MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterTea | 2026-02-09 17:08:26+00:00
Down voting simply because you disagree is a thoughtless "fuck you" to everyone trying to have a conversation.

This forum encourages "thoughtful conversation" so if you disagree you should discuss why you disagree. Down voting is there to empower the community to squelch posts that are thoughtless clutter, off topic, offensive, or anything else that is disruptive to conversation.
by adolph | 2026-02-09 17:08:26+00:00
It is interesting to see camera-in-airpods as a rumor instead of wireless-radio-as-camera [0] to detect similar. Maybe it is less power/volume intensive to add very limited cameras instead of upping the processing power to run inference on the radio signals?

I suppose that the "camera" could be as simple as an optical flow sensor [1] commonly used on mice and quad-copters and placed behind the black plastic so there would not be a visible lens [2].

0. https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/WiFiReadingThroughWall

1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10164626

2. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/camera-transp...
by yanhangyhy | 2026-02-09 17:08:56+00:00
> Mao's revolution failed, the PRC is a capitalist nation with a highly stratified class system and no path to Communism

it failed doesn't means we forget it and dont want it anymore. we still think of him all the time and wish we can try again. we are not commusim, but we are still the closet one. and we still have the biggest chance to become one. so i hope USA people can have someone like him, and live a better life, not pathetic enough to compare their living standard to a developing country like china.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-09 17:09:12+00:00
I wonder what this would do to battery life -- continuously-on IR cameras are going to be a significant power draw. And then there's the question of whether the video processing is done on the earbuds, or how much Bluetooth bandwidth is used sending the video stream to your phone for processing.

Using this to detect gestures does seem very cool, however. Seems like a fascinating engineering challenge.
by orev | 2026-02-09 17:09:37+00:00
These clocks are irritating because they show up in the results when searching for “radio atomic clock” and similar, and it can be very hard to figure out if they actually use the WWVB radio signal. I’ve concluded that none of them do, because WWVB is only reliable in (most parts) of the US, and companies only want to make things that appeal to a global audience now. La Crosse seems to be the only one that makes them, and unfortunately most of their designs lack any style (i.e. they’re ugly).
by ltbarcly3 | 2026-02-09 17:09:56+00:00
I mean the quotes in this article aren't even disagreeing except on vague value judgements with no practical consequences.

Yes you can make better and more perfect solutions with a deep understanding of every consequence of every design decision. Also you can make some real world situation thousands of times better without a deep understanding of things. These two statements don't disagree at all.

The MIPS image rendering example is perfect here. Notice he didn't say "there was some obscure attempt to load images on MIPS and nobody used it because it was so slow so they used the readily available fast one instead". There was some apparently widely used routine to load images that was popular enough it got the attention of one of the few people who deeply understands how the system worked, and they fixed it up.

PHP is an awful trash language and like half the internet was built on it and lots of people had a lot of fun and got a lot more work done because people wrote a lot of websites in PHP. Sure, PHP is still trash, but it's better to have trash than wait around for someone to 'do it right', and maybe nobody ever gets around to it.

Worse is better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
by Findecanor | 2026-02-09 17:09:59+00:00
> not something that is easy to get when generating from a language which does not itself have lifetimes

Not easy, but there are compilers that do it.

Lobster [0] started out with automatic reference counting. It has inferred static typing, specialising functions based on type, reminiscent of how Javascript JIT compilers do it. Then the type inference engine was expanded to also specialise functions based on ownership/borrowing type of its arguments. RC is still done for variables that don't fit into the ownership system but the executed ops overall got greatly reduced. The trade-off is increased code size.

I have read a few older papers about eliding reference counting ops which seem to be resulting in similar elisions, except that those had not been expressed in terms of ownership/borrowing.

I think newer versions of the Swift compiler too infer lifetimes to some extent.

When emitting Rust you could now also use reference counting smart pointers, even with cycle detection [1].
Personally I'm interested in how ownership information could be used to optimise tracing GC.

[0]:https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html

[1]:https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Breadth-first-Cycle-Co...
by mindslight | 2026-02-09 17:10:18+00:00
I thought the idea that individuals should be advocating for themselves (and their families) in the modern medical establishment is just basic table stakes in 2026, not a "vague conspiracy theory."

I don't see how calling out someone's reaction to the word "drugs" is "an angle of bad faith". If someone has an emotional reaction to the reality that a doctor is proposing giving their kid mind-altering substances, that indicates they haven't gotten to the point where they're able to judge it rationally. The answer isn't to shy away from the reality!

So yes, unfortunately the first step to making an informed decision is getting past the fearmongering propaganda pumped out by all the anti-illegal-drugs campaigns. And yeah that sucks, but it's certainly nowhere near the biggest hurdle to self-actualization that our society perpetuates.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-09 17:10:23+00:00
There is nothing democratic about China. This is just a fact. Admittedly western countries are also not democratic per definition, but at least they have an elected oligarchy, which is miles closer to democracy than Chinese despotic regime. Even if the regime in China is kinda benevolent to the subjects, it doesn't matter for this question. Democracy is a word used a for a very specific thing, and it's completely absent in China.
Show HN: Ayder Crash Sandbox – SIGKILL durability proof (per-visitor container)
by Aydarbek | 2026-02-09 17:10:40+00:00
Hi HN,

Most durability demos are “trust me”: a blog post, a benchmark chart, or a unit test.

This is a live sandbox that tries to make durability auditable.

Every visitor gets:

a dedicated Docker container (no shared state with other visitors)

a dedicated persistent volume mounted at /data

Click “Run double proof” and it does:

Produce N events

Hard-kill the process with a real SIGKILL (docker kill -s KILL)

Restart the container (docker start)

Consume from offset=0 → should return N (no loss)

Commit offsets (Ayder commits “last processed”; resume starts at committed+1)

Consume again with the same group → should return 0 (no duplicates)

The UI shows pass/fail, but also exposes the raw proof JSON and “Docker Forensics” (inspect + docker events + logs tail) so you can verify the kill/die/replay yourself.

I’m curious: what other failure modes would you want a demo like this to cover (disk full, host reboot, partial writes, etc.)?
by avin01 | 2026-02-09 17:10:42+00:00
I haven’t used Odoo myself, but a few friends have at small NGOs, and from our discussions your concern seems real. It works fine if you stay close to out of the box. Once you need real customization, you start depending on the partner for every small change, and costs slowly creep up.

I agree with @magnumpowers. Without someone technical in-house, it can turn into a "managed software" pretty fast :)

If most users are volunteers and non technical, I’d be a bit cautious and compare simpler tools first.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-09 17:11:17+00:00
i would imagine that's what everyone is doing instead of sitting on their hands. Setup a different remote and have your team push/pull to/from it until Github comes back up. I mean you could probably use ngrok and setup a remote on your laptop in a pinch. You shouldn't be totally blocked except for things like automated deployments or builds tied specifically to github.com

Distributed source control is distributable.
by proper_black | 2026-02-09 17:11:19+00:00
I’ve been exploring graph theory and built Overtone, an interactive graph that maps musical artists, genres, albums, labels, instruments, and their relationships using MusicBrainz data. This spun out of a separate graph-based fraud-detection project that I hope to introduce on HN sometime soon.

It’s a beta, but already works well on desktop and makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph.

Here's the link in case you wanna find some new music to listen to, or look at the artists you know and love in a different light - https://overtone.kernelpanic.lol

Feedback welcome — especially on UI/UX and scalability limits.
by phoenixy1 | 2026-02-09 17:11:36+00:00
I work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of age verification in Australia, so TIL.)
Show HN: ClawSec an open-source, community-driven secure skill suite
by abutbul | 2026-02-09 17:11:50+00:00
Hey HN

Me and my friends at Prompt Security (a SentinelOne company) have been working hard on ClawSec a package of security skills, with a focus on secure skills and secure distribution of them.

Repo: https://github.com/prompt-security/clawsec

example skill in the suite:
the Soul-Guardian plugin which prevents unauthorized system prompt drift.

upcoming updates I’m working on for the suite installer (signed skills here we come)

We’d love engagement from humans and bots alike who like the idea and want to be part of it.

If you try it out, I’d really appreciate:

feedback on what you liked and what needs polishing

suggestions for new skills

suggestions for additional advisory feed sources

contributions (vibe-coded PRs absolutely welcome )

Would love to hear what you think.
by onlypassingthru | 2026-02-09 17:12:10+00:00
Pro tip: Try to get the facts straight before commenting.

"There was a lot of death on the other side, unfortunately. But a lot of Cubans were killed yesterday trying to protect him," Trump said.[0]

[0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-officials-reveal-new-detail...
by cortesoft | 2026-02-09 17:12:14+00:00
> I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals

Plenty of businesses do the “your credit card will be charged $1 and then reversed” as a verification method that I don’t think it would be a major issue. I do wonder how much those companies are paying for that, though… I am guessing they lose some of that $1.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-09 17:12:37+00:00
> Which ratified treaty did the US's operation in Venezuela violate?

Even if it hadn't violated a ratified treaty (it did violate several, starting with the UN Charter and OAS Charter), it would still violate international law; the US has recognized (among other places, in the London Charter of 1945 establishing the International Military Tribunal) that the crime of aggressive war exists independently of the crime of waging war in violation of international treaties.
by re-thc | 2026-02-09 17:12:53+00:00
> There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though

Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind.

> While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.

I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving.

> To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since

They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.
by Festro | 2026-02-09 17:12:55+00:00
Hybrids were a good idea, past tense. Every year since the first commercial EVs launched they've become a weaker proposition.

They're no longer a best of both worlds, good overall range, not as bad for the environment.

They're now worst of both worlds, bad electric range, bad for the enviroment.

Anyone considering an EV isn't going to want to compromise on those two things as much as they used to.
by kspacewalk2 | 2026-02-09 17:13:09+00:00
I mean, not to descend too deeply into the stereotype of nerds and comic books, but you'd probably be a lot more distraught and critical of Professor X making terrible, self-interested and decidedly unfriendly choices than you would be about Magneto doing Magneto things.

Annexing Greenland, even if it did happen, is objectively not nearly as terrible as the genocide of Uygurs or murdering tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. You just don't expect it from America, that's all. But no worries, give us time, the rest of us are re-calibrating our expectations and next time we won't be nearly so comically shocked.
by riskable | 2026-02-09 17:13:13+00:00
I want to see someone convert one of those cheap projection clocks like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/La-Crosse-Technology-5-in-Color-...

The red projection is just the right brightness (at night) but it sucks that it's not wifi-enabled so you can't just get it to NTP sync (or hook up a GPS receiver). The projector part of the clock is a separate device that's attached to it via a ribbon cable. I would reverse engineer it myself but I haven't got the time.

Ideally, I'd want a matrix of LEDs projected on to the ceiling so I could get more info than just the time. Such clocks exist but they're super duper expensive! Example: https://buyfrixos.com/
by marojejian | 2026-02-09 17:13:14+00:00
I am reading "The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset" by their guest MIike Bird. Its very good.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221772645-the-land-trap

Even though I know a decent amount of economic history I'm learning some fascinating things. E.g. that the U.S. imposed radical degrees of land redistribution in Asia post WWII, led by an impressive russian expat: Wolf Ladejinsky.

and of course Odd Lots is great overall.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-09 17:13:30+00:00
If Apple really walked the walk about their privacy marketing, it would sunset all their APIs used for tracking, making impractically hard for advertisers to track you. Not warning "do you still want to be tracked?", but remaking their whole stack to make tracking unreasonably hard.

Currently I see Apple as safer than, say Google or Microsoft, but not as the privacy bastion it claims to be.
by chillacy | 2026-02-09 17:13:43+00:00
> Singapore’s free speech restrictions, whatever you think of them, no longer seem so far outside the box. Trump is suing plenty of people. The UK is sending police to knock on people’s doors for social media posts, and so on. That too makes Singapore more of a “normal country"

That seems like it should make Singapore _more_ cool, at least my personal theory is that this changed a lot of perception of China (at least in some parts of gen z social media, "it's a very Chinese time").
by throwdbaaway | 2026-02-09 17:13:49+00:00
As mentioned by the sibling comment from godelski, it is about the lack of precision, not the lack of determinism. After all, we already got https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in..., which is not even an issue for single user local inference.

Question: Have you tried using LLM as a compiler?

Well, I sort of did, as a fun exercise. I came up with a very elaborate ~5000 tokens prompt, such that when fed with a ~500 tokens function, I will get back a ~600 tokens rewritten function.

The prompt contains 10+ examples, such that the model will learn the steps from the context. Then, it will start by going through a series of yes/no questions, to decide what's the correct rewrite pattern to apply. The tricky part here is the lack of precision, such that the "else" clause has to be reserved for the condition that is the hardest to communicate clearly in English. Then it will extract the part that needs to be rewritten and introspect the formatting, again with a series of simple questions. Lastly, it will proceed, confidently, with the rewrite.

With this, I did some testing with 50+ randomly chosen functions, and I could get back the exact same rewritten functions, from about 20 models that are good in coding, down to the newlines and indentations. With a strong model, there might only be 1~2 output tokens in the whole test where the probability was less than 80%, so the lack of batch invariance wasn't even a problem. (temperature=0 usually messes up logprobs, go with top_k=1 or top_p=0.01)

So input + English = output, works for multiple models from multiple companies.

But what's the point of writing so much English, in hope that it leaves no room for ambiguity? For now, I will stick with mitchellh's style of (occasional) LLM assisted programming, jumping in to write the code when precision is needed.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-09 17:14:03+00:00
I still own a Google device with that tech on it (Home Display), and, yeah it isn't useful. They just hide certain UI elements until your hand gets close, which is obnoxious and feels like they invented something then invented a usage for it to justify it.

UI should be consistent, it allows users to learn a muscle memory, this "hide stuff until you're 20cm away" stuff is the antithesis of that (and all good design in general).
by nradov | 2026-02-09 17:14:18+00:00
That's a total non sequitur. Ukraine wasn't a NATO member so why would NATO fight for it? (Several NATO members have given substantial aid to Ukraine.) In terms of a potential conflict between mainland China and Taiwan, the only NATO member with the capacity to do anything is the USA. The other players will be Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Australia so the outcome will largely depend on whether they decide to get involved.
by avidiax | 2026-02-09 17:14:20+00:00
How does this keep track with DST?

Looking at the code [1], it looks like if the actual time is 1 hour ahead of the displayed time, then we get 10 pulses per second to leap forward. Otherwise, the clock stops running for an hour to fall back.

https://github.com/jim11662418/ESP8266_WiFi_Analog_Clock/blo...
by sowbug | 2026-02-09 17:14:28+00:00
We've been shopping for a simple bathroom clock to replace our final Amazon Echo and leave that increasingly dystopian ecosystem. There are some models that use Bluetooth on your phone to sync the time. I could imagine BLE being a good low-power and relatively stateless solution. But given our goals, we're not going to install an app on a phone just to maintain a wall clock. (I'd be fine if Android provided BLE time sync as a built-in service.)
by somenameforme | 2026-02-09 17:14:40+00:00
I don't think this is realistic. A few thoughts in no particular order:

- War is logistics and you're talking about trying to get involved in a war, that would necessitate supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles.

- China is extremely technologically advanced with the largest military in the world, by a wide margin.

- China is the at-scale manufacturing king of the world. In a shift to a war economy, nobody would be able to come even remotely close to competing. They parallel the US in WW2 in a number of ways.

- China is a nuclear power, meaning getting involved is going to be Ukraine style indirect aid to try to avoid direct conflict and nuclear escalation.

- Any attempt to engage in things like sanctions would likely hurt the sanctioners significantly more than China.

- The "rest of the world" you're referring to is the anglosphere, EU, and a few oddballs like Japan or South Korea. This makes up less than 15% of the world, and declining.

- War fatigue is real. The US really wanted to invade Syria, but no matter how hard we beat the war drums, people just weren't down with it. I think this is because people saw major echoes of Iraq at the time, and Taiwan will have a far louder echo of Ukraine. This isn't a show many people will be enthusiastic about rerunning.
by steveruizok | 2026-02-09 17:14:44+00:00
(author here) To be fair, we also were getting plenty of poor PRs that implemented well-described issues. Or hey, maybe they were poor and maybe they weren't, but they were someone else's "claude please fix" and I don't think it's important for me to review them.

But you're right about the todos... except that the majority of times my little /issue command actually produces really great issues and digs up root causes very well. I still need to read and bless them though. Maybe we need a "potentially slop" label.
by koeng | 2026-02-09 17:14:57+00:00
if 10x the average amount of microplastics are showing changes that are approximately equivalent to hormonal or behavioral changes, it's not a significant factor to be worried about.

There are many times where unblinded experiments are still valid. And unfortunately, n=1 means that you can't have controls. The question: "did this intervention, in one person, cause a greater-than-normal increase in epigenetic changes, above baseline?"
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-02-09 17:15:06+00:00
Related incidents:

Incident with Pull Requests
https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/smf24rvl67v9

Copilot Policy Propagation Delays https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/t5qmhtg29933

Incident with Actions https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/tkz0ptx49rl0

Degraded performance for Copilot Coding Agent https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/qrlc0jjgw517

Degraded Performance in Webhooks API and UI, Pull Requests https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ffz2k716tlhx
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-09 17:16:04+00:00
AlphaGo was able to recursively self-improve within the domain of the game of go, which has an astonishingly small set of rules.

We're asking AIs to have data that covers the real physical world, plus pretty much all of human society and culture. Doing self-improvement on that without external input is a fundamentally different proposition than doing it for go.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-09 17:16:05+00:00
Who "they"? If you want to say that this operation was completely botched and there was no quality improvement for the regular Venezuela citizens, then yes, i would agree completely. and international law also suffered as a result. At the same time it is also true that Maduro deserved to be smuggled out, tried and shot. By any possible law or moral standard of any country in the world. He is a horrible criminal even by known public facts. So these things are true at the same time. Same with China, if anyone would decide to intervene there, it would be good and bad simultaneously. There is no easy clear answer to that.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-09 17:17:11+00:00
Most of my PRs are drive-by PRs: I have an problem, maybe a bug or missing feature, that annoyed me enough to fix it. And because I want to use future versions without the work of maintaining a fork I instead invest the work to upstream the fix. A step that is sometimes more work than the fix itself. At that point I wouldn't mind paying $1 to get that PR looked at and merged.

But that is not the only type of PR. We clearly need escape hatches for people who engage with a project on a deeper level.