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Showing posts from November, 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras

Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras 440 by nullpxl | 161 comments on Hacker News. Hi! Recently smart-glasses with cameras like the Meta Ray-bans seem to be getting more popular. As does some people's desire to remove/cover up the recording indicator LED. I wanted to see if there's a way to detect when people are recording with these types of glasses, so a little bit ago I started working this project. I've hit a little bit of a wall though so I'm very much open to ideas! I've written a bunch more on the link (+photos are there), but essentially this uses 2 fingerprinting approaches: - retro-reflectivity of the camera sensor by looking at IR reflections. mixed results here. - wireless traffic (primarily BLE, also looking into BTC and wifi) For the latter, I'm currently just using an ESP32, and I can consistently detect when the Meta Raybans are 1) pairing, 2) first powered on, 3) (less consistently) when they're taken out of the char...
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving

Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving 433 by prodigycorp | 94 comments on Hacker News. I’ve been a part of this community for fifteen years. Despite the yearly bemoaning of HN’s quality compared to its mythical past, I’ve found that it’s the one community that has remained steadfast as a source of knowledge, cattiness, and good discussion. Thank you @dang and @tomhow. Here's to another year.
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New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator

Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator 452 by johnsillings | 201 comments on Hacker News. Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit . You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel real, and I think the project mostly delivers on that. When I was developing it, I kept getting confused between which tab was the "real" HN and which was the simulator, and accidentally submitted some junk to HN. (Sorry dang and team – I did clean up after myself). The app itself is built with Node + Expr...
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New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay

Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay 353 by foxbarrington | 138 comments on Hacker News. This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone. I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety. My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end. 40 years creates a mirror between the Reagan Era and today. The parallels include celebrity populism, Cold War tensions (Soviets vs. Russia), and inflation economics. The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition: OCR & Ingestion: Conve...
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New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable

Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable 298 by searchepstein | 52 comments on Hacker News. Hey all, Throwaway in case this is assumed to be politcally motivated. I spent some time organizing the Eptstein files to make transparency a little clearer. I need to tighten the data for organizations and people a bit more, but hopeful this is helpful in research in the interim.
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not 405 by stillatit | 364 comments on Hacker News. Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0]. Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and displays when you press the link. I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation. Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or R...
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