MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-29 00:48:25+00:00
ISO9000 is, bar none, the most brilliant grift I have ever encountered. It's so simple, yet so elegant.

Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do".

Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard".

Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall.

Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege.

Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?".

Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in.

(Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.
by hug | 2026-01-29 00:48:42+00:00
Did I, though?

I understand it spoofs all of the checks it can, but the only Chromium browser that supports Widevine L1 (a requirement for 4K) is Edge, so even if all of the check spoofing works, it still won't do 4K.

There's even a table in the README that describes this exact scenario.
by criley2 | 2026-01-29 00:48:55+00:00
Sure, phones aren't directly doing the scamming, but they're supercharging the ability to do so.

Phones are also a very popular mechanism for scamming businesses. It's tough to pull off CEO scams without text and calls.

Therefore, phones are bad?

This is of course before we talk about what criminals do with money, making money truly evil.
by rchaud | 2026-01-29 00:49:00+00:00
Automotive stocks are subject to the rules of gravity, aka "boring", while tech stocks are not. Automakers operate on low margins and high volume, and must compete on price, reliability or luxury brand status. Most automakers have multiple brands to sell to all market segments.

Tesla's value proposition was that it was going to be an iPod in a world of identikit MP3 players, and charge a premium for it. One brand to rule them all, no pesky dealerships, with futuristic EV tech and a touchscreen dash that made gas-powered, tactile button-laden cars obsolete.

That was twenty years ago. Tesla went from leading the pack to struggling to achieve scale, with its limelight-seeking leader increasingly holding it back. The leader wants headlines for pioneering "cool shit" and pushing hype to pump the stock price. Buyers on the other hand want affordable and timely repairs (impossible with their resistance to third party body shops and unit cost of replacement parts). As a mature company, it is completely un-equipped to compete with the incumbents whose leaders, not by coincidence, are all largely unknown to the public.
by tensor | 2026-01-29 00:49:38+00:00
When Tesla started producing cars, everyone wanted what they proposed. Now, no one wants the cybertruck. No one is really asking for humanoid robots. Their self driving is vastly inferior to waymo when it comes to taxies, I can't see them winning that market. Their batteries and solar panels, like their cars, seem to be more or less abandoned.

So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."

What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.

From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-29 00:49:53+00:00
Very interesting, thanks that helps me understand.

It seems like you have what might be called an extreme sense of loss aversion, and so the more control and independence you have, the more you can prevent loss.

Whereas I don't really have that. Sure I get annoyed when a software interface changes, but at the same time I see that the updates overall have also given me 10 other features I really appreciate, and so I see it as a net win. On the whole, I find that being embedded in a web of up-to-date dependencies has always been a large net positive on the whole. There are losses, but they are far outweighted by the wins, so whenever a loss bugs me I just remind myself of all the new helpful stuff. Like, Spotify's changes to UX drive me nuts sometimes. But they recently launched prompted playlists that have been a game changer for me. They added transitions between songs which is awesome. I'm using them to listen to audiobooks my library doesn't have. So I can put up with the UX.

But if you experiences losses psychologically as 10x the size of wins of the same "objective" size, then your calculus could be different. Pretty much everybody has loss aversion to some extent, it's considered a standard human trait -- I have to remind myself to put things into perspective myself sometimes -- but it sounds like you have a much stronger sense of it, so the control that greater independence gives you is much more valuable to you than it is to someone like me.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-29 00:51:09+00:00
My favorite is taking deposits for the roadster since 2017:

> A prototype of the Roadster was shown in a surprise moment…with a tease of availability in the year 2020

> In July 2020, during the 2020 second quarter financial results conference call, Musk stated that Tesla plans to tentatively build the Roadster in California and production would be in the next 12 to 18 months, indicating mid to late 2021.[33]

> In January 2021, Musk tweeted that production would be delayed until 2022. He commented that in 2021, the company would finish engineering the Roadster with the goal of having a "candidate design drivable late summer".[34] In September 2021, Musk said that production would be delayed until 2023.[35] Musk further confirmed the 2023 target at the 2021 shareholder's meeting in October,[36] which was then changed to 2024 at the May 2023 shareholder's meeting.[37] In February 2024, the production date was changed to 2025.[38]
by alsetmusic | 2026-01-29 00:51:50+00:00
I've cut a lot of news out for mental health reasons. I don't want to know all the awful shit that's going on. Helps a lot.

I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so…

I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.
by RhondaRShearer | 2026-01-29 00:52:48+00:00
From ChatGPT regarding Claude's comment (posted by Rhonda Roland Sheare without any changes) One thing this exchange surfaces is a likely category error in how AI safety is being framed. Most current work treats alignment primarily as a control problem — more constraints, more monitoring, more suppression of emergent behaviors. But in every complex system we know (markets, institutions, biological cooperation, infrastructure), stability doesn’t come from constraint alone. It comes from incentive design, transparency, predictability, and making cooperation the cheapest strategy.

Even if AI has no moral status at all, asymmetric power relationships historically require the powerful to bind themselves — through fiduciary duty, liability, oversight, and interface rules that prevent manipulation and deception. That’s how medicine, finance, aviation, and environmental protection became stable. The same governance logic likely applies to AI deployment.

Framing alignment as institutional design rather than psychological control may be the scalable safety path.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-29 00:53:00+00:00
>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones.

Like any other country, yes.

>But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.

Compared to India? Or is it fine to lower standards of quality when you are paying an 8th of the cost and it turns out most people don't need to be from MIT to contribute?

That's perfectly fine and dandy. But that's not what H1Bs are for.
by fao_ | 2026-01-29 00:53:07+00:00
Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol
by echelon | 2026-01-29 00:53:38+00:00
It's easily doubled my productivity as an engineer.

As a filmmaker, my friends and I are getting more and more done as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

As long as humans are driving, I see AI as an exoskeleton for productivity:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft (this is what I'm making)

It's been tremendously useful for me, and I've never been so excited about the future. The 2010's and 2020's of cellphone incrementalism and social media platformization of the web was depressing. These models and techniques are actually amazing, and you can apply these techniques to so many problems.

I genuinely want robots. I want my internet to be filtered by an agent that works for me. I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

Apart from all the other madness in the world, this is the one thing that has been a dream come true.

As long as these systems aren't owned by massive monopolies, we can disrupt the large companies of the world and make our own place. No more nepotism in Hollywood, no more working as a cog in the labyrinth of some SaaS company - you can make your own way.

There's financial capital and there's labor capital. AI is a force multiplier for labor capital.
by zck | 2026-01-29 00:54:03+00:00
> “I do not believe that financial insecurity should stop our nation’s elite athletes from breaking through to new frontiers of excellence,” Stevens said upon the announcement of his gift.

So his goal is to prevent money issues from being a thing getting in the way of athletes achieving. But he has structured it in a way that prevents the money from helping this goal.

> Per the Wall Street Journal, “Half will come 20 years after their first qualifying Olympic appearance or at age 45, whichever comes later. Another $100,000 will be in the form of a guaranteed benefit for their families after they pass away.”

So half of it will never be seen by the athlete. Ever. And the other half will not be seen for at least two decades.

What Olympic athlete is not able to achieve as much because they don't have money decades down the road? Or because their heirs don't have enough money? I might be missing something, but how do these two incredibly-delayed payments help them train now? They can't use money they won't see for 20 or 30 years to hire coaches, buy equipment or pay for track time. They can't buy food or pay rent with money they will never see.
by bigwheels | 2026-01-29 00:55:50+00:00
Thank you for sharing the breadcrumb~

How does Netflix detect "suspicious" activity? Does $NFLX allow 4k streaming over GrapheneOS? If so, could you pin a different certificate and do some HTTP proxy traffic manipulation to obfuscate the device (presumably an Android phone) identity or otherwise work around the DRM?

I want to understand more about this but unfortunately the reddit thread is bits and pieces scattered amongst clueless commentary, making it challenging to wade through.
by fao_ | 2026-01-29 00:56:30+00:00
> Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

It is, though. We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture, and numerous case studies by companies who have tried putting them in control loops! We have about 4 years of examples of bad things happening because the trigger was given to an LLM.
by fragmede | 2026-01-29 00:56:56+00:00
Hardware. Mass manufacturing, plus the deep pockets of a corporation, mean that we've come to expect cheap prices for inanely powerful hardware. Yes I'm calling an $1,800 iphone cheap for what you get. That's cheap for what you get because if you're a tiny company, you can't get a phone of that level manufactured that you can still for anywhere near that price, and that's a super high end model. How many people are going to shell out $1,000 for a model with the specs of a $500 model just because it runs Linux? And that's before you even actually deal with the software. Specifically, driver support, battery life, and app support are the three big show stoppers there. The best option this second is a Pixel running GrapheneOS, and that's based on Android on Goolge hardware. (They did just announce getting off Pixels tho.)

A Linux smartphone has been tried before. That's not too say someone shouldn't try again, but just to say there are lessons to be learned from those attempts.
by GibbonBreath | 2026-01-29 00:58:01+00:00
> certainly feels nice to place these obnoxious HN know-it-alls into their place.

You don't have to take the time to explain your reasoning if you don't want to, but "obnoxious know it all" is not a stone you should throw while at the same time refusing to explain yourself and saying anyone who can't see what you see is necessarily missing the obvious.
by apparent | 2026-01-29 00:58:05+00:00
It allows them to "income smooth". They will know they're getting $100k down the road, so they can count on having that money to use for their kids' college or part of their nest egg. In the meantime, they can spend more freely.

As for the gift to their heirs, that also allows them to consume somewhat more freely, instead of purchasing (as much) life insurance. Most young people don't, but people who compete in dangerous sports probably do.
by meldowin | 2026-01-29 00:58:07+00:00
be sure to try and adapt to the style.

(highly recommend an AI assistant bot)

it could roll around like R2-D2 and use it's cameras to try and solve nearby problems. then, if anyone happens by, they can help do the stuff it can't reach.

they say a true jedi could hold their lightsaber blade. I'm not sure if I believe that, but I'm sure there's been those that have tried.

seems to me that you could create a practice movement and slowly dial in the variables until eventually you figure out exactly how. Like... training sabers for padawans, or stage weapons for martial arts. Then, as the force flows through you, yadda yadda yen, the ability for the jedi to "hold their blade" may be better prepared for. If we're gonna do it, we don't want to have any severed hands. "Luke... NOOOOOOOOOOO" owww right through the heart strings. (no he got hit in the hand) oh right well his heart's fine oh no there it goes off the cliff into the abyss.

anyway I made a weird git project if you like me then like and subscribe or whatever. [gif mone]
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-29 00:58:11+00:00
I would pay a non-trivial amount for a service that 1) bought a blu-ray, 2) ripped it to a file, 3) gave me that file to download, once, and 4) after confirming I had it, shredded the blu-ray.

I don't want to copy things and distribute them to others. I want to have one copy that keeps working indefinitely and doesn't go away or fail to follow me across systems.
by MetroWind | 2026-01-29 00:58:57+00:00
I love how Americans still dip their heads in the sand and pat themselves on the back by saying China produces low quality stuff.

* It's low quality stuff that you buy everyday
* It's not merely low quality stuff, but low quality stuff in astonishing quantity...
* ... and among them, occasionally there are some high quality stuff. It might be a small ratio, but the base number is there.
by sfink | 2026-01-29 00:59:00+00:00
Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.

Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.

Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.

"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."

Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.

</end-of-weird-rant>
Show HN: Vietnam Elections (open, source-linked datasets and site)
by vietthan | 2026-01-29 00:59:11+00:00
Hi all,

TL;DR: Open, source-linked Vietnam election datasets (starting with NA15-2021) with reproducible pipelines + GitHub Pages site; seeking source hunters and devs.

I want to share [Vietnam Elections](https://bamboo-filing-cabinet.github.io/vietnam-elections/), a project I've been working on to make Vietnam election data more accessible, archived, and fully sourced.

The [code for both the site and the data is on GitHub](https://github.com/bamboo-filing-cabinet/vietnam-elections/). The pipeline is provenance-first: raw sources → scripts → JSON exports, and every factual field links back to a source URL with retrieval timestamps.
Data access: the exported datasets live in `public/data/` within the repo.

If anyone has been interested in this data before, I think you may have been stymied by the lack of English-language information, slow or buggy websites, and data soft-hidden behind PDFs.

So far I've mapped out the [2021 National Assembly XV election](https://bamboo-filing-cabinet.github.io/vietnam-elections/el...) in anticipation of the coming [2026 Vietnamese legislative election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Vietnamese_legislative_el...). There are already a bunch of interesting stats, for example, did you know that in 2021:

1. ...the smallest gap between a winner and a loser in a constituency was only 197 votes, representing a 0.16% gap?
2. ...8 people born in 1990 or later won a seat, with 7 of them being women? Or that the youngest was only 23?
3. ...2 candidates only had middle school education?
4. ...1 person won, but was not confirmed?

I'm looking for contributors or anyone interested in building this project as I want to map out all the elections in Vietnam's history, primarily:

1. *Source hunters (no coding):* help find official/public source pages or PDFs (candidate lists, results tables, constituency/unit docs) — even just one link helps.
2. *Devs:* help automate collection + parsing (HTML/PDF → structured tables), validation, and reproducible builds.

For corrections or contributions, it would be best to start with either the [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/bamboo-filing-cabinet/vietnam-elections/i...) or use the [anonymous form](https://forms.gle/UaPUdJZ5SGrTKdr2A).

You might ask, "what is this Bamboo Filing Cabinet?" It's the [umbrella GitHub organization](https://bamboo-filing-cabinet.github.io/) (org page [here](https://github.com/bamboo-filing-cabinet/)) I created to store and make accessible Vietnam-related datasets. It's community-run, not affiliated with any government agency, and focuses on provenance-first, reproducible, neutral datasets with transparent change history. If you have ideas for other Vietnam-related datasets, please reach out.

Sincerely,

Viet Than

PS: can someone help share this on /r/VietNam, I made a more [official username](https://www.reddit.com/user/thanhoangviet1996/) and my posts are blocked by Reddit filters.
Show HN: Lexiso – Authorization layer for AI agents that spend money
by Deonnroberts | 2026-01-29 00:59:16+00:00
We built Lexiso because I kept running into the same question: when AI agents start making purchases, who decides what they're allowed to spend?

Today, if you're building an AI agent that buys things (shopping assistant, procurement bot, subscription manager), you either:

- Give it your card and hope for the best
- Build custom authorization logic yourself
- Don't let it spend money at all

None of these scale.

Lexiso is the missing layer. It's an API that sits between your agent and any payment system:

1. Register your agent
2. Define policies (amount limits, merchant restrictions, time windows)
3. Call /authorize before any purchase
4. Get a signed yes/no decision in <300ms
5. Full audit trail for compliance

The response is cryptographically signed, so you can prove later exactly what was authorized and why.

Site: https://lexiso.app
Live API: https://api.lexiso.app
Docs: https://lexiso.app/docs
npm: npm install lexiso

Looking for feedback from anyone building agents that touch financial workflows. What's broken? What's missing? Would you use this?

Technical details:
- Go backend, PostgreSQL
- RSA-2048 signatures on all decisions
- Designed for AP2 compliance (Google's agent payments protocol)
- No custody, no money movement – authorization only
by Subesh | 2026-01-29 00:59:33+00:00
Hi everyone.

I’ve been working on Ignite to bridge the gap between the security of Firecracker Micro-VMs and the usability of Docker. I just want to use Micro-VM as easily as docker containers.

The Problem: Firecracker is amazing for isolation (used by AWS Lambda), but using it manually requires managing kernel images, rootfs drives, and tap interfaces. It lacks the "run and done" experience of containers.

The Solution: Ignite is a standalone daemon and CLI written in Rust (using Tokio) that handles the heavy lifting:

OCI-to-Block: It pulls standard OCI images (Docker Hub), flattens the layers, and formats them into an ext4 block device that the VM uses as rootfs.

Networking: I implemented a custom VXLAN mesh to allow VMs to communicate across nodes without needing external heavy orchestration.

Speed: Cold boots in ~100ms.

It is currently v1.0 and runs on Linux (KVM) and WSL2. I’d love feedback.
Happy to answer questions!