MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simontheHWguy | 2026-01-05 18:40:48+00:00
That’s a great story about the Monolith.

To answer your question: My primary goal right now is simply reliable, high fidelity data collection. However, I think neurofeedback is a fascinating application. I’ve been interested in eventually mixing this tech with tACS in a closed loop control system to train the brain to enter specific mental states.

Regarding the MonolithEEG, it's wild to look back at that tech. It is a shame it was limited to 2 channels at 10 bit resolution, but it was a pioneer. With the ADS1299, we are now getting 24 bit resolution across 8 channels. That difference in dynamic range makes a huge difference, especially for precision applications like SSVEP where the noise floor really matters.
by flanbiscuit | 2026-01-05 18:40:59+00:00
Nice to see other fellow Western NC folks commenting here, I'm in Asheville. I did not know about all of these text only version of major news sites. I'm going to bookmark them.

What saved us from a news deficit after Helene was that we had 2 portable AM/FM radios. Both of the radios took batteries and one of them you could even charge via a hand crank. I highly recommend having a portable AM/FM radio of some kind. Blue Ridge Public Radio (our local NPR) was amazing during this time. Their offices are located right in downtown, which never lost power, so they were able to keep operating immediately after the storm.

I also feel this pain of bloated sites taking forever to load when I'm traveling. I'm on an old T-Mobile plan that I've had since around 2001 that comes with free international roaming in 215+ countries. The only problem is that it's a bit throttled. I know that I could just buy a prepaid SIM, or now I can use an eSIM vendor like Saily, but I'm too cheap and/or the service is just good enough that I'm willing to wait the few extra seconds. Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin helps some, but not enough (also I just switched to iPhone last month). I've definitely been on websites that take forever to load because there's just so much in the initial payload, sometimes painfully slow. I don't think enough developers are testing their sites using the throttling options in the dev tools.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-05 18:41:14+00:00
If I met a paranoid schizophrenic and decided to spend the next few months building up a relationship with him and confirming all his delusions (yes, you're special with divine powers, yes your family and friends are all spying on you and trying to spiritually weaken you, here's how they're doing it, by the way you have to do whatever it takes to stop them, etc) I would expect to be charged with something if he then went and killed someone. However, when Sam Altman manages to do this at scale by automating it so it's now possible to validate hundreds of thousands of paranoid schizophrenics' delusions at the same time, it's fine because it's just part of the cost of innovation and we need to keep treading lightly with regulation, never mind actually charging any executives with anything. Funny how that works.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-05 18:41:30+00:00
It would start off with a complete boycott of anything US made and that will result in a lot of irreversible damage.

This is a path to madness and I'm really surprised that there are no saner heads in the US putting a stop to this before it gets even further out of control. I'm even more surprised at how many people in the US support this, either tacitly or even outright.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-05 18:42:13+00:00
> It seems from the reports many people are being affected

I think the rapid scale and growth of ChatGPT are breaking a lot of mental models about how common these occurrences are.

ChatGPT's weekly active user count is twice as large as the population of the United States. More people use ChatGPT than Reddit. The number of people using ChatGPT on a weekly basis is so massive that it's hard to even begin to understand how common these occurrences are. When they happen, they get amplified and spread far and wide.

The uses of ChatGPT and LLMs are very diverse. Calling for a shutdown of long conversations if they don't fit some pre-defined idea of problem solving is just not going to happen.
Show HN: Vector Defense – retro tower defense game
by michaelteter | 2026-01-05 18:42:51+00:00
Vector Defense is a retro vector graphics style tower defense game for desktop web browsers.

This was a holiday "weekend" project. I wanted to recreate some of the fun I had in the past with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDefense and one other (Android?) game that may predate GeoDefense, but which was fixed grid and placement.

Creation Details

I "wrote" this in English. 99% of my development came from carefully articulated directions and requests from me to Gemini 3 (usually planning mode, in Antigravity IDE). Music is also AI generated via Suno.com, from my prompts. SFX are samples from Pixabay.com (others' contributions).

Most of my direct code editing has been in the form of defining consts and const data structures, then telling Gemini how I want those used (rules, game logic). I have done virtually all of the (play)testing, because at this point I find the Antigravity web browser driver experience way too slow and unreliable. If I were turning this into a professional, long term project, I would do a refactor review with my own eyes on code, define some strategies, and then direct the agent(s) to execute.

Maps, ship and tower shapes, and other visible/audible choices are my own (which is why they are quite simple for now... I'll probably make changes to the shapes in time).

Feedback

Please let me know what you think: what do you like, what do you hate, what would make it more fun, etc. I'll continue work on it until I think it's polished enough to release on one of the free web gaming sites.

Next Features

A help guide! Not all the mechanics and options are obvious. And I'm being asked to make a high score chart (public/global), so that's probably next. I also want to provide a map building tool so players can share and enjoy each others' ideas. These won't all happen soon; I have other projects waiting.

Work

I'm looking for a good employment (or contract) opportunity. Of the myriad titles I would potentially take, Forward Deployed Engineer sounds most interesting to me at this point in my career. I love putting beneficial tools and technology into environments where it can make a big impact (especially reducing pain, suffering, and tedium from others' work lives).
by gf000 | 2026-01-05 18:43:13+00:00
> No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output

But.. why? How many WM is feasible to have? Is it really an area where we want a "wide waist"? Should a WM be its own thing? Why not just make it an extension/plugin of a desktop environment, and have only a few of the latter? Being a library call is more efficient and easier to maintain, over maintaining an IPC API (especially that with X, X is just a dumb proxy to the compositor).

> And it shows in complexity and even in power use

You surely mean that X is more complex and has a higher power use, right?
by alwillis | 2026-01-05 18:43:20+00:00
There's an X thread where Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows his workflow of running 5 CC agents in the terminal using 5 tabs while running 10-15 instances of CC on the web [1] and how he moves projects from the terminal to the web and vice versa.

[1]: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177
by goldenshale | 2026-01-05 18:43:26+00:00
Of course they want to hide the data. The public freaks out with absurd claims about it being the fault of a chat bot when someone does something crazy. Humans need to remain 100% accountable for their own actions, and we should stop with this post-modern, social construction nonsense that pretends we are all like ping-pong balls just bouncing around between external forces.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-05 18:43:28+00:00
Why does "database" is surveys like this not include DuckDB and SQLite, which are great [1] embedded answers to Clickhouse and PostgreSQL. Both are excellent and useful databases; DuckDB's reasonable syntax, fast vectorized everything, and support for ingesting the hairiest of data as in-DB ETL make me reach for it first these days, at least for the things I want to do.

Why is it that in "I'm a serious database person" circles, the popular embedded databases don't count?

[1] Yes, I know it's not an exact comparison.
by furtimmodus | 2026-01-05 18:43:43+00:00
Furtim Modus | Hiring Java Developer (Full-Time) | NYC (HYBRID) | https://www.furtimmodus.com/software-engineer

We are currently seeking a talented and driven Java Developer to join our team full-time. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute your skills and expertise to a fintech venture with emphasis in capital markets tech based out of the New York City and in exchange we’ll provide you with base comp $125k-200k, full benefits, cash bonus, and equity.

Requirements:

- Electronic trading server-side software development experience

- Experience in Open Source technologies such as Aeron Transport, Aeron Cluster, Aeron Archive, Artio, Agrona, or CoinTossX is a big plus

- Experience with Adaptive Hydra trading platform is a big plus

Benefits:

- Flexible hybrid schedule to accommodate other commitments

- Collaborative and supportive team environment

- Relocation assistance to NYC Metro area

If you are passionate about Java development and interested in joining a fintech venture, we would love to hear from you. Please submit your resume if interested to agency@furtimmodus.com in this opportunity.

----------

Furtim Modus | Hiring DevOps Engineer (Full-Time) | NYC (HYBRID) | https://www.furtimmodus.com/devops-engineer

We are currently seeking a talented and driven DevOps Engineer to join our team full-time. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute your skills and expertise to a fintech venture with emphasis in capital markets tech based out of the New York City and in exchange we’ll provide you with base comp $125k-$175k, full benefits, cash bonus, and equity.

Requirements:

- Electronic trading DevOps engineering experience

Plus:

- Experience in Open Source technologies such as Aeron Transport, Aeron Cluster, Aeron Archive, Artio, Agrona, or CoinTossX is a big plus

- Experience with Adaptive Hydra trading platform is a big plus

Benefits:

- Flexible hybrid schedule to accommodate other commitments

- Collaborative and supportive team environment

- Relocation assistance to NYC Metro area

If you are passionate about DevOps engineering and interested in joining a fintech venture, we would love to hear from you. Please submit your resume if interested to agency@furtimmodus.com in this opportunity.
by ackyshake | 2026-01-05 18:43:50+00:00
> Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple.

Yeah, but I doubt that would change much; the amount of damage done would be difficult to roll back. What do you think Apple is going to do for the next macOS: "Look we told you to design all these extra icons last year. Guess what, this year we want you to remove them."

I just can't imagine that happening. This is the fundamental thing that is wrong with this. They had the OSes in beta for a few months, barely listened to feedback, and now we're stuck with the damage. For how many more OS iterations?

I really wish they had at least macOS in a different cycle than iOS (and with the idiotic year version names, they've brazenly signed themselves up for the yearly schedules.) I really couldn't care less about what damage they do to iOS after iOS 7, but I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe and I won't do so until they roll this design back entirely...which I don't see happening.

Maybe I'm just pessimistic about Apple at this point but I feel like no amount of criticism is going to change their design trajectory now, unless it affects their bottom-line.
by kjellsbells | 2026-01-05 18:44:20+00:00
IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.

Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.
by lysace | 2026-01-05 18:44:34+00:00
I'm probably not 100% up to date with their progress (feel free to educate me/us), but to me Tailscale seems perfect for a small startup of highly competent people but has the risk of falling apart catastrophically when you grow and hire people who maybe aren't.

I just use the free version at home. The mere existence of this tool feels a bit like validation of my skepticism.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-05 18:44:38+00:00
FWIW (and this is IMHO of course) DuckDB makes working with random JSON much nicer than SQLite, not least because I can extract JSON fields to dense columnar representations and do it in a deterministic, repeatable way.

The only thing I want out of DuckDB core at this point is support for overriding the columnar storage representation for certain structs. Right now, DuckDB decomposes structs into fields and stores each field in a column. I'd like to be able to say "no, please, pre-materialize this tuple subset and store this struct in an internal BLOB or something".
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-05 18:45:10+00:00
> And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways.

It's important that you have relationships with your boss's boss. Some organizations call these skip-level 1-1s, other times it's just riding with your boss's boss in the car. This also is not politicking or CYA.

The reason is that managers are fallible, and when you have a relationship with your boss's boss, it helps get things back on track when someone (you, your boss, or your boss's boss) makes a mistake.

Getting back to the point: If you get a dressing down from your manager, your relationship with your boss's boss helps you know if you deserve it, or your manager made a mistake and your boss's boss has to intervene.

---

Quite tangible: A few weeks ago my manager gave me a dressing down. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with the CEO where he told me I was 100% in the right, so my manager was basically putting his foot in his mouth the entire time they gave me the dressing down. It's interesting to see where the situation is going to go, because everyone (me, the CEO, and everyone else in the company) really respects my manager and wants to continue working with them in a non-managerial role.
Show HN: Stagify – Virtual staging in seconds with AI
by Timrael | 2026-01-05 18:45:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the solo founder of Stagify, a virtual staging tool I’ve been building over the past ~3 months.

You can try it directly on the landing page without creating an account. The demo lets you upload a photo and generate staged results (up to 9 generations). Demo images are watermarked.

What’s different from other tools I tried:
- Unlimited generations per uploaded photo
- Instructions that apply to all generations, plus fine-tuning of a specific result
- Image annotations (draw on the photo) instead of text-only instructions

It’s aimed at realtors, real estate photographers, and investors.

Current state: a few paying users, a few thousand images processed. Main limitations are typical AI image issues like occasional hallucinations or imperfect instruction following.

I built everything myself (backend, image pipeline, infra), except the visual design.

Happy to answer questions and would appreciate feedback, especially from people who work with real estate photos or image editing tools.
by pjaoko | 2026-01-05 18:45:20+00:00
> It's a source of stress to add a class to the system with a simple, short and readable name and have to worry it is used someplace else.

That is the whole point of CSS classes: re-use. A CSS class is not meant to be used in only one very specific place. For that, you can select an element's ID or an elements HTML path, to style just that one thing.
by nithish95 | 2026-01-05 18:45:35+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA Remote: Yes (also Hybrid / On-Site)
Willing to Relocate: Yes

Employment Type: Full-Time / Contract

Technologies: Golang, Python, C/C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Dart, Flutter, Next.js, Vue.js, Tailwind, Schadcn, AWS (IAM's, Lambda, API gateway, Amplify, S3, Apprunner, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Rekognition), Docker, Kubernetes, LangChain, PyTorch, Redis, SQLite, DynamoDB, Supabase, CI/CD, GitHub Actions/Workflows, REST APIs, WebSockets, Postman, Git

Portfolio/Résumé: portfolio.nithish.net

Email: nithish952001@gmail.com

I’m a Software Developer / AI Engineer with over 3 years of experience building scalable, user-focused systems.
Seeking a full-time role to leverage my skills in building innovative, high-impact solutions. Open to remote opportunities or relocation to tech hubs in the USA.
by pembrook | 2026-01-05 18:45:36+00:00
How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche.

It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world.

I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum.

Please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how "original" it actually is.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-05 18:45:37+00:00
The available data indicates that you're wrong. You *think* you know, you don't.

Would it be acceptable to not belt your kids because you have faith in your driving skills? (And never mind that the one time in my life where a seat belt mattered was when I was essentially PITted by someone who didn't look left. I walked away with nothing but a pulled muscle and because I was belted my foot correctly found the brake pedal while I was spinning around and totally disorientated.)

Or how about the woman from ~30 years back that said that DUI doesn't really matter if your faith is strong enough as god will protect you.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-05 18:46:18+00:00
You seem to be positing that Maxwell's Demon can be reassigned to another impossible task, but that isn't a proper use of his "powers".

Infinities defy simple assumptions about maths, while Maxwell's Demon only needs to ignore the Laws of Thermodynamics.

I'm being serious, not glib, here. "And then do it infinitely many times" doesn't automatically enable any possible outcome, any more than the "multiverse of all possible outcomes" enables hot dog fingers on Jamie Curtis.
by toast0 | 2026-01-05 18:46:20+00:00
How is disabling the account when it's not being paid for illegal? Beyond some grace period, if I'm not paid, I'm not accepting your mail. If I'm not being paid, I'm not answering DNS queries on your behalf either.

I'm not going to interfere with your contract with a different party that handles your mail or DNS if that's how you manage your mail or DNS.

I'm a nice guy so I'll signal a temporary error and if you arrange payment (or at least claim that you will arrange payment shortly), hopefully your correspondents will retry and you'll just have delays and not lost messages.
by tptacek | 2026-01-05 18:47:09+00:00
The whole thing is really uncomfortable; it's as if, after attempting the sudoku solver, Ron Jeffries sat down for a discussion with Peter Norvig, who was not especially diplomatic about the outcome of the experiment. The section before that, where they're talking about the "decomposition" of Knuth's simple primality tester, is brutal. "Looping over odd numbers is one concern; determining primality is another".
by 0x457 | 2026-01-05 18:47:16+00:00
"Beautiful" maybe, not "good UX" for sure. Prior to Uber, calling a cab using the phone app was...suboptimal and easier to actually call a taxi company. They also provided much better services, which is what make them stick around.

RH made a lot of investment tool accessible to people that "I just want to buy stock of some company", I used tasty trades for a while, but their mobile app while has all functionality, but realistically you will just look to overview portfolio.
by jsheard | 2026-01-05 18:47:17+00:00
Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.

There was a period where western devs shifted away from gacha mechanics, probably fearing regulatory crackdowns, but now they're swinging back. Overwatch removed lootboxes in 2022 but then put them back in 2025.
by rchaud | 2026-01-05 18:47:22+00:00
Name recognition only matters if there are competitors. Office is profitable because it is sold in bulk licenses to companies who don't care what it's called. They aren't going to switch to Google Office or Facebook Office because of a name change, not least because migrating comms, cloud storage away from Outlook, Teams and OneDrive/Sharepoint is unthinkable.

As for consumers, those who don't want to pay a subscription for Office (they make the one-time purchase very hard to find) are probably already on Google Docs.
by gf000 | 2026-01-05 18:47:47+00:00
> To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.

This is not a given, though. It's entirely feasible to have a stable "display manager/server" with an extension/plugin system where your WM of choice would sit. Crashing the latter should not bring down the former.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-05 18:47:51+00:00
Unless you're making a very particular type of video), you likely want to capture aspects of the water's movement, color, sound, or interactions without much care about faithfully capturing a video of the literal ocean. The former part is a big portion of what turns a video of the ocean from not inherently being art to being as much of art as you make it so. Saying the only reason would be to share the literal ocean forces the art out, not in.
by pqtyw | 2026-01-05 18:47:54+00:00
> Cheap oil

Well allowing Iran unlimited access to global markets would certainly help that.

Same for Venesuela, lifting sanctions and making it easier for them to develop their infrastructure would have lowered the global price of oil.

Governments in both countries are more than happy to sell more oil if anyone allowed them to.

It's not like US politically controlling a large oil producing country makes oil cheaper for Americans. They still have to buy it at the same price as everyone else.

Profits of American oil companies is quite a different matter, though.
by bpt3 | 2026-01-05 18:47:58+00:00
Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there!

You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
by MichaelNolan | 2026-01-05 18:48:12+00:00
> The real problem with Java in particular is you'd end up chaining calls ... and have no idea from the error or the logs what was broken from: a.b.c.d();

That’s been solved since Java 14. (5 years ago) Now the error will tell you exactly what was null.

And “soon” Java will have built in support for expressing nullability in the type system. Though with existing tools like NullAway it’s already (in my opinion) a solved problem.