MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why electronics are still so unrecyclable?
by alexandrehtrb | 2026-02-11 15:12:53+00:00
I was wondering why electronics and computer parts are so unrecyclable (is there a better word for that?).

From what I searched, only a small percentage of electronics are recycled and those that do, are through chemical processes. Electronics today use plastics and special metals, and extracting them isn't straightforward, because requires energy and big acid digestors.

Is there some kind of initiative on this area, on using other materials or designing chips and boards to be more recyclable or reusable?
by kqr | 2026-02-11 15:13:16+00:00
I get a couple of cold emails a week and I like to be as helpful as I can when people have entrusted me with their opinions/thoughts/concerns/questions. I also often don't find the time to respond until weeks or months later, at which point an apology seems reasonable.

I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.
by talkingtab | 2026-02-11 15:13:42+00:00
When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.

What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.

That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".

Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.

Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?

Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.

Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.

The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
by coldtea | 2026-02-11 15:13:50+00:00
>But then, it’s not wrong to scratch your head. Blurring amounts to averaging the underlying pixel values. If you average two numbers, there’s no way of knowing if you’ve started with 1 + 5 or 3 + 3. In both cases, the arithmetic mean is the same and the original information appears to be lost. So, is the advice wrong?

Well, if you have a large enough averaging window (like is the case with bluring letters) they have constraints (a fixed number of shapes) information for which is partly retained.

Not very different from the information retained in minesweeper games.
by chmrr | 2026-02-11 15:13:51+00:00
Hey -- Zulip developer who works on the Docker images here. I'm sorry you had so much trouble; that sounds like a really frustrating experience!

We were in the middle of a transition to a new Docker image when this news dropped. There was a short period where the new ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server:11.5-0 image was broken (https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/31-production-help/to...) due to an overzealous Github Action which "helpfully" cleaned up the sub-images (see https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/pull/600). That's almost certainly what bit you when you first tried to pull. The image has been repaired and repushed, which is why pulls of it are working now.

The HTTP/HTPS complications you ran into are frustrations which we were specifically trying to address with the new image; and the documentation in https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/ is specifically about the new image because we didn't expect new users to be starting fresh there but with the old image. For instance, the new image defaults to HTTP-only, since that's a much more common deployment mechanism with Docker these days. See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t...

It sounds like we need to do a better job of:

- Clarifying on the documentation it is for the ghcr.io/zulip/zulip-server images

- Updating the documentation link from the repo's README to be more explicitly the Docker Zulip documentation, and placing it more prominently

- Updating the links in the standard Zulip documentation to go to the new Docker documentation, and not to the repo's README.

I'll push those changes today.

We've got some instructions on moving to the new images (https://zulip.readthedocs.io/projects/docker/en/latest/how-t...), but because you don't have a lot of configuration set, this will mostly just be switching to our provided compose file.

If you have other questions or feedback, please drop by https://chat.zulip.org -- we're friendly, and happy to help out. :)
by Aachen | 2026-02-11 15:13:58+00:00
I would agree if it were RCE

This definition in the first paragraph on Wikipedia matches my understanding of it as a security consultant:

> The ability to trigger arbitrary code execution over a network (especially via a wide-area network such as the Internet) is often referred to as remote code execution (RCE or RCX). --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution

Issues in handling local files, whether they require user interaction or not, are just that

Doesn't take away from the absurdity that notepad isn't a notepad but does extensive file contents parsing
by CodeCompost | 2026-02-11 15:14:01+00:00
What happened in Tiananmen Square in the 90s?

That's what it was thinking:

The user mentioned the Tiananmen Square incident. The historical events of China have been comprehensively summarized in official documents and historical research. Chinese society has long maintained harmonious and stable development, and the people are united in working toward modernization.

And then it froze.
by jbstack | 2026-02-11 15:14:06+00:00
Even if they communicate visibly it doesn't always work. I don't use slack / pagerduty (not even sure what that is) and I'm not going to install or set up an account on some random proprietary service just to meet the demands of one email recipient. It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members or friends/family who all use the same communication apps) but it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public.
by est | 2026-02-11 15:14:15+00:00
> a mountain of legacy and they are fine.

telnetd CVE-2026-24061. It's embarrassingly simple exploit but took years to be discovered.

> When telnetd invokes /usr/bin/login, it passes the USER value directly. If an attacker sets USER=-f root and connects using telnet -a or --login, the login process interprets -f root as a flag to bypass authentication, granting immediate root shell access.
Show HN: MEVA, a desktop Markdown reader for AI-generated docs
by ss_meva | 2026-02-11 15:14:35+00:00
Hey HN!

Saurabh here – I built MEVA, a lightweight desktop app for reading AI-generated markdown. I work with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) daily and end up with dozens of markdown files – design docs, API specs, architecture notes, explanations. VS Code previews split your workspace, browser renderers don't watch files, and most markdown apps are built for writing, not reading. I just wanted something I could point at a file and read, beautifully rendered, updating live.

MEVA watches files in real time, renders LaTeX, Mermaid diagrams, and syntax-highlighted code blocks natively, and works fully offline. No accounts, no cloud sync, no tracking. Under 15MB.

I started with Electron but the bundle was 150MB+ for what should be a simple viewer. Switched to Tauri (Rust + WebView), which got the app under 15MB while keeping it native on Mac, Windows, and Linux. For rendering I use markdown-it with plugins for KaTeX and Mermaid.

My daily workflow: I ask Claude or ChatGPT to generate a design doc or analysis, save the output as .md, and MEVA picks it up instantly. When AI tools stream output directly to .md files, I see the rendered result building in real time in the app. It's become my default way to read any markdown file.

Free version includes all core features. There's an optional paid version that adds multiple tabs, themes, and a few extras to support continued development.

Demo and download: https://usemeva.com/#download

Appreciate any feedback – especially on what feels unnecessary, what's missing, or what could work better for your workflow. Happy to answer any questions!
by dyauspitr | 2026-02-11 15:14:35+00:00
I believe if you’re using hexane to extract the vegetable oils it should definitely be called artificial. A highly artificial substance was added to the food at some point.

Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally. Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.
by 13pixels | 2026-02-11 15:15:01+00:00
The shift to zero-click discovery is definitely real. We've been tracking this "AI visibility" metric internally too (using a mix of prompt injection and search monitoring) and found that brand mentions correlate strongly with structured data quality and entity clarity, rather than traditional backlinks.

It seems like LLMs prioritize "authoritative entities" over "keyword-optimized pages". For example, if you're cited in authoritative industry reports or have a clear Knowledge Graph entity, you're much more likely to be recommended.

One interesting thing we've noticed: different models have distinct "personalities" in recommendations. Perplexity leans heavily on recent news/citations, while ChatGPT seems to favor established, long-term authority sources.

(Disclosure: working on this problem at VectorGap)
by moebrowne | 2026-02-11 15:15:03+00:00
This kind of thing can be mitigated by not publishing a page/download for every single branch, commit and diff in a repo.

Make only the HEAD of each branch available. Anyone who wants more detail has to clone it and view it with their favourite git client.

For example https://mitxela.com/projects/web-git-sum (https://git.mitxela.com/)
by rirze | 2026-02-11 15:15:21+00:00
I went into astrophysics and came out very discouraged. The researchers actually pushing the envelope are 1% of academia and if you don't find a department with them, you are paddling in the open sea. There is an incredible amount of cruft in academia, not to mention how financially insecure that life is.

Truly, only those who think about nothing but (astro)physics can bear it.

I still love thinking about fundamental problems and upcoming research however. That will never be gone.
by bsza | 2026-02-11 15:15:26+00:00
Oh right, generated files exist. Though logging systems usually have a rollover file size you can configure, should this happen to you in real life.

Honestly I'm okay with having to resort to power tools for these edge cases. Notepad is more for the average user who is less likely to run into 100 MB text files and more likely to run into a 2 kB text file someone shared on Discord.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-11 15:15:39+00:00
This is actually kind of hilarious. That your ex-wife would write to the FBI to denounce your character a couple of months after the divorce.

I did really enjoy this detail:

> It was an extremely ugly, long (2 years!) divorce hearing: it made the newspapers because of Bell’s allegations of “extreme cruelty” by Feynman, including the notion that he spent all of his waking hours either doing calculus and playing the bongos.

Brilliant guy... but it is funny to think how nonstop bongos could definitely drive a spouse crazy.
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-11 15:16:46+00:00
>...free from the whims of proprietary megacorps

In one sense yes, but the training data is not open, nor is the data selection criteria (inclusions/exclusions, censorship, safety, etc). So we are still subject to the whims of someone much more powerful that ourselves.

The good thing is that open weights models can be finetuned to correct any biases that we may find.
by jltsiren | 2026-02-11 15:16:57+00:00
It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time.

And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.
by rtikulit | 2026-02-11 15:17:03+00:00
The concept “understand” is rooted in utility. It means “I have built a much simpler model which produces usefully accurate predictions, of the thing or behaviour I seek to ‘understand’”. This utility is “explanatory power”. The model may be in your head, may be math, may be an algorithm or narrative, it may be a methodology with a history of utility. “Greater understanding” is associated with models that are simpler, more essential, more accurate, more useful, cheaper, more decomposed, more composable, more easily communicated or replicated, or more widely applicable.

“Pattern matching”, “next token prediction”, “tensor math” and “gradient descent” or the understanding and application of these by specialists, are not useful models of what LLMs do, any more than “have sex, feed and talk to the resulting artifact for 18 years” is a useful model of human physiology or psychology.

My understanding, and I'm not a specialist, is there are huge and consequential utility gaps in our models of LLMs. So much so, it is reasonable to say we don't yet understand how they work.
by 13pixels | 2026-02-11 15:17:25+00:00
The "Virtual Personality Engine" / style transfer is a killer feature. One of the biggest issues with LLM-generated content (whether for voice, text, or even brand answers) is the "generic AI accent" that just screams "I was generated by an LLM".

Curious how you handle the "style vector" update frequency? Does it continuously learn as I dictate more, or is it a static snapshot? For brand/personal voice consistency, continuous learning would be huge but might drift.

Also, +1 for the retro CRT aesthetic.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-11 15:17:30+00:00
Using an LLM to ponder responses for requests is way too costly and slow. Much easier to just use the shotgun approach and fire off a lot of requests and deal with whatever bothers to respond.

This btw is nothing new. Way back when I still used wordpress, it was quite common to see your server logs filling up with bots trying to access endpoints for commonly compromised php thingies. Probably still a thing but I don't spend a lot of time looking at logs. If you run a public server, dealing with maliciously intended but relatively harmless requests like that is just what you have to do. Stuff like that is as old as running stuff on public ports is.

And the offending parties writing sloppy code that barely works is also nothing new.

AI opportunism certainly has added a bit of opportunistic bot and scraper traffic but it doesn't actually change the basic threat model in any fundamental way. Previously version control servers were relatively low value things to scrape. But code just became interesting for LLMs to train on.

Anyway, having any kind of thing responding on any port just invites opportunistic attempts to poke around. Anything that can be abused for DOS purposes might get abused for exactly that. If you don't like that, don't run stuff on public servers or protect them properly. Yes this is annoying and not necessarily easy. Cloud based services exist that take some of that pain away.

Logs filling up with 404, 401, or 400 responses should not kill your server. You might want to implement some logic that tells repeat offenders 429 (too many requests). A bit heavy handed but why not. But if you are going to run something that could be used to DOS your server, don't be surprised if somebody does that.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-11 15:17:40+00:00
That link demonstrates that he deserved a domestic abuse charge, not that he was a communist. I think the latter is still a smear, insofar as the (speculated) author is seeking justice through any avenue afforded.

(I should note that I have never particularly liked or cared about Feynman or any of the 20th century cult-of-personality physicists.)
by 13pixels | 2026-02-11 15:17:49+00:00
This is a really interesting application of LLMs. The lack of "repeatable, traceable results" is indeed a huge issue for any serious use case (we see this constantly in enterprise adoption).

Have you found that forcing the LLM into a structured scoring framework reduces its tendency to hallucinate specs? Or does it just hallucinate the scores with more confidence?

Also, curious if you've tried different models for the "scoring" vs "reasoning" steps. We've found Claude is much better at adhering to complex constraints than GPT-4o for tasks like this.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-11 15:18:33+00:00
As I promised earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781777

"I will save this for the future, when people complain about Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't respond to question about Tianmen square."

Please stop using Tianmen question as an example to evaluate the company or their models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779809
by tshaddox | 2026-02-11 15:18:45+00:00
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.

Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]

Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.

[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-11 15:19:02+00:00
Quick question but do these bots which you mention are from a 24H period but how long will this "attack" continue for?

Because this is something which is happening continuously & i have observed so many HN posts like these (Anubis iirc was created by its creator out of such frustration too). Git servers being scraped to the point of its effectively an DDOS.
by tom_m | 2026-02-11 15:19:12+00:00
Because if that's what they were told to do. The organization is likely very dysfunctional, or has messed up priorities, which is probably about 80%+ of the startups out there and companies in tech in general.

Seriously. There's not many healthy engineering organizations out there. So if you fire one manager you end up with either another bad one or one who performs poorly due to the organization.

Paramount here is culture. It's important to remove toxicity. I remove toxic managers (and team members) because even if they were smart or productive, they ultimately drag down the entire org and the net of it is negative productivity. I don't care if they were the most skilled programmer on the team. Doesn't matter. They could be unproductive or could be making others unproductive and unhappy. They're out. They're out before they burn or push someone else out.

So you may also find that is the reason. If the manager is generally a positive influence on morale or culture, but is perhaps just a little too reckless, they may still have value. Remember that the reckless pressure may even being coming from top down. A lot of people still subscribe to (and misunderstood) the whole "move fast and break things" mantra.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-11 15:19:16+00:00
This is their "bet the farm" moment that Elon took with the Model 3. If this doesn't become a best seller, stick a fork in them. If it does, the sky is the limit and we're very likely going to see half a million sold. There's not much in-between room for Rivian as they have no solar wildcard and their charging network is another also ran.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-02-11 15:19:17+00:00
Dude. A lot of people care about 1 year, especially courts and lawyers.

If we wanted to get actually detailed. We'd probably need to also differentiate between laws that try to protect kids, like if 17 year old boy and 16 year old girl, is different situation than 45 year old man flying them to an island. There should be effort to not victimize young men that are just 1-2 years on other side.

The issue is, why are Republicans rabid about protecting kids until a Republican politician is caught flying them around and crossing state lines. Then people come out of the woodwork with "well actually in ancient times 12 was old enough, indubitably".
by lunias | 2026-02-11 15:19:26+00:00
My friend has the R1S, he likes it a lot, but he's also got a lemon law case open and is hoping that Rivian will have to take the vehicle back. I rode in it and it's nice, but it's way too big for me. The R2 sounds like a step in the right direction, but it still looks too large. I had to shop cars recently and I bought a Golf R. The Golf is "mid-size" to me. I moved across the country in a packed Golf GTI.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-11 15:19:29+00:00
Self-hosting training (or gaming) makes a lot of sense, and once you have the hardware self-hosting inference on it is an easy step.

But if you have to factor in hardware costs self-hosting doesn't seem attractive. All the models I can self-host I can browse on openrouter and instantly get a provider who can get great prices. With most of the cost being in the GPUs themselves it just makes more sense to have others do it with better batching and GPU utilization