MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-18 16:54:27+00:00
> Personally I find all of the pretense and posturing around these issues both comical and concerning

> There is no sign that Canada and the European nations will be in a position to even put up a shadow of resistance to it.

Same for the US. There has been ample reporting about how there is no shipbuilding capacity in the US (but there still is in Europe).
by selectodude | 2026-01-18 16:55:00+00:00
I’ve been tear gassed. I’m out here trying. I just know it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. The regime is losing its grip and the only way out that fascists know is to escalate the violence.

Invading Greenland is a symptom of us on the ground fighting back. It’s to prove to Americans that we’re now isolated.
by wronex | 2026-01-18 16:55:06+00:00
As a side note. Beware when exporting to the USA using UPS. Especially when having the receiver pay for imports and taxes. UPS does not enforce payment. They will hand out the package before receiving the taxes and tolls. Then, they force you, the exporter, to pay, since you’ve agreed to it by accepting their terms and conditions. I’ve learnt this the hard way.
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-18 16:55:30+00:00
We are trying. Please realize that the second largest conflict (based on spending) in the world right now, behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is DJT’s ICE attacks on the US. That is how much he is spending to attack his own country. More than Israel spends to occupy Palestinians.

Sadly, if you look at polling, none of this is remotely unpopular with US Republican voters. Our country’s union is hanging on by tattered threads.
Show HN: Opal Editor, free Obsidian alternative for markdown and site publishing
by rbbydotdev | 2026-01-18 16:55:44+00:00
A fully featured markdown editor and publisher. Free, open-source and browser-first (no backend required). Built with modern technologies like React, TypeScript, Shadcn/UI, and Vite. (thoughtfully crafted, not vibe coded)
by knorker | 2026-01-18 16:55:51+00:00
It makes me sick to see London bragging about this. This is last century technology, and other cities managed to retrofit this just fine, including of course using leaky cable in the tunnels.

That it took 20-30 years longer than everyone else is through absolute incompetence and mismanagement. It would have been in place at least 10 years ago if they hadn't screwed up the RFP that Huawei won.

And it's not even shared infra! Vodafone is WAY behind the other networks.

I have worked with these things. There's no valid excuse for being 20-30 years behind on this.

And it's still not landed! By the time it finally gets to all stations I wouldn't be surprised if it's 40-50 years behind everyone else.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-18 16:55:58+00:00
The parent comment did a sneaky thing and gave the advertising budget then pivoted into rants about Google and Meta. They never actually said “All of this money goes to Google and Meta”. It was just expected that on HN everyone would assume as much because that’s what everyone is familiar with.

In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.
by artninja1988 | 2026-01-18 16:56:11+00:00
> The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work

Would you call something that could replace your labor "spicy auto complete"? He also evokes nfts and blockchain, for some reason. To me this phrasing makes it sound like he thinks they are damn near useless.
by FpUser | 2026-01-18 16:56:48+00:00
>"I still can't tell whether Trump is actually an asset of Russia, or just insane."

Why do people keep looking for Putin under their bed in the mornings? Trump does not give a flying fuck about Putin. He has no problems sanctioning Russia. Trump just does what he wants to do. Meanwhile EU kept sucking up to him instead of standing up. Now the EU reaps what their rulers sowed.
by csense | 2026-01-18 16:56:56+00:00
Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them.

In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices.

Alas, the short-term single-firm directional incentive for company decision makers in that world leads to marginal prioritization of higher margins. The loss of wages leads to loss of consumer spending power but it's spread across the economy. But every firm has the same incentive so they all do the same thing, and the good thing gets ruined.

This line of thinking leads to a Georgist-ish conclusion: The class conflict shouldn't be between workers and employers. They should be allies; the real cause of nobody being able to afford anything is rent extractors. (Writing in the 1800's, George [1] was most concerned about land rents; but the advertising monopoly of Google / Meta may be another form of extractive rent with similar characteristics.)

Maybe Henry Ford was on to something when he shocked the world by paying his employees enough to afford the product they were making (more than doubling many workers' wages)...

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...
by daveguy | 2026-01-18 16:57:32+00:00
Rampant propaganda bots and consolidation of communications channels in the US is a real problem. Half the country is getting fascist cheerleading 24/7. When you can monopolize the communications channels there is effectively no free speech. Because dissenting views are priced out. Thanks to lax oversight on merging communication companies and the Citizens United decision that equates speech to money in politics, we are in the middle of it now.
by leviathant | 2026-01-18 16:57:35+00:00
...among the people who voted. There are a lot of folks who opted out that bear responsibility for the way this country and its power is being dismantled.

He wouldn't win the popular vote today! Why is it that when you call yourself a Republican, you take a very narrow margin of victory and consider it a mandate to only listen to your fanbase? I bet it feels fun at first, and there are a few people who get very wealthy and powerful as a result, but reality always comes crashing back down.

I suppose that if the talk of suspending mid-term elections bears fruit, that changes the equation.
by throwaway5235 | 2026-01-18 16:58:12+00:00
Hot take/Unpopular opinion: I'm increasingly becoming pro-China and pro-Russia oriented (even though I'm against Russian occupation of Ukraine). I believe in checks-and-balances and the only way for one superpower be in-check, is another strong superpower. I want these countries to rival US and I want them to rival each other. That's how we get lasting peace.
Show HN: Nextdnsctl – A CLI for managing NextDNS profiles declaratively
by danme | 2026-01-18 16:58:20+00:00
I use NextDNS, but found managing allow-/denylists through the UI tedious, especially since I like to sync lists between profiles and keep them in version control.

So Claude and I built nextdnsctl, a small Python CLI that lets you manage lists via the official API.

pip install nextdnsctl
# get your key from https://my.nextdns.io/account
nextdnsctl auth <api-key> # or set NEXTDNS_API_KEY
nextdnsctl profile-list
nextdnsctl denylist import "Router Profile" ./blocklist.txt
by rendall | 2026-01-18 16:58:38+00:00
That's only part of it. It feels worse now because everything is visible. Information moves instantly. Evidence is public. Financial trails can be followed. Citizens now expect ethical behavior as a baseline rather than a bonus. In earlier eras, people slept better largely because they didn’t know what was happening, not because leaders were more virtuous.

For decades, elite self-dealing, institutional opacity, and captured power steadily eroded public trust. Trump did not arrive as a reformer. He arrived as a punishment mechanism. A stress test.
by aesmontyhn | 2026-01-18 16:59:20+00:00
Most career advice for junior devs right now is lazy: "learn to prompt or be replaced." This misses the point of market moats. I’ve been thinking about this from a founder's perspective, and I think there are three distinct paths with different "competitor profiles."

AI Labs: Compete against the world's best researchers.

AI-Native Building: Compete against the AI (and the death of SaaS moats).

Mission-Critical/Crypto: Compete against other humans in regulated, high-stakes environments that resist automation.

I’m biased because I run a crypto startup, but I think the logic of choosing a field based on who you compete against holds up even if you strip away the crypto angle. Curious to hear how others are thinking about "displacement-proof" niches.
by dannote | 2026-01-18 16:59:21+00:00
Thanks! Right now it doesn't parse CSS directly, but you can bind colors to Figma variables:

figma-use variable create "brand/primary" --collection <id> --type COLOR --value "#3B82F6"

Then reference them in JSX render:

figma-use render ./Button.figma.tsx

const colors = defineVars({
primary: { name: 'brand/primary', value: '#3B82F6' },
})

export default () => (
<Frame style={{ backgroundColor: colors.primary }}>
<Text style={{ color: '#FFF' }}>Button</Text>
</Frame>
)

So if you map your design tokens to Figma variables first, components will reference them. Parsing CSS/Tailwind configs automatically could be a good feature though.
by ktyptorio | 2026-01-18 16:59:34+00:00
There are two steps:

Vector search (HNSW): Find top-k similar entities/text units from the query embedding

Graph traversal (BFS): From those seed entities, traverse relationships (up to 2 hops by default) to find connected entities

This catches both semantically similar entities AND structurally related ones that might not match the query text.

Implementation: https://github.com/gibram-io/gibram/blob/main/pkg/engine/eng...
by steveBK123 | 2026-01-18 16:59:35+00:00
Right the problem with UBI is the people being productive in some way to fund it will always see the level of benefits as too much and those on the receiving end will see the benefits as too little. So as a higher % of people are on the receiving end, it creates a spiral of unfundable benefits demands.

Look at France, it seems like the biggest protests now are when it is suggested their retirement program is unsustainable and they should phase in a higher retirement age. And these programs across the west are becoming unsustainable because retirement ages were set decades ago at levels 0-10 years below life expectancy, and that gap has now grown to 20 years with a lower employed:retired ratio.
by torlok | 2026-01-18 16:59:37+00:00
This comment shows why the damage done by Trump will be so hard to reverse, no matter who's in charge next. When Trump talks about taking Greenland, the answer should be "no, moron, it's effectively a part of NATO", and instead you get all this muddying analysis of the strategic signifficance of Greenland, history, and how the EU is weak.
by godelski | 2026-01-18 16:59:43+00:00
I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate.

But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.
by leviathant | 2026-01-18 17:00:21+00:00
While you're remembering things you shouldn't forget, pay attention to how the Black Panthers are out in Philadelphia, and ICE isn't messing around over here. We chased those Patriot Front clowns out immediately, too.

But yeah, focus on the peaceful citizens making their voices heard, if that makes you feel more secure about how things are going.
by paxys | 2026-01-18 17:00:22+00:00
Russia can barely hold its own in a war against a neighboring country 30x smaller than them. Do people really think they are a threat on the global stage any more? China, yes, but their tactic is economic rather than military. And they are already winning in that front considering how dependent the rest of the world is on their manpower and manufacturing.

It's pretty clear that going forward the only real military threat the rest of the world has to deal with is the USA.
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-18 17:00:51+00:00
> Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA?

> Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

> What can I do to prevent this in the future?

> If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

Love how actual captcha spyware has turned to victim-blaming to justify its existence.
by susam | 2026-01-18 17:01:07+00:00
> If only there was a language that could run in all of our browsers, maybe even easily executable via some Quake-like console window that could open next to the website, that could just grab all visible URLs within some specific parts... Oh well ;)

That's the easy part. The time consuming part is reviewing each website and ensuring that it is a legitimate personal website and not a commercial website or a startup website or blogspam. There have been a fair number of such submissions that do not qualify for this directory that is meant to be about personal websites. So we need to review each submission anyway.

If you or anyone else knows a quicker way to process all these submissions, determine if they are suitable for this directory and convert them to the data format we need, we would very much appreciate pull requests to <https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd>.
by cdrnsf | 2026-01-18 17:01:08+00:00
We can hope that enough democrats win to cause gridlock and impede more harm. However, the democrats don't offer much in the way of substantive reform and have never demonstrated the stomach for taking bold stances. Whenever a candidate does come along and propose bold change, the institutional democratic party goes out of their way to sabotage or undercut them (think AOC, Sanders, Mamdani et al).
by r_lee | 2026-01-18 17:01:15+00:00
This is the right answer. I don't know why everyone is overreacting saying how the US democracy is dead and he will be in office forever.

He's just a narcissistic guy who wants to achieve some goals thw US had previously to show he's the only one who could do it, and to show what this great power can do (Iran, Venezuela, etc...)

I also think he's probably aware of his age and cognitive decline, so that's why he's in such a hurry to do everything as fast as possible. He's not the same as in 2017
by treetalker | 2026-01-18 17:02:35+00:00
If the Senate convicted, things would change. For one thing, I'm confident the military would not consider an impeached and convicted president as its commander in chief. And the prospect of the consequences of continuing to side with such a one would largely evaporate the availability of the administrative apparatus. Civil war would be a possible result, sure. But I disagree that such a Congress would simply be ignored and that ignoring it could be done while maintaining the means of continuing power.
by ComputerGuru | 2026-01-18 17:03:09+00:00
I'm not a frontend dev but I came up with this and use it a lot in my userscripts. It's not the most efficient (it can certainly be refactored to create a MutationObserver singleton and then have each call hook into that) but it works well enough for my needs and lets me basically use an old-school to dealing with reactive sites (so long as you are fine with using async):

function awaitElement(selector) {
return awaitPredicate(selector, _ => true);
}

function awaitPredicate(selector, predicate) {
return new Promise((resolve, _reject) => {
for (const el of document.querySelectorAll(selector)) {
if (predicate(el)) {
resolve(el);
return;
}
}

// Create a MutationObserver to listen for changes
const observer = new MutationObserver((_mutations, obs) => {
// You could search just inside _mutations instead of the entire DOM.
// Efficiency will depend primarily on how precise your selector is.
for (const el of document.querySelectorAll(selector)) {
if (predicate(el)) {
resolve(el);
obs.disconnect(); // Don't forget to disconnect the observer!
break;
}
}
});

// Start observing the document
observer.observe(document.documentElement, {
childList: true,
subtree: true,
attributes: false,
characterData: false,
});
});
}
by temporallobe | 2026-01-18 17:03:22+00:00
I definitely needed the initial input from the stakeholders as to what they wanted and why, but it turned into pointless bickering about colors and many disagreements about symbol meanings - for example should a dropped pin have a shadow? Should it be pin or a baloon-like thingy? Should it lean left or right? How does one represent a “duty station” when there is no previous iconography or other kind of standard around this? It also led to a lot of design-by-committee meetings where well-intentioned people suggested good ideas but things were always left at some ambiguous action item that never had any follow through. This took months and I kept re-rendering the icon set (which were all multi-layer SVGs) and then pasting the PNG renderings into a Word doc because that’s how they wanted to review them.

What this did teach me was to create very efficient workflows. I had all the Inkscape keystrokes memorized and found out they had an API that allowed me to create some level of automation (things like batch conversations IIRC). I kept certain symbols as separate base/template images so I could quickly swap things in and out. I had separate color files with swatches of various color themes, all in hexadecimal. Since I was and am fundamentally a software engineer, I used those engineering processes and principles to make it more like a typical software project than just a collection of images.
by netsharc | 2026-01-18 17:03:27+00:00
I'm sure you consider yourself a clever person, ever consider that the situation was more complex than your one line comment? That maybe it's possible the German banks were so happy to see a country that suddenly had the backup system of the European Central Bank, i.e. a country full of customers they could lend to, that they flooded it with offers of loans? That Greeks, like the sub-prime borrowers of the USA, thought "Well, if everyone is saying the future looks bright, why not borrow money and pay it back with the promised future income?".

That, if I knew my friend was going to be irresponsible with money but their parent was going to bail them out, why shouldn't I lend them money with interest? Is that irresponsible of me? Do I deserve to get all my money back, instead of suffering some of the losses as well? (In this highly simplicized example, I = German banks, my friend = the Greek society, their parents = the ECB. Not saying all of Greek society was irresponsible, but in aggregate, it was a risky "investment")

A lot of the Greek bailout could be summarized as the German government bailing out German banks with EU taxpayers' money...

Here's a long article about what happened when Germany got flooded with money in the 1870s: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/michael-pettis-syriz... . It's longer than your one line, maybe you'd rather hold on to your more succint (and maybe more intelligent) summary...
by dapperdrake | 2026-01-18 17:04:18+00:00
That level of database optimization is rare in practice. As soon as a non-database person gets decision making authority there goes your data model and disk layout.

And many important datasets never make it into any kind of database like that. Very few people provide "index columns" in their CSV files. Or they use long variable length strings as their primary key.

OP pertains to that kind of data. Some stuff in text files.
by mmaunder | 2026-01-18 17:05:13+00:00
I’m fascinated at how out of touch that NYT article is. It’s as if it was written by someone who just spent 3 years on the moon. “The next big thing will be agents: The models will fill digital shopping baskets and take care of online bills. They will act for you.”

Golly Mr two times Pulitzer nominee, do tell us more!

There is a kind of liberal arts elite that seems to not be using AI very much and not be buying any of their services. Contrast that with those of us in tech who are handing over money as fast as we can and can’t get enough of gpt 5.2 codex on xhigh and similar products that are game changing enablers.

Makes me wonder if we’re seeing a fracture in society beginning to form where the doomsdayers, naysayers, cynics and skeptics will realize their error too late.

My view on AI is that this is the world’s first Unbubble: where the majority view is that we are over invested, but where history will show we actually underestimated future revenue and profitability.

The conditions for the Unbubble are perfect. We have a once in a species level innovation with an economic system where all value accrues to the creators and financiers. And we have just emerged from the housing bubble and the dot com bubble in the last 3 decades, freshly scorched.

We thought connecting everyone would create new value far faster than it did. But really it took a long time to run all that fiber and make it fast, and it was just laying the plumbing for this moment.

Training big foundational models may seem slow, but it’s happening way faster than circling continents and the globe with fiber and developing terabit switching fabric.

I spend 12 hours a day using codex CLI to write extremely fast Rust and cuda code with advanced math that does things I didn’t think were possible. My focus is on creating value from the second and third order effects of AI. These enabling effects are in few conversations. As weirdly innovative products emerge from small shops, they will begin to be discussed.
by sowbug | 2026-01-18 17:05:30+00:00
You can measure the success of a pathological narcissist by brain-minutes. A brain-minute is one human brain thinking about the narcissist for one minute, no matter whether the thought is admiration, confusion, disgust, anger, or fear. You can continue to amass brain-minutes even after you die, as long as people keep thinking about what a [saint | jerk] you were.

By this measure, he is in contention to become the most successful pathological narcissist in history. Which is his sole goal.

I don't like it, but all the time I spent writing this comment contributes to his brain-minute score. So does the time you spend reading it.

In theory, this perspective is similar to the advice to ignore the bully. In practice, we've let this one go on too long.
by notahacker | 2026-01-18 17:05:36+00:00
Not really an example of the trope, but suspect Asimov might have got some of his ideas from Huxley's Brave New World, where it turns out the occupation-segregated dystopia is actually run by an idealistic type who's committed to the system but finds nonconformists and forbidden literature really interesting study subjects to make it better, and exile to the Falklands is actually a reward, sort of...
by dohguy | 2026-01-18 17:06:12+00:00
Thanks for posting this - I'm the author of the piece in case anyone has any questions :)

I just came from another thread where another hacker was sharing how they are getting their kids into programming by teaching them how to make games (ie. starting with Scratch then moving upwards) so I wanted to share that a friend of mine used Playdate's Pulp editor to help my daughter learn game design and he said that he had a great experience. So all in all, big praise to the Panic team!