MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-10 15:46:17+00:00
You bring up an interesting point.

How is it we have come to a place in society where we second-guess everything we type? But perhaps also where we go (with our "tracking devices" in our pockets…).

I mean, obviously the internet is what changed everything. But it is like you have a megaphone strapped to your face whenever you connect to a site and make a comment.

Maybe this is not a good thing.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-01-10 15:46:44+00:00
Did you edit your comment? I was about to begin by saying I could not see how you escaped that, but now I see the backslashes.

Looks like even the documentation for org-mode recommends using zero-width spaces:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html

I think org-mode was never primarily about its rendered output. Most users probably, like me, spend a lot of time (hours every day) in various org-mode documents, staring at what is essentially the raw mark-up. Org-mode in Emacs makes only a few minor changes to how the text is displayed, like hiding link targets, so you rarely look at the output. I export less than 1% of my org documents, so usually I don't care at all about what formatting renders like, as long as I get the mark-up correct enough that org-mode itself is functional (links can be followed, sections collapsed etc). The few documents I do want to export I can imagine using workarounds like the zero-width spaces, but it is not like there is often a need to have things looking like org-mode mark-up in the output.

For me at least, worrying about escaping mark-up would be too distracting and just add noise, as the raw mark-up is what I will read anyway. But I think some good way to escape things would not be a bad thing to have.

BTW there are verbatim blocks that can be used when you have entire lines of non-org content. And of course src-blocks. But that obviously does not handle every case escapes could be useful.
Ask HN: What frustrates you most about personal finance apps?
by FrankHobson | 2026-01-10 15:46:59+00:00
I’ve tried most popular personal finance apps over the last few years, and I always end up quitting.

For me, the main reasons are:

- Core functionality hidden behind paywalls

- UX that feels bloated or optimized for upsells

- $100+/year pricing for some

- Needing multiple separate tools (budgeting, tracking, investments) with manual syncing and often no decent mobile app

I’m starting an open personal finance tool as a side project because I want something I’d actually stick with long-term.

Before locking myself into the wrong design, I’d love to hear from others:

- Why did you stop using finance apps (if you used any)?

- What features are must-haves vs. nice-to-haves?

- What made a tool “click” for you — or never click at all?

Happy to hear if this feels redundant or already solved better elsewhere.
by ipaddr | 2026-01-10 15:47:15+00:00
Do you double check every fact or are you relying on yourself being an expert on the topics you ask an llm? If you are an expert on a topic you probably aren't asking ab llm anyhow.

It reminds me of someone who reads a newspaper article about a topic they know and say its most incorrect but then reading the rest of the paper and accepting those articles as fact.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-10 15:47:27+00:00
Even if you are playing tic-tac-toe at a chess tournament, you still have to think a move ahead. Saying "Very naive to think that the Russian and Chinese governments didn't get a full copy" makes your initial point moot. If the adversaries you are supposedly worried about already have everything, what's the point of keeping it from the American people?
by sowbug | 2026-01-10 15:47:44+00:00
I don't order delivery food, but I recently learned my Amazon Prime membership includes GrubHub Premium membership, and fees were waived, so I said why not give it a try.

The no-fee price for the order was $70. Going directly to the restaurant website would have been $38. Item prices were higher, there was a non-fee driver fee, and there was a non-fee order fee. I shudder to think how many more fees there would have been if I were a non-non-fee member.

The only advantage I can see from DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates et al. is that they provide a directory of places willing to deliver to me. For that, every restaurant suffers from 80% higher delivery prices, or faces the challenge of advertising itself against all the delivery platform giants. I fail to see how anyone but the platforms have benefited from this new normal.

There has to be another name for this than mere rent-seeking or scalping. Extortion?
by dizhn | 2026-01-10 15:48:06+00:00
I tries oh my zsh whil switching to it from fish ("the we don't believe in configuration" shell). I thought it would be great with all the popularity it has but 90 percent of the plug-ins are alias definitions which I certainly won't memorize somebody else's. Just found a few plugins I like for the fish functionality I liked. Spent some time configuring it asking for help on the irc channel for zsh when needed. Great people. Zsh is awesome. No plugin manager for me though. Thanks.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-10 15:48:11+00:00
> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).

Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.

The stripped down base models don't sell well.

Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.

The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.

There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.

It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
by dahart | 2026-01-10 15:48:44+00:00
Yes, you’re right, good point. Maybe there is no one good term for this case (but given the ocean of terminology, I’d be slightly surprised). ‘Not a function’ also isn’t the right term here because functions of x that returns a constant are okay - they just don’t depend on x. Hashed random functions are true functions but are designed to be non-invertible, so maybe non-invertible (or irreversible) is a decent single term for what @vunderba meant. Other terms that broach it might be ‘non-injective’ and ‘entropy-reducing transform’. I suspect those aren’t technically strong enough for the kind of information loss we need in this context.
by Sevii | 2026-01-10 15:49:02+00:00
Small models are getting good but I don't think they are quite there yet for this use case. For ok results we are looking at 12-14GB of vram committed to models to make this happen. My MacBook with 24GB of total ram runs fine with a 14B model running but I don't think most people have quite enough ram yet. Still I think it's something we are going to need.

We are also going to want the opposite. A way for an LLM to request tool calls so that it can drive an arbitrary application. MCP exists, but it expects you to preregister all your MCP servers. I am not sure how well preregistering would work at the scale of every application on your PC.
by jph | 2026-01-10 15:49:22+00:00
UK government has a opportunity to improve cyber security in a pragmatic way: phase in coordinated vulnerability disclosure.

This is a real world practical way to help security professionals and technology workers to report cyber risks in ways that are safer, sooner, and with better collaboration.

When I read about cyber security bills, I believe it's very helpful to phase in specific improvements that can help the UK make progress. For me this is professional because my work involves UK software engineering for medical information.

My notes on coordinated vulnerability disclosure:
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/coordinated-vulnerabi...
by cmxch | 2026-01-10 15:50:06+00:00
https://x.com/AlphaNews/status/2009679932289626385?s=20

She accelerated against the officer, hit them, he defended himself, which stands counter to the bloodlust directed towards ICE. If anything, it indicts Gruber for wanting to bandwagon and not be aware that when you are hit by a deadly weapon such as the decedent’s Missouri Honda, it doesn’t matter how many times.

—
Order of events based on video analysis:

- The agent approaches the vehicle, which is stopped or slow-moving.

- The woman speaks through the window (partial audio/transcript includes phrases like "Big boy, show your face," "I'm not mad at you," and references to not changing plates or being a U.S. citizen—tone appears defiant or sarcastic).

- The agent positions himself near or in front of the vehicle.

- The SUV then accelerates forward, with the hood/grille filling the camera view (suggesting very close proximity, potentially a bump or near-miss).

- The camera shakes/tumbles, ending with views of the street and the vehicle driving away.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-10 15:51:34+00:00
> Meanwhile, the cars sold in my market are all egregiously enormous, have giant screens inside, etc.

I really don't understand these comments.

You can go shop for a number of cars in the $20-25K range or even slightly less depending on incentives which are compact, don't have many features, and use basic engines that have been refined to be reliable (to keep warranty claims down, necessary for keeping price down).
by 1313ed01 | 2026-01-10 15:52:09+00:00
I thought I was the only one. It is great for just having some text with headers and links, without any distractions.

Only complaint is that it handles line-breaks the way some Markdown variants do, with each line being one paragraph of text. I much prefer line-breaks to be just treated as whitespace and using double breaks to end paragraphs, like e.g. Pandoc's Markdown format (one reason I always use that when I render Markdown).
by skeledrew | 2026-01-10 15:52:23+00:00
Markdown can be trivially embedded in org-mode, so no need to even miss out on that which "won sufficient share":
* Org with md block
#+begin_src markdown
.....
#+end_src

Markdown may be a winner, but preferring it when org-mode exists is like tying both arms behind my back and trying to do serious things with my feet.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-10 15:52:28+00:00
> that says all software written by LLM’s will just work.

Well, certainly not all software. But a static, no deps, no external loading, no db, no dynamic anything binary, written in rust and running on a hardened pod? Yeah, that'll likely "just work".

Note the many good choices made by the person who implemented this. They're not vibe coding stuff straight to prod. They had a hunch it could be done, and tried it out. When it seemed to work, they took the time and effort to think about deployment, make more good choices and so on.

> Was there no open source ip geolocation they could self host before?

Probably, yeah. Would running those have taken less time to audit? I don't think so. Plus they'd probably come with 25 other features that OP didn't need/want. And someone would have still have to spend time integrating it. What's the point then, for such a limited scope app?
by awesan | 2026-01-10 15:52:56+00:00
I understand the goal of the spec. In my experience once some spec document gets adapted widely enough, there's a strong incentive to add new features to it, which renderers would then be compelled to implement. Before you know it, MD is a complicated spec that doesn't serve its original purpose.

In this case a few minor edge cases is really not a big deal compared to that (in my opinion).
by MattiaHall | 2026-01-10 15:53:05+00:00
I’ve tried Mint, YNAB, and a couple of smaller apps. I usually quit after a few months because keeping everything categorized and up to date feels like work, not help. Auto-sync breaks, rules need constant tweaking, and once you fall behind it’s hard to catch up. The only features that really mattered long-term were reliable transaction import, simple rules, and a clean mobile UI. Most apps try to do too much instead of making the basics effortless.
by sph | 2026-01-10 15:53:51+00:00
Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.

The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.

I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
by soared | 2026-01-10 15:54:29+00:00
Agreed - check out for example a Toyota rav4 le. This is the base model with effectively zero modern “subscription-esque” fancy features. It’s got a touchscreen and power windows, but otherwise it’s all the reliability/etc of Toyota and that’s it. About half the price of what most rav4s are listed at and $20k+ cheaper than a 4Runner.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-10 15:54:40+00:00
> I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image.
> It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.

It's not particularly difficult -- see Graphene and Lineage. The main issue is that there are few phones on which to run these custom builds. Ironically, Google Pixels allow to run other operating systems than the one they come with (the bootloader can be unlocked). Other than the Pixel and a couple of Chinese models, you are looking at low-end or ancient hardware. You can't just build a phone without OS and install Linux/Android like you would on a PC.
by Redster | 2026-01-10 15:54:54+00:00
I wanted a stack where .md posts would look good by default, but I could make custom pages with javascript-based demos and interactivity trivially. I'm experimenting with and like the Astro ecosystem so far. So far the defaults seem intelligent and I couldn't believe how fast setting up pagefind was and how much better the results were than the other static site search engines I had tried.

(I'm coming from the Svelte and Sveltekit ecosystem, which I also like.)
by 1313ed01 | 2026-01-10 15:55:13+00:00
I have used Emacs on mobile for years. Works great in Termux on Android for instance. I use it daily and with the same .emacs.d (synced using git) as I use on computers, with just a few conditionals in init.el to not load too many bloated dependencies for things I am unlikely to use on my phone anyway.
by perihelions | 2026-01-10 15:56:14+00:00
This describes NASA's pre-flight quarantines since Apollo 14, and makes (very brief) references to in-flight diseases (and apparent transmission) prior to Apollo 14 ("upper respiratory infection"; "viral gastroenteritis"),

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ochmo-tb-006... ("Health Stabilization Program (HSP)")
by jfengel | 2026-01-10 15:56:18+00:00
I wonder how much of that is due to dealers, who want to upsell. Do they even keep the base model in stock, or does it have to be special ordered (or today, we can give you a "discount" on the fancy model that still has a higher profit margin for us).

I'm just speculating; the same reasoning wouldn't apply to the iPhone mini. But car dealers have a lot of incentive to skew the results. It takes a fair bit of willpower to say "I am buying this specific car I want and will go elsewhere if I can't have it."
by Defletter | 2026-01-10 15:56:24+00:00
This kind of stuff is fascinating because it's the state interacting with itself. The Queen was powerless to reject his request, he being the leader of the government who governed in her name, whose prorogation was overturned by judges she appointed. She ultimately did not need to act because she had an army of people who acted on her behalf. This is not to say that every misuse of power is always caught, but rather that the Monarch gets to maintain a facade of impartiality because all the partiality is being done by their institutions instead.
by maqp | 2026-01-10 15:56:53+00:00
>Very naive to think that the Russian and Chinese governments didn't get a full copy of the documents Snowden stole and absconded with.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

>Snowden is some sort of hero?

He left his cozy upper middle-class life, partner, and put his life on the line to expose illegal mass surveillance. That's gazillion times more risk and sacrifice to do the right thing, than you ever accomplish.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-10 15:57:12+00:00
As much as I ideologically hate the loss of these institutions and fantasize about going back to a time when it felt like these things worked.

I don’t know that it ever worked and maybe there’s a hump we can get over when individuals really can create their own media. It feels like we’re getting there with journalism, through real investigative or international journalism may always be prohibitively expensive (sharing an opinion or researching public data is easy. Else not so much)

But I’ve never really enjoyed the news. The news has never been what the newsroom said it was, at least not in my lifetime. It was always pretty shallow.

Hollywood is similar, it was certainly better?, but will we get to the point that a movie line rounders could be self-financed?
by pgalvin | 2026-01-10 15:57:17+00:00
The front page of the BBC right now, at the very top, is a large photo of protestors in Iran. The headline reports that hospitals are overwhelmed by the regime cracking down on protestors.

The article focuses on first-hand accounts from medics inside Iran, describing the crackdown and casualties. It also contains statements from the Iranian opposition, the UN, US and French presidents and British PM, all critical of Khamenei, with just two mentions of the regime’s official statements.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9rengvnp9o
by odyssey7 | 2026-01-10 15:57:32+00:00
There is a spectrum of importance when you consider medical interventions. Expert opinions are pluralistic, not a monolith, so there’s a judgement call when a policy is written.

Policymakers could prioritize more or fewer vaccines, and the reasons to prioritize any particular vaccine would be expected to change over the decades.

Why the CDC isn’t prioritizing more vaccines might be seen as reckless to some. I think it’s a huge mistake that there isn’t a strep vaccine and a universal mandate for that, but it’s clearly not been historically prioritized.

On the other hand, some infections might be better handled by vaccinating around where cases show up, a capability that is possible only now that we have electronic medical records, better tests, the information era, etc. Just-in-time logistics is a huge success story of the modern world.

Opinions of experts are important: expertise requires that opinions should change as the realities do.

An expertise that’s required of a policymaker is to maintain the effectiveness of their institutions by translating expertise into policies that are actually listened to. We have serious warning signs that public trust in healthcare is disintegrating, and that the vaccination campaigns are failing. Policies that are more focused could play out better.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-10 15:57:48+00:00
You're right. But I say "it's fine" when I take into account the odds of this happening to anyone at random.

I mean even before this administration, there were serial killers (well, probably still are) but I wouldn't tell someone to stay away from the US because there are serial killers. That was my point.

The country is indeed very fucked up though in general. But if you want to see the National Parks or museums, please enjoy (especially because it might get worse here down the road).
Show HN: HackLikeMe – A DevSecOps CLI agent that thinks before it acts
by abrarnasirj | 2026-01-10 15:58:07+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Abrar Nasir Jaffari, co-founder of HackLikeMe. We built an agentic CLI because we were tired of the context-switching between LLM web chats and the terminal when doing DevSecOps work.Most AI coding assistants are just wrappers for file editing. We’ve built 6 specialized agents (Coder, FullStack, Security, DevOps, Plan, Monitor) that have native terminal access.

It doesn't just suggest code; it can:

Run nmap to audit your local network.

Use tshark to analyze packet captures.

Manage docker containers and kubectl clusters.

The 'Pause to Think' feature: Before it executes a command, it generates a reasoning plan so you can see why it's about to run a specific script."

The "Beta" Offer: "We launched yesterday and we're currently in beta. We are giving free Pro access for the first 100 HN users—no credit card required.

We’re running on a mix of AWS and GCP (leveraging some credits we just landed), so we’re able to offer some decent compute for the reasoning models during the beta.
by Signatura | 2026-01-10 15:58:07+00:00
I agree with this. What stands out to me is that the hiring process often treats one internal mental model as “correct”, and anything outside of it as a flaw in the candidate.

The example you gave about solving the same problem differently is common; different approaches get mistaken for lack of competence.

I like the negative testing idea a lot. If a hiring process never examines who it’s rejecting, it has no way to know whether it’s filtering quality or just filtering familiarity.

Have you seen teams actually test or evolve their hiring criteria this way, or does it usually stay fixed once defined?
by Defletter | 2026-01-10 15:58:25+00:00
BREAKING NEWS: conservatives blame "socialism" for the ills caused by conservatism

People thinking that New Labour is left wing is both frustrating and amusing. There's constant in-fighting in the Labour party for a reason. Thatcher supposedly thought one of her greatest achievements was making the Labour Party agree on the economy. Labour is increasingly socially regressive. Mrs. Snooper's Charter herself was leader of the Conservative Party and brought in a ton of state surveillance. I'm genuinely baffled what you think "socialism" even is or what you think it's to blame for here.
by wpm | 2026-01-10 15:58:38+00:00
I have a ThinkPad T420 that is sufficient for most tasks that don't involve HEVC acceleration. It's got a mobile Sandy Bridge i7, booting off of a SATA SSD.

The only thing that really needed an upgrade was the display. I ditched the crappy 1366x768 TN for a 1440p IPS and an LVDS-eDP conversion board. Looks fantastic. Runs great.
by Bad_Initialism | 2026-01-10 15:58:41+00:00
Not really from scratch if it uses the SDL2 library. I'd try it if I had the first clue how to resolve this dependency without obtaining a university degree in the subject. Or if the README gave the slightest hint about how to proceed.

It may not be the flex you think it is to leave the SDL2 part as an "exercise for the reader". I don't think it would really affect the size of the data hoard on github if everyone who used an obscure and difficult-to-install library as the basis of their project explained how to get it. Isn't gatekeeping fun and cool?