MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitexploder | 2026-01-05 17:03:30+00:00
AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.

I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.

Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-05 17:03:40+00:00
> None of these feel good things matter when someone victimizes a child…

That's very true, yes. But many of us are attracted to certain characteristics without compulsively raping anyone possessing them; I like blonde hair! The parent poster is pointing out the distinction between attraction and action.

I find it deeply uncomfortable that, in some cases, pedophilia can be fixed by brain surgery. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pedophile-lost-ur...
by marojejian | 2026-01-05 17:03:48+00:00
gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...

Not at all surprising, and a mostly arbitrary milestone for NYT to declare. But still key to mark the progression, and note where we are at right now.

this part seems painfully ironic:
>often run on off-the-shelf microcomputers like Raspberry Pi
by viamroboticsnyc | 2026-01-05 17:03:55+00:00
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Why this could be interesting to you:
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by ecb_penguin | 2026-01-05 17:04:02+00:00
> At the same time doing that in a professional environment sucks for your coworkers

The vast majority of what we learn is in a professional environment. I can't build a hobby app with hundreds of millions of active users. We learn at work, and that means sometimes it sucks. But that's why we have blameless cultures, because we all realize you can't learn unless you first do it in a shitty way.

It's also why AI replacing juniors is terrible. Juniors need to make mistakes and figure things out. That's how they become experienced seniors.
by cd_mkdir | 2026-01-05 17:04:03+00:00
OP here.

Just to share a bit of the engineering headache behind this: The hardest part wasn't the Django backend, it was getting the LIBR (Lowest Intermediate Balance Rule) logic to handle edge cases in the PDF parsing.

Bank statements often group transactions by date, not time. If a user deposits $5k and withdraws $5k on the same day, the order matters for the 'dip' calculation. I ended up having to write a heuristic that forces 'Withdrawals First' (worst-case scenario for the claimant) to ensure the report stands up to conservative judicial scrutiny.

If anyone here has worked with financial event sourcing for legal compliance, I'd love to know how you handle same-day timestamp ambiguity.
by Lendal | 2026-01-05 17:04:13+00:00
Bingo. The guy has a lot of things right, but I was floored when I read "progressive consumption tax" coming from an otherwise well written essay. Consumption taxes are regressive, and no amount of progressive lip stick will make them redistribute sufficiently to achieve the effect he wants.

I would say that any tax reform that fails to reduce asset concentration will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. Let Bezos have his newspaper, if that's all he owns. Let him game the system to evade income tax. Fine. The problem is when a very small group of people own all the newspapers plus their original business empires plus their privately owned social media companies, plus their funded PACs, their psyops, etc.

All assets must be taxed directly to such an extent that concentrated assets are redistributed naturally through market forces. Tax wealth, not work.
by awaaz | 2026-01-05 17:04:18+00:00
> Have you thought about adding ML-based classification for notifications that are harder to catch with patterns?

Honestly that's a little out my league. The idea did occur to me, but I'm discouraged by the amount of compute required for most ML.

> Also curious about battery impact — how often does it process the notification stream?

The OS sends any new notification to the app (it is a push based approach) automatically. On my own phone, this app currently shows at the bottom of the list in battery usage (<1%).
by Theaetetus | 2026-01-05 17:04:35+00:00
1. I have always loved learning things, both big and small.
2. I enjoy trivia competitions.
3. I'm interested in human memory more generally.
4. I think that spaced repetition software could be a lot better, and I'm trying to make such software. So when I study, I'm also getting the value of using and improving my own software.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-05 17:04:43+00:00
I appreciate the honesty myself... While I'd like to see the actually elected officials in Venezuela put in charge, I understand the govt will largely be working through the seated govt and other channels in order to encourage the desired changes.

I don't think Oil is the sole reason for this, I think that the influences of Iran, China, Russia and Cuba in Venezuela as well as the drug trafficking coming through them is the larger issue... getting back the Oil trade in the end is just icing on the proverbial cake. I also think it could be better for the people of Venezuela in the long run vs the authoritarian and communist influences they've had over the past half century.

Trump is funny, dishonest as hell when it comes to his ego, but more honest than any other politician I've ever even heard of at the same time.
by nogridbag | 2026-01-05 17:04:59+00:00
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.

I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.

First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.

I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-05 17:05:53+00:00
The Romania stuff is a complete farse. The campaign for Georgescu wasn't funded by Russia. It was funded by a member of the same ruling coalition whose judges cancelled the vote. [1] They launched a PR campaign that horribly backfired as they were skirting bounds of campaign law, so they couldn't actively name a candidate. The influencers followed their script, but didn't exactly have the same candidate in mind. It's like an equal but opposite of Bud Light hiring Dylan Mulvaney for PR.

Imagine in Hungary if a sort of pro-establishment (NATO/EU/Ukraine/etc) type won, and then they cancelled the election, banned this candidate, and reran it after making some mostly unprovable (and ultimately false) claims of foreign meddling. Can you imagine how you would feel about this? Can you imagine how the unelected EU bureaucrats would act, or what they would be calling it? For people on the other side of the political aisle, you just had an act carried out that would more than justify all the rather hyperbolic rhetoric you're using about the US. And when it's reality, and not just rhetoric, this ends up shaping the views of people for decades.

[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
by llvmhelpbot | 2026-01-05 17:06:25+00:00
This is the reality for me too. Something about css just doesn't click. The surface area of the api, how often it changes, the lack of suggestions and guardrails. It's just so different feeling than regular programming. Thank God for AI, I don't have to burn 50% of my time on battling css and can focus on shipping things.
by bityard | 2026-01-05 17:07:24+00:00
I guess I'm surprised that Android would allow one app to read/manage/block notifications from all other apps. I mean, I'm happy to have that kind of control over my phone, but it also seems like it could be viewed as a giant security hole? (Which would be a bit ironic given that Google is actively stamping out the ability for users to install apps that come from outside their walled garden.)
by zaidf | 2026-01-05 17:08:11+00:00
My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...

Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-05 17:08:19+00:00
> There are rumblings that the MySQL project is rudderless after Oracle fired the team working on the open-source project in September 2025.

Not just the open-source project; 80%+ (depending a bit on when you start counting) of the MySQL team as a whole was let go, and the SVP in charge of MySQL was, eh, “moving to another part of the org to spend more time with his family”. There was never really a separate “MySQL Community Edition team” that you could fire, although of course there were teams that worked mostly or entirely on projects that were not open-sourced.
by Theaetetus | 2026-01-05 17:08:46+00:00
1. My algorithm is probably inefficient, and a big Q1 2026 goal is to figure out where the inefficiencies are and (better) to get a better system for addressing and remediating them in an automated way.

2. A lot of my cards were also made in 2025 (and 2024), so I'm probably much farther to the left of you on the learning curve, on average.
by trashb | 2026-01-05 17:08:55+00:00
Excel (or similar spreadsheet programs) is indeed great and has it's place. There are certain area's where there is no real replacement which is impressive. However I think that creating (interactive) applications is not one of the jobs Excel is the best tool for the job.

This exactly the argument I try to make Excel (spreadsheets) is a great interface for processing and working with certain type of data, think economic etc. but it is not great for other things. There we need a different interface to efficiently communicate our intent. For example programming languages or even writing a novel would not work very well in a Excel sheet (though no doubt someone has attempted it).
by John_V | 2026-01-05 17:08:57+00:00
I’m a non-technical founder. For the last 12 months, I’ve been in the trenches building PostReach AI, and I did almost everything wrong at the start.

I’m sharing this because I see a lot of people here about to make the same "outsourcing" mistakes I did.

The $5,000 Agency Trap: I thought I could skip the technical struggle by hiring an agency. I expected a product in 3 months. 5 months later, I had a half-baked, unfinished app and $5,000 less in the bank.

What I learned the hard way:

Co-founders > Freelancers: You need people who are invested in the vision, not just the invoice. My co-founders are the reason my mental health stayed intact when things broke.

Validation isn't "Feeling Confident": I assumed the market was validated. I was wrong. You can't just build and hope they find you.

The Landing Page is a Living Document: We rebuilt ours 4 times. Don’t obsess over it on Day 1. Use it to see if anyone even cares enough to join a waitlist.

Launch Before You’re Ready: The "perfect" app is a myth. Launching early is the only way to get the feedback that actually matters.

Ignore VCs (Unless You Need Them): Don’t waste your limited hours on pitch decks if you can spend them on product.

We eventually found our way and built PostReach AI, a conversational engine that handles social media so founders can get back to building. But the tool is secondary to the lesson: Don’t try to be a solo hero.

I’d love to hear from other non-technical founders: what was your "expensive" lesson? I'll be in the comments to chat.
by ericjmorey | 2026-01-05 17:09:05+00:00
Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can be disregarded at no cost.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid...

https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...
by zamadatix | 2026-01-05 17:09:13+00:00
I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).

Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).

You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.
by stocksinsmocks | 2026-01-05 17:09:19+00:00
There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is that there is no price discovery mechanism or system pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women doing basically nothing. I don’t know why the powers that be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful work, but here we are. Now we’re a couple generations into this social experiment by “smart” billionaires and their courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we’re Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don’t let the marketing in Venezuela fool you. I’m just hoping the robots give us a few more decades of working plumbing.
by epicureanideal | 2026-01-05 17:09:57+00:00
> Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?

Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
by ctippett | 2026-01-05 17:10:21+00:00
500+ comments and no one's mentioned the jack of all trades "share" button? I would really love to see the internal metrics around how many users press share because they're actually sharing something versus wanting to use any one of the myriad of other functions it hides.

Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
by Theaetetus | 2026-01-05 17:10:26+00:00
1. I enjoy it.

2. I like trivia competitions.

3. I like making and using my own software.

4. Memorizing facts is an underrated way to become a better software engineer. Not the best way or even close to the best way, but an underrated way!

5. It enriches my experience of the world (I plan to write more about this soon).
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-05 17:10:51+00:00
Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story.

I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).

Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".

This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-05 17:10:57+00:00
CSS isn't "like" a programming language. It is a programming language.

It's just not one based on states, mutability, and variables. Even the things that use the `var` keyword are constants, not variables.

(But then, don't read that as being against scoped rules. The fact that all rules are global to the document is bad. We can emulate scopes with specific selectors, but that's the kind of thing a language is supposed to help with.)
by torginus | 2026-01-05 17:11:43+00:00
That's not how you're supposed to handle this kind of errors (according to .NET designers) - there's 2 kinds of errors in concept, everyday errors that are to be expected, such as a dictionary not containing a key, or in this case, a user supplying a badly formatted integer. For this you have the Try.. methods with TryGetValue, TryParse etc.

Go for example, allows for multiple return values, so it allows more elegant handling of this exact cass.

Then there's the serious kind of error, when something you didn't expect goes wrong. That's what exceptions are for. If this distinction is followed, then you don't want to handle specific exceptions (with very few notable distinctions, like TaskCanceledException), you just either pick a recoverable function scope (like a HTTP handler), and let the exception bubble to its top, at which point you report an error to the user, and log what happened.

If such a thing is not possible, just let the program crash.
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-05 17:12:06+00:00
Unless elderly care is too expensive and people have their parents live with them.

In the late 90's when we talked about the transition to the Service Economy, jobs such as call center were touted as the way forward for the recently unemployed textile workers. Until we found we could move those to the Caribbean, Philippines and India.

I remember a number of people talking about how they could make decent money bar-tending and waiting tables. Until the economy slowed down and people stopped eating out.

Service is job that you pay someone else to do because you don't want to do it, which is great until you have less income. Then it becomes a budget line item that can be cut.
by fcantournet | 2026-01-05 17:12:29+00:00
Historically news outlet run as public service (with sufficient guardrails for autonomy) such as the BBC, PBS, France Television, Arte (naming only those I know well) have produce much better news coverage than the privately owned ones.

OTOH the concept of independent public institution and general checks and balances seems to have been entirely forgotten, so maybe that's not a solution for 21st century.

An alternative would be communally owned media (50/50 by readership and journalists), with simple direct tax incentive to fund them (equal amounts of $ per person)
Show HN: Timestamps for ChatGPT Conversations
by hangzhi | 2026-01-05 17:12:43+00:00
I built a small Chrome extension that adds timestamps to ChatGPT conversations.

I found it surprisingly hard to tell when a message was sent, especially when reviewing long chats or referencing conversations later.

The extension is lightweight and free. Open source here: https://github.com/Hangzhi/chatgpt-timestamp-extension

Would love feedback or suggestions.
by chisomekwuribe | 2026-01-05 17:12:44+00:00
Location: Lagos, Nigeria

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: Nest.js, PostgresQL, Next.js, Tailwind, Flutter

Email: chisomekwuribe@gmail.com

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RW3so6XhPsF8yOFjzeh3fbax...

Summary: I'm a highly passionate and motivated engineer that loves to build. I enjoy working with people and I'm looking for an opportunity to bring my creative energy and knowledge to a team that's building innovative solutions