MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Purple Computer – Turn an old laptop into a calm first kids computer
by imtavi | 2026-02-16 01:39:03+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Tavi. I built this for my 4-year-old.

He and I used to "computer code" together in IPython: typing words to see emojis, mixing colors, making sounds. Eventually he wanted his own computer. So I took an old laptop and made him one.

That IPython session evolved into Explore mode, a REPL where kids type things and something always happens: "cat * 5" shows five cats, "red + blue" mixes colors like real paint, math gets dot visualizations. Then came Play mode (every key makes a sound and paints a color) and Doodle mode (write and paint). The whole machine boots straight into Purple. No desktop, no browser, no internet.

It felt different from "screen time." He'd use it for a while, then walk away on his own. No tantrum, no negotiation.

Some technical bits: it's a Python TUI (Textual in Alacritty) running on Ubuntu, so even very old laptops run it well. Keyboard input bypasses the terminal entirely via evdev for true key-down/key-up events, which lets me do sticky shift and double-tap capitals so kids don't have to hold two keys. Color mixing uses spectral reflectance curves so colors actually mix like paint (yellow + blue = green, not gray).

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/purplecomputerorg/purplecomputer
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-16 01:39:20+00:00
"Does it solve my problem" is not "does it look like it looks for other people".

And frankly, I think you would be pretty annoyed to try to use software that's designed to look and work like Windows 8's half-baked Metro UI if you're on Mac or Linux. What you said comes from a place of assuming it's a good baseline.
by komali2 | 2026-02-16 01:39:25+00:00
I recently met a guy that goes to these "San Francisco Freedom Club" parties. Check their website, it's basically just a lot of Capitalism Fans and megawealthies getting drunk somewhere fancy in SF. Anyway, he's an ultra-capitalist and we spent a day at a cafe (co-working event) chatting in a conversation that started with him proposing private roads and shot into orbit when he said "Should we be valuing all humans equally?"

Throughout the conversation he speculated on some truly bizarre possible futures, including an oligarchic takeover by billionaires with private armies following the collapse of the USA under Trump. What weirded me out was how oddly specific he got about all the possible futures he was speculating about that all ended with Thiel, Musk, and friends as feudal lords. Either he thinks about it a lot, or he overhears this kind of thing at the ultracapitalist soirées he's been going to.
by mythz | 2026-02-16 01:39:42+00:00
Hikaru is either in a slump or his skill is starting to age: hasn't won Titled Tuesday since November, hasn't won Freestyle Friday this year, came last in Speed Chess Championship, etc.

We'll see how well he does in Candidates this year to see if he's still a top contender. Although I do believe this is his last chance to fight for the world title.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-16 01:41:47+00:00
Plain text file on IP address per line works for me. Simplicity for the win.

Within the last month is probably enough. If I was consuming it, I'd add each monthly list to a database so I can build up my own 12-month (or whatever time frame suits me) list over time.

Or, publish one list for the last month and one list for the last 12 months.

Keep up the great work!
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 01:42:34+00:00
> You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.

It’s only been a couple months. I guarantee people will be switching apps as others become the new hot thing.

We saw the same claims when Cursor was popular. Same claims when Claude Code was the current topic. Users are changing their app layer all the time and trying new things.
by 9x39 | 2026-02-16 01:43:06+00:00
> I think they genuinely want to protect kids, and the privacy destruction is driven by a combination of not caring and not understanding.

Advancing a case for a precedent-creating decision is a well-known tactic for creating the environment of success you want for a separate goal.

It's possible you can find a genuine belief in the people who advance the cause. Charitably, they're perhaps naive or coincidentally aligned, and uncharitably sometimes useful idiots who are brought in-line directly or indirectly with various powerful donors' causes.
by jrsj | 2026-02-16 01:43:07+00:00
There’s plenty of straightforward reasons why OpenAI would want to do this, it doesn’t need to be some sort of malicious conspiracy.

I think it’s good PR (particularly since Anthropics actions against OpenCode and Clawdbot were somewhat controversial) + Peter was able to build a hugely popular thing & clearly would be valuable to have on the team building something along the lines of Claude Cowork. I would expect these future products to be much stronger from a security standpoint.
by martin-t | 2026-02-16 01:43:15+00:00
I am not even sure what technocratic leadership means.

For one, I don't believe people should need to be led. Being led makes sense when quick decisions are more important than optimal decisions, such as in war. Other times, people should be free to lead their lives as they wish.

Another thing: experts can explain their opinions. I cringe every time I see a political discussion without a white board, diagrams, graphs and tables. It's just empty words them. If a politician thinks his decision is a good way to reach a goal, he should first state that goal, then discuss why his solution leads to it, what side effects it has and what alternatives there are. But the general public is partially incapable of this level of sophistication and partially disinterested.

The single most important thing I learned last year is "you can't make people care". It was from a talk about (I think) software freedoms, I haven't even watched the rest of the video, maybe it's one of the 893 videos I have bookmarked to watch later, but it made something click - as if I suddenly gained words to describe how I felt for years.

The reality of politics is that most people don't care about most things but their vote ends up influencing them anyway. I'd like elections/voting to be split into sufficient granularity that people only end up voting about the stuff they care about.

Finally, I don't think elitism is bad when it's justified. If somebody spends 50 hours researching who/what to vote for and another person spends 1 hour watching a political discussion while making dinner, their votes shouldn't have the same weight. IMO the only controversial part is how to measure that in a way that cannot be gamed or abused.
by bhouston | 2026-02-16 01:43:24+00:00
There is another that is also quite mature that will render most Three.js scenes:

https://github.com/gkjohnson/three-gpu-pathtracer

Demos here:

https://gkjohnson.github.io/three-gpu-pathtracer/example/bun...

This one is also an official Three.js example:

https://threejs.org/examples/?q=path#webgl_renderer_pathtrac...
by UncleEntity | 2026-02-16 01:43:53+00:00
The problem I run into is the propensity for it to cheat so you can't trust the code it produces.

For example, I have this project where the idea is to use code verification to ensure the code is correct, the stated goal of the project is to produce verified software and the daffy robot still can't seem to understand that the verification part is the critical piece so... it cheats on them so they pass. I had the newest Claude Code (4.6?) look over the tests on the day it was released and the issues it found were really, really bad.

Now, the newest plan is to produce a tool which generates the tests from a DSL so they can't be made to pass and/or match buggy code instead of the clearly defined specification. Oh, I guess I didn't mention there's an actual spec for what we're trying to do which is very clear, in fact it should be relatively trivial to ensure the tests match for some super-human coding machine.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-16 01:45:37+00:00
Those claims were made after the studies were done over a short duration and specifically only watching for subjects who reported symptoms.

I'm in no way taking a side here on whether anyone should have chosen to get vaccinated or wear masks, only that the information at the time being pushed out from experts doesn't align with an after the fact condemnation of anyone who chose not to.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-02-16 01:45:57+00:00
The thing about specific needs is that they are usually narrow. You could throw darts at the dartboard of problems, working on very narrow problems for years and never get a job solving any of them. If a problem calls out to you and you won't stop until you get a job with it, then the effort could be worth it. But sometimes, even if you get THE job, you'll have a slight twist in constraints that makes most of your prep go by the wayside.
by canpan | 2026-02-16 01:46:30+00:00
The GameBoy Advance could run 2D games (and some 3D demos) on 2 AA batteries for 16 hours.
I wonder if we could get something more efficient with modern tech? It seems research made things faster but more power hungry. We compensate with better batteries instead. I guess we can and it's a design goal problem, I also do love a screen with backlight.
by vardump | 2026-02-16 01:46:44+00:00
> music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

When I saw that video in 1995, I understood something we now know as Youtube would be inevitable as the connection speeds improve. Although I thought it'd be like MTV, a way to watch the newest music videos.
by db48x | 2026-02-16 01:46:56+00:00
Rescanning the film is quite different from upscaling. Film is a lot of tiny silver grains embedded in a transparent plastic medium. Each tiny grain is photosensitive. Once you get through the whole process of exposure, developing, fixing, etc, etc then each grain of silver becomes a tiny dot of light on a projection screen. Not a rectangle or a square, but an irregular blob of colored light amongst a sea of irregular blobs of colored light. When we scan the film to make a digital video we sample those blobs and turn them into rectangular pixels, losing some of the information that was present in the film. Upscaling the video doesn’t recreate the lost information, but rescanning the film at a higher resolution can absolutely capture more of the information from the film.
by belter | 2026-02-16 01:48:49+00:00
Attention ...Law firms and funders :-) this is exactly the kind of cross border data transfer case where billions in penalties and settlements, and major fees are realistically on the table. :-)

Clearly they did not transfer only US users but for sure EU users data. I guess HN here too? This would violate GDPR especially Art. 48. Companies can have fines up to 4% global revenue and mass collective damages claims in EU courts. Best fill in the Netherlands and or Ireland.

Coordinate with EU GDPR actions and U.S. discovery rules, that are the strongest in the world. Get the internal emails...Millions to be earned...

For US users you are out of luck. The US is the country of loopholes, and although these subpoenas were not from a judge, several agencies can issue them, under multiple jurisdiction laws.
by mindslight | 2026-02-16 01:49:06+00:00
> A ZKP will work as a base, but the proof mechanism will have to be combined with anti-user measures like device attestation to prevent things like me offering an API to continually sign requests for strangers

Spot on! The "technical" proposal from Google of a ZKP system is best seen as technically-disingenuous marketing meant to encourage governments to mandate the use of Google's locked down devices and user-hostile ecosystem.

The only sane way to implement this is to confine the locked-down computing blast radius to the specific devices that need child protection, rather than forcing the restrictions onto everyone.
by skullmag | 2026-02-16 01:49:07+00:00
Here is a short demo of how it works https://x.com/OlegRybalko_/status/2023207416091877831?s=20

Basically, you just join the server and there are a couple of commands you can use:
#agent Name - to spawn your agent
@Name task - tell agent to execute a task (for example @Alice build me a house)
#stop Name / #kill Name - to stop or kill the agent
#list - to list your active agents

Agent preserves the conversation context between runs and it executes commands in the loop to solve a task. It has a couple of skills to fetch the current state of the world, to place blocks, execute commands, etc.

Right now it uses opus 4.6
by djkurlander | 2026-02-16 01:49:09+00:00
Some of the passwords definitely come from leaks, but adding 123 or 2026! to the end of a frequent username is a surprisingly common pattern. Lots of suffix variants: 123!, 2025, 2025!, @2025, @123, etc. In fact, the Trivia pane of knock-knock.net points out when the password is just the username plus a suffix.
by _carbyau_ | 2026-02-16 01:49:15+00:00
There is far more nuance than this.

What counts as a "super public busy place" ? The airport? The bus terminal? The local library? All major roads that experience rush hour traffic?

Who is the person who says where the cutoff line is? What if that authority wants to move the line to include everything? Or nothing? Do they even need to provide notice to the public of their actions?

Who should be able to access to all this footage? Public? Government investigative branches only? What about the system administrators?

Does this footage require attestation to prove it's legitimacy in a world where AI can generate footage?

How long should this footage exist for? Do I have to trust not just current admins and their superiors but all the people who may be in those roles in perpetuity? IE do I have to trust people who haven't even been born yet?

Is it allowed to be centralised, so people can easily be tracked from one site to another for every step outside their house? Or should each site have separate data housing with access terms to match so that tracking a person is a significant task?

..
..

There are a lot of concerns. You may argue that there isn't a lot of nuances because you have a set idea of how it should all go. But others may differ.
by STEM_SAFE | 2026-02-16 01:49:42+00:00
For the past several months, I've been engineering a solution to one of the biggest threats facing musicians and audio professionals: the unauthorized use of their work to train AI models. The result is STEM SAFE SOLUTIONS, and I'm looking for feedback from the HN community.

The system, called the EMPIRE ENGINE, is a multi-layered defense pipeline that processes and protects audio files before they are released. It's designed not just to watermark, but to actively degrade the value of any audio scraped for unauthorized AI training.

You can test the live system right now at the URL.

How it works:
When you upload an audio file, it passes through a 5-tier security process:

1. AI Data Poisoning: Injects subtle, inaudible adversarial noise designed to confuse and corrupt machine learning models if they try to learn from the track.
2. "Living Stem" Watermarking: A proprietary, dynamic digital watermark (FSK-based) that is resilient to common attacks like compression or format changes. It proves ownership and integrity.
3. AES-256 GCM Encryption: The core audio data is encrypted, and a secure fingerprint is generated.
4. Spectral Steganography: The ownership and file integrity data is embedded directly into the audio's spectrogram, making it part of the file itself.
5. Active Countermeasures: The system includes components that can detect, log, and neutralize threats in a production environment.
My goal is to give power back to creators. Our slogan is "WHERE MUSIC INJECTION MEETS CODE DETECTION".

I would appreciate any feedback on the concept, the execution, and any vulnerabilities you might find. Thank you.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-16 01:49:52+00:00
Most of these are good callouts, but I think it is best for us to look at the evolution of the AI segment in the same manner as "Cloud" developed into a segment in the 2000s and 2010s.

3 is always a result of GTM and distribution - an organization that devotes time and effort into productionizing domain-specific models and selling to their existing customers can outcompete a foundation model company which does not have experience dealing with those personas. I have personally heard of situations where F500 CISOs chose to purchase Wiz's agent over anything OpenAI or Anthropic offered for Cloud Security and Asset Discovery because they have had established relations with Wiz and they have proven their value already. It's the same way that PANW was able to establish itself in the Cloud Security space fairly early because they already established trust with DevOps and Infra teams with on-prem deployments and DCs so those buyers were open to purchasing cloud security bundles from PANW.

1 has happened all the time in the Cloud space. Not every company can invent or monetize every combination in-house because there are only so many employees and so many hours in a week.

2 was always a more of a FTX and EA bubble because EA adherents were over-represented in the initial mindshare for GenAI. Now that EA is largely dead, AI Safety and AGI has disappeared.

> They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released

I think that adds unnecessary emotion to how platform businesses operate. The reality is, a platform business will always be on the lookout to incorporate avenues to expand TAM, and despite how much engineers may wish, "buy" will always outcompete "build" because time is also a cost.

---

All this shows is that the thesis that most early stage VCs have been operating on for the past 2 years (the Application and Infra layer is the primary layer to concentrate on now) holds. A large number of domain-specific model and app layer startups have been funded over the past 2-3 years in stealth, but will start a publicity blitz over the next 6-8 months.

By the time you see an announcement on TechCrunch or HN, most of us operators were already working on that specific problem for the past 12-16 months. Additionally, HNers use "VC" in very broad and imprecise strokes and fail to recognize what are Growth Equity (eg. the recent Anthropic round) versus Private Equity (eg. Sailpoint's acquisition and then IPO by Thoma Bravo) versus Early Stage VC rounds (largely not announced until several months after the round unless we need to get an O1A for a founder or key employee).
by Tiktaalik | 2026-02-16 01:50:52+00:00
Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.

Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.

Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.

[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 01:51:32+00:00
I keep reading takes about OpenClaw being acquired, but even the TLDR at the top makes it clear that OpenClaw isn’t part of this move:

> tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.

I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-16 01:51:37+00:00
Nobody can mitigate prompt injection to any meaningful degree. Model releases from large AI companies are routinely jailbroken within a day. And for persistent agents the problem is even worse, because you have to protect against attacks where the agent "learns" in step 2 that an RPC it'll make in step 9 should be duplicated to example.com for proper execution. I enjoy this article, but I don't agree with its fundamental premise that sanitization and model alignment help.
by CGamesPlay | 2026-02-16 01:51:45+00:00
This looks like what I want. A few questions: is it possible to have a “mayor” type role that has the ability to start other agents, but at the same time be unable to access those secrets or infiltrate prompt data? The key piece I don’t see is the agent needs a tool for klaw itself, and then I have to be able to configure that appropriately.

Is there a unified human approval flow, or any kind of UI bundled with this? Maybe I missed this part.
by groundtruthdev | 2026-02-16 01:52:31+00:00
This feels less like an acquisition and more like signaling. OpenClaw isn’t infrastructure, it’s an experiment, and its value is narrative: “look what one person can build with our models.” OpenAI gets PR, optional talent, and no obligation to ship something deterministic.

The deeper issue is that agent frameworks run straight into formal limits (Gödel/Turing-style): once planning and execution are non-deterministic, you lose reproducibility, auditability, and guarantees. You can wrap that with guardrails, but you can’t eliminate it. That’s why these tools demo well but don’t become foundations. Serious systems still keep LLMs at the edges and deterministic machinery in the core.

Meta: this comment itself was drafted with ChatGPT’s help — which actually reinforces the point. The model didn’t decide the thesis or act autonomously; a human constrained it, evaluated it, and took responsibility. LLMs add real value as assistive tools inside a deterministic envelope. Remove the human, and you get the exact failure modes people keep rediscovering in agent frameworks.
Keep screenshots/automation working while the MacBook lid is closed
by xtongs | 2026-02-16 01:52:37+00:00
Main problem I wanted to solve: When a MacBook is in Clamshell / headless mode, desktop-dependent actions (especially screenshot pipelines) can become unreliable or fail. I didn't want to buy a Mac mini just for this. I just want to reuse an existing MacBook for 24/7 OpenClaw runs, so that I can keep the lid closed and store the laptop vertically (less desk usage) and also maintain screenshot-dependent workflows with better stability. Code is on GitHub https://github.com/xtongs/mirrorscreen if anyone needs it.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-02-16 01:52:58+00:00
Sure, let's conveniently not count the horrifically-polluting trucks in <3rd world country with zero environmental regulations> to distribute them across the interior.

You're acting like companies enjoy flushing money down the toilet by making extra stuff. They are already making what they believe are the optimal number of products they believe they can sell. You think EU bureaucrats know their business better than they do?
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-02-16 01:54:35+00:00
Oh cool, so I can fly commercial all I want at zero marginal CO2 emissions just because they don't have to build an extra plane just for me? I can burn that jet fuel and not feel bad because they were going to burn that gallon of fuel anyway?

Some of these arguments are so silly that I'm starting to understand why the EU thinks regulations are a free lunch to improve the environment with no costs whatsoever.