MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 10:32:56+00:00
Yeah. I've been using Apple products off and on for 47 years and:

a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago.

b. Apple quality varies greatly over time. I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years. People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying. Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo.

c. Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>. Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct. And they seem to hire only sociopaths. Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths. I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them.

Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.
by RyanMu | 2026-01-26 10:33:04+00:00
Coloring pages are everywhere. You can find thousands of PDFs online with animals, princesses, vehicles, mandalas—almost anything. But after making coloring pages for kids in my own family, I noticed a frustrating limitation: traditional coloring pages are not customizable at all.

If a child wants “a dinosaur with glasses,” or “a fire truck with a cat driving,” or if a parent wants a coloring page that matches a bedtime story they just read, the usual workflow is:
search → compromise → print something close enough.

That’s the gap I wanted to solve.

I built a Coloring Pages Generator that lets you generate custom black-and-white, print-ready coloring pages from simple text prompts. Instead of choosing from a fixed library, you describe what you want, and the system generates a clean line-art page designed specifically for coloring (no gray shading, no messy textures).

What makes it different from traditional coloring pages
1. True customization
You’re not limited to predefined themes. You can specify characters, actions, styles, and complexity levels. For example:
“A simple coloring page of a robot baking cookies, for a 5-year-old.”
2. Designed for printing and coloring
Many AI image tools generate images that look nice but are terrible to color. This generator focuses on:
• Clear outlines
• High contrast
• Black-and-white only
• Printable PDF output
3. A growing gallery of community-generated pages
In addition to generating your own pages, users can browse coloring pages created by others. This helps parents, teachers, and educators quickly find ideas, remix prompts, or reuse ready-made pages without starting from scratch.

Who it’s for
• Parents who want personalized activities for their kids
• Teachers looking for themed worksheets
• Story creators who want matching coloring pages
• Anyone tired of generic, one-size-fits-all coloring PDFs

This isn’t meant to replace traditional coloring books—they’re great—but to add flexibility where static content falls short.

I’d love feedback from the HN community, especially around:
• Prompt control vs. simplicity
• Print quality expectations
• Use cases in education

Thanks for reading, and happy to answer questions.
by wlkr | 2026-01-26 10:34:11+00:00
I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.

Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-26 10:35:03+00:00
> If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know.

It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government).

Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.
by roenxi | 2026-01-26 10:35:11+00:00
I mean, you bought up an example of a man being dragged off the streets of the UK for (1) trying to express support for playdough and (2) being suspected of undermining support for genocide.

I have relatives in the UK, right now. And after this conversation I'm now more concerned for them than I was this morning, and I can make some educated guesses about why ol' mate didn't want to talk to you about Pinochet, who Wikipedia suggests died 20 years ago. Sounds like something is going on in the UK right now.

I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?
by imtringued | 2026-01-26 10:36:01+00:00
Back when I used Windows, there were plenty of boot looping updates in Windows Vista, 7 and 10. You had three options. Either you disable Windows Updates, reinstall Windows or find a way to delete or prevent the specific patch that breaks your Windows installation.

On Windows 10 I was forced to disable Windows Updates altogether, because the updates never finished even after running overnight. I have stopped using Windows since 2018.
by silvestrov | 2026-01-26 10:36:29+00:00
I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds.

He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle.

I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
by Archelaos | 2026-01-26 10:36:44+00:00
> The European Union is strictly meant for European countries.

In the (non-binding) "Briefing No 23 Legal questions of enlargement" of the European Parliamentary Research Service, this criteria is described as follows:

The sole material condition laid down by Article O of the TEU is that the applicant must be a 'European State'. There is no unequivocal interpretation of that criterion. It can be read equally well in geographical, cultural or political terms.

In 1987 an application to become a Member of the Communities was received from Morocco. The application was rejected by the Council on the grounds that Morocco was not a European State [...]. In the case of Turkey, Article 28 of the Association Agreement signed in 1963 incudes the option of Turkey's eventually acceding to the Communities. Turkey in fact lodged an application to accede on 14 April 1987. Historically, Turkey has formed part of the so-called 'European concert'. Although part of Turkey's territory is located geographically in Asia, Parliament, the Council and the Commission have confirmed Turkey's eligibility [...]. This example shows that the term 'European State' need not be interpreted in a strictly geographical sense. It is at all events a criterion subject to political assessment.[1]

I would personally add Cyprus to the list. Geographically it is situated in Western Asia, but is considered culturally European.

In this perspective, countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. might be electible for membership. -- And there is always the option that the EU amends or officially clarifies its accession conditions.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/enlargement/briefings/23a2_en...
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-26 10:36:46+00:00
What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control.
This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care less about UK law and are less trustworthy.

I remain upset that they do this without building the necessary infra. They already assert identity when applying for a passport (and they do this very well). If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped. Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. Instead we have this status quo of encouraging UK citizens to hand over their identity documents to dubious third-parties or shifting their traffic from the UK externally to avoid these checks.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-26 10:36:57+00:00
Firefox is only a few percent market share. You are hiring your users for not improving their user experience because it's not compatible with one of the a web browsers on a few percent of people's computers.

Chrome add these features because they are responding to the demands of web developers. It's not web developers fault if firefox can't or refuses to provide apis that are being asked for.

Mozilla could ask Claude to implement the filesystem api today and ship it to everyone tomorrow if they wanted to. They are holding their own browser back, don't let them also hold your website back. In regards to browser monoculture there are many browsers built on top of the open source Blink that are not controlled by Google such as Edge, Brave, and Opera just to name a few of the many.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-26 10:37:26+00:00
I found some interesting tidbit about this bigger issue. And I want to share how to more easily check it.

We many times see some people reporting that they clearly see lower quality LED light flicker and is really distracting to them and even causes them headaches.

Now, I didn't see this until recently (unless in failing lights) in the right conditions. If the light is very, very dim: For instance, only 1 light on in the night, and you are in a division far away from the light so that it's extremely dim. There, I could finally really see it flicker.

I've replaced that light for a better one and the effect went away.
by gampleman | 2026-01-26 10:38:49+00:00
Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me:

- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.

- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).

- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)

- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)

- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).

So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.

But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-26 10:38:55+00:00
The Roman Empire died in 1453 because the Ottoman Turks had gunpowder cannons. I am not anybody predicted that considering the Arabs could have likely finished off the Roman Empire immediately after finishing off the crusader states. The Mongols absolutely could have finished off the Roman Empire but just weren’t interested after bouncing off Palestine. Before that the early Muslims could have finished off the Roman Empire has Khalid Ibn Al Walid not been sacked by his cousin.

With so many near death experiences actually death was challenging to guess at.
by schiffern | 2026-01-26 10:39:13+00:00
Scientific Reports is a junk journal fyi. That's not conclusive, but it is indicative.

Despite claiming the visible flux component is "small" and that the tungsten lamps "were not expected to [be used] as task lamps," Figure 6 (a) and (c) shows... desk lamps set right at the work stations like task lamps! Not only is this experimentally unblinded, but the visible light immediately in front of the test subjects is noticeably brighter and warmer.

What would James Randi do? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," and this ain't it.

Come back after they add a visible light filter on the lamps so they only emit infrared radiation, and have an identical double-blind control with a 60 watt heater bulb so it emits no SWIR but the same radiant heat (which could confound and/or unblind).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 10:39:20+00:00
So effectively truly Private vpn providers have to have an exit from UK. I mean even if say proton says that its not meant for UK but "substantial" people use protonvpn because its private, then they would be forced for the same laws.

Another point is what prevents UK govt or UK bots to sign up for Proton Vpn say themselves and the difference between bots and humans is becoming thin especially for such Private Vpn's and then UK govt comes again knocking asking for age verification.

Honestly makes me feel like UK citizens are hostage in their own countries & we might see more UK IP's being blocked from accessing services because the idea of Virtual private network is still vague in my opinion. One can abstract a sort of VPN on top of xmpp or matrix servers too or even telegram as the intermediate. Would that mean that UK govt would come knocking onto these asking for who created the VPN (suppose I built a VPN which uses telegram to send messages/packets or uses telegram infra, so would they come to telegram asking what is the IP/detail info of my telegram user, would they go to signal or xmpp or matrix providers too? What if I use a provider who colo's on a datacenter and they go to the datacenter asking for access or the company behind datacenter

I am not saying that they would for something so niche but the fact of the matter is that nothing's stopping them from the laws from what I can gather.

They would only have to do it once to instill fear in the masses. I mean technically just this law has instilled fear and I am not even a UK citizen

Someone familiar with UK law please comment on my message but VPN is such a vague term imo. Like at this point you are just targeting private networks or people who meet online in private

VPNs LITERALLY means Virtual "PRIVATE NETWORKS"

What gives the govt right to intercept between two parties communicating in any way (enforcing a condition for one party to have Id of other for age verification etc.)
by Orygin | 2026-01-26 10:39:28+00:00
Where does this article mention LED lights vs other types of artificial light-at-night?
What I could find regarding light color:

> However, most studies relied on satellite-images with a very low resolution (1 to 5 km, from the Defense Meteorological Program [DMSP]) and without information on color of light

> noted that data quality suffered from many limitations due to the types of satellite images used and the focus in the vast majority on visual light levels only rather than considering the circadian-relevant blue light component, among others. Future studies should consider improved satellite-based ALAN technologies with improved resolution and information on spectral bands and apply these technologies to a variety of cancer sites to yield better estimates for the potential risks between ALAN and cancer.

So nothing conclusive about LED being bad for your health (vs other types of light).
by Lerc | 2026-01-26 10:39:40+00:00
One of the very first experiments I did with AI was trying to build a filesystem interface and general API provider. I think the first attempts were with ChatGPT 3.5 . I pretty quickly hit a wall, but Gpt4 got me quite a lot further.

I see the datestamp on this early test https://fingswotidun.com/tests/messageAPI/ is 2023-03-22 Thinking about the progress since then I'm amazed I got as far as I did. (To get the second window to run its test you need to enter aWorker.postMessage("go") in the console)

The design was using IndexedDB to make a very simple filesystem, and a transmittable API

The source of the worker shows the simplicity of it once set up. https://fingswotidun.com/tests/messageAPI/testWorker.js in total is just

importScripts("MessageTunnel.js"); // the only dependency of the worker

onmessage = function(e) {
console.log(`Worker: Message received from main script`,e.data);
if (e.data.apiDefinition) {
installRemoteAPI(e.data.apiDefinition,e.ports[0])
}
if (e.data=="go") {
go();
return;
}
}

async function go() {
const thing = await testAPI.echo("hello world")
console.log("got a thing back ",thing)

//fs is provided by installRemoteAPI
const rootInfo = await fs.stat("/");
console.log(`stat("/") returned `,rootInfo)

// fs.readDir returns an async iterator that awaits on an iterator on the host side
const dir = await fs.readDir("/")
for await (const f of dir) {
const stats = await fs.stat("/"+f.name);
console.log("file " +f,stats)
}

}

I distinctly remember adding a Serviceworker so you could fetch URLs from inside the filesystem, so I must have a more recent version sitting around somewhere.

It wouldn't take too much to have a $PATH analog and a command executor that launched a worker from a file on the system if it found a match existed on the $PATH. Then a LLM would be able to make its own scripts from there.

It might be time to revisit this. Polishing everything up would probably be a piece of cake for Claude.
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 10:40:02+00:00
But there is! ChatGPT.com has a canvas feature, and that can be used to render HTML and javascript, including UI controls. It's pretty neat, albeit limited.

Generated via ChatGPT, this canvas shows a basic pyramid and has sliders that you can use to change the pyramid, and download the glTF to your local machine. You can also click the edit w/ ChatGPT and tweak the UI however you're able to prompt it into doing.

https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/697743f616d4819184aef28e70...
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 10:40:07+00:00
I've been met with that kind of stone walling before too, you know what eventually worked to actually turn the position of a local councilwoman? Going to her office and demand to speak with her, then sitting down, listening and having a conversation with her. Turns out that most of the emails "she" wrote to me was written by an assistant "to save her time" and she weren't aware of the points I was trying to bring up. Granted, this was like one and half decade ago, but if I was met with something similar today I'd try the same thing.

People tend to be a lot more reasonable in person, and also if you listen to them first.
by gytisgreitai | 2026-01-26 10:41:07+00:00
So perhaps don’t use kafka at all? E.g. Adyen used postgresql [1] as a queue until the outgrew.
In this case it seems there are a lot of things that can go south in case of major issue on the event pipeline. Unless the throughput is low.. but then why kafka?

[1] https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/design-to-duty-adyen-arc...
by blixt | 2026-01-26 10:41:12+00:00
Since AI became capable of long-running sessions with tool calls, one VM per AI as a service became very lucrative. But I do think a large amount of these can indeed run in the browser, especially all the ones that essentially just want to live-update and execute code, or run shells on top of a mounted file system. You can actually do all of this in the user's browser very efficiently. There are two things you lose though: collaboration (you can do it, but it becomes a distributed problem if you don't have a central server) and working in the background (you need to pause all work while the user's tab is suspended or closed).

So if you can work within the constraints there are a lot of benefits you get as a platform: latency goes down a lot, performance may go up depending on user hardware (usually more powerful than the type of VM you'd use for this), bandwidth can go down significantly if you design this right, and your uptime and costs as a platform will improve if you don't need to make sure you can run thousands of VMs at once (or pay a premium for a platform that does it for you)[1]

All that said I'm not sure trying to put an entire OS or something like WebContainers in the user's browser is the way, I think you need to build a slightly custom runtime for this type of local agentic environment. But I'm convinced it's the best way to get the smoothest user experience and smoothest platform growth. We did this at Framer to be able to recompile any part of a website into React code at 60+ frames per second, which meant less tricks necessary to make the platform both feel snappy and be able to publish in a second.

[1] For big model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic there's an interesting edge they have in that they run a tremendous amount of GPU-heavy loads and have a lot of CPUs available for this purpose.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 10:41:42+00:00
Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows.

But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)

Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-26 10:41:43+00:00
Same article also says the bill includes a ban on social media for users under 16, like Australia. Pretty dramatic change.

Meanwhile the government and official accounts continue to use X even as they're trying to ban it. Mixed messaging.

Lead proponent of the VPN ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash; he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies again, the dead hand of Thatcherism.
by m000 | 2026-01-26 10:42:07+00:00
ICJ is definitely a legit source. But it also looks biased to cite only one of the two sides as untrustworthy, and choose the one which actually agrees with the legit source for the specific case.

I don't claim the bias was deliberate. The point is that we have internalized having to conform with the narrative of western (elite) interests, which in this case is to exert control on the region, resources and trade routes.