MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AaronDS4 | 2026-01-17 17:21:47+00:00
Hi HN
I’m A. De Sloover, founder of FlowDesk.
FlowDesk is an AI-powered workspace built to reduce meeting overload and context switching for founders and teams.
The idea came from a simple frustration:
meetings generate decisions, tasks, follow-ups… but they’re scattered across tools and usually lost.
What FlowDesk does:
AI Meeting Prep – before the meeting, AI summarizes context, past decisions, docs, and action items
AI Real-time Meeting Assistance – live summaries + suggested responses during meetings
AI Meeting Summaries – automatic summaries, decisions, and next steps after the call
Unified workspace – tasks, documents, CRM, and dashboards connected to your meetings
The goal is not “another productivity tool”, but a system where AI understands your workspace and acts proactively.
It’s still early, and I’m actively iterating based on feedback.
I’d love to hear:
What feels useful / unnecessary?
Would you trust AI inside live meetings?
What would stop you from using a tool like this?

Thanks for the feedback
A. De Sloover
by Snuggly73 | 2026-01-17 17:21:49+00:00
I've watched them today work in the new repo - https://github.com/wilson-anysphere/fastrender/tree/main , adding another 50k lines trying to optimize scroll/rendering performance (spoiler: not really)

At this point, its 1.5mlocs without the vendored crates (so basically excluding the js engine etc). If you compare that to Servo/Ladybird which are 300k locs each and actually happen to work, agents do love slinging slop.
by beached_whale | 2026-01-17 17:21:51+00:00
Better is subjective here. Vancouver will be a bit different with it's warmer weather, but for the week or two at -30C to -40C(like I get) it provides a lot more heat at a lower price and in Canada, at least Ontario, it is still much cheaper to heat a home and water with. I'll probably go heat pump if my boiler goes as I can avoid the cost of adding ductwork(really expensive these days and more than furnace for install) and get A\C too.
by thundergolfer | 2026-01-17 17:23:06+00:00
I definitely see what you're saying, but:

> has come at everyone, equally, all at once

is not true. It's obvious that certain people and certain fields are technological laggards or technological early adopters.

Other computing and IT technologies also provided a good training ground for this stuff. LLMs have really interesting new properties, but all have familiar properties and decade+ old methods of distribution.

This stuff is difficult, sure. But we have long set a low bar for education management and the results—declining literacy and math in countries which have become stupidly wealthy—speak for themselves.
by OutOfHere | 2026-01-17 17:23:06+00:00
As a American, given what the US is becoming now, also given that Denmark actually has reliable public healthcare and the US canceled it for its own people, Greenland is better off staying with Denmark than with the US. If Russia were to invade, NATO still holds.

This is about more oil mining, about Trump appeasing to his oil friends, considering Greenland very likely has a substantial quantity of it.
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-17 17:23:27+00:00
> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.

All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.

And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
by wonger_ | 2026-01-17 17:23:27+00:00
Good point. I haven't found many ascii examples online.

Here's a copy-paste snippet where you can try chafa-ascii-fying images in your own terminal, if you have uvx:

uvx --with chafa-py python -c '
from chafa import *
from chafa.loader import Loader
import sys
img = Loader(sys.argv[1])
config = CanvasConfig()
config.calc_canvas_geometry(img.width,img.height,0.5,True,False)
symbol_map = SymbolMap()
symbol_map.add_by_tags(SymbolTags.CHAFA_SYMBOL_TAG_ASCII)
config.set_symbol_map(symbol_map)
config.canvas_mode = CanvasMode.CHAFA_CANVAS_MODE_FGBG
canvas = Canvas(config)
canvas.draw_all_pixels(img.pixel_type,img.get_pixels(),img.width,img.height,img.rowstride)
print(canvas.print().decode())
' \
myimage.jpg

But results are not as good as the OP's work. https://wonger.dev/assets/chafa-ascii-examples.png So I'll revise my claim that chafa is great for unicodey colorful environments, but hand-tailored ascii-only work like the OP is worth the effort.
by xgbi | 2026-01-17 17:23:59+00:00
What are you talking about ?

It says that the parental settings (when enabled!) are just letting children do whatever they want by default:

- buying overpriced objects
- chat without any restriction online
- play without interruption for long time

I think the first one is probably the most poignant: piping children into disguised gambling addiction by default seems like a major fault. Borderline illegal, if you ask me.

It looks a lot like a phony feature "let's add a parental control, it will make people feel like we're trustworthy and bring back more revenue. And please don't disable ingame purchases by default, this is our cash cow".
by NorwegianDude | 2026-01-17 17:23:59+00:00
As a game developer myself, I think young kids should not be able to make purchases on their own.

But some of the ideas on what needs to be done is just silly.

Here is some of the ideas the Norwegian Consumer Council suggested:
- All things in games should be shown in real money value, not in game currency that you have to but for real money, and the price should reflect the most expensive way to get the currency.
- All transactions in games should have the same rights as in real life(if you buy an item in game, you could use your right of withdrawal).
- Users should be able to choose how much the want to buy of premium currency/spend.

While it might have good intentions, they have serious issues. I sell bundles of in game currency. I don't allow users to select just how much they want to buy. I don't do this as part of an evil plan, but because it makes sense. Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower. Tiny amount can not be bought, as it would not make sense considering the per transaction cost.

I don't price things in real currencies, cause after the purchase is made, it's not real money, and if it were, I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks. It also would cause issues when it comes to inflation adjustment. If an user buys 100 "coins", they can buy something for 100 coins. If I adjust for inflation then I adjust the price of coins, not how many coins are needed to buy something in game. That would not work with real money.

Regulation is welcome, but don't do something dumb. Let most thing be as they are, but put strict rules in place on kids making purchases, that way a grown up who hopefully understands money can approve or deny the purchase.
by mosura | 2026-01-17 17:24:19+00:00
Easy - they are in hiding.

They are good enough that they have to actively hide in order that they are not killed, literally, in the cross fire their work has caused. This has been the situation for over a decade.

Consider how big the Indian software universe is and how utterly implausible it would be for them not to have any capacity. That would be the extraordinary claim.
by jimmyl02 | 2026-01-17 17:24:35+00:00
It's very powerful to have ownership over a framework that many developers are familiar and like!

It might not be clear just yet what the path to monetization looks like but an easy example would be deeper integrations with the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem (for example allowing R2 to be easily along with something like duckdb to live in a world of truly local analytics or something like that).

It seems like these great open source frameworks need to monetize by building a platform around the product but these days it's hyper competitive (ex. Vercel, Cloudflare) and it's hard to get started without an incredible differentiator. So, while monetizing independently as a company might be difficult, Astro can provide a lot of value to the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem.
by pydry | 2026-01-17 17:24:41+00:00
This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded.

At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient?

Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates.

The party might be over.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-17 17:24:42+00:00
> he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White

English is not classical formal logic. NOT "It's okay to be white" does not have the same meaning as "It's not okay to be white": it merely means "I reject what is communicated by the phrase 'It's okay to be white'". This observation fits quite well into any analysis of slogans: if he hadn't committed to the uncharitable misinterpretation, I'd expect him to write about this (though I'm not so sure he'd have used this particular example).
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-17 17:24:44+00:00
> I hope if they decide on fines that they weigh it against the finances of the entire Microsoft Corporation.

For more serious offenses I agree that should be the norm, but we're talking about mobile games being annoying. Even with the "won't someone think of the children" angle it sounds excessive. What have we really lost from mobile Call of Duty not being better?

> Has anyone other than Bobby Kotick and the other previous ABK shareholders benefitted from the acquisition?

Me, as a consumer. I haven't purchased a game in over five years and I've played a ton on Game Pass. And the diversity of games I've played is greater than before, there's many indie games I wouldn't otherwise have tried. The catalog is high quality and hasn't descended into garbage like Netflix over the years. It's been too good a value to feel possible and however long they want to keep it up, that's great.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 17:25:16+00:00
I liked this bit by Doctorow recently https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/

If you're getting tariffs anyway, why not just take the yoke of American business protection laws off your shoulders? Let French engineers sell jailbreaking hardware for iphones, or Romanian developers sell unlock keys for John Deere tractors.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-17 17:25:22+00:00
I was thinking consume more like conspicuous consumption for clout. There's been lifestyle inflation, i believe due to social media, compared to times when society was more social. I'm running of general feelings here though, not specific datasets.

Somethings that come to mind: Expensive smart phones, fast fashion clothing spend, travel, tattoos, car feature creep leading to price increases and more loans taken, sq foot per person in housing, Food as an identity statement (more foreign/imported/, more protein are two trends I believe are true).
by constantcrying | 2026-01-17 17:25:50+00:00
I personally hate micro transactions and avoid games like these, especially mobile games, like the plague.

But we have to be honest here, these micro transactions are what consumers want. There is a reason that gatcha games (and paid mechanics of those games are implemented in the games mentioned in the article) are so successful and so popular. Consumers of mobile games, unlike consumers of PC games, enjoy these mechanics, gatcha games are going so far, that the core system of the game is not the gameplay (which is often disregarded as an automated activity), but rather the gatch mechanics.

Yes, these systems are stupid and insane. But they are giving consumers exactly what they want.
by deaux | 2026-01-17 17:25:54+00:00
This is such an American take diametrically opposed to reality. You literally could not be more wrong. The correlation between "effort to fight market forces (i.e. protectionism" and "independence from US tech) is 1:1. It's China, then Korea, then the rest of the world which is all 100% dependent on US tech. China is independent entirely thanks to protectionism and banning right from the staft, Korea is inbetween thanks to the exact same.

The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.
Show HN: Open-source AI workflows for high converting social media videos
by tadasg | 2026-01-17 17:26:36+00:00
hey all

just figured there's no such thing as open source ai videos for social media to bring traffic to your websites, especially as there are now so many vibe builders of apps and saases but marketing is still a bottle neck.

right now there's only a few workflows built but there's a whole framework to generate those workflows easily.

Think of this as Litellm but for video & image models.

Would appreciate a star, I will be maintaining and improving this constantly!

Thank you!
by EgregiousCube | 2026-01-17 17:26:38+00:00
The "at math" is the important part here - I've met more than a few people who are super smart about math but significantly less smart about drugs.

I don't think that it's a good policy to forcibly muzzle their drug opinions just because of their good arithmetic skills. Absent professional licensing standards, the burden is on the listener to decide where a resource is strong and where it is weak.
by rectang | 2026-01-17 17:27:02+00:00
Can semi-technical people replace developers if those semi-technical people accept that the price of avoiding developers is a commitment to minimizing total system complexity?

Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.)

But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintances, there are plenty who cannot.
by neomantra | 2026-01-17 17:27:29+00:00
I have a two-fold approach to this:

* With specific positive or negative feedback, I will issue friendly complements and critiques the LLM to reinforce things I like and reduce things I don't.

* Rather than thinking sycophantic/antagonistic, I am more clear about its role. e.g "You are the Not Invented Here technologist the CEO and CTO of FirmX will bring to our meeting tomorrow. Review my presentation and create a list of shortfalls or synergies and as well as possible questions".

So don't say "please suck at your job", give them a different job.
by kuerbel | 2026-01-17 17:27:40+00:00
I sell/work as a consultant for m365 and azure and the services are definitely getting worse. AI translated garbage docs in which "plane" is translated as aeroplane (Flugzeug), Exchange as "Umtausch" (literal meaning of to exchange something) and so on. Obviously those are the ones I can remember because they were funny. There are also other errors that are not as obvious.

And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-17 17:28:21+00:00
With this the EU-US tariff deal from earlier goes down in flames. It apparently wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Not surprising given how Trump and the fascist MAGA crowd acts.

The UK are in a precarious spot though due to not being inside the EU single market and are forced to find their own way out with a much weaker hand.

Brexit forever and ever coming back to haunt the UK.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-17 17:28:25+00:00
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.

Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
by fellowniusmonk | 2026-01-17 17:28:41+00:00
It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.

Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)

So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-17 17:28:58+00:00
> why not just take the yoke of American business protection laws off your shoulders

Because that means we in the US may as well quasi-nationalize major European investments in the US like VW, Siemens, Saint-Gobains, OnSemi, NXP, Arm, and Nexperia and target European luxury cultural exports like Cognac (LVHM), Wine (LVMH), designer clothes (LVMH), designer purses (LVMH), and others like China did.

As a result, oligarchs like (eg.) Arnault (LVMH) would metaphorically slap Macron like they did on multiple occasions [0][1], and threaten to switch to supporting the RN. If they made Macron in 2017 [2], they can unmake him in 2026 [3].

It's the same story across Europe. And any domestic capacity that could have remained within the EU is going to start leaving on January 27th [4].

Edit: can't reply

> how you get from IP law abrogation to 'quasi- nationalization'

IP Law protection is sacrosanct in any US trade deal, as we are a services exporter. If faced by actions like mentioned above, we wouldn't be above retaliating. This is why American tech companies lobbied both the Biden and Trump administration to tamp down on any attempt on a Digital Services Tax by any country.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-richest-man-lvmhs-arna...

[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/08/07/how-be...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-05/lvmh-s-ar...

[3] - https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/dossier/la...

[4] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/exclusive-eu-india-trade-deal-...
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-17 17:29:36+00:00
The Flavor Aid drinkers and elite establishment liberals are both aligned in despise of open debate and discussion, even when what's going on is far more important than running Doom in Visual Basic on a microwave. That's the disconnect between reality; that politics is "unclean", "uncivilized", far removed, and doesn't matter; that people can't have respectful exchanges of ideas and need to be controlled like children, or that discussion needs to have somewhere else more "appropriate": which is all code for "STFU and take it because the status quo benefits us". Avoiding the 800 lbs. gorilla that's hurting you, the ones you love, and brainwashing others into doing their work for them is tone deaf and on the wrong side of history that paints all of tech as sinister and morally bankrupt.
by ForceBru | 2026-01-17 17:30:01+00:00
In fact, I agree with the article! For instance, many indeed offload thinking to LLMs, potentially "leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains". It also makes sense that students who use LLMs are not "learning to parse truth from fiction ... not learning to understand what makes a good argument ... not learning about different perspectives in the world".

Somehow "pushing back against preconceived notions" is synonymous to "correcting societal norms by means of government-approved LLMs" for me. This brings politics, dystopian worlds and so on. I don't want LLMs to "push back against preconceived notions" and otherwise tell me what to think. This is indeed just one sentence in the article, though.
by Braini | 2026-01-17 17:30:05+00:00
In general you are right, I expect something like this to appear in the future and it would be cool.

But isn't the criticism rather that there are too many (as you say repetitive, not relevant) events - its not like there are cool stories emerging from the underlying game mechanics anymore ("grand strategy") but players have to click through these boring predetermined events again and again.
by coffeefirst | 2026-01-17 17:30:19+00:00
> At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar

Wait, but organizing and expressing your thoughts IS writing. If you don’t make them do the work why bother sending them to school at all.

AI has a great niche place in schools: searching the library. The rest of this seems dumb.
by mmaunder | 2026-01-17 17:30:25+00:00
Related to the Maunder Minimum, named after my namesakes: Astronomer Walter Maunder and his wife Annie Maunder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

And here's more info on The Little Ice Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Debatable as to whether solar activity was a contributor to The Little Ice Age.
Independent fellowships for post‑PhD next‑gen memory research
by feynman_quantum | 2026-01-17 17:30:35+00:00
Looking for examples of independent research fellowships (Thiel Fellowships) or grant programs that fund post‑PhD researchers (not students) to pursue self-directed work in next‑generation memory / neuromorphic hardware (e.g., memristive devices, compute‑in‑memory, analog in‑memory accelerators, unconventional memory architectures, brain‑inspired microelectronics) (PhD in US and non-US citizen)
Ask HN: Feedback on an open cognitive framework (design and structure)
by DELTA-X | 2026-01-17 17:30:50+00:00
Ask HN: Feedback on an open cognitive framework (design & structure)

I’ve published an open-access cognitive framework focused on structure, alignment, and mechanical coherence, without claims about therapy, diagnosis, or performance enhancement.

The project is available here: https://osf.io/ub5f4

I’m looking for direct, technical feedback:

Does the structure hold under scrutiny?

Are there internal inconsistencies or unclear assumptions?

How would you attempt to falsify or stress-test this framework?

What would you improve in the documentation or logical flow?

No product, no company, no pitch.
Just a body of work I want challenged.