MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by luthiraabeykoon | 2026-01-22 15:19:23+00:00
I came across this project recently and thought it was pretty interesting. Remotion is an open source framework that lets you create videos using React components instead of a traditional video editor.

You define scenes, animations, audio, and transitions in code, and it renders to formats like MP4, WebM, or GIF. Since it’s React-based, it works well for data-driven or templated videos, automated content generation, and anything you’d normally struggle to do in a timeline UI.

Feels especially useful if you’re already comfortable with modern frontend tooling and want reproducible, programmatic video output.
by eldaisfish | 2026-01-22 15:19:30+00:00
this is a problem with all indian "education". I work in renewable energy and regularly chat with other Indians at IEEE conferences who are looking for work in the West.

These supposed electrical "engineers" have an IEEE "paper" to their name but regularly confuse power and energy. They have no curiosity, no interest in their work, atrocious communication skills (not language, communication) and swarm you like piranhas once word spreads.

All this combines to devalue Indian degrees and the reputation of Indian STEM talent. The genuinely good people are drowned under this avalanche and there's not much you can do to help them or to find them.
by tonyww | 2026-01-22 15:19:31+00:00
Good question. On the surface, it does look very similar to the traditional scraper/script, but there's a subtle difference in where the logic lives and how failures are handled.

A traditional scraper/script hard-codes selectors and control flow up front. When the layout changes, it usually breaks at an arbitrary line and you debug it manually.

In this setup, the agent chooses actions at *runtime* from a bounded action space, and the system uses the built-in predicates (e.g. url_changes, drawer_appeared, etc) to verify the outcomes. When it fails, it fails at a specific semantic assertion with artifacts, not a missing selector.

So it’s less “replace scripts” and more “apply test-style verification and recovery to AI-driven decisions instead of static code.”
by BearOso | 2026-01-22 15:19:51+00:00
HFCS came about when there was an abundance of corn and nothing to do with it. So when they discovered corn syrup they added corn subsidies and heavily tariffed cane sugar. Ethanol appeared and is a far greater corn sink, so HFCS no longer even serves that purpose.

But the processing industry doesn't want to disappear (money and job losses), so they lobby and the status quo remains. Same with private health care in a cozy position where they act as an unneeded middleman. It's too lucrative to certain people, and they won't willingly give it up.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-22 15:19:57+00:00
>We got to where we are by brute-forcing the problem

This has been a bit of a concern of mine. That we have to do things the hard way for a long time, and in doing so make a massive amount of fast hardware. Then we get some breakthru that massively drops the amount of compute necessary, the surplus we suddenly have may lead to some kind of AI capability explosion.
by muvlon | 2026-01-22 15:20:12+00:00
> What do other languages' standard libraries do to walk around clone3 then?

They don't offer generic clone3 wrappers either AFAIK. All the code I've seen that uses it - and a lot of it is not in standard libraries but in e.g. container runtime implementations - has its own special-purpose code around a specific way to call it.

My point is not that other standard libraries do it better, but that clone3 as a syscall interface is highly versatile, moreso than it could be as a function in either C or most other languages. That is, the syscall API is the right layer for this feature to be.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-22 15:20:41+00:00
> Trusting this folder means code within it may be executed automatically.

But as you point out elsewhere, what constitutes code is very context dependent. And the user isn't necessarily going to be sufficiently expert on how Code interacts with the environment to evaluate that context.

> I'm curious what would stop you from opening it in restricted mode?

Even after years of using Code, I don't know the precise definition of "restricted mode". Maybe I ought to, but learning that isn't at the top of my list of priorities.

> You get the warning up front when you open a folder though, isn't this before you're in a flow state hacking away on the code?

NO! Not even close! And maybe this is at the heart of why we're not understanding each other.

My goal is not to run an editor and change some characters, not at all. It's so far down the stack that I'm scarcely aware of it at all, consciously. My goal is to, e.g., find and fix the bug that the Product Manager is threatening to kill me over. In order to do that I'm opening log files in weird locations (because they were set up by some junior teammate or something), and then opening some code I've never seen before because it's legacy stuff 5 years old that nobody has looked at since; I don't even have a full picture of all languages and technologies that might be in use in this folder. But I do know for sure that I need to be able to make what edits may turn out to be necessary half an hour from now once I've skimmed over the contents of this file and its siblings, so I can't predict for sure whether whatever the heck "restricted mode" will do to me will interfere with those edits.

I'm pretty sure that the above paragraph represents exactly what's going on in the user's mind for a typical usage of Code.
by bunderbunder | 2026-01-22 15:21:03+00:00
It gets me thinking about the “high context / low context” distinction in natural languages. High context languages are one where the meaning of a symbol depends on the context in which it’s embedded.

It’s a continuum, so English is typically considered low context but it does have some examples. “Free as in freedom versus free as in beer,” is one that immediately comes to mind.

À high context language would be one like Chinese where, for example, the character 过 can be a grammatical marker for experiential aspect, a preposition equivalent to “over” “across” or “through” depending on context, a verb with more English equivalents than I care to try and enumerate, an affix similar to “super-“, etc.

When I was first starting to learn Chinese it seemed like this would be hopelessly confusing. But it turns out that human brains are incredibly well adapted to this sort of disambiguation task. So now that I’ve got some time using the language behind me it’s so automatic that I’m not really even aware of it anymore, except to sit here racking my brain for examples like this for the purpose of relating an anecdote.

I would bet that it’s a similar story for APL: initially seems weird if you aren’t used to it, but not actually a problem in practice.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-22 15:21:16+00:00
From a security perspective, I'd really really like not just a pre-baked image, but also instructions on how to replicate that using only files and tools with known-good hashes and/or digital signatures.

I too distinctly remember the times I earned my money cleaning up malware, and a few times the root cause was someone using pre-cracked install media from some shady torrent.
by gryfft | 2026-01-22 15:21:16+00:00
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.

(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*

*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
by nathan_compton | 2026-01-22 15:21:41+00:00
"Live and let live" is a political philosophy. I don't see what is so hard about this concept: human beings typically don't agree on everything. They have to decide what to do. That process is called politics, whether it happens to result in a live and let live attitude towards many things or the oppressive politics of the Soviet Union. When you tell me that in many contexts people should not feel pressure to adhere to a specific political line you are, in fact, expressing a (non-universal) political ideal, one which you don't need to search much to find counter-ideologies to.

I happen to agree with you: my preference is one in which dogmatic and performative adherence to a specific ideology is discouraged but that doesn't make me non-political, especially if I happen to live in a society where (for example) religious fundamentalism is the main cultural artifact.

At a deeper level, assertions that we should "remain apolitical" are, in the end, simply assertions that the status quo is "sufficient" or even good and that people who have some difference of opinion about how human affairs are managed are "bothersome" for bringing it up. Sometimes this is motivated by a misapprehension or genuine (if incorrect, in my opinion) belief that the status quo reflects some obviously "correct" view of things and thus questioning it is pointless, bothersome, or even dangerous.

I think political differences should (for the most part) be tolerated, resolved through discussion and democratic processes, and that a healthy society is one in which people are (to the extent possible given other goals) allowed to live as they please, but I do not think of this as a non-political goal. I mean, just look around, plenty of people want to take that sort of society away from you.
by jMyles | 2026-01-22 15:21:45+00:00
I'm normally very reluctant to cheer most comparisons us the US political situation to nazi germany, or to fascism in general.

But events like this (and the Intel stake) seem like an exact implementation of what has come to be called The Third Position[0], which, if I understand correctly, was the etymology of the world 'fascism' itself.

Mussolini's 1913 Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria was apparently named after 'fasci', or corporate syndicates, his vision of which is basically exactly what we're seeing here: the state owning stakes in the means of technocratic production, and corporate leaders in positions of military command.

And although "The Third Position" is usually called a _neo_-fascist movement, I believe that Mussolini articulated it, more or less in its entirety, some time in the early 1920s?

I'm more of a political scientist than a historian, so it's possible I have this wrong.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-22 15:21:49+00:00
This is going to be the norm globally. After the events of the last couple months (Venezuela kidnapping, Greenland / Canada invasion threats, repeated tariff threats), almost the entire world distrusts America and is going to silently decouple to avoid being undermined or attacked in some way. It means the market for American tech companies will be smaller going forward.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-22 15:21:51+00:00
There's literally zero platform coverage for rural issues. The hotbeds of liberal politics weren't NYC and Boston 50 years ago -- it was Iowa and Wisconsin. Subsidies today are mostly about stabilizing a few commodities.

Dairy is the best example, it's an industry that scales down just fine with a regulated market. That was thrown away and massive dairy producers have literally destroyed the supply side of the market. 90% of dairy operations in New York have shut down since 1980. I worked on a farm as a teenager in the 90s that has been in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period in the 1600s. Almost 200 years of that was significant dairy operations. They probably had 50-100 cows in the 1970s, but that business was gone by 1990-1992. Today, the family boards horses to pay their taxes and work for the government.

Dairy is important because it supports a large ecosystem of business. Vet practices. Laborers. Dairy processing and cheese making. The remaining producers in New York are usually captive producers for vertically integrated businesses like convenience stores, co-ops or scaled operations in Western NY. All of that is dead, and that pattern repeats everywhere.

Even in big agriculture states like say Iowa, the "farmers" are mostly tenants and employees now. All of these Trumper idiots who are going bankrupt will have their land purchased by PE, foreign capital or other funds and will become workers.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-22 15:21:57+00:00
Yeah, the irony is the CCP is a major holder in both companies.

I wish Prusa could work up a way to make a machine to directly compeat at the low-end, but as they have noted in blog posts --- they can't even source the bare components of the low-end printers even in very large quantities for what the now entry-level printers from China are selling for.
by gond | 2026-01-22 15:22:13+00:00
>I practiced Design Thinking at IDEO for 10 years

That may possibly explain your motivation but even ten years do not make it right, nor the speed of teaching.

You are saying it yourself: internalising the very abstract system for decomposing and adapting it has a value of its own you cannot replicate by pre-solving it. The spinning-off of Design Thinking only accomplished further segmentation of a space which was already too fractured and was a disservice to the field.

I don’t think we will approach a consensus here, and that’s fine.
by rchaud | 2026-01-22 15:22:24+00:00
The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.

Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).
by toyg | 2026-01-22 15:22:32+00:00
> The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens.

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue, really (pun intended).

In the end, it doesn't really matter why things got where they are - what matters is where we want them to go next. And US interests seem to be hell-bent on continuing to wash chickens. So they will continue to be banned from Europe.
by Cort3z | 2026-01-22 15:22:34+00:00
I wonder if there is a way to blanket prevent these types of problems.

Possible solutions I can think of:

- Require an account with a paid service. Fix = require money
- Require an account verified with real ID/passport etc. Fix = link to real person
- Automated reply system to "waste tokens" if it is an AI that is responding. Fix is increased cost of spammer.
- Have some kind of "vetting system" where you get on an allowed list to report these types of things. Seems not good to me, but perhaps there is something in it.

I wonder how much open source code is lost because maintainers must deal with this type of thing versus the "good" that AI can bring in productivity.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-22 15:22:43+00:00
> Dwyer claims Granger’s act was akin to slashing someone’s tires to protest the oil industry.

Granger's protest was properly executed as you slash the tires of the oil trucks and oil execs - you strike the people peddling what you are protesting. So of course Dwyer is trying to downplay the significance.
by arethuza | 2026-01-22 15:22:51+00:00
I do know the type of person you are talking about and I don't think it's the Empire as such (which is long gone) but the lingering on of the kind of exceptionalism that was used to justify the Empire. Wonderful sayings like:

"Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." Cecil Rhodes

Mind you - perhaps I'm just bitter because I'm a Scot ;-)
by numpad0 | 2026-01-22 15:23:14+00:00
Can't help but wonder looking through the gifs, am I actually insane that I MUST fillet, chamfer, or chamfer AND fillet basically every single one of those edges[1] with with tangency weight of 1.5 where possible, until the shape takes a generic apple/bauhaus/lego/ikea style? I'm aware that doing so don't necessarily improve load distribution, but I just can't stop rounding those corners.

Am I really the only one?

1: http://numpad0.com/imgs/2026-01-23%20001128.png
by sanderjd | 2026-01-22 15:23:16+00:00
As I just commented above, I do think The Office fundamentally maintained this foundation of comedic failure, but I also think it wouldn't have worked as well for American audiences (and indeed, wasn't working as well in the first season because of this) if not for the much larger emphasis on the likable-character love story with Jim and Pam. Maybe the upshot is that you can have a British edge in American comedy, as long as you sand it down a bit with some other element.

I see a similar kind of dynamic in Parks and Recreation, which is maybe a more culturally native take on the same kind of show, where Leslie is also ultimately a comedic failure, but with the edge sanded down by a certain amount of (mostly fruitless) competence and especially a seemingly inexhaustible well of enthusiasm and optimism that can't help but infect most of the people around her.
by adregan | 2026-01-22 15:23:22+00:00
> This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized?

I believe this is the same tune we hear in other industries: it’s the effect of the consolidation of companies which provide the inputs (seed and chemicals) leading to a lack of competition and the increase in prices on a captive consumer base.

When farmers feel the crunch due to macro forces in the market (and tariffs), the government effectively acts as a backstop for the conglomerates providing the inputs. Think of the farmer’s hand as an open palm, the subsidy flows through it directly to the company to which they are indebted (the money is in the ground as I used to hear during a brief time in crop insurance).

While these subsidies may have initially began with the quaint notion of protecting against scarcity (as many sibling replies seem to believe), the reality is that farmers are being squeezed just as the rest of us. Profits are way up while competition is way down.
by Krssst | 2026-01-22 15:24:01+00:00
Windows 10 was the start of the forceful push towards use of Microsoft accounts and telemetry, dark patterns to achieve that and weird features nobody wants like like Bing search in the menu or the help opening bing in Edge rather than an actual help or your browser of choice, all that to improve random KPIs without considering user satisfaction.

Compared to that, Windows 8 was misguided but not a strong attempt at disrespecting user consent.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-22 15:24:26+00:00
Exactly that's why I was making the comparison, It's not a in your face PopUp, where users get used to just pressing the blue, highlighted and glowing "I trust the authors" button without even being told what features they'd miss out on.

The Protected view in Office instead tells you "Be careful" and to only activate editing when you need to.
by northfield27 | 2026-01-22 15:24:28+00:00
Agreed - ego does push individuals towards mastery because it provides stability and status. But the ones too tied to ego gets lost in history.

What I don't agree with is the current hype based marketing.

First calculators and computers were sold with the promise of improved productivity and those tools actually delivered in the same time frame. But thats not the case with AI.

Consider this promise: "AI will eat up coding completely".
Each CEO claims that 92%-95% percent of coding is done by AI in their company. But if you are active here, you would know that even some senior engineers at big tech don't find it useful in production. I think that these "hype-funded" engineers at CEO's company are just working on toy projects, because I find claims of senior engineers true.

These CEOs make wild claims when many of them haven't actually programmed much. Every interview with these CEOs pushes the year-of-AGI 2-3 years forward.

This is such a time where I really hope the investors actually look into the details, experience the gap between the claims and reality and pull their funding.
by ch_123 | 2026-01-22 15:24:39+00:00
> That's much more relevant to industrial applications where some device is controlled by an ancient computer because the vendor originally provided drivers for NT 5.0 or 5.1 which don't work on anything modern.

In most of those applications, you just leave the computer be and don't touch it. In some cases (especially medical devices) you may not even be allowed to touch it for legal/compliance reasons. If the hardware dies, you most likely find the exact same machine (or something equivalent) and run the same OS - there are many scenarios where replacing the computer with something modern is not viable (lack of the correct I/O interfaces, computer is too fast, etc.)

If there were software bugs which could impact operations, they probably would have arisen during the first few years when there was a support contract. As for security issues - you lock down access and disconnect from any network with public internet access.

All that assumes that ReactOS is a perfect drop-in replacement for whatever version of Windows you are replacing, and that is probably not a good assumption.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-22 15:24:45+00:00
I think that's amazing, surprisingly physically nice looking, and now you've gone and reminded me that Plan 9 is an option, which is kinda another tangent I didn't need:), but IIRC Plan 9 is really low resource so it might be a good fit (aside it lending itself to distributed computing). Have you written up the build anywhere?
by ccppurcell | 2026-01-22 15:24:50+00:00
The thing about norman doors is that it's not really a design flaw, not in every case. Like handles on push doors. It's tempting to think of that as a design flaw but more likely it's designed to be mass produced and reversible, the cost of making two (or more) configurations being much higher than the occasional confused user. You could argue this only enhances the metaphor as a lot of design issues occur when things are optimised for the company and not the user.
by jasonhong | 2026-01-22 15:24:57+00:00
I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking about those things.

Off the top of my head, some of the key ideas include:

* Affordances, that objects should have (often visual) cues that give hints as to how to use things
* Mental models, that every design has three different models, namely system implementation, design model, and user model, and that the design model and user model should try to match each other
* Gulf of Evaluation (the gap between the current system state and people's understanding of it) and Gulf of Execution (the gap between what people want the system to do and how to use the system to do it)
* Kinds of Errors and how to design to prevent and recover from them, e.g. slips (chose the right action but accidentally did the wrong thing, e.g. fat finger) vs mistakes (chose the wrong action to do)

What's particularly useful about Norman's book is that these key ideas apply for all kinds of user interfaces, from command-line to GUI to voice-only to AR/VR to AI chatbot. I'd encourage you to think about this book in this kind of framing, that it gives you general frameworks for reasoning and talking about UX problems rather than specific practical solutions.