MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ezst | 2026-02-16 22:47:28+00:00
For me too, ejabberd is the admin-friendlier/lower-effort one. Being more "monolithic", your calls will work straight out of the box because it ships a turn server properly configured out of the box, manage certificates over ACME for you, etc. Prosody isn't bad but has a reputation of needing attention to be paid to which incompatible modules not to enable together and overall more protocol knowledge. Both will run on a first gen RPi effortlessly.
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-02-16 22:49:19+00:00
The first is certainly interesting, but it won't help you develop 0day. I would think of it like more of a collection of fun puzzles and esoterica. For example all the heap unliking/metadata attacks and House of X stuff is pretty antiquated. These will help you win ctfs but are certainly not a prerequisite or even all that relevant to contemporary vuln research. Most of the public research I see is probably at least a year behind the current meta (and I expect the public internet will only grow more quiet over time)
by bananaflag | 2026-02-16 22:49:23+00:00
> Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas.

You are right, but that comes also from a descriptivist perspective. And a linguist would study what sort of prescriptions stick and what sort don't.

When linguists say they aren't prescriptivists, they don't say prescriptivism doesn't work, they just say their job is not about deciding whether to say football or soccer.
by gruez | 2026-02-16 22:49:49+00:00
>That's a problam (one of many problems) with WiFi MAC address randomisation - you can sniff the network names a phone is trying to connect to, then stand up a wifi access point with one of those names and the phone will reveal its real MAC address when it connects.

That's not how mac address randomization works now for both android and ios. Both connects with a randomized mac as well, which might be persistent per-network, but it still heavily hampers data collection. For ios specifically, it also seems to have some sort of heuristic to detect which network names are common/guessable, and use a rotating mac for those. Moreover "you can sniff the network names a phone is trying to connect to" isn't really a thing unless the network is using hidden ssid, which isn't the default for almost all routers.
by neoromantique | 2026-02-16 22:49:59+00:00
>As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create

I'm hoping that the already full of slop centralized platforms now with LLM fueled implosion will overflow and lead to a renaissance of sorts for small and open web, niche communities and decoupling from big tech.

It's already gaining traction among the young, as far as I can see.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-16 22:50:17+00:00
Certainly we are exposed more to the thoughts of billionaires (and they are exposed more to ours). This makes it way easier to observe them being monsters.

But I think there is something to be said for the rising power of the labor movement in the past. I'd wager that Rockefeller was more concerned about being murdered by workers than Zuckerberg. That could manifest both as violent crackdowns against labor but also as a need to appear benevolent to the masses.
Show HN: Babylog – baby tracker built with OpenClaw from a hospital room
by chand1012 | 2026-02-16 22:50:26+00:00
Hey HN! I built Babylog (https://babylog.chand1012.dev) — a simple baby tracker for logging feedings, diapers, and naps — entirely from my wife's hospital room using an AI coding agent.

My wife's water broke the day before her due date. After 18 hours of labor and an emergency c-section at 3am, our son was born. When a nurse asked "do you know what time he ate last?" and we had no idea, I knew I needed something to track it. But I didn't bring my laptop.

I had OpenClaw set up on a home server, accessible via Telegram. So I built the whole thing from my phone — planning the architecture, writing code, deploying to Cloudflare Workers — all through chat.

Stack:

• React + Vite + React Router frontend (PWA)
• Hono backend on Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare D1 (SQLite) for storage
• Retro UI component library
• CI/CD via GitHub Actions
The MVP deployed and worked first try — account creation, child profiles, diaper and feeding logging all functional immediately. My wife and I have been using it daily since.

What went well: Zero-to-working-app without touching a keyboard. The agent handled monorepo setup, API design, frontend, deployment, and even CI/CD pipeline creation.

What didn't: No migration system (the agent skipped proper DB migrations), context poisoning made initial Cloudflare deployment painful (~1 hour of fighting the wrong API endpoint), and I broke every security best practice by giving the agent my API keys directly.

Lessons learned: Scaffold your template and CI/CD first, then let the agent iterate on features. Blog post with the full story: https://dev.to/chand1012/i-built-a-baby-tracker-app-from-my-...
by cjameskeller | 2026-02-16 22:50:34+00:00
Sort of, but it generally goes more like: base/perineum, genitals, navel, heart, throat, forehead, and then one at the top of the head or just above. The Sefer Yetzirah, however, references specifically "Head, Belly, and Chest" as the three loci of the human body. (§ 3.4-5)
by biophysboy | 2026-02-16 22:50:39+00:00
Looking at the paper, the effect is significant but weak (5-7%), even with the conditionals that magnify the effect. I would be curious to see the effect if this experiment were performed on a slightly different categorical variable (e.g. how are two white ethnicities treated). I do think its bad if preferences are "baked in" to the default though - prompting them away seems like a bad solution.
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-16 22:50:40+00:00
I latch on to some of these trends by lowercasing everything, in this case I mostly just don’t correct it if I missed a case

its more like insulation, the people that criticize it seem less connected and less compensated than me while understanding exactly what was conveyed, and the people like me are the same

like “look at this try hard middle manager that doesn’t focus on anything relevant”

one thing I do consciously correct is punctuation, I remove periods after consciously typing them, since an entire generation of people considers it a harsh statement, while the lack of period doesn’t confuse anyone else

language exists to convey a shared concept
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-02-16 22:51:03+00:00
I’m sick and tired of people forgetting that with every field, the first 95% is easy, the last 5% is almost insurmountably hard and what people get paid for.

Yelling “it’s 95% there, we’re so cooked” when anyone can be 95% there for any field since Google was invented doesn’t show much.
by tentativeuser | 2026-02-16 22:51:09+00:00
A zero-dependency Node.js proxy that sits between OpenClaw and the Anthropic API, automatically routing each request to the cheapest Claude model capable of handling it.

Everything runs locally on your OpenClaw server. No data is sent to ibl.ai or any third party — the router is a localhost proxy that forwards directly to your chosen LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenRouter, etc.) using your own API key.
by protocolture | 2026-02-16 22:51:17+00:00
>We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.

Eeehh

I agree in principle. Its just that, a lot of people would want those databases heavily redacted if this was the case, which would ruin their utility.

The financial disincentive that a 25 dollar access fee creates, reduces the amount of spam that can be directed at people listed in these databases by several orders of magnitude. Land title searches are already difficult (in my locality), because a few people can afford to have their solicitors or agents receive and read all their mail. Open that right up, and everyone will either hide behind an agent selling a trash all service, or try and sneak the wrong data in there. Poisoning it.
by etruong42 | 2026-02-16 22:52:11+00:00
I also suspect there is a vortex of temptation as you become an increasingly interesting person. Rich, famous, powerful, well-connected, beautiful etc are all interesting characteristics to nefarious people since those characteristics can advance their own nefarious interests. I suspect that, as you become an increasingly interesting person, you must actively defend your peace. It's not like they actively undermine their own peace, at least not always.

This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-16 22:52:21+00:00
Ok. So I have a bunch them here, different sizes, both SSD and spinning rust. The big ones are all consumer grade drives with a little adapter board like you describe. The small ones are a mix of a single custom board with a USB connector and adapter board based ones. The tell tale is the outer dimension in the length, if the case is a little bit longer than a standard drive you have a very good chance of having one with an adapter board if it is the same or even smaller than the standard format then almost all of them are custom boards. The really nice ones have NVME guts in them that you can immediately repurpose.
by jtrn | 2026-02-16 22:52:32+00:00
Tell me what I’m wrong about?

I have absolutely no frustration with my clients. Be it psychopaths, social anxiety, pedophilia, or schizophrenia. I think I currently actually like all of my clients. And I think all of them I appreciate my approach. Because with them, I don’t care about labels. I only care about figuring out together what the real problem is. Can I accept who they are no matter what their problem is, or who they are. The only thing I “fight”, metaphorically, against self deception.

That doesn’t mean that diagnosis is are handy quick references for the topic at hand.

Obviously, I don’t talk so directly confrontation with my clients as I do on a forum, but I follow the same principle. If I disagree on their own self assessment, I talk with them about it until we both agree on what the real problem is. Sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes the diagnosis label people give themselves is a defense mechanism.
by mrandish | 2026-02-16 22:53:40+00:00
I didn't test this but I suspect current SotA models would get variations within that specific class of question correct if they were forced to use their advanced/deep modes which invoke MoE (or similar) reasoning structures.

I assumed failures on the original question were more due to model routing optimizations failing to properly classify the question as one requiring advanced reasoning. I read a paper the other day that mentioned advanced reasoning (like MoE) is currently >10x - 75x more computationally expensive. LLM vendors aren't subsidizing model costs as much as they were so, I assume SotA cloud models are always attempting some optimizations unless the user forces it.

I think these one sentence 'LLM trick questions' may increasingly be testing optimization pre-processors more than the full extent of SotA model's max capability.
by madeofpalk | 2026-02-16 22:54:24+00:00
Apple makes a pretty strong creative decision in how it 'computes' photos for its camera. In recent years they've got a fair bit of criticism from both tech reporting and regulars I've seen on tiktok commenting that they're just crushing the shadows out of any image (presumably in an attempt to get better low light images), aggressively colour balancing, and over-smoothing to eliminate noise.

If the old man Process Zero comparison is fair, it shows that sometimes this pretty clearly makes the photo worse and there's room to tweak the processing to get a "better" photo. The difference to his skin colour and shadows across his face is astonishing.
by quacked | 2026-02-16 22:55:06+00:00
That's a critical question that isn't being asked enough.

Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.

So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.

And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.

I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-16 22:55:15+00:00
There are technical reasons, though.

Let's suppose we have a pacemaker, and it has data that is beneficial to read -- maybe even in real-time on their pocket computer, or opportunistically as the patient walks by their reader-device, or however that is done.

So we want this data, and we want it over RF. It probably seems obvious that it should only transmit when it is told to do so, right?

So how do we tell the pacemaker to transmit? On its face, that problem seems solved by integrating a receiver that sits and waits for a valid instruction.

Except: That receiver takes power to run. And since changing batteries inside of a person is problematic, we want them to last as long as they can while still performing the desired task.

Now we get to the not-obvious part: In terms of power, it's often less costly to intermittently transmit a string of data than to continuously operate a radio receiver. And maybe it's a bad idea to have an implanted pacemaker that has an open receiver for anything nearby to try to fuck with, anyway.

But a transmit-only radio? Good luck hacking that.

So... we do intermittent transmission, and this works for pacemakers. It also works for the cheap Zigbee thermometer I have (wherein I don't normally request the temperature; it just delivers it periodically, and it runs for years and years on a coin cell).

(Now: Should that pacemaker data be encrypted? Yes, of course. And so should the ID. In fact, the whole transmission should be indistinguishable from background noise by unrelated devices. In this way, authorized devices can then use pre-shared keys to receive and decode these messages and others receive nothing. That kind of cuts BLE and thus also the pocket computer out of the monitoring mix, but tradeoffs are tradeoffs.)
by hn_acker | 2026-02-16 22:55:30+00:00
> Withdrawing Section 230 would lead to more free speech, not less. We will have lots of smaller sites hosting content with their own individual editorial controls

This can already happen right now. Nothing about Section 230 prevents people who would make the hypothetical "lots of smaller sites hosting content with their own individual editorial controls" from making them while Section 230 continues to exist as is.
by RoyalHighness | 2026-02-16 22:55:52+00:00
In working closely with procedural AI systems at a high level of use, I began to notice something subtle but consequential: safeguards are not always applied with deterministic consistency. The instructions may be fluent, even technically correct — yet disclosure of risk can vary. I wanted to examine whether the level of safeguards — and the quality of protection surrounding data, AI-generated instructions, and user environments — was being applied equally across all users. When safety signaling fluctuates, operational equity becomes a real concern.

This piece explores that imbalance and argues for a clearer, more consistent standard — one that treats procedural risk as a structural obligation, not a probabilistic afterthought.
by bpye | 2026-02-16 22:55:55+00:00
Finding something with symbols will help a lot. Symbols end up getting left in Linux and macOS builds fairly often.

The reverse engineering I've learned has generally been to fix something that has annoyed me - for example I reverse engineered part of RCT3 to fix mouse input with high poll rates and allow for resizable windows [0]. Certainly easier to approach than trying to get into a closed device since you can attach a debugger.

[0] - https://mastodon.social/@benpye/109261545643008493
by RiverCrochet | 2026-02-16 22:56:18+00:00
On one hand:

If it's not legal for me to buy something then why do I see ads for it? Prescription drugs and products for children like toy and food ads during kid's shows fall in this category.

On the other hand:

- Not everyone has a doctor that gives them more than 3-4 minutes during a visit. So, while this is a separate issue that drug ads aren't designed to solve, there are positive effects:

-- Drug ads may make you aware of a treatment you didn't know about before.

-- Drug ads are a good opportunity for companies to inform of the side effects of drugs.

And:

- The "placebo effect" may contribute to a success of a drug. Maybe drug ads help start this psychological process through the visuals in their ads.

Regarding the content of most pharmaceutical ads, I'd say they don't really explicitly mislead and they do their best to present side effects and such in the timeframe of the commercial. I haven't seen any that are more annoying or untruthful than other typical ads.

I associate negative thoughts with them not because of the content or purpose of the ads, but because the ads seem to appear where older people are believed to be, and that means someone has put you into an old-person bucket.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-16 22:56:28+00:00
> The solder's surface tension does more of the work. It feels a lot more like sticking together things with tiny droplets of glue. Having the correct amount of solder in the right place is critical.

I believe this is why I have an easier time hand-soldering BGA than QF[np]: I can't screw up solder amount/evenness.
by vessenes | 2026-02-16 22:56:35+00:00
This looks super useful! And it’s intellectually appealing to think that the LLM will have the ability to think back precisely and we can rely on DAG tooling to reason about and keep track of history (and correct history).

Have you considered making an openclaw plugin/PR for it? I understand you have your own coding CLI tool, but I don’t think this looks so hard to implement that it can’t be implemented elsewhere.

Either way, thanks for sharing this.
by jorl17 | 2026-02-16 22:56:37+00:00
Thank you so much for your work!

I've echoed the sentiment here on HN (and elsewhere) that these kinds of mechanisms seem to be a pathway to extending context longer and longer and longer and I wish I could toy around with this technology right now (can I?). I'm so excited!!

Your work is the shoulders-built-on-shoulders upon which other giants shall keep on building. Thank you so much.
by foresto | 2026-02-16 22:56:38+00:00
> Are you really a hobbyist if you aren't desoldering and reclaiming parts?

Fun memory from who-knows-how-many years ago:

While installing a Playstation mod chip, I managed to overheat a nearby surface mount resistor, pulling off one of its metal contacts in the process. I didn't think that was fixable, and since it was Sunday, the local electronics shop was closed. I ended up disassembling an old junk digital camera that hadn't yet been taken to the e-waste recycling drop, and finding inside it a resistor that seemed close enough to maybe work. The transplant was a success, and the Playstation ran great thereafter. Very satisfying.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-16 22:56:53+00:00
And if you insult people, and get rewarded by submission, one reaction is to amp up the insults.

After all, you don't know the limits of your power until someone quits. So abuse people, exhibit outlandish public behavior, say racist or otherwise objectionable things...every person who remains on your payroll is a sign of how powerful you are.

This is not a common tactic, but it's a highly visible tactic, and it's not hard to find some notable examples out there right now.
by lollobomb | 2026-02-16 22:57:30+00:00
That is not really true, or at least it's very difficult and you lose accuracy. The problem is that the definition of "Open Source AI" is bollocks since it doesn't require release of the training set. In other words, models like Qwen are already tuned to the point that removing the bias would degrade performance a lot.

Mind you, this has nothing to do with the model being Chinese, all open source models are like this, with very few niche exceptions. But we also have to stop being politically correct and saying that a model trained to rewrite history is OK.
by ass22 | 2026-02-16 22:58:06+00:00
Im working on a project to change this.

Funny that you mention 'real people'. There are a number of components that sit at the core of what Im building - it should allow you to have the time and reach to vet more (100% verified) candidates than you ever could before. I also want to reduce the cost of hiring so that firms can hire more people.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-16 22:58:24+00:00
> Is there anything useful about this?

Directly: no, the end of the article has a nice list of reasons why, reframed as random musings.

Miles, if you're reading this, it's useful. You're already doing what .1% of people do. I call them journeys and emphasize they're a million steps without clear direction, and if you're lucky, maybe positive feedback along the way. You're just on step N < 1,000,000. This works out, in some way, you already know it's not literally "yes this is sooo useful that we should start autofolding it at 1000x scale". It will work out. maybe as exactly this, this with some tweaks, or the $25K helps you do $X, or the publicity helps you do $Y.
by lukev | 2026-02-16 22:59:49+00:00
This clarifies an important point for me.

The derivative of a LLM agent's capabilities (on its own) is negative. It's not that they can't do useful work -- it means that (for now) they require some level of input or steering.

If that were to change -- if an agent could consistently get better at what it does without intervention -- that would represent a true paradigm shift. An accelerating curve, rather than one trending back towards linearity.

This represents a necessary inflection point for any sort of AI "takeoff" scenario.

So this study is actually kind of important, even though it's a null result. Because the contra view would be immensely significant.
by nl | 2026-02-16 23:00:15+00:00
"the post-training performance gains in Qwen3.5 primarily stem from our extensive scaling of virtually all RL tasks and environments we could conceive."

I don't think anyone is surprised by this, but I think it's interesting that you still see people who claim the training objective of LLMs is next token prediction.

The "Average Ranking vs Environment Scaling" graph below that is pretty confusing though! Took me a while to realize the Qwen points near the Y-axis were for Qwen 3, not Qwen 3.5.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-16 23:01:17+00:00
There's probably legit uses in finance for LLMs, in exploring potential scenarios and strategies, spit-balling ideas, summarizing financial news. Sure. Great. Maybe even as a trading agent, questionable, but I'd buy that as maybe happening.

But replacing Bloomberg terminals with "Chat with NYSE", that is no exaggeration one of the most out of touch ideas I think I have ever heard in my life!