MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nearbuy | 2026-03-08 03:54:52+00:00
This tech (detecting pulse from regular video) has been around almost 20 years now, and this doesn't seemed to have happened yet.

You see this type of thing in spy movies, but I'm not sure it's that useful in real life. You're basically taking one piece of data a polygraph uses, but without the most important component (skin conductance). Polygraph accuracy isn't that great to begin with. You can profile and manipulate people more effectively based on their reactions and behaviour, and their pulse will be much harder to interpret.
by NiloCK | 2026-03-08 03:55:21+00:00
This may be the purpose of a prediction market for an outside observer. But the outside observer and the US government (or any org that holds private information) have different purposes - it's an adversarial mechanism.

In particular: the government is free to just publish any insider/true information that it wants the public to know about. If it shared that purpose then the market wouldn't need to exist.
by nemo44x | 2026-03-08 03:55:39+00:00
You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it.

This isn’t comfortable but now is the time to ship fast and hard. To overstep boundaries and be the person getting attention. In a few months everyone will be so you need to do this now.

Just don’t. Don’t limit yourself. Ask for forgiveness.
by stana | 2026-03-08 03:57:10+00:00
I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.
by verdverm | 2026-03-08 03:57:17+00:00
They won't demoralize us. To the contrary, they are motivating us. I'm now mass producing whistles for a local org because of what I saw in Minnesota, among other efforts I'm engaging in.

Could be working to improve society. Instead I have to fight my government.

Turn off biometric based unlocks, get hardware keys. Know your rights.
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2026-03-08 03:57:23+00:00
> how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago

Those were hunted down to extinction for ratings, about the time audience ratings were figured out. Not a reader left behind, so to speak ...

Most really deserved to be taken out and shot, they just demonstrated how lazy and unkempt the writer was. Editing was hell.
by Eisenstein | 2026-03-08 03:58:34+00:00
I don't know about this project, but the technique is sound, with some caveats.

* Can be blocked by many materials

* It is highly directional

* Takes a lot of power

* A lot of people can actually hear it

* 2M isn't really that far when you consider what a modern mic can pick up

* https://github.com/mcore1976/antispy-jammer
by dryark | 2026-03-08 03:58:37+00:00
One important thing the article glosses over: even if you sign your binary with task_for_pid, that does NOT mean you can attach to arbitrary processes on modern macOS, especially on Apple Silicon machines.

There are two separate layers people often confuse:

1) Having the task_for_pid entitlement
2) Being allowed to obtain a task port for a target process

AMFI and the kernel enforce the second one.

Even if your binary has the entitlement, the kernel will still refuse task_for_pid() for many targets (Apple platform binaries, hardened runtime processes, protected tasks, etc). In those cases the call simply fails.

Older blog posts and guides often mention disabling AMFI with a boot argument like:

amfi_get_out_of_my_way=1
(also seen as amfi=0x80)

Historically that worked because AMFI behavior could be weakened via NVRAM boot arguments. The flag effectively disabled entitlement validation and allowed processes to obtain otherwise restricted capabilities. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

That advice is now largely outdated on Apple Silicon.

On modern M-series Macs the boot chain is tied into Secure Boot and the Secure Enclave. The kernel image, boot policy, and security configuration are verified during boot, and the system enforces what boot arguments are allowed to affect security policy.

In practice this means:

• You cannot freely change security-sensitive boot args from a normal system.
• Boot policy is enforced by the secure boot chain.
• Root does not get to override it.

Changing these policies requires booting into Recovery and modifying the machine’s security mode (Reduced Security). Even then, many AMFI protections remain active.

So the old “just set amfi_get_out_of_my_way and reboot” trick that worked on older Intel systems does not translate cleanly to Apple Silicon machines.

As a result, signing a tool with task_for_pid does not magically give you the ability to attach to arbitrary system processes on modern macOS. Without weakening the system’s boot security policy or patching the kernel, AMFI-protected processes remain non-attachable by design.
by wisemang | 2026-03-08 03:59:25+00:00
I’ve noticed the honestly thing for sure.

But I feel like I’ve noticed an uptick in people using the adverb “genuinely” in what I genuinely believe to not be AI generated comments, articles, etc. Maybe it’s just me, I got similar vibes about the word efficacy a few years ago, before the ascent of GenAI (but after the pandemic — again, maybe just me).
by roywiggins | 2026-03-08 03:59:34+00:00
Iran is not welcoming to Western reporters, so Western press aren't pointing their TV cameras out their hotel windows to show the explosions like in 2003. And local press can't report other than in tiny snatches of text as the internet has been turned off in the country for ages, and one imagines operating a satphone in Iran right now would be a risky endeavor.
by doodlebugging | 2026-03-08 03:59:55+00:00
It didn't work for me. Win10Pro, Firefox 146.0, Dell T5400 workstation with LG monitor, no camera or microphone ever installed.

LOL. I'm with users /u/functionmouse and /u/croes. This will be weaponized against the users, possibly by adding it to apps with other, more normally useful technology. There will be no disclosure outside of the one that is buried in dozens of pages of ToS that no one will ever read. That will make it all okay from the app provider's standpoint because ethics can't be allowed to get in the way of all that income.

Maybe I should keep a browser open so it can burn some cycles looking for a camera.

I hate SaaS bullshit apps.
by mancerayder | 2026-03-08 04:00:23+00:00
One recent phenomenon for me was falling in love with Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, which explores very long-term colony ships sent out with thousands of cryogenically sleeping people of various skillsets, and planets seeded with a virus that artificially causes non-human beings to develop a certain kind of intelligence of being able to transmit complex ideas to each other, leading to technological evolution. There's so much depth to this series it's breaktaking.

So when I finished the books and explored his fantasy series (City of Lost Chances?), I had to check three times that I in fact had the same author. It's full of regurgitated fantasy tropes, the writing and characters seem simple, and there's a forced world building with what feels like an infinite and boring back story, with no movement to justify it.

Maybe the author was trying to capitalize on the fantasy popularity? His sci-fi is otherwise genius.
by throwaway894345 | 2026-03-08 04:00:23+00:00
I didn’t have a strong opinion on standard library sizes until I tried Rust, but Rust was not a very pleasant experience because there were not standard packages or even consistent community advice for things as pervasive as error handling or async.

But I understand people have different opinions and that there will never be a standard library that appeases everyone. I don’t think “having a batteries included library” aims to appease everyone either. But mostly I just don’t understand the people who criticize Go for not having enough things in their standard library because Go’s standard library is one of the more useful (which may not be everyone’s ideal).
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-08 04:00:43+00:00
Cathedral or Bazaar on and on. We vary in opinion.

IMO we should be using the best easiest information syndication we have for all, that's as decentralized as we can be. That's why I suggested atproto. I believe the Bazaar approach here would be more interesting, and would avoid pressure points of only specific people having the relationships to pull the oh shit alarm.
Show HN: SafeAgent – exactly-once execution guard for AI agent side effects
by Lions2026 | 2026-03-08 04:00:45+00:00
I built a small Python library called SafeAgent that protects real-world side effects when AI agents retry tool calls.

One issue we ran into while experimenting with agent workflows is that retries can trigger irreversible actions multiple times:

agent calls tool
↓
network timeout
↓
agent retries
↓
side effect happens twice

Examples:

• duplicate payment
• duplicate email
• duplicate ticket
• duplicate trade

Most systems solve this ad-hoc using idempotency keys scattered around different services.

SafeAgent centralizes this into a small execution guard.

The idea is simple:

1. every tool execution gets a request_id
2. SafeAgent records the execution receipt
3. retries return the original receipt instead of running the side effect again

Example:

FIRST CALL
REAL SIDE EFFECT: sending email

SECOND CALL WITH SAME request_id
SafeAgent returns the original execution receipt
(no second side effect)

The project is early but includes examples for:

• OpenAI tool calls
• LangChain style tools
• CrewAI actions

PyPI:
https://pypi.org/project/safeagent-exec-guard/

GitHub:
https://github.com/azender1/SafeAgent

Curious how other people are handling retry safety for agent side effects.
Show HN: Qry – CLI web search that always outputs JSON, with swappable back ends
by justEstif | 2026-03-08 04:01:15+00:00
I wanted web search I could pipe. Every tool I found either had an interactive UI (ddgr, googler), required a single paid API, or returned HTML. I wanted something that composes: pipe to jq, feed to an agent, use in scripts, no friction.

So I built qry. It's a hub binary that routes queries to adapter binaries via stdin/stdout JSON. The hub knows nothing about search engines. Adapters know nothing about routing. You swap adapters in a config file.

Four adapters today, three require no API key:

- DDG Lite scraping
- Brave Search HTML scraping
- Exa AI via the public MCP endpoint
- Brave Search API (requires key)

```
$ qry "numpy latest version"
[{"title":"...","url":"...","snippet":"..."}]
```

Install:

```
mise use -g go:github.com/justestif/qry@latest
mise use -g go:github.com/justestif/qry/adapters/qry-adapter-ddg-scrape@latest
mise reshim
```

The adapter protocol is plain stdin/stdout JSON so adapters can be written in any language. Docs on
building one are in the repo.

https://github.com/justEstif/qry
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-08 04:01:45+00:00
Actually no, he hasn't. Star Trek (back when it was good) worked because the writers were smart enough to trust the viewers to draw their own conclusions. They would set up a dilemma, let the characters give arguments on both sides, and then not openly take a side. Even when you could guess which side the writers were on, it almost never felt like they were lecturing you like a child.

I am perfectly happy for science fiction to offer commentary on social issues. That's one of the strengths of the genre! But to do that, you need to be subtle and lots of modern authors don't even try to be subtle any more. And as a result, their attempts at social commentary are absolutely insufferable to sit through.
by xlbuttplug2 | 2026-03-08 04:02:26+00:00
> they aren't even making 1.5x developers

I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x.

I choose to sit on my hands in my freed up time so upper management does not catch on to and exploit this fact. Eventually they will though via overzealous coworkers.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-08 04:03:44+00:00
This is just a new (and primarily conservative) interpretation of the system (the so-called "unitary executive" theory).

There's a different interpretation where the existing laws constrain the executive, there is no "unitary executive", and the result is a highly constrained presidency. E.g. Biden attempting to use explicit language written by Congress to do something and being told he could not do so by the judiciary (for "reasons").
by minorglitch | 2026-03-08 04:04:13+00:00
My own attempt at this concept. Uses age for encrypting your data and Shamir for the passphrase sharding (optional). Dynamic QR density, configurable through the config. Gzip support before encryption and two encoding modes for the QR codes - binary and base64. Printable javascript recovery kit in two variants - smaller one without camera support and a bigger one with. Multiple templates you can choose from depending on taste and density needs.
by bichiliad | 2026-03-08 04:04:58+00:00
Besides the technical constraints (the zip code can't always tell you the city, etc), the zip code is more of a checksum to make sure the address you typed makes sense. I think you could probably get around the imperfections by making the city / state / zip be things suggested to you, whether in an autocomplete or by making them first in a dropdown. The imperfection of a zip code in encoding a city name doesn't mean that the frustration of filling out addresses isn't a real one!
by jibal | 2026-03-08 04:05:37+00:00
You guessing, based on an overgeneralization of "too heavy" (the context was quite explicitly opening a single file outside the Obsidian vault--nothing about electron), that it isn't what they're looking for provides no value to me (or to anyone else, for that matter). I was simply trying to be helpful; if marktext isn't what they want then they won't use it. The same for the other solutions I posted, such as using pandoc to generate html from markdown.
by zachbee | 2026-03-08 04:05:52+00:00
One thing that people rarely discuss about book publishing is a change to US tax law in the late 70s that meant that publishers couldn't write down the value of unsold inventory, but could write off that inventory by destroying it.

That meant that poorly selling books were destroyed to realize a taxable loss, which killed the ability for books to slowly "pick up steam" over a year or two to eventually generate a profit for the publisher. If you didn't make a profit fast, the backlog got destroyed and the book lost its chance to make money.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-03-08 04:09:10+00:00
> Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money...

Because then you miss opportunities like this in which to market yourself. A kind of hedging your bets in order to get more money and/or stay out of jail if the winds change. (Jail can be expensive.)

Or it could be honest cognitive dissonance.
by hedora | 2026-03-08 04:10:56+00:00
A while back, they started aggressively rate limiting non-logged-in users.

I rarely login, because I don’t want to be a supply chain attack vector, but I guess that’s bad for someone’s promotion metrics.

Anyway, don’t host documentation there, and if you do, put it on one big page. If I read two paragraphs, think, then read the next page and so on, it bans me after about 5 clicks.

Them A/B testing “make it all private” would disappoint me, but not surprise me.
by Lions2026 | 2026-03-08 04:12:25+00:00
A bit more context on why I built this.

While experimenting with LLM agents calling tools, I ran into a reliability problem: retries can easily trigger irreversible actions more than once.

For example:

agent → call tool
network timeout → retry
agent retries tool call
side effect runs twice

That can mean:

duplicate payment

duplicate email

duplicate ticket

duplicate trade

Most systems solve this locally with idempotency keys, but in agent workflows the retries can come from multiple layers (agent loops, orchestration frameworks, API retries, etc.).

SafeAgent is a small execution guard that sits between the agent and the side effect. Every tool call gets a request_id, and SafeAgent records a durable execution receipt. If the same request is replayed, it returns the original receipt instead of executing again.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-08 04:13:14+00:00
The question was about the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Since the battle and the period following it are pretty well documented, there's no need to look for modern examples - we know what happened in England/Britain after William/Guillame won, and the results were absolutely transformative. Your summary of "the main outcome of a war" is completely disconnected from what took place in England after 1066.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-08 04:13:28+00:00
You are perfectly capable of looking at the rate of inflation since the mid 2000s and seeing that it only tells a small portion of the story.

You cannot possibly look at the price of ram now compared to six months ago and be so fixated on including inflation. Obviously inflation occurred and obviously after 20 years it has an impact on price. But we are all on HN and all know what inflation is, so forcing people to drill down on its contribution in order to advance the conversation when it clearly only accounts for a small portion and we all know it’s a factor is absolutely ridiculous. You know this, we know this, and yet here we are still talking about it. I may as well explain what ram is if we want to get this elementary about things.

True or false: ram has become substantially more expensive in the last 6mo in a way that cannot be meaningfully explained by inflation.

There is a very clear, very obvious answer here. Inflation or not.
by keepamovin | 2026-03-08 04:14:29+00:00
The fragmentation and friction! Comparing prices usually requires 10 open browser tabs and a spreadsheet, which is what keeps people locked into their default cloud. I built a tool to solve this called BlueDot (ie, Earth, where all the clouds are)[0]. It’s a TUI that aggregates 58,000+ server configurations across 6 clouds (including Hetzner). It lets you view side-by-side price comparisons and deploy instantly from the terminal. It makes grabbing a cheap Hetzner box just as easy as spinning up something on AWS/GCP.

[0]: https://tui.bluedot.ink
by water_badger | 2026-03-08 04:15:08+00:00
Sorry it is a little buggy sometimes!

You can see the first step of the idea here:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/eec07cc4-e8fa-4350-a496-a...

And the second step here:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5cba1778-8289-4744-a1ad-2...

Just thought it looked cool!
by moregrist | 2026-03-08 04:17:53+00:00
> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
by nine_k | 2026-03-08 04:19:48+00:00
This is true, but in like 95% of cases, the ZIP code determines the state and the city (and the county, when it matters). Pre-populating them would save time to a lot of people.

Those few with the luck to live at zip codes that span cities and cross state borders would still still have to fill these in manually, like the 100% of us currently.

It's a pure improvement with no downsides, except the downside of slightly changing the 100-years-old sequence of address fields. Put the ZIP code first, and your customers are going to be happy with that.
by nirui | 2026-03-08 04:21:45+00:00
A lot of people despite the idea of killing, but as technology advances, and the cost of weapon systems increases, it is less and less likely that these expensive systems will be used to target innocent people, since doing so is likely a waste of resources. On the other hand, usually it is those less-advanced weapons that inflects most mass casualties.

Some country can perform a successful head hunt in the span of an afternoon tea party, while some other country have to level cities for few years and yet still fails to even touch the opposition leader. That's the difference between advanced and less-advanced systems.

If people here loves peace, good. But if we can always reasoning our way out of conflict, then why do we also invented the career of professional police force?

Of course, it is possible that countries advanced too far ahead might bully those less-advanced ones. But then, maybe the less-advanced countries should look inward and reflect on the question why can't they themselves create such advanced weaponries. I don't know, maybe these countries instead of forcing their own people to wear an obeisant smelling face mask, it's time to gave back the power and opportunities so their people can actually grow and gain and eventually contribute.
by wolrah | 2026-03-08 04:22:13+00:00
That might work for the current form of the country-specific time zones officially acknowledged by countries that exist in TLD form, but the tz database contains many more current time zones more importantly piles of historical time zones. Representing just the historical forms of currently recognized time zones in DNS would be a mess, without even getting in to those that are not associated with a country that currently exists and has a TLD.

edit: This is a great video explaining a lot of the reasons why time zones are nowhere close to as straightforward as you may think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
Show HN: RotaGuide Spotlight – Markdown based UI guide system for web apps
by furkankub | 2026-03-08 04:23:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small open-source library called RotaGuide Spotlight.

It helps developers add step-by-step guides to complex web apps by tagging elements and writing the guide in markdown.

You can mark elements like:

guideTarget("save-button")

Then define the guide flow in markdown and trigger it with components like MarkdownGuideButton or MarkdownGuideTrigger.

I’m experimenting with a developer-friendly approach where guides can be versioned as files instead of configured in dashboards.

Would love feedback from frontend developers.
by quuxplusone | 2026-03-08 04:24:11+00:00
Experienced programmers can skip to the conclusion, which (after a brief misstep to say that "accessing memory on the stack is, like any other memory access, O(n), depending on how much memory you access") is basically that the defining characteristic of a systems language is that no built-in operation should take more than O(1).

I mean, sort of. Except that obviously there are operations, like sorting, which necessarily take more than O(1). Suppose we had a language exactly like C except that `sort` was a builtin instead of a library function: would that make it less of a good systems language? Or is there something about spelling the operation "sort" that makes it more acceptable?

Is the ultimate criterion just that everything should have "the right" cost for how it's spelled — or in other words, that operations' costs should be predictable by the systems programmer — or in other words, the language shouldn't behave too weirdly given how it looks — or in other words it should look mostly like C, and the parts that look like C should also behave like C? I think that's a pretty decent criterion, actually.