MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RajT88 | 2026-01-21 15:31:33+00:00
I could get behind this argument if commodity ISP gateways required special rules for IPv6 (from what I have seen - they do not).

As far as I can tell, this is just pedantry, until those features are implemented in most ISP gateways. Akamai has been warning that IPv6 scanning attacks are on the rise.

Maybe someone knows better than I about this.
by sovsparrow | 2026-01-21 15:31:34+00:00
i ran into the same “looks legit but wrong” failure mode building modular repos with llms! So i built belgi (released yesterday). thesis: treat llm output as untrusted; acceptance depends on locked spec + executed evidence + invariants (default no-go). your arc frame-id vs page-id bug is exactly the kind of silent drift this is meant to catch.
by mikemarsh | 2026-01-21 15:31:41+00:00
I wonder if the concern about "civic institutions" as some unique and special thing within society is a generational thing; as a millennial I've almost always viewed "universities, and a free press" ("rule of law" is much more nebulous) as simply "institutions", or rather "the establishment", the key distinction being "the establishment" also includes corporations, banks, big capital, etc.

The "institution" of the AI industry is actually a perfect example of this; the so-called "free press" uncritically repeats its hype at every turn, corporations (unsurprisingly) impose AI usage mandates, and even schools and universities ("civic institutions") are getting in on implicitly or explicitly encouraging its use.

Of course this is a simplification, but it certainly makes much more sense to view AI as another way "the establishment" is degrading "society" in general, rather than in terms of some imagined conflict between "civic institutions" and "the private sector", as if there was ever any real distinction between those two.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-01-21 15:31:42+00:00
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.

There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.

The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...

I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.
by chownie | 2026-01-21 15:32:54+00:00
> They routinely removed blue checkmarks of people that had naughty opinions

This is actually you doing it again, lying-via-hyperbole. This didn't happen routinely (it was high profile enough to get news stories the few times it did) and it was pretty specifically white supremacist groups.

> You happened to enjoy the old smell.

If you approach conversation with a little more honesty yourself you might not just fall into the assumption other people are partisan.
by voidUpdate | 2026-01-21 15:33:02+00:00
I was going to comment the same. I saw the huge difference and went "wow", then read that it was a 2x improvement and had to check the axes properly, thinking "slightly less wow". It reminds me of that barchart of women's average heights in different countries that starts at 5 feet https://preview.redd.it/dohqa8l94kb41.png?auto=webp&s=865180...
by bluGill | 2026-01-21 15:33:11+00:00
Good question. My thought is similar to yours, but there is a lot of room for debate on what to send. They probably don't care about the roman empire like we do - but there are enough references in modern science that we need to send a summary just so they understand some things. We produce a lot of data, but most of it isn't meaningful.

if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt
by alibarber | 2026-01-21 15:33:33+00:00
For labour - the laws of where that labour is actually being conducted are the ones that are followed. Spanish prosecutors can for sure bring a case against an Estonian company if they are not. In theory at least.

But for company tax law, that company is a tax resident in Estonia, not Spain.

Also, we harmonise laws such as traffic laws (for example, in Finland, all solid yellow central lines were painted white) so that people have the chance to work across the whole union as transport operators, why not do the same for entrepreneurs?
by mock-possum | 2026-01-21 15:33:35+00:00
I suppose to belabor the analogy, its still not the petrol’s fault - the same fuel is also used to transport firefighting resources, in fact, a controlled burn might have effectively mitigated the risk of a forest fire in the first place. Who left those leaves to smolder in the first place, anyway? Why’d you throw petrol on the pile?

You just have to be careful not to say “this is AI’s” fault - it’s far more accurate, and constructive, to say “this is our fault, this is a problem with the way some people choose to use LLMs, we need to design institutions that aren’t so fragile that a chatbot is all it takes to break them.”
by snowmobile | 2026-01-21 15:33:44+00:00
There are many incentives not to sell exploits, the major one being that it's not logistically feasible. First of all the people submitting these false reports don't have any real exploits.

But imagine you were sitting on an actual RCE exploit in curl, who would you sell it to? How would you convince them it's working without disclosing the details for free? How would you get paid?

> Curl is a popular and well supported tool, if it needs help in this area, there will be a long line of competent people not volunteering their time and/or money

I'm not sure if that not is a typo, but yes, even though a tool is very popular, there's almost nobody competent and willing to work on it for free. This has been a well-known problem in open source for decades now.
by spopejoy | 2026-01-21 15:33:50+00:00
It's weird, I'm on 8.2.4 but it hasn't asked me for any new permissions. It did use mobile data last October but none this month. Is network access a permission? I only see "Phone" granted.

It may be because my aging phone is on Android 10, I auto-migrated Nova from an even older phone. Back then app drawers were in the free version, so after the migration I can't modify them (don't care, I didn't end up using that feature).
by miroljub | 2026-01-21 15:33:54+00:00
Not related to the comment, but in general I agree with you.

You can't have a single monetary system without complete unification, including tax systems, budgeting systems, governance models, retirement systems, benefits. I mean, you can, like we have now, but it's not sustainable, and eventually we all have it worse.

As a European, I would not want to go that way, since I'm afraid such a unified EU will be a bureaucratic monster that is even more centralized than the USA, and way more autocratic than any current EU state.

I'd rather take a step back, dissolve much of the EU's competences, and go back to pure trade union, dissolve the EURO as a currency, and let every member state take sovereign decisions on their own.
by trollbridge | 2026-01-21 15:34:09+00:00
A modern PC can most certainly run Flight Simulator. Most PCs still have an EFI that provides a CSM. And most GPUs default to running a program that provides VGA (and thus CGA) compatibility.

What's even more surprising is that it functions properly, other than a timing issue with the World War I Ace mode.

If you want to run FS 2.11 or earlier, you will need to get a cracked copy, since its copy protection requires using a diskette version. But "PC compatible" has never required diskette drives - the original IBM PC included an edition with no diskette drives at all.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-21 15:34:14+00:00
The one I like is that medieval monks associated a lion with having pride, hence a pride of lions. Reality is different, lions often will not hunt directly but take the killings of hyenas. There is no pride in that. [0]

The other fun fact about medieval monks is that they classified fowls as a combination of plant and meat. Humans did not know about bird migration. When winter came, they though birds trans-mutated into tree branch and back into birds during spring. This means they are not 100% meat. Fowl could be eaten in place of fish or plants during Lent.

[0] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lucy-cooke/the-trut...
Show HN: Web Assembly (WASM) + Model Context Protocol (MCP)
by ra0x3 | 2026-01-21 15:34:22+00:00
Hey folks — I put together a fork of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Rust SDK that integrates Web Assembly (WASM) based execution [1].

The goal wasn’t a production-ready framework, just a POC to answer: how hard is it to add WASM to MCP, really? Turns out: not that hard.

I’m skeptical of one-vendor-controls-all MCP tool marketplaces (e.g., Composio/Pipedream). An open, contribution-driven model (think GitHub Actions) feels like a much better fit for Rust + MCP.

WASM brings sandboxing, safer untrusted code execution, and easy binary sharing — and runtimes like WasmEdge [2] make things like DB or network access much more realistic.

Overall, pretty happy with how it turned out. Happy to hear any feedback. Also curious what other Rust folks think about MCP + WASM as a direction.

- [1] https://github.com/ra0x3/mcpkit-rs
- [2] https://wasmedge.org/
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-21 15:34:39+00:00
We don't care only about money. We're doing pretty great, we have some issues like housing cost but the US has those too. I'm happy with my life and I don't feel like there's something missing that having more money would fix. Less employment and welfare rights would cause a lot of worry and uncertainty though.

It's not all about economy and getting ever more more more like the US. I'm pretty happy living here and I would never move to the US. In fact right now I wouldn't even visit it but hopefully the status quo doesn't last forever.

And it's not all about business. But about people, the employees.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 15:35:01+00:00
>but it being common isn't a great argument for it being good

Then step up and deeply think about the situation at hand and all it's ramifications.

When you see Chesterton's Fence don't rip it out of the ground before you understand why it was built in the first place. Think of how you would make a system with the least problems (you can't solve all problems without infinite costs or infinite loss of freedom).
by zigzag312 | 2026-01-21 15:35:46+00:00
It depends on how you calculate statistics. If you are designing a file format that over the lifetime of the format hundreds of millions of user will use (storing billions of files), what are the chances that 32 bits checksum won't be able to catch at least one corruption? During transfer over unstable wireless internet connection, storage on cheap flash drive, poor HDD with a higher error rate, unstable RAM etc. We want to avoid data corruption if we can even in less then ideal conditions. Cost of going from 32 bit to 64 bit hashes is very small.
by oytis | 2026-01-21 15:35:55+00:00
All of the Arab countries have basically seceded from Ottoman empire under an occupation of this or that European country.

"Unilaterally" is not easy to define. Sometimes there is a long and violent struggle for independence and the metropole eventually gives in and signs some paper, sometimes it is stubborn and doesn't sign anything - the difference is not that important in my opinion.
by Flavius | 2026-01-21 15:36:14+00:00
> The obvious culprits being smartphones and social networking, though it's really hard to prove causality.

Totally get hating on social media, but social media didn’t make politicians corrupt or billionaires hoard wealth while everyone else got crumbs. It just made it impossible to keep hiding it. Corruption, captured institutions, and elite greed have been torching public trust for years. Social media just handed everyone a front-row seat (and a megaphone).
by sentinelowl | 2026-01-21 15:36:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I've spent the last few weeks building a Python workbench to analyze the Masoretic Text (the Hebrew Bible) not as a linguistic narrative, but as a hexadecimal instruction set (Base-22).

*The Hypothesis:* If the text is a "simulation" or "creation" guide, does it carry executable data?

*The Findings:*
1. *Entropy:* The extracted binary (`tanakh_full.bin`) has an entropy of *7.5 bits/byte*. (Random is ~8, Text is ~4.4). This suggests high-density compression or compiled code.
2. *Anomalies:* A forensic hex-scan revealed the ASCII strings *"IPv6"*, *"DNA"*, and *"AI"* clustered in the bitstream.
3. *Visualization:* I built a browser-based "System Monitor" that uses the binary as a seed for a Rule 30 Cellular Automaton. It generates coherent, non-collapsing structures.

*The Stack:* Python (analysis), HTML5 Canvas (visualization), GitHub Pages (hosting).

*Live Demo:* https://consigcody94.github.io/genesis-protocol/
*Repo:* https://github.com/consigcody94/genesis-protocol

Would love feedback on the entropy analysis methodology or if anyone recognizes the Instruction Set Architecture (my tool labels it "Aleph-Zero RISC").
by kingstnap | 2026-01-21 15:36:28+00:00
Mine lol. My ISP sent a Nokia Beacon 3.1. When I first logged into its web GUI, it had a "Security" tab with these dropdowns.

Security level

High: Traffic denied inbound and minimally permit common service outbound.

Low: All outbound traffic and pinhole-defined inbound traffic is allowed.

Off: All inbound and outbound traffic is allowed.

It was actually set to "Off" interestingly enough.
by matesz | 2026-01-21 15:36:31+00:00
Its important to understand the context. Germany, and Europe in general, is basically like a falling empire. It will be less and less significant and life won't get any better than it is relatively speaking. The same will almost certainly happen with the US, but first goes Europe.

Unfortunately citizens and therefore ruling elites of empires fueled by relatively extremely high standard of living for decades in comparison to the rest of the World always have very hard time swallowing their national pride. They have built very elaborate conceptual framework of linking their nationality to the level of relative success, fueled by politicians who want to make people feel good again about their nationality.

Just look at the news, almost everything directly or indirectly is linked to the concept "nation".

And in almost all cases of empires a natural consequence of their fall is war. So, it is very important to set expectations right.
by dfxm12 | 2026-01-21 15:36:33+00:00
In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
by maxglute | 2026-01-21 15:36:40+00:00
There's no contradiction to resolve, Trump decided CAN should no longer benefit from proximity. That's the geopolitical reality under current US admin. There's nothing left to do but hedge and move on or wait for new US admin. Ontario auto is 2.5% of gdp, Alberta crude is 5.5%, other exports to US is 9%... i.e. 17% of CAN gdp. CAN US imports is 16% of GDP - it's reasonably balanced, and TBH US got better deal since that 5.5% crude is massive discount, CAN could be selling it for more if US meddling didn't prevent CAN from refining for decades. But broadly those are Canadian exposure. Really all CAN can do if US doesn't to trade without retarded geopolitical conditions is to hedge by diverting 17% export to other buyers and minimize the 16% imports from US (ideally circular Canadian substitution between provinces). Really if US/Trump throws hissy fit over reasonable economic rebalancing (not strategic shift, CAN not replacing NORAD with PLARF) with most of worlds' largest trade partner, then not much Canada can do but wait for next annexation attempt.
by sschueller | 2026-01-21 15:36:42+00:00
I agree on application costs to be less but I believe a company needs to bring some capital. In Switzerland you need to pony up 20k in startup capital for a GmbH or 100k for an AG (ignoring the 50k work around), it belongs to the company but guarantees some security for customers and vendors that you aren't just going to take their money and run.

In Switzerland you don't even need to collect VAT until you make at least 100k a year so I find requiring some capital ok.
by tmtvl | 2026-01-21 15:36:50+00:00
I've been meaning to try programming with AI, but it's a bit tricky to manage the maze of models which one can download and run. I know one can pull down qwen3 or starcoder2 with ollama, but there's multiple variations and I have no idea what everything means and what the implications are for running them on my PC. I suppose cloud-based offers simplify all that, but I don't trust them for a hair.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-21 15:37:05+00:00
At will employment is something we'll never accept here. We don't need the threat of having nothing from one day to the next.

It's good for billionaires but not for actual people that matter.

Running a business is not something everyone should have to do anyway. It's good if it's hard. That keeps the cowboys at bay.

I would never ever want to own a business. I don't need that uncertainty. I just want a stable wage.

The prevailing idea here is that the US is best at everything and its model will always win. But in reality it's been in decline for a long time and it's become a pretty toxic society I don't want to see here in Europe. Trump is only a symptom of that but not the cause. The real cause is a top layer (which many HN commenters are part of) that is getting ever richer and a huge disadvantaged mass that is stagnant or declining. Their anger is what drives MAGA. Also called late stage capitalism. Going even more capitalist is not the way to fix or prevent that.
by t-3 | 2026-01-21 15:37:08+00:00
People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very, very wrong.

People use gmail because it was free and in the right place at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI sucks.

None of these things are simple or good or the best solution, they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
by PxldLtd | 2026-01-21 15:37:39+00:00
Have you thought about leaning into some of the fintech space? They'd happily pay for the sorts of features they need to stream financial data (which is usually bazillions of data points) and graph it efficiently.

Off the top of my head, look into Order Book Heatmaps, 3D Volatility Surfaces, Footprint Charts/Volatility deltas. Integrating drawing tools like Fibonacci Retracements, Gann Fans etc. It would make it very attractive to people willing to pay.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-21 15:37:43+00:00
Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".

The essay is written by academics who ignored all the evidence that their precious institutions are none of the things they claim to be. Universities don't care about truth. Look at how much fraud they publish. The head of Harvard was found to have plagiarised, one of her cancer labs had been publishing fraudulent papers for over a decade, the head of Stanford was also publishing fraudulent papers, you can find unlimited examples everywhere.

Universities have made zero progress on addressing this or even acknowledging the scale of it because they are immersed in post-modernist ideology, so their attitude is like, man, what even is truth? Who can really even say what's true? It's not like science is anything specific, riiiiiight, that's why we let our anthropology department claim Aboriginal beliefs about the world are just as valid as white western man's beliefs. Everyone has their own truth so how can fraud be a real thing? Smells like Republicans Pouncing!
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-21 15:37:46+00:00
The section about the transition from BIOS to UEFI really sums up why hardware support is such a nightmare to maintain. I remember dealing with those old IRQ conflicts back in the day, and I certainly do not miss it. It is accurate to say that a PC is just whatever we agree it is because the technology has drifted so far from the original design.
by macleginn | 2026-01-21 15:37:54+00:00
I think part of the negative attitude towards the effects of AI stems from the fact that it demolishes a lot of structure. The traditional institutes maintain well-structured, low-entropy societies in terms of knowledge: one goes to a lawyer for legal advice or to a doctor for medical advice, one goes/send one's children to a university for higher education, etc. One knows what to do and whom to ask. With the advent of internet, this started to change, and now the old system is almost useless: as you note, it may be more efficient to go to AI for legal advice, and AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers, if used correctly. In the limit, the society as it existed before is not simply transformed but is completely gone: everybody is a fully autonomous agent with a $AI_PROVIDER subscription. Ditto for professional groups and other types of association that were needed to organise and disseminate knowledge (what is a lawyer these days? a person with a $LEGAL_AI_PROVIDER subscription, if this is even a thing? what is a SWE?). Now we live in a maximum-entropy situation. How do values evolve and disseminate in this scenario? Everybody has an AI-supported opinion about what is right. How do we agree? How do we decided on the next steps? AI doesn't give us a structure for that.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-21 15:38:23+00:00
A 'near-total ban' would involve basically banning the entire site of HN, and also tends to expose the inherent hypocrisy in any platform attempting to be 'non-political'.

For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
by facontidavide | 2026-01-21 15:38:27+00:00
Cool to see that this project started 5 days ago!
Unfortunately, I can not make it work on my system (Ubuntu, chrome, WebGPU enabled as described in the documentation).
On the other hand, It works on my Android phone...

Funny enough, I am doing something very similar: a C++ portable (Windows, Linux MacOS) charting library, that also compile to WASM and runs in the browser...

I am still at day 2, so see you in 3 days, I guess!
by mrwh | 2026-01-21 15:38:34+00:00
> If a lawyer wants 500€ per half hour of advice, whereas some AI tool is almost zero-cost, even if the advice may only be up to 80% of the quality of a good lawyer, then there is no contest here. AI wins, even if it may arguably be worse

Interesting example, because when I look at it I think of course I'm going to pay for the advice I can trust, when it really matters that I get advice I can trust. 20% confidently wrong legal advice is worse than no advice at all. Where it gets difficult is when that lawyer is offloading their work to an AI...