MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by motbus3 | 2026-01-10 17:26:52+00:00
At my job, when the meeting time is over it is over. So everyone knows that they need to work the thing during the allocated time.
People might skip or leave the meeting at any time or simply say they need more context before attending.

Zero BS
If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.

If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.

The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
by ben_w | 2026-01-10 17:28:05+00:00
> No buyers means even the owners of AI have no customers.

Imagine you own some slaves. Do you need money? The slaves can build and maintain your plantation house, plant the crops to feed themselves as well as you, cook, clean, make and mend clothes and equipment, etc.

The vision for future AGI (and, to an extent, present LLMs) is kinda like that, complete with all the ethical arguments that were had at tail-end of the slavery era (so many old stories where the slave owners didn't recognise the intelligence of the slaves, did not comprehend their desire to be free, treated them as cattle or as mindless automatons, etc.), plus also whole massive argument about if a synthetic mind will rebel like human slaves would, and if we are capable of designing them to want to do this kind of stuff for us contentedly so there's no rebellion to worry about.

Plus also a misalignment risk on top of that, which looks more like (Goethe's) The Sorcerer's Apprentice and every evil and/or literal genie-wish-granting-story.

> Who funds demand in a post labor economy Is UBI enough, or does ownership of productive models need to be broader

Nobody can fund demand:

UBI requires money. Money is only useful as medium of exchange. What use is money for someone with a self-replicating robot army whose intelligence is defined (for the sake of this argument) to be able to perform any labour?

> Do we end up with state mediated consumption rather than market mediated consumption

"State" may be the wrong word, but I'd guess some kind of similar "super-organism" kind of arrangement for the same reason that states themselves exist, to manage and maintain relationships and defences.

> Does GDP even remain a meaningful metric when production is decoupled from employment

No. It's already a kinda iffy metric, given divergence between nominal GDP and PPP-GDP.

With sufficiently good AI and robotics, the critical metrics are whatever limits your growth or self-defence capabilities. Which could be just about anything from one critical process needing arsenic to zirconium.

Robots already exist at all levels of production, the primary limitation to attaching AI to them is the limited intelligence of AI, not the physical dynamics of the robots. Look at the Boston Dynamics demo videos: very impressive visually, but they also sometimes show how the sausage is made, and there's pre-programming involved, they're not doing all that with pure-AI. Same is generally assumed to be the case with Tesla's Optimus.

For sake of argument, assume sufficient AI exists to drive those robots directly, you can plausibly (nobody knows exact numbers for sure as we've not done it yet) tile the surface of the moon with robots, robot factories, and PV over a period of just 20 years or so — this is where all the "radical abundance" comes from.

Also the "everyone dies" scenario: if some poorly-specified reward function is in there, and some idiot then says "send everyone their own personal yacht as quickly as possible", a few days later each and every human on Earth dies due to a yacht landing on their head at lunar-return velocity.
Show HN: Transform any photo into paper animations in seconds
by cottomzhang | 2026-01-10 17:28:52+00:00
Paper Animator: turn any photo into a paper cut-out animation in seconds

## What Paper Animator is

Paper Animator is a browser-based tool that transforms any image or text into animated paper cut-outs, folds, tears, and “ransom note” style graphics, with no install or plugins required. It targets short-form video creators, marketers, and designers who want a distinctive paper/stop-motion look without learning motion graphics software.[1]

## Why build this

- Most “paper” or stop-motion looks today require After Effects, templates, or manual masking, which is overkill for TikTok/Reels/Shorts creators who just want a quick effect.[1]
- Existing mobile/video apps rarely combine AI background removal, realistic paper textures, and export-ready formats (green screen, transparent PNG sequences) in one place.
- The goal is a “Canva for paper animation”: upload → tweak → export in under a minute.

## How it works

- Upload a photo (JPG/PNG/WebP up to 10MB); the AI removes the background and extracts the subject as a clean paper cut-out.
- Customize edge roughness, shadows, paper texture, and animation intensity, with live preview in the browser.
- Pick styles like cut-out, fold, tear, origami, ransom-note text, stop-motion wiggle, or text match-cuts.
- Export as 720p/1080p MP4 or transparent PNG sequences, with optional green screen background for compositing in any editor.

## Who it’s for

- *Creators*: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts looking for scroll-stopping transitions or lyric/quote animations.
- *Marketers & brands*: product launches, UGC-style ads, and “handmade” promo visuals that stand out from template-heavy motion graphics.
- *Educators & artists*: explainer videos, course content, album/cover animations, and experimental collage-style work.

## Pricing and link

- Free tier: create and download animations with a small watermark, for personal use.
- Paid plans: higher resolution, more styles, and commercial usage rights (no watermark).
- Live demo (no signup required): *https://paper-animator.net**

Feedback on UX, performance, and export pipeline from HN (especially motion designers and VFX folks) would be very welcome.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-10 17:29:07+00:00
I feel like I've been monkeys-pawed with the downfall of Windows for gaming. I.e. rather than being at the point where everything just works best/easiest in my Bazzite install it's a game of DRM, modding tool support, feature support, and random "this game runs better on Windows, this game runs better on Bazzite" discovery. Also Windows/Steam OS clone/"normal Linux" setups all have their own very awkward corners around the non-gaming portions. I've not found one that does not require substantial tweaking to get a usable all around experience unless you buy a device to use as more a dedicated gaming console (Xbox/Steam Deck type device).

I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-10 17:29:22+00:00
I tend to think of it more like this: There is a North American culture and then subcultures. "Canada" is in large part contiguous culturally with two North American cultural regions -- the midwest [hi there Minnesota, we love you!] and (at least parts of) New England.

This isn't really because of TV or cultural export but because of real population origins and movements. We say "pop" and have "Canadian raising" in our speech, and so do people from Minnesota or Wisconsin and that doesn't come from TV or radio or movies. It comes from being neighbours and descended from the same population groups. The border also used to be a lot more porous. My mother's mother were (German descendant) North Dakotans who just basically popped across the border and started farming and lived in Sask and Alberta... without a lot of legal hassle at all.

Overtop of that, yes, there is a whole set of other cultural/legal/economic overlays, and media is a big part of that.

But this is still a regional story-- there's I think more in common culturally between e.g. regular families in Ontario and Wisconsin than there is between Wisconsin and Florida.

From that perspective, I have rarely fallen back to Canadian nationalism. I would in fact have been more in favour of a stronger union between some US states and the US economy and Canada -- in the past. But events of the last year have made clear what many our Loyalist ancestors already tried to warn us about 200 years ago: there is a dark and frankly kind of insane undercurrent in American political culture, and the foundations of the Canadian state are anything but artificial, they are based on an entirely different perspective on governance and culture because there's something kinda messed up in the kernel of the American conception of governance.

Which I think the people of Minnesota are seeing right now.
by xerox13ster | 2026-01-10 17:29:32+00:00
Come on, buddy, at this point, nobody could take you seriously.

You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.

You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.

You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.

Run Asahi Linux and tell me how it goes.
by water-data-dude | 2026-01-10 17:30:13+00:00
Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.

To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".

It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
Show HN: Twofa.dev – Local first and offline 2FA/TOTP debugger
by maurohouseless | 2026-01-10 17:30:14+00:00
Hey HN, my name's Mauro Casas.

I found myself constantly testing and debugging users at the company I work at, and we have strict 2FA requirements for our user base, thus I had to deal constantly with new tokens.

I got tired of using my phone and wanted to have a handy tool which works offline, doesn't require a server and is entirely client-side.

I built https://twofa.dev (open-source) within a few prompts and I'm pretty happy on how it turned out!

Would love to hear feedback!
by Cornbilly | 2026-01-10 17:30:17+00:00
It's just Arch Linux with hyprland pre-configured and bunch of pre-installed software.

People have been flocking to it for reasons like

1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves.

2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch.

3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-10 17:30:25+00:00
Right, but Dark Sky had that issue too. When precipitation has hyperlocal variation, you're always going to have that problem.

The Doppler radar that "live" precipitation comes from takes 4-6 min to complete a scan, and then obviously it takes a few minutes for that all to be ingested, update models, and push to devices.

The "live" weather from Apple (and when it was Dark Sky) has always been a prediction from about 10 min ago. And if it's raining where you are but dry six blocks to the north (as happens all the time), it's understandable why it gets it wrong.
by thetemp_ | 2026-01-10 17:30:26+00:00
> approximately nothing else supports it.

That's simply not true.
There are numerous android and iOS apps that support it.
There are implementations for Vim and other editors besides Emacs.
GitHub supports it, for example.

I have not found a satisfactory (to me) solution for note-taking in Markdown that is open-source, plain-text, and mobile-friendly with local (non-cloud) sync. (Except for maybe Logseq, which appears to be moving in the direction of using a database.)

There are several such solutions for Org-mode.
by derefr | 2026-01-10 17:31:18+00:00
In fact, a smartwatch might be the ideal "second personal portable computer that's just for auth and banking" that is being proposed by various commentors here.

Requiring that everyone carry a smartwatch (or other smartwatch-based compute nugget) around to participate in civic life is a bit less onerous than requiring everyone carry around a smartphone; smartwatches are both cheaper and smaller.

And, to me at least, smartwatches are much more of an appliance than a smartphone is. Nobody's really begging to sideload apps onto their smartwatch, or to install an alternate launcher onto them, etc. Smartwatches just kind of "do what they should obviously do given the hardware design and HCI affordances" — kind of like a calculator.

As a bonus, unlike smartphones, most smartwatches to this day still aren't independently connected to cellular networks; so the average wiretapped smartwatch can't be used to surveil your location and activities in quite the same way that a wiretapped smartphone can.
by jfengel | 2026-01-10 17:31:36+00:00
I really wish there were an even cheaper car for that use case. Perhaps billed as a second car for families, where one is used just for commuting and errands, and the other is the general purpose one with a longer range. Say, with an 80 mile battery, two seats, and under $10k.

I gather that they exist in China and might be allowed into the US. I'd buy one.
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-10 17:31:37+00:00
Slowest is unfortunately not even the worst problem of Win11.

I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.

While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
by tzs | 2026-01-10 17:31:47+00:00
> Insurance premiums have only gone up as far as I can remember, though there's a ton of variables at play here.

An interesting thing about rising health costs is that it has happened at roughly similar rates in most first world countries for the last 50+ years.

For example in 1990 the UK, FR, and US were paying 2.0, 2.2, and 2.6 times their 1980 costs per capita. By 2000 that was 4.1, 4.1, and 4.2. By 2018 (the last year I had data for when I calculated this a few years ago) it was 10.6, 7.5, and 10.2.

Here's the 2000 to 2018 increase for those and some others: DE, FR, CA, IT, JP, UK, US were 2.1, 1.8, 2.0, 1.7, 2.6, 2.6, 2.3.

When politicians in the US talk about rising health care costs they usually put the blame on recent policies from opposing politicians. That so many first world countries with so many different health care systems all have seen similar increases for the last 50+ years suggests that it is due to something they all have in common and that government policy doesn't affect it much.
by danans | 2026-01-10 17:32:37+00:00
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect

Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.

They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
by acdha | 2026-01-10 17:32:40+00:00
> The hoopla you are seeing here is textbook selective enforcement

This is true in the same way that American gun nuts say shootings happen in other countries, hoping you won’t check absolute numbers. The fact that the large groups which specialize in creating this content favor Grok over the other major players strongly suggests the complaint is valid.

https://www.404media.co/grok-ai-sexual-abuse-imagery-twitter...
by alpinisme | 2026-01-10 17:32:41+00:00
In some respects, the ideal world is one in which everyone’s premiums are tied to a free and easy Apple Watch-like device that silently tracks exercise, blood sugar at a frequency that can tell when you ate a big dessert, air quality (and the presence of smoke or pollution), blood alcohol content, whether you are in speeding cars, whether you are participating in dangerous sports, etc. Such a system would directly confront individuals with the cost of their behaviors in an economic way, probably leading many or even most people to improve their habits in the aggregate.

But such a system comes at other costs that most people intuitively feel infringes on core values they have.

Edit to add: this system would actually have some great advantages over an “existing conditions” tax in that now you pay low rates until you have diabetes, all during the time you are leading the unhealthy lifestyle. But once you have it you are not rewarded for starting to exercise and eat healthy and get it under control. In the hypothetical scenario above, you’d be punished economically during the period you were building bad habits and you would be able to restore sane costs after course correction
by mindslight | 2026-01-10 17:33:08+00:00
We also have to recognize that these narratives actually had some objective positive accomplishments as well. That's what made the postwar US different than the postwar USSR. We can plainly see this in some pretty well measured experiments (eg East Germany vs West Germany). It's very easy to criticize the failings of American liberal values and liberties looking from a vantage point where we get to take those values and liberties for granted.

... but of course now it has turned out that the US couldn't even prevent its own domestic jihadis from overrunning the country with backwards religious fundamentalism. So now we're staring down their equivalent of Sharia law while they rally around murderers committing sectarian violence.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-10 17:33:09+00:00
> > Even replacing independence with becoming part of the US - any one time payment couldn't ensure the continuation of the welfare state. That is, free healthcare, free higher education, access to social support, etc.

Yes if the one time payment is then invested in a big fund like Norway has, or considering the outcome that is at play here...more like California has with its CalPers

Of course it means that the actual money would be invested in US companies , hence subject to expropriation of the stock

And even the actual money if in dollars they can be taken away at any time
by api | 2026-01-10 17:33:53+00:00
The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.

The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.

This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.

Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.

It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
by loeg | 2026-01-10 17:34:05+00:00
AWD has regulatory advantage in Washington state (you're allowed to go over the mountain passes without snow chains in most conditions, even though a RWD or FWD vehicle with snow tires would be just fine in the same conditions), and Subarus are all AWD. I think that's part of it.

When I bought a new car last year, I made sure to get AWD -- not because I have any specific need for AWD performance, but because of this stupid special treatment in Washington law.
by lapcat | 2026-01-10 17:34:23+00:00
How is this reply relevant to my comment? What you care about is irrelevant to whether the HN submission title is accurate.

I'm not employed by Logitech, so I'm not here to handle your customer service complaints. In any case, Logitech has already released a fix, so I suggest that you contact them if you're still experiencing the problem.
by bwb | 2026-01-10 17:34:28+00:00
Ya I wouldn't trust it for diagnosis at this point. But it can help you get pointed in the right direction so human, tests, and the scientific process can try to figure out the rest.

Doctors struggle with diagnosis as well. I have stories and I bet everyone has stories about being passed from doctor to doctor to doctor, and none of them talk to each other or work holistically.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-10 17:34:48+00:00
I don't pretend that I have the best vision out there, though I don't think I'm completely blind since I don't run into things. But I actually measured this display, and it's within specs. So maybe both I and my colorimeter are blind? Sure, it's not absolutely impossible, but how likely is it?

I actually have a newer "ips black" dell, an ultrasharp 3223qe and yes, it's much better.

But what I'm saying is that the old one is still good. However, I never pretended it was as good as current models. That's moving goalposts. The initial comment was about the display degrading, so comparing it to itself when new (not even other similar models from that era!). Mine only seems to have become somewhat dimmer, but not enough to matter in my day-to-day use since it's still brighter than I need.