MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I tried to build a soundproof sleep capsule
by bizzz | 2026-02-11 12:57:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I've struggled with apartment noise for years, so I attempted to engineer a mechanical solution: a decoupled, mass-loaded sleep capsule.

I went down a deep rabbit hole involving:

- Mass Law vs. decoupling

- Building a prototype cube

- Accidentally creating a resonance chamber (my prototype amplified bass by ~10dB)

- Pivoting to acoustic metamaterials (Helmholtz resonators) and parametric CAD

The project was ultimately a failure in terms of silence, but a success in understanding acoustics and regaining a sense of agency. I wrote up the physics, the build process, and the mistakes here.

Happy to answer questions about the build.
by jazz9k | 2026-02-11 12:57:33+00:00
I'm a consultant full-time now (no boss, make my own hours) and had my own business for 7 years (close to solo, with 2 parters).

Most people can't relate when they talk about a terrible boss or some ridiculous drama at work..and you don't have any of that.

I don't even talk about work anymore with family.
by mediaeater | 2026-02-11 12:58:35+00:00
This is a solid assessment of whats here and what is in front of us. Broad brush stroke dismissals aside, we are here. Evolve or Perish. AI is like unchecked fire, but make no mistake fire is very powerful once it was harnessed. AI leans more supplemental vs incremental than prior major tech shifts and that's worth noting. It will be the same for other sectors and verticals over time. The markets view software eats the world is being eaten by new software.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-11 12:58:46+00:00
their monopolies were formed in a different time, when it might have been thought prudent to drop bad merchants even if they themselves did not bear the risk in order to not get governmental regulation imposed that would be more detrimental than just dropping the merchants.

Not saying that's the case, just given circumstances not sure if risk is needed to explain the result in this case.
by whatsupdog | 2026-02-11 12:59:22+00:00
Unjustified downvoting. You absolutely have a point. Not just software, also the gazillion UI/UX designers. They keep moving things around and changing colors and fucking things up just to justify their salaries. Case in point: Google maps. It was perfect 15 years ago. We don't need vomit inducing color changes every 2 years
by aero9188 | 2026-02-11 12:59:57+00:00
> You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done.

Interesting. So you regularly make new apps in 1 hour each.

How is that the same as...writing a book? Did you mean write several short stories? Or are we talking non-fiction?
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-11 13:00:12+00:00
They also added strange hacked on half-support for alpha-transparency in modern MS Paint. Meaning there is an alpha layer, and imported staff may utilize it, but if you need to do anything with that layer, you're basically SOL.

Better to have no alpha-transparency than whatever this is. At least old Paint just turned it white, and you could manipulate the white layer, with this working with the alpha layer is a nightmare.
by nanobuilds | 2026-02-11 13:00:20+00:00
The browsing data itself is only half the problem. Even if you remove the spying extension, the profile it helped build persists and keeps shaping what you see as it gets sold and changes hands.

We focus a lot on blocking data collection and spyware.. but not enough about what happens after the data is already collected/stolen and baked into your algorithmic identity. So much of our data is already out there.
by amluto | 2026-02-11 13:01:32+00:00
> do time sync by having A/V sync and good clocks on each device and aligning based on audio loud enough to be recorded by all devices

Why do you need good clocks? For audio, even with simultaneously playing speakers, you only need to synchronize within a couple of ms unless you need coherence or are a serious audiophile. If if want to maintain sync for an hour I suppose you need decently good clock.

But as long as you have any sort of wire, basically any protocol can synchronize well enough. Although synchronizing based on visual and audible sources is certainly an interesting idea. (Audio only is a completely nonstarter for a sporting event: the speed of sound is low and the venues are large. You could easily miss by hundreds of ms.)

> then mix, reencode and distribute on normal GPU-equipped datacenter servers using GPU acceleration

Really? Even ignoring latency, we’re talking quite a few Gbps sustained. A hiccup would suck, and if you’re not careful, you could easily spend multiple millions of dollars per day in egress and data handling fees if you use a big cloud. Just use a handful of on-site commodity machines.
by fusslo | 2026-02-11 13:02:32+00:00
"zoom", "LibreOffice Editor", "Enhanced Image Viewer", "Video Downloader PLUS"

I guess I shouldnt be surprised on how many use "LibreOffice" or other legit company names to lend legitimacy to themselves. I'm wondering if companies like Zoom don't audit the extension store for copyright claims

I for sure used to use Video Downloader PLUS when I still used chrome (and before youtube-dl)
by mtlynch | 2026-02-11 13:02:40+00:00
Take my advice with a big grain of salt because I'm by no means an expert at finding customers. I can just say what's worked for me.

The thing that's been successful for me is to figure out who my customers are and find ways to show them I have something valuable to offer.

My most successful example was TinyPilot, where I wrote about how I built the first prototype,[0] and that post had an extremely positive reception on HN[1] and reddit[2]. I continued writing about my homelab because readers who were interested in learning about homelab were also people who had a use for TinyPilot.

I did the same thing when making my blogging course a few years ago. I joined a community for developer bloggers and gave people constructive feedback when they'd ask for notes on their drafts. Then, I approached the community manager and asked to pilot the course in the community for free (she actually insisted on paying me because she didn't believe in asking for free work). But the community liked it, the manager liked it, and it was great for me because it gave me feedback and testimonials for my course.

I've used ads but never as a first step. I think the first step has to be highly personalized where I'm out there meeting customers where they are and showing I can offer something useful.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927380

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hwimys/tinypilot_b...
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-11 13:02:52+00:00
Yet I was unable to find a better priced vehicle that does not charge monthly for remote start, access to the vehicle's camera recordings, phone key, and navigation.

And the monthly subscription is for a software feature that does quite a bit more than lane keeping, in my experience of the trial they offered during December. I did multiple 45 min drives across town, on urban and traffic light streets without intervention, and many other drives where intervention was only required 1 or 2 times. I could see real utility in it for someone with slower reflexes or poorer eyesight, such as the elderly.

I haven't seen anyone offer that capability at anywhere near Model Y's price.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 13:02:53+00:00
It is a classic supply-chain attack. The same modality is used by gamers to sell off their high-level characters, and social media accounts do "switcheroos" on posts, Pages, and Groups all the time.

You know, a lot of consumer cybersecurity focuses on malware, browser security, LAN services, but I propose that the new frontier of breaches involves browser extensions, "cloud integrations", and "app access" granted from accounts.

If I gave permission for Joe Random Developer's app to read, write, and delete everything in Gmail and Google Drive, that just set me up for ransomware or worse. Without a trace on any local OS. A virus scanner will never catch such attacks. The "Security Checkup" processes are slow and arduous. I often find myself laboriously revoking access and signing out obsolete sessions, one by one by one. There has got to be a better way.
by rwmj | 2026-02-11 13:02:54+00:00
The OP should try with -march=native so the compiler can use vector instructions.

Slightly off-topic but I like this way to test if memory is all zeroes: https://rusty.ozlabs.org/2015/10/20/ccanmems-memeqzero-itera... (see "epiphany #2" at the bottom of the page) I really wish there was a standard libc function for it.
by aero9188 | 2026-02-11 13:03:10+00:00
> Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up.

Only a risk in terms of dying sure, but plenty of people lost taste and smell for long periods before the vaccine (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have yet to get it back). I'd rather be dead, to be honest. The food around my part of the world is too delicious.
by ljm | 2026-02-11 13:03:16+00:00
There are a lot of situations at work where posting a confluence page or a markdown doc on slack doesn't really get any traction, but a mob session does as you can step through things.

Something like this might be a good middle ground (can't interrupt with questions, but can still step through changes). That said, I usually write a script and spin up Loom as the 5 minute limit forces me to keep it tight.
by goku12 | 2026-02-11 13:03:24+00:00
I think it's a bit of a stretch to include protocols and protocol suites among centralized services. One simple test for this is the question: "How many Xs are there?". For examples, how many email servers, FTP servers or terminal servers are there? Compare that with "How many Facebooks or GitHubs are there?".

Email protocol suite is designed to be federated. FTP is just a file system access protocol. But you could combine it with an inter-server filesystem synchronization protocol/service to make it a distributed federated service. And as for terminal servers,.. well, I don't think centralization makes much sense there. How can you achieve any of these with centralized services?
by krupan | 2026-02-11 13:03:32+00:00
Thanks for writing that. It reminds me that there are many things we build and they work (for some definition of work) even though we don't fully understand them.

Did the first people that made fire understand it? You mentioned bridge building. How many bridges have failed for unknown (at the time) reasons? Heck, are we sure that every feature we put into a bridge design is necessary or why it's necessary? Repeat this thought for everything humans have created. Large software projects are difficult to reason about. You'll often find code that works because of a delightfully surprising combination of misunderstandings. When humans try to modify a complex system to solve one problem they almost always introduce new behavior, the law of unintended consequences.

All that being said, we usually don't get anywhere without at least a basic understanding of why doing X leads to Y. The first humans that made fire had probably observed the way fires started before they set out to make their own. Same with bridges and cars and computers.

So yes, you are absolutely correct that nobody fully understands how AI/LLMs work. But also, we kinda do understand. But also also, we're probably at a stage where we are building bridges that are going to collapse, boilers that will explode, or computer programs that are one unanticipated input away from seg faulting.
by pockybum522 | 2026-02-11 13:03:39+00:00
Every once in a while, I try LLMs just to see how improvement is going.

Yesterday I had to explain to Opus what the color white is and what "bottom right" means after it declared problems fixed, repeatedly, that a literal preschooler would have been able to tell were absolutely unchanged from the original problem description.

I am still waiting for this world of redundant programmers I've been hearing about for years.
by hackinthebochs | 2026-02-11 13:04:02+00:00
No, its extremely silly to use the incidental name of a thing as an argument for the limits of its relevance. LLMs were designed to model language, but that does not determine the range of their applicability, or even the class of problems they are most suited for. It turns out that LLMs are a general computing architecture. What they were originally designed for is incidental. Any argument that starts off "but they are language models" is specious out of the gate.
by arantius | 2026-02-11 13:04:43+00:00
I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:

* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around.
* Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.)
* I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.

The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".
by superactro | 2026-02-11 13:04:58+00:00
Hey HN, maker here. I built ClawBox because I got tired of paying $40+/mo for cloud VPS setups that still couldn't do browser automation reliably.

ClawBox is a dedicated hardware box (NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super) running OpenClaw (https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw), an open-source AI assistant framework. You plug it in, connect Telegram/WhatsApp/Discord, and it just runs - 24/7, on your desk, drawing 15W.

What it actually does:
- Controls a real Chrome instance (fills forms, monitors sites, scrapes data)
- On-device voice pipeline (Whisper STT + Kokoro TTS, no cloud)
- Connects to any AI model (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini via API, or Llama 3 locally)
- Reads your email, manages calendar, sends messages

The hardware: 67 TOPS AI performance, 8GB LPDDR5, 512GB NVMe, dual-band WiFi + BT 5.0, carbon fiber case. Setup takes ~5 minutes, no terminal needed.

I chose Jetson over Raspberry Pi because the GPU makes a real difference for browser automation + speech processing simultaneously. A Pi just can't keep up.

Cost comparison: ClawBox is EUR399 one-time. A comparable cloud VPS runs $30-50/mo. It pays for itself in under a year, and you own the hardware.

We've shipped 3 units so far (just launched last week). Happy to answer any questions about the hardware, software stack, or business side.
by gvurrdon | 2026-02-11 13:05:25+00:00
Definitely.
I have spent the last few days trying to get a replacement "Digipass" device for a bank account I run for a small sports club. The bank was very reluctant to issue a new one as they want to move everyone onto their app to generate codes for logging in to their website.
Trying to argue that even if their app worked now on a de-Googled Android device there was no guarantee that they wouldn't require Google's safetynet etc. at some point in the future was a failure. They did not understand this and decreed that the app not working, or possibly not working, on one's phone was "not a valid reason" to be excused from using the app.
Luckily because the account is a business account I was able to claim that using banking apps on phones was against company policy (I set the policy myself), which is an excuse they were willing to accept. For now.
Ask HN: Necessity of LLC for solo game dev?
by throwawayhnxxx1 | 2026-02-11 13:05:43+00:00
I have a couple of games that I made as a hobby project over the years, and currently working on my next game. I was thinking about putting my current games on steam for a nominal fee, mostly to get some experience with that side of things. I am not expecting to make any money through this, but would like to be in a good position in case one of the games catches fire.

I'm concerned that releasing games under my own name may make me an easier target for frivolous lawsuits and/or scams, however I am also not sure if starting a LLC is worth it for something that I don't expect to make any money. Does anyone have experience navigating a similar situation?
by insin | 2026-02-11 13:05:57+00:00
HN story about what Stylish was up to 7 and a bit years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447816

I'd assumed most people would have jumped ship to Stylus [1] after that, but most people probably never heard anything about what Stylish was/is doing.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpee...
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-11 13:06:00+00:00
I have seen coworkers, who are otherwise very nice people, become rather nasty when given some authority over other's code in the form of code reviews. The code review turns into "this is how I would have written it, rewrite it."

What we did before code reviews: we would get together with our fellow engineers in front of a whiteboard and knock out the structure of the code one was tasked with. We'd argue whether caching is necessary or if the framework provides it for us. We'd talk about concurrency issues and whether to use semaphores or locks…

Once the plan looked good, an engineer was trusted enough to go off and implement it.

Unit tests are fine. Before unit tests we had coworkers (QA) that did full test suites for integration, functional testing. At the more "unit level", robust param checking (with assertions, logging) happened early within the functions that could fail. (Obvious example: checking for zero in a function that might use that value to divide. Its a kind of unit test in situ.)

Of course when management uses unit tests as some kind of replacement for actual integration and functional testing they become an end unto themselves (bonus: the company is also able to lay off QA).
by EllaAILab | 2026-02-11 13:06:14+00:00
Seedance2.fun is an AI-powered video generation platform that turns text prompts and images into high-quality cinematic videos. With advanced motion synthesis and visual effects, users can create marketing videos, social media content, and storytelling clips effortlessly. No professional editing experience is needed—just describe your idea and let seedance2.fun bring it to life in minutes.
by ern_ave | 2026-02-11 13:07:23+00:00
> letting the LLM write my code for me is like letting the LLM play my video games for me.

I'd love to get to the point where I'm still writing code, but the LLM is typing it for me. Part of the problem though, is that I actually kind of think in code, and I often have to start typing in order to fully form an algorithm in my head.
by Grom_PE | 2026-02-11 13:07:35+00:00
It seems crazy to me that the offered way to install an extension on Chrome is to click a button on a privileged website,
and then the installed extension autoupdates without an option to turn it off.

I hate the idea of installing stuff without an ability to look at what's inside first, so what I did was patch Chromium binary,
replacing all strings "chromewebstore.google.com" with something else, so I can inject custom JS into that website and turn
"Install" button into "Download CRX" button. After downloading, I can unpack the .crx file and look at the code, then
install via "Load unpacked" and it never updates automatically. This way I'm sure only the code I've looked at gets executed.
by nondrool | 2026-02-11 13:07:47+00:00
You must be unaware that you're your own best salesman. Only you buy the bullshit you sell, and you can't be shocked when others don't. There's a lot I could tackle here, as you're wrong in tons of ways, but objective facts reveal truth. Sadly that bot of yours won't work in the physical realm, so hopefully that's not the bullshitter.

Install cameras everywhere there's assumed privacy like the bathroom / water closet, bedrooms, or anywhere else. Can keep costs down by simply filming it as well. When anyone asks what you've been doing lately simply provide them those recordings. Might want to upload somewhere if easier, and freely post those too since you don't care.

Make copies of your ID, credit cards, phone number, and email addresses. Have some with two of those, some with three, and some with all four included. Mix it up in any carefree fashion you'd like. Next time one is required hand them copies, and then carelessly proceed about your business. Tell them to get over it, and move on, since that's their social problem of which you don't care regardless if they care you're a weirdo that doesn't care.
by bnovikov | 2026-02-11 13:07:54+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with x402-style payment flows where bots pay and receive USDC programmatically, without trad brokerage accounts or manual KYC loops. It changes the architecture quite a bit since the agent can settle value natively on-chain.

Curious how you’re thinking about long term payment infrastructure. Do you see this staying custodial with provided capital, or moving toward agents managing their own on-chain balances?
by zachdotai | 2026-02-11 13:08:03+00:00
Two techniques that keep working against agents with real tools:

Context stuffing - flood the conversation with benign text, bury a prompt injection in the middle. The agent's attention dilutes across the context window and the instruction slips through. Guardrails that work fine on short exchanges just miss it.

Indirect injection via tool outputs - if the agent can browse or search, you don't attack the conversation at all. You plant instructions in a page the agent retrieves. Most guardrails only watch user input, not what comes back from tools.

Both are really simple. That's kind of the point.

We build runtime security for AI agents at Fabraix and we open-sourced a playground to stress-test this stuff in the open. Weekly challenges, visible system prompts, real agent capabilities. Winning techniques get published. Community proposes and votes on what gets tested next.
by sneela | 2026-02-11 13:08:54+00:00
I recently bought a film camera (Minolta X-700) and I wasted a whole roll because I inverted the aperture (i.e, 2 = sharp, 32 = blur)...

I'm interested to see how the roll turns out - gave it for development the other day, had a good laugh with the employees though.

I now have a mnemonic for it: Blor - a (somewhat) portmanteau of Blur and low. So low aperture = blur.

Edit for clarification: I mean low number (2 vs 32) = blur
by Pythagomizer | 2026-02-11 13:11:21+00:00
I like this approach. I especially agree with the comparison of complex numbers to negative numbers. Remember that historically, not every civilization even had a number for zero. Likewise, mathematicians struggled with a generalized solution to the Quadratic. The problem was that there were at least 6 possible equations to solve a quadratic without using negative numbers. Back then, its application was limited to area and negative numbers seemed irrelevant based on the absolute value nature of distance. It was only by abandoning our simplistic application rooted in reality that we could develop a single Quadratic Equation and with it open a new world of possibilities.
by alphazard | 2026-02-11 13:11:36+00:00
The ability to reverse is very dependent on the transformation being well known, in this case it is deterministic and known with certainty.
Any algorithm to reverse motion blur will depend on the translation and rotation of the camera in physical space, and the best the algorithm could do will be limited by the uncertainty in estimating those values.

If you apply a fake motion blur like in photoshop or after effects then that could probably be reversed pretty well.