MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by otherme123 | 2026-02-02 06:44:42+00:00
> And perhaps a tool to e.g. do a checksum of all Notepad++ files, and compare them to the ones of a verified clean install of the user's installed version, would be a start?

Did I understand the attack wrongly? The software could have a 100% correct checksum, because the attack happened in a remote machine that deals with call home events from Notepad++, I guess one of those "Telemetry" add-ons. The attackers did a MITM to Notepad++ traffic.
by AngryData | 2026-02-02 06:45:21+00:00
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.

/S
by numpad0 | 2026-02-02 06:45:38+00:00
Situation:
- The author is running macOS ARM64
- off of a USB disk
- plugged into DFU capable USB-C port
- that shouldn't be the DFU one according to docs
- attempting to run macOS updater
- (supposedly)there's nothing else connected to it

Outcomes:
- updates were failing and rolling back with cryptic errors
- errors persist despite all efforts
- -> later magically solved after changing the port
- -> the problematic port later revealed to be the DFU port
- contradictory to Apple documentation

Or at least that's how it reads to me. As for reasons, I don't know why anything that can boot from USB can't from DFU-enabled USB port, but maybe it's configured as a special non-USB debug connector while bootloader is executing.
by raincole | 2026-02-02 06:46:41+00:00
> From what I've read, every major AI player is losing a (lot) of money on running LLMs, even just with inference.

> It's hard to say for sure because they don't publish the financials (or if they do, it tends to be obfuscated)

Yeah, exactly. So how the hell the bloggers you read know AI players are losing money? Are they whistleblowers? Or they're pulling numbers out of their asses? Your choice.
by cricalix | 2026-02-02 06:47:13+00:00
Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.
by cthalupa | 2026-02-02 06:48:01+00:00
It's still correct, but like most things related to human health, there are many different factors at play. The practical consideration for most people is not just getting too much, or having high levels of both muscle and fat, increasing your total body size more than just being one or the other.

Higher muscle mass tends to mean better insulin sensitivity, a higher general level of physical fitness, etc. etc. etc. These are all larger beneficial improvements than the problem with just being a larger person.

But if you look at two people of different heights, the same FFMI, etc., the larger person will have lower life expectancy, and it's not because their head is a few inches higher in the air, and despite having a similar body composition and more total muscle mass. (Obviously controlling for all other variables)

We know that blood flow demand increases put additional strain on the heart. We know this is one of the causes of things like LVH and other negative cardiac remodeling. We know that at rest, muscle and fat mass have essentially identical blood flow requirements. Even natural powerlifters when having their heart scans have found increased septum and posterior wall thickness without the increase in chamber size that endurance athletes have that keeps function optimal - they have diastolic function loss. In fact, in many of the negative imaging results, they found minimal difference between natural powerlifters and enhanced - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4079743/

People get obstructive sleep apnea from too much muscle mass, even at low levels of body fat.

On the enhanced side, we see better health outcomes from people that both drop the AAS usage alongside letting them size go down vs. those that just come off the gear. (You can keep very significant portions of your enhanced gains while at physiological levels, as long as you maintain strict training, protein intake, etc. It's one of the reasons that many people argue that the 7-10 year bans in natural powerlifting federations is not actually effective.)

It's a u shaped curve. At some point all of the health benefits of muscle can't make up for the increased cardiovascular strain. The majority of people have more risk from their less-muscular body composition so building more will almost certainly benefit them, but that's not the same as the idea that body size, from any cause, doesn't have a negative correlation with longevity.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-02-02 06:48:36+00:00
This makes me think how AI turns SW development upside down. In traditonal development we write code which is the answer to our problems. With AI we write questions and get the answers. Neither is easy, finding the correct questions can be a lot fo work, whereas if you have some existing code you already have the answers, but you may not have the questions (= "specs") written down anywhere, at least not very well, typically.
by 6stringmerc | 2026-02-02 06:48:39+00:00
I want to print this article and take it with me when asking permission to use my pro-grade Garrett metal detector on unused, abandoned but owned / to be redeveloped property.

I’m old enough and studied enough to know where I live people in the Great Depression stashed loot in jars and buried it. Who knows what all could be in the occasional backyard recovery. History tells lots of things, not many listen. Utility can be limited in scope.
by nitroedge | 2026-02-02 06:48:56+00:00
If the context window is managed properly that offsets almost all these "random drill holes", I see so many people just filling up the buffer and then compacting and complaining. With ambitious huge task requests and not having any form of system that breaks a job into multiple mini tasks.

Context rot is real and people who complain about AI's hallucinating and running random wild, I don't see it when the context window is managed properly.
by bigbuppo | 2026-02-02 06:50:40+00:00
You can tell times have changed because nobody has tape backups these days, just a hope and a prayer that the copy of their data to a different cloud provider will still be good when The Great Oops takes out everything. Unfortunately, everything has a dependency on us-east-1, except that us-east-1 has a critical dependency on the dns servers of a small regional ISP probably somewhere in the southeast US.
by comex | 2026-02-02 06:50:44+00:00
Probably the biggest thing that serious predictions are relying on is the METR graph:

https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

It shows a remarkably consistent curve for AI completing increasingly difficult coding tasks over time. In fact, the curve is exponential, where the X axis is time and the Y axis is task difficulty as measured by how long a human would take to perform the task. The current value for 80% success rate is only 45 minutes, but if it continues to follow the exponential curve, it will only take 3 years and change to get to a full 40 hour human work week's worth of work. The 50% success rate graph is also interesting, as it's similarly exponential and is currently at 6 hours.

Of course, progress could fall off as LLMs hit various scaling limits or as the nature of the difficulty changes. But I for one predicted that progress would fall off before, and was wrong. (And there is nothing saying that progress can't speed up.)

On the other hand, I do find it a little suspicious that so many eggs are in the one basket of METR, prediction-wise.
by randomuser47 | 2026-02-02 06:51:00+00:00
> Not sure why using FSST is better than using a standard compression algorithm to compress the dictionary entries.

I believe the reason is that FSST allows access to individual strings in the compressed corpus, which is required for fast random access. This is more important for OLTP than OLAP, I assume.
More standard compression algorithms, such as zstd, might decompress very fast, but I don't think they allow that
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-02 06:52:19+00:00
It's not about me. It's about the author of TFA, the person who was hurting him and how he made him stop.

Just two people exercising their freedoms. Officially, nothing happened. It's just two guys randomly using their TV remotes at roughly the same time. If police had been called, they wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

Yet a game was played. One turned up the volume, the other remotely turned off the TV in response. On and on it went until the volume would no longer get turned up. Victory.

Note that the neighbor never figured out who was doing it. There's no way to know what he would have done in that case. Maybe nothing. Maybe something.

Hackers should probably think twice before liberally applying their boundless ingenuity to social problems like these. It can work. It can also escalate.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-02 06:52:53+00:00
That's sad. China should be more helpful with regards to open source.

Notepad++ is a great editor. I don't use it on Linux, because I have
an older editor I am very used to, but on Windows I like notepad++
a lot (though lately I have been using geany on Windows, mostly
for convenience - I think notepad++ is better but I sort of like
the github-based development of geany; either way notepad++ is
really excellent as well).
by tgma | 2026-02-02 06:53:08+00:00
> This is strongly contested.

Sure if you watch #AyatollahBBC or Democrat media who created the beast in the first place under Carter.

--

The rest I will just let you wait and see... There may be some success on the Kurdish/Azeri separationist fronts, but there is less than zero chance Pakistan and Iraq could take over the rest of the country.

The majority of Iranians hate Pakistan and Arabs. The whole undercurrent of the protest is a nationalist movement to kick Islam and Arab culture out. You take a province here a province there; what to do with the rest?
by deaux | 2026-02-02 06:56:05+00:00
People have been getting zero-click hacked on iPhones by Israeli malware now also in use by ICE, even recently. I don't blame Apple too much given what they're up against, but zero-clicks are the worst thing possible.

[0] https://www.securityweek.com/paragon-graphite-spyware-linked...

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/eff-statement-ice-use-...
by cthalupa | 2026-02-02 06:56:33+00:00
You understand that all of this is a feedback loop, right? They've been under embargo for more than half a century. Do you not understand how that can cripple an economy? How it can prevent an economy from growing and developing?

You're confusing defending with pointing out objective fact. I don't have to like Cuba, it's current regime, or really anything about it to point out that acting like the state of it's economy and industry isn't massively shaped by the embargo is silly.

Hell, if it wasn't, then we could say the embargo is pointless and not having it's intended impact. We're not embargoing them just to go "Well, we at the United States of America think you guys suck." We're explicitly doing it to make them feel economic pain for their policies. It's a very strange conversation we're having where I am pointing out the embargo has worked and you're providing ethical justification for why we should embargo them but also ignoring the actual (desired!) outcome of the embargo.
by Antibabelic | 2026-02-02 06:56:56+00:00
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/gen_ai_shadow_it_secr...

"With 45 percent of enterprise employees now using generative AI tools, 77 percent of these AI users have been copying and pasting data into their chatbot queries, the LayerX study says. A bit more than a fifth (22 percent) of these copy and paste operations include PII/PCI."
by peteforde | 2026-02-02 06:57:34+00:00
I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board. Certainly tastes are individual and like any skill worth practicing, you do get better at it... but it's just such a miserable way to work. IMO, again.

Not only can you now order a real PCB for under $10, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could just buy extremely large pre-cut wire kits and treat them as the consumables that they truly are.

I'd rather go back to wire-wrapping. Every time I think "this is a great opportunity to use up a proto board!" I end up covered in flux goo and wondering what on earth I was thinking.

The real problem with proto board is what happens when you inevitably need to change your circuit. Again, it's miserable and suddenly your perceived speed gains are simply gone.

I think that the most exciting thing in prototyping right now is Stephen Hawes experiments with a) creating a PCB with premade vias that can be used to prototype anything and b) using a fiber laser to make your own PCBs.

Truly one of the most inspiring creators today.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-02 06:57:49+00:00
Ah, so this has to do with mainland China going after those who think the Taiwanese do not belong to mainland China. Well, I see them as independent folks. Mainland China needs to stop thinking it can occupy land willy-nilly; unfortunately with USA, Russia and China thinking they can bully other countries that lack nukes, I think these smaller countries absolutely need nukes for defensive purpose.

It is also annoying that all these three countries think they can bully other countries too. That is basically them saying they can kill other people in other countries at all times no matter the real "reason" (just make up a fake reason, such as Russia with regard to Ukraine) - annoying to no ends.

Having said that, and I just pointed out I disagree with mainland China bullying the Taiwanese, I think it would actually be better to have software itself be completely apolitical. I never understood why people felt a need to tie political goals into software. That is a valid statement even if I happen to agree with the political goals here.
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-02-02 06:59:36+00:00
- plugged into DFU capable USB-C port

This is what I'm contending. No, I don't think this is true. All he found was the upgrading macOS on the external disk, which as documented must not be on a DFU capable USB-C port, did not work when plugged into a port that was documented to not be DFU.

The source the author is referring to, Michael Tsai, indeed found that he had plugged his external disk into the DFU port. The author then (reasonably, but IMHO erroneously) deduced that his problem, also solved by changing ports, must thus have had the same cause. I say it may be confounding factors, and the only way to validate the wrong DFU port hypothesis is putting their mac in DFU mode and then running Recovery Assistant against it, on various ports.

Tangentially, it is infuriating that Apple would swap what the DFU port is across generations, as if it wasn't confusing enough.
by ongy | 2026-02-02 07:00:19+00:00
It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.

It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM.
Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.
by fragmede | 2026-02-02 07:01:00+00:00
There more stuff in mine, but at the top of my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md file, I have:

## Important Instructions

- update todo.md as items are completed

**Commit to git after making code changes.** Check `git status` first - only commit if there are actual changes:
```bash
# If not in a git repository, initialize it first:
git init

# Then commit changes:
git add <FILES_UPDATED>
# Be surgical - add only the changes you just made.
git commit -m "Description of changes"
by anishyc | 2026-02-02 07:01:03+00:00
Hey HN, I’m a solo dev. I got tired of manually closing 10 browser tabs, killing Slack, and opening VS Code every time I wanted to switch from 'Client Work' to 'Deep Code' mode.

So I built SwitchBlade. It’s a native macOS app that lets you define 'Profiles'. One click in the menu bar kills specific apps, launches others, opens URLs, and toggles system settings (Dark Mode/DND). It also supports running shell scripts (e.g., docker-compose up) on activation.

It’s $39 (one-time), but I’m looking for feedback on the 'Shell Script' feature specifically. Let me know what you think.
by moi2388 | 2026-02-02 07:01:15+00:00
That’s because of several problems in the problem definition.

First off, a lot of research talks about consciousness, but doesn’t define it.

Do you mean attention?
Do you mean memory?
Do you mean awareness?
Do you mean self awareness?
Do you mean ability to report on a phenomenon?
Do you mean a combination of these things?

Then they’re looking into the physical or neurological basis. Why would that need to be there?
Are you going to look at the physical basis of a software application, when there are multiple chip architectures which work? When it could be done mechanically, when it could have been done with a pen and paper?

What part of the physical basis are you looking for? It’s neurons. We know how they work. (Well, and all the other cells in our nervous system and brain which for some reason we just ignore)

I think the problem with consciousness isn’t consciousness itself, it’s our preconceived notions of what constitutes and doesn’t constitute consciousness, and our inability thus far to accurate define and constrain both the subject and research question.
by stealthcoderai | 2026-02-02 07:01:55+00:00
StealthCoder.ai is an autonomous code governance engine that:

UNDERSTANDS YOUR ENTIRE CODEBASE
• Knowledge graph of symbols, functions, and call edges
• Dependency graphs track how changes ripple across files
• Cross-file reasoning - not isolated file-by-file analysis
• Interactive Repo Nexus visualizes your architecture with Mermaid export

ENFORCES COMPLIANCE AUTOMATICALLY
• Policy Studio with SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, WCAG, ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, CCPA
• Per-rule enforcement: blocking, advisory, or disabled
• Org defaults with per-repo overrides
• Config-as-code via .stealthcoder/policy.json
• Structured pass/fail reporting in every review

SHIPS CI-VERIFIED FIX PRs
• Opens PRs with working fixes - not just comments
• Runs your CI automatically
• Smart retry with learned context if checks fail
• One-click GitHub Suggested Changes
• Optional merge blocking for critical issues

COMPLETE CONTROL
• Nightly scheduled, instant on-demand, or PR-triggered reviews
• BYO OpenAI/Anthropic keys for unlimited usage
• Lines-of-code pricing - pay for what you analyze
• Preflight estimates before every run
• Real-time status, full run history

ADVANCED CAPABILITIES
• Production-feedback loop - connect Sentry/DataDog/PagerDuty to inform reviews with real error data
• Cross-repo blast radius - "This API change breaks 3 consumers in other repositories"
• AI-generated code detection - catch Copilot hallucinations, transform generic output to your style
• Predictive tech debt forecasting - complexity trajectory, bug hotspot prediction, refactoring ROI
• Learning system that adapts to your team and stops repeating noise
by wisefounder | 2026-02-02 07:02:23+00:00
I was frustrated with existing calendars, so I built my own. Most calendars are just passive grids of meetings. They don’t help with planning, coordination, or context around time.

What I built combines:
•agenda + notes
•scheduling (Calendly-style)
•shared events with RSVP
•an AI assistant that can manage and reschedule things

The goal isn’t “AI for AI’s sake”, but to make time management less manual and less fragmented, while keeping data private and under user control.

Still early, but curious if others here feel the same gaps with current calendar tools.
by fooker | 2026-02-02 07:03:13+00:00
> I think it's worth taking the results seriously but not the proposed mechanism literally

Yes, agreed. There has been plenty of einstein-smart humans making observations for the ~30000 years of human prehistory, with and without the scientific method. Even with a low hit ratio, there is bound to be plenty of correct intuitions. A large number of post-renaissance scientific discoveries are about expressing these in the right testable framework and language.

Unfortunately, people do not bother to make the effort to study these (first hand sources, historical documents like travelogues, even scripture) and rely on either making up or repeating random shit.
by cheema33 | 2026-02-02 07:03:15+00:00
I have been using Netbird for my small company of 10 people for about 2 years. Users on slow connections complained that they could not stay connected with services reliably. I could not reproduce the problem as I mostly connected from very fast connections. I thought that maybe the users or their ISPs were to blame. And then one time I was using the wifi on a plane. It was a slow connection and I was connected to an RDP server. I could not stay connected. I also has Cloudflare VPN connected to the same server. It worked really well over the same connection. I went back ad forth many times as I had trouble believing how bad the Netbird connection was. Long story short, we are now completely switching over to Cloudflare VPN. It is free for first 50 users and is very very reliable, in our experience.
by friendzis | 2026-02-02 07:04:25+00:00
> I'm curious what portability concerns you've run into with JSON serialization.

The hard part concerns instructions and it is not technical implementation of serializing an in-memory data structures into serialization format (be it JSON or something bespoke) that is the root of complexity.

> You have a function to execute the process that takes the configuration and a function to roll back that takes the same configuration.

Don't forget granularity and state tracking. The opposite of a seemingly simple operation like "set config option foo to bar" is not a straightforward inverse: you need to track the previous value. Does the dry run stop at computing the final value for foo and leaves possible access control issues to surface during real run or does it perform "write nothing" operation to catch those?

> This does tie the representation very closely to the program itself so it doesn't work if you want to be able to change the program and have previously generated "plans" continue to work.

Why serialize then? Dump everything into one process space and call the native functions. Serialization implies either strictly, out of band controlled interfaces, which is a fragile implementation of codegen+interpreter machinery.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-02 07:04:34+00:00
I strongly recommend investing in some lights-out management (IPMI, KVM or alike) solution that doesn’t depend on any OS peculiarities.

Configuration switching and rollback mechanisms aren’t exactly reliable with trickier setups, as it doesn’t account for any ephemeral state (like what’s actually in the routing tables), and that stuff cannot be always preemptively declared upfront. I’m afraid that despite a lot of efforts, the only truly reliable method to ensure system will come back is still to deploy-and-reboot.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-02 07:05:50+00:00
While I agree that the MCP craze was a bit off-putting, I think that came mostly from people thinking they can sell stuff in that space. If you view it as a protocol and not much else, things change.

I've seen great improvements with just two MCP servers: context7 and playwright. The first is great on planning sessions and leads to better usage of new-ish libraries, and the second is giving the model a feedback loop. The advantage is that they work with pretty much any coding agent harness you use. So whatever worked with cursor will work with cc or opencode or whatever else.