominally for radios like LoRa (Semtech) which are programmed with microcontrollers. To run it, you need Python software, or more recently, std Rust, both of which can't be used on the devices that would make sense for the hardware.
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 14:02:45+00:00
Which would be fine if they were calling themselves mathematicians, we can debate if their ideas are more/less worthy of funding vs all the other mathematicians working on interesting math that might or might not be useful. However when they call themselves physicists we demand they prove they are creating useful physics. There are other areas of study in Physics that are producing results and thus seem more worthy of funding.

Remember resources are limited. We cannot fund everyone who wants it. Society needs to make choices, we are generally okay with a bit of "interesting but unlikely to produce anything important", but most of what we fund needs a return on investment.
by pndy | 2026-01-20 14:03:56+00:00
Looks like you're in a dire need for an official Apple Polishing Cloth with... list of compatible devices to maintain your sanity levels /s

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mw693am/a/polishing-cloth

Being serious, I'm always wearing nitrile gloves if whatever I have to clean is dirty - plus it's also a protection against detergents.
A spare Samsung phone I've got mid-pandemic I had to purify with isopropyl because young guy who was selling it clearly didn't care much about all the gunk.
by jyounker | 2026-01-20 14:05:40+00:00
If you have the right tools then it's easier than ever.

To put a different spin, a friend's father was a very successful auto mechanic. What he loved about it was the mental challenge of diagnostics. The stranger the problem, the better for him.

A few years back he sold his shop. There were two reasons:

1) He made f** you money, and retired decades earlier than he'd expected.
2) For many years he'd felt like the daily intellectual challenge was gone.

His repeated refrain was that modern self-diagnostic systems were good
enough that it took away most of the day-to-day intellectual challenge.
by neogodless | 2026-01-20 14:05:50+00:00
This is an odd one to take so long to "become normal" in luxury cars.

Lincoln started doing this about 20 years ago. You can buy Chevrolet pickup trucks with this feature. Of course my Polestar 2 (Swedish but made in China) has ventilation.

Now some might do true AC, while many just do ventilation, but either way it adds a lot of comfort if you're in a very warm cabin (or, say, have a huge panoramic sunroof.)
by rdtsc | 2026-01-20 14:07:06+00:00
> Meanwhile, reporters were on the street asking people how they felt about the oncoming invasion and they all said some variation of "they've been threatening that forever, it's all talk, it won't happen".

The Ukrainian government took the approach of not starting a full on panic. They thought maybe there was still some chance of stopping it. And not knowing 100% the day and time meant stopping the economy, people fleeing and such. It could even play into the hands of the enemy as they could react and postpone as well.

Some have criticized the government for that tactic science. Some might say they should have listened to the US intelligence instead, but that presumes people should trust the US intelligence more than their own government.
by yksanjo | 2026-01-20 14:07:39+00:00
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by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-20 14:08:25+00:00
Zero greenhouse emissions isn't a remotely achievable goal.

I hope you have never run a technology project this way by starting with a goal that simply can't be accomplished; you would have set it up to fail, demoralized your team, and chased the wrong priorities.

The goal is net zero, meaning, emissions added = emissions removed. There must be an allowance for some emissions. Industrial human life cannot continue without some amount of greenhouse emissions.

For that goal, I am way better off driving less than buying a new EV - it releases greenhouse gases to produce the plastic in your Tesla and the battery in your Nissan Leaf.

I walk to the supermarket. I work from home. I don't eat red meat. I'm careful with my home electricity consumption. For the third time in this thread: my old 4 cylinder Corolla is not the thing standing between us and existential doom. Focus on more important things.

I don't understand the myopic focus on car emissions: is it because Elon talks about it? Is it because it's the most easily seen for you?
by hypfer | 2026-01-20 14:08:52+00:00
I mean this _is_ HN after all. That is the core mindset that is being pushed here.
Y Combinator is a startup accelerator.

It is just called "hacker" news because it's a nice sounding name. Not because it would actually be news for hackers nor because it would actually be culturally adjacent to hacker culture.

Though, those aforementioned hackers still do seem to occasionally hang out here regardless. Probably some weird case of masochism.
by omnicognate | 2026-01-20 14:09:52+00:00
Why doubt? Transformers are a form of kernel smoothing [1]. It's literally interpolation [2].
That doesn't mean it can only echo the exact items in its training data - generating new data items is the entire point of interpolation - but it does mean it's "remixing" (literally forming a weighted sum of) those items and we would expect it to lose fidelity when moving outside the area covered by those points - i.e. where it attempts to extrapolate. And indeed we do see that, and for some reason we call it "hallucinating".

The subsequent argument that "LLMs only remix" => "all knowledge is a remix" seems absurd, and I'm surprised to have seen it now more than once here. Humanity didn't get from discovering fire to launching the JWST solely by remixing existing knowledge.

[1] http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.ht...

[2] Well, smoothing/estimation but the difference doesn't matter for my point.
by vitaut | 2026-01-20 14:10:04+00:00
The shortest double-to-string algorithm is basically Schubfach or, rather, it's variation Tejú Jaguá with digit output from Dragonbox. Schubfach is a beautiful algorithm: I implemented and wrote about it in https://vitaut.net/posts/2025/smallest-dtoa/. However, in terms of performance you can do much better nowadays. For example, https://github.com/vitaut/zmij does 1 instead of 2-3 costly 128x64-bit multiplications in the common case and has much more efficient digit output.
by aja12 | 2026-01-20 14:10:27+00:00
>Most TOTP apps support backups/restores, which defeats this.

Citation needed?
Yubico authenticator doesn't (the secure enclave is the Yubikey).
I'd be very surprised if MS Authenticator and Authy (which I don't use but are the most popular apps that I know of) support such backups
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-20 14:10:59+00:00
I had a really shit ass redmi phone once which was cheap.

The launcher was so slow and ass and had me wait for >10 minutes at times or be completely black which ate my god damn mind

Tried kiss launcher and it was beautiful and mostly worked like a charm on what it controlled

That being said, to manage wallpapers from kiss iirc atleast on redmi required me to do some crazy shenanigans which probably weren't worth it but none of them being kiss's fault.

I used to use nova launcher prior to kiss too and used to love nova launcher. Shame it went this path as I was seeing some kickstarter or change petition iirc to open source nova launcher which could've been so good.

On my other device I also use foss launcher which is a fork of simple-tools after it got accquired and all the issues which followed it (added ad tracking etc.)

Kisslauncher is so minimal like 300kb or something I forgot but extremely small iirc, it was wild to me to imagine an application this small. Might be smallest app I saw ever.
by Zababa | 2026-01-20 14:11:15+00:00
>My digital thermometer doesn't think. Imbibing LLM's with thought will start leading to some absurd conclusions.

What kind of absurd conclusions? And what kind of non absurd conclusions can you make when you follow your let's call it "mechanistic" view?

>It's an algorithm and a completely mechanical process which you can quite literally copy time and time again. Unless of course you think 'physical' computers have magical powers that a pen and paper Turing machine doesn't?

I don't, just like I don't think a human or animal brain has any magical power that imbues it with "intelligence" and "reasoning".

>A cursory read of basic philosophy would help elucidate why casually saying LLM's think, reason etc is not good enough.

I'm not saying they do or they don't, I'm saying that from what I've seen having a strong opinion about whether they think or they don't seem to lead people to weird places.

>What is thinking? What is intelligence? What is consciousness? These questions are difficult to answer. There is NO clear definition.

You see pretty certain that whatever those three things are a LLM isn't doing it, a paper and pencil aren't doing it even when manipulated by a human, the system of a human manipulating a paper and pencil isn't doing it.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-20 14:11:40+00:00
i’ve tried this, and it almost almost works to just rebuild the Dom on every state change as a pure function of state without any react or anything. The resulting interface is actually way snappier than react – but preserving local state of elements like what text is highlighted, where the cursor is, which radio button is tabbed to etc turns into a nightmare.
by corv | 2026-01-20 14:12:44+00:00
I'm pursuing a different approach: instead of isolating where Claude runs, intercept what it wants to do.

Shannot[0] captures intent before execution. Scripts run in a PyPy sandbox that intercepts all system calls - commands and file writes get logged but don't happen. You review in a TUI, approve what's safe, then it actually executes.

The trade-off vs VMs: VMs let Claude do anything in isolation, Shannot lets Claude propose changes to your real system with human approval. Different use cases - VMs for agentic coding, whereas this is for "fix my server" tasks where you want the changes applied but reviewed first.

There's MCP integration for Claude, remote execution via SSH, checkpoint/rollback for undoing mistakes.

Feedback greatly appreciated!

[0] https://github.com/corv89/shannot
by onionisafruit | 2026-01-20 14:13:13+00:00
That sounds like a good idea. When I have a one-off need for misc files I tell it to put them in the project’s ./tmp because that’s already in my global gitignore. That generally works, but I still run into surprise files it leaves in source dirs like a puppy leaves turds on a rug. I’ll try adding that to my instructions instead of doing it one-off.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-20 14:13:20+00:00
Didn't read past the paywall, but if your take on this is not
"Whoah, Greenland might actually be bought by the US" and is instead "wow gambling is bad" I'm at awe.

There's potential problems that might come from the benefits of prediction markets, like insiders getting incentivized to change the outcome or leak info.

But gambling is an old problem which emerges in many scenarios, casinos, card games, sports betting, financial markets, crypto.

This take is like a new hooters opening up on the moon and people complaining that there's alcohol addiction, food addiction, sexism, wage exploitation... yeah I know man, but it's on the moon!
by karlmdavis | 2026-01-20 14:14:15+00:00
I love absolutely everything about this… except for the lack of cross-platform support. I know how ludicrous it is to expect that, but… most workflows I’m considering solutions like this for are crippled by their inability to run Xcode or a native Windows build. Heck, I’m pretty sure I’ll even run into glibc version mismatches that block work I care about.

Frustrating that the best solution is still, “well, if that’s important to you, then set that up in your home lab or rent some extra (pet) VMs in the cloud.”
by wat10000 | 2026-01-20 14:14:19+00:00
They're flying in mountain wave. Basically, the wind flows over the mountains and you get ripples downstream. You can ride the upward parts of those ripples. They eventually ran out of mountains.

Winter tends to have more favorable conditions for creating these ripples. It needs more than wind, you also need the right temperature profile in the atmosphere.

Darkness is a big problem. Normally you just have to wait for sunrise to fly, and land before sunset. These guys used night vision goggles to avoid that limitation.
by bennydog224 | 2026-01-20 14:14:22+00:00
I struggled at first with trying to translate a technical framework (blind sigs/privacy pass) into a privacy feature end users would understand.

I ended up using the “casino” analogy to describe the new feature. Same thing, different words. The security knowledge stack is so dense that it helps to embrace analogies when explaining concepts to customers.

By “blinding” ourselves, we’re signaling to users that we’re making their data invaluable for marketing, analytics, or third party sharing. Think the EU “Reject unnecessary cookies” banner but on steroids.
by digiown | 2026-01-20 14:14:39+00:00
This stat is also complete bullshit. If it were true, your scrubs of any 20+TB pool would get at least corrected errors quite frequently. But this is not the case.

The consumer grade drives are often given an even lower spec of 1 in 1e14. For a 20TB drive, that's more than one error every scrub, which does not happen. I don't know about you, but I would not consider a drive to be functional at all if reading it out in full would produce more than one error on average. Pretty much nothing said on that datasheet reflects reality.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-01-20 14:14:46+00:00
The real story here is China and India have been quietly buying up gobs of African IP blocks - most of which are used for botting operations. I see it in my server logs.

China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.

When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
by fnands | 2026-01-20 14:14:51+00:00
What value does an accurate prediction market bring? I.e. how can this information be used to improve lives (other than the person winning the bet)? I.e. even if it is sorta accurate, is this valuable to anyone?

As I see it it seems to be a way to incentivize insiders to leak information, e.g. see the alleged Google insider betting on Google actions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2025/12/04/alleged-...

Great for the person who has insider knowledge, probably not so great for Google.
I wouldn't be surprized if some companies start cracking down on their employees making bank off unannounced company actions.
by dan00 | 2026-01-20 14:14:55+00:00
> Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.

Right, talking about feelings is a way of regulating yourself.

Conflicts with my wife are a lot easier if I'm able to empathize with her emotional distress, acknowledging it, instead of jumping directly into logical problem solving. If I'm only looking logically at the issue, I can't really understand the issue she is having.

I like the view of the therapist Terry Real, that during conflicts you can either be right or stay connected. That doesn't mean that you hide your views, but that you also emotionally acknowledge the view of your partner. It's surprising how effectively this takes out the fire in conflicts.
by pwatsonwailes | 2026-01-20 14:15:03+00:00
To expand on this a little for those interested, time has properties space doesn't. For example, you can turn left to swap your forward direction for sideways in space. You cannot turn though, in a way that swaps your forward (as it were) direction in space for a backward direction in time.

Equally, cause always precedes effect. If time were exactly like space, you could bypass a cause to get to an effect, which would break the fundamental laws of physics as we know them.

There's obviously a lot more, but that's a couple of examples to hopefully help someone.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-20 14:15:09+00:00
I'd argue that any gap is coercive, just as I'd object to giving criminals even one minute of additional prison time for being critical of the President.

Someone who forces the state to prove its case is merely exercising their legal right to do so. Giving them a harsher sentence for this is effectively punishing them for exercising their legal rights. You can word this as rewarding people who don't force the state to prove its case i.e. people who don't exercise that particular legal right, but it's the same thing.
by rayiner | 2026-01-20 14:15:56+00:00
That’s possible, but it’s a much more uncertain claim than the one being made above. The US became 50% richer than western europe by being an “isolationist MAGA wonderland” before reengaging with the world during the wars.

Did hegemony help the U.S. maintain that edge? Maybe! But I think that’s a harder claim to prove than suggested by OP. I think the direct cause of America keeping its edge in the second half of the 20th century is we have Silicon Valley. I can think of a mechanism how reserve currency status is an indirect cause: reserve currency status means the world invests in American banks, and banks then use that money to fund tech startups. But is that really what’s happening? As I said above, I’m unsure.
by goku12 | 2026-01-20 14:16:05+00:00
The article mentions the dangers lurking on social media and doom scrolling. Something that is not mentioned however, is how it affects the intelligence and its growth in children. Teachers from all over the world are reporting significant drop in intellectual proficiency of children, including in literary skills and even very basic reasoning skills. Some descriptions are very disturbing, but teachers don't seem surprised by these reports. This seems to be caused by AI, in addition to social media.

Similar trends are seen in young adults too, especially with regards to their beliefs and culture. Many of them complain about being pressured into a life of vanity due to the race for attention on social media. I've seen research papers that indicate that the same culprits may be causing a drop in IQ among adults of all ages. I haven't seen anything so far that mentions elder adults in particular, but I don't think that they're doing much better either. From my observation, these technologies seem to drive people into extreme ends of the beliefs that existed before they were introduced.

None of this is surprising though, considering how these technologies designed to engage with humans. Many of the symptoms described in adults are exactly the same as substance addiction. And just like addiction, their effect on children is devastating and long lasting. Now it has reached a level where the consequences cannot be ignored anymore.

I favor personal choice and responsibility over big brother style control in these matters. But while those concerns remains, I don't believe that this can be solved without external intervention. It's a bit imprudent to expect addicts to pull themselves out of this mess. Meanwhile, denying people the true benefits of the internet and AI is also unethical and immoral. Due to these problems, we really need to objectively assess the outcome of social experiments in progress at places like Australia, even if they appear dystopian at the first glance. I don't know how entire societies can be saved from this scourge without sacrificing individual freedoms in the process. However, I do know that this is one serious problem that needs attention and solutions as much as any other serious problem we face (like climate change) as a species.
by thatcks | 2026-01-20 14:16:05+00:00
Two examples that I can find are https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7910, where very old versions of ZFS appear to have quietly written slightly incorrect ACL information, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zfs-linux/+bug/190... where Ubuntu 21.10 shipped with a bug that created corrupted ZFS filesystems. I believe https://www.illumos.org/issues/9847 may be another example of this, although less severe, where ZFS leaked disk space under some circumstances.
by keybored | 2026-01-20 14:16:33+00:00
Yeah I see the plot here. From this one:

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/

> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.

> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.

And this one:

https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/

I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)

The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.