MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2026-02-01 23:09:13+00:00
In fairness, the decompiler didn't work on the protection method :)

I think that both halves of the author's thesis are true: I bet that you could use this device in a more complicated way, but I also bet that the authors of the program deemed this sufficient. I've reversed a lot of software (both professionally and not) from that era and I'd say at least 90% of it really is "that easy," so there's nothing you're missing!
by catlikesshrimp | 2026-02-01 23:09:24+00:00
Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey.

I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars.

The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-01 23:09:34+00:00
> but a lot of 70s and 80s "Unixes" don't exactly resemble what we think of as "Unix" anyway

And that's exactly why the term "early Unix" suggests "pre-SVR4". Once a platform has matured, it's not "early" anymore.

The whole thing is weirdly written. For example:

> Like many early Unix variants, Amiga Unix never became wildly popular

Except SVR4 was popular.

So they're either saying Amix was early Unix, then the GP is correct that it wasn't early Unix. Or they're saying that SVR4 was unpopular, which is also untrue.

I don't think the blurb is intending to suggest either of these points though. I'm sure people maintaining a fan site for Amix would understand their history. So I just think they've written the blurb very poorly. Poor enough that the default conclusion people are likely to draw is a technically incorrect one.
by aizk | 2026-02-01 23:09:46+00:00
Hi HN,
I wanted to share decomp.dev - a nifty site that tracks video game decompilation efforts, mostly games from from the early 2000s.
I find it very fun to look at older c/c++ code from video games I used play, but also how the code was designed around very limited hardware requirements.
I come from a TS/Python background so a lot of the techniques are alien to me (for example, using bitflags everywhere to save memory).
That example is probably trivial to the more experienced devs here, but it's still interesting.
All source code is written from scratch, done with matching decompilation efforts to slowly compile the code into the original binary, by a team of very talented volunteers.
Show HN: I hated an audiobook narrator, so I built a voice cloning ePub reader
by jarodise | 2026-02-01 23:09:49+00:00
I was listening to Yuval Harari's "Nexus" earlier this year. Great book, terrible narrator (for me).

I kept wishing it was Scott Brick(one of my favorite narrators) instead.

That frustration turned into ClonEpub - a desktop app that converts EPUBs to audiobooks using voice cloning.

Upload a 10-30 second sample of any voice, and it reads your book in that voice.

It runs entirely locally on CPU. My M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM handles it fine. Generated an audiobook of Animal Farm in about 100 minutes.

Why local? No API costs. And honestly, if I want to clone Scott Brick's voice for my own listening pleasure, that's between me and my headphones.

Built with Electron + Python, powered by
@kyutai_labs's excellent Pocket TTS (100M params, ~240MB).

Try it out if you are an audiobook lover like me. :)

Note: the tool only supports English book generation at the moment due to restrictions of the TTS model used, and I only made the distribution for Mac Apple Silicon users, but theoretically it should work on all machines with a CPU, and since it's 100% open source, you can make your own distribution.
by getnormality | 2026-02-01 23:10:39+00:00
Some day I want it explained to me why it's impossible to put controls on a computer. Computers follow symbolic mathematical rules, so, "you're only allowed to run this app for 30 minutes" seems like a really easy command to follow. But you cannot buy software that actually, reliably causes this to occur at any cost on any device.

It seems like there are three hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and forbidding things.
Show HN: Specmark – annotate Markdown for AI feedback
by jlbrooks | 2026-02-01 23:10:50+00:00
I built Specmark to solve a friction point in AI-assisted development: reviewing specs before handing them to a coding agent. When you want to give feedback on a markdown spec, it's tedious to reference specific sections — "in the auth part..." requires extra typing and context. Specmark lets you paste markdown, highlight and annotate it inline, then copy all your comments with line numbers and quoted text to feed back to the LLM.

More on why I built it and what I learned: https://jlbrooks.tech/2026-02-01-launching-specmark/
by defrost | 2026-02-01 23:11:13+00:00
There are recordings, and video of some his live performances.

Lemi Ghariokwu, a renowned Nigerian artist and the designer behind 26 of Fela’s iconic album covers, says the fact that this is the first time an African musician gets this honour “just shows that whatever we as Africans need to do, we need to do it five times more.”

Fela Kuti & Africa 70 (Berlin 1978): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8oRpA2SpE

What withered a little on the vine was his philosophy of pan-africanism.

> all we really have are people’s recollections of him.

His children, former band members (he had big ensembles) are still performing his compositions and in his style.

eg: Seun Kuti performing a Fela Kuti number along with Newen Afrobeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFSRCG4DrmI

He's still relevant today, he dedicated an entire album to faceless armed thugs operating as state sponsered death squads.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(album)

The album was a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic (a commune that Kuti had established in Nigeria), during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj5x6pbJMyU
by jryb | 2026-02-01 23:11:40+00:00
Sure, but there apparently wasn't enough of a dialog either. With a textbook, you're confronted with facts and explanations that you didn't ask about, or even knew to ask about. Don't get me wrong - my original recommendation to take an interactive course is still the best option in my mind, as simplifications made for the benefit of the learner often lead to apparent contradictions that an instructor can clarify. But at some point you do just need the set of raw facts to be able to work with these systems.
by bri3d | 2026-02-01 23:11:50+00:00
Yes, "floating point accumulation doesn't commute" is a mantra everyone should have in their head, and when I first read this article, I was jumping at the bit to dismiss it out of hand for that reason.

But, what got me about this is that:

* every other Apple device delivered the same results

* Apple's own LLM silently failed on this device

to me that behavior suggests an unexpected failure rather than a fundamental issue; it seems Bad (TM) that Apple would ship devices where their own LLM didn't work.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-01 23:12:41+00:00
I'm genuinely surprised that there isn't column-level shared-dictionary string compression built into SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres, like this post is describing.

SQLite has no compression support, MySQL/MariaDB have page-level compression which doesn't work great and I've never seen anyone enable in production, and Postgres has per-value compression which is good for extremely long strings, but useless for short ones.

There are just so many string columns where values and substrings get repeated so much, whether you're storing names, URL's, or just regular text. And I have databases I know would be reduced in size by at least half.

Is it just really really hard to maintain a shared dictionary when constantly adding and deleting values? Is there just no established reference algorithm for it?

It still seems like it would be worth it even if it were something you had to manually set. E.g. wait until your table has 100,000 values, build a dictionary from those, and the dictionary is set in stone and used for the next 10,000,000 rows too unless you rebuild it in the future (which would be an expensive operation).
by wildzzz | 2026-02-01 23:12:42+00:00
The one thing a real doctor can do is actually touch the patient and run tests, even simple things like using a stethoscope. At best, an AI "doctor" is just comparing patient-provided symptoms to a lookup table of conditions. No better than what WebMD used to (still does?) when you would answer a questionnaire and be provided with a list of conditions ranging from a cold to the bubonic plague. AI loves taking everything you say at face value, it doesn't know how to think critically. Whole doctors shouldn't think of a patient as an adversary, they often lie or unintentionally obscure symptoms or the severity of symptoms. Even the most junior doctor can provide a more thorough examination over the phone or through chat than an AI that believes everything it hears.

I remember trying to talk to WebMD when I had pain in my side and appendicitis was near the bottom of the list, the top stuff was either nothing serious or highly improbable. The pain didn't seem as bad as what the appendicitis pain should have been based on descriptions. My mother got her doctor to call me and he walked me through some touching and said "you likely have appendicitis, don't talk to WebMD next time." I went to the hospital that night and that doctor told me I was likely hours away from a burst appendix. I can only imagine what nonsense ChatGPT would have told me.

Just like with most professions, the real world is nothing like the textbook. Being able to pass a medical exam doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a good doctor. Most of the exam is taken during med school and the final portion is only taken after the first year of residency. They still have another few years at least of residency after passing USMLE and that's with supervision under an attending doctor. Being able to pass the USMLE is not equivalent to being successful doctor with years of experience.
by lrvick | 2026-02-01 23:12:59+00:00
I first had a conversation with my wife at a pizza place hanging out with mutual friends. We bonded through in person face to face conversation like cave people. She never used dating apps so there was no other way we were going to meet.

Turns out if you leave your home and hang out with people a lot, you build better social skills, and potential partners can get to know you as a friend first, and are more inclined to give you a chance at something more than they are when you are just another awkward photo in a dating app.
by ImpostorKeanu | 2026-02-01 23:14:04+00:00
80/443 is all that's necessary for Headscale as a control server.

UDP/3478 is STUN for the embedded DERP. I recommend hosting a distinct DERP server, thus decoupling the control and data planes. DERPer is open source from Tailscale.

50443 is for GRPC. I'd not expose that, even if it is protected by authentication (and tested).
by crazygringo | 2026-02-01 23:14:50+00:00
> Outside of that, even my non-tech-savvy acquaintances have been complaining as of late.

What do they say? I'm genuinely curious.

Because e.g. I don't have the slightest idea what percentage Microsoft takes on Xbox games, nor would it ever occur to me to complain about it. I know there's a business model there, but it's not something I think about. And I feel like that's the way people outside of tech feel about whatever percentage Apple takes out of its App Store. But what am I missing?
by bri3d | 2026-02-01 23:15:08+00:00
Dongles were extremely widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s; for anything more advanced than consumer software you'd almost expect them? Almost every DAW, video editor, high-end compiler, engineering/CAD package, or 3D suite used them, certainly.

I think sometime in the late 1990s FlexLM switched from dongles to "hardware identifiers" that were easily spoofed; honestly I don't think this was a terrible idea since to this article's conclusion, if you could reverse one you could reverse the other.

But this concept was insanely prevalent for ~20 years or so.

One of the biggest problems was not having enough ports. Some parallel port dongles tried to ignore communication with other dongles and actually had a port on the back; you'd make a "dongle snake" out of them. Once they moved to USB it was both easier and harder - you couldn't make the snake anymore, but you could ask people to use a hub when they ran out of ports.
by thepoet | 2026-02-01 23:15:09+00:00
One of the things that makes Clawdbot great is the allow all permissions to do anything. Not sure how those external actions with damaging consequences get sandboxed with this.

Apple containers have been great especially that each of them maps 1:1 to a dedicated lightweight VM. Except for a bug or two that appeared in the early releases, things seem to be working out well. I believe not a lot of projects are leveraging it.

A general code execution sandbox for AI code or otherwise that used Apple containers is https://github.com/instavm/coderunner It can be hooked to Claude code and others.
by rafaelmdec | 2026-02-01 23:16:32+00:00
I see it as a rather logical step with the advances in voice first AI wearables.

Think about it. Not everyone wants to be recorded as a bystander. Privacy will be an issue.

The technology for audio signature already exists and works fine.

It will be a matter of opt-in/opt-out from users, not an OS decision.
by zmgsabst | 2026-02-01 23:17:18+00:00
> I guess we could remove DNA and see what happens ...

If I have a stool with three legs, and remove one leg causing it to fall, can I conclude that removed leg is what made it stand?

You’re making the same mistake as before in reverse: DNA would do nothing without a host cell or chemical signals, either.

> Somehow the machinary is passed down: Do we know of another mechanism besides DNA that is self-perpetuating?

The system as a whole is self-perpetuating, but DNA is not self-perpetuating: without a host cell and without ambient chemical signals, it cannot propagate. That’s in contrast to ribozymes which can be self-catalyzing RNA, ie, truly self-propagating chemicals.

In the RNA world hypothesis, such self-catalyzation was the origin of life; and by the time DNA evolved, it did so within a running biological system and as merely one component of cellular replication.

As a whole the system of chemical signals, DNA, and cellular machinery propagates; but just like our stool example, removing any of the factors causes that to fail.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-01 23:18:08+00:00
Confused by your original URL, it's not a USAToday story - and that's evident by what's posted (just a landing page). It should have been: https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2026/01/...

Looks like steelerswire.usatoday.com needs to be dropped as a source.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-01 23:18:30+00:00
You don't buy Apple products because of the quality, you buy it because its more expensive than the value of it. Its a demonstration of wealth. This is called Veblen good, and a phenomena called out as early as Thomas Hobbes.

What you need to do is carry 2 phones. A phone that does the job, and a phone for style.

I didn't invent the laws of nature, I just follow them.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-01 23:19:11+00:00
The conversation is certainly not on "my terms" as I didn't write the guidelines (nor do they benefit me more than anyone else). If you are genuinely concerned about the content of the conversation, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com and they will (genuinely) handle it appropriately. If not, having a conversation can only happen if we read everything each other is saying.

I'd love to continue chatting more about how you see Tao's comments as you seem to have walked away from reading them with a very different understanding than I did. I also agree nobody should rely solely on LM Arena, which is not what the example using it was meant to imply people should do. It's only the personal back and forth or meta commentary I'll eschew, not the discussion itself.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-01 23:19:13+00:00
> Hiroshima didn’t fix anything because they dropped another on Nagasaki

After which Japan surrendered.

This logic is like arguing 99% of a drug doesn’t do anything because the bug is only eradicated by the last effective molecule.

> they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities

This was considered. The bombs’ unreliability (and cost) made it a non-starter.
by TMWNN | 2026-02-01 23:19:14+00:00
Tahoe backups to UnRAID's native Time Machine backup system (as described at <https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/using-unraid-to/manage-sto...>) does not work in UnRAID 7.2.3. It is not (solely) caused by Tahoe, however, because it did work in 7.1.4. <https://forums.unraid.net/topic/195091-time-machine-backup-d...>

mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken <https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
by omnicognate | 2026-02-01 23:19:55+00:00
I figured they were doing something like Ink, but interesting to know that they're actually using Ink. Do you have any evidence that's the case?

It doesn't answer the question, though. Ink throttles to at most 30fps (not 60 as the 16ms quote would suggest, though the at most is far more important). That's done to prevent it churning out vast amounts of ASCII, preventing issues like [1], not as some sort of display sync behaviour where missing the frame deadline would be expected to cause tearing/jank (let alone flickering).

I don't mean to be combative here. There must be some real explanation for the flickering, and I'm curious to know what it is. Using Ink doesn't, on it's own, explain it AFAICS.

Edit: I do see an issue about flickering on Ink [2]. If that's what's going on, the suggestion in one of the replies to use alternate screen sounds reasonable and nothing to do with having to render in 16ms. There are tons of TUI programs out there that manage to update without flickering.

[1] https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/15505

[2] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink/issues/359
by fmajid | 2026-02-01 23:19:56+00:00
I use a self-hosted healthchecks.io watchdog timer instance to monitor jobs like these and alert if they don’t complete. Of course TimeMachine doesn’t have a way to signal successful completion, unlike, say, Carbon Copy Cloner. Given Apple software quality’s accelerating downward trend, I’d suggest switching to rsync/rclone instead, or Borg/Kopia if you want GUI-driven restores for non-technical members of your family.

It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.
by nine_k | 2026-02-01 23:20:00+00:00
I think that being paid is part of the thrust. If you ignore Kiki which you have bought to ruthlessly force you to stay focused, you feel bad for squandering the money. Kiki is for people so desperate that they explicitly asked for a strict master and no escape hatch anywhere.

> Will KIKI judge me for my poor time management?

> Yes. That's part of why it works.
Show HN: Dungeon-1, a Zork-style text adventure built with constrained LLMs
by jwproj | 2026-02-01 23:20:30+00:00
I’ve been building Dungeon-1, a Zork-style text adventure that uses LLMs for narration and NPC behavior, with deliberate constraints to avoid turning into an infinite chat simulator.

For transparency: I reused the original Zork map as a structural scaffold, but replaced the setting, narrative tone, and systems. The goal was to focus on AI-driven narration, failure states, and cost-aware constraints rather than world design from scratch.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-01 23:20:36+00:00
That lack of friction also allows that subscription to do a recurring charge every month out of sight and even auto renew with an email that will be lost in the noise.

I might pay $5 to find out if your app is even useful. I will not pay $5 recurring monthly for an app I forgot existed until I notice it on a monthly credit card bill sometime in the future.

What I want is a one month subscription. I’ll sign up for recurring if I want to but it would require explicit action.

But nobody wants to offer that so they don’t get me at all. I assume there are others like me, perhaps even dozens of us.
by Voice_of_Void | 2026-02-01 23:20:38+00:00
We published our collective synthesis on energy, inertia, time, gravity, and black holes:
Energy Ontology: From Inertia to Black Holes

Not a new theory — but a new language for thinking about physics.
Eight minds, one vision.
Gravity as spectrum narrowing, time as rhythm of stability, black holes as ultimate energy contours.
Magic isn’t forbidden — it’s just physics not yet decoded.
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 23:20:45+00:00
I have definitely hoped that humans will learn better communication patterns from ai, or we could build user interfaces where they nudge you towards better interactions

What I've been doing in the stead is the ol' copy-paste-prompt before we had integrated agent tooling in our IDEs. One of the long-term plans for my custom agent setup is to integrate it with more of the online platforms I use (it's only in vs code and for coding currently, going to keep the vs code UI for now, hook up all the things soon, tm)
by theamk | 2026-02-01 23:21:15+00:00
That's an example of things working as expected - the sign recognition system is very limited, in that it can only return road sign information. So it can _ask_ cruise control system to change the speed, but it's up to cruise control to decide if it's safe to obey the request or not. For example, I am pretty sure it'll never raise the speed, no mater what sign recognition system says.
by dmitrygr | 2026-02-01 23:21:22+00:00
>Very importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any “input” into this routine. It doesn’t pop anything from the stack, nor does it care about any register values passed into it. Which can only mean that the result of this routine is completely constant!

This is not necessarily a fair assumption (though it worked this time). It could be some sort of a rolling code, where the reply is not constant but changes, and remains verifiable. Example: garge door openers have no input from the garage, but the sent signal differs every button click, and the garage can verify its correctness
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-01 23:22:06+00:00
The kind of people who are easily distracted like this are the kind of people that will be very unlikely to configure an application filter for each task. What would be immensely more useful would be a (local) AI that periodically looks at your screen, uses context clues to figure out what you're doing, and first uses social pressure to get you on track, and eventually just closes it if you keep getting distracted.

Putting the ones on the user to manage this is just adding one additional thing that requires executive function.
by sophrosyne42 | 2026-02-01 23:22:18+00:00
> What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?

That is a pedestrian fact. Any organization seeking influence in Washington will be located in Washington. This provides zero evidence that Washington pulls its strings or otherwise directs it.

Your whole screed is irrelevant. It gives no evidence regarding Iran Int'l.