MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-23 16:18:27+00:00
The index you just cited is calculated out of five sub-numbers, one of whom is literally "functional government", and Czechia for some reason gets rather low 6.4 on this, less than Greece.

First, this is not my experience, and second, much like you I don't think that this is particularly relevant to the democratic character of the country.

I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe. Most problems around opening anything are caused by bureaucracy, which is obliged to follow norms produced by the lawmakers. Some of these norms are stupid, but that does not mean that they are undemocratic. Voters have the right to be stupid and to elect stupid representatives who produce stupid norms.
Show HN: MermaidTUI - Deterministic Unicode/ASCII diagrams in the terminal
by tariqshams | 2026-01-23 16:18:42+00:00
Hi HN,
I built mermaidtui, a lightweight TypeScript engine that renders Mermaid flowcharts directly in your terminal as clean Unicode or ASCII boxes.

Visualizing Mermaid diagrams usually requires a heavy setup: a headless browser (Puppeteer/Playwright), SVG-to-image conversion, or a web preview. That's fine for documentation sites, but it's overkill for TUI apps, CI logs, or quick terminal previews.

The Solution is a small engine (<= 1000 LOC) that uses a deterministic grid-based layout to render diagrams using box-drawing characters.
Key Features

- Intelligent Routing: It uses corner characters (┌, ┐, └, ┘) for orthogonal paths.

- Topological Layering: Attempts a readable, structured layout.

- Support for Chained Edges: A --> B --> C works out of the box.

- Zero Heavy Dependencies: No Mermaid internals, no Chromium, just pure TypeScript/JavaScript. With commander for the CLI, not the MermaidTUI library

I wanted a way to see high-quality diagrams in my CLI tools quickly, it’s great for SSH sessions where you can’t easily open an SVG. I was initially embedding this within a cli tool I’m working on and figured I’d extract out a library for others to use. I also initially used regex to parse, but now I made the parser a bit more robust.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the layout engine or any specific Mermaid syntax you'd like to see supported next!

GitHub: https://github.com/tariqshams/mermaidtui

npm i mermaidtui
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-23 16:18:43+00:00
It’s disturbing to see officials channels of the Trump administration share doctored photos. What’s even more disturbing is seeing Kaelan Dorr (White House Deputy Communications Director) justify this attempt to share a manipulated photo in his follow-up post on Twitter/X (https://x.com/Kaelan47/status/2014410500096856358):

> Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

He is treating this as a ‘meme’ when it is revisionism of an attempt the manipulate the public with blatantly false information. These are the same people who regularly attack the press and label it “fake news”, which has successfully caused half the country to distrust journalism entirely. How can the American political process function properly if the source half the country lists to shamelessly lies and attacks.
by NoboruWataya | 2026-01-23 16:18:46+00:00
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.

It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-23 16:18:51+00:00
You have put your finger on why agent assisted coding often doesn't suck, and other use cases of LLMs often do suck. Lint and the compiler get there licks in before you even smoke test the code. There aren't two layers of deterministic, algorithmic checking for your emails or invoices.

So before anyone concludes that coding agents prove that AI can be useful, find some use cases with similar characteristics.
by andy99 | 2026-01-23 16:19:05+00:00
> Issues and discussions can use AI assistance but must have a full human-in-the-loop. This means that any content generated with AI must have been reviewed and edited by a human before submission.

I can see this being a problem. I read a thread here a few weeks ago where someone was called out on submitting an AI slop article they wrote with all the usual tells. They finally admitted it but said something to the effect they reviewed it and stood behind every line.

The problem with AI writing is at least some people appear incapable of critically reviewing it. Writing something yourself eliminates this problem because it forces you to pick your words (there could be other problems of course).

So the AI-blind will still submit slop under the policy but believe themselves to have reviewed it and “stand behind” it.
by lucideer | 2026-01-23 16:19:49+00:00
One of the most "real" features of vinyl records that I never really internalised until I started buying a few is that you can take a record out of its sleeve & look at the grooves to see how many tracks is on each side & how long each of the tracks is. You can also "skip" to tracks when playing (much better than tapes ever could) using this same method.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-23 16:20:23+00:00
>My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future,

I think my mom was convinced because of bargain bin prices after it was more or less dead as a platform. But I'm not sure, she's not around to ask anymore... I've read though that after TI gave up on it, some department stores were dumping them for well under $100, and sometimes closer to $50.

I think I only once, ever, got it to load a saved program from cassette. I don't know if I was just a moron as a kid, or if they were actually that horrible for storage.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-23 16:20:25+00:00
Re: moderation:

Like BitTorrent, you choose which repos to mirror. If you’re crazy or you watch your server like a hawk you could just choose to automatically mirror everything.

Like BitTorrent there is no way to “moderate” what another node chooses to share.

They are working on tools to help permissive nodes remove repos flagged for deletion, but the protocol itself does not prevent a node from ignoring this flag.
by zffr | 2026-01-23 16:21:08+00:00
You listed 8 types, and this is because there are 3 axes that each have 2 values

- Mutable or not

- Typed or Raw

- Single object, or Buffer

Given one kind of pointer, you can convert to any other kind of pointer, but you are responsible for knowing if it’s safe to do.

The API is not super intuitive, but I can see how it makes it more clear what you are doing in your code.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-23 16:21:18+00:00
Trump 1.0 I dismissed as an aberration, but Trump 2.0 has truly exposed the inhumanity of a significant segment of US society, that was always there beneath the surface since slavery and Jim Crow just waiting for "normalization" that would allow it to re-emerge. I was naive about the progress the US had made over the last century, and it has been a rude awakening. I no longer want to raise my kids here and am actively working towards emigrating.
by troyvit | 2026-01-23 16:21:26+00:00
Yeah I was pretty hard on podman in that comment but the truth is I use it over docker wherever I can. I have a mixed environment at home but settled on RedHat for the home server and everything seems totally ok. I really like quadlets, and the ability to go rootless is a big load off my mind to be honest. I do wish they'd package it for other distros though. It would save some headaches.
by iamlintaoz | 2026-01-23 16:21:35+00:00
The disk storage EloqKV uses (EloqStore [1]) is optimized for batch updates because the upper Data Substrate layer manages buffering and the Write-Ahead Log (WAL), absorbing writes and guaranteeing durability. When durability is not required, the WAL can be optionally disabled.

[1] github.com/eloqdata/eloqstore

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of EloqData
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-23 16:21:55+00:00
renewables are still made from different substances, one of which is copper. One byproduct of copper is extremely toxic- arsenic, and it's spills are not that different in terms of dangers. That's the point. For nuclear at least, over time decay happens, esp for most dangerous isotopes, but for chemical waste - it's forever.

Nuclear still has higher capacity factor than any VRE.

Evacuation numbers for Fukushima are accounted in the stat. But it's also worth mentioning Japanese govt acknowledged most of the deaths are caused by extreme evacuation measures that werent needed, but govt ignored the data it had to enforce them. The panic against nuclear caused them, not radiation.
Show HN: CloudClerk. We struggled with BigQuery finops, so we decided to fight
by lgvdp | 2026-01-23 16:22:22+00:00
Hello HN, Lucas here.

I’ve been working with BigQuery for ~5 years, mostly in large (petabyte-scale) environments. Over time we ended up spending a lot of money and engineering effort just trying to understand where costs were coming from, why and how to optimize them.

At some point we decided to stop, leverage all our past experience and spend a full cycle building tooling focused on cost visibility and optimization. The main goal was to regain ownership of cost data and make it possible to understand our cost structure in under a minute, while aligning the views of engineering and FinOps at the project level. To complement these, and given the recent rise of AI, we also built agents that review usage patterns and selected KPIs to surface issues and suggest concrete optimizations (always through an encoding layer for privacy).

This ended up working well for us: we reduced monthly BigQuery spend by ~43% and made cost considerations part of normal engineering workflows instead of a separate FinOps exercise. After validating it with a few other teams facing similar problems, we decided to ship it publicly in November.

Some transparency items to consider:
- We only work with bigquery related information, not all gcs.
- While we already support most sources of cost, the project is in constant development. If you use an uncommon feature it may not be covered, but we will implement it for you.
- The larger the company the larger the impact, since there tends to be larger technical debt. Nonetheless, we've seen significant impact in lower scale startups.
- We dont need labels. Labels are great, and should be taken care of, but we do not depend on them to provide insights.

Happy to share details, lessons learned, or tradeoffs if this is interesting to others dealing with large-scale data warehouse costs. Check us out at https://www.cloudclerk.ai/
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-23 16:22:22+00:00
A large proportion of historic usenet posts are archived and remain freely available today. Didn't google end up with one of the larger commercial archives? So that "stupid stuff" is still around unless it got deleted at the time (and wasn't archived first).

New uploads to github are constantly being scanned by both benevolent and malicious actors for secrets that were inadvertently checked in. It's far too late by the time you notice and delete it.

This P2P system doesn't appear to introduce any new problems that aren't already widespread.
by julian_t | 2026-01-23 16:22:27+00:00
I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something like sync an iPhone I no longer have with a Mac I no longer have. I've usually just cloned one phone to the next, but I reckon that next time I may be in for a manual copying job.
by throwaway91827 | 2026-01-23 16:22:28+00:00
Revolutionary terror in 1789 wasn't about killing the Bourgeisie- the French Revolution was a Bourgeois revolution- the Revolution was about overthrowing the Aristocracy, the nobles, the people with, as you say, titles- Being Bourgeois generally meant that you're common-born but well-educated and moneyed.

The fact that the Bourgeois of France were growing in real power, but completely unrepresented in the formal political systems in France, was one of the major pressure points that caused the entire system to explode into Revolutionary violence.

I think you're right to point out the irony that revolutionary violence mostly affected the common man, and not the aristocracy, but the "enemies of the revolution" were nobles, clergy, and their sympathizers (perceived or otherwise), not "the bourgeoisie".

Proletarian revolutions against the Bourgeois don't really happen until there IS an urban proletariat in the first place- in pre-industrial 1789, the bourgeois and the sans-culottes were grouped together socially in the "Third Estate".
Show HN: Physio Tracker – a local-only, offline PWA for tracking exercises
by innovationlab | 2026-01-23 16:23:18+00:00
I built this while doing physiotherapy and struggling to keep a clear record of what I was actually doing week to week.

I had exercises from multiple clinicians, things changed over time, and I wanted a simple way to log what I did without accounts, cloud sync, or rigid plans.

Physio Tracker is a small installable web app (PWA) that:
- works offline
- stores data locally on the device
- lets you add and adapt exercises freely
- supports JSON export/import

I export the data occasionally and use it to summarise progress before appointments, but the app itself is just a personal logging tool, not medical advice and not a replacement for a physio.

I’m sharing it to see if it’s useful beyond me. I’d appreciate feedback on:
- whether this solves a real problem
- what feels unnecessary
- what’s missing

App: https://www.physiotracker.app
by madwolf | 2026-01-23 16:23:23+00:00
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives.
I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids.
And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
by bob1029 | 2026-01-23 16:23:47+00:00
I would encourage anyone who thinks that XML is strictly inferior to attempt integration with certain banking vendors without use of their official XSD/WSDL sources. I've generated service references that are in the tens of megabytes. This stuff is not bloat. There are genuinely this many types and properties in some business systems. There is no way you could hand code this and still get everything else done.

The entire point of heavy-handed XML is to 1:1 the type system across the wire. Once I generate my service references, it is as if the service is on my local machine. The productivity gains around having strongly typed proxies of the remote services are impossible to overstate. I can wire up entirely new operations without looking at the documentation most of the time. Intellisense surfaces everything I need automatically as I drill into the type system.

JSON can work and provide much of the same, but XML has already proven to work in some of the nastiest environments. It's not the friendliest or most convenient technology, but it is an extremely effective technology. I am very confident that the vendors I work with will continue to use XML/WCF/SOAP into 2030.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-23 16:23:52+00:00
> democratic character of the country

The core crux of "democratic character" is providing an even playing field as much as possible institutionally, organizationally, and politically. If functioning is subpar or requires "hacks" or misaligned institutions, it undermines democratic character itself.

Chest-thumping while ignoring the real degradation of institutions in a large portion of Europe is only going to put you back in the same position as the US.

> I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe

I'd rather not given the incumbent in power and how small the Cybersecurity FDI community in Czechia is. Maybe Vsquare, just not you.
by lioeters | 2026-01-23 16:25:02+00:00
It's a bet beyond LLM and generative AI, to embrace other techniques and areas of research.

> The world is unpredictable. If you try to build a generative model that predicts every detail of the future, it will fail. JEPA is not generative AI. It is a system that learns to represent videos really well. The key is to learn an abstract representation of the world and make predictions in that abstract space, ignoring the details you can’t predict. That’s what JEPA does. It learns the underlying rules of the world from observation, like a baby learning about gravity. This is the foundation for common sense, and it’s the key to building truly intelligent systems that can reason and plan in the real world. The most exciting work so far on this is coming from academia, not the big industrial labs stuck in the LLM world.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-23 16:25:11+00:00
Now, I'll be the first to agree that you're biased, but surely you see that the rules and norms of the road are generally far more nuanced and not necessarily identical the rules of the road as the government writes them?

There's no reason motorists shouldn't be able to go almost any speed on motorways, conditions permitting. Germany's system is fairly sensible in this regard and many American states have one or two good laws that correlate well with norms and should be adopted elsewhere.

If the rules and laws actually reflected norms of behavior there would be more appetite for enforcement.
by vpribish | 2026-01-23 16:25:21+00:00
he's angry at being misunderstood and is acting rude, but your comment is right on. It's such a commonplace thing to say (even if they don't really mean it literally) that I wish there was a really quick and clear way to reply. mainstream news, for instance always summarizes market moves in number of points on the DOW which is the same sort of thing if you don't all know the denominator.

maybe saying it's comparing +1 Euros to +5 Yen? of losing 1 tablespoon vs 2 teaspoons? or 5/10 to 1/2?
by sidsud | 2026-01-23 16:26:08+00:00
Not surprised - data exfiltration and Tenant Owner Azure access for DOGE officials were previously reported via Whistleblower Aid.

https://www.eff.org/files/2025/10/06/085-15_ex_o_berulis_4.1...

"Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were
preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’
home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood"
by wat10000 | 2026-01-23 16:26:11+00:00
Legitimacy can mean more than just following the letter of the rules. There's a pretty good argument to be made that refusing to even hold hearings for a nominee is a violation of the Senate's Constitutional duties. And refusing to uphold norms is a completely reasonable basis for calling something illegitimate as well. A pretty big chunk of our legal system is based on precedent and norms rather than written law.
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 16:26:17+00:00
If you were to move WY to CA you probably would need the test. Though I don't know.

I do know if you move from CA to IL you wouldn't need to take the test, but I'm not sure about WY to IL. I moved from MN->IA->IL, and I had to take a test but I remember at the time moving directly from MN would have meant no test required.
by wang_li | 2026-01-23 16:26:17+00:00
The adaption is going to be that competent, knowledgeable people will begin forming informal and formal networks of people they know are skilled and intelligent and begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent. They will be less willing to work with people who don't have a proven record of competence. This results in greater stratification and harder for people who aren't already part of the in group to break in.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-23 16:26:22+00:00
2010-2018...when did the Tories time in government end? Based on your comment, I am assuming 2018.

Lol, quite the pedant. To be clear though, yes when they are short-staffed they only have one car actually on patrol for the whole country (iirc, the actual full staffing policy overnights is two cars...which you can see has been covered by the media).

Traffic was consolidated into Police Scotland so there is only one police force, and so there aren't local forces patrolling a local area. I believe the total number of traffic police is something like 400 now (which is mostly not people on patrol) and so, overnight around holidays, the policy is to have two cars which turns into less than that on some occasions.
by boogieknite | 2026-01-23 16:27:15+00:00
mj had a growth spurt his jr year of hs (the rest of his family is < 6') scottie had a giant growth spurt in college (was a walk on point guard and was 6') kelly olynyk is a local example of a guy who grew late in hs (also a pg before growing). bill walton was normal tall, his brothers are 6'3"ish (nba pg height), but then shot up 8 inches to 6'10" his jr year of hs. many many examples. Robinson for sure the most drastic bc he grew in the navy

now that you mention it, you have a good point that it seems less common lately
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-23 16:27:32+00:00
No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.

The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.

The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.

Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.

Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.
by ubergeek42 | 2026-01-23 16:28:24+00:00
tl;dr: Rippling does not ensure HSA contributions from your paycheck and deposits into the HSA actually match, leading to a situation where you may have money withheld from your paycheck that doesn’t actually get deposited into your HSA. If you use Rippling and have an HSA, you should really go audit your contributions and make sure they match the deposits into your HSA account. In my case, I was missing $400.
by cbm-vic-20 | 2026-01-23 16:28:25+00:00
If you're into this, you may be into a series on the Usagi Electric YouTube channel where he's building a homebrew computer based on the TMS9900 processor from the TI-99/4A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADigs7hlLTM&list=PLnw98JPyOb...
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-23 16:28:33+00:00
I disagree. The Dems shot themselves in the foot for several reasons:

- trying to appeal to the "center" instead of going the other way and channelling the more radical elements' rage against Trump. I believe Bernie would have beaten Trump as the nominee. Yes, the GOP would have painted him as a "Communist destroying the American Way of Life", but they did that to Harris anyway so being centrist gave the Dems nothing.

- not focusing on prices and jobs from day one, in simple terms the average uneducated worker could understand, and mostly, trying to say "things are good/better" which may have been true, but everyone else thought they were not when they went to buy eggs

- Biden trying to stay in for a second term instead of bowing out at the start