MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jrowen | 2026-01-19 20:45:43+00:00
> Nobody disagrees that a brighter color draws more attention than a subdued one, or that the eye is drawn to a heavier weight before a lighter one.

But they disagree on which of those is "good design" in which context. For example, some want bold colors loudly distinguishing app icons, some want a consistent minimal theme (idk the state of desktop customization today but it was pretty wild in the early 2000s).

> Nobody disagrees that it looks more balanced to have the round parts of letters like "O" and S" extend slightly beyond the baseline and cap line, beyond where the bottom and top os "E" and "B" are.

I'm not totally sure what this means but it sounds incredibly dubious to state as fact and there are no doubt heavily used fonts that don't do it.

For virtually any "universal" graphic design "rule" there will be successful examples of things that did not follow it. There will be a camp that disagrees with it. They also change and drift, they're relative to time and place, nothing is really static. There can be inherent value in explicitly doing something as a counterpoint to a dominant trend.

I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't learn the vocabulary and the body of accumulated experience, but there's no way you're going to make a universally right and objectively correct decision.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-19 20:46:01+00:00
That would have required intent to deceive.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/14/west-midland...

“I had understood and been advised that the match had been identified by way of a Google search in preparation for attending HAC. My belief that this was the case was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the committee.”
by dns_snek | 2026-01-19 20:46:01+00:00
Do you believe in private property rights? If the product they want doesn't exist then they're shit out of luck and they must either make one or wait for one to get made. You're arguing that it's okay for them to break the law because doing business legally is really inconvenient.

That would be the end of discussion if we lived in a world governed by the rule of law but we're repeatedly reminded that we don't.
by lovich | 2026-01-19 20:46:17+00:00
The linked tweet

> BREAKING: The ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.

That’s just CBS reporting hearsay from non first party sources in an admin that’s been caught directly lying about the events cutting local authorities out of the investigation.

> I am not expert, but I can tell you with certainty I would have expected no different outcome in my country.

Don’t know which country it is, but it sounds like a shithole country if you’d expect government agents to execute people against their own training, and accept government lies about it.
by ModernMech | 2026-01-19 20:46:33+00:00
> If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.

People say this but they lost by like 1% in 2024. If that had gone the other way by 1%, people would be talking about what political geniuses they are (as has happened in the past). Winning in this environment just means playing long enough that the noise goes your way eventually, and then everyone talks about what a political mastermind you are. Or if it goes against you then you're forever lost in the political wilderness. Until the next election when it eventually, randomly goes your way again.
by apaprocki | 2026-01-19 20:46:56+00:00
A quick search finds many COBOL checkers. I’d be very surprised if a modern model was not able to fix its own mistakes if connected to a checker tool. Yes, it may not be able to one shot it perfectly, but if it can quickly call a tool once and it “works”, does it really matter much in the end? (Maybe it matters from a cost perspective, but I’m just referring to it solving the problem you asked it to solve.)

Clearly it isn’t just “broken” for everyone, “Claude Code modernizes a legacy COBOL codebase”, from Anthropic:

https://youtu.be/OwMu0pyYZBc
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-19 20:47:04+00:00
> a statement as simple as 'black lives matter' was controversial.

That was never controversial. What was controversial was the unstated implication after that statement: "and people don't think they do". When your slogan is a false accusation against people in general, they aren't going to take it well. Approximately zero people in the US think black lives don't matter, so they aren't going to appreciate you coming at them with that accusation even if it is left unstated.
by xvxvx | 2026-01-19 20:47:09+00:00
I wish someone at X would leak data on the current state of the user base. Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere.

Apparently X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.

Maybe they’re not being shadowbanned or ghosted. There’s just almost no real people using that site.
by fasterik | 2026-01-19 20:47:13+00:00
Prediction markets perform the valuable function of information aggregation, at least in theory. When there is a financial incentive to make a correct prediction, the market should converge on the probability an ideal observer would assign to the event.

Of course in practice, there are issues like low trading volume, market manipulation, etc. And whether or not a particular market is performing better than, say, super-forecasters or experts in a given field is an empirical question.

That said, it seems a bit excessive to dismiss prediction markets as merely gambling platforms that add no value to society.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-19 20:47:25+00:00
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025–2026_Iranian_protests

And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.

It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Invalid counter-argument: the survey in question looks all sort of movements, both those that succeeded and failed.
by susam | 2026-01-19 20:47:45+00:00
Some of the top items:

hello world
4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52

hello
4358f43b660389eecd435dc2a5f5cee29786245cd2cff27bd4de0b3e8fd53b79

4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52
406cc6dbc566bf6c672a2167868341e9853f7fbbd2a21eb1caa4d08006abae41
(Thanks @Y_Y)

a
beef7c4d3141c30ab4f6ebf1f724936c50f609ee1915951d802046ba1d9fa23d

subth.ink
3f3b05abaec959c9950d5a93a64525971c7d9fcabf6436d653edba62f29d5bea
by darkteflon | 2026-01-19 20:47:46+00:00
Ffs. Alright, what’s the best way for me to run Silverblue on Mac hardware these days with a full GPU-accelerated desktop experience? Is UTM any good? Any alternatives? I used to run Win 10 in Parallels on MacOS and it was excellent - that’s the level of virtualisation polish I’m going for.

After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.

I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.

Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
by tgtweak | 2026-01-19 20:47:48+00:00
Most have low/no duties on most goods categories from China - aside from a few specific goods categories in developed markets - most goods flow out of China to export countries without tariff/duties. ASEAN markets and most of Africa have zero tariffs. I don't think there are any developed markets (which are China's main export destinations) with double-digit tariff averages except India. Using Germany as an example... Electronics (hs code 85) is 0-6% tariffs on Chinese origin goods (averages out under 2%), and has been that way for a while. US on the other hand is now 7.5-27.5% where it was previously 0-4%. While they aren't "no tariffs", an average ~2% tariff across all imported goods is very small compared to what is shelved in the US. ASEAN is almost entirely no tariff.

So when the US is high teens/low 20's average tariff and the rest of the developed world is 0-5%, that's essentially zero as far as market pressure is concerned.

Chinese imports to the US is down to 8% in October 2025, compared to >13% prior to recent trade policy changes. In the same period, EU imports from China have grown 5%. My point remains that US exerting import pressure on China is benefitting the rest of the world's buying power with China, at it's expense.
by mothballed | 2026-01-19 20:47:51+00:00
In US Native/Indigenous usually call themselves either by their tribe or "Indian." White people are the ones that generally use native/indigenous more even though natives call themselves Indian more.

Since the context was US civil rights you can see how I came to the conclusion, since it didn't make any sense someone could simply declare their heritage is from an extra-continental nationality and thus I was wrong.

In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian) so at best it is a shared failure of communication.
by hollerith | 2026-01-19 20:47:53+00:00
The US already has what you call an ad police: for decades, it has been unlawful to make false statements in an ad and to accept any money for advertising (or endorsement or sponsorship) without making it plain to the viewer which parts of the content are ads and which are not.

Since the US Federal Trade Commission can smoothly enforce the second of those two rules, what makes you think it cannot smoothly enforce an outright ban on ads? "Smoothly": you seem to have been unaware that the second of the rules I described existed, and you probably would have been aware if the enforcement had yielded anything deserving of the name "kafka land".
by ptero | 2026-01-19 20:48:07+00:00
> And why is CS not in STEM?

It sure is. If I said that it is not it was a typo.

What I was saying is that today I see a non-CS STEM major plus a CS-like minor as a better ticket for an undergrad (who will enter the job market in the next 2-4 years) than a CS major. Which was not the case for the last almost 30 years, when a pure CS major gave many folks an excellent start. My 2c.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-01-19 20:48:09+00:00
A lot of work and money has gone in to preventing zebra mussels from spreading to new lakes in Minnesota. Think free sites for people to have their boats cleaned when they’re going from lake to lake, PR campaigns, etc.

My parent’s small pond, which has never seen a boat or any other real human activity, got them before the big lake it’s connected to did. Clearly there was some other way they could spread, presumably by bird.

Anyways, one by one every lake in the area no has zebra mussels. Even if they would only spread via human, it was clearly only a matter of time. As much as they suck (they’re sharp and attach themselves to basically anything in the lake) I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.
by veselin | 2026-01-19 20:48:14+00:00
What is the state of using quants? For chat models, a few errors or lost intelligence may matter a little. But what is happening to tool calling in coding agents? Does it fail catastrophically after a few steps in the agent?

I am interesting if I can run it on a 24GB RTX 4090.

Also, would vllm be a good option?
by lycos | 2026-01-19 20:48:23+00:00
I don't touch my display on my MacBook and it's always yucky because of the finger oils on my keyboard, so the thought of having to use a special cloth to clean it always seemed like too much of a hassle for me compared to the glossy display. I did wonder if this improved ever since they added nano texture to the ipad pro, but sounds like fingerprints are still annoying.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 20:48:25+00:00
To be really honest, they can take a look at bao. (I used it for an eerily similar project like this one though its great that this is receiving traction! I Do feel like scuttlebutt protocol might be good implementation for most use cases as well)

Bao allows us to have a common hash for the first n contents of the term and then they can still have common hash so you can just loop it over each continuous word to see how much commonly (long?) their hash is and the length becomes the amount similar

Some issue might come where if the word changes in the start and the rest is similar but I feel like bao could/does support that as well. My information on bao is pretty rusty (get the pun? It's written in rust) but I am sure that this idea is technically possible & I hope someone experienced in the field could tell more about it

https://github.com/oconnor663/bao, Oconnor's bao's video or documentaries on youtube are so good, worth a watch & worth a star (though they do mention that its a little less formally cryptographically solved iirc but its still pretty robust imo)
by k2enemy | 2026-01-19 20:48:46+00:00
I could not agree more.

It probably doesn't help that I just spend an hour trying to figure out how to update to 18.7.3 on my iphone. It turns out you can't. The only way to get security updates now is to upgrade to iOS 26. Apple no longer supports security updates to old major versions if the device is capable of running the new major release. Apple is no longer making choices that benefit customers, but ones that benefit project managers.
Show HN: Imagine Play – Generated stories with illustrations and narration
by foxinthebox | 2026-01-19 20:48:53+00:00
I built a platform that creates personalized stories with age-appropriate content.

Stack:
- Claude, Gemini, and 11Labs for content generation
- Preact + Vite frontend
- Cloudflare Workers/Pages/D1/R2/Queues
- Stripe for payments

The demo stories on the homepage let you experience a full story without signing up. Would love feedback on the reading experience and whether the pricing makes sense.
by shimman | 2026-01-19 20:49:20+00:00
Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.

It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.

I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).

John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).

You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-19 20:49:26+00:00
Looking purely at import volumes, most of those other countries haven't experienced drop-offs like China. Canada exports about the same amount of goods to the US today as they did in early 2024. Mexico is in a similar trend. What I see is that when Chinese buying dipped due to exorbitant tariffs, Canada and Mexico spiked until they were also hit with tariffs, returning to their previous levels.
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2026-01-19 20:49:34+00:00
You're right that I maybe phrased it too harsh, the repairability _is_ a great feature. And of course, they do more by checking supply chains for some of the parts. The thing is, if your part is not available, you're stuck with their repair service. It surprises me they don't offer all parts.

Great though, that they resolved yours within the scheduled time!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-19 20:49:35+00:00
> Nonviolence wasn't simply some magic bullet that was magically better than force, it was a political tool that seemed nicer compared to the alternative of force

Fair enough. And perhaps showing a group of people movitated enough to credibly threaten violence demonstrates their potency as a political bloc. But the value is in showing organisation. Not in the violence per se.

Levying violence as a political tool a dangerous game. If that rhetoric turned to action, the civil-rights movement would have been destroyed. By popular command.
by mmooss | 2026-01-19 20:49:57+00:00
Defining tool use is subtle. Here's one defintion:

"... the tool is a detached object (rock) used to procure some thing (food) ordinarily incapable of being accessed without a tool.". Also it is "manipulated independent of its location." [0]

Rubbing against a tree is not tool use. Similarly, dropping a nut on a rock is not tool use, but dropping a rock on a nut is.

It gets a bit more complex: You can pickup a stick and use it (similar to the cow); you can first prepare the stick by stripping leaves and branches off (some primates); you can bend the stick into a useful hook (New Caledonian crows).

Look up corvids and especially New Caledonian crows. they are pretty amazing; in some tasks they apparently outperform all primates except one particular species.
by nikanj | 2026-01-19 20:50:03+00:00
I remember how religiously people used to care about their Google ranking. It's almost shocking to realize how fast that has changed. People used to spend tons of effort gaming site load speed, optimizing sitemaps and writing blog content.

All of that is fast getting completely irrelevant, people see ads on their favourite TikReels app, find their holiday presents on Temu and ask their questions from ChatGPT
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-19 20:50:18+00:00
<< You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model

In a sense, the threat is always there. Human nature did not magically change over the course of the years. However, it is well understood that actual violence is frowned upon and is expected to be an absolute last resort.

The problem is, and always has been, and it is a sentiment I have expressed on this forum a fair amount trying to lower the temperature somewhat: it is really hard to stop violence once it starts. The old violence begets violence may have been uttered by MLK, but its origins are biblical.

This is why I tend to urge people, who, sometimes openly and online, argue for violence, to think twice or thrice before going down that path. There rarely is a way to go back once you do. And that is assuming you do not have friends or family, because you can't just assume they will be unscathed.

There are reasons why I look at current events with US with a sense of real concern. Because I think some people do not understand the actual cost should that actually come to pass.

Edit: In case it was not clear: nonviolence is the only way if we want the system to remain in place. And it is easy to reflexively say: 'but I don't like the system'. You do. You just don't understand how much the system protects you right now.
by Y_Y | 2026-01-19 20:50:19+00:00
Currently number three is:

4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52

with hash:

406cc6dbc566bf6c672a2167868341e9853f7fbbd2a21eb1caa4d08006abae41

i.e. the hash of "hello world"
by dijit | 2026-01-19 20:51:04+00:00
You've misunderstood the point I was making. I'm not claiming legal findings are objectively true in some metaphysical sense, I'm saying that for a legal system to function, there must be finality to proceedings.

The alternative is what, exactly? Perpetual relitigation? Every convicted person maintains their innocence indefinitely and the system just... accepts that as equally valid to the jury's verdict?

We have mechanisms for when the system gets it wrong: appeals, post-conviction relief, habeas corpus. These exist precisely because we recognise legal findings aren't infallible. But the burden is on the convicted to demonstrate error... and rightly so, because the alternative is paralysis.

Your patent office analogy inadvertently supports my point: yes, there are edge cases where prior art is missed. But the solution isn't to abolish patent finality, it's to have robust review mechanisms, which we do.

The claim upthread is that the system is unjust more often than just. That's a far stronger claim than "the system sometimes gets it wrong."
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 20:51:08+00:00
Fat chance expecting the European nations to stand up to USA's strong-arm tactics, when they have willingly supported it blindly for every new war in the past (as NATO coalition).

Oh wait, it was the British+Europeans who allowed the U.S.Dollar to become the dominant exchang currency of the world in the first place, thus enabling USA to do whatever it pleases...

Here's the interesting tale of how the world economy came to shaped after the World Wars, due to a cunning American and some last-minute forgery.

The Bretton Woods conspiracy:
https://www.damninteresting.com/foreign-exchanges/
by jen729w | 2026-01-19 20:51:15+00:00
> Btw. alcohol is a very good way to destroy the old glossy screens (non nano texture).

Respectful disagree. My partner's family's go-to surface spray has always been a home-made mix of ~30% methylated spirits to water. That's the only bench spray I've used for 10+ years and I can report it's as effective as any commercial spray, and 10% the price. Just mix it at home and use it everywhere. Kitchen, bathroom, anywhere else. I speak as a clean-freak. It works.

It's also amazing for cleaning laptop screens. I spray it directly on. I shouldn't. I do. I type this on a 5-year-old Macbook Air whose screen has been cleaned countless times using this method. It looks like this. (The moon-surface-like texture at the top is the texture of the reflected wall, above.) https://share.cleanshot.com/bnHrCQDZ

1. Make this mixture in a $1 spray bottle at home.

2. Lock your laptop and press Escape so the screen turns off. Lay it screen-back-down, keyboard open at about 80°, so it sits on the bench.

3. Spray a small amount of this mixture on the screen, directly. But don't be shy. Just don't have the screen be swimming.

4. Wipe carefully with a kitchen towel.

5. Repeat as necessary.

So far the only danger I've found is catching an abrasive particle in the cloth in the wiping process. A pre-wipe can alleviate the issue.
Show HN: Sign and initial PDFs in the browser (no uploads)
by assetofbaskets | 2026-01-19 20:51:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web app that lets you sign PDFs and replicate initials across all pages entirely client-side. PDFs are processed in the browser only — nothing is uploaded to a server.

Why I built it:

Most tools require accounts or uploads

Initialing long contracts page-by-page is tedious

Some clients are sensitive about document privacy

Features:

Typed or drawn signatures

One-click “initial all pages”

Works without signup

Free option (watermark), paid to remove it

Tech notes:

PDF manipulation is done client-side (JS)

No server-side PDF processing

Payments only touch Stripe/PayPal

Link:
https://instantpdfsign.com/

Would love feedback on:

UX issues

Edge cases with PDFs

Anything you’d do differently technically

Thanks!