MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gdwatson | 2026-01-21 13:59:03+00:00
Units based on base 12 or base 2, as U.S. standard measures tend to be, are easier to divide in many ways.

Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-21 13:59:47+00:00
EU like making new regulation.
There are simpler steps to make doing business here easier:

-force banks to respect EU free trade union and stop them from discriminating EU citizens and companies who are not citizens

-stop abuse when it comes to currency conversion rates

-raise VAT-free threshold to something that doesn't catch very small companies, 200k EUR in sales to EU would be a good start (currently it's 10k)

-force EU countries to move all the bureaucracy online; it's very realistic, Poland has done it (it's not 100% yet but close to it)

-enforce English as 2nd official language for business related paperwork

Instead I am pretty sure we will get more paperwork, requirements and way for bureaucrats to prolong every process and request more documents on the way.
by jasonhong | 2026-01-21 13:59:59+00:00
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal.

The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
by alkonaut | 2026-01-21 14:00:06+00:00
Yeah is fl.oz on consumer containers _really_ seen as a volume measurement, i.e. thought of in terms of conversion "How many of these to a gallon", "what does a 6-pack weigh" and so on?

Or are they more like t-shirt sizes "I know I want a 16oz can to drink and I know how big they are"?
by tomjuggler | 2026-01-21 14:00:12+00:00
Personally I use "agent mode" in Cecli for almost everything - I don't know about other AI coding agents but you can easily set up tests to run and validate the output.

Since MCP came out the quality of code has improved since there is always context7 and fetch to look up syntax.

But yes at some point you need to look at the code yourself just to be sure
by kd149 | 2026-01-21 14:00:15+00:00
secure calculator vault hide and encrypt users file. For encrypting the file we use AES 256 encryption. Also added the built in media viewer so user don't need to leave the app for viewing the file. when user remove the file from the app it automatically decrypt the file. user can choose where he wants to save the file on computer after removing from the app.

it's a user's privacy focused app. Designed for user who value security and simplicity, the app allows you to safely manage and view your personal files while maintaining full control over access. it runs fully offline, does not track users, and follows Windows security best practices.

image extension supported by media viewer :- png, jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, webp, svg, tif, tiff, ico

video extension supported by media viewer :- mp4, mkv, mov, webm, avi, mpg, mpeg, ogv

text extension supported by media viewer :- txt, csv, md, log

pdf extension supported by media viewer :- pdf

Key Features :-
Secure calculator interface
Built-in file viewer for images, videos, and text files
Offline operation - no internet required
clean, distraction - free UI
Optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktop devices
One - time purchase - no subscription

Privacy & Security :-
No ads
No analytics
No background data collection
No tracking
Files stay on user's device.
by bArray | 2026-01-21 14:00:32+00:00
Forgetting Haskell, technically speaking, everything could be expressed as a function. I thought about writing a type of shell script that reflected everything as a function to clean up the likes of bash.

Take the command `ls` for example, it could be expressed as either:

ls -la *.png # lazy
ls(-la, *.png); # formal

For pipes, they could be expressed as either:

ls -la *.png | grep cat # lazy
ls(-la, *.png) | grep(cat)
|(ls(-la, *.png), grep(cat)); # formal

I thought about writing this with something like Micropython that could have a very small memory footprint.
by Frost1x | 2026-01-21 14:01:03+00:00
I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.

Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.

Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
Show HN: Semantic search engine for Studio Ghibli movie
by aninibread | 2026-01-21 14:01:04+00:00
Hi HN! I built Ghibli Search, a semantic search engine for Studio Ghibli movie scenes (e.g. Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, etc.).

Describe a dreamscape like "flying through clouds at sunset" or upload an image, and it finds visually similar scenes from the films.

Live demo: https://ghibli-search.anini.workers.dev/

Full Cloudflare stack: Workers, AI Search, R2, Workers AI

Open source: https://github.com/aninibread/ghibli-search

Would love feedback on the search quality and any ideas for improvements!
by bevr1337 | 2026-01-21 14:01:04+00:00
Whatever work is paying for on a given day. We've rotated through a few offerings. It's a work truck not a personal vehicle, for me.

I manage a team of interns and I don't have the energy to babysit an agent too. For me, gpt and gemini yield the best talk-it-through approach. For example, dropping a research paper into the chat and describing details until the implementation is clarified.

We also use Claude and Cursor, and that was an exceptionally disruptive experience. Huge, sweeping, wrong changes all over. Gyah! If I bitch about todo! macros, this is where they came from.

For hobby projects, I sometimes use whatever free agent microsoft is shilling via VS Code (and me selling my data) that day. This is relatively productive, but reaches profoundly wrong conclusions.

Writing for CLR in visual studio is the smoothest smart-complete experience today.

I have not touched Grok and likely won't.

/ two pennies

Hope that answers your questions.
by prasoon2211 | 2026-01-21 14:01:16+00:00
I founded a UG and a GmbH in 2024. It took me 3 months total including visits to the notary (who charges a non-insignificant sum for their services).

I did this as a subsidiary for a US company and literally had to email and call people every few days to move the process along (mostly, it was the banks who somehow expected us to be a multi-national company and wanted to charge an arm and a leg just to let us open a bank account. Most banks outright refused us).

When the notary finally filed the paperwork to the court, the court replied after a few weeks with additional clarifications for which we had to go AGAIN to the notary to do the whole song and dance of them chanting at us in German at 1000 words per minute.

Everything took painfully long and delayed investment for while. People have absolutely no idea how painful it is to merely have the incorporated entity available. Then, it takes a few weeks to get your tax ID - this is when you can start employing people / accepting payments etc.
by staticman2 | 2026-01-21 14:01:19+00:00
I'm not gonna watch a video but did you even read that article before you linked to it?

"Fink is still a big believer in the U.S. economy and argues things are looking mostly constructive at this point. He feels the bull story is still intact, but its durability matters a lot more."

It's the human equivilent of AI slop.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:02:12+00:00
> The grassroot movement is from https://proposal.eu-inc.org

So correct me if I had way too little coffee, but that subdomain is under eu-inc.org meaning eu-inc.org is in fact the grassroot movement then? I don't understand the complaint, seems to be the right people? You're mad about that they also sell hats?
by kqr | 2026-01-21 14:03:02+00:00
I have experienced this before (almost universally negative comments, but still many upvotes). In those cases, some people have reached out to me personally to tell me they enjoyed whatever it was and didn't agree with the negative feedback. They didn't comment because they didn't think it was worth engaging with people who clearly didn't get it, and it's fine that not all people get it.
by lioeters | 2026-01-21 14:03:14+00:00
Right.. So not only all data structures and operators, but all kinds of control flow can be described as functions. What an interesting way to look at programs, I'll study more in this direction.

I wonder how languages support this question of "unevaluated arguments", like in the `if` conditional function. I guess in Lisp(s) they're simply quoted expressions, and in the above Smalltalk example, it sounds like the syntax [...] calls a function with lazily evaluated arguments.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-21 14:03:54+00:00
> I live in a different western country but was old enough to watch the US news (Tom Brokaw) then. People did actually discuss these things. The consensus was: the border should exist. Tomboys were tomboys. Effeminate boys were effeminate boys. You can’t just have a policy of hiring someone based on their race because that’s silly and illegal.

I'm very curious about this if you're able to find records on this sort of thing.

From the top:

- I don't think the words we use on news these days were even allowed back then (rapists, Small Hands Rubio), so I don't think "these things" were discussed.

- "You can’t just have a policy of hiring someone based on their race because that’s silly and illegal." You said you're not American, so you may not understand that the current ethos of 'reverse racism' was not how this question was viewed in the 90's

- "the border should exist" This hasn't changed. I'm not sure why people are so ready to parrot this point, when Obama deported more people than any previous president, and Biden continued that. If anything, there has been a monotonic increase in this (but nevermind that many large businesses rely on undocumented labor)

- "Effeminate boys" I am sure that was never on the news in the 90s, and definitely not in a party platform. Gay people have always existed and it's a credit to our current era that we have finally started acknowledging that this isn't a 'wrong' way of living
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-21 14:04:30+00:00
That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).

I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
by opan | 2026-01-21 14:04:34+00:00
Please do not. Some people do not use Discord and thus will never report bugs or give feedback even if they use your software and would otherwise report bugs for other software.

Something public-facing that uses standard protocols would be ideal. Email, forums, IRC. For bug reports, a web form that doesn't need an account registration would be nice. You want to reduce friction or people will give up partway through the process. Don't mark too many fields as required or try too hard to categorize things either, that's a common misfeature I run into.
by matesz | 2026-01-21 14:04:55+00:00
I don't understand the tax objection. The 28th regime changes corporate law, not fiscal law. A Berlin-based "EU-Inc" still pays full taxes (Körperschaftsteuer, Gewerbesteuer, etc.) to the local Finanzamt. It isn't a disembodied tax haven - it just standardizes the legal wrapper.

You are right that this threatens the status quo, though. If this works, founders based in Germany will likely abandon the GmbH. That will require swallowing some national pride and admitting that the current system is simply a less efficient, less competitive legal form for high-growth companies.

One thing I think is also worth mentioning are labor rights. I am not arguing against the German model of employee protection. Mitbestimmung could be viewed as a good thing, even if it will mean less power to the VC and / or founders. And frankly, I don't care if the consensus forces strict, German-style Mitbestimmung on the EU-Inc. Stricter form of EU-INC is still vastly better than nothing at all.

Asianometry has a great video on the labor rights in germany btw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0teMtLT9XI).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 14:05:14+00:00
That's vaguely describing common practices, not what's actually necessary or why. It also doesn't address my note that the purpose of the hash is important. Are "file systems" and "file checksums" referring to globally unique handles, content addressed tables, detection of bitrot, or something else?

For detecting file corruption the amount of data alone isn't the issue. Rather what matters is the rate at which corruption events occur. If I have 20 TiB of data and experience corruption at a rate of only 1 event per TiB per year (for simplicity assume each event occurs in a separate file) that's only 20 events per year. I don't know about you but I'm not worried about the false negative rate on that at 32 bits. And from personal experience that hypothetical is a gross overestimation of real world corruption rates.
by RogerL | 2026-01-21 14:05:19+00:00
That we can add structure to something doesn't mean the something is the structure. Part of the problem is op didn't define their domain. Is a civil war a function? A dog? Okay, keep it within math/programming, fair enough. A set is not a function. It just isn't. Can you wrap it in a function that maps NULL->set()? Sure, but that is a different thing. It is a function that returns a set, it is not a set. Is 3 a set because I can construct {3}? No, 3 is a natural number, which in that construct is an element of the set. A group is a set of elements with a certain properties (binary op, unity/neutral element, inverse, etc). That doesn't make the group equal to a field (the elements might be members of a field, such as the reals). It is composed of elements of a field. Different things.

I'm taking a more mathematical than programming stance here, but op didn't define their domain, and all this originally came from math, so I'm comfortable with that choice.

But, take rand(), which programmers call a function. Is that a function? Certainly not in the mathematical definition, which requires a unique output for every input. We can use your null wrapper to force it to take an input, but the codomain is not a one-to-one mapping, to say the least.

Or even take an array. I disagree it is a function. A const array, sure. My arrays tend to mutate, and there goes that 1->1 mapping.
by api | 2026-01-21 14:06:26+00:00
One more important thing to note:

If you really feel you must have NAT, there is IPv6 NAT. Unlike IPv4 NAT, V6 affords enough address space that IPv6 NAT can do 1:1 IP:IP mapping between internal and external. This eliminates entire classes of issues around port exhaustion and port remapping and allows P2P applications to work fine. P2P NAT traversal with simple 1:1 NAT has a nearly 100% success rate on the first attempt.
by vacuity | 2026-01-21 14:06:42+00:00
Someone had to take the plunge. Regardless of the other political considerations at present and whatever future events will happen, I respect Carney's initiative. I also appreciate the reference to Havel's essay; to me, its insight always felt obvious but also difficult to apply. But framed in this way, I understand. For some time, I've felt that the United States has been the leading example of a country that is powerful through narrative. Narratives are naturally idealized, but at some point the gap becomes too large to tolerate.
by swaits | 2026-01-21 14:07:09+00:00
Look at it in the realm of realpolitik. Isolationism, from a neighboring superpower at that, is just not smart. Cooler heads and sharper diplomacy would serve the Canadian people significantly better. It’s extremely shortsighted, poor leadership.

He went to Davos, a safe space for the lefty elites, to trash the US, and gets a standing ovation. But the rest of the world (and insightful Canadians) aren’t clapping.

Most of Canada’s exports go to the US. In this divorce, Canada suffers, the US barely notices.

They’re heavily dependent on NORAD and NATO for defense. Replacing that is something Canada cannot afford.

Canada does not have the leverage to "divorce" the United States. Attempting to do so while standing in a Swiss ski resort, rather than negotiating at the table in Washington, is dangerous political theater that risks the livelihoods of millions of Canadians.

For my Canadian friends, I’m sorry you’re going through this.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 14:07:15+00:00
Thanks, I do feel like though as such one has to create their own standard of what a good show HN means if they don't want to flood show HN or are more interested in having a snowball effect in first place.

Like, not every project should be a show HN and that's okay. One can always create an interesting takeaway from any project and create an article about it and publish it on Hackernews as well.

I think what I get the feeling is to find out how original your idea is. If your idea is really original, you can greatly benefit from SHOW HN. But if not, which is okay as well, creating a normal article might be more correct (if a key takeaway from a project can be established?)

Or would you recommend a seperate place for such instead of Hackernews in this particular context?

> Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".

Yes but isn't this also causing the issue where people think that their projects are great and upload show HN and just with AI the amount of projects have grown so large and the signal ratio has just been shrinked impacting real projects as well

I feel as if the people who Submit show Hn needs to ask themselves internally what they would feel about the project without any bias if the project was randomly viewed by them with 0 upvotes, would they ignore or click and read me or upvote and comment and if the project doesn't fit the sense then to not fill SHOW HN with complete garbage AI slop deployed on lovable or something.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-21 14:07:49+00:00
I think what's even more important is that the costs for founding and maintaining such an LLC should scale with revenue, including scaling to 0.

In many EU countries, you still have to pay social security and/or health insurance, even if your company brings in no revenue. This isn't supposed to be a problem, as you're not really supposed to officially start a business unless you cross specific revenue thresholds. However, that doesn't work in practice if you're offering your services online, as many payment gateways in Europe will not deal with non-business accounts.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-21 14:08:26+00:00
It’s not that the quality of politics posts here are very high (you get plenty of “engineers outside their domain” type stuff). Just, it is hard to find sites with

* Active political discussion communities

* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party

I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).

I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
by yareally | 2026-01-21 14:08:27+00:00
Honestly, the best way to cook is with grams. Throw everything into the same pot on a scale and keep zeroing it out. Way less mess to clean up. All the top baking recipes tend to already be in grams, but there's plenty of others out there that are not

Also a great use for LLMs. I'll tell it to convert recipes from volume to grams by estimating density. It's surprisingly accurate
by detectivestory | 2026-01-21 14:08:28+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. The images come from pixabay, pexels, and my own camera, some will be AI generated, most aren't - they are selected for their suitability in learning certain vocabulary. The hints are all manually added. AI is used for translations (although I am in the process of replacing most translations for the non-beta languages with professional translations) and feedback. If you found the web app UI to be "janky" maybe you could try install the native app for your device.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-21 14:08:33+00:00
I already debated this on HN when this was posted two days ago, but this paper is not peer-reviewed and is a draft. The examples it uses of DOGE and of the FDA using AI are not well researched or cited.

Just as an example, they criticize the FDA for using an AI that can hallucinate whole studies, but they don't talk about the fact that it's used for product recalls, and the source that they use to cite their criticism is an Engaget article that is covering a CNN article that got the facts wrong, since it relied on anonymous sources that were disgruntled employees that had since left the agency.

Basically what I'm saying is the more you dig into this paper, the more you realize it's an opinion piece.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:08:39+00:00
> naively assuming that agents would be able to handle a well-bounded problem such as test coverage reasonably well.

We haven't figured out a way for humans to do that well :P I still see people arguing about "80% test coverage is obviously better than 70%" and similar dumb sentiments that completely misses the point.

But agree with the first part, LLMs are massively oversold and it's hard to blame users for believing them. Tempered expectations as always win.
Show HN: Abuse URL shorteners to host throwaway webpages
by fainpul | 2026-01-21 14:08:52+00:00
The data of your page is stored in the URL shortener's database.

Visit https://tinyurl.com/mrpas5dc to see how it works.

The full URL, if you don't trust the short URL:

https://mdview.io/#mdv=N4IgbiBcCMA0IBMCGAXJUTADrhzWOAtgnjgMQ...
by bayindirh | 2026-01-21 14:08:59+00:00
It's funny how many of us know the shortcomings of AI, yet we can't be bothered to do the thing ourselves and read or at least skim a in-depth research paper to increase our depth.

Even if we don't agree with what we read, or find its flaws.

Paradox of the century.

P.S.: Using ChatGPT to summary something you don't bother to skim while claiming AI is a scam is the cherry on top.
by opan | 2026-01-21 14:09:33+00:00
You could do a video on selfhosting one of the free software chat solutions like IRC, XMPP, or Matrix, then move your community there as a way of showing real-world usage. You could then do some update videos later on how performance and maintenance have been. If you go with IRC you could focus specifically on IRCv3 and the modern features it gives you, plus which clients/servers support the new features. I think an audience that likes technology would appreciate this.
by jcmartinezdev | 2026-01-21 14:09:52+00:00
Some tax consultants are very shady, and some are really arrogant. I'm currently looking for one as we had some disagreements on pricing with my previous one, and many won't even take me due to my volume, or maybe because I ask to speak English, idk...

But sometimes I feel they are doing me a favor by taking my company, rather than me feeling like I'm hiring them as a service.