MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theamk | 2026-02-09 17:01:33+00:00
This post would benefit greatly from using common terminology, or with some specific comparison to existing technologies. This article implies Arcan will fix the problems with the existing web, so giving a few examples of problematic Web behavior and how Arcan would fix it would be great. Some cases I'd like to read about:

- User opens a very old website (arcan-site?) which uses very old versions of browser standards. (In regular web, this is handled by browsers painstakingly added compatibility and quirks modes.)

- User opens the very newest website, which uses all the latest website standards, including new video codec, new font and new text rendering effect. (In regular web, this would only happen once most clients update to the very latest version of the browser, and telemetry says enough clients have updated)

If the answer to the question above is "Arcan will use a different external client for each", then how will those clients be managed? Is there going to be a allow-list of video codecs and text renderers hardcoded into the browser? Or any site can specify any requirement, and browser will just go fetch it automatically on first visit? Or will there be a user prompt ("This site uses LALA.Image codec which is not installed. [download and install] [go back]")? Oh, and those codecs/renderers, are they all Lua, or a native code?

- User comes to an artistic website whose author thinks purple on red is a great color schema. In current web, I'd use "reader mode", or a custom UserScript if I plan to go to website often. What happens in Arcan - is this up to the "decode client"? What if the site author chose a "decode client" which has no such functionality?

- User comes to a hostile website, which contains content they want to read, but also 78 tracker scripts which send data to 9000 partners and a cryptominer. In the regular web, this is where adblockers shine - the tracker scripts are external, so they are easily blocked, plus they are "plugins" so they can go and mess with page's code. What happens in Arcan world? Arcan has no dynamic loader, so all those 78 tracker scripts and cryptominer will be bundled into main app during "compile package sign" process, and presumably obfuscated as well. Does Arcan browser has a place for adblock? Where in the layers does it live? If it lives in "decode client", can website author choose the client which has no adblock functionality?
by raphaelmolly8 | 2026-02-09 17:01:47+00:00
The choice of Duktape here is smart — it's one of the few JS engines that can actually run freestanding with minimal libc stubs, since it was designed for embedding in constrained environments. V8 or SpiderMonkey would be a nightmare to get running pre-boot.

What I find most interesting is the UEFI services binding approach. Rather than trying to abstract away the hardware, it exposes the raw EFI protocols (GraphicsOutput, SimpleFileSystem, etc.) directly to JS. That's a much more pragmatic design than trying to build a full HAL — you get to prototype UEFI applications rapidly while keeping the escape hatch to C for anything performance-critical.

Would love to see if anyone tries hooking this into UEFI's built-in network stack for PXE boot scripting. That could actually be useful beyond the novelty factor.
by imiric | 2026-02-09 17:01:48+00:00
They're out there. I've noticed a surge of Show HNs right here. A lot of it is vibe coded.

I would like to see GitHub's project creation and activity charts from today compared to 5 years ago. Similar trends must be happening behind closed doors as well. Techy managers are happy to be building again. Fresh grads are excited about how productive they can be. Scammers are deploying in record time. Business is boomin'.

It's likely that all this code will do more harm than good to the rest of us, but it's definitely out there.
by gowld | 2026-02-09 17:01:51+00:00
Quanta-to-English translation:

The work concerns elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), which describe systems that vary in space but are in equilibrium over time (e.g., stress distribution on a bridge, temperature in a static lava flow).

Mathematicians seek to prove that solutions to these equations are "regular."

Regularity means the solution is well-behaved, smooth, and lacks sudden, physically impossible jumps or singularities.

Establishing regularity is essential because it allows researchers to use approximation methods to solve complex equations that cannot be calculated directly.

The Standard Theory (Schauder Theory): In the 1930s, Juliusz Schauder proved that for uniformly elliptic PDEs (modeling "nice," homogeneous materials where properties like conductivity stay within fixed limits), regularity is guaranteed if the equation's coefficients change gradually.

This theory failed for nonuniformly elliptic PDEs.

These equations model heterogeneous materials (e.g., a mix of rock and gas) where physical properties can vary drastically and are unbounded.

For decades, mathematicians could not determine the conditions required to guarantee regular solutions for these messier equations.

Initial Discovery (2000): Giuseppe Mingione and colleagues discovered that Schauder’s condition (gradual change) was insufficient for nonuniform cases; equations satisfying Schauder's rules could still yield irregular solutions.

They proposed that regularity in nonuniform systems depends on a specific inequality.

This inequality acts as a precise threshold: it dictates that the more nonuniform the material is, the more tightly controlled the changes in the equation's coefficients must be.

Mathematicians Cristiana De Filippis and Giuseppe Mingione provided the proof using the following techniques:

The "Ghost Equation": Because the gradient (the function describing how fast the solution changes) of the original PDE could not be calculated directly, they derived a "ghost equation"—an approximation or "shadow" of the original PDE.

Gradient Recovery: They developed a multistep procedure to extract information from this ghost equation to recover the gradient of the actual solution.

Bounding the Gradient: To prove regularity, they had to show the gradient does not become infinitely large. They achieved this by splitting the gradient into smaller pieces and proving that each piece remains within a specific size limit.

The Result: De Filippis and Mingione proved that the inequality proposed 20 years prior is the exact, sharp boundary for regularity.

If a nonuniformly elliptic PDE satisfies this inequality, its solutions are guaranteed to be regular.

If it does not, regularity cannot be guaranteed.

This extends Schauder’s century-old theory to nonuniformly elliptic equations, allowing for the rigorous mathematical analysis of complex, real-world physical systems with extreme variations.
by gxonatano | 2026-02-09 17:02:07+00:00
It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-09 17:02:44+00:00
People commonly continue to wear their AirPods in the changing rooms, because why not? Keep the tunes/podcast/etc going while you get ready/even shower.

If they add cameras to them, regardless of the implementation, I'm pretty sure that not only is against every gym-policy, but may be an actual criminal offense in certain states.

So I guess what I am saying is: This could be an anti-feature for certain people, or get people into trouble who continue to do a preexisting habit.
by observationist | 2026-02-09 17:02:52+00:00
It's not even a strongly worded letter, lol. Senators and congress people should have to wear shock collars, and on majority polling get hourly "feedback" from their constituency, and for senators, weekly national feedback.

The convention of states project seems like it might be the only way out - there's a shot at implementing term limits, clearing up some of the money in politics issues, no risk of a runaway convention, etc, and we can bypass the people deliberately fouling up the system.
by morsecodist | 2026-02-09 17:03:21+00:00
> HK always was bound to become a part of China

Why so? Do you think Monaco should be part of France? Do you think Singapore should be part of Malaysia? A lot of big countries respect the sovereignty of neighboring smaller countries, although that is unfortunately becoming less true now.

It isn't about colonialism. I have never seen anyone seriously argue it should go back to the British. It is about a framework to ensure they maintain their rights. It would be great if that looked like expanded rights for all of China but it can also look like some degree of sovereignty, which was in place for quite some time.
by diogenes_atx | 2026-02-09 17:03:29+00:00
To add context to the discussion, it is important to recall that Discord was reported to have recently filed paperwork with the SEC for an IPO [1]. Thus it seems likely that the real reason for the age verification (i.e., user identification) policy is to boost its perceived earnings potential among Wall Street investors. According to this theory, Discord is the new Facebook.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...
by pkulak | 2026-02-09 17:03:35+00:00
Fluffy Chat is great on iOS. My mom uses it; it respects system fonts very nicely.

I get the frustration with encryption though. I wish there was a way to mark a homeserver as default _NOT_ encrypted. My homeserver is in my closet. Given the choice, I'd rather take the extremely tiny opsec hit for all the simplicity and usability benefits of unencrypted rooms.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-09 17:03:48+00:00
> all users globally will be required to submit age verification via a face scan or submitted ID, or be given teen-level access restrictions.

Who seriously thinks a face scan can distinguish a 19-yr-old from a 20-yr old.

Or a 12-yr-old from a 13-yr-old.

Hang on. Does Discord know what a teen is?

Discord is announcing enhanced teen safety features rolling out globally that reinforce its long-standing commitment to creating a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13.
by koreth1 | 2026-02-09 17:04:04+00:00
The biggest thing tying my team to GitHub right now is that we use Graphite to manage stacked diffs, and as far as I can tell, Graphite doesn't support anything but GitHub. What other tools are people using for stacked-diff workflows (especially code review)?

Gerrit is the other option I'm aware of but it seems like it might require significant work to administer.
by MobiusHorizons | 2026-02-09 17:04:13+00:00
There will always be many gaps in peoples knowledge. You start with what you need to understand, and typically dive deeper only when it is necessary. Where it starts to be a problem in my mind is when people have no curiosity about what’s going on underneath, or even worse, start to get superstitious about avoiding holes in the abstraction without the willingness to dig a little and find out why.
Show HN: Airut – Sandboxed Claude Code sessions over email
by hardsnow | 2026-02-09 17:04:14+00:00
I built Airut to solve the friction I hit while switching to an agent-first workflow.

With the latest models and a solid CLAUDE.md, I could reliably go from prompt to PR using Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions. But that left me with two problems:

1. Safety: Running permissive mode on my host machine felt reckless. I needed real sandboxing — not just a container, but network isolation too.

2. Session management: I needed a way to run multiple long-running Claude Code sessions without juggling terminals.

I realized the ideal interaction model matches email: asynchronous, threaded, long-form. So I built a service that runs headless Claude Code inside rootless Podman containers, mapping email threads to agent sessions.

The security model goes beyond container isolation. All network traffic routes through an mitmproxy instance that enforces a per-repo allowlist — the agent can only reach pre-approved hosts. Credentials use a masked secrets system where containers get surrogate tokens; real values are swapped in by the proxy only for scoped hosts. Even if the agent is compromised via prompt injection, exfiltration paths are significantly constrained.

Today I develop two large projects (plus Airut itself) almost exclusively over email. I send a task, the agent works in its sandbox, and I get a PR to review. And I often do this from my phone while on the go.

Compared to OpenClaw, Airut is more opinionated — email-only, Claude-only, git-native — with a deeper sandbox (network allowlist, masked secrets, DNS exfiltration protection). Compared to enterprise agents, there's no issue tracker or web UI to fight with.

It's open source (MIT) and self-hosted. I'd love feedback on the security model and whether this async email workflow resonates.
by teraflop | 2026-02-09 17:04:36+00:00
Cool project!

The most interesting part, IMO, is the "SRAM with EEPROM backup" chip. It allows you to persistently save the clock hands' positions every time they're moved, without burning through the limited write endurance of a plain old EEPROM. And it costs less than $1 in single quantities. That's a useful product to know about.
by palmotea | 2026-02-09 17:04:59+00:00
> In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.

Or, to put it another way: they're anti-Americans.

It's interesting to see the exaggerated responses to Trump. Objectively, he's less authoritarian than say the PRC, but he's unlocked a lot of probably pre-existing resentment in US allies (probably derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...), and gotten a much stronger and more vicious response.

I mean, if you're mad about what happened to that 5 year old immigrant with the hat in Minneapolis, what you you think about what's happening to kids in Xinjiang and Tibet (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/world/asia/ti...)?

> Gyal Lo, a Tibetan education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016, when he saw that his two preschool-aged grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin, not Tibetan.

> When the grandnieces, then ages 4 and 5, went home on the weekend, he said in an interview, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan with their parents, much changed from when he saw them in the previous year. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home,” he said.

> “I said to my brother, ‘What if you don’t send them to the boarding school?’” Gyal Lo said. “He said he had no choice.”

> Gyal Lo set out to investigate the changes that families were going through as the schools expanded across Tibetan regions in China. Over the next three years he visited dozens of such schools, and saw that many Tibetan students spoke little of their mother tongue and were sometimes only able to see their parents once every several weeks or even months.

It's much worse and more systematic.
by gengstrand | 2026-02-09 17:05:24+00:00
I am working on an app that uses old-school predictive AI (i.e. pytorch and scikit-learn) to predict professional sports outcomes in a way that is useful for DFS fans. Here is the landing page.

https://www.higherscoresdfs.com/dfs/spa/welcome/

Here is the pitch.

We seek to empower DFS fans through education about predicting professional sports athlete outcomes. We do that through strategy advice, hot player tips, optimized lineups, and pick’em style game-friendly player props. We're not trying to take away your control or do your thinking for you. We are just here to support you in making better decisions. Let the app do the number crunching so you can get back to competitive play that gets results and is also fun.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-09 17:05:33+00:00
you are both confusing two issues.

Yes there is a lawful intercept system that operates inside telecoms networks, that is an issue.

The other issue is that there is no real security inside said telecoms networks. (side note, there is still fucking SS7 floating about)

Salt typhoon is not "just hijacking lawful intercept" its ability to fuck with the network in a way that is largely undetected. Sure the intercept stuff might help, but they don't actually need that. In the same way we learnt about state actors taking complete control of middle east telecoms systems, we can be fairly sure that other state actors have taken control of USA telecoms systems

Both the Executive and congress have done shit all about it, and will continue to ignore it until something happens
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-09 17:06:13+00:00
> For example, if a user watches a video using Apple Vision Pro and the new AirPods, and turns their head to look in a specific direction, the sound source in that direction can be "emphasized to enhance the spatial audio/computing experience.

Geez, if only the Apple Vision had some kind of gyroscope and accelerometer so it could detect head motion without relying on external hardware...
by Fabricio20 | 2026-02-09 17:07:01+00:00
Personally what drove me away was all the thousands of little annoying things that you just dont have to deal with on other apps like Telegram or Discord or Slack. The final straw for me was the 2nd time losing all chat history because I got logged out on my browser and when logging back in and providing the super secure authentication key and resynchronizing, messages older than 7 days still didn't decrypt on all chats so I just lost all of that. Plus Element client being mega laggy and stuff (though I had a smoother experience with the third party Cinny client).
by sowbug | 2026-02-09 17:07:14+00:00
If you like this but don't want to get your hands as dirty, have a look at the Crazy Clock: https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/crazy-clock/

I got one for my daughter. The erratic ticking eventually became a distraction when she was studying, so we have retired it for now. But we got a lot of amusement out of it.
by ifwinterco | 2026-02-09 17:07:22+00:00
I think Singapore's immigration policy is still interesting and relevant to western countries, but it's true it's also kind of similar to the UAE.

Essentially it's (relatively) easy to get work visas for areas where there's a genuine shortage but difficult to get permanent residency and almost impossible to get citizenship.

That's still a very different policy to what most western countries have right now.

The UAE has the most extreme version of this so the milder Singaporean version is less interesting as an example.
by exodys | 2026-02-09 17:07:23+00:00
This is the most milquetoast take I have ever seen.

From what I read of the article, a 'Bad Person' is just someone you have bad vibes with. Quote:

> They tend to be charming, capable, but since the beginning your intuition tells you that something’s not right.

So if someone tells you, "No, that is physically not possible, you will lose money, here is my evidence" and you just have some bad vibe about them, ignore them! They're just a bad person. In fact, remove them!

What a joke. The idiom "If you lie down with dogs you get fleas" comes to mind. Usually this rhetoric comes from people who have been on their high horse for too long, and call many other kettles black.
by luckypipewrench | 2026-02-09 17:07:29+00:00
This is cool for testing the model side, but the real scary part is what happens after the injection succeeds. Even if your agent fails 3 out of 10 tests, that's a 30% chance it exfiltrates whatever secrets are in its environment. The defense can't just be "hope the model catches it." You need architectural controls on the egress side too.
by itsmorgantime | 2026-02-09 17:07:31+00:00
I really wonder if when this is fully implemented if they will have any safe guards against selling "adult verified" accounts. With AI being a possible work around for those who don't want to share an ID, selling accounts would be another big issue unless they check for IP addresses and block based on locations and logins. EDIT: I see in another comment that its against TOS to sell accounts, I doubt that has stopped anyone before though.
by paulddraper | 2026-02-09 17:07:42+00:00
A few reasons:

1. Stateful systems (databases, message brokers) are hard to switch back-and-forth; you often want to migrate each one as few times as possible.

2. If something goes sideways -- especially performance-wise -- it can be hard to tell the reason if everything changed.

3. It takes a long time (months/years) to complete the migration. By doing it incrementally, you can reap the advantages of the new infra, and avoid maintaining two things.

---

All that said, GitHub is doing something wrong.
by heyitssim | 2026-02-09 17:08:03+00:00
As a web dev you're in a better spot than you think — state management, event handling, render loops... you already have the mental models.

Claude Code can genuinely help you with:
- Scaffolding a game project (Phaser.js is great for web devs getting into 2D)
- Writing boilerplate: input handling, collision detection, basic physics
- Debugging weird edge cases in game logic
- Generating utility code like sprite sheet parsers, tilemap loaders, etc.

What it can't do (and where most beginners hit a wall):
- Game design. Knowing what makes a game actually fun is a skill Claude can't shortcut. You need to playtest, iterate, and develop taste.
- Art and assets. This is the #1 blocker for most solo devs. Claude can't draw your sprites or design your tilesets.
- Feel and polish. Tweaking jump curves, screen shake timing, hit feedback — that's all manual iteration. AI will give you "technically correct" values that feel lifeless.
- Architecture decisions. Claude will happily generate an ECS system or a scene manager, but it doesn't know your game's actual needs. Bad architecture early on will cost you weeks later.

Start with a tiny scope (like a single-screen platformer), use Claude Code to move fast on the code side, but spend most of your energy on the parts AI can't help with — design and feel.

Also, shameless plug, if you want to skip the code entirely and just focus on making the game, that's what CraftMyGame is for. Everything is visual, no coding needed. Might be a good way to prototype ideas fast before deciding if you want to go deeper on the code side ;)
by chickenpotpie | 2026-02-09 17:08:07+00:00
Because it's significantly harder to isolate problems and you'll end up in this loop

* Deploy everything
* It explodes
* Rollback everything
* Spend two weeks finding problem in one system and then fix it
* Deploy everything
* It explodes
* Rollback everything
* Spend two weeks finding a new problem that was created while you were fixing the last problem
* Repeat ad nauseum

Migrating iteratively gives you a foundation to build upon with each component
by steveruizok | 2026-02-09 17:08:21+00:00
Hey, OP here. Shitty issue command is fine in a world where I have time to review it and expand it, just like I would have before; except now, there's a 80% chance that actually the AI got it right and I have a well-researched issue that can be immediately worked on. The only problem is if someone without any content comes by and feeds it into cursor to make a PR.

Maybe it would have been better to keep the original no-body "fix truncate in sidebar text" style issues, though I quite like my little /issue command. I'm sure I'll have something else in a month.