MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I got tired of collecting emails for Secret Santa, so I built this
by xiaolu627 | 2026-01-13 06:42:53+00:00
I’ve used Elfster or DrawNames every year to organize Secret Santa for teams and friends, but I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with their mandatory user registration and email collection. For small, informal groups, it’s complete overkill and creates unnecessary privacy friction.

So, I decided to invert the design: What if the entire event state lived inside a shareable link?

I built Secret Santa Generator. Here’s how it works:

The organizer enters names, sets exclusions (optional), and clicks generate.

The system creates a unique event ID on the server and produces a hashed link (e.g., /event/abc123def456). All participant data, matches, and wishlists are tied to this ID.

You share this link with the group.

Each participant visits the link, enters their name, and instantly sees their assignment (matching logic runs server-side on first access). They can add a wishlist.

No accounts, no emails, no profiles. Close the browser tab, and the event is “gone,” but the link remains active until it’s purged.

Stack & Decisions:

Frontend: Plain HTML/JS (Vue.js), focused on speed.

Backend: Node.js/Express. The core is ensuring random, fair draws while respecting exclusions.

Data: Events are stored in memory (e.g., Redis) with a TTL (e.g., 14 days) for auto-expiry. This is key—we don’t want to store anything permanently.

Privacy: No analytics (e.g., Google Analytics). Possibly only minimal, anonymized server logs.

Challenge: Ensuring valid matches for all participants while respecting “A cannot get B” constraints (a graph problem, solved with backtracking).

This isn’t a startup. It’s a weekend project solving a specific itch. I think the web needs more of these simple, self-contained tools.

If you need to organize a quick, frictionless Secret Santa this year, give it a try. Technical feedback is welcome.

Link: https://secretsantagenerator.online
by defrost | 2026-01-13 06:43:09+00:00
UPS is as much about smoothing through "glitches" (lights flickering isn't a power outage but it will shutdown a desktop computer / NAS) as it is about power for a 20 minute outage.

Which prompts a question- do you run a server / destop / NAS type system, or are you one of the many phone / tablet / other device users that are already somewhat independant of the power grid being fully on 24/7?

Asking about "remote rural" wasn't about whether people there could afford off grid power of their own, rather it was about the grid quality and delivery for people that live there and rely on it.

Where I am we get relatively few "outages" (minutes without power) but glitches and 20 second outages are common enough in lightning season ( we get a lot of ground strikes compared to other ares of the world ) and the power lines and transformers are surge protected which is seen as glitching on the long arms of the delivery network.
by yojat661 | 2026-01-13 06:43:36+00:00
I have two LG oleds. I turned off a bunch off settings and blocked the LG update url in pihole, set pihole as dns. I just use the tv, without any connected devices. It is pretty responsive, I get 0 ads.
The only inconvenient part is going fully through their god awful settings menu and turning off a bunch of them once.
by usr1106 | 2026-01-13 06:44:38+00:00
I run my personal PauseOS since the early 2000s.

1. My phones are always data offline, except when I use the internet browser to read news or retrieve information. If someone wants to contact me they can send SMS or call.

2. There is no email client configured on my phone.

3. GPS is always off (not so much for pausing reasons, but to maintain orienteering skills and resist surveillance capitalism

I used SymbianOS 2000 - 2014. MeeGo 2007 - 2014. SailfishOS 2014 - now, Android without Google account 2024 - now.
by hobofan | 2026-01-13 06:47:07+00:00
They also raised $10M at that time. I assume there were conditions to that deal and/or the launch didn't really turn the trajectory around and they saw the writing on the wall.

While I admittedly also haven't been using them for quite some time, it's sad to see them shutdown. For me they were the first ones that did web search in AI chat well enough to make AI actually into a useful daily tool.
by gmueckl | 2026-01-13 06:47:09+00:00
I remember running into issues with link-style clickable text in some parts of the UI that was almost unidentifiable as clickable because it stood alone with no similar text in non-link style nearby for reference.

There were other issues that I clearly remember. There was some remarkable jank when moving the mouse cursor across screen borders in a multi-monitor setup. If you were moving towards the edge of the current screen, Windows would under certain circumstances trap the cursor there instead of moving it across the border. I believe this was done to give "hot corners" a bigger mouse target, but that feature was almost completely DoA on desktop.
by solaire_oa | 2026-01-13 06:48:23+00:00
I think this is a fair take (despite the characteristic HN negativity/contrarianism), and succinctly summarizes a point that I was finding hard to articulate while reading the article.

My similar (verbose) take is that seniors will often be able to wield LLMs productively, where good-faith LLM attempts will be the first step, but will be frequently be discarded when they fail to produce the intended results (personally I find myself swearing at the LLMs when they produce trite garbage; output that gets `gco .`-ed immediately- or LLM MR/PRs that get closed in favor of manually accomplishing the prompted task).

Conversely, juniors will often wield LLMs counterproductively, accepting (unbeknown) tech debt that the neither the junior nor the LLM will be able to correct past a given complexity.
by karakoram | 2026-01-13 06:49:28+00:00
BigTech and BigSchool most certainly get you in the door.

You still have to leverage connections at BigSchool and your previous BigTech though, many ex-FANG fail to do this.

People without these obvious advantages should be looking into other industries outside of direct tech. Oil/gas/energy, Supply chain/logistics, Automotive (Ford etc), Retail tech (Walmart Global Tech), and so many other industries where they still need SWEs.

Many people overlook these options. Pay may not be big tech level but being jobless is worse.
by djwide | 2026-01-13 06:50:31+00:00
In 2000, President Bill Clinton famously looked at Beijing’s early internet controls and quipped: “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

So far he’s been proven wrong. The CCP didn’t just contain the internet; it has effectively used the internet as a tool to entrench its control by building a system that fuses chokepoints, platform governance, and punitive enforcement into something like a sovereign information utility. That said, the jury is still out, and Clinton may still be vindicated.

On the one hand, LLMs can be understood as a natural outgrowth of Clinton’s (and Gore’s) internet but it can also be seen as its next evolution. By amplifying individual autonomy, LLMs present significant opportunities for economic growth but in pursuing growth they will also amplify individual agency. Therefore, the Party faces a quandary: pursue a strategy of economic growth and risk an erosion of Party authority or crack down and risk being left behind in the technology of the future.

Full article linked.
by toyg | 2026-01-13 06:50:40+00:00
I actually love the concept. It's effectively like the iMac, except more flexible and serviceable - great for kiosks and shared workstations.

One could also couple it with AR glasses like the XREAL One and have portable computing but more immersive (although it looks a little big for that).

I don't understand the scepticism - surely it's good that we see some experimentation again on the form factor of computing, we cannot just accept that the laptop is all we'll ever get. Yeah, the copy is stupid, but that's just marketing.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-01-13 06:50:48+00:00
Poor obese people aren't working so much they don't have time to cook.

And using numbers to support that idea doesn't work, it actually goes against you. A small (much smaller than most obese people will eat in one sitting) fast food meal costs about an hour of minimum wage! Buying stable calories in cereals where the time to buy and cook them can be amortized into many more servings can be amortized is actually cheaper and also takes less time.

In the US, obesity rates rise as income drops, but it continues to rise beyond the point at which income drops below a full time federal minimum wage income.

It's over-eating and under-exercising. I know this is hard for certain ideologies to accept because it means obesity is not inflicted upon victims against their will and beyond their control. If you really need to minimize their agency and responsibility for their choices you can call it addiction to food and addiction to sedentary lifestyle if it helps.
by sincethiscall | 2026-01-13 06:53:53+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a tool that tracks the performance of stock/crypto predictions made on Twitter (X). Paste a tweet URL, and it tells you the exact ROI since that prediction was posted.

The Problem: Financial influencers delete their wrong calls and retweet their wins. There's no accountability. This tool creates the permanent record.

Tech Stack:

Framework: Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript
AI Parsing: Vercel AI SDK + Google Gemini Flash 2.0
Extracts ticker symbol ($BTC, $NVDA), sentiment (bullish/bearish), and timestamp from tweet text
Regex fallback for rate limit handling
Data Sources:
Yahoo Finance (stocks – historical + real-time)
CoinGecko (crypto prices)
Binance API (crypto historical data)
DexScreener (meme coins/DEX tokens)
Styling: Tailwind CSS + lucide-react icons
Challenges:

Tweet parsing is messy – emojis, slang ("moon", "rekt"), sarcasm. Gemini handles it surprisingly well.
Historical crypto pricing for small-cap tokens is unreliable. DexScreener helps but isn't perfect.
Rate limiting across 4+ APIs required careful orchestration.
Live: https://sincethiscall.com

Would love feedback on the architecture or feature ideas. Code is open source.
by 40four | 2026-01-13 06:53:58+00:00
I’m sure I’m not the only one, but it seriously bothers me, the high ranking discussion and comments under this post about whether or not a model trained on data from this time period (or any other constrained period) could synthesize it and postulate “new” scientific ideas that we now accept as true in the future. The answer is a resounding “no”. Sorry for being so blunt, but that is the answer that is a consensus among experts, and you will come to the same answer after a relatively small mount of focus & critical thinking on the issue of how LLMs & other categories of “AI” work.
by Jess-D | 2026-01-13 06:54:34+00:00
Venngage is an accessible, and intuitive *online visual design platform* that helps individuals, teams, and businesses turn ideas, data, and content into *clear, professional visuals* without needing graphic design skills.

It is widely used to create:
- Infographics
- Reports and whitepapers
- Presentations
- Charts and data visualizations
- Social media graphics
- Internal documents and business visuals

### Why Venngage stands out

- *Easy drag-and-drop editor*
Create visuals quickly using ready-made templates and simple customization tools.

- *AI-powered design assistance*
Venngage includes AI features that help generate layouts, structure content, and speed up the design process, making it easier to go from idea to final visual.

- *Built for communication, not just design*
Ideal for marketing, SEO content, education, HR, internal reports, and business storytelling.

- *Simple data visualization*
Turn complex data into charts and visuals that are easy to understand and remember.

- *Brand and team-friendly*
Helps teams maintain brand consistency and collaborate efficiently.

### Who uses Venngage?

Venngage is used by:
- Marketers and content creators
- Founders and startups
- Educators and trainers
- Consultants and analysts
- Corporate teams and enterprises

Whether you’re explaining a concept, sharing insights, or presenting data, Venngage helps you communicate visually and effectively.
by steve_taylor | 2026-01-13 06:54:54+00:00
When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.

These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
by georgefrowny | 2026-01-13 06:55:14+00:00
Turn on TV: 3 seconds

Roku boots: 10 seconds

Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds

Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)

Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds

Select profile: 3 seconds

Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in

Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)

Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds

Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)

And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it.

At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
by ksec | 2026-01-13 06:56:13+00:00
>If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs.

I dont think the model is that much different if they thought Siri was half decent enough for so long.

Judging from the past 10 years, I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services. When everything else being roughly equal.

Instead of raising price again Paying Apple even more per user, How about we pay the less but throw in Gemini with it?

Apple has been very good, if not the best at picking one side and allowing the others to fight for its contract. They dont want Microsoft to win the AI race, at the same time Apple is increasing the use of Azure just in case. Basically playing the game of leverage at its best. In hindsight probably too well into it they forgot what the real purpose of all these leverage are for, not cost savings but ultimately better quality product.
by neoden | 2026-01-13 06:56:31+00:00
Yes, I get your point and I think your arguments are valid, it's just not the whole story.

The thing about programming languages is that both for their creators and advocates a significant part of motivation to drive is emotions and not the rational necessity alone. Learning a new programming language along with its ecosystem is an investment of time and effort, it is something that our brains mark as important and therefore protected (I'm looking at Rust). Now when AI is going to write all the code, that emotional part might eventually dissolve and move to something else, leaving the question of choice of a programming language much less relevant. Like the list of choices Claude Code shows to you in planning mode: "do you wish to use SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL as a database for your project?" (*picking the "Recommended" option)

That said, I hope that Zig will make it to version 1.0 before AI turns all the tables and sweeps many things away. It might be my bias and I'm wrong and overestimating the irrational part, then I'll be glad to admit my mistake.
by rkomorn | 2026-01-13 06:57:33+00:00
You have the agency to let the person in front of you have a more enjoyable flight without judging them for it.

That is also a decent and unselfish thing to do.

I don't lean back on flights, but I don't consider the person in front of me an asshole for doing it.

Are you talking about agency and not being an asshole, or are you just being selfish about your space?
by Tracnac | 2026-01-13 06:57:45+00:00
Yes, sadly, the one billion dollar mistake… I don’t know why the author took this path. it’s so confusing and immediately raised an issue: https://github.com/z-libs/Zen-C/issues/19
And of course, confusion: https://github.com/z-libs/Zen-C/pull/13#issuecomment-3739722...
Life is already hard, but apparently not for developers, as I see
by riffraff | 2026-01-13 06:57:58+00:00
Congrats and good luck!

If I may ask, do you think you will be able to cope with the lack of willpower once you stop taking the drug?

I don't want to sound dismissive or argumentative, I'm asking out of pure curiosity, forgive me if I sound negative, I'm rooting for people who try to improve their health.
by hans0l074 | 2026-01-13 06:59:08+00:00
IIUC, this is a preview for Claude Max subscribers - I'm not sure we'll find many teachers or students there (unless institutions are offering Max-level enterprise/team subscriptions to such groups). I speculate that most of those who will bother to try this out will be software engineering people. And perhaps they will strengthen this after enough feedback and use cases?
by xelxebar | 2026-01-13 06:59:18+00:00
One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful:

- Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
- Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs;
- Reading articles (e.g. Wikipedia) feels closer to reading a book;
- It even supports JavaScript to a degree!
- The affordances of line-oriented editing carry over nicely.

In particular, when using line-oriented interfaces, it's quite natural to build up a small collection of context-dependent snippets from documentation, source code, sample code, whatever. Putting a small collage of these on the screen is effortless and an experience I do miss with other UI paradigms.

The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!

[0]:https://github.com/edbrowse/edbrowse
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-13 06:59:50+00:00
This is frankly scary. Elon has been thoroughly radicalized. And the US casually talks of invading other nations. We need to reduce defense spending and maybe reduce all money that flows to SpaceX or other Musk companies. Otherwise this merger of the government and corporate power could be a dark future.

Also an interesting note from the comments on that website:

> Yes Heritage Foundation is the same org that developed Reagan’s Star Wars / SDI in the ’80s and more recently wrote Project 2025
by CJefferson | 2026-01-13 06:59:58+00:00
I'd guess it's much less accurate than that.

Part of genetics is pattern matching, and last time I checked I still can't find a model that can correctly solve hard Sudokus (well, assuming you don't pick a coding model that writes a Sudoku solver.. maybe some of them are trying to do genetics by doing correct algorithms), a trivial job if you write a program that is designed to do it.
by physarum_salad | 2026-01-13 07:01:13+00:00
"This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe."

Revive what exactly? There's ASML, IMEC and many others. Then a host of PCB fabs that are expensive but are present and perfectly useful such as Eurocircuits and many others. This project is typical of these conferences where people find it interesting and fun to do things from scratch.

Given the economics, it is not possible for anywhere other than a couple of south east asian countries to be competitive at scale with Chinese manufacturers. This presentation hasn't a hope of replacing that using the methods outlined but it doesn't mean its a waste of time!
by k310 | 2026-01-13 07:01:43+00:00
It's time to end the North American colonialism that's planned, by the creation of the United States of North America, USONA for short.

And in line with the genius of our founders, each member country would have the same number of senators representing it.

Think of it. No immigration problem. Just interstate travel.

As for the shenanigans going on with Greenland, Venezuela, ICE and others, think one very big reason for them all. The Epstein Distraction act. And this will all get worse as the Epstein Event Horizon approaches, very soon. Argentina may get a little crowded with naughty billionaires who have escaped accountability, at a very high price.
by CyberShadow | 2026-01-13 07:02:37+00:00
> Browsers don't let random pages on the internet hit localhost without prompting you anymore

No, that's a Chrome-specific feature that Google added. It is not part of any standard, and does not exist in other browsers (e.g. Safari and Firefox).

> The rest is just code running as your user can talk to code running as your user

No, that assumes that there is only a single user on the machine, and there are either no forms of isolation or that all forms of isolation also use private network namespaces, which has not been how daemons are isolated in UNIX or by systemd. For example, if you were to ever run OpenCode as root, any local process can trivially gain root as well.
by friendzis | 2026-01-13 07:02:41+00:00
> Do you mean “context engineering” is hard to optimize around ? That’s often thought of interchangeably I think,

The so called "context" is part of the prompt.

> we may eventually engineer that aspect to an extent that will be able to much more consistently yield better results across more applied contexts than the “clean code”/“trivial app” dichotomy.

> the amount of work required to coerce non-deterministic models into effectively internalizing that,

That's, essentially, the point here. You write a prompt (or context, or memory, or whatever people want to call it to make themselves feel better), get code out, test the code and get test failures. Now what? Unless the problem is obvious lack of information in the prompt (i.e. something was not defined), there are no methodical ways to patch the prompt in a way that consistently fixes the error.

You can take program code, apply certain analytical rules on it and exhaustively define all the operations, states and side effects the program will have. That might be an extremely hard exercise to do in full, but in the end this is what it means to be analyzable. You can take a reduced set of rules and heuristics and quickly build a general structure of the operations and analyze deficiencies. If you are given a prompt, regardless of how well structured it is, you cannot, by definition, in general tell what the eventual output is going to look like without invoking the full ruleset (i.e. running the prompt through an LLM), therefore average fix of a prompt is effectively a full rewrite, which does not invoke the shortcut I have invoked.
by Quothling | 2026-01-13 07:02:44+00:00
> So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.

This is anecdotal but "people" care quite a lot in the energy sector. I've helped build our own AI Agent pool and roll it out to our employees. It's basically a librechat with our in-house models, where people can easily setup base instruction sets and name their AI's funny things, but are otherwise similar to using claude or chatgpt in a browser.

I'm not sure we're ever going to allow AI's access to filesystems, we barely allow people access to their own files as it is. Nothing that has happened in the past year has altered the way our C level view the security issues with AI in any other direction than being more restrictive. I imagine any business that cares about security (or is forced to care by leglislation) isn't looking at this as a they do cars. You'd have to be very unlucky (or lucky?) to shut down the entire power grid of Europe with a car. You could basically do it with a well placed AI attack.

Ironically, you could just hack the physical components which probably haven't had their firmware updated for 20 years. If you even need to hack it, because a lot of it frankly has build in backdoors. That's a different story that nobody on the C levels care about though.