MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbdevidal | 2026-02-02 02:33:47+00:00
First product is called SecureCoop, that either opens the coop door or monitors another coop opener, then sends phone notifications if there are issues. Door didn't open on time, door is stuck, etc.

Next product will be battery security cameras trained on predator models (raccoon, fox, snake). Then the next one will be an electric fence monitor. All solar powered.

Basically going for back yard security for small hobby farms.

Biggest hurdle has been that I only knew 5% of what I needed to know to do this. Haha. Many mistakes. But now am close to visiting the FCC lab for SDoC verification, and then I can legally sell.

Thanks for asking!
by defrost | 2026-02-02 02:33:54+00:00
First link has Australia, the country, at 32% obesity Vs. USofA at %41.6.

My only observations, having travelled in both, is that Australia like eveywhere has gotten more urban in past 20 years and I've got a feeling the percentage of Australians significantly past the technical bar of "obese" is very low compared to rates in the US of "well past" "just merely obese".

I'm not sure anyone's broken down the obesity quintile demographics.
by overgard | 2026-02-02 02:35:00+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), but if the screws start being turned on investment dollars they not only have to increase the price of their current offerings (2x cost wouldn't shock me), but some of them also need a (massive) influx of capital to handle things like datacenter build obligations (10s of billions of dollars). So I don't think it's crazy to think that prices might go up quite a bit. We've already seen waves of it, like last summer when Cursor suddenly became a lot more expensive (or less functional, depending on your perspective)
by mmooss | 2026-02-02 02:35:30+00:00
> You shouldn’t make an assumption in either direction.

The null hypothesis is usually that there is no effect. Otherwise we'd say 'do life forms from the Andromeda galaxy affect climate change? We have no data, so shouldn't make an assumption either way.'

Correlations aren't perfect, but you'd need data correlating it with race. East Asia has many other differences such as diet. Why the drive to find an intellectual basis for discrimination based on race? It generally has only reflected biases and has had very bad consequences.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2026-02-02 02:35:46+00:00
Does anyone remember a similar commercial(?) application from maybe 10~20 years ago that was focussed specifically on point-and-click Myst-like adventure games? I think it didn't have scripting, at least not of the kind that AGS has. I can't remember what it was called.

Edit: Oh, it was Adventure Maker! And it had a free version: https://www.adventuremaker.com/ — Apparently stuff like scripting and sprites do exist, but only in the paid version. It's cool the website is still around.
by b1temy | 2026-02-02 02:36:05+00:00
> You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected.

I understand you might feel this way, but it seems to me customers are mostly business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.). In fact, having no copy protection would probably have saved you the problem you mentioned where a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available; this is one of the talking points that anti-drm/copy protection people advocate for, software lost to time and unable to be archived when the entities who made such protections go out of business or no longer want to support older software.

> even on legitimate platforms like Shopee or Lazada.

On a slight tangent, but I personally don't find either platform legitimate (Better than say, wish[.]com or temu, but not as "legitimate" as other platforms, though I can't think of a single fully legitimate e-commerce platform). Shopee collects a ton of tracking information (Just turn on your adblocked, or inspect your network calls. It's even more than Amazon!), is full of intrusive ads, sketchy deals, and scammers. You yourself said you can easily find cracked versions of the dongle there, which doesn't speak well for the platform. And Lazada is owned by Alibaba Group, which speaks for itself. I'm not sure why consumers in South East Asian regions aren't more outspoken about this, since they seem to be the some of the more popular e-commerce platforms there.
by Froedlich | 2026-02-02 02:36:29+00:00
Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for a slide rule, and they wouldn't necessarily be limited to slide rule approximations. Engineers, accountants, etc. would be more productive by being able to do calculations without having to reach for a slide rule or pencil and paper.

[pause for 'slide rule' chuckle]

The same applies to "open calculator app and key the figures in," though. I'm not sure that "user interface" was a thing back when he wrote that, but that's what he was talking about.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-02 02:37:55+00:00
Also Eamon for Apple ][, I played with that a lot! And wrote my own in FORTH too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(video_game)

Good god, 280 Eamon Adventures, last released October 2023, I have a lot of catching up to do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eamon_adventures

Same dragon title screen illustration as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventur...

Also great memories of Richard Garriott's Akalabeth: World of Doom!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom

An Adventure I wrote in Logo, released on the C64 Terrapin Logo examples floppy, using the Logo REPL as the parser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...

Now I'm creating adventures in Cursor with MOOLLM and working on compiling them to JavaScript to run in the browser, kind of like The Sims meets LambdaMOO meets Cursor:

Adventure MOOLLM Anthropic skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure Compiler design document:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure-4 example microworld:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

Here's a marathon session playing in Cursor, and making a wish on a monkey's paw for the rest of the monkey:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

Here's an interview where MOOLLM explains itself, then we go on a wild ride with the Irn Bru snowman, with underground embassy intrigue, Columbo style:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
by 47282847 | 2026-02-02 02:38:49+00:00
“Burning wood at home produces more pollution than road traffic” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjdne9ke0m1o

“Residential wood-burning is the biggest source of particulate matter and soot/black carbon in Europe” https://www.fern.org/publications-insight/latest-evidence-on...

“domestic wood-burning is the largest source of particulate pollution in the UK. Only 8% of the UK’s homes burn wood, but this accounts for around 21% of the total PM2.5 emissions, whereas all traffic on the UK roads produces 13%” https://medium.com/the-new-climate/why-the-environmental-mov...
by LoganDark | 2026-02-02 02:39:38+00:00
I can't help but feel there must some better venue for such messaging.

When I see politics in software updates or documentation, nothing happens because I'm not looking to use the software for political activism. Maybe I tell my adblocker to remove the messaging, and carry on with my task.

I can engage with politics in a social context, when political messaging isn't interrupting something else I'm doing; that's a better place for activism, IMHO.

I almost always see activists using the argument that if I don't like the messaging then I'm part of the problem. Somehow I doubt that, given I don't mind messaging at all, where it's appropriate.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-02 02:40:26+00:00
> Perhaps the likelihood of it escalating was slim.

Not as slim as he had hoped.

People feel free to close the door on others because they are used to a life without violence. Their implicit thinking is "I'm not even gonna consider what this other person wants because what's he gonna do about it? Nothing." They think there is no way they will be held accountable for their actions. That's magical thinking.

People really shouldn't ask that question. There are a lot of things that can be done about virtually any situation. People would do well not to forget that.

"What are you going to do about it?" is a challenge. It's refusal to negotiate and a direct challenge to escalate the situation. "If this matters so much to you, then you had better do something about it". Not only does it escalate, it insults the other person. They have no choice but to escalate because the alternative is to be seen as weak which costs respect, especially if the exchange happens in front of peers.

> It transfers to the guy who thinks he can correct people’s behavior with technology.

Yes. The situation has escalated. The other person can either submit or escalate even further. Perhaps into physical violence.

Hope the hacker has a gun and is able and willing to use it. You know. Just in case. Plenty of people out there willing to die over real or perceived slights.
by michaelsshaw | 2026-02-02 02:41:11+00:00
Is asking for invites to Epstein's island a good look?

It's really sad you would take the word of paid-off ego glazers and insult your own intelligence by buying into the super-genius bullshit Elon wants you to.

The truth is pretty clear: he's just a sex fiend and likely pedophile who pays people to say nice things about him. It is clear as day that anyone not on his payroll has no love for him whatsoever.
by derektank | 2026-02-02 02:41:56+00:00
>But it just begs the question, if you think that then go measure those things with your study.

Because randomized control, multi-year, longitudinal studies into behavioral interventions in human beings are incredibly annoying and expensive to run if you want to account for the risk of drop outs and/or non-compliance. They hosted twice weekly aerobic exercise classes for the experimental group (dozens of people) for a year! That’s not cheap by any means
by nextos | 2026-02-02 02:42:36+00:00
I agree. I think fixing the keylogging issue should be possible without dumping the entire architecture. Perhaps the new X11 fork https://x11libre.net will achieve that? At least, it's encouraging to hear it's getting maintained.

Regarding (recent) supply chain attacks, Linux needs to take supply integrity and sandboxing more seriously. The tools to do so are there (e.g. Nix and firejail/bwrap) and, unlike Wayland, they play well with existing software.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-02 02:44:25+00:00
I've seen a few people point this out in this thread, but, seriously? There's a generation that are going to say the 2020's were the best decade?

I think that suggests:

1) Things are getting worse from decade to decade and,

2) If you weren't alive in an earlier decade you don't know how great it was.

(Personally, I saw the creek start running with shit when cable TV exploded and at the same time trash AM talk-radio began. The 70's were the last decade when we weren't hating each other.)
by bakugo | 2026-02-02 02:44:35+00:00
So uhh... what exactly did the "state-sponsored actors" do?

They go on about how their server was compromised, and how the big bad Chinese were definitely behind it, and then claim the "situation has been fully resolved", but there is zero mention of any investigation into what was actually done by the attackers. Why? If I downloaded an installer during the time they were hacked, do I have malware now?

The utter lack of any such information feels bizarre.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:44:45+00:00
Ah yes, the proverbial Quick Google Search that proves me wrong.

Sorry, can't be bothered to take any of that noise seriously.

As I pointed out in my other now-censored post, I breathe in smoke every day through the copious amount of weed I smoke, and have done so for decades. I'm in perfect health. Odds are, much better than you in fact.

When was the last time you were sick? For me it has been decades. Let's compare notes and decide which of us really knows the meaning of health.

Everything is a lie. Believe none of it.
by guessmyname | 2026-02-02 02:45:55+00:00
I don’t get it, why don’t you all—absolutely all of you reading—use Little Snitch? [1]

It really doesn’t compute in my head why would any macOS user not use a network firewall like this, or similar, to block unwanted outgoing HTTP(s) requests. You can easily inspect the packet with tools like Wireshark or Burp Suite Professional (or Community) edition, or any other proxy tool, of which there are many in the macOS ecosystem.

And this is not unique to macOS, this is all possible in Windows, Linux and any other OS.

[1] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
by sberens | 2026-02-02 02:47:26+00:00
Yep lumens are additive (though your eyes perceive them logarithmically).

I don't know much about car headlights, but chatgpt says high beams are typically 25-45 watts, and assuming a generous 200lm/w that gives you 5000-9000 lm.

Roughly speaking, it's expensive because it's 50 lbs & tons of electrical components (that are much higher quality than $24 headlights).
by rebane2001 | 2026-02-02 02:48:22+00:00
The loading issue is just a hug of death, the site's currently getting multiple visitors per second, and that requires more than a gigabit of bandwidth to handle.

I sort of need to pull all the data at the initialization because I need to map out how every post affects every other - the links between posts are what take up majority of the storage, not the text inside the posts. It's also kind of the only way to preserve privacy.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-02 02:49:36+00:00
Similar comments also come up in the [now regular] "I don't want to see political articles on HN" threads, and I think the response is similar: Asking for "no politics" is itself a strong political view: One in support/service of whatever the current status quo is. Trying to set oneself apart from (or above) politics is itself political. If you're lucky enough to be one of the fortunate people on earth who are not under attack by political forces or who benefit from status quo politics, I'd encourage you to simply reflect on that good luck and try to ignore the "politics" that others are deeply affected by and care about.
by jofzar | 2026-02-02 02:50:17+00:00
I 100% agree, reading very obviously ai written blogs and "product pages"/readme's has turned into a real ick for me.

Just something that screams "I don't care about my product/readme page, why should you".

To be clear, no issue with using AI to write the actual program/whatever it is. It's just the readme/product page which super turns me off even trying/looking into it.
by orwin | 2026-02-02 02:51:43+00:00
Yeah, my observation is that for my usual work, I can maybe get a 20% productivity boot, probably closer to 10% tbh, and for the whole team overall productivity it feels like it has done nothing, as senior use their small productivity gains to fix the tons of issues in PR (or in prod when we miss something).

But last week I had two days where I had no real work to do, so I created cli tools to help with organisation, and cleaning up, I think AI boosted my productivity at least 200%, if not 500.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-02 02:52:34+00:00
I don't care for the current status quo at all. The current administration has wrecked this country and completely compromised its position in the global economy potentially forever. But there is a time and a place for those arguments and activism, as well as the same for other parts of the world suffering from similar or worse issues. Like, I wouldn't be receptive to hearing about Ukraine every time I go to the grocery store. When I want to hear about it I go to the YouTube channels documenting it! They're very interesting, but I need to be in a space to receive it. Otherwise it is just noise. This is absolutely no statement about the status quo, but just how my brain works. It's also not a statement against activism in general, just about my personal opinion of it in certain places.
by tgv | 2026-02-02 02:52:54+00:00
This is from the abstract: Engaging in 12 months of moderate-to-vigorous exercise reduced brain-PAD in early-to-midlife adults. The pathways by which these effects occur remain unknown.

They do not make the claim from the title. Given that the effect is small, it might just be that brain-PAD is sensitive to other factors than age, e.g. exercise. As a matter of fact, this study is decent aupport for that hypothesis.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-02 02:53:26+00:00
To be fair, GNU/Linux distros like Debian lean very heavily on the GNU part. They owe a lot to the GSF and its work is highly praised.

Just their kernel somehow seems to be stuck in vaporware status. Probably because a lot of developers would think "why work on this when we already have Linux" which is a fair point too.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-02 02:54:05+00:00
There is more detail linked below:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Notepad-updater-installed-malwa...

https://doublepulsar.com/small-numbers-of-notepad-users-repo...

The TLDR is that until version 8.8.7 of Notepad++, the developer used a self-signed certificate, which was available in the Github source code. The author enabled this by not following best practices.

The "good news" is that the attacks were very targeted and seemed to involve hands on keyboard attacks against folks in Asia.

Blaming the hosting company is kind of shady, as the author should own at least some level of the blame for this.
by fy20 | 2026-02-02 02:54:18+00:00
I ran the numbers for this a while ago. I live where we have proper winters (currently -22c). I wanted something simple just with solar thermal and water pumps (no heat pump). Sand batteries work at an industrial level, but for domestic use you want something simple so that means just water.

A 100m3 (100,000 litres or 26,500 gallons) cylindrical water tank (approx 5x5m) buried and insulated with 50cm of XPS could provide around 4000kWh of deliverable heat throughout winter. Which would be more than enough for heating and domestic hot water for my house.

In the summer you'd use solar thermal to charge it to 85c. In the winter you'd run water through underfloor heating and discharge it to 35c (so you just need a mixer valve and pump).

The structural engineering part of it isn't actually that complicated (with a garden on top, not a house). You can buy plastic water tanks of that size, it just needs to be buried and have XPS foam placed around it. And because it's volume, it scales up well. An extra one meter in each direction would increase the volume by around 60%, but you have a lower overall heat loss, so the heat capacity would more than double.
by elisbce | 2026-02-02 02:56:17+00:00
Totally agree. I found the results surprising because a bunch of languages are faster than C++. Then I looked closer. The requirements are self-conflicting, No SIMD, but must be production-ready. No one would use the unoptimized version in production. Also looking at the C++ implementation, they are not optimized at all. This makes this benchmark literally pointless.
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-02 02:57:33+00:00
> Because EF's default behavior implements Unit of Work, a LOT of the complex transactional spaghetti ended up disappearing when we switched.

I have never felt more understood by a fellow HN user. I think I know the exact spaghetti you are talking about, and I agree with you 100%. I wish EF could create (SQL) views, but it's not really any issue considering I can just use raw SQL to accomplish the same thing.

> complex entity graph mutations.

I'm too dumb to know what those words mean together. But I going to assume it's something to do with complex entities. If so, I completely agree as well. I sometimes harness the powers of the Dark Magics where my domain entities and database entities are the same objects (I'm not one of those DDD people either). Thanks to EF, I've been able to create some complex objects that really have cut down on a lot of useless objects I used to litter applications with.
by gamblor956 | 2026-02-02 02:58:23+00:00
Unless Tesla drivers were already paying obscene rates for car insurance, the per mile-based charge will still be as much as most people with ICE vehicles pay for their insurance coverage...and for Tesla owners this will still be an additional insurance cost on top of their original car insurance cost.

Also, important to note: Lemonade isn't actually available in the states with the largest population of Tesla owners, like California. So...basically this is a big nothingburger.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-02 02:59:11+00:00
Thanks for posting that link, but after reading it, I'm not nearly as hopeful as you are:

> Also on January 12, 2026, the Court ordered Respondents to respond to the Petition by January 15, 2026 at 11:00 a.m., certifying the true cause and proper duration of Petitioner’s confinement and showing cause as to why the writ should not be granted in this case. Respondents entered an appearance that day but have not filed any response to the Petition.

The government didn't even bother responding to the habeas petition because they knew what they were doing was unconstitutional, but it still successfully sows fear.

Worse, ICE detained the man again less than 24 hours after he was released on the judge's orders and called it a "mistake": https://youtu.be/jmoF63Msk0Y

I know who the domestic terrorists are, and it sure as hell isn't Renee Good or Alex Pretti.
by hyperadvanced | 2026-02-02 02:59:23+00:00
This is my understanding as well. If GPT made money the companies that run them would be publicly traded?

Furthermore, companies which are publicly traded show that overall the products are not economical. Meta and MSFT are great examples of this, though they have recently seen opposite sides of investors appraising their results. Notably, OpenAI and MSFT are more closely linked than any other Mag7 companies with an AI startup.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spe...
by Soerensen | 2026-02-02 03:01:20+00:00
I think you are asking the wrong question. AI has not replaced Excel, but it has replaced the need for me to hire developers to build features.

I am a non-technical founder (background in growth/marketing). Two years ago, building a production web application required either (1) learning to code for months/years, (2) hiring engineers at $150-200K/year, or (3) outsourcing to contractors and praying.

None of those options were viable for me to validate an idea quickly.

With Cursor, v0, and similar tools, I built our entire frontend in production. Not a prototype, not an MVP in the old sense, but actual production code serving real customers. Features that would have cost $5-10K to spec and outsource, I can now build in an afternoon.

The tools did not "replace Excel" or any specific application. What they replaced was my dependency on other people to execute technical work. That is a much more profound shift than feature replacement.

The comparison to traditional applications is a category error. AI is not competing with Excel. It is competing with the labor market.