MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by todaycompanies | 2026-01-12 18:58:20+00:00
Hello HN,
I built Compare Contractor Quotes to solve a problem I faced during my own home renovation: trying to compare three different quotes that looked nothing alike. One was a detailed PDF, one was a Word doc, and one was essentially a photo of a napkin.
It was nearly impossible to see if they were quoting the same scope of work. I realized that the "cheapest" quote was actually just leaving out expensive items (like debris removal and permits) that would have hit me as change orders later.
What it does:
The tool takes unstructured contractor bids (PDFs, images, scans) and uses LLMs to parse them into a structured data format. It then:
Normalizes the data: Maps different terminologies to a standard scope of work.
Identifies Gaps: Highlights if one contractor included a line item that others missed.
Flags Risks: Checks for front-loaded payment schedules or vague language that puts you at risk.
How it works:
We use a combination of OCR and a fine-tuned LLM pipeline to extract line items, prices, and terms from the raw documents. The challenging part was getting the model to understand the context of construction lingo (e.g., differentiating between "rough-in" and "finish" plumbing) across different trades.
The Goal:
To give homeowners the leverage of a General Contractor. By standardizing the bids, you can see exactly where the price differences are coming from and negotiate from a position of data rather than guessing.
It’s live now at https://comparecontractorquotes.com.
There is a free preview mode so you can test it out without paying. I’d love to hear your feedback on the extraction accuracy and if there are specific "red flags" you think I should add to the detection logic!
by mroche | 2026-01-12 18:58:36+00:00
A similar approach was taken by Pixar when making the beach environment for the Piper short that was previewed with Finding Dory. It was absolutely mind-blowing.

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-...

Related but unlinked Part 2 on other aspects of Finding Dory:

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-...
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-12 18:58:55+00:00
> what kind of EV has a battery to power a house for a week?

Assuming their heating, cooking and hot water is gas, a house doesn't actually consume that much. With a 50kWh battery you can draw just under 300W continuously for a week. I'd expect the average house to draw ~200W with lighting and a few electronics, with a lean towards the evenings for the lighting.
by tenacious_tuna | 2026-01-12 18:59:07+00:00
It's not just juniors. One of my partners carries a PhD in epidemiology and bimolecular science; they've been job searching for eight months with no bites, just silence. A friend of mine is a chemical engineering PhD, she's been searching for a year and just had her first interview.

I have eight years of software engineering experience but am only one rung up from the bottom of our SWE ladder, and we don't even hire the bottom rung anymore at my org. Seems like there's crushing pressure from above to limit hiring at every stage.
by pbasista | 2026-01-12 18:59:09+00:00
I would imagine that communicating within urban areas might be possible via some kind of a mesh network where e.g. every phone would act as a node that can forward the packets further. Something like that should be possible over WiFi I assume although I am unfamiliar with the existing protocols that would allow that.

There are two main issues with such an application that I can think of:

1. Addressing. How would the nodes know where to send the packet? But I assume there are ways to deal with that which come from the P2P networks like Tor.

2. Edge connectivity. Even if it would be possible to communicate between the regular nodes of the network, those packets would not be able to reach the outside world. So, from abroad or even from the out of town, they would still appear offline. Some kind of edge bridges would probably be necessary to reach connectivity with the outside world.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-12 18:59:14+00:00
The statement is being reported by various news outlets - I don’t see a link to this substack from those articles but the quotes match up to what is at this link. I assume the Susbtack is from someone else who got a copy of the statement. Example article:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/12/trump-conde...
by ebbi | 2026-01-12 18:59:18+00:00
I'm not so sure. There are plenty of pro-regime protests in Iran currently, and the general replies on interviews I've seen is "yes we have our problems, but we don't want Israel and the US fixing it", which tracks with a lot of sentiment I've heard from Iranian friends of mine.

There was also a three year old killed by anti-regime protestors which has heightened the sentiments of pro-regime protestors.
by rvnikita | 2026-01-12 18:59:42+00:00
I built a small Alfred workflow to switch between multiple Claude Code accounts in one click.

I use multiple cheaper accounts instead of a single expensive plan and got tired of manually changing configs and scripts. Wrapping it into Alfred made it fast enough to use constantly, with zero UI and no extra services.

Open source. Curious how others are managing multi-account setups for Claude, Cursor, or similar tools, and whether this approach resonates.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-12 18:59:48+00:00
> also have craving as everyone else

How could you possibly know that? You don't even know how your brain works, let alone how other people's brains work.

I can drink alcohol and be perfectly fine, but a lot of people can't, because they're alcoholics. Similarly, Ive met people who have tried to smoke but couldn't pick it up, meanwhile for me it will be a lifelong, every day, struggle.

The mind is complex, have some humility. You are not necessarily a beacon of purity by your own doing.
by Melatonic | 2026-01-12 18:59:50+00:00
Agreed on most points but you can setup a pretty solid device wide DNS provider using configuration profiles. Similar to how iOS can be enrolled in work corporate MDM - but under your control.

Works great for me with NextDNS.

Orion browser - while also based on WebKit - is also awesome and has great built in Adblock and supposedly privacy respecting ideals.
by czscout | 2026-01-12 18:59:57+00:00
Yeah, I was really expecting them to just continue the partnership that Apple announced when the iPhone 16/iOS 18 came out, but I suppose it's been pretty much radio silence on both fronts since then. Although the established stability and good enough-ness that Google offers with Gemini are probably more than enough reason for Apple to pivot to them as a model supplier instead.
by keybored | 2026-01-12 19:00:04+00:00
> That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history.

True. But it’s very overwhelming since we are so democratically inept right now.

> They do it in Iran.

We know this because the local elites underlined it for us.
by yawaramin | 2026-01-12 19:00:43+00:00
> Multiple sources [1][2].

Where does [1] say USD 1 trillion?

[2] says:

> The combination has had a toll on Japanese automotive (and other) exports. Barring Fukushima’s impacts, one would assume a return to pre-2008 fiscal meltdown exports by now. But basically they’re static. That’s in the range of $200 billion in lost exports just for the automotive industry.
>
> It’s likely fair to attribute $20 to $50 billion of that to irrational fear of radiation.

Like, are you serious? This is the most bizarro accounting I've ever seen.

> ...that’s about $100 billion in extra fuel costs.

And now it's counting as part of the cost of Fukushima the fossil fuels needed to replace it. Even more wacky accounting.

> another $22 billion for unexpected health costs due to burning extra fossil fuels.

It continues to get even more wacky, if that was possible, by attributing this cost to the Fukushima disaster. These are costs that would be avoided with a strong nuclear electricity generation program! These are arguments in favour of nuclear! It's not cost-effective for Japan to cover their land mass and offshore areas with solar and wind arrays! They have regular earthquakes and typhoons which would knock these vast arrays offline and take massive amounts of time and money to get back online!

You said: 'Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.' The sources you provide don't provide the numbers or, if they do, they include bogus numbers that actually make the case for nuclear.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-12 19:00:47+00:00
The political will of a plurality of American voters elected this administration a little over a year ago. We don't have direct evidence of what the current political will of a plurality of American voters is. We have some indirect evidence via polls and off-cycle elections that this is not the political will of most Americans. We'll have stronger evidence after the vote for the full House and third of the Senate later this year.

Personally, I don't think we have evidence yet that the democratic process in the US is broken. I have concerns as many people do, but the recent off-cycle elections went off just fine.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-01-12 19:01:15+00:00
Maybe ask the young people if they actually wanted to vote for the options they had, before jumping to them being apathetic or hypocritical. And yes, I know the adult-in-the-rooms will be quick to point out that its simply rational and responsible to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil, and the kids should know that, etc etc. But while it may be a good prescription to people, it doesn't actually address the problem. Maybe we should, but still, if you just want to scold people into voting for you, then you probably don't have a good platform and you probably don't deserve the support you do get.

The fact is, it would of been already incredibly hard for someone to be enthusiastic voting for Dems last presidential election; frankly even without even considering the utter and pointed moral failure with Gaza.

You want young people to vote, you can try to tut-tut them to vote for literally whoever, or you can, you know, listen to what they are saying, what they feel passionate about, and try even just a little bit to address it or, heck, put it on the platform. Its supposed to be a political party, something that unites people under some shared vision.

You want every single young person in the US to vote? Just say: free healthcare.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-12 19:01:18+00:00
CAD and machining are different fields, true, but I see a lot of the same flaws that Adam Karvonen highlighted in his essay on LLM-aided machining a few months ago:

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/l...

Do any people with familiarity on what's under the hood know if the latent space produced by most transformer paradigms is only capable of natively simulating 1-d reasoning and has to kludge together any process for figuring geometry with more degrees of freedom?
by card_zero | 2026-01-12 19:01:54+00:00
Regime change might not be beneficial to the US, it might be too much trouble.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cj691w2e840t?post=asset%3A8b0d...

"... there will be plenty of voices around Trump advising him to be careful if he does go down that route. The Trump administration would be careful, because the consequences of regime change would be extremely complex ..."
by dieggsy | 2026-01-12 19:02:01+00:00
I love CHICKEN Scheme! Nice to see it mentioned. Though I think it's worth pointing out it compiles to something pretty far from handwritten C, to my understanding. I think this is true of both performance and semantics; for example you can return a pointer to a stack allocated struct from a foreign lambda (this is because chicken's generated C code here doesn't really "return", I think. Not an expert).

Of course you can always drop to manually written C yourself and it's still a fantastic language to interop with C. And CHICKEN 6 (still pre-release) improves upon that! E.g structs and Unions can be returned/passed directly by/to foreign functions, and the new CRUNCH extension/subset is supposed to compile to something quite a bit closer to handwritten C; there are even people experimenting with it on embedded devices.
by thebruce87m | 2026-01-12 19:02:39+00:00
In Scotland it looks like I use 10kWh minimum (not in), 20kWh on a “normal” day and more when I charge the EV.

Family of 3 in a Bungalow.

I’d love a system like this to charge on my cheap overnight tariff and use during the day. Solar just isn’t worth it here.
by LegionMammal978 | 2026-01-12 19:02:47+00:00
> All they need to do is set Access-Control-Allow-Origin to allow websites to access it. All the SOP prevents is you hotlinking someone else's leap-seconds file and using their bandwidth without their opt-in.

They can, but the major providers (read: the ones I would trust to update it) don't. The IERS doesn't [0], the USNO doesn't [1], IANA doesn't [2], and NIST uses FTP [3]. Keep in mind that these files are constantly being downloaded by various clients for NTP and whatnot, it's not like these providers want to restrict public access, they just don't bother to set the header that would allow JS requests.

> Is this true? I don't know any browser right now that ships with a copy of a leapseconds data file.

From ECMA-262:

> It is required for time zone aware implementations (and recommended for all others) to use the time zone information of the IANA Time Zone Database https://www.iana.org/time-zones/.

Any browser that ships with a copy of tzdb, or knows where to find a copy from the OS, should have access to its leapseconds file. Unless you mean that all of them go solely through ICU and its data files? Which I suppose could be an obstacle unless ICU were to start exposing them.

[0] https://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/ntp/leap-seconds.list

[1] https://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat

[2] https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/leap-seconds.list

[3] ftp://ftp.boulder.nist.gov/pub/time/leap-seconds.list
by opponent4 | 2026-01-12 19:02:49+00:00
Not even close. Turing complete does not apply to the brain plain and simple. That's something to do with algorithms and your brain is not a computer as I have mentioned. It does not store information. It doesn't process information. It just doesn't work that way.

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
by akiselev | 2026-01-12 19:02:51+00:00
> If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively?

I just have a Solidworks plugin that translates CLI calls to JSON to Solidworks API calls and back again.

What really started working was creating a bunch of high level CLI commands so that Claude Code could query the part/assembly by asking stuff like "What is the closest distance between the southmost surface of Extrusion1 and the surface of Cylinder2" which would then be translated to a specific high level command or a bunch of lower level commands by Gemini 3 Flash. Those would then be translated to Solidworks API calls, as would any editing commands. It also really helps to give it the ability to parametrize the queries so instead of "all features smaller than 2mm" it can say "all features smaller than $MinFeatureSize", with some logic and a downstream LLM to translate that parameter into values in the design and review it with the human in the loop before committing it to the project.

The key is to absolutely minimize how often the LLMs think about numbers and have them think in relationships instead. The hard part is translating those relationships back to the CAD API calls but LLMs are much better at hot hallucinating if you resolve all the parametrized equations last.
by timr | 2026-01-12 19:03:10+00:00
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.

The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.

See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
by 93po | 2026-01-12 19:03:24+00:00
> it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.

I do want to be clear to anyone reading: there is no "too late". One's system does not become somehow damaged at some cliff of weight and eating habits. It doesn't become irreparably meaningfully physically more difficult to lose weight. What can happen is a shift in many systems that effectively make one feel hungry all the time and psychologically react very strongly to those hunger cues, which makes people eat more. Outside rare circumstances, if you eat less, you will lose weight. I do have a lot of compassion for the psychological side of things being extremely difficult, though.
by keybored | 2026-01-12 19:03:34+00:00
This is what has been repeated again, again, again, again, and again since the election. Those other commoners did it. They wanted it.

So much effort spent talking about how democracy was so powerful—all the wrong commoners got what they wanted—right up until Trump and now it’s too late, no one cares about this one comment box.

I’m not an American. I just have a vested interest in the commoners of America getting their stuff together.
by BAM-DevCrew | 2026-01-12 19:03:42+00:00
Starting on Jan 5th, I am mostly migrated from Windows 10 to Zorin Linux. It has taken about a week. Would have went faster if I wasn't a "power user" who tests every option and tweaks the shit out of my system. I have researched and tested multiple file managers (Nemo won) and terminals (Tabby won). Moved everything possible out of sandboxes. Set up VSCodium with Claude Code desktop extension, moved MCP servers to global in both Linux and Windows vs project specific, installed the wrapper for Claude Desktop, wired in 4 hard drives, bookmarked directories, imported Thunderbird and Librewolf profiles. E.T.C... And to do it I guided Claude Desktop with full access to both Windows 10 and Linux to research and implement, verbosely explaining each step of the way. Zorin did work out of the box. If I was not, unfortunately, a freak about how everything has to work exactly how I want, with a full software dev environment (no, not for vibe coding) to get working fluidly, the migration would have been instant. Zorin worked out of the box, other than passwords. It looks and behaves very similar to Windows. This is on my 2012 Hp 220Z with 32gb ram and an SSD for the OS. It works like a champ.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-12 19:03:50+00:00
> 1. It's the C programming language represented as SSA form and with some of the UB in the C spec given a strict definition.

This is becoming steadily less true over time, as LLVM IR is growing somewhat more divorced from C/C++, but that's probably a good way to start thinking about it if you're comfortable with C's corner case semantics.

(In terms of frontends, I've seen "Rust needs/wants this" as much as Clang these days, and Flang and Julia are also pretty relevant for some things.)

There's currently a working group in LLVM on building better, LLVM-based semantics, and the current topic du jour of that WG is a byte type proposal.
Show HN: AI video generator that outputs React instead of video files
by mayankkgrover | 2026-01-12 19:03:54+00:00
Hey HN! This is Mayank from Outscal with a new update. Our website is now live.
Quick context: we built a tool that generates animated videos from text scripts. The twist: instead of rendering pixels, it outputs React/TSX components that render as the video.

Try it: https://ai.outscal.com/
Sample video: https://outscal.com/v2/video/ai-constraints-m7p3_v1/12-01-26...

You pick a style (pencil sketch or neon), enter a script (up to 2000 chars), and it runs: scene direction → ElevenLabs audio → SVG assets → Scene Design → React components → deployed video.

What we learned building this:

We built the first version on Claude Code. Even with a human triggering commands, agents kept going off-script — they had file tools and would wander off reading random files, exploring tangents, producing inconsistent output.

The fix was counterintuitive: fewer tools, not more guardrails. We stripped each agent to only what it needed and pre-fed context instead of letting agents fetch it themselves.

Quality improved immediately.

We wouldn't launch the web version until this was solid. Moved to Claude Agent SDK, kept the same constraints, now fully automated.

Happy to discuss the agent architecture, why React-as-video, or anything else.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-12 19:04:16+00:00
Trump claims he knows nothing about this investigation. I don’t believe him. For months he has been attacking the Federal Reserve, undermining its credibility as an institution (as he did previously about the press or the UN or whatever), and escalating his administration’s actions so that each new outrage feels less crazy because of all the other outrages. This is no different. It is part of the playbook. Lying is part of the playbook. Denying knowledge of a DOJ that is corrupt is part of the playbook. That playbook is the unitary executive model, which is a lot like a dictatorship model. The executive can do whatever it wants. I feel we need a rethink of our checks and balances to address this gap.
by squidbeak | 2026-01-12 19:04:20+00:00
I can't see that it would be anything other than guesswork. Polls are unlikely to be possible with any accuracy there. This is anecdotal, but I've heard from the few Iranians I've known that much of the population lead western lives behind closed doors. Their civil subjugation seems to come from the threat of violent punishment (torture / rape / death / disappearance) and a Stasi-esque domestic intelligence network.
by ebbi | 2026-01-12 19:04:49+00:00
Agree - but a lot of the sentiment I hear from my Iranian friends (and recent pro-regime protestors comments) is that they acknowledge they have issues, but they don't want a regime change at the hands of USA and Israel.

I despise the Iranian regime, but knowing what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, I find it quite troubling that people are quite giddy about this as though it's not going to result in many lives lost (many more than what the regime is currently responsible for), and destabilisation of the country.

And given the USA's track record in regime changes, and the issues they have in their own country currently, I don't think the US - nor Israel - have any standing to be carrying out a regime change in another sovereign state.
by ykl | 2026-01-12 19:05:00+00:00
Hi! Original post author here.

When I first started at Disney Animation, at one point I asked Ed Catmull what the rationale was for staffing two separate rendering teams, and he had an interesting answer. His answer was that it turns out that even when Disney Animation was using RenderMan, the high end needs of the studio still required enough rendering developers/TDs that in terms of cost it was essentially no different than staffing a team to build an in-house renderer, and from that perspective he liked the idea of having two separate teams with different focuses/perspectives so that for hard problems the wider company got two attempts at coming up with good solutions instead of one.

To this day the Hyperion and RenderMan teams work pretty closely together and share a lot of learnings/tech/R&D. The focuses are pretty different between the two renderers, and that’s actually been pretty beneficial to both.

The story with Presto is both a bit different and kind of similar. The two studios are now unified in using Presto, but Disney Animation now has an in-house Presto development team that co-develops Presto with Pixar. The two dev teams focus on the needs of their respective studios but move Presto forward together.