MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maltalex | 2026-02-09 17:17:41+00:00
I get that you don't like lawful intercept. That's fine. But focusing on only that aspect of telcos derails the conversation and prevents us (in the very broad sense of "us") from making progress on things we all agree on. Can we stop bikeshedding and agree that telcos are critical infrastructure and need to be highly secure in general?

A hacker in control of a telco can do as they please regardless of any backdoors or lawful intercept systems. They can just use regular network functions to route calls wherever they want.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-09 17:17:58+00:00
>> How many Trump's bad polices did the protestors force him to retreat? if nothing changes, its a shitshow just for the people to feel good about themselves.

> What's your alternative suggestion?

Good question. For starters, the common saying about "doing the same thing over and over expecting different results" applies here, which you seem to at least entertain.

What I would do is try and figure out exactly how and why people protest some things and not others. What spurns them on to stand in negative weather with snow and windchill standing for Cause A but not Cause B, C, or D?

My theory is essentially manipulation. The trolley problem is interesting to apply here. Why are some causes (lives, because people are dying every day across many conflicts) worth protesting and others simply don't matter?

If this theory has any value (probably not, but maybe) what should be done about it? I posit trump is a symptom. Focusing on the symptom is why harris lost. "I'm not him!" didn't work as a platform. Protesting against the symptom is like slapping a cold cloth on a fevered person instead of treating the infection causing the fever. It might even work for a half hour or so, a little, maybe.

What is the root cause of all this? How did we get here? I posit, and hold your breath for this one: money and power. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I cannot figure out how the stock market is at ATHs, unknown hundreds of billions are sloshing around for "AI" and I have friends making over 130k/yr trying to figure out how to pay their electric bills. How does that happen? How do we fix THAT?

I don't think protesting trump fixes that. If anything, it emboldens him. "Oh you don't want me to stop hitting you? You mean like this hit (punches you in the face) or this one (punches you in the stomach)? Ok, so not the face?" [Proceeds to punch you in the stomach]

Follow the money. Figure out the inception of these causes people get off their couch to protest. Fix that. These epstein files might have been a good start. Find the other 100 epsteins, they're out there. Blow the whole up for real.
by leecoursey | 2026-02-09 17:18:16+00:00
A 20-year study involving 2,800 healthy adults aged 65 and older found that those who completed specific computerized speed training, which involved quickly identifying flashing objects, lowered their risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by 25% compared to a control group. Participants in the speed training group initially received five weeks of two weekly sessions, and the group that showed the most benefit also received eight additional “booster” sessions across the following three years. This training, called Double Decision, focuses on improving visual speed, divided attention, and peripheral vision; researchers theorize the reduced risk is due to procedural learning, which drives a lasting, fundamental change in the brain similar to learning a skill like riding a bicycle.
by Ef996 | 2026-02-09 17:18:21+00:00
Author here: i agree the article oversimplified here and in practice vehicle tracks can sometimes be non concentric. But it has nothing to do with differentials. Differentials just allow wheels to rotate at different speeds (as perimeter of a smaller radius circle is smaller the outer one). Non parallelism usually comes from the Ackerman steering or slipping. But rear tracks of a vehicle going slowly through sand will always be concentric. Parallelism is important for engineers because it also allows multiple vehicles to go in parallel on a multi lane road. You can see how that is failing with bezier paths in the CS2 ss in the article. Also hairpin turns are usually designed with arcs in mind as well
by userfrom1995 | 2026-02-09 17:18:21+00:00
I built envon because activating Python virtual environments across different shells was always a bit frustrating for me.
Remembering whether to run source, which activate script to use, or where the virtualenv is located became repetitive.
With envon, you can just run a single command to find and activate the right environment, no matter which shell you’re in.
It also supports searching for environments and activating them by path to make workflows easier.
It’s not a huge project just a small tool I use daily and thought might be useful to others.
Happy to hear any feedback!
by jonahx | 2026-02-09 17:18:28+00:00
Going to be that guy, even though I think this is a really nice work overall...

But the winking and "cool guy" emojis are so grating. In general, technical explanations that apologize for themselves with constant reassurances like "don't worry" and "it's actually simple" undermine their own aim.

Your job -- if you're making content for people with double digit ages -- is to make the explanation as clear as you can, not to patronize and emotionally hand-hold the reader.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-09 17:18:32+00:00
The "Rayleigh Scattering" comic is really spot on.

Air is blue. The reason air is blue is blah blah blah physics, see the article we're all commenting on, but at the end of the day air is blue. We don't demand the same elaborate physics questions for why a ripe banana peel is yellow.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-09 17:18:40+00:00
Huh?

The whole point of society is that you don’t need to know how the whole thing works. You just use it.

How does the water system maintain pressure so water actually comes out when you turn on the tap? That’s entirely the wrong question. You should be asking why you never needed to think about that until now, because that answer is way more mind-expanding and fascinating. Humans invented entire economic systems just so you don’t need to know everything, so you can wash your hands and go back to your work doing your thing in the giant machine. Maybe your job is to make software that tap-water engineers use everyday. Is it a crisis if they don’t understand everything about what you do? Not bloody likely - their heads are full of water engineering knowledge already.

It is not the end of the world to not know everything - it’s actually a miracle of modern society!
by Bayart | 2026-02-09 17:18:43+00:00
> Do you think Monaco should be part of France?

Monaco is already 90% part of France. There was an agreement until recently that Monaco would become French if the Princeship went extinct. By law the Prime Minister and the Police has to be French. France also handles their defense etc. It's very conditional sovereignty, the deal being that they can be a tax heaven if they want to, but not to France and Italy.

> Do you think Singapore should be part of Malaysia?

AFAIK they've been expelled from Malaysia after independence.

I'm not trying to disprove your point, just that it's fluid and fragile. Sovereignty itself has only been conceptually defined with the Treaties of Westphalia, it's recent and quintessentially Western.
by luckypipewrench | 2026-02-09 17:18:53+00:00
The part that worries me about agentic everything is the security model hasn't caught up. We're handing agents more and more access (shell, network, APIs, file systems) and the security story is still basically "the model probably won't do bad things." That's not how we secure anything else in computing. Principle of least privilege should apply to agents the same way it applies to services.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-09 17:18:53+00:00
> AI can be great at generating unit tests but it can and will also frequently silently hack said tests to make them pass rather than using them as good indicators of what the program is supposed to be doing.

Unit testing is my number one use case for gen AI in SWE. I just find the style / concept often slightly different than I would personally do, so I end up editing the whole thing.

But, it’s great at getting me past the unpleasant “activation energy threshold” of having a test written in the first place.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-09 17:19:17+00:00
Well that is certainly how it feels when I am in a city in north america.

A small errand that takes me 5 to 10min in my hometown takes me 45min to 2h in suburbialand. Worse, mutualizing errands do not even reduce the overhead of a single trip because infrastructure is usually made in such a car centric way that it makes it super inconvenient if not downright dangerous to walk from one huge parking lot to another one a couple of blocks away so you are kind of pushed to move your car, sometimes navigate a stupidly long loop to simply turn around and go on the other side of a stroad.

By the end of the day you realize you have barely done anything.

Funnily it makes it worse for both drivers and non drivers.

At home I usually opt to not take the car, not because it would be slow but because in many cases it is silly. It would be too short for the engine to even warmup and I would not have the chance to enjoy some time outside and/or exercise at the same time.

I totally see the impact spending so much time in the car and traffic has on my in law family's stress level and they do complain a lot about it while being seemingly unable to envision a better way of living and push for it at political level. It is also super bad on the security side of things because they often opt to take/make calls while driving for it to not make it time totally lost and aren't just as focused as they should be on the road.
by nradov | 2026-02-09 17:19:21+00:00
China's takeover of Hong Kong proved that any notion of "one country, two systems" is a total lie and assurances from the Chinese Communist Party are completely worthless. There's no coming back from that, at least as long as Xi Jinping remains in power. Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before. Fewer of them even have direct family ties there now.
by legitimate_key | 2026-02-09 17:19:47+00:00
Interesting and smart approach - most noise generators are obviously artificial in their traffic patterns.

I've been thinking about browser privacy from a different angle: not hiding what you browse, but hiding what's visible on your screen when you share it. Screen sharing during video calls basically bypasses every privacy tool you have running (VPN, tracker blockers, etc.) because the other person sees your raw screen.

The layered privacy defense framing makes sense. This handles the ISP/tracking side. But what handles the "accidentally showed my email to my entire team during a screen share" side? Different threat model but equally common.

Congrats on shipping.
by 46493168 | 2026-02-09 17:19:49+00:00
Are you Chinese, by chance? Chinese Buddhist lay food culture (especially in the south) generally accepts oysters, mussels and scallops as non-sentient, and I can see why. I’ve considered trying them, but right now I don’t have a clear way to measure whether I am deficent in the nutrients in question (and therefore can’t measure whether supplements help), so I’ve defaulted to avoiding them.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-09 17:19:59+00:00
The casebottom of my 15" MBAir has never exceeded 32°C — and that's sitting on a bed. Just a matter of physics: conductive case has orders of magnitude more thermal mass.

It also helps that Apple Silicon processors consumer orders of magnitude less power than most competitor OEMs. Pegged out the entire machine uses less energy than my former notebook's GPU, alone.
by foxyv | 2026-02-09 17:20:02+00:00
You become woke by accepting and learning about reality. Colleges teach people about reality. The right wing is distinctly anti-intellectual because they depend on ignorance to maintain support from the moderate right.

I started out far-right because I was indoctrinated that way. Then I got an education thinking I was already smarter than everyone. Then I started to see through the lies I had been raised with. Lies about non-white people. Lies about gay people. Lies about colonialism. Lies about industrialization. Lies about other countries. Lies about leftists. Then I woke up.
by steveruizok | 2026-02-09 17:20:05+00:00
(author here) Code quality matters a lot—we make an SDK, we sell our code. I'm writing my own code with the assistance of AI tools. When I'm asking an agent to step in, I can recognize when the tools are producing poor results, I can pause the work, correct it, or take the wheel in order to get things going in the right direction. Programming is still important, quality and care perhaps more important than ever, given how much of it we can do when tool-assisted.
by FreakLegion | 2026-02-09 17:20:13+00:00
You're on a tangent from the discussion you're replying to. Individual services get to decide requirements for their users, but that's not at all the same as "banning" KeePassXC from the entire ecosystem.

Like, there are lots of services that require SMS or email link MFA. I guess KeePassXC is just banned from everything, then?

To repeat, the GitHub issue digiown linked is not a threat to ban KeePassXC. A random guy from Okta doesn't have that power. Okta itself doesn't have that power or want to have that power. The GitHub issue is simply a description of what attestation is.
by AtomicApps | 2026-02-09 17:20:13+00:00
I’ve been working with WPF for a long time (mostly enterprise apps), and one thing has always annoyed me: making WPF look modern takes an unreasonable amount of work.

I built AtomicUI as a side project to explore a simpler approach — an opinionated theming engine that restyles the standard WPF controls and adds subtle animations/interactions, without rewriting controls or restructuring existing apps. With just a few lines of code, it makes a typical WPF app feel much more modern (improved Windows 11 inspired, but cleaner, smoother and more consistent) .

This is very much a v1:
- Dark theme only (light theme in progress)
- Some rough edges
- Not trying to replace full UI frameworks — just offering a lightweight alternative

I’m mainly looking for feedback rather than promotion:
- Does this approach make sense
- Would you consider using it in a real app
- What would be a deal‑breaker
There’s a small before/after demo if you’re curious.
Any feedback from WPF devs would be really appreciated — thanks.
by myk-e | 2026-02-09 17:20:19+00:00
Yes, I meant ordinary hardware which you find at home, like a current MacBook Air or equivalent Windows desktop. There must be a time frame when early SOTA LLMs were at a level that compares to open models that can run on ordinary hardware. But it's more like years rather than months. My rough guess would be 2-3 years. Which still would be amazing if we could get OPUS 4.5 quality within 2-3 years on an ordinary computer.
by yesfitz | 2026-02-09 17:20:30+00:00
This was a solved problem in the 1st and 2nd generation of AirPods with tap controls[1]. I'm still surprised that they removed that feature in favor of pressure, although now that I'm reflecting more on it, I wonder if it's part of Apple using their manufacturing and engineering as a moat[2]. i.e. Tap controls are relatively easy, so once wireless earbuds became commodities, they had to figure out some way to differentiate themselves.

That said, as someone who does pottery (messy hands), wears gloves/hats (stuff in the way), and has relatively poor fine motor control, I guess I welcome any solution that doesn't mean getting clay or cold air in my hair/ear.

The battery consumption and latency of the IR cameras will be interesting though. Too sensitive, and you'll eat up your battery. Not sensitive enough, and UX suffers.

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102628
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186975
by mfenniak | 2026-02-09 17:20:44+00:00
It probably depends on your scale, but I'd suggest self-hosting a Forgejo instance, if it's within your domain expertise to run a service like that. It's not hard to operate, it will be blazing fast, it provides most of the same capabilities, and you'll be in complete control over the costs and reliability.

A people have replied to you mentioning Codeberg, but that service is intended for Open Source projects, not private commercial work.
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 17:20:58+00:00
The article doesn’t make any sense. The man concedes he came to the U.S. illegally. He says he has a green card application pending based on marriage. But U.S. law prohibits illegal immigrants from getting a green card: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

“Except as otherwise provided in this subchapter, no person shall be naturalized unless he has been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence in accordance with all applicable provisions of this chapter. The burden of proof shall be upon such person to show that he entered the United States lawfully, and the time, place, and manner of such entry into the United States.”

There are various exceptions and waivers but they’re discretionary. Also, the person is being detained only because he is refusing to return to his country of citizenship. Federal law provides that any alien contesting removal may be detained or released on bond, at the discretion of the Attorney General: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim.... If you don't want to be detained, you can generally depart voluntarily: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1480811/dl
by ms7892 | 2026-02-09 17:21:01+00:00
Building, "Workloom ( https://workloom.so )" - a free-to-use project management tool for freelancers and small teams.

What's Included:
- Kanban boards
- Time tracking
- Documents
- Team chat
- Schedules
- Analytics
- Voice notes
- File storage
- Task templates
- Client reports
by JamesBarney | 2026-02-09 17:21:25+00:00
The most impactful censure is not the government coming in and trying to burn copies of studies. It's the the subtle social and professional pressures of an academia that has very strong priors. It's a bunch of studies that were never attempted, never funded, analysis that wasn't included, conclusions that were dropped, and studies sitting in file drawers.

See Roland G. Fryer Jr's, the youngest black professor to receive tenure, experience at Harvard.

Basically when his analysis found no evidence of racial bias in officer-involved shootings he went to his colleagues and he describe the advice they gave him as "Do not publish this if you care about your career or social life". I imagine it would have been worse if he wasn't black.

See "The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth" where the lead investigator was not releasing the results for a long time because she didn't like the conclusions her study found.

And for every study where there is someone as brave or naive as Roland who publishes something like this, there are 10 where the professor or doctor decided not to study something, dropped an analysis, or just never published a problematic conclusion.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-09 17:21:27+00:00
It hasn't been cool for a long time. My dad was offered Singaporean citizenship in the 1990s despite then being an Indian national but decided to immigrate to the US to work in tech in Silicon Valley instead and raise us. This is a pretty common story among Bay Area Chinese and Indian Americans who immigrated during that era.

In the 90s and 2000s, Singapore's value add was that it could act as a door into China, India, and ASEAN due to expansive trade and investment treaties, but why would I want to build an R&D center in Changi staffed with PRCs and Indians when I could just hire them directly in Shenzhen or Bangalore.

After China committed to being hands-off on HK business and contract law in the 2000s, SG lost some value as it didn't have the same connections that HK had legally speaking to enter the Chinese market.

SG continues to remain the best place to incorporate a business in Asia, but just because your lawyers and holding company is in SG it doesn't mean your operations, operational headcount, and capital expenditures is there.
by Spivak | 2026-02-09 17:21:37+00:00
Well they don't call it being a wage slave for nothing. You aren't getting a raise because you're still selling the same 40-60 hours of your time. If the business is getting productivity wins they'll buy less time via layoffs.

(USSR National Anthem plays) But if you owned the means of production and kept the fruits of your labor, say as a founder or as a sole proprietor side hustle, then it's possible those productivity gains do translate into real time gains on your part.
by AstroBen | 2026-02-09 17:22:06+00:00
Sometimes, yeah. I don't think we're disagreeing

What I'd also add:

Because of the unspecified behaviour, you're always going to need someone technical that understands the output to verify it. Tests aren't enough

I'm not even sure if this is a net productivity benefit. I think it is? Some cases it's a clear win.. but definitely not always. You're reducing time coding and now putting extra into spec writing + review + verification
by KawaiiCyborg | 2026-02-09 17:22:14+00:00
> "it's a donation to a project you care about"

But I'm already donating my time by creating a PR, it definitely would disincentivize me to make PRs if I had to also pay in addition to already doing the actual work. Just always such a shame that the good people have to suffer because of the actions of the shitty people...
by mmooss | 2026-02-09 17:22:18+00:00
Thank you.

> There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf)

That's the most complete summary I've seen so far, though I don't know if the author, Kirk Miller, has expertise in the area.
by palmotea | 2026-02-09 17:22:56+00:00
The examples in the article are pretty poor:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Most of them are like "So what? What effect does my action have?" and "It is what it is" which may be "thought-terminating" but seem to be able to serve a positive function of directing attention towards more productive avenues. Similarly, "let's agree to disagree" is a arguably a recognition that thought has already stopped (heels have been dug in) and it's better to move on.

It's not reasonable to expect someone to always engage fully with every topic every time. It's socially necessary to be able to terminate such interactions when one party doesn't want to continue.

There are better examples in this thread like "a rising tide lifts all boats" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945482), which are specific slogans designed to terminate specific thoughts (i.e. critique of specific ideologies).
by rrrpdx1 | 2026-02-09 17:23:07+00:00
I had a slightly different question (that wasn't googleable), that you may be able to answer with the data you have.... What two points on earth are furthest from each other when taking into account the earth is an ellipsoid? I'm guessing Chimborazo and whatever is diametrically opposed to it, but is there anything else that's close?
by gostsamo | 2026-02-09 17:23:25+00:00
Yep, I get you about the community.

As an alternative, I thought mainly as a secondary repo and ci in case that Github stops being reliable, not only as the current instability, but as an overall provider. I'm from the EU and recently catch myself evaluating every US company I interact with and I'm starting to realize that mine might not be the only risk vector to consider. Wondering how other people think about it.