MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerlam | 2026-01-06 19:51:55+00:00
Manufacturers sometimes change things that already work, just to separate the "old technology" and the new. When people want a completely new car, they expect things to be different and new, even if they are worse.

I believe Toyota did this frequently in their Prius models, where things were different from mainline Toyota just because, like the center-mounted speedometer and the joystick shifter.
by KolenCh | 2026-01-06 19:52:07+00:00
Small bugs? May be. But there’s a lot of lack of functionality and stability. I’d recommend InFuse if anyone is hitting those problems. If it has been running fine for you then there’s no need to switch.
The problem is related to source codec. Depending on that you’ll have difference experience. So that’s why the experience varies because there’s vast differences in source formats.
A good client not only handles well on some sources, but many if not all.
by vel0city | 2026-01-06 19:52:16+00:00
> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
by conductr | 2026-01-06 19:53:21+00:00
This list gets long pretty quick once you start it though. I'm sure you could say the same for healthcare & education. In doing so, according to a cursory google search, you just removed profit from ~40% of GDP. That's going to be felt.

Propose pivoting our entire economy all you want, but do it in a way that doesn't cripple it and provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications.
by cheschire | 2026-01-06 19:53:22+00:00
Yep you nailed it. That’s all I was saying. None of those things were critical to Jellyfin working.

But I will say for the size of my music library, Jellyfin was not quite as good as plex and was the impetus behind my switch to navidrome for audio.

And navidrome isn’t the best for audiobooks so I’m in the process of testing good audiobook hosting platforms.

So the reply wasn’t wrong either. Plex is just easier for a lot of folks, and that is why I don’t have any ill will towards their changes. They just aren’t for me.
by merelysounds | 2026-01-06 19:53:29+00:00
> 1.1 partially fixed it, so that strings (quoted ”no”) did not become Boolean false.

Do you have a source? Afaik v1.1 didn’t introduce such a change, v1.0 specified the same behavior for quoted strings, i.e. in v1.0 a quoted “no” would remain a string “no” as well.
by tavavex | 2026-01-06 19:53:56+00:00
> gaslight every one about how important winning the Ukraine war was for global stability and the rules based international order

For someone who used the preceding paragraph to position themselves against imperialism and authoritarian regimes, that is a very strange statement to make. Ukraine was the one responsible for ringing the alarm bells. If the US deemed Ukraine's total military victory as being beneficial to them, they could've made that happen single-handedly and in very short order, no "gaslighting" required. Instead they chose the endless war-of-attrition + appeasement approach and sent some aid while posturing and making promises. They were terrified of "escalation" and ended up not doing anything. The countries that cared about the war didn't have a lot to send, and the countries that had a lot to send didn't care about the war that much. Now the side that's not scared of escalation is using all that military might to airlift heads of state of sovereign nations.

> just to stick their thumbs up their asses when their dictator pulls shit like this is beyond me

Is that Biden admin in the room with us right now? The Americans gave the current administration a blank cheque to do anything they want, the not-far-right party's federal role right now had been reduced to looking angry/concerned in hopes that maybe a future election could let them have some power. Unless you seriously expected Biden et al. to storm the White House and coup their current administration, they can't really do anything anymore - and every day, their odds get slimmer as the entire country is being reshaped around them.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-01-06 19:53:57+00:00
> 3. Good design is as little design as possible.

> 10. Good design is aesthetic.

Unfortunately, these two principles conspire to produce the bland minimalist aesthetic that while some people like[1], leaves me feeling like I'm living in a sterile, clinical, and ultimately soulless environment.

We lament the lack of beauty in architecture and design and here, in this list, is the authoritative voice convincing people to produce more soulless objects. Design is a reflection of the designers interiorality, but what I see when I look at objects designed this way is a lack of interiorality which misses the point of art in it's entirety. It's the human equivalent of AI slop.

1. I understand it appeals as looking "clean" and makes some people's brains feel less itchy.
by legitster | 2026-01-06 19:54:06+00:00
Again, the debris cloud from one strike could disable the entire constellation on the same orbit. Especially if it was engineered to do so. But even doing literally nothing, the constellation will fall out of orbit over the course of 5 years if we choose not to supply it with new nodes.

The idea of an unstoppable AGI in space is a completely implausible scenario based on current or near technology.
by crims0n | 2026-01-06 19:54:19+00:00
Interesting thought experiment, replace "AI agent" with "computer" in this article. Seems our parents/grandparents may have been having some of the same conversations 50 years ago.

---

The advantages of computers over human employees:

1. The best computer can be copied infinitely.

2. Computers can run 24/7

3. Computers could theoretically think faster than humans

4. Computers have minimal management overhead

5. Computers can be instantly scaled up and down

6. Computers don’t mind running in a nightmare surveillance prison

7. Computers are more tax efficient
by lossolo | 2026-01-06 19:55:07+00:00
Did Hong Kong destroy its financial sector to deny China a "major prize"? If someone were going to invade and occupy your country, would you destroy your huge source of revenue so they couldn't claim it as a "major prize"? And then what? Stay poor?
I feel like people who repeat this view (something they read somewhere) haven't really analyzed it in a social, economic, historical, and geopolitical context. Because if you do, there's zero logic to it, given the consequences for the 23 million people who would still be living on the island afterward.
by tirant | 2026-01-06 19:55:12+00:00
Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.

However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
by skrebbel | 2026-01-06 19:55:31+00:00
No the meaning is that there's a wave of hardware innovators who started as software innovators. Musk (Paypal) is the most obvious example. The Boom CEO featured here is another. There's a fair bunch more, I agree with the author that a weirdly high % of founders of cool hardware / deeptech companies have a software engineering background. Like, you'd expect that space to be dominated by mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and physicists etc but somehow it isn't.
by denizkavi | 2026-01-06 19:56:10+00:00
It certainly was an investment for us to meet the security and enterprise-readiness criteria for our enterprise users. As an n of 1, we don't tend to do on-prem, and even much of the most skeptical companies will find a way to use cloud if they want your product enough.

I think most large companies have similar expectations around security requirements, so once those are resolved most IT teams are on your side. We occasionally do some specific things like allowing our product to be run in a VPC on the customer cloud, but I imagine this is just what most enterprise-facing companies do.
by vel0city | 2026-01-06 19:56:21+00:00
> I can select---from the steering wheel---how many seconds the interior lights stay on after I close the door.

I don't mind this feature is somewhere deep in the menus of the driver settings area. However, if you're tripping over settings like this either the car is poorly designed or your routinely delving into settings areas you really shouldn't be in while driving.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-06 19:56:44+00:00
I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.
by lucketone | 2026-01-06 19:56:59+00:00
So in summary:

- own the hardware, if you have constant load and have enough expertise (personally or a team) to use/maintain it at your required reliability level

- rent the cloud, if your usage is opportunistic/ spike’y/rapidly changing

- also rent the cloud, if required expertise/maintenance would cost you more than the hardware (if you want to have gazillion of nines, you need somebody who’s there to deal with smoking stuff, in several locations)
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-06 19:57:37+00:00
Thunderbird for Android supports pretty much everything Gmail supports and probably more, but it's "only" 40MiB in size. Even on Android, that's a 3x size reduction.

I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps (that doesn't just seem to be a Google problem) but you certainly don't need the full size of the Gmail app.
by chrisweekly | 2026-01-06 19:57:42+00:00
That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, one,...".

1. https://open.spotify.com/track/4TWzk0mTsVcwZRGkpoxjvG?si=vbK...

2. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
by ghaff | 2026-01-06 19:57:43+00:00
And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO.

At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.
by mcswell | 2026-01-06 19:57:52+00:00
OP here. I've fallen many times, but never sprained my ankle. Usually if I have an injury from a fall at all, it's that I've skinned my knee or the palms of my hands (you can wear fingerless leather gloves if you're worried about that).

I have had two injuries that required medical attention. Dislocated my pinky finger once.

The other time I was crossing a wet wooden bridge. On the down-slope of that bridge, my feet went out from under me and I fell on my back. It hurt, so I walked a mile or so back to my car. Hadn't gotten better after a few days, so I checked in at an ER. Turns out I had cracked a rib, and that had caused a small pneumothorax. I was in the hospital for three days while they suctioned it and waited for the lung to heal. (The MD was amazed at my ability to breathe well despite everything.) When I come to that bridge now, I change to a walk.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-06 19:57:54+00:00
> In another sense, it is similar to arguments against tasers, where they are being evaluated in a vacuum instead of being evaluated against their alternatives. If you compare tasers to guns, or power outages to bombs, then they are safe rather than dangerous.

Nah, I disagree here.

Tasers do indeed offer an alternative to guns. But they allow more force in other situations, where officers would previously have had to deescalate because "just shoot them" wasn't justified.

Cops now use a taser where zero force might previously have been used.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-06 19:58:01+00:00
> A big and higher definition screen provides a ton more context from the navigation's map with wider sidebars that can contain more information, while also providing more contrast and better legibility.

As someone with a 2003 Golf (with a tape deck) I find the screen on my iPhone sufficient to get me to where I want to go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by jmcallister | 2026-01-06 19:58:05+00:00
Creator here--today's target is hard but doable :)

I found a path from Books to Rainbow with 366 generated topics!
Books → Publishing (broader)
Publishing → Media (broader)
Media → Times Square (places)
Times Square → Central Park (opposite)
Central Park → Strawberry Fields (Central Park) (deeper)
Strawberry Fields (Central Park) → Strawberry Fields (broader)
Strawberry Fields → Berry Fields (broader)
Berry Fields → Berry Fields Winery (places)
Berry Fields Winery → Wine Country (broader)
Wine Country → Wine Region (broader)
Wine Region → Terroir (similar)
Terroir → Agriculture (broader)
Agriculture → Desertification (evil)
Desertification → Reforestation (opposite)
Reforestation → Ecology (broader)
Ecology → Landscape Ecology (deeper)
Landscape Ecology → Ecology (broader)
Ecology → Ecosystem ecology (deeper)
Ecosystem ecology → Trophic dynamics (deeper)
Trophic dynamics → Nutrient cycling (deeper)
Nutrient cycling → Nitrogen cycle (good)
Nitrogen cycle → Biogeochemistry (broader)
Biogeochemistry → Earth science (broader)
Earth science → Meteorology (deeper)
Meteorology → Weather science (broader)
Weather science → Meteorology (deeper)
Meteorology → Weather phenomenon (deeper)
Weather phenomenon → Sunshine (good)
Sunshine → Sunlight spectrum (deeper)
Sunlight spectrum → Visible spectrum (deeper)
Visible spectrum → Rainbow Chromaticity (places).

Try it yourself at www.llmgame.ai
by accelbred | 2026-01-06 19:58:05+00:00
The amount of paranoia I need for unsafe Rust is orders of magnitudes higher than C. Keeping track of the many things that can implicity drop values and/or free memory, and figuring out if im handling raw pointers and reference conversions in a way that doesn't accidentally alias is painful. The C rules are fewer and simpler, and are also well known, and are aleviated and documented by guidelines like MISRA. Unsafe Rust has more rules, which seem underspecified and underdocumented, and also unstable. Known unknowns are preferable over unknown unknowns.
by amluto | 2026-01-06 19:58:10+00:00
Some manufacturers have massively screwed up the cruise control buttons. On Rivians, for example, the car will instruct you to take control of steering if you will soon enter an area where it can’t do assisted steering. Fine, except that the only control that can transition directly from assisted steering to plan enhanced cruise is to jerk the steering wheel, which is distinctly uncool. So you instead cancel cruise entirely and then re-engage it.

To add insult to injury, despite the fact that the speed up and speed down buttons are actual physical buttons, they are so aggressively denounced that there’s a loop: press button, wait, press, read screen to see if you’re making progress, press, etc.

Anyway, the point is that, while physical buttons in predictable locations can make it possible to operate something without looking, it still needs a good design and implementation.
by _boffin_ | 2026-01-06 19:58:22+00:00
Quick clarification: the `/hn` page is a no-login, no-API-key interactive demo (autoplay is just the default walkthrough; you can pause and click around).

OpenAI BYOK is only for the full app when you want real model calls.

More detail on what’s different under the hood:

- Branches are anchored to a source message + selected span (not freeform threads).

- Collector items are references back to those spans, so "Compose" can build a prompt from explicit citations rather than chat history drift.

- "Context compiler" shows the exact prompt stack + token budget, and lets you exclude/pin items to control what survives truncation.

Feedback I'd love: does Branch + Collector + Compose feel faster than "open a second chat window + copy/paste", or does it feel like extra steps?
Show HN: A simple, local-only CRM desktop app built with Python/Tk and SQLite
by sieep | 2026-01-06 19:58:40+00:00
Hi HN,

This is my first project I ever did with Python a while ago, I use this app weekly to help manage my business relationship data.

It's essentially just a spreadsheet with less functionality, so don't have high expectations. I would highly recommend a spreadsheet over this.

It was a way for me to learn more about desktop GUI development using Python and Tkinter.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-06 19:58:40+00:00
If you lump them all together you will mask the fact that some of them are done way better and safer than others.

I tested a cruise by moving off the curb into a parking spot at big speed. The autonomous control saw me, predicted my trajectory and slowed so it could stop if needed. The safety driver didn’t see me at all. (Safer than huma)
But the uber autonomous car didn’t work like that (not safe), Tesla regularly run down children in controlled test. (Obviously not safe)

Lumping them together will mess up your statistics.
by xp84 | 2026-01-06 19:59:03+00:00
As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).

The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.

I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-06 19:59:09+00:00
Ah I see, your model gives more details in a simple way. The one I bought is veeery barebones[0], I basically have to stop what I'm doing and look at the watch for a couple of seconds to figure out approximately what time it is...

> I just can't justify "yet another watch"

Same, there's a watch I find absolutely beautiful[1] since years, but it costs around 3.5k, could never justify spending that much for a watch.

The other two watches you posted are interesting, fun to meet another person who likes cheap and/but quirky watches. Took longer than I'd like to admit to understand how the SHENGKE works :D

Since getting my RePebble a couple weeks ago I haven't worn another watch.

[0]https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_Singly_AA29.html

[1]https://www.longines.com/de-ch/p/watch-longines-master-colle...
by vel0city | 2026-01-06 19:59:18+00:00
Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine. Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically 1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades ago.

Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-06 19:59:23+00:00
Ok so this looks like bullshit.

First things first, its entirely possible to geolocate using just visual markers.

A bunch of startups did it around 2018 (most got bought by facebook, ie mapillary) They work by extracting keypoints from pictures and building a massive point cloud of identifiable key points.

But

That picture they use with supposed keypoint matching is wrong. None of those keypoints are reliable feature descriptors. They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible.

Now, they might have a vibe based matcher which does some basic spatial comparison, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, especially given a large search radius.

The other interesting question is, where did they get their data from? I'm pretty sure google spent a lot of time making it really difficult to train from street view (lord knows we've tried.)

Edit the demo here: https://geospy.ai/ is much more what I recognise a bog standard VPS system does. Note that the user is matching buildings. Thats far more reliable way to do feature matching.
by tonymet | 2026-01-06 19:59:44+00:00
The actual fix would involve simplifying the driving experience. Adding 30+ buttons to the steering wheel and 25+ to the console does not improve the situation.

The bar should be whether the operator can keep their eyes on the road while operating the controls. And when getting into a new vehicle, how easy can they find common controls like mirrors, climate, parking brake, cruise without consulting the manual.

I rented a Highlander which did have nice physical controls, but many features were buried in cryptic menus. The auto steer feature, which dragged and pulled steering in corners, and aggressively applied braking , was buried under 3 levels of menus labeled "RTSS", "SCS", "Advanced".

Capable drivers don't need cornering and braking assist. It's $2k+ worth of useless components , for a worse driver experience.
by matthewkayin | 2026-01-06 19:59:47+00:00
You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies.

There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.

Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.

But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.

This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.

It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.

And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.