MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Intuitive Minecraft Skin Editor - Full FOSS Rewrite, try new mobile UX
by moxvallix | 2026-01-17 12:44:28+00:00
I have a small group of friends that like to play Minecraft together fairly regularly. Over the years, one of the friends would make us matching skins for certain occasions, all using a site called needcoolshoes.com. However, come 2023, needcoolshoes went offline for good, and suddenly my friend had lost his favourite skin making tool.

Wanting him to make a particular skin set for our group, I dug the old editor out of the Wayback Machine, and fixed it up to function as before. I put it up on a static site, then shared it with him, as well as commenting the link on a few Reddit threads asking about needcoolshoes.com. My restoration started to gain traction, and soon I had multiple people asking me to add back the gallery, so they could share their skins like on the old site.

Being a Rails developer, I spun up a basic Rails app, using my restored version of the editor, and implementing a basic gallery. I named it needcoolershoes (which helped it replace the old site on search engines). From there, the site kept growing in traction, and more and more features were requested and implemented. However, people were requesting features of the skin editor itself, which at this point was an amalgamation of obfuscated archived javascript, and some patches I had made to add some basic features. Eventually, maintaining this editor became a hassle, and paired with the fact that I didn't technically have the rights to modify and distribute it, I decided to rewrite it from scratch.

Now, two years on, myself and a few others who joined the community have fully rewritten the editor, using Lit for webcomponents, but otherwise sticking mostly to vanilla Javascript. Three JS is used for the 3D rendering. The editor is now fully mobile responsive, with touch controls, and portrait oriented UI, but switches to a landscape oriented desktop UI for larger screens. As well, it now supports modern skins, with transparency, and slim model support.

One of the members of the community made a trailer which shows off some of the editor's features, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InOz7jUmhcI

Really appreciate anyone here in to Minecraft checking out needcoolershoes, it has been a real passion project the last few years, and the site runs free with no ads, hosting funded by donations. Also appreciate it if anyone shares this with people they know that are in to Minecraft, we love seeing new skins being submitted to the site!
by idiotsecant | 2026-01-17 12:45:36+00:00
It's so frustrating discussing topics you know about on HN because you get so many software developers, which naturally know everything, that make comments like this.

Solar does not 'just work' - in the US it's a crisis in the making. Power prices in several areas of the grid routinely go negative because the grid is a zero sum game - there is very little storage so what goes in must exactly match what goes out or grid frequency deviations and eventually blackouts happen. This is much more likely to happen once undispatchable resources climb past a certain threshold in our generation mix.

To fix this we need massive storage and transmission investment, like moon landing and WW2 put together. We desperately need to do that before we add more non-dispatchable generation.

Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.
by antonymoose | 2026-01-17 12:45:48+00:00
I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two.

There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-17 12:45:50+00:00
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.

Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.

Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
by pydry | 2026-01-17 12:46:08+00:00
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.

Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.

It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.

Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-17 12:46:33+00:00
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick

El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.

Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.

> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.

Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
by adrian_b | 2026-01-17 12:46:50+00:00
That's right.

My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.

Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.

However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.

They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.

By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.

Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
by elfatnorthpole | 2026-01-17 12:46:52+00:00
These are the letters that was posted on the USPS operation santa program website for generous people to fullfil. Here you can see what people wanted for christmas, and how many percent are completely outragous requests. And how many percent of letters were sent in mass

There are also ones for past years:
https://archive.org/details/usps2024
https://archive.org/details/usps2023
https://archive.org/details/usps2022
by edgineer | 2026-01-17 12:47:34+00:00
The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.

There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].

From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...
by derangedHorse | 2026-01-17 12:48:34+00:00
> How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new?

That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do.

> What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?

What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.
by riedel | 2026-01-17 12:50:17+00:00
I am also quite irritated by the fact that many TTS fail to state what language (and probably even dialect) they support. Actually to support a really good workflow for many Europeans (and probably also the rest of the world) one would actually need a multi language models that also support the use foreign words within one's own language. I am using a local notification reader on my smartphone (with SherpaTTS) and the mix of notification language as well as languages embedded in each other makes the experience rather funny at times.
by einsteinx2 | 2026-01-17 12:50:21+00:00
> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not.

Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
by Macha | 2026-01-17 12:51:19+00:00
This was a constant problem with late Intel Macs where I was working at the time, to the point that people started explicitly using shut down enough to the point that security complained it was slowing down their patch rollouts.

Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
by alexpotato | 2026-01-17 12:52:26+00:00
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].

To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.

Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:

- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects

- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)

0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
by pydry | 2026-01-17 12:52:40+00:00
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.

It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.

For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.

I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-17 12:53:03+00:00
Adams. Rowling. Kanye.

All made great art. All destroyed there own legacies by being absolutely insufferable. I'll never know how much of this is driven by a raw need for attention.

Congratulations. You won capitalism. Now go into your high castle with your harem of models. Maybe I'm weird, but if I was rich I'd be doing better things than arguing with strangers on Twitter.

Was Twitter a mistake? The ability to get massive amounts of attention in exchange for saying something mean ?

If I ever make real money you won't know anything about my personal views. The only question will be how big of a castle I have and how vast of a harem.

Or maybe I'd live in a small condo in Seoul. One partner, she's a bit older than me, she's not Korean. I'm not 100% where she's from and I feel it's rude to ask.
by alexpotato | 2026-01-17 12:54:49+00:00
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.

What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
by seanwilson | 2026-01-17 12:56:25+00:00
> Since you cannot "run the theorem", you cannot vibe-code your way through it. E.g., there is no equivalent of "web app seems to be working!"

If you're trying to prove something like "for every list x, length(sorted(x)) === length(x)", you can plug in examples of x to see if it holds. A bit like unit testing.

Using a theorem to help in another proof is somewhat like running it as well e.g. using the above to replace length(sorted(x)) with length(x). If your theorem isn't expressing what you intended, you're probably going to find out soon when you try to use it and it's not making sense.

It's also possible to extract programs from proofs e.g. for a (constructive) proof of "for every list x, there exists a sorted permutation of x", you can extract a runnable sorting algorithm you can test with values.
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 12:57:26+00:00
While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.

Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.

I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.
by Uriopass | 2026-01-17 12:58:43+00:00
> We couldn't just deploy and pray. 50,000 goroutines don't just disappear.

They do once you restart the server. Unsure what the "phase 3 monitoring" shows where the goroutines go down gradually. If you have new code to deploy you must recompile and therefore restart and those goroutines are gone anyway.

This feels like an AI made-up story but I'm not sure I understand the point of making this up.

However, goroutine leak is interesting! I hope what I learned from this post isn't hallucination.
For example, how could the subscriber send messages/heartbeats to the closed goroutine without an error...
by Rochus | 2026-01-17 12:59:03+00:00
I think there is a misunderstanding about what is being back-translated.

We don't back-translate the proof steps (the thousands of intermediate logical derivations). That would indeed be verbose and useless.

We back-translate the specification: the Invariants, Guards, and Events.

For a traffic light system, we don't need the LLM to explain the 50 steps of predicate logic that prove inv3 holds. We just need it to translate inv3 itself:

Formal: inv3: light_NS = Green ⇒ light_EW = Red

Back-translation: 'Invariant: If the North-South light is Green, the East-West light MUST be Red.'

This isn't verbose; it's the exact concise summary of the system's safety rules. The 'verbosity' of handling edge cases (like the 'Allsome' example) only applies when the specification itself relies on subtle edge cases, in which case, being verbose is exactly what you want to prevent a hidden bug.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 12:59:11+00:00
@FoundFootageFest

Random old clips edited and rearranged for comedy purposes. One recent example, a KFC training video done to look like Wayne's World.

@torscabinetofcuriosities

This is an old school YouTube channel, with a young guy talking at camera about various things. He is a bit Wikipedia-reliant but I like it.

@6u66legun

Take downs of mostly British pop groups narrated like a crime documentary. He has some good one liners. "Nestled between Black Sabbath and Black Flag is a curious creature called Black Lace..."

@NewThinkingAllowed

This consists of interviews on parapsychology, philosophy, religion and some art and culture. Some of the interviewees are complete fruitloops to be honest, but there are also some of the best interviews I've seen on YouTube on here, if you are willing to dig about. James Tunney is an underrated figure and has much to say on William Blake and other cultural figures. Others discuss ancient philosophy from Greece, China, Persia, India etc. Also some good vintage stuff including interviews with Jacques Vallee.
by fpoling | 2026-01-17 13:01:06+00:00
With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-17 13:01:29+00:00
It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-17 13:02:19+00:00
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.

Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.

Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-17 13:02:22+00:00
No communist ideology? What was the regime demanding compliance with, do you think? The normalization era was a return to Marxism-Leninism, not a departure from it.

Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.

It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.

The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-17 13:02:34+00:00
I think that would have been an alternate present rather than a plausible future.

ECH needs for the outer (unencrypted) SNI to be somewhat plausible as a destination. For ECH GREASE what happens is that this outer SNI was real, what looks like the encrypted inner ECH data is just random noise.

For non-GREASE ECH we want to look as much like the GREASE as we can, except that it's not noise that's the encrypted payload with a real inner SNI among other things.
by philistine | 2026-01-17 13:03:37+00:00
You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.

In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
by mr_mitm | 2026-01-17 13:03:46+00:00
This is mostly an issue in active directory networks. Usually the reason people give as to why they still have this enabled is due to some legacy system that can't authenticate via Kerberos or at least NetNTLMv2. Worst case is if they then enable NetNTLMv1 on the domain controllers, even if the DC acts as a client. Using authentication coercion, this is a pretty quick win for an adversary.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-17 13:04:51+00:00
In practice the average German voter is still supporting the coalition against the AfD despite that the coalition is implementing Soviet-like policies. They talk constantly about banning the most popular political party, for example, and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions. Germans who aren't actively supporting the AfD should feel no sense of moral superiority, there simply isn't anything in the historical context to feel proud of there.