MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: 'Irrational' Tools – Perception-first color/image utilities
by piyush_soni | 2026-01-14 18:52:50+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building a few color and image-related tools with a focus on ease of use, solid UI/UX, and correctness as a hobby project.

What makes these different from other online tools? Very often I needed free, simple, yet powerful utilities for these little tasks and couldn’t find anything that fit, so I ended up building them myself (100% client-side, no sign-ups required!)

Color Palette Generator: Uses the OKLCH color space (instead of RGB) to generate perceptually the most distinct colors for a given scheme. It also includes sequential palettes and palette generation from an image for convenience.

Smart Color Replacer: Uses HSV-based fuzzy matching, supports multiple input-output color pairs (something I couldn’t find elsewhere), and preserves original highlights and shadows by replacing only hue. It also includes a “magnetic lasso”-style tool that snaps selection vertices to detected object boundaries (not perfect yet - I’m working on additional selection modes) to limit replacements to specific areas.

Color Mixer:A pretty simple mathematical Color averager, but allows you to input colors in multiple spaces (just write anything in the textbox, or 'bulk' copy and paste!), and adjust input and output colors quickly by clicking on the swatch.

Image Blender: Fast, simple, no frills client-side image blending. Change opacity if you need.

I’d love to hear your kind suggestions or feedback!
by scatbot | 2026-01-14 18:52:50+00:00
>But I do think s-expressions are an improvement over HTML in certain scenarios.

I agree. S expressions are a data interchange format. HTML is a markup language. They solve different problems.

S expressions define nested lists of atoms. HTML describes semantic hypertext documents defined by a document tree made of element nodes as subtrees, attribute nodes as subtree metadata, and text nodes. In some scenarios a uniform data structure like s expressions is nicer to work with.

To be honest it boggles my mind that XML was ever used as a universal data format.
by catigula | 2026-01-14 18:53:03+00:00
If I mostly trim my hedges, but sometimes, very rarely, need to cut down small trees, am I best served by simply owning a hedge-trimmer and renting a chainsaw or other appropriate tool when necessary, or by buying a katana for both jobs?

Everybody knows why you bought the katana. We know you have a story to tell yourself, it's just not convincing.
by srean | 2026-01-14 18:53:09+00:00
This.

I also think that a lot of the waste can be done away with by using application specific codecs. Yes, even gzip compresses logs and metrics by a lot, but one can go further with specialized codecs to hone in on the redundancy much quicker (than what a generic lossless compressor eventually would).

However to build these one can't have a "throw it over the 3rd party wall" mode of development.

One way to do this for stable services would be to build hi-fidelity (mathematical/statistical) models for the logs and metrics, then serialize what is non-redundant.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-14 18:53:13+00:00
> Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights

I think the EFF would have more success spreading their message if they didn't outright lie in their blog posts. While cryptographic digital ID schemes have their problems (which they address below), they do fully protect privacy rights. So do extremely simple systems like selling age-verification scratchcards in grocery stores, with the same age restrictions as cigarettes or alcohol.
by yunohn | 2026-01-14 18:53:21+00:00
Surely if you can consider the second order effects of giving away these extra potatoes for free, then you can also consider the second order effects of not giving them away? And maybe even thinking more about it, consider that they may be going to different markets/people/causes?

Given this example is about 1T batches of potatoes, it could be used by a business that depends on cheap potatoes like a food kitchen, or a business that can absorb the input surge and convert it into a product that can be stored longer term like frozen foods.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-14 18:54:14+00:00
To play devils advocate I'm old enough to remember when glass bottles and cans were what was around and there are a number of problems there that manufactures would fight...

Glass is heavy as shit. For as much plastic waste as we create, we've saved a ton in fuel costs that would be in the atmosphere otherwise.

Glass likes to break and become a dangerous object/weapon. How much less glass litter is around is amazing. Always fun when you went to the lake, then the hospital because some dipshit broke their coke. It still can happen with liquor, but it's massively reduced the problem.

Also, glass likes to break and cause product inventory shrinkage, which the manufactures and retailers hate.

Same with bulk goods. Never underestimate how fucking dumb your fellow citizens are in their ability to screw up and ruin bulk product displays.

Also, when something in bulk is polluted/one piece goes bad, typically the entire container is a loss.

What we have to force manufactures to do is use plastics that are recyclable and put deposits on them. And then force recycling on the items they collect. This would massively reduce waste by incentivizing the public to gather any they see.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-14 18:54:20+00:00
I’m curious about some of the design choices.

Having a period / full stop as the EOL punctuation rather than a semicolon is a nice idea. But personally I think the idea of a line terminator is antiquated.

Using square brackets for strings feels superfluous when you have to quote the strings anyway. Was there a reason for this design?

I don’t like the “stop” keyword either. Is that doing anything special that the ‘.’ punctuation isn’t already doing? If so, that should be clearer.

Using whitespace to reference objects instead of ‘::’, ‘->’ or ‘.’ is also counterintuitive. However at least this is just familiarity issue; at least just so long as tabs and multiple spaces don’t break the method calls. Otherwise you then have an easy way to introduce hard-to-spot bugs.

Iteration syntax is weirdly terse compared to the verbosity of the rest of the language. I’m not saying the syntax is bad, but it feel jarring at first when compared to the design choices of the rest of the language.

On the positive side of things, it’s nice to see someone experimenting with language syntax. There’s definitely aspects I do like there too.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-14 18:54:20+00:00
The thing with Cybertrucks losing panels certainly didn't help.

A big part of the Cybertruck marketing was the robustness of its unusual design: exoskeleton! space grade materials! They smashed the door with a hammer and it didn't dent (just avoid pétanque balls...), Elon Musk commented that it would destroy the other vehicle in an accident. Morally dubious arguments sometimes, but it appeals to many potential customers.

And then, the vehicle that is supposed to be a tank falls apart by looking at it funny. And the glued on steel plates, is it that the exoskeleton? Not only the design is controversial, but it failed at what it is supposed to represent.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-14 18:54:23+00:00
I know you responded to "sounds like", I'm asking why.

When they said "sounds like", they were acknowledging the mechanical turk joke, and extending it. Your response looks like you're calling them wrong, like why are they talking about amazon, it's actually about mechanical turk! Which would be a deep misunderstanding of their comment.

Could you just say yes or no: When you first replied, did you realize they understood the mechanical turk joke?
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-14 18:54:43+00:00
> Some farmer probably lost a lot of money over this.

The farmer got their money (it was purchased in advance). The company purchasing it didn't pick it up tho, because demand is not there, and they'd likely lose more money on transport and distribution. Which is where the two companies doing this campaign come in - they pay for distribution costs, so the farmer doesn't throw them away.
Show HN: Repomance: A Tinder style app for GitHub repo discovery
by masterpos | 2026-01-14 18:54:53+00:00
Hi everyone,

Repomance is an app for discovering curated and trending repositories. Swipe to star them directly using your GitHub account.
It is currently available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. I plan to develop an Android version once the app reaches 100 users.

Repomance is open source: https://github.com/mpospirit-apps/Repomance-iOS

All feedback is welcome, hope you enjoy using it.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-01-14 18:55:01+00:00
I actually enjoy doing road trips in my tesla more so than in ICEs, because of the forced breaks. With ICEs, stops would be either for food or for bathroom breaks. A lot of times just eating in the car while driving. But for a 10 hour drive I am forced to take 4 20 minute stops - so once every 2 hours. This ends up making me feel a lot better at the end of the trip and also gives you "guilt free" time to enjoy a random park you've never been to, or sit down and have a meal. So, lets say 80 minutes of added time for a 10 hour trip, vs maybe 40 minutes that I would have added in my gas guzzler. 40 minutes extra on a 10 hour trip just isn't that big of a deal to me and especially so considering all the benefits from walking around for a bit or seeing some new places.

Obviously you could do that same thing in an ICE car, but I feel the pressure to keep moving so it hits different.
by goku12 | 2026-01-14 18:55:36+00:00
This is exactly the cynical, dismissive and defeatist take that I was talking about. Yet, we have numerous examples of this dismissal being wrong. Right now, free software is something we take for granted. But you have no idea what sort of great achievement it was for the early pioneers. Microsoft even used to call it evil.

> We can solve the climate emergency if the consumers unite and stop living the way they live

This is wrong in two ways. The first is that it is a strawman. The consumers are the biggest emitters. The big corporations, militaries and billionaires are. Second, we did solve a related problem with market pressure - the stratospheric ozone depletion and the ozone hole.

Again as I said before, it's easy to call it naive or scoff at it any number of ways. But people have achieved much harder goals. And that takes a lot of skill and effort.
by raybb | 2026-01-14 18:55:39+00:00
What a cool project and I really appreciate the way you are emphasizing the foss nature of it.

Have you had any luck using vector maps? I know for the web SDKs, vector maps are finally getting some love for OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure what the situation is on Android or if something like https://openfreemap.org/ can be used.
by hinkley | 2026-01-14 18:55:51+00:00
I’ve contemplated building my own CI tool (with a local runner) and the thing is if you assume “write a pipeline that runs locally but also on push”, then the feature depth is mostly about queuing, analyzing output, and often left off, but IMO important, charting telemetry about the build history.

Most of these are off the shelf, at least in some programming languages. It’s the integrations and the overmanagement where a lot of the weight is.
by merelythere | 2026-01-14 18:56:14+00:00
It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling.
After the last six months exploring the recycling process what I get is this:

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the last step when something has to be trashed away. In the case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and reuse much better than the two others solutions.

A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very appealing for sellers either.
by palmotea | 2026-01-14 18:56:14+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/marie-gluesenkamp...:

> It’s all but impossible to go into any rural bar in America today, ask for thoughts on pickup trucks and not hear complaints about the size of trucks these days, about touch-screens and silly gimmicks manufacturers use to justify their ballooning prices. Our economy, awash in cheap capital, has turned quality used trucks into something like a luxury asset class.

> It’s often more affordable in the near-term to buy a new truck than a reliable used one. Manufacturers are incentivized by federal regulations, and by the basic imperatives of the thing economy, to produce ever-bigger trucks for ever-higher prices to lock people into a cycle of consumption and debt that often lasts a lifetime.

> This looks like progress, in G.D.P. figures, but we are rapidly grinding away the freedom and agency once afforded by the ability to buy a good, reasonable-size truck that you could work on yourself and own fully. You can learn a lot about why people feel so alienated in our economy if you ask around about the pickup truck market.

> Instead, the authors of “White Rural Rage” consulted data and an expert to argue that driving a pickup reflects a desire to “stay atop society’s hierarchy,” but they do not actually try to reckon much with the problem that passage raises — that consumer choices, such as buying trucks, have become a way for many Americans to express the deep attachment they have to a life rooted in the physical world. A reader might conclude that people who want a vehicle to pull a boat or haul mulch are misguided, or even dangerous. And a party led by people who believe that is doomed among rural voters, the Midwestern working class and probably American men in general.

> This approach to politics governed by data and experts is what we mean when we talk about technocracy. It’s a system that no longer really functions today because the broad societal trust that once allowed data and experts to guide political choices has broken down. Democrats, increasingly, live in a world where data and researchers convincingly show that low-wage immigration raises the economy and our gun laws are reckless and misguided.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-14 18:56:18+00:00
> Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.

1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.

And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile.

We need to have both.
by starik36 | 2026-01-14 18:56:21+00:00
> many vehicles ... are almost indistinguishable

That is so right on the money. I attended the LA Auto Show a couple of months back and the takeaway was that every manufacturer pretty much makes the same safe car. There might be a feature here and feature there, but it's the same car.

In the years past they at least had lots of concept cars. This year, I maybe saw two and they weren't all that "concept".
by pygy_ | 2026-01-14 18:56:23+00:00
- Why did you close your eyes ?
- So that the room will be empty.

Your copy reads as "I'm a radical centrist and will die trying to preserve the status quo".

As it usually goes you'd then tolerate hateful, bigoted folks in the name of openness and Free Speech Absolutism™ (which is totally non-political /s) and chase away women, minorities and folks who care about them.

If this isn't your intention, a CoC is the way to go.

You regrettably can't make hate disappear by pretending it doesn't exist.
by frogperson | 2026-01-14 18:56:24+00:00
The main thing holding EV back is the oil industry, not the tech. The US is the only country lagging on EV and its all because the industry puts so much effort in to squashing all progress.

EVs are simpler and cheaper. Look at how fast adoption is growing outside the US. If US citizens could buy a BYD for the same price as in China, the the US auto makers and oil companies would be in trouble.
by bgentry | 2026-01-14 18:56:38+00:00
This is largely because LISTEN/NOTIFY has an implementation which uses a global lock. At high volume this obviously breaks down: https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-s...

None of that means Oban or similar queues don't/can't scale—it just means a high volume of NOTIFY doesn't scale, hence the alternative notifiers and the fact that most of its job processing doesn't depend on notifications at all.
by cyberax | 2026-01-14 18:57:26+00:00
> Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials?

I used to be. So I spent quite a lot of time researching the issue. Not just google searches, but actually speaking with biologists.

I think that the current microplastic scare is overblown. The "credit card worth of plastic in brain" articles are just ridiculous. Biologically, the body has defenses against microscopic contaminants in blood. There are special immune cells that "eat" insoluble particles and then get excreted (typically in bile).

It looks like I'm not alone in my bafflement: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/scary-research-... or https://www.vox.com/climate/475004/microplastics-research-fa...
by soraminazuki | 2026-01-14 18:57:45+00:00
> The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.

Former administrations, to their credit, exhibited some degree of restraint that the current administration lacks. However, they indicted Julian Assange and plenty of people back then have warned precisely about the kind of things happening today.

- The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653012

- Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639165

From the EFF back then:

> Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/governments-indictment...
by masfuerte | 2026-01-14 18:57:55+00:00
I'm not an immigration lawyer but as I understand it: having been born in the UK as the child of Bangladeshi parents who were living here legally she was entitled to British citizenship, but she wasn't British automatically. They would have had to apply for it. As such, the politicians were able to take it away.

This is quite a recent change in the law. Prior to 2014 they could only strip citizenship if you applied and received it without having a right to it (e.g. if you were born abroad to non-British parents). After 2014 naturalised citizens (like Begum) were also liable.

I do think it is a bad law and she is being treated disgracefully. There's still hope the ECHR will sort it.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-14 18:58:20+00:00
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-14 18:58:38+00:00
Usually, the people writing the Makefile are the same that could also be writing this stuff out in a YAML (lol) file as the CI instructions, often located in the same repository anyway. The irony in that is striking. And then we have people who can change environment variables for the CI workflows. Usually, also developers, often the same people that can commit changes to the Makefile.

I don't think it changes much, aside from security theater. If changes are not properly reviewed, then all fancy titles will not help. If anything, using Make will allow for a less flaky CI experience, that doesn't break the next time the git hoster changes something about their CI language and doesn't suffer from YAMLitis.
Show HN: ViaHuman, app for LLMs to send me notifications
by pdrojack | 2026-01-14 18:59:14+00:00
TL;DR: Mobile notifications for AI workflow approvals. Built it because running 5+ AI agents at once is chaos.
The problem:
This paragraph is the longest thing I've written by hand in weeks. Everything else? AI-generated across 5 browser tabs (GPT, Gemini, Claude) and multiple terminals running Claude Code.
They're FAST. They're GOOD. But here's what nobody tells you: you become the bottleneck.
I'd start 3 agents on different tasks, context switch between them, and lose track of which ones needed my input vs which ones were safe to auto-execute. Critical decisions got buried in terminal output.
What I tried:

Telegram bots (hacky, unreliable)
Slack integrations (too much noise)
Checking terminals every 5 minutes (defeats the purpose of automation)

None of it worked.
What I built:
viahuman – a notification server that lets AI agents ping me when they need human approval.
How it works:

Integrated a local MCP server with my LLMs
Told them: "Run autonomously, but notify me for important decisions"
They send mobile push notifications when done or stuck
I approve/provide context from my phone
They adapt and continue
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-14 18:59:50+00:00
I see the slate as the successor of the now extinct (in Can + US) mini-truck. 90s trucks like the small Toyota Truck, old Ford Ranger, Nissan hardbody, etc.

The kind of trucks that landscapers are still using, that are beat to shit, and have three features, cheap, load carrying, reliable by way of simplicity.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-14 18:59:52+00:00
They seem to be flooded on dealership lots and are not selling whatsoever. OEMs force dealers to take the crap vehicles if they are to get the good ones. You have a vehicle that started off as a hard sell to the crowd that normally buys the vehicle and then you make it so the price is astronomical...forget the dealer reluctance, what did you think was going to happen?

[1]:https://youtu.be/F0SIL-ujtfA?t=532
by graemep | 2026-01-14 18:59:52+00:00
All that is true, but I was not claiming it is the primary driver, but that safety and comfort mattered too.

With seatbelts I think the biggest problem is most people simply do not understand how much safer you are if you wear seatbelts - people who will pay a premium for a "safer" car and not wear seatbelts.

I as not familiar with the term 2LDK. it seems to be a Japanese term for a two bed flat? The places I know are less crowded and the equivalent would be a house or somewhere a lot bigger (at least for anyone who could afford higher education abroad).
by mebizzle | 2026-01-14 19:00:01+00:00
Literally the only people who can think that this dude is anywhere remotely objective is if you are already a Tesla hater; he posts qualifications in every title and always adjusts the wording and tone to be negative. Every Electrek's take on an article is him describing how he warned everyone about the Elon/Tesla heel turn as you laid it out. It screams confirmation bias but since he isn't a journalist there's no code of ethics he's bound to follow.