MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quotemstr | 2026-01-18 02:33:42+00:00
Yeah. That's why my preferred approach isn't to use Rust for the core TCB. It'd be mostly unsafe anyway, so what's the point? You can write in an all-unsafe language if you want. you can still prove it correct out of band, and seL4 has done that work for you.

Sure, you could just use unsafe Rust and prove it correct with Prusti or something, but why duplicate work?
by ImprobableTruth | 2026-01-18 02:33:47+00:00
The quill and ink at least communicates that it's about writing. The new one is so abstract that when I first looked at it I had no idea what I was even looking at, it certainly doesn't communicate "this is like word" to me. Without comparison to the previous icon, how many people do you think would understand that the bottom line is intended to be a stroke drawn by the pen?
by jlamberts | 2026-01-18 02:34:46+00:00
Re: existing model, for recsys, as long as the product already exists you have some baseline available, even if it's not very good. Anything from "alphabetical order" to "random order" to "most popular" (a reasonable starting point for a lot of cases) is a baseline model.

I agree that a randomized control is extremely valuable, but more as a way to collect unbiased data than a way to validate that you're outperforming random: it's pretty difficult to do worse than random in most recommendation problems. A more palatable way to introduce some randomness is by showing a random item in a specific position with some probability, rather than showing totally random items for a given user/session. This has the advantage of not ruining the experience for an unlucky user when they get a page of things totally unrelated to their interests.
by Leftium | 2026-01-18 02:35:26+00:00
I think web sites are often a "feature" or means to an end. It may be better to focus on the benefits. (Like more sales/revenue. Reduced customer support. Etc.)

For example, I had a client who wanted me to build a web site that hosted her piano lessons. She was sure if only they were hosted somewhere, people would flock to it.

I tried to tell her what she really wanted was marketing and sales, which the web site could be a small part of. She insisted so we built the site anyway. I don't think it's ever gotten any sales...
Show HN: Nex.Design – AI+Senior=10x, AI+Junior=3x with debt
by zxzxy1988 | 2026-01-18 02:35:56+00:00
I spent 6 weeks building www.nex.design, an AI ads agent for e-commerce. It discovers viral social ads, replicates their proven structure, and generates production-ready creatives at scale.

Background: I came from Microsoft doing algorithms/backend. Zero Node.js or frontend experience. Built this with Claude Code as my primary coding partner.

What I learned:

Week 1-2: AI is incredible for cold starts. Had a working tldraw canvas, Cloudflare Workers, image generation, and auth within hours.

Week 3-4: Hit the context window wall. Found 8 components with duplicate fetch() calls, 3 different credit validation implementations, and race conditions between Stripe webhooks. AI builds what you ask for right now - it doesn't think about the system.

Week 5-6: Partnered with an experienced engineer. He didn't write much new code - he deleted things. The codebase got smaller but more stable.

My productivity hack: 3 terminal windows with 2 Claude instances working on independent features while I review. Parallelization helps but multiplies the duplication problem.

Key insight: AI + experienced engineer = 10x. AI + inexperienced developer = 3x with debt.

Question for HN: How do you handle AI-assisted frontend work? AI can't see the UI. It doesn't notice a button is 2px off or spacing looks wrong on mobile. Any workflows that close this visual feedback loop?

Free to try. Codes HN50 (50% off, first 100) and HN20 (20% off, first 1000) if useful.

https://www.nex.design
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-18 02:36:27+00:00
Some related discussions:

Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529756

The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567683

Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062198
by Balgair | 2026-01-18 02:36:53+00:00
Early on the Japanese learned this.

Gave him a golden samurai helmet. Very rare, very important. I heard that it was like a New Yorker gifting a Ruth home run bat. Trade deal got signed, everyone was happy.

Then 'liberation' day happened. The Japanese got smacked with absurd tariffs. Big trade deal might as well have been chewing gum. They didn't get the samurai helmet back. They're still sore about it.

That peace prize he got on Friday? Couldn't even remember her name that afternoon.

There is not a single thing he says that any nation can trust. If the first rule of politics is that once you're bought, you have to stay bought, then Donny is playing Calvinball.
by lordkrandel | 2026-01-18 02:37:21+00:00
No one actually forces anyone to create opensource. It is a choice of creation and licensing. A choice of giving. The fact that you are "supposed" to then maintain and work on it it's just in your mind. If you don't want to give to the public, you can avoid it by not creating, publishing, or licensing differently. You got plenty of choice. Just stop being annoying.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-18 02:38:00+00:00
Has anyone ever in life been prosecuted for allowing their teen watch boobs on the internet? I mean if you at any time prior to 18 have a computer in their room you absolutely know that you basically provided an adult portal.

Before the internet as I kid I rewired our houses cable wiring and stole my dad's dirty magazines. Pretty sure damn near everyone saw adult material prior to 18.
by akst | 2026-01-18 02:38:10+00:00
I think you’re assuming I’m calling for perfection and suggesting people abstain from something less than perfect, we live in reality most things aren’t perfect.

Even if Wikipedia was the least worse resource people would still do themselves a disservice in ignoring issues with it. Acknowledging issues isn’t the same as dismissing it entirely.

How is this elitist? These other resources are more accessible than ever, no gate keepers are keeping anyone from looking at them. I’m also not making any judgments about anyone who uses Wikipedia either.
by komali2 | 2026-01-18 02:40:36+00:00
> Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.

Then, depending on your definition of nationalism, it sounds like it's an unimpeachably good thing to be Woke, so I'm super confused where you're coming from here.

To be clear: I was saying that the OP was purposefully misgendering Nex Benedict in order express their transphobia.
by adastra22 | 2026-01-18 02:40:41+00:00
That might be a better word to use, maybe. But I'm not sure there was an adequate word for the point I was trying to make.

The linguistic definition of ideographic is that it is a language which uses symbols to represent concepts, rather than just literal pictures (pictographic) or sounds (alphabet or syllabrie).

Linguistics textbooks as far as I'm aware do not define symbol in this context, but generally a symbol seeks to represent the concept. Emoji are great symbols - you see an emoji and you largely understand its meaning, even if you have never seen it before.

The modern Chinese writing system is so abstracted that even an otherwise highly educated person that just lacks exposure to Chinese written script would have absolutely no idea what any of the characters mean. 一, 二, 三, sure. Beyond that, no fucking clue.

So yeah, they wouldn't be legible. Because as symbols, they objectively suck until you learn the basic components, structure, and patterns of organization of the characters.

So to the extent that an ideographic language conveys words as ideas through symbology, and to the uninitiated these symbols lack all meaning, it's not really ideographic is it?

But yeah, not legible might have gotten the point across better.
by connorshinn | 2026-01-18 02:42:18+00:00
There's a theory I heard somewhere recently that part of the reason Trump is so interested in Greenland is due to his lack of understanding of maps.

The Mercator projection (which is how most 2D maps are displayed) makes Greenland appear to be the size of North America. It's large, to be sure (around 25% bigger than Alaska), but it's certainly not continent sized.

Obviously thats no justification for his actions, but found the explanation at least a bit amusing given his other odd misunderstandings (eg thinking people seeking asylum are from an insane asylum, thinking wind mills somehow affect whales, etc. The list goes on and on...)
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 02:42:21+00:00
The library problems you described are nothing that can't be solved using symlinks. A bad solution? Sure, but it works, and doesn't require me to understand cc. (Though when I needed to solve this problem, it only took me about 15 minutes and a man page to learn how to do it. `gcc -v --help` is, however, unhelpful.)

"A similar project" as in: this isn't the first piece of software ever written, and many previous examples can be found on the computer you're currently using. Skim through them until you find one with a source file structure you like, then ruthlessly cannibalise its build script.
by eru | 2026-01-18 02:42:34+00:00
Titles are useful, because they are essentially free to the company, and (some) employees value them. And valuing titles can be rational, even if worker herself doesn't care, because they can look good on the CV and to friends and families.

Some 'trinkets' are worth more to the employees than they cost the company to provide. So it's rational to provide them. Think of Wally's beloved coffee for an example. Or look at Googlers' lunch.
by labrador | 2026-01-18 02:42:43+00:00
I had Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 do a Tarot reading for me given what their memory systems know about me and was underwhelmed but I that just may be Tarot, which I'm not familiar with.

More interesting was when I asked them to tell me which character I most resemble in the folowing: The Wire, The Sopranos, Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad and the game of Chess.

Both said I was Freeman in The Wire, Hesch in The Sopranos, Mike in Breaking Bad and a Knight in chess. I asked them to explain their reasoning, which was enlightening from a self-knowledge perspective.
by bikeshaving | 2026-01-18 02:44:37+00:00
Seeing this makes me miss the salad days of MOOCs. I learned programming in the 2010s through MIT’s EDX Introduction to Programming course, and then a course on Coursera by Martin Odersky on Functional Programming through EPFL, and I feel like that ladder has been kicked away due to MOOC monetization policies. I wonder if we could return to these days.
by karim79 | 2026-01-18 02:45:33+00:00
This just reminds me of a random discussion I had with a very close German friend.

He pointed out that Tado (who do smart radiator valves) noted from a study, which drew from their data, that the UK sucks at insulation, losing heat up to three times faster than other European neighbours[0].

[0] https://www.tado.com/en-gb/press/uk-homes-losing-heat-up-to-...

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated nor am I a customer of Tado. Also, I'm British and I just felt like commenting here because it felt relevant.
by gumby271 | 2026-01-18 02:46:04+00:00
It feels like Apple did all of this in reverse. They created a new UI system and effects that look like shit with any amount of fine detail, and now suddenly their design guide says "actually fine details are bad for the user". They didn't come up with a good design, they came up with a shader tech demo and had to make a design that works with that new constraint.
by defrost | 2026-01-18 02:46:07+00:00
Denialism is not the majority position of the readership as a whole in my experience.

It's more that such titles attract the denialists and edgelords like bees to sucrose.

Lack of significant action is more a majority position, and that's unsuprising given many people struggle with how to make meaningful change as individuals or accept greater risk and reduced returns as C-suits of corporations.
by mikewarot | 2026-01-18 02:46:21+00:00
>The tools expanded who could write software, but they didn’t eliminate the expertise required for substantial systems.

The hardest thing about software construction is specification. There's always going to be domain specific knowledge associated with requirements. If you make it possible, as Delphi and Visual Basic 6 did, for a domain expert to hack together something that works, that crude but effective prototype functions as a concrete specification that a programmer can use to craft a much better version useful to more people than just the original author.

The expansion of the pool of programmers was the goal. It's possible that AI could eventually make programming (or at least specification) a universal skill, but I doubt it. The complexity embedded in all but the most trivial of programs will keep the software development profession in demand for the foreseeable future.
by eru | 2026-01-18 02:47:52+00:00
> Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.

It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.
by pembrook | 2026-01-18 02:48:01+00:00
I think you might be post-hoc rationalizing an emotional feeling, as clearly this meme is emotionally triggering to everyones nostalgia/pessimism nerve (hence why it went viral).

I'm 100% positive more people would guess the far left icon is a text editor compared to the far right icon. Not that I like the left icon aesthetically. Both are pretty weak icons.
by lanthade | 2026-01-18 02:48:23+00:00
A couple decades ago I came into posesion of some late model compaq servers, some fibre channel equipment, and a stack of small FC disks. Thanks to my MSDN sub I then had the necessary bits to build a proper MS server cluster. Thanks to that home lab I build the experience necessary to land a very good job and eventually ended up as a MS Server Clustering SME for a giant tech company doing work for one of the major CC companies. Home lab can be great because you can just break stuff on purpose to see how things work and what system resiliency looks like.
by giberson | 2026-01-18 02:48:41+00:00
I think tool calling is your answer—you’re just missing a separation of concern(s).
For example to handle personality configuration, don’t use a tool to get personality configuration , use a tool to handle responding to the customer. When your agent has gathered the information to respond to the customer it will call the tool sendMessage with the response. Your tool call implementation is a role play prompt that rephrases the message with the provided tone/personality configuration (this is where the customer config is injected as context). The output is then passed through a guardrails completion for potential censoring before finally being displayed to the customer.

This means your main agent model simply becomes a routing agent (a tool calling optimized model) that directs to sub agents that handles various tasks (like figuring out shipping capabilities, or flavoring responses with personality affects, or adhering to guardrails) keeping the customer centric configuration’s blast radius (impact on the effectiveness of your prompts) narrowed to purely aesthetic completion and out of any functional completion.
Show HN: Image Text Editor – replace text inside images (no layers)
by zhaomeng | 2026-01-18 02:50:28+00:00
Hi HN! I built ImageTextEditor — a small web tool to edit text that’s already inside an image.

The goal is to keep the workflow minimal: upload → select the text area → type replacement → generate. I’m focusing on making the edit look natural by removing the old text and reconstructing the background, instead of just overlaying new text.

Current status: [what works best], known limitations: [hard cases].

I’d love feedback on:

cases where the result looks “patched”,

what export/pricing model feels fair for a tool like this,

which image types you most want it to handle well (screenshots vs photos vs banners).

Thanks for taking a look!
by westurner | 2026-01-18 02:51:00+00:00
So I went looking for TLS accelerator cards again:

/? TLS accelerators open: https://www.google.com/search?q=TLS+accelerators+open :

- "AsyncGBP+: Bridging SSL/TLS and Heterogeneous Computing with GPU-Based Providers"
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10713226 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664295

/? XDP hardware offload to GPU: https://www.google.com/search?q=XDP+hardware+offload+to+a+GP... :

- eunomia-bpf/XDP-on-GPU:
https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/XDP-on-GPU

Perhaps AsyncGBP+ + XDP-on-GPU would solve.

The AsyncGBP+ article mentions support for PQ on GPU.

But then process isolation on GPUs. And they removed support for vGPU unlock.
by cycomanic | 2026-01-18 02:51:21+00:00
Why are people arguing that icons should be intuitively tell you what the app is about? Since when was that the goal of an icon (in paritucal an app icon)? It should be easily distinguishable from other icons. If I don't know what the icon means it will take me exactly 1s to find out by clicking on it, after that I will know what the app icon is for, and I only care if I can distinguish it easily from other icons, so I don't accidentally start a different app.
by kmeisthax | 2026-01-18 02:52:05+00:00
Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white.

The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
by bpodgursky | 2026-01-18 02:53:28+00:00
No, the EU obviously did need to pump out massive amounts of gear, and failed to, and that's why four years into a war, Ukraine is still suffering under the yoke of a country with 1/10th the GDP of the EU.

If the EU had taken their responsibilities seriously given the MASSIVE THREAT next door, Ukraine would have had massive ordinance dumped on it in March 2022 and been free of Russians by Christmas.
by 827a | 2026-01-18 02:53:32+00:00
Not 3%; 7% of 3%: 0.2%. And, even less than that, because we're not talking about 100% of US agricultural export to the EU disappearing. Nor are we talking about anything happening on any immediate timeline. But sure, there's political spin. Your viewpoints are also spun around politically. That's every viewpoint; there is no such thing as objectivity when it comes to systems this complex.

This is a good thing for the EU; more diversity in their import partners is a good thing. This is a bad thing for the EU; their farmers are about to see prices for their goods drop. This is a good thing for the US; less international demand for their products means US customers will see more stable prices. This is a bad thing for the US; because of everything you said. How it shakes out is a story for the history books; but the game that's being played right now is far bigger than you realize, and more important.
by brigandish | 2026-01-18 02:55:44+00:00
My go-to example is the "Constitution" of Medina[1]

> It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.

Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.

Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.

The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.

Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…

Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#History_and_devel...

[3] https://journalijcar.org/issues/first-written-constitution-w...

[4] https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#1-end-decision-making-b...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
by shagie | 2026-01-18 02:55:47+00:00
One of my favorite series is Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper... in In Ashes Born, there's an bit about creating a logo for the company...

He pointed to the far end of his studio. Two tiny patches of white—which were probably actually gray—lay in a single pool of light. One was a smudge of red and the other was a spiral of red. “Which one of those is your logo?” he asked.
“Neither,” Pip said.
“The smudge,” I said understanding where the kid was taking us.
“Right,” he said. “The smudge.”
“What?” Pip asked.
The kid held up the paper from the workbench. “Look, this is nice and all, but it’s too fussy. If you look at anybody else’s logo, it’s not fussy. It’s iconic. A crown with wings. A C in a circle. That’s yours,” he said to Pip. “All of them are simple shapes combined to form an unmistakable pattern.”

My own choice for a gavatar is similar - https://github.com/shagie (it's from a photo I took). While by itself its a neat bit, its also something that is easily recognizable as "that's Shagie's" when its projected on a screen on the other side of the room or if it's someone's full screen share and everyone's icons are shrunk down to smaller blurs - mine remains clearly distinct.

The goal of an icon is to be able to identify it quickly without having to read the associated text.

The inkwell and the two with the paper are artistic - but they aren't things that stand out quickly when you're trying to find them in the launchpad or on the sidebar.

Pages is orange. Numbers is green. iTunes is red. Keynote is blue.

For Microsoft, Word is blue, Excel is green, and Powerpoint is orange (and Outlook has an envelope like shape). The letter reinforces the choice, but that's more of a hint and reinforcement.

The shape and color is the important thing for quickly finding what you're looking for.
by karlgkk | 2026-01-18 02:55:51+00:00
I’ve been saying this for a while. CPU demand is about to go through the roof.

I think about it, to get these tools to be most effective you have to be able to page things in and out of their context windows.

What was once a couple of queries is now gonna be dozens or hundreds or even more from the LLM

For code that means querying the AST and query it in a way that allows you to limit the results of the output

I wonder which SAST vendor Anthropic will buy.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-18 02:56:17+00:00
Leftmost is probably a pen, rightmost is definitely a pen and specifically a fountain pen. I've never seen these icons before, and I'm trying to be the fairest I can, and I think rightmost wins at evoking "text editor". But the one exactly in the center wins by a mile. Pen on lined paper, hard to do better.
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-18 02:57:47+00:00
That 'underwhelmed' feeling is exactly what I was trying to avoid!

It makes sense that the character matching worked well—AI is incredible at pattern matching your past data/context. But Divination (Tarot/I Ching) requires Synchronicity and a sense of 'randomness' that feels earned.

When an LLM generates a reading, it's just predicting the next likely token, which flattens the magic. The manual ritual (shuffling cards or clicking stalks) restores that 'weight' that AI removes.