MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: FightHOAFines – An AI agent that reads bylaws to dispute HOA violations
by todaycompanies | 2026-01-07 18:33:47+00:00
Hey HN,
HOAs are essentially small governments that often operate without checks and balances. They rely on the fact that most homeowners won't read 50 pages of CC&Rs (Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions) to fight a $50 trash can fine.
I built FightHOAFines.com to balance the scales.
How it works:
It scans your violation notice and cross-references it with your specific HOA bylaws and state statutes. It then generates a response letter that is technically "polite" but legally "pedantic"—pointing out procedural errors, vague language, or conflicting state laws.
The Goal:
To make it more administratively painful for the HOA to pursue the fine than to just drop it.
I’m currently tweaking the prompt engineering to dial in the "tone"—I want it to sound firm but not trigger an immediate lawsuit. Feedback on the generated letters is welcome!
by array_key_first | 2026-01-07 18:33:59+00:00
There is A LOT of evidence that diets high in saturated fats cause heart disease and the whole plethora of metabolic diseases that go with it. It's basically undeniable that red meat is just, like, bad for you.

Not to mention processed red meats are in the same classification of carcinogen as alcohol and Tabacoo. And regular red meat is still higher up than aspartame, aka diet coke.

Meat can be good for you. But it shouldn't take a genius to deduce that a diet of steaks, cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and bacon probably is not.
by parliament32 | 2026-01-07 18:34:02+00:00
Respectfully, it's absolutely important to "gatekeep" a title that has an established definition and certain expectations attached to the title.

OP says, "BUT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW THE CODE WORKS.. No I don’t. I have a vague idea, but you are right - I do not know how the applications are actually assembled." This is not what I would call an engineer. Or a programmer. "Prompter", at best.

And yes, this is absolutely "lesser than", just like a middleman who subcontracts his work to Fiverr (and has no understanding of the actual work) is "lesser than" an actual developer.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-07 18:34:04+00:00
Alcohol is neither a carb nor sugar and weight is largely a function of calories in versus calories out. All of the hand-wringing about HFCS and seed oils and deep fried Crisco is misplaced; while these things are all unhealthy in their own way obesity is largely a function of sedentary lifestyles and overeating.

Nobody wants to hear that they're a lazy glutton, however, so pop health media conflates various causes and effects. In other words eating foods with higher satiety and lower macronutrient density and walking more is harder than introducing a new dietary restriction to combat the "monster of the week" - inflammation, microbiome imbalance, etc.
by FunnyUsername | 2026-01-07 18:34:22+00:00
The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":

- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.

- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.

- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.

- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.

- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.

Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.

There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.
by vjanma | 2026-01-07 18:34:33+00:00
LLMs are trained on text about the world, not the world itself. Olfaction is an interesting test case because it's one of the most ancient and direct sensory modalities. no symbolic abstraction layer, just molecular binding triggering pattern recognition.

What's compelling about pairing e-nose hardware with transformer architectures is you get that grounded perception loop you're describing. The sensor array produces high-dimensional response patterns from real physical interactions, and the model learns to classify and reason over patterns it's never been explicitly trained on—genuine novelty detection rather than interpolation over training data.

The "this is outside what I know" capability is critical for real-world deployment. A model that hallucinates a scent classification is potentially dangerous (think: fentanyl detection in law enforcement). You need calibrated uncertainty, not just a softmax score.
by todaycompanies | 2026-01-07 18:34:39+00:00
Hey HN, OP here.
I built FightHOAFines.com because I got tired of the arbitrary enforcement and bureaucratic nightmare that is the modern Homeowners Association.
The Problem:
HOA boards often send violation notices based on vague interpretations of bylaws or without following proper state notification procedures. Most homeowners just pay the fine because researching the CC&Rs (Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions) and drafting a formal response takes too much time.
What this tool does:
You upload your violation notice (or describe the issue), and the tool generates a formal dispute letter. It doesn't just complain; it structures a "legal-lite" argument.
Under the Hood:
Input: It takes the violation details and (optionally) your specific HOA documents.
Processing: I'm using [Insert Model, e.g., GPT-4o/Claude] to parse the legalese of the violation.
Retrieval: The system cross-references the violation against a database of common defenses and specific state statutes (currently optimized for [Your State/Florida] but working on others) to find procedural errors the HOA might have made.
Output: It generates a formatted PDF letter ready to mail.
Why I built it:
I realized that 90% of fighting an HOA is just sounding professional enough and citing the right statute to make them back down. I wanted to democratize that "lawyerly pushback" for people who can't afford actual counsel for a $100 trash can fine.
I’d love feedback on:
The letter quality, is it too aggressive or too passive?
Any specific edge cases (e.g., selective enforcement) you think I should add.
Thanks!
by Lichtso | 2026-01-07 18:34:55+00:00
> but [analytic anti-aliasing (aaa)] also has much better quality than what can be practically achieved with supersampling

What this statement is missing is that aaa coverage is immediately resolved, while msaa coverage is resolved later in a separate step with extra data being buffered in between. This is important because msaa is unbiased while aaa is biased towards too much coverage once two paths partially cover the same pixel. In other words aaa becomes incorrect once you draw overlapping or self-intersecting paths.

Think about drawing the same path over and over at the same place: aaa will become darker with every iteration, msaa is idempotent and will not change further after the first iteration.

Unfortunately, this is a little known fact even in the exquisite circles of 2D vector graphics people, often presenting aaa as the silver bullet, which it is not.
by bombcar | 2026-01-07 18:35:17+00:00
You may need to look for 8.27" x 11.69" - https://www.staples.com/hammermill-copy-plus-8-27-x-11-69-co...

Or you can buy a ream of legal-size and have a printshop slice it down (which is how I got ahold of B4 or B5 IIRC).
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-07 18:35:19+00:00
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000

If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.

Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
by guywithahat | 2026-01-07 18:35:44+00:00
I understand I'm legally driving but the broad point here is whether a screen is enough or if I should have buttons. The way I interact with the car is screen oriented, and the car is sufficiently autonomous that I don't need to rely on a button which never moves. I enter an address on my phone, get in my car, push the brake, and it drives me somewhere.

Similarly I don't know the exact date Tesla started talking about FSD/Autopilot, but they've certainly been talking about it for as long as I've been aware of the brand.

Obviously the 2009 prototype has buttons and as I've already mentioned it doesn't have cameras, but the point stands. Tesla has oriented the features and experience in a way where just having a screen makes a lot of sense. VW just added a screen and hasn't made moves to back it up with other features or with similarly involved regular updates. I think it makes sense for Tesla to continue building cars with just a screen, whereas if VW won't take advantage of the screen they should add buttons back, at least in my opinion.
by brightball | 2026-01-07 18:35:54+00:00
The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.

Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.

The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.

This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushed to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.

The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-01-07 18:36:05+00:00
I haven't been buying a ton of new music recently but a couple from the last year or so are: https://parishuk.bandcamp.com/album/queen-of-the-skies-b-w-s... https://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult

And these are good youtube channels for finding new things: https://www.youtube.com/@NWOTHMFullAlbums/videos https://www.youtube.com/@666MrDoom/videos
by cogman10 | 2026-01-07 18:36:06+00:00
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.

It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.

The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.

This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.

That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.

Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
Show HN: I built a tool to stop pretending I understood research papers
by jjoe | 2026-01-07 18:36:13+00:00
I'm not a researcher. I'm just someone who gets unreasonably excited when a new paper drops in a field I have no business reading about. Protein folding? Fascinating. Quantum error correction? Sign me up. The problem is, jumping into a paper on topological qubits when your physics education stopped at "electrons go around the nucleus" is... humbling.

So I built PaperSplain for myself. It implements the Three-Pass Method – an actual academic reading technique where you read a paper three times at increasing depth. First pass: what's the paper about and why should I care? Second pass: what did they actually do, with attention to the figures that usually make or break my understanding. Third pass: what are the assumptions, limitations, and implications?

The idea isn't to replace reading the paper. It's to give me enough scaffolding that when I do read it, I'm not just pattern-matching words I've seen before. There's also a foundation survey that identifies prerequisite concepts I'm missing – turns out knowing what you don't know is half the battle.

The library already has a few hundred papers across different fields, and I keep adding more as I find interesting ones. You can borrow already analyzed papers or upload your own.
by A_Duck | 2026-01-07 18:36:14+00:00
One thing we know is that few of the people debating this have actually read Plato's Symposium

A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...

Or just the two sections in question:

Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half

Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-07 18:36:19+00:00
These are the companies that receive the most H1B approvals because they have large numbers of high skill employees, so it isn’t surprising that they have thousands of visas approved. But the total number of visas across the country is capped annually per the law (by Congress). All H1B workers combined are still only a fraction of a percent of the total jobs in America.

Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.

As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
by conartist6 | 2026-01-07 18:36:22+00:00
My question is so simple: why is a level playing field seen as bad now?

Have we given up on having a market economy? You can't have a fair game when one team playing is also the referee. Yet everywhere I look that's the way of it. Apple runs the app store so that they can also ensures that every successful app is theirs. The supermarket stocks the shelves, but also uses their position of power to kill successful independent brands. Node takes libraries which have taken years of work and shits out builtins with at most a week invested.

I think it's a national embarrassment: anticompetition to the point of communism held up as if it were the genuine spirit of the American Dream.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 18:36:27+00:00
Even questionable quality ground beef is almost always a better option than most carb-centric nutrition sources. It freezes well, transports is broadly available and can usually be ordered for delivery.

Eggs, aside from some of the disease issues are also a very good, nutritionally complete source of protein that are relatively inexpensive.

Another issue is that people have been conditioned to eat/snack all the time... a lot of people have moved towards 2-3 meals a day which is closer to historical norms... have protein be your main source, with vegetables as a side, and maybe bread/pasta at some meals.

There are also beans/legumes if you can tolerate them.
by zahlman | 2026-01-07 18:36:37+00:00
> the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025.

You are supposed to go to the existing question and post a new answer on it.

Answer approval means almost nothing and should never have been implemented. In the early days it helped experts spread out their attention, as there was an immediate signal that a question had at least one answer good enough for the OP. But there is really no reason to prioritize the OP's opinion like this. (The reputation system has been misaligned with the site's goals in many ways.)
by array_key_first | 2026-01-07 18:36:38+00:00
Fiber greatly lowers your blood sugar response because you can't digest it. It also lowers your blood cholesterol for the same reason, so it's often recommended for those with a risk of CVD to eat more fruits and vegetables. It also protects against colorectal cancer for similar reasons.

Turns out just slowing down digestion can have a lot of benefits.

Also, most Americans eat very, very little fiber. Anything is an improvement. I believe the FDA recommendation is 30 grams a day, and most Americans eat, like, 2.

However, most Americans are not deficient in protein. They eat lots of meat, and very little veggies.
by lakkal | 2026-01-07 18:36:44+00:00
I'm 2 years younger than you and was in NJ. My aunts had given me a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" and a couple of others by the same author. I remember also having some books on pyramid power, reincarnation, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle. Even then, it all seemed like fiction to me.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-07 18:36:52+00:00
Although interestingly, as that wikipedia article also points out, people did go down into the 40s quite a bit during the Age of Sail (the famous clipper route), because the strong prevailing winds meant it was the fastest way to get around the world. This comes up quite often in the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian.

If you're not a sailing ship, you don't benefit from the winds, so those latitudes are pretty empty nowadays.
by apparent | 2026-01-07 18:37:01+00:00
> if you need to be sold on it it’s probably not going to help you much

This seems like a red flag because it can be used to justify anything, even being in a cult. I think there probably are benefits to some of these things, but we shouldn't shut down when someone asks what the mechanism is. Perhaps they want to get some of those benefits, but want to go about it a different way, and therefore want to know how they might go about doing that.

Telling them that someone who wants to be "sold" on it isn't going to benefit just makes the whole thing seem less legit, IMO.
by RickS | 2026-01-07 18:37:02+00:00
If you're referring exclusively to tariffs from the current admin, that doesn't really line up with the timeline on this, which started closer to the beginning of covid. I don't have a firm evidence-based take on the causality, but the vibes based take is a combination of actual input cost shock and bullwhip from covid, plus a lot of opportunism and greedflation/shrinkflation from corps that used the cover of the legitimate (BOM-driven) cost increases to squeeze hard on comparatively illegitimate cost increases. This situation was totally F'd way before 47 took office.

And then the tarrifs hit, which certainly does hurt. I was making desserts w nice belgian chocolate that went from $65 per 5lb to $90. So I'm not discounting the pain there, but the bulk of this effect seems to predate the tariffs, unless there are some from 46 admin or before that I'm not aware of.
by savolai | 2026-01-07 18:37:08+00:00
One could claim it is a self reflection tool where the point is not the claims at face value, but the value lies in the activity itself of focusing, of directing your mind to look at and feel your existence from a different/wide perspective. Which is true about many pedagogical tools.

The concrete results would thus be highly specific to the subject and their learning process on what they themselves deem relevant.
by overgard | 2026-01-07 18:37:29+00:00
I think it's generally fair to lump them together, because the types of fats you get in them are similar.

The history of cotton seed oil is interesting. After reading that, I would challenge people to think if that's really something they'd want in their body. Other than cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed oils and a lot of upside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottonseed_oil#Economic_histor...
by short_sells_poo | 2026-01-07 18:38:14+00:00
I just had an issue where Opus misspelled variable names between usages. These are fundamental and elementary mistakes that make me deeply distrust anything slightly more complex that comes out of it.

It's great for suggesting approaches, but the code it generates looks like it doesn't actually have understanding (which is correct).

I can't trust what it writes, and if I have to go through it all with a fine toothed comb, I may as well write the code myself.

So my conclusion is that it's a very powerful research tool, and an atrocious junior developer who has dyslexia and issues with memory.
by tormeh | 2026-01-07 18:38:22+00:00
I've tried the stock Windows shell and utilities. `ls` is noticeably slow in directories with like 15 subdirectories. That's not acceptable. Even the terminal emulator is so slow pasting 30 characters takes several frames. That's not too annoying, but I might replace it with Wezterm or something.

The stock Windows terminal experience is awful. Windows has improved markedly recently with `winget`, so maybe they'll get around to fixing the speed sometime, too.
by blitzar | 2026-01-07 18:38:54+00:00
If ones position for "other people" was "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" then the same applies. If your position was we should stop/slow/consider the march of progress - well you lost to 30 years of moving fast and breaking things.

I suggest and ask for nothing but consistency, irrespective of if you like or dislike the people who are affected.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-07 18:39:09+00:00
Yes, employment statistics rarely tell you anything about the quality of the jobs. And when they do tell something, it's the simplest information possible.

But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.

1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.
by wintermutestwin | 2026-01-07 18:39:12+00:00
Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.