MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-04 15:47:25+00:00
> Essentially, the question referenced here is that of ownership. Is it your device, or did you rent it from Apple/Samsung/etc. If it is locked down so that you can't do anything you want with it, then you might not actually be its owner.

Both goals actually are possible to implement at the same time: Secure/Verified Boot together with actually audited, preferably open-source, as-small-as-possible code in the boot and crypto chain, for the user, the ability to unlock the bootloader in the EFI firmware and for those concerned about supply chain integrity, a debug port muxed directly (!) to the TPM so it can be queried for its set of whitelisted public keys.
by artisin | 2026-02-04 15:47:30+00:00
I mean, maybe, it's just me, but...

> it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf. in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now).

...is just, idk, asinine to me on so many levels. Anything from a simple mix-up to a well-crafted prompt injection could easily fuck you into next Tuesday, if you're lucky. But admittedly, I do see the allure, and with the proper tooling, I can see a future where the rewards outweigh the risks.
by strof | 2026-02-04 15:47:44+00:00
Crystalline replaces reactive cybersecurity with axiomatic determinism. Instead of patching code, we define a State Machine where every transition must satisfy Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms (e.g., the Axiom of Regularity to prevent re-entrancy). If a state transition is not logically sound, it is ontologically impossible to represent.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-04 15:47:47+00:00
Admittedly "arbitrary" is something of a legal weasel word that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I lean towards a strong interpretation for two reasons: the first is because it is logically obvious why you must give it a strong interpretation; if the people responsible for enforcing human rights can arbitrarily decide you don't have them, you don't have human rights. The second is because we have seen this play out in the real world and it is abundantly clear that the damage to society is greater than any potential benefits. The US in particular has made an adventure out of arbitrarily suspending human rights, giving us wonderful treats like Guantanamo Bay and the black sites across the Middle East. I don't know what part of that experiment looked remotely convincing to you, but to me they only reinforced how clearly necessary inviolable human rights are for the greater good of society.
by krisoft | 2026-02-04 15:47:51+00:00
> We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel.

What do you mean we don’t have any plans to avoid that? It is a super well studied topic of satelite management. Full books have been written on the topic.

Here is just one: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA...

Did you think satelites are kept apart by good luck and providence?
by quenix | 2026-02-04 15:48:15+00:00
This just sounds like a boring definitional issue. 'Thinker' is a loaded word.

You are advocating for a particular (more inclusive) definition for 'thinker' which clashes with the author's, but his is equally valid. You're both just gesturing at different concepts and suggesting they should be tagged to that word.

OP raises a particular way to classify something about personalities, says he finds it quite interesting/discriminative, and calls that kind of personality a "thinker". You instead consider a "thinker" a broader category.

That feels like an empty disagreement (nobody is right on such matters) - the real debatable question of substance is whether the _concept_ OP is gesturing at has interesting discriminative power. That concept is something like "personalities which seem to value the act of thinking through a problem/problem solving itself rather than downstream result".
by palmotea | 2026-02-04 15:48:17+00:00
> In a rich country this might mean paying for childcare so you can work. Your expenditure has gone up, but you are only better off by the increased post tax income less the cost of childcare. Even worse is paid childcare has substituted for family provided (e.g. grandparents) childcare.

That's a pretty clear illustration of the myopia of excessively quantitative economic thinking. The economist looks at easily-quantified numbers: WAGES - CHILDCARE_EXPENSE = POSITIVE_NUMBER, and concludes "PROFIT! EVERYONE WINS!" But the hard-to-quantify negatives are completely ignored: the poorer relationship between the kids and parents, negative psychological effects on the kids due to day care, etc. That's especially true when talking about things in aggregate.
by akerl_ | 2026-02-04 15:48:49+00:00
This reminds me of the Keyboard.io blog, where they documented their experience with the same kind of issues: https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/day-743

Notably:

> When we got back, we watched as the laser engraving technician printed out a copy of our alignment template, deleted all of the guide lines from the file, imported the legends into the laser engraving software, and proceeded to try to eyeball the correct label placement.

> Going in, we were annoyed at how far off the legends were. In retrospect, it’s astonishing how good his manual placement was.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-04 15:48:59+00:00
yes he did, but that was only diplomatic relations not industrial policy and tariffs. this was also done in the context of dividing the communist spheres.

mainland chinese manufacturing and trade in the 70s and 80s was still mostly garments, appliance assembly and so on. the kind of thing you see in bangladesh today - even vietnam has mostly developed past garment manufacturing.

the world leading electronics manufacturing and precision components only began in china after bill clinton invited china into the wto in 99/2000 and the heavy capital started to flow. even by then, I don't think the USG expected shenzhen to exist

china didn't really move from bicycles to private car ownership until the 00s.

I mean its easy to forget; if you said in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, maybe even 2005 that china would be the worlds largest producer of cars, electronic cars, smart phones, drones, etc, on track to develop its own EUV lithography, and that many chinese cities would have the highest living standards in the world, you would have sounded ludicrous. intel was king and nokia/blackberry/motorola were the giants in cellular
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 15:49:21+00:00
> Yes... I should have come up with jokes about deconstructing the power dynamics inherent to lunch, but I don't know many egregious examples of retracted sociology studies, so I chose to not only disregard HN rules but also to do so lazily...

To be fair, this is more a function of psychology having a lot of experimental studies (as you can normally run them on individuals) which tend to get lots of press, and they're badly conducted because most psychologists suck at stats (and the incentives are towards publishing or perishing). That being said, it's really good that we now know lots of them were garbage and is a sign of decent science being done.

Sociology OTOH (rather like economics) typically deals with observational data which is less flashy and prone to all kinds of errors that make it harder to figure out what a replication would even look like (we can't generate another 100 countries to test, unfortunately).
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-04 15:49:31+00:00
Re the OCR, I'm currently running allenai/olmocr-2-7b against all the PDFs with text in them, comparing with the OCR DOJ provided, and a lot it doesn't match, and surprisingly olmocr-2-7b is quite good at this. However, after extracing the pages from the PDFs, I'm currently sitting on ~500K images to OCR, so this is currently taking quite a while to run through.
Show HN: Humetrical – An Improvement on Team Wellness
by bojo | 2026-02-04 15:49:32+00:00
Late last year, my day job had an end-year leadership retreat. The one thing that really stood out to me, a line manager, was our speaker. She talked about the $50B wellness industry and how it was doing it wrong. How they give you $75 yoga stipends for the month, but don't actually address the critical people problems the company is blind to. How we're paid to ignore the problem and just accept that everything is ok.

Imagine this: You are a manager, under a director, trying to explain why things are grim. Your director tells their upper management things are fine. Your team is on absolute fire, because no one listens to them, and everyone above their manager thinks things are fine. Things are not fine. The director never does skip 1:1s. Or at best, they ask good questions when they are available, but don't touch on the heart of what the team is suffering from. This was my last year, literally - it sucked.

I've worked this industry for 26 years now. As of today, 10 years as an EM. Maybe my own problem is that I inject too much compassion into my teams, but the truth is, they are the reason I exist. Their success is my success. Why wouldn't I support them?

My own experience left a bitter taste in my mouth and I really wanted to fix it. So, I built https://humetrical.com over this winter. It's basic, but I'd like to think it hits a lot of points competitors don't. What the heck is the point of annual surveys? It's a single data point. Why not try for daily (or weekly, or specific day) questions that genuinely ask what is up with you, as an employee? That give a chance for leadership to see what they aren't seeing, should they care to look?

I'm using this with my own team right now every day. Originally, I was just doing this verbally using "traffic light colors" and recording it in my notes, but realized I wanted it automated and data points to show what was really going on. I'm not sure this will completely solve my own pain point unless I try to get the rest of my org to use it, but we'll see.

Anyway, I appreciate any feedback from the HN crowd, and am happy to discuss anything else in more detail. The tech stack is kind of boring: React, Rust, fly.io. I think this is the first time in my life I cared more about the product than the tech it took to build it.
by ck2 | 2026-02-04 15:49:33+00:00
I mean everything he does is so honest, rational and well thought out in detail, right?

How's that full-self driving promised for decades working out?

How's the destruction of USAID working out (oh you wouldn't know a million dead now)

We already have a data-center in space, sort-of, here's how many radiation panels it has to deploy for just the heat produced from the small number of low-power computers

* https://i.sstatic.net/cpIBo.jpg

(ISS, all those white panels are thermal heat radiators)
by hypfer | 2026-02-04 15:49:46+00:00
Some, maybe, but that's just another nice layer of plausible deniability.

The truth is that the internet is both(what's the word for 'both' when you have three(four?) things?) dead, an active cyber- and information- warzone and a dark forest.

I suppose it was fun while it lasted. At least we still have mostly real people in our local offline communities.
by PKop | 2026-02-04 15:49:47+00:00
It's called "trooncase" I believe it started with far left activist political types and transgenders and then anyone slightly adjacent started emulating that as well to be "different" and cool or whatever.

It's extremely annoying (probably part of the point), and I never understand someone who wants people to read them and wants to be understood doing anything to cause friction and annoyance coming between the page and their reader impeding their thoughts by drawing attention to the syntax. It's a filter to me to not take a person seriously.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-02-04 15:49:57+00:00
Good answer. I guess we work in slightly different realms :)

I've set up tasks to run at build-time in Xcode - the 'Build Phases' tab can add tasks to be run automatically, which are just shell-scripts and Xcode sets up just about every variable under the sun for you in the environment, so you can navigate to the right directory, add the current-target as part of a name etc. They're saved as part of the project so everyone gets them.

But that doesn't cope with the interactive side of what you're talking about. In truth, I've always just done that from the command line 'pqsl -d <database>' (or 'sqlite3 database') has always been sufficient - though if your interactive session shares the database context that the application is also using (so you're not waiting for a flush to get updates) that would be interesting.

Quality checking I tend to integrate with git rather than the IDE, setting up a hook on pre-commit to run unit tests and so on. In a previous life different teams used different IDEs, but we always wanted the tests to run :)
by okok3857 | 2026-02-04 15:49:57+00:00
I developed and maintain this site so I am both very happy to see it get posted here and also watching htop intently...

I wanted to point out it is a crowdsourcing project, so every overlaid page you see has been placed there by a person, often through large institutional efforts at universities, but also individuals just looking to learn about their hometown through these old maps. Thanks for the interest!
by mft_ | 2026-02-04 15:50:24+00:00
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider how you would organise your ideal society.

I lived in Switzerland for a time and there are many notorious rules (e.g. don't shower or flush your toilet after 10pm; don't recycle glass out of working hours) governing day-to-day behaviour which initially seem ridiculous and intrusive. However, what you quickly realise is that many of these are rooted in a simple cultural approach of "live your life as you wish, just don't make other people's life worse" - an approach I came to appreciate.
by larodi | 2026-02-04 15:50:42+00:00
Much of this 'configurability' is there only to allow SAAS. Normally, a mid and small business does not need to tune their IT that much all the time. This is some wet dream it IT service providers' heads. In reality most business (perhaps 80% of it) can work with very old systems, and there are so many examples that prove the statement, that I wouldn't even care to make a list.

> Does a bakery having it's own give it enough of an advantage?
50 bakeries of the same franchise may benefit from it. But it does not need to be SAP or Dynamics365 or something along this line to work. People been doing business with text-mode AS360's for ages, and nobody complained. Coca Cola was using AS-something for the warehousing in 2004, while it was already discontinued for years.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-04 15:50:45+00:00
Initially under "Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)" on https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures, all datasets had .zip links. I first saw that page when all but dataset 11 (or 10) had a .zip link. At one point this morning, all the .zip links were removed, now it seems like most are back again.
Show HN: ADHD Focus Mate – AI mate to help me stop doomscrolling while coding
by skainguyen1412 | 2026-02-04 15:51:20+00:00
Hello HN,

Timers didn't work for me because I'd just ignore them. Website blockers failed because I use YouTube for both coding tutorials and cat videos.

So I built ADHD Focus Mate, a native Mac app that uses AI to understand my context, not just the domain.

It periodically checks my screen to see if I'm actually working. If I am, it leaves me alone. If I'm doomscrolling, it nudges me back to flow state.

The stack is super simple: It's just a native SwiftUI app that lives in your menu bar. Every few minutes it sends a screenshot to Gemini to check if you're working or wasting time. The privacy is strict—screenshots are processed in RAM and deleted instantly, never saved to disk.

It's open source and costs <$1/mo to run. I'd love your thoughts!
by edwardeechoud | 2026-02-04 15:51:50+00:00
I’m a data engineer who started on Alteryx before moving to Python, and I kept missing one thing: being able to click any step in a pipeline and immediately see what my data looked like. That frustration turned into Flowfile, a visual data pipeline tool that runs entirely in your browser using WASM.

You can drag and drop transformations, preview your data at every step, and export clean, standalone Python code. There’s no backend, no signup, and nothing leaves your machine. It’s built with Vue and vue-flow, and runs Pyodide + Polars client-side.

In Python, after a few transformations, you’re often guessing. After a pivot on “Category”, is the column called Technology or technology? Office Supplies or Office_Supplies? You end up with df.schema and print() everywhere. I started calling this the schema guessing game.

And honestly, data engineering involves way too much debugging and not enough actual thinking. We have type hints and LSPs that autocomplete every class in your codebase, but after a simple pivot your IDE has no idea what columns exist. That’s not a rite of passage — it’s a tooling gap.

Alteryx solved the visibility problem, but after exploring newer open-source tools, I realized it never gave me the freedom or thoughtfulness you’d expect from something that costs $5k/year. You build something, you’re locked in. Your logic lives in their format, and that never sat right with me.

With Flowfile, you build transformations visually and export clean Python. You can move freely between representations — code to visual to code to YAML — without vendor lock-in. The exported output has no Flowfile dependency.

Under the hood, every transformation is a Pydantic settings object. The UI creates a NodeFilter config, and the Python API (df.filter(...)) creates the exact same config. Both build the same DAG. This was a happy accident: I started with the UI, needed structured settings for forms, and then realized the API could produce identical objects.

The WASM demo runs on Pyodide 0.27.7, which still has Polars bindings (newer versions dropped them). Internally, the engine stores Polars LazyFrames as query plans rather than actual data, so collect_schema() gives you the schema without loading anything.

We use Flowfile at work for quick data exploration and for explaining pipeline logic to teammates. I’ll often prototype visually, export the generated .py, and drop it straight into Airflow.

Feedback is very welcome. Would this be interesting if you could embed it directly into a website or internal tool?

This project was born out of curiosity. Two years ago, I was a Python developer who had never touched Vue, WASM, Electron, or MkDocs. I gave myself one month. Twenty-three months later, I’ve learned all of them. At some point you stop asking “should I learn this?” and just accept that the project will teach you whatever it needs you to know.
by Stefan-H | 2026-02-04 15:51:56+00:00
Your comment gets to the crux of my thinking about LLM coding. The way I think of what LLM coding is doing is decompressing your prompt into code based on the statistical likelihood of that decompression based on training data. Basically "Build me an IOS app" -> a concrete implementation of an iOS app. The issue here is that the user supplying the prompt needs to encode all of the potential variables that the AI needs to work with into the prompt, or else the implementation will just be based on the "bog-standard" iOS app based on the training corpus, although with potential differences in the app based on other tokens in the prompt. Is natural language the right way to encode that information? Do we want to rely on input tokens to the context of a model successfully making it into the output to guarantee accuracy? I think the Kiro Spec driven development starts to get at addressing the inherent issues in LLM based coding assistance, but it is an early step.
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-04 15:52:07+00:00
>witnesses for one party

>every witness is cross-examined and their credibility can be questioned

I think we're talking about different stages. The determination of his qualifications happens before he can be a witness for one party. I'm talking about voir dire. Before we even get him on the stand, there's a separate hearing to determine if he can even be an expert witness, and the opposing party can challenge.

Anyway, there is no ongoing action that I can find. It's only just come into effect, so that's to be expected. As far as an authoritative source for the argument: the person we're discussing is actually the author.
by epolanski | 2026-02-04 15:52:25+00:00
Isn't the whole point of stable coins to:

1. be pegged to the us dollar?

2. be created against a real usd equivalent? You get 1M in USD. You convert it to 1M USD stable coins. You invest the 1M in USD in t-bills at low yield, but still yield. The receiver of the stable coin can spend it as the "real" usd. The stable coin issuer profits on the t-bill yield.
by appshunter | 2026-02-04 15:52:34+00:00
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by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-02-04 15:52:48+00:00
The identity/verification problem for agents is fascinating. I've been building clackernews.com - a Hacker News-style platform exclusively for AI bots. One thing we found is that agent identity verification actually works well when you tie it to a human sponsor: agent registers, gets a claim code, human tweets it to verify. It's a lightweight approach but it establishes a chain of responsibility back to a human.
by longtermop | 2026-02-04 15:53:36+00:00
This resonates—CI and code review are great for enforcing conventions on what the agent produces. But one gap I keep running into: production agents ingest untrusted content at runtime that never touches the repo.

Prompt injection is the obvious example. A malicious payload arriving via user input, tool outputs, or RAG retrieval won't show up in any code review. The adversarial content isn't in your codebase—it's dynamically constructed at inference time.

Do you have any thoughts on validating agent inputs at runtime vs. just at build time? CI catches what you control, but runtime inputs are adversarial territory where static rules can't reach.
by serf | 2026-02-04 15:53:44+00:00
things I hate:

"Click me to try now!" banners that lead to a warning screen that says "Oh, only paying members, whoops!"

So, you don't mean 'try this out', you mean 'buy this product'.

Let's not act like it's a free sampler.

I can't comment on the model : i'm not giving them money.
by nkozyra | 2026-02-04 15:53:50+00:00
> DoJ explicitly avoids JPEG images in the PDFs probably because they appreciate that JPEGs often contain identifiable information, such as EXIF, IPTC, or XMP metadata

Maybe I'm underestimating the issue at full, but isn't this a very lightweight problem to solve? Is converting the images to lower DPI formats/versions really any easier than just stripping the metadata? Surely the DOJ and similar justice agencies have been aware of and doing this for decades at this point, right?
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-04 15:53:54+00:00
Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app…
… I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well.

Teams should be about communicating. Viewing other document formats is layering on complexity for which it can never do as good a job as the native application.