MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by windowpains | 2026-01-13 16:24:27+00:00
He was from a kinder more tolerant time, when people thought being non-anonymous online was safe. Sort of the same problem that others from his generation, Julian Assange, many others had. But I wonder if time won’t prove these people right. If you do put yourself out there you make enemies and open yourself to the hatred on many psycho basement dwellers. But if you don’t the world never knows you. All if that is too many words to say there’s a price to be paid for fame. Anyway, Dilbert was an important part of our cultural landscape and made a lot of people feel good despite the pains of cubicle life. To make people smile and feel better, that’s a pretty great achievement after all. Rip Scott, hopefully you’ll be making many folks smile in the afterlife too.
by palmotea | 2026-01-13 16:24:33+00:00
> The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

That's not true: you're forgetting positive externalities. The product is worth the cost, but the straightforward capitalist revenue streams aren't enough to cover those costs.

So if you rely on capitalism in 2026, that value get destroyed and the community is worse off for it.
by negzero7 | 2026-01-13 16:24:45+00:00
Because the dead can't respond or defend themselves. That's why you don't do it.

And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-13 16:25:21+00:00
This resonates. A lot of AI reading tools optimize for removal of effort (summaries, shortcuts), which often ends up weakening comprehension rather than strengthening it.

One thing I’m curious about: how do you decide when the AI should intervene versus stay silent? In deep reading, timing matters a lot — too much contextual help can break flow, too little can frustrate.

Have you observed differences across use cases (e.g. technical papers vs. philosophy vs. fiction)? It feels like the “right amount” of AI assistance probably isn’t static and might depend on reader intent and text difficulty.

Interesting direction overall — especially the idea of AI as a reading companion rather than a replacement.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-13 16:25:27+00:00
I have often been happy to have a clean linear history when asking myself things like "does build X.Y.Z include this buggy change I found in commit abcdefg?". With a history full of merges, where a commit from 1st of January might be merged only on the 20th of July, this gets MUCH harder to answer.

This is especially true if you have multiple repos and builds from each one, such that you can't just checkout the commit for build X.Y.Z and easily check if the code contains that or not (you'd have to track through dependency builds, checkout those other dependencies, possibly repeat for multiple levels). If the date of a commit always reflects the date it made it into the common branch, a quick git log can tell you the basic info a lot of the time.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-13 16:25:31+00:00
One of the greatest failings of journalism over the last bunch of decades has been that it takes too much of a neutral (or capital-oriented) position. You can follow this from the scores of puff pieces on the Vietnam War being, like, totally under control, dude, straight through to the modern endless refrain of "well, Steve says the Earth is round and Bob says the Earth is flat, but it's up to you to decide :)". Incuriosity and hypercredulity of access-journalists saving up trivia for their book deals, all with the "noble" goal of appearing "neutral" - it's been the death spiral of Western democracy.
by blumenkraft | 2026-01-13 16:25:35+00:00
I imagine they do not see it as a level playing field. If OpenCode can draw on Claude Code credits but cannot draw on Codex ones (we've just had a tweet promising to fix this, more or less), then it can be construed as an advantage on the part of OpenAI. Personally I think it's idiotic and companies should stop penny-pinching in situations where people are already paying $200, there can be no more value extraction at this price point.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-13 16:26:03+00:00
Clicky:

https://lax-lang.space It has a link to SourceForge instead of GitHub

https://github.com/lax-inc/Lax

> Please create your own project forks or empty repositories with .lx files

Do you mean "new" instead of "empty"? My recomendation is to try to get real users instead of asking minimal repos.

Remember to use two spaces to activate the magic "code" mode in HN

[start
[spot op_raw [input "Select operation (+, -, , /, sqrt, expt): "]]
[spot op [string->sign op_raw]]
[spot is_unary [eq? op [string->sign "sqrt"]]]
...
]

Some functions like "eq?" use a question mark and other like "is_unary" use an underscore. It's strange.

From github

> License and Restrictions

> No License.

> All rights are reserved by Lax Inc.

> Copying is strictly prohibited.

> The redistribution of source code, binaries, or the Lax compiler logic is not permitted.

> Unauthorized use of the Lax trademark or the Lax REPL CLI interface design is forbidden.

Are you selling the compiler? IIUC I can only stare at the compiler code but not download or run it. Seling compilers is very hard now. People expect an open source license, but it's hard to monetize. Some people tried with "semi-free"[1] licenses. Who can use your compiler for free? Who must pay to use it?

[1] or "semi-close", depending who is complaining. The only truly free part is to get voluntaries for complaining.
Show HN: SQG – Compile SQL (SQLite,DuckDB) to TypeScript/Java Code
by uwemaurer | 2026-01-13 16:26:03+00:00
I developed SQG because I had to access a SQLite and a DuckDB database from Java and from Typescript and was unhappy about maintaining the DB access code twice.

Also for larger analytics queries (DuckDB) it was annoying to copy the query out of the code into DBeaver, work on it and then copy it back into the code.

So I thought of a way of keeping the SQL queries in a separate file, compatible in DBeaver format so I can run them there, and also generate the code from it.

This works especially well with DuckDB since it has full type information of the query result, better than SQLite which has it only for fields, not for expressions.

For DuckDB it can also generate code using their Apache Arrow API for very fast access.

I hope you find it useful, I am glad to hear your feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/sqg-dev/sqg
Docs: https://sqg.dev
Try it online: https://sqg.dev/playground/
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-13 16:26:06+00:00
I'm very confused by this, on many fronts.

I don't really know why the government is doing it. It's not for grand headline reasons, as it's all pretty quiet, for this and for prior changes.

I also really don't think the UK is in the grips of some kind of authoritarian nightmare. If anything, my experience is that it's impossible to convince the police to do anything. These days, surveillance state or not, when your car or phone get stolen, the police write you a crime number to take to the insurers and consider their job done. Even if it's all done for nefarious reasons, this would be an easy sidekick to running a surveillance state that earns the state some cash, and every autocrat likes money. The UK democracy is flawed in many ways, but I really don't think a spy state is currently the problem.

So... Why?
Show HN: Debug your AI application in web browser
by yol | 2026-01-13 16:26:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Bryan, an ex-big-tech engineer that's been tinkering with AI for the past two years.
I made Pixie, an open-source project that allows you to debug your AI application interactively in the web browser, with just a few lines of setup.

## Why

I started this project because I find debugging my AI applications time-consuming and cumbersome. A lot of my projects are experimental, so it doesn’t make sense for me to build the frontend just to test, or setup automated tests/evals. So what I ended up doing is a lot of inputting awkwardly into the command line, and looking through walls of logs in different places.

## How it works

Start local devserver:

```bash
pip install pixie-sdk
pixie
```

Add decorator to an async function or generator for the AI app.

```python
import pixie

...
@pixie.app
async def my_app(initial_input):
...
# use this if you want interactivity from web ui
# specify expected input type with any json or pydantic type
user_input = yield pixie.InputRequired(int)
...
```

Then open [Web UI](https://gopixie.ai) to start debugging.

Here's a [demo](https://www.loom.com/share/6d419cfe20884b3994121697377b2a7e)

It currently works out-of-the-box for applications built with Pydantic-ai, langchain, langgraph and openAI SDK/Agents.

Looks interesting? Would love to hear your thoughts!
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-01-13 16:26:22+00:00
It's typical right wing "boys will be boys" mentality. Under no circumstance should boys or men be held accountable for their actions. The only options for boys with issues is to let them kill people or kill them. It's simply not possible the parents are doing something wrong or that we hold young men accountable. It contributes to how extremely fragile a scary percentage of young men are these days. Everything must revolve around them or violence is expected and understood. It's all this and much more from him.
by pc86 | 2026-01-13 16:26:24+00:00
I hope this isn't too off topic but one of the key underpinnings of, for lack of a better word, capital-D Democratic / liberal (/ leftist-ish?) ideology in the US is that there is not a universal truth governing reality. Watch any debate where "objective truth" gets brought up and more than half the time the response won't be disagreeing with that truth but that the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.
by phil21 | 2026-01-13 16:26:42+00:00
I’m guessing I know the local newspaper/newsletter you speak about being in Chicago. I was a very early supporter of them when they started up, but canceled a couple years back when it was clear they care far less about reporting and more about pushing personal beliefs and vendettas. To the point of outright destroying local businesses over petty ideological driven things.

I still think they do good work here and there, but their editorial standard is such that when faced with evidence of a reporter ignoring facts their response was to double down much less post a retraction. A conversation with one reporter I had basically summarized to “we will report what we want to how we want to, it’s our organization and we don’t get paid enough to be objective”. Fair enough, I suppose.

At that point random people with a blog is better since at least there is not an aura of neutral fact-based journalism behind it.

Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement for knowing the general happenings in my neighborhood and city. I’ve made an attempt to get more involved with local meetings and events the alderman holds, etc. but it seems far too little to keep up on anything in a major way.
by boringg | 2026-01-13 16:26:43+00:00
9-11 year payback isn't bad based on the projections. You could probably goose it a bit with inflation of electrical prices (depends on how the electrical policies change and what they pass through).

I'll also add theres some O&M coming down the line. Inverters @ year 10, small maintenance and Im assuming you re-did your roof before you installed. Anyone putting solar up make sure you do it at the same time as a roof because taking it down to redo a roof kills your economic value.
by firstshow | 2026-01-13 16:26:57+00:00
Built this over the weekend because I was frustrated with calculator apps that are either too complex or filled with ads.

CalcPercent is intentionally simple - 6 percentage calculators, everything runs in your browser, no tracking, completely free.

Tech stack: Pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript, hosted on Hostinger

Would love feedback from the HN community on what features to add next!
by Kapura | 2026-01-13 16:27:22+00:00
Seeing how drone warfare has become the new hot front in 21st century conflicts like Ukraine, it's hard not to speculate on the implications of this as political unrest continues to rise in the U.S.

It's no secret that the current U.S. regime views a sizeable portion of its own civilian citizens as enemy combatants. They are already shooting people in the face and not even putting up a pretense of acting shocked at the act. Historically, it is easier to win elections than revolutions; limiting access to game-changing technology puts the power advantage even more firmly in the corner of the regime.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-13 16:27:28+00:00
I think Orwell was prescient and attuned to this sort of thinking in England at his time. Perhaps, it never really went away? e.g.: "crimestop"

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-...

It isn't precrime or "dissent management" that is the problem, but the engineering of behavior and thought in society where such concepts are acceptable to people.

I don't think we can discuss it in detail here, but with this , chat control, and all sorts of other controversial laws, you'll notice the people of the country actually support that stuff. There is an interesting conversation there about democracy, and the priority of the working class people. Naturally, a person living paycheck-to-paycheck and fighting for healthcare and keeping their job (or getting one) does not care about this stuff. So who does? Not the ruling class. A lot of people (including on HN) who think this stuff is important (rightfully) are not poor people, perhaps middle-class?

Is democracy itself something that can survive, if it is left entirely up to popular vote? Power has gravity, it always wants more. Ideally, there would be institutions that are democratically established and managed that would be trusted to safeguard the people's interests. In the US, there are executive department agencies for example like the FCC, FTC, FDA and more, but they are subject to those in power who are elected by the people.

My "food for thought" here is that similar to supreme courts, there needs to be a regulatory and oversight branch of the government, whose chiefs are apolitical (like actually, not like the US supreme court), well compensated, long-tenured (but not lifetime, more like 20 years), and appointed by confirmation of all other branches of government.

We need to address the problem of power, influence to wield power and incentives for those entrusted with power to act in good faith, but also with good competence. The last part is important, because I have no doubt, a lot of the politicians that come up with this Orwellian nonsense have good intentions, the outcome they seek are noble, just not the means. they just happen to be incompetent when it comes to the subject matter.
by haakon | 2026-01-13 16:27:52+00:00
Just watching it now (and what a house it is). There's a TV in almost every room, and Fox News is on each of them. He says: "Yes, it is the same station on every television, because that's how the system is designed. It's designed so it'll play the same station all over the house. It happens to be Fox News, but I do flip around. It's not nailed on Fox News, in case you're wondering."
by stodor89 | 2026-01-13 16:27:58+00:00
My initial reaction was to disagree, but the man did allegedly take in an abandoned infant. And a woman to care for it[1]. And, our readings[2] of that quote (acceptance vs altruism) aren't in any way incompatible.

[1] You absolutely don't want to be a single woman in 1st century AD.

[2] acceptance vs altruism
by venndeezl | 2026-01-13 16:28:01+00:00
I really don't understand this pathetic grovel and prostrate at the feet of the rich, thing.

Why are the masses, the majority, obliged to kiss ass and suck up to what, a half million politicians, a million cops, and 1%ers?

Why do you see others as court jesters that must dance for modern equivalent of barons and baronesses?

What an antiquated and childish cult behavior.
by fidotron | 2026-01-13 16:28:01+00:00
It's this now, but 3D printers, Meshtastic, and the ESP32 all seem likely to catch the ire of the administration if some deal is not done in the coming years.

I've been saying it for ages, but a decent easily available western equivalent to the ESP32 (meaning easy WiFi) needs to happen, and until it does there will be a giant hole in the middle of the entire maker universe, which increasingly acts as the prototyping stage for commercialized gadgetry.
by cootsnuck | 2026-01-13 16:28:22+00:00
To me, "be wary" means interrogate the intentions and motives of the people boosting certain technologies and applications of said tech.

Don't consume industry "show-and-tells" unexamined.

For me it doesn't mean "don't use AI coding tools", but rather when I do use them I should make sure I'm thinking about my own "agency" as it relates to the work I'm doing and ultimately accountable for. How do I ensure I'm centering my own skills as I use these tools and not off-loading "too much"? What do I consider "too much"?

It's going to be different for everyone.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-13 16:28:25+00:00
I don't see how a slide rule would substantially improve anything in my kitchen, honestly.

> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.

I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-13 16:28:27+00:00
This is my argument for the Adobe subscription. One day, I'm a photographer needing apps like Photoshop and Lightroom and After Effects (because I do a lot of timelapse). One day, I'm a graphic designer, so I need Photoshop and Illustrator. One day, I'm an editor, so Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and After Effects. One day, I'm doing desktop publishing with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign.
by starkparker | 2026-01-13 16:28:41+00:00
Maine? Because in Portland, OR:

- the Oregonian's newsroom is in all but open conflict with its editorial board, its credibility for breaking hard news was already in the shitter before it sold to ADVANCE, and for several years it stopped publishing a broadsheet edition and shuttered its print facility to cut costs

- the Merc sold out to a Seattle-based group run by a former Washington state legislator in July 2024 that's been buying out alt-weeklies in Seattle and Chicago

- Pamplin/Trib and EO groups got bought out by Carpenter, a Mississippi-based conglomerate, in June 2024 with a rep for cutting everything but sports coverage. Layoffs hit both in July 2025

Only the WWeek is still locally owned, and it started a non-profit and seeking donations in 2024. Maybe 20 full-time employees there, at best, and as of 2024 barely above water financially.
by StackBuilders | 2026-01-13 16:28:59+00:00
Are you one of the many fans still waiting for GTA VI’s release? Originally announced for 2025 and now pushed into late 2026, the situation is a clear example of a common reality in software projects: conflicts driven by misalignment and difficult trade-offs.

Software challenges rarely start as big problems. They usually begin as small misalignments that are easy to overlook. In our latest blog, we explore the most common software project conflicts and share practical ways to address them before they turn into delivery risks.
by nasmorn | 2026-01-13 16:29:07+00:00
So what I take away is that he is using approx 3x electricity, that I do and that is including my electric car. I use an additional 5-7MWh of heat but on a heat pump that would still only be a max of 2MWh which doesn’t even bring me to half of his usage, for a family of 4.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-13 16:29:09+00:00
>it seems just investing in batteries and charging

I mean a lot of companies already do this with megawatt/gigawatt installations.

The key is peaking and grid stabilization. If you're a huge provider you can pay for all your batteries in a year or two if there is some large grid emergency and rates skyrocket.

If you're a non-commercial user, it's going to be hard because the provider rates you pay/get paid are much more likely to be fixed at a pretty low rate.
by starky | 2026-01-13 16:29:10+00:00
Long time SolidWorks user here with experience in other programs. Frankly, SolidWorks is one of the easiest pieces of CAD software to use, being much more flexible in how things are done compared to a lot of other programs. That said, it is incredibly powerful software, and while someone can learn how to use it in a week, it takes months or years to be actually proficient.

My big tip if you can't find a button there is always the search bar. Just search the command you are looking for, it will even show you where the button is located for next time. That said, they don't move things around that much from year to year, I'm surprised if you can't find a command in a tutorial made in the last 10 years.

The features you are talking about sound like you want to be doing surfacing, which is definitely a more advanced modeling technique that I only recommend trying to learn once you understand the basics and can predict how the software wants you to model something.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-13 16:29:21+00:00
I'm aware this is a cultural difference, government betrayal and overreach are hotbutton and mainstay topics in the common culture of the UK and related states (e.g. the US).

It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale.

Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to abuse or as an excuse for abuse, and perhaps because people actually believe in it, they do materialize as one too. Presents as a vicious cycle to me, and as if people were disallowing themselves from recovering of it.

I really have to wonder how much of it is the available options always being just two parties in these territories, and the electoral systems supporting that convergence. In such a scheme, I can indeed definitely imagine people being compelled to vote further and further from their own interests and values, and the slippery slope rhetoric being finding a manifestation.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-13 16:29:21+00:00
As a hobbyist cook, this article starts with a false (or at least misleading) premise:

maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g

The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.

The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.

PS

I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.
by paganel | 2026-01-13 16:29:55+00:00
> that doesn't mean that they're intimately aware of the full EU budget.

There's no "intimate" knowledge required in order to be aware of the EU spending tens to hundreds of billions of euros on the war close to its Eastern border, it has been one of the main topics of discussion in the media for a good time now. Unless this speech holder has lived under a rock since February 2022, which doesn't seem to be the case (he was the one mentioning the "war" thing).