MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-17 20:54:36+00:00
The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.

There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.
by marcyb5st | 2026-01-17 20:54:39+00:00
I think the flaw in your thinking is that you assume the US is self-sufficient. If that was the case there would be a very small trade deficit and given the sherade about tariffs early last year, this is not the case (IMHO).

As an external person which is actually benefitting from Trump's shanenigans (I am paid in CHF, which are worth more and more as they are considered probably the safest currency there is) I think the current US Administration wants to thread the needle by devaluating the currency enough that debt becomes manageable and exports benefit from a weak USD while remaining the reserve currency.

However, I also believe that for this plan to work you shouldn't alienate your closest allies as they will go trade elsewhere, impose tariffs on you, or trade in Yuans just to spite you. So you are left with a weak currency that is not as important anymore and basically unchanged exports.
by rmason | 2026-01-17 20:54:54+00:00
The story talks about Dearborn which is adjacent to Detroit but not part of the city. However as Detroit underwent its well publicized bankruptcy fifteen years ago one of the benefits was turning back on the city's streetlights. The entire system was updated at that time and one of the benefits cited was they were spending the extra money so that they could easily add EV charging. To my knowledge it was never implemented, even on a trial basis.

Instead the governor spent millions repaving a short stretch of road that could recharge EV's. But most EV's couldn't make use of it and its such a short stretch of road you couldn't easily get any meaningful recharge.
by aappleby | 2026-01-17 20:55:02+00:00
I'm sure the authors believe they are saying something important, but there is absolutely nothing concrete referenced by this "manifesto". No prior art, no examples, nothing actually specific to "computing".

I'm not trying to be harsh - I do agree with their five bullet points - but as written it's all romanticism and no practicality.

For comparison, here's a bullet point I'd put on my own "manifesto":

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Feeds must be finite, relevant, and consumable.

A "feed" - a regularly updated list of content that the user is interested in - is in principle a great way to spread information and connect people to authors and creators.

As they are currently implemented though, they are biased towards maximizing "addiction" instead of productivity. Endless feeds that mix slop and advertising along with the occasional nugget of relevance encourage only endless scrolling in the hope that there will be another hit of dopamine on the next page.

Ethical feeds should follow a few main guidelines:

1. The number of items in the feed should match the number of items generated by the feed's sources. No inserting "You might be interested in..." articles between feed items. No inline sponsored advertisements. No random unrelated news clippings selected for maximum engagement. No clickbait short videos or misleading "one weird tricks" allowed. The feed must be allowed to run dry.

2. All feed items must be viewable in chronological order with no duplications or omissions. If my feed is backed by 50 sources, then my viewing tool must fetch the latest items from all sources and sort them by date. Omitting or reordering "small" items like "We just had a baby!" because some algorithm predicts that they would be less impactful than "Apple releases new MacOS27" is forbidden.

3. All feed items must be easily "consumable". If I mark an item as "read", it must never show up in my feed again. If I save it to some collection of important notes, it should never show up in my feed again . I must always be able to get to the feed equivalent of "inbox zero" without doing anything other than starting at the top and scrolling to the bottom. I should never have to chase my feed across multiple pages or tabs to read it completely.

----------

The above is an actionable, opinionated definition of how feeds "should work", and the requirements are sufficiently clear to determine whether any particular piece of software obeys these rules.

That, to me, is a useful manifesto. Perhaps too far on the practical side, but I'm an inherently practical dude.
by frizlab | 2026-01-17 20:55:30+00:00
I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me, joy. I spent a little more than an afternoon writing a parser to parse a new ad-hoc file format I created to represent the IDs (class and ID) I will use in my CSS, and it was just fun. Sure some AI could probably have written that for me, but for what? So I can dig directly back into complicated actual engineering issues? Where would my breaks be?
by andrewflnr | 2026-01-17 20:55:42+00:00
Someone who says there are too many meetings is probably actually saying they are having bad meetings. If they got value from those meetings, they wouldn't be complaining. So there is likely still a problem to address.

Also, as a somewhat trivial side note, an instinctive reaction to not getting the clarity you need from a meeting is to ask for another meeting. So even if the optimal level of meetings is annoyingly high, bad meetings will probably push the level of (bad) meetings even higher. So you'll still actually have "too many" meetings.
by coldtea | 2026-01-17 20:56:03+00:00
>And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.

>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.

I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"

It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.
by probably_wrong | 2026-01-17 20:56:10+00:00
My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.

My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-01-17 20:56:22+00:00
The deal allows up to 70,000 cars a year by 2030 to be imported at the reduced tariff. Canadians buy 1.5-2 million cars per year, and roughly a quarter million EVs per year.

If this deal as reported somehow manages to doom the Canadian auto industry, then our auto industry was probably somehow doomed anyways.
by anonymars | 2026-01-17 20:57:07+00:00
There was a post, I think on the Uber engineering blog, that stuck with me. It essentially boiled down to: it's easier to change the tech stack than the hiring pool, and talked about deliberately setting something up that was technically less optimal but easier to hire for

Corollary: it's perhaps easier to throw money at fancier hardware to improve performance than the alternatives
by AstroBen | 2026-01-17 20:57:22+00:00
> The customer might be able to do it themselves

Have you ever paid for software? I have, many times, for things I could build myself

Building it yourself as a business means you need to staff people, taking them away from other work. You need to maintain it. It's not the norm that that's going to be good ROI

No matter how good these tools get, they can't read your mind. It takes real work to get something production ready and polished out of them
by EEBio | 2026-01-17 20:57:25+00:00
But the 18th century artist who did portraits and wedding paintings is the today’s (wedding) photographer.

Does it take less money to commission a single wedding photo rather than a wedding painting? Yes. But many more people commission them and usually in tens to hundreds, together with videos, etc.

An 18th century wedding painter wasn’t in the business of paintings, but in the business of capturing memories and we do that today on much larger scale, more often and in a lot of different ways.

I’d also argue more landscape painters exist today than ever.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-17 20:57:36+00:00
> “There are too many meetings” At very large software companies, programming ability, technical expertise, and raw resources are not the limiting factors. Coordination is.

In my opinion there exist much more efficient ways for coordination: for example, write down some really good documentation and explanations that are then read by the other stakeholders, so that these, at the end, also have a very deep knowledge about the topic.

Nearly all employees have studied at a university, so the people are very used to writing texts (papers, seminar papers, lecture notes, thesis, ...).

In my experience the reason for too many meetings is rather that many managers love meetings.

--

> “There is too much process and bureaucracy” [...] At a very large software company, the software matters. It may be relied on by millions of people. It may underpin businesses, infrastructure, or daily life. It may not be particularly glamorous software but it has to work. It has to keep working. Failure is not charming, and recovery is not always cheap. [...] Process exists to manage risk, correctness, and scale. Calling it “too much process” without acknowledging the stakes involved is like criticizing a bridge for having too many safety checks because you once built a treehouse with a hammer and some nails.

This is one reason. Other common reasons for so much process and bureaucracy are

- Many managers love processes, because they can "hide" their failures behind processes, and introducing new processes and bureaucracy lets the manager pretend that he is doing something to solve the problems that plague the department.

- Many processes and bureaucracy are simply demanded by the legislature when you work in some heavily regulated industry. These legal demands often don't make sense.
by paulpauper | 2026-01-17 20:57:55+00:00
Here’s another hypothesis: Maybe Americans are down in the dumps because their perception of the “good life” is being warped by TikTok and Instagram.

Pundits who say say this probably never use social media much, or their social media usage is limited to Twitter. The vast majority of Facebook/Instagram/TikTok users are not famous or celebrities. Given the massive popularity of those platforms, we would expect the average user to be as successful as the median American, which is to say, a far cry from being wealthy or super-successful. Follow a hundred of so random people on Instagram or TikTok, and how many Google or AI employes are you going to find among them? Likely none, compared to Twitter , where everyone seems super-successful on there.
by dangus | 2026-01-17 20:57:56+00:00
I have always found the American perspective on this subject annoying precisely because of the crazy emissions and consumption per capita in the US.

It feels like US citizens intentionally or not gatekeep wealth, and do nothing policy-wise about the unsustainable consumption patterns besides going to war for oil.

No serious attempt to increase transit ridership, no serious attempt to electrify the automotive industry, no serious attempt to build a domestic renewable energy production pipeline, no serious attempt to curb suburban sprawl, no economic disincentive on single use items like fast food packaging, no serious effort to move public health education toward healthy low carbon diets (less red meat, less dairy from cows), no corporate-level disincentives to waste (e.g., companies throwing out returned items when it’s cheaper), no serious effort to move to high efficiency construction and HVAC practices.

The list goes on and on. In the American perspective other counties like China are at fault for everything despite being the world’s foremost consumer of resources and one of the biggest ideological sticks in the mud for progress.
by PlanksVariable | 2026-01-17 20:58:05+00:00
The number of Canadians of Asian descent shifted from 1:75 to almost 1:4 in the past fifty years. While Trump’s policies are a factor here, there’s a demographic factor as well. Many Canadians, especially younger Canadians, have stronger cultural ties to Asia than America or Europe, and this trend will continue to play out in the years ahead.
by bluebarbet | 2026-01-17 20:58:18+00:00
Purely anecdotal, but every house I have ever visited in the Netherlands and Scandinavia has been properly heated and above all insulated. Which is absolutely not the case for the UK and even less so for France and countries further "south". If you want to be cold indoors in Europe, spend a winter in Spain, Portugal, Italy or Greece. Here I speak with some experience.
by mantas | 2026-01-17 20:58:32+00:00
Maybe lift all the green deal stuff on our own farmers while at it? Let’s make it a fair competition.

What’s next, let in shitty US food?

I don’t see general public welcoming it. Most people don’t seem to even know about it. Out of those who do know, many don't seem to be happy about it.

Also, fucking over our farmers in unstable world does not seem like a smart thing to do. It’s time to do opposite and double-down on sovereignty on all fronts. And food sovereignty was one of very few sectors where EU got it right. Our food is not cheap, but we got plenty locally and quality is pretty good.
by lumost | 2026-01-17 20:58:36+00:00
China is the only vertically integrated economy left. In a multipolar/bifurcated/low trade world they will be the strongest.

The NAFTA/EU trade blocks were extraordinarily strong, this Greenland business is exactly the kind of issue which can shatter the entire block. It benefits no one to give Greenland to the US, so they won’t do it without a fight. It provides no benefit to the US to take it.

The only thing that would really be settled by the US annexing another country on a presidents whim is the formal end of the U.S. separation of powers.
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 20:58:45+00:00
I searched for clawdbot on HN and none of these entries had any comments or upvotes. On the other hand, in the Reddit world and on X, https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot has an insane following. And I learned about it from a recent episode in Jessica/Sam Lessin's podcast (More or Less Podcast).

Why the lack of love for this tool?
<tinfoil>Deliberate mass-downvoting by the AI-powers-that-be?</tinfoil>
Are these category of "wrapper toolsets considered too pedestrian for the high-minded CS fundamentalists?
Or were all the submissions made at inopportune times and they each got buried under the ocean of me-too entries.

I'm gonna go off on a little tangent here...

<rant>
This is not the first time I have seen such a wide gap in what the HN audience values and what the rest of the tech-friendly world gravitates towards.

It is depressing that so many awesome / interesting submissions don't see the light of the day in HN and yet so many of us are so hooked onto HN because we have formed this collective sentiment that HN represents last true gating from the tech elite about what merits a discussion (or adoption) and what doesn't.

I agree many of us come to HN and go straight for the discussions because more often than not these are intellectually much richer than the story / demo itself.

I am really hoping YC has plans to improve the discoverability aspect without sacrificing gating quality.

I am looking forward to the irony of this getting zero up-votes and zero comments :D
</rant>
by dh2022 | 2026-01-17 21:00:54+00:00
It looks like the behavior of EU governments contradict what you wrote. Germany is not selling off Ukraine (last week Merz re-affirmed full support for Ukraine's security)

And the US are now being hated by Europeans. Supporting Donnie's latest lunacy is not a winning political move in EU. For example, France, Germany, and Sweden sent troops in Greenland to protect against US, all those US boosters in their governments be damned.

So I think what I wrote makes sense: EU will distance itself from US and will be able to protect itself against Russia. It helps EU that today's Russian military is not the one from 1943/44/45 - but it is the one from 1918 (corrupt and ineptly led).
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-17 21:01:13+00:00
The pattern I've noticed building tooling for accountants: automation rarely removes jobs, it changes what the job looks like.

The bookkeepers I work with used to spend hours on manual data entry. Now they spend that time on client advisory work. The total workload stayed the same - the composition shifted toward higher-value tasks.

Same dynamic played out with spreadsheets in the 80s. Didn't eliminate accountants - it created new categories of work and raised expectations for what one person could handle.

The interesting question isn't whether developers will be replaced but whether the new tool-augmented developer role will pay less. Early signs suggest it might - if LLMs commoditise the coding part, the premium shifts to understanding problems and systems thinking.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-17 21:01:56+00:00
> It's not clear what it means to "challenge users to reflect and evaluate"

In childhood education, you're developing complex thinking pathways in their brains. (Or not, depending on quality of education)

The idea here isn't to corral their thinking along specific truths, as it sounds like you're interpreting it, but rather to foster in them skills to explore and evaluate multiple truths.

That's doable with current technology because the goal is truth-agnostic. From a sibling comment's suggestion, simply asking LLMs to also come up with counterfactuals produces results -- but that isn't their default behavior / system prompt.

I'd describe the Brookings and GP recommendation in terms of adjusting teenager/educational LLMs by lessening their assumption of user correctness/primacy.

If a user in that cohort asks an LLM something true, it would still help their development for an LLM to also offer counterfactuals as part of its answer.
by metalman | 2026-01-17 21:02:10+00:00
the current deal is for 45000 cars, which they think will be all sold in 90 days or less, then there is mention of BYD building a plant in Canada, with whatever balance of imports and domestic production gets agreed on, so there is room and time for something like Autopact with China

Nova Scotia here, off grid, realy want to build a new bigger solar pv set up with sodium batteries, and design for whole house, shop, and car charging.
Time for that is looking like now!
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-17 21:03:40+00:00
They've literally been doing it for over 50 years at this point while winning races, respectfully I think you overestimate the intelligence of the average voter.

There's a significant percentage of voters who will believe, no matter what, that what's going on right now is the fault of the Democrats. Hell, Federal agents are killing people in the streets on camera and a significant percentage of the population is OK with it.
Show HN: RoastDB – A searchable database of 3,800 specialty coffee beans
by moabdelkader | 2026-01-17 21:03:50+00:00
Hi HN! We built RoastDB (https://roastdb.com) – think Discogs for specialty coffee. A searchable index of beans from independent roasters around the world.

*The problem*

We got into specialty coffee gradually. Whenever we tried something we liked — a washed Colombian, a natural Ethiopian — we'd save the bag. At some point we had drawers of empty coffee bags we couldn't bring ourselves to throw away.

Our flow was simple: go to a cafe we liked, drink coffee, buy a bag of whatever they were roasting or stocking. Over time we started noticing patterns — we kept reaching for naturals, for East African origins, for anything with fruity notes. We'd try to seek out similar beans next time. Occasionally we'd fall in love with something and start reordering it online.

But discovery was limited to the few roasters we already knew. There was no easy way to find out that a roaster across town — or in another country — had something we were going to love. We knew great coffee existed out there. We just had no map.

So we built one. RoastDB currently indexes 3,800+ beans from 420+ roasters — and growing every week. Search by origin, process, variety, tasting notes. Save beans you want to try. When you find something, you buy directly from the roaster — we're a discovery engine, not a store.

*How it works*

The hardest part isn't the scraping — it's finding roasters worth indexing. We spend a lot of time hunting for quality third-wave roasters: browsing coffee forums, following competition results, exploring roasters in new cities. The selection is the real work.

Once we've found a roaster, the pipeline runs on a €5/month Hetzner VPS:

1. Scrapers fetch product pages from roaster websites

2. LLMs extract structured data (origin, variety, processing, price, tasting notes)

3. Normalization cleans up inconsistencies ("Äthiopien" → "Ethiopia", "84,25" → 84.25)

4. Non-English descriptions get translated

5. Deduplication scores beans and merges duplicates

6. Human review via an admin dashboard before publishing

The scrapers rerun weekly with content hashing — we only re-extract pages that actually changed, which keeps the data fresh without burning through API costs.

We built an internal tool that gamifies the review process, making it easier to keep up with new beans. And we control the whole pipeline through a Telegram bot — kick off scrapes, approve costs, get notified of failures, all from our phones.

The web app is Next.js + SQLite. The database file is ~15MB and serves directly from disk, no complexity.

*Feedback welcome*

- Roasters we should add (especially outside Europe)

- Filter combinations that would be useful

- Anything broken or confusing
Show HN: ChunkHound, a local-first tool for understanding large codebases
by NadavBenItzhak | 2026-01-17 21:03:52+00:00
ChunkHound’s goal is simple: local-first codebase intelligence that helps you pull deep, core-dev-level insights on demand, generate always-up-to-date docs, and scale from small repos to enterprise monorepos — while staying free + open source and provider-agnostic (VoyageAI / OpenAI / Qwen3, Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Grok, and more).

I’d love your feedback — and if you have, thank you for being part of the journey!
by debarshri | 2026-01-17 21:03:52+00:00
The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and the new reality for startups.
by reactordev | 2026-01-17 21:04:27+00:00
But if you attest that your computer system is not accessible by any passersby in order to pass compliance, is that not also a crime? If it is indeed accessible to just anyone? HIPAA law violations and all that

I’m not arguing the person who stole didn’t commit a crime - just a lesser one than actually breaking in, cracking a safe, and making off with the jewels. I think the CEO and executive staff are culpable.