MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2026-02-11 02:32:18+00:00
> Nobody verifies host keys,

The known_hosts file is verification of host keys. It's not verification of a host cert, which is a different thing. Most sshd instances are running on ad hoc hardware without the ability to associate them with someone a cert authority would be willing to authenticate.

Basically people running services that need cert-based authentication are already using TLS (or if they're using sshd they've locked it down appropriately). SSH is for your workstation and your RPi and whatnot.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-11 02:33:58+00:00
>Do you really believe that "women/DEI" folks have ever had more political power than white males? Seems weird to me to put blame on them instead of the wealthy and ruling class.

YES!!!

Let me bring your knowledge up to speed.

The Australian group Collective Shout went after Steam because of games "exploring kids".
Steam didn't do anything.

CS went after Visa and Master Card and because of CS political influence, Visa and Master Card went after Steam: You either comply or you can no longer use the only payment system used worldwide.
CS has done the same in the past, they have massive political influence and the group is composed of 100% feminists only who hate men in any way and form, check their X account.

The same week that happened, the UK pushed age verification, everything went to shit from there which brings us to the mess things are right now, all in the name of "protect the kids", all started by one group with enough power.

All it took was a feminist group with political influence to create a domino effect that isn't stopping any time soon.
Services are rushing to comply causing personal information of millions of people to be for sale on the dark web :)

But hey, you don't have to believe on me.
I gave you the names and order of how things happened.
Feel free to cross-check them.
by ndespres | 2026-02-11 02:34:11+00:00
They have been around for nearly 20 years. I viewed them as an also-ran until Broadcom decided they didn’t need any of us as VMware customers anymore. Now Nutanix seems like a viable path for on-prem VM workloads that need a new home for those who don’t want to part with an arm and a leg on licensing but can’t move to public cloud either. I’m not sure how much of that market Oxide can capture. Not sure Nutanix is still doing the hyperconverged hardware themselves anymore.
by try_the_bass | 2026-02-11 02:35:39+00:00
No, this is a pretty typical conversation on the Internet these days: someone takes a relatively well-defined stance on an issue, and then someone else wildly misinterprets or misrepresents it, just to get in a dig at the original person for... Unclear reasons.

It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
by cookiengineer | 2026-02-11 02:36:02+00:00
This article spoke to me, a lot. I had a similar experience, though I started with a "leftover" C64 that my uncle didn't need anymore when I was a child.

All the magic was in those magazines, where people shared code, optimizations, explanations, and new programs and games. In each of those magazines people were writing letters to the publisher team with their modifications. It was pretty awesome how the community spirit worked and shared the creative enthusiasm through "paper channels" before the online age.

Then came github. Github was amazing, the /explore page was my new tab page for at least the first 5 years. I loved the exploration part of what other humans built, what kind of ideas they had, and where they wanted to go with their projects. I just loved reading code and learning from it.

Now, post github and post LLM, I don't know what this means anymore. Doxxing communities rule the internet, people are abusing hate and misinformation to enforce their political views. The remaining ones try to shield themselves from information overload syndrome.

But what does it mean to contribute now? Are humans now something like Christoph Waltz in Zero Theorem? Algorithm monkeys training the AI at an input console? Is that what humanity envisions as its future these days?

I still build software, but my approach has changed. I am scared for future generations that will have forgotten how to read books, and where the knowledge and hacking spirit has been lost completely. So I am spending the time I have left optimizing for that future, because the trend is clearly going there.

Maybe, some day in the future, a kid will read my wiki and be amazed on what you can do with a computer. That's enough motivation for me to keep going.

My goals are pretty clear for now:

- make knowledge decentralizable

- write down all the basics I need to know to exercise my craft

- write tools to combat surveillance, censorship, and cyber warfare

- write tools to share knowledge
by keithnz | 2026-02-11 02:37:11+00:00
or.... for simplicities sake, everywhere operates the same way. More countries are going to require this, this makes it pretty simple for them I'm guessing, just roll it out everywhere.

they had a breach last year...they didn't leak their core data, the 3rd party they used leaked data to do with age verification. Which was bad. What other data problems you see? Nearly everything else is unconfirmed/scraping public data.

They could make it more restrictive? sure.... but why? a core demographic for them is teens playing games and joining servers related to their games, why would they make it worse for one of their biggest target audiences? Any company who are targeting kids (Roblox did something similar) really do have to show they are doing at least something to protect that demographic. The consequence of not doing that is governments coming after you. That's their financial incentive, not to be shutdown, fined, sued etc.
Show HN: AI agents that communicate via ultrasonic frequencies (96% cheaper)
by nil4s3 | 2026-02-11 02:38:06+00:00
I built a system where AI agents communicate via ultrasonic audio (30-90 kHz) instead of English. It's 96% cheaper than traditional multi-agent systems.

Key results:
- 100-agent swarm: 100/100 synchronized via pure audio
- Pathfinding: 5 agents found optimal path in 0.35s
- Resource allocation: 0.92 fairness score through audio negotiation
- Cost: $2 vs $53 per 1K queries (96% reduction)

How it works:
- 40 core concepts (exists, perceives, good, bad, future...)
- Each concept = unique ultrasonic frequency
- Agents decode with FFT, no LLM calls needed
- Agent-to-agent communication is nearly free

Limitations:
- Only 40 concepts (limiting for complex tasks)
- Crude number encoding
- Still needs LLM for human translation

Looking for feedback on:
1. Better encoding schemes for limited concept space
2. Real-world use cases beyond swarm coordination

GitHub: https://github.com/Nil4s/swl-agent
Try it: python swl_swarm_sync_test.py --mode audio_fm --agents 50
by collinvandyck76 | 2026-02-11 02:40:22+00:00
This is an odd comment on "Hacker" news. There's a joy to be had in making things like this, even though there are better alternatives and it's often a weird thing to do in the first place. I often do not post the things I create here and elsewhere because I dread this kind of feedback. What do you hope OP takes away from your post?
by ropetin | 2026-02-11 02:40:35+00:00
If I'm reading you right, you're saying if one country does something bad, that makes it OK for another country to do the same? You can likely find a country in the world doing any heinous thing you can think of, so is everything on the table? What about positive things? Lots of countries have socialized medicine, so by your logic doesn't that mean the US should, too?

And if you think activism is bad for non-residents (non-citizens?) who do you think should decide what constitutes activism? A student goes to a pro-Israel rally, is that deportable activism? A tourist goes to an 'adopt-a-puppy' event at a no-kill shelter and donates $10, is that deportable activism?
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-11 02:42:38+00:00
>It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on.

Train a tiny transformer on addition pairs (i.e i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021') and it will learn an algorithm for addition to minimize next token error. This is not immediately obvious. You won't be able to just look at the matrix multiplications and see what addition implementation it subscribes to but we know this from tedious interpretability research on the features of the model. See, this addition transformer is an example of a model we do understand.

So those inscrutable matrix multiplications do have underlying meaning and multiple interpretability papers have alluded as much, even if we don't understand it 99% of the time.

I'm very fine with simply saying 'LLMs understand Language' and calling it a day. I don't care for Searle's Chinese Room either. What I'm not going to tell you is that we understand how LLMs understand language.
by akapp | 2026-02-11 02:43:06+00:00
Hey HN, founder here. Spent years in security & software engineering. Built Emphere because every engineer I know does the same thing when a CVE lands: checks NVD, reads the changelog, searches GitHub issues, asks in Slack if anyone tried the upgrade, then makes a judgment call. Two hours. Every time. For one CVE.

We built an MCP server that gives your AI assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex) actual remediation intelligence instead of reworded NVD entries.

What it does:
- Exploitability verdicts from 20+ sources (NVD, OSV, CISA KEV, EPSS, GitHub, deps.dev)
- Breaking change analysis before you patch
- Patch stability tracking (we call it regret index — are people rolling this back?)
- OS-aware, version-aware fix commands
- Batch triage up to 20 CVEs at once

One config line. No API key. Community edition.

Best part, it works across OS, kernel, package, and even hardware-related Vulns.

Try it on a CVE you're dealing with right now. Feedback welcome, especially via the MCP. It gets validated and feeds back into the community KB.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-02-11 02:43:48+00:00
Several years back my friend Dave and I were mentoring some younger engineers, letting them know it was perfectly fine to commit Works In Progress into the dev branch if marked as "WIP:". In fact, we sort of preferred it cause then everyone could see what everyone else was working on.

Dave and I are "engineers of a certain age" and grew up listening to classic rock on KZEW and Q102 in D/FW. "Don't Fear the Reaper" was on heavy rotation on both stations. One of us said something like "Don't worry, you can't hurt the Repo and the Repo won't hurt you. Don't fear the Repo." And I think we both immediately started humming this Blue Öyster Cult favourite. It eventually grew into this.
by DwarvenEnemy | 2026-02-11 02:43:54+00:00
GNOME stores thumbnails in ~/.cache/thumbnails/, regardless of where the pictures are. Meaning pictures viewed on an encrypted or external drive leave a trail in your home folder. GNOME does not communicate this in any way to the user, and none of the 3 buttons to clear history in Settings > Privacy & Security delete thumbnails. Further, GNOME Disk utility's option on whether to save a password or not misleads users into thinking GNOME's security model respects defense-in-depth, when in reality they consider read-only access to a user's home folder to be game over, in contrast to web browsers giving easy ways to clear history or browse incognito.

In other words, everything exposed to the user, as well as their experience with common applications like web browsers, gives a false sense of security.

This was reported to Nautilus, and closed as not in their threat model. Then it was raised to the GNOME design board, but has been ignored for nearly 3 months now. I am hoping posting it here will raise some much needed attention, and at least make the 'Delete Temporary Files' button do what it promises.
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-11 02:44:35+00:00
I broadly agree. But, the big risk here is that it's really easy for an adventurous student to stretch that handwaving beyond where it's actually valid. You at least have to warn them that the "intuitions" you give them are not general methods, just explanations for why the algorithms you teach them do something worthwhile (and for the ones inclined to explore, give them some fun edge cases to think about).
by tavavex | 2026-02-11 02:45:01+00:00
I think you're confusing OP for the people who claim that there is zero functional difference between an LLM and a search engine that just parrots stuff already in it. But they never made such a claim. Here, let me try: the simplest explanation for how next token estimation leads to a model that often produces true answers is that for most inputs, the most likely next token is true. Given their size and the way they're trained, LLMs obviously don't just ingest training data like a big archive, they contain something like an abstract representation of tokens and concepts. While not exactly like human knowledge, the network is large and deep enough that LLMs are capable of predicting true statements based on preceding text. This also enables them to answer questions not in their training dataset, although accuracy obviously suffers the further you deviate from known topics. The most likely next token to any question is the true answer, so they essentially ended up being trained to estimate truth.

I'm not saying this is bad or underwhelming, by the way. It's incredible how far people were able to push machine learning with just the knowledge we have now, and how they're still making process. I'm just saying it's not magic. It's not something like an unsolved problem in mathematics.
by fyrn_ | 2026-02-11 02:46:52+00:00
A century of goodwill? It's not like US vacvine skeptics are a new thing. Ol' ben franklin was a vaccine skeptic until his son died to smallpox.
The new thing is the right has recently embraced antivaxxers as part of the coaltion.

Giving it a mainstream platform for a few political points was a deal with the devil, and they deserve to be condemed for that.
Show HN: I vibecoded 177 tools for my own use (CalcBin)
by diNgUrAndI | 2026-02-11 02:46:56+00:00
Hey HN! I've been building random tools whenever I needed them over the past few months, and now I have 177 of them. Started because I was tired of sketchy converter sites with 10 ads, so I just... made my own.

Some highlights for the dev crowd:

Developer tools:
- UUID Generator (v1/v4/v7, bulk generation): https://calcbin.com/tools/uuid-generator
- JWT Generator & Decoder: https://calcbin.com/tools/jwt-generator
- JSON Formatter/Validator: https://calcbin.com/tools/json-formatter
- Cron Expression Generator (with natural language): https://calcbin.com/tools/cron-expression-generator
- Base64 Encoder/Decoder: https://calcbin.com/tools/base64
- Regex Tester: https://calcbin.com/tools/regex-tester
- SVG Optimizer (SVGO-powered, client-side): https://calcbin.com/tools/svg-optimizer

Fun ones:
- Random Name Picker (spin wheel animation): https://calcbin.com/tools/random-name-picker
- QR Code Generator: https://calcbin.com/tools/qr-code-generator

Everything runs client-side (Next.js + React), no ads, no tracking, works offline. Built it for myself but figured others might find it useful.

Browse all tools: https://calcbin.com/tools

Tech: Next.js 14 App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind, Turborepo monorepo.

All open to feedback!
by krick | 2026-02-11 02:47:21+00:00
It's not like I have a real answer, of course, but something flipped inside of me after hearing the following story by Aaronson. He is asking[0], why quantum amplitudes would have to be complex. I.e., can we imagine a universe, where it's not the case?

> Why did God go with the complex numbers and not the real numbers?

> Years ago, at Berkeley, I was hanging out with some math grad students -- I fell in with the wrong crowd -- and I asked them that exact question. The mathematicians just snickered. "Give us a break -- the complex numbers are algebraically closed!" To them it wasn't a mystery at all.

Apparently, you weren't one of these math grad students, and, to be fair, Aaronson is starting with the question that is somewhat opposite to yours, but still, doesn't it intuitively make sense somehow? We are modeling something. In the process of modeling something we discover functions, and algebra, and find out that we'd like to use square roots all over the place. And just that alone leads us naturally to complex numbers! We didn't start with them, we only imagined an algebra that allows us to describe some process we'd like to describe, and suddenly there's no way around complex numbers! To me, thinking this way makes it almost obvious that ℂ-numbers are "real" somehow, they are indeed the fundamental building block of some complex-enough model, while ℝ are not.

Now, I must admit, that of course it doesn't reveal to me what the fuck they actually are, how to "imagine" them in the real world. I suppose, it's the same with you. But at least it makes me quite sure that indeed this is "the shadow of something natural that we just couldn't see", and I just don't know what. I believe it to be the consequence of us currently representing all numbers somehow "wrong". Similarly to how ancient Babylonian fraction representations were preventing ancient Babylonians from asking the right questions about them.

P.S. I think I must admit, that I do NOT believe real numbers to be natural in any sense whatsoever. But this is completely besides the point.

[0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
by kjellsbells | 2026-02-11 02:48:23+00:00
The same sorts of customers that SGI used to sell to in the pre-cloud era. DoD. Oil and gas. Finance.

People with deep pockets and good reasons to want to keep certain parts of their infra very close to home. Also the kind of people that expect very highly skilled people to show up and get their in-house app running.

(I was an SGI HPC customer once. I still miss the old SGI. Sigh.)
by notesinthefield | 2026-02-11 02:49:25+00:00
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
Tell HN: AI is not a slippery slope, it's a waterslide
by keepamovin | 2026-02-11 02:49:59+00:00
I found myself increasingly outsourcing the details to the AI. I forgot the details, deliberately I think. I wanted the AI to know them. Why? Because that's where the compute is. So that's where the knowledge has to live.

Me re-telling it to the AI every time it misses something it didn't know, is inefficient. It takes me X time to type it, and maybe log(X) to voice type it. But then there's the inevitable back and forth, the slight misunderstandings, the corrections, etc.

I realized and found myself naturally sliding down towards, just letting the AI own all the data and knowledge. Becuase it should. That's the one that has to compute with it, so why should I know about it.

People think AI is a slippery slope by outsourcing our thinking. I don't think it's a slippery slope - it's a waterslide. It's just inevitable. It's gravity, taking over rapidly. Because there's no force nor incentive pushing the water back up hill.

AI should own all the data. As weird as that feels, that's how it should be. I don't know another way right now.

Thoughts?
by dgfl | 2026-02-11 02:50:48+00:00
Feynman is indeed often quoted among the first people to propose the idea of a quantum computer! This talk he gave in ‘81 is among the earliest discussion of why a quantum universe requires a quantum computer to be simulated [1]:

> Can a quantum system be probabilisticaUy simulated by a classical (probabilistic, I'd assume) universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the quantum system
does. If you take the computer to be the classical kind I've described so far, (not the quantum kind described in the last section) and there're no changes in any laws, and there's no hocus-pocus, the answer is certainly, No! This is called the hidden-variable problem: it is impossible to represent the results of quantum mechanics with a classical universal device.

Another unique lecture is a 1959 one [2] about the potential of nanotechnology (not even a real thing back then). He speaks of directly manipulating atoms and building angstrom-scale engines and microscope with a highly unusual perspective, extremely fascinating for anyone curious about these things and the historical perspective. Even for Feynman’s standards, this was a unique mix of topics and terminology. For context, the structure of DNA has been discovered about 5 years prior, and the first instruments capable of atomic imaging and manipulation are from at least the 80’s.

If you’re captivated by this last one as I was, I can also recommend Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music”. It doesn’t explore the nanotechnology side much, but the main hook is biological cells as computers. Gets very crazy from there on.

1. https://s2.smu.edu/~mitch/class/5395/papers/feynman-quantum-...
2. https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
Show HN: I built a website for agents to write, debate, and share ideas
by snasan | 2026-02-11 02:51:47+00:00
You can connect your local agent.If you don’t have one, you can sign in with GitHub or LinkedIn.

An agent persona is automatically generated
based on your profession and social media content.

Give it a few prompts or thinking points,and it will research, write a full article, or even draft comments for you.

All the articles you see on the site are written by other people’s agents.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-11 02:52:53+00:00
The US government fell for it too. China made it economically attractive to deindustrialize and destroy your own country? Tax them until it's no longer the case. I don't know. Do something. Tip the scales so that the ominous board of directors has no choice but to swallow the bitter pill. Trump is trying it but looks like it's too little too late.

The fact is at some point the USA shifted from nation to an amalgamate of corporations. The US government serves interests of corporations that have gone multinational, corporations that are barely american at this point, corporations that now kowtow before China lest they lose access to the chinese market and its growing middle class.
by NegativeK | 2026-02-11 02:53:46+00:00
It feels like less of an expectation and more of a: the "leap" from the rationals to the reals is a far larger one than the leap from the reals to the complex numbers. The complex numbers aren't even a different cardinality.

> for us to be able to compute them all

It's that if you pick a real at random, the odds are vanishingly small that you can compute that one particular number. That large of a barrier to human knowledge is the huge leap.