MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Telaneo | 2026-02-02 13:21:43+00:00
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that I actually have faith in the people actually developing Windows. I'm not at all aurprised that they are rebelling against stupid non-features. But that rebelling doesn't amount to anything, since managers and decrees from the top funnel all effort into the most user-hostile results possible.

If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-02 13:21:52+00:00
Too little, too late, and too specific in scope. Windows 11 is awful not merely because of the AI bullshit being shoehorned into everything, everywhere (CoPilot in Notepad? In Paint? Are you serious, Microsoft?!), but also because of all the other completely unnecessary changes made to the OS. A curated selection of real-world examples from my recent gig making a hardened Windows 11 image for a physical product line:

* Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode!

* Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline

* Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call)

* Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change.

* Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again.

* Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise

Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS.

I hate it.
by pron | 2026-02-02 13:22:10+00:00
What you're saying may (sometimes) be true, but that's not why Java's performance is hard to beat, especially as programs evolve (I was programming in C and C++ since before Java even existed).

In a low-level language, you pay a higher performance cost for a more general (abstract) construct. E.g. static vs. dynamic dispatch, or the Box/Rc/Arc progression in Rust. If a certain subroutine or object requires the more general access even once, you pay the higher price almost everywhere. In Java, the situation is opposite: You use a more general construct, and the compiler picks an appropriate implementation per use site. E.g. dispatch is always logically dynamic, but if at a specific use site the compiler sees that the target is known, then the call will be inlined (C++ compilers sometimes do that, too, but not nearly to the same extent; that's because a JIT can perform speculative optimisations without proving they're correct); if a specific `new Integer...` doesn't escape, it will be "allocated" in a register, and if it does escape it will be allocated on the heap.

The problem with Java's approach is that optimisations aren't guaranteed, and sometimes an optimisation can be missed. But on average they work really well.

The problem with a low-level language is that over time, as the program evolves and features (and maintainers) are added, things tend to go in one direction: more generality. So over time, the low-level program's performance degrades and/or you have to rethink and rearchitect to get good performance back.

As to memory locality, there's no issue with Java's approach, only with a missing feature of flattening objects into arrays. This feature is now being added (also in a general way: a class can declare that it doesn't depend on identity, and the compiler then transparently decides when to flatten it and when to box it).

Anyway, this is why it's hard, even for experts to match Java's performance without a significantly higher effort that isn't a one-time thing, but carries (in fact, gets worse) over the software's lifetime. It can be manageable and maybe worthwhile for smaller programs, but the cost, performance, or both suffer more and more with bigger programs as time goes on.
Mental Sundhed Og Velvære
by agnes-nordic | 2026-02-02 13:23:41+00:00
Jeg har delt et nyt blogindlæg om mental sundhed og velvære, hvor jeg udforsker, hvad psykisk velvære betyder, hvordan det former vores daglige liv, og hvorfor bevidsthed og omsorg er vigtige. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46855710
by Archelaos | 2026-02-02 13:23:57+00:00
I agree. However, the EU is by far the most advanced on this path. Unfortunately, it is compelled to build its own minor empire now, since the global hegemon abandons its mainly cooperative approach and wants to reign by force. Now, that the USA seems to turn back into what it was before the civil rights movement, the EU is forced to cut its close ties to the USA to preserve her liberties.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-02 13:24:43+00:00
Yes, it will, unless there will be a nuclear war or something..there is very little actual problems. People are very busy with looking on numbers and focusing on single problems, but hardly the big picture. Any complaints about EU and their countries are high-level nagging, people complaining whether they can buy two golden pools or have to be satisfied with one. EU and most of their countries are filthy rich, have a good foundation and while they have the occasional internal problems, they are not on a road to burn down and lose everything.

Bad things can always happen, of course, we just had multiple of them in the last 5+ years. But we did survive it and adapted, so the probability is much higher that nothing catastrophical world-shattering will be happening again in the next decades. We are moving back to the "normal" trouble and EU so far has shown a very good survivability in those years. Heck, in 2008-2012 there was far more trouble for EU than today.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-02 13:24:49+00:00
Insanity or opportunity? Like, the climate is already messed up, if we want to maintain our species standard of living then we need to move towards a society that emits much much less carbon.

If we don't then we'll either go extinct or regress to a level where we use less. Sure, it's gonna really really suck for the next while but there isn't really any other options.

As a benefit, if we do this then we can sell the technology to the rest of the world.
by jfyi | 2026-02-02 13:24:59+00:00
In highschool, age 14, I was taking a turbo pascal class.

The teacher had assigned us to pick a project to work on for 2 weeks.

I had picked replicating some basic dos application. I legitimately just wanted to know how it worked and get down to a lower level and reimplement it.

The teacher kept asserting "it already exists, pick something else". I was young and didn't really know how to explain it to her at the time and kept insisting on that project.

It turned into some big hoopla, dragging my parents into the principal where we sat and discussed options. They had no idea of what was going on. The teacher kept pushing implementing a card game, I think it was poker. I being completely unreasonable immediately latched onto, "why does it have to be gambling? Why not something useful?"

Neither I, nor my parents had anything against a poker game morally, but that really changed the tone of the conversation and we ultimately landed on a big int implementation.

She had legitimately thought it was some gotcha and was noticeably angry when I demoed it 2 weeks later. It was of course the most naive implementation imaginable but worked well beyond the expectations assigned.

I never told her I finished it in a couple hours.

Whenever I think about it, it just kills me how disfunctional that school was on so many levels. I suppose I was lucky though to have computer science classes at that age in the 90's.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-02 13:25:05+00:00
"given how prohibitive its welfare/retirement system is from the business point of view."

True, the French government redistributes the most money in the entire OECD (close to 60 per cent of GDP) and this is mostly driven by heavy welfare and old-age rent spending. They are pushing the ceiling to see what is still possible.

One interesting question is: if this French model spreads across the rest of the EU, will the EU as a whole become more or less competitive on the global stage? I would guess "less".
Show HN: Nucleus – enforced permission envelopes for AI agents (Firecracker)
by difc | 2026-02-02 13:25:50+00:00
I’ve been building Nucleus because most “agent security” is still policy-only: a config file that says “don’t do bad things,” while the agent can still do them.

Nucleus is an OSS experiment that pairs a small, compositional permission model with runtime enforcement: *side effects are only reachable through an enforcing tool proxy*, inside a Firecracker microVM. The envelope is *non-escalating*: it can only tighten or terminate, never silently relax.

What works today:

* MCP tool proxy with *read / write / run* (enforced inside the microVM)
* default-deny egress + DNS allowlist + iptables drift detection (fail-closed) on Linux
* time + budget caps enforced
* hash-chained audit log + HMAC approval tokens (scoped, expiring) for gated ops

What’s missing (being upfront):

* web/search tools exist in the model but aren’t wired to MCP yet
* remote append-only audit storage + attestation are still roadmap
* early/rough; targeting “safe to run against sensitive codebases,” not “replace your local terminal”

Most of the code was written with Anthropic tools; I’ve been leaning on tests/fuzzing/proptests to keep it honest.

Would love feedback on: (1) dangerous capability combinations beyond the lethal trifecta, (2) what enforcement gaps you’d want closed first, (3) how you’d evaluate this vs gateway-only approaches.
by mirsadm | 2026-02-02 13:26:23+00:00
Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with.

I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.
by anymouse123456 | 2026-02-02 13:26:33+00:00
If you think it's bad now, the early days of the web were absolutely filled with scumbag grifters who made small fortunes hiring contractors and then refusing to pay.

Many of them disappeared in the y2k dot com bust, but then seem to have reappeared in SF after 2008.

In the late 1990's, my second ever Flash app development client stiffed me on a $10k invoice.

He finally figured out 6 months later that he didn't have the source material to make changes and paid the full invoice in order to get it.

So I took precautions with the next client. It was a small agency that was serving a much larger business.

We were on 30 days net payment terms and I submitted the invoice when the project was done.

They didn't pay and within a couple weeks of gentle reminders, they stopped responding.

I smiled.

Exactly 30 days from the due date, I got a panicked call shrieking about their largest client website being down and did I have anything to do with it?!

I asked them what the hell they were talking about, they don't own a website. They never paid for any websites. I happen to own a website and I would be happy to give them access to it if they want to submit a payment.

They started to threaten legal nonsense, and how they had a "no time bombs clause in the contract."

I laughed because my contract had no such clause. If they signed such a contract with the client, that's not my problem.

I told them I wouldn't release the source files until the check cleared my bank, which could be weeks. A cashier's check arrived that morning and their source files were delivered.

By the end of it, the folks at the agency thanked me because that client wasn't planning to pay them and they hired me for other work (which, they had to prepay for).

Of course I don't know about the OP, but I'd bet the company was trying to stiff that contractor on their last check.
by DerThorsten | 2026-02-02 13:27:27+00:00
Author here: If you want to skip the reading and directely want to go to the code, just go here https://notebook.link/@DerThorsten/jupyter-games

A jupyter notebook which runs python in the browsers via wasm will wait for you.
Pyb2d3, python bindings for box2d-3 are installed in the environment and are used to create tiny games / simulations in a hand full of lines of code.

The goal of this is to make fun things like box2d accessible for educational purposes and similar, without the hussle of installing anything.
Show HN: Copost – A team LinkedIn tool inspired by 37signals and PostHog
by alexandrechs | 2026-02-02 13:28:15+00:00
Hello HN !

The Problem:

LinkedIn Company pages are dead. The only way to win is "Employee Advocacy" (empowering team members to post on personal profiles to build their own brand + company reach).

The Solution:

Existing tools for this are stiff corporate chores. So we built copost. Heavily inspired by 37signals and PostHog, we traded the boring spreadsheet vibe for a vintage "Postcard" UI. It’s colorful, tactile, and completely anti-corporate.

Under the hood:

- The "Algo Hack": You can schedule team likes/comments before the post goes live. This signals quality to the algorithm immediately upon publishing.

- Security First: No shared passwords. You can post on someone's behalf without asking for their login details.

- Gamification: We built a shared "Team Streak" (like Snapchat) to make consistency a multiplayer game.

Feedback:
I’m curious if you think this playful "Postcard" UI makes the process less painful for teams, or if you find it too bold for a B2B tool?

Thanks ! - Alexandre
by ubercore | 2026-02-02 13:28:40+00:00
Wasn't my point. Domestic economy has suffered less from Dutch Disease than a lot of other countries in their position.

My point is that reducing this to "Norwegians still buy cars and cars are bad" is reductive, and if people are going to buy cars, reaching high levels of electric car use is a good outcome.

Now there should also be focus on reducing car use period. But that doesn't mean it was a mistake to electrify transportation in the meantime.
by lapcat | 2026-02-02 13:28:49+00:00
> it is easy to refute your theory. Just do a DFU with the port indicated by Apple

No, it's not easy. I just said, in the comment you replied to, "I'm not even sure that I have all the prerequisites on hand."

> I have personally tested this

On my Mac model?

To be clear, I'm saying that the doc is wrong about my specific, relatively new Mac model, which I bought a year ago. I'm not claiming that the doc is wrong about other, older Mac models.
by matt_trentini | 2026-02-02 13:29:07+00:00
Always double-check an LLM, particularly when it's just a quick(er) search away:

https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/genrst/index.html

Specifically: JSON is built-in, logging is available. There's no multiprocessing (it is designed for a micro, after-all - and note that thread is available on some ports), no built-in XML lib.

Be sure to check micropython-lib, the MicroPython Awesome List and mim for others.

https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib

https://awesome-micropython.com/

https://checkmim.com/
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-02 13:29:17+00:00
Sure, I directly and explicitly talked about Apple's version of tensor cores in the GPU. But the ANE is by every definition a neural accelerator. Yes, I'm aware of Apple's weird branding for their tensor cores.

"In fact MLX does not even support ANE yet"

I didn't say otherwise. The ANE is a fantastic unit for small, power-efficient models, like extracting text from images, doing depth modelling, etc. It's not made for LLMs, or the other sorts of experimental stuff MLX is intended for. Though note that MLX's author's reason for not supporting the ANE is that it has a "closed-source" API (https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/issues/18#issuecomment-184...), making it unsuitable for an open-source project, and given that MLX didn't want to just lean on CoreML. But anyways, the ANE is fantastically fast at what it does, while sipping juice.

In any case, the code change shown should have zero impact on the running of MLX on an iPhone 16 Pro. MLX tries to really leverage platform optimizations so maybe another bifucation is making the wrong choice.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-02 13:29:24+00:00
I recently added support for DigitalOcean after feedback from people who saw an earlier version here. This is a small, paid, "shareware" (trial then pay) product to search and rent cloud VPS. It wraps CLIs (but never touches your creds, auth is handled by calling the cloud's official CLI and you filling doing its steps) and abstracts across 6 clouds: AWS, Azure, DO, GCP, Hetzner & Vultr.

I made it because I thought people would find it useful, but mostly I made it because I didn't want to switch out of terminal to spin stuff up (and I disliked the difference between all the cloud consoles). AFter renting hundreds of boxes in the last 8 years, I wanted something that did the essentials (SSH access, public IP) quickly and simply.

This does not cover the space that PaaS occupies (Vercel, Render, Railway, Heroku, etc), nor is it for all managed offerings from the clouds. It's exclusively for boxes: whether sahred, dedicated or metal. From one TUI you can access the tens of thousands of possibly server configurations these providers offer.

If you like playing with things from the terminal, and can relate to othis workflow it's probably for you. I can see myself keeping it maintained because it's quite a useful little tool.

Why BlueDot? That's a nod to the iconic Blue Dot photo of Earth from space - yes, but why? Because that blue dot is where all the clouds are :)
by Rygian | 2026-02-02 13:29:57+00:00
My usecase for Termux: most pictures get backed up properly into the home NAS, but the sync process sometimes skips a few [1] (which is exasperating, but here we are still not migrated to Immich).

So I have a python script in the NAS that calculates the MD5 checksum of every photo and video, and generates a shell script that, when executed on the phone, will calculate the MD5 on the local device, and delete if it is equal to the NAS.

The generated shell script gets sent to the phone, then I execute it from within a Termux window, pointing at the DCIM folder.

I can free up tens of GB of memories with reliability in the face of a misbehaving sync algorithm.

[1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/auto-upload-is-skipping-random-...
by gertrunde | 2026-02-02 13:30:04+00:00
That's not really what happened...

https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...

tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).

Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
by master_crab | 2026-02-02 13:30:10+00:00
The BBC article is interesting:

With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too.

Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.

China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
by detroitwebsites | 2026-02-02 13:30:21+00:00
Great points on the Docker setup - that's definitely the right approach for limiting blast radius. For Gmail/Calendar, I've found a few approaches that work well:

1. Use Gmail's delegate access feature instead of full OAuth. You can give OpenClaw read-only or limited access to a primary account from a separate service account.

2. Set up email filters to auto-label sensitive emails (banking, crypto, etc.) and configure OpenClaw to skip those labels. It's not perfect but adds a layer.

3. Use Google's app-specific passwords with scope limitations rather than full OAuth tokens.

For the separate Gmail approach you mentioned, Google Takeout can help migrate old emails, but you're right that it's a pain.

Totally agree on needing a security playbook. I actually found howtoopenclawfordummies.com has a decent beginner's guide that covers some of these setup patterns, though it could use more advanced security content.

The real challenge is that prompt injection is fundamentally unsolved. The best we can do right now is defense-in-depth: limited permissions, isolated environments, careful tool selection, and regular audits of what the agent is actually doing.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-02 13:30:23+00:00
It's a bit trite, but the answers are: 1) money 2) money

Can't repair your own stuff and either need to use authorized repair shop or buy new? The company gets more money.

Force your developers to forgo quality in efforts to produce more cruft in less time? The company gets more money.

Of course, only considering short-term, long-term they'll lose money, but at that point all the executives and managers already got their bonuses and probably moved on to doing the same in some other company.
by timonoko | 2026-02-02 13:30:49+00:00
Try this:

(menu-bar-mode -1)
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)
(global-set-key "å" 'hippie-expand)
(global-set-key "∆" 'toggle-truncate-lines)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f12>") 'toggle-truncate-lines)
(xterm-mouse-mode 1)
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-5>") 'scroll-up-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-4>") 'scroll-down-command) ;
(global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-up>") 'scroll-up-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-down>") 'scroll-down-command) ;
(setq case-fold-search t)
(setq-default truncate-lines t)
(setq sort-fold-case t)
(autoload 'scad-mode "scad-mode" "A major mode for editing OpenSCAD code." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.scad$" . scad-mode))
(require 'scad-preview)
(global-set-key (kbd "Å") 'dabbrev-expand)

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'whitespace-mode)
(setq whitespace-line-column 128)
(custom-set-faces
'(default ((t (:background "#000000" :foreground "#ffffff"))))
'(whitespace-space ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-tab ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-newline ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-empty ((t (:background "black" :foreground "grey50")))))
by notahacker | 2026-02-02 13:31:25+00:00
"Sovereign" in the context of spacecraft means satellites that are designed, built and operated within a territory without relying on external suppliers for key subsystems.

If you insist on inventing new definitions of the word like "total subjugation of the individual to the state", at least keep it sufficiently on topic to explain how parts of a satellite coming from Italy and France and ground ops from Spain without relying on imports from the US or South Africa is going to lead to this...