MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by einpoklum | 2026-01-20 16:57:33+00:00
> The US is making an absolute mockery over the honor and responsibility etc.

The US was a rather empire without many scruples before WW2 and after it. It engaged in genocide in Vietnam, and was complicit in several others, including the ongoing one in Gaza - which was sanctioned, funded and facilitated first and foremost by the Biden-Harris administration.

So, without detracting from Trump's crimes and jingoist rhetoric and action, his deviation from US foreign policy tradition is not as far as one might imagine.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-20 16:57:43+00:00
>China is intentionally undermining the dollar in order to try to make the Yuan the world currency

The constant devaluation makes it unappealing.

> My current hypothesis is that the growth in the _price_ of the US Stock market (eg S&P 500) is actually devaluation of the dollar.

I generally agree. But economic orthodoxy says 'Inflation is only 2%', despite precovid, it seemed more like 4%.
by mannyv | 2026-01-20 16:57:51+00:00
De-dollarization is one of those things economists love to talk about.

The chance of the dollar losing its reserve currency status is slim-to-none. No matter how bizarre the US is, nobody trusts the Chinese Communist Party (CPP). And although the US can manipulate the value of the dollar, its tools are limited compared to the CPP.

Plus, the US is still the only country that's willing and able to prop up the world financial system with no immediate benefit (see Argentina). The US can and will intervene when necessary. And as history has shown, the Euro Zone can't really make decisions quickly and effectively. How many times has the Euro been on the verge of collapse in the last 20 years? And is proximity to Russia is, well, risky.

In any case there is no currency big enough to take the dollar's spot at this point in time. Trillions of dollars flow through the financial system every day.
by btbuildem | 2026-01-20 16:58:16+00:00
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, something like that? I think we are indeed watching the fascist takeover, and economic collapse is under way -- it's just when you watch a giant fall, they seem to fall oh ever so slowly, the scale distorts the speed until it's right there, then it's "suddenly" a cliff drop.

I agree with you, one dimension of the cultural split is urban / rural. The other dimension is actual culture as based on history -- deep south, southwest, cascadia, breadbasket, eastern seaboard -- these areas have different enough cultural heritage you could see them as separate regions if you squint hard enough. But the key deciding factor are the centers of military power -- where the major air, navy, and nuclear bases are. Overlay that over the cultural map, and you get the Independent Regions. The urban centers would define the voronoi centers of the subregions, with rural areas becoming more of no-mans-land, roving-bands boundary scenarios.

I mean yes it all sounds fantastical, but most unprecedented things do until they come to pass. There's so many patterns and echoes that gently indicate that this unfortunately may indeed be the way.
by histriosum | 2026-01-20 16:58:24+00:00
You clearly DON’T “get it”.. obviously Trump is different than Hitler, but to say he’s nothing remotely close is some serious handwaving.

ICE is acting a LOT like the Gestapo.

Trump is telling obvious lies and his supporters simply parrot it as fact. That was a big part of Hitlers power, the propaganda machine that made it acceptable for otherwise intelligent people to pretend to believe the obvious lies.

Trump is aggressively threatening to expand the empire, under similar dubious security reasons.

How much does history need to rhyme before you actually notice?
by WarmWash | 2026-01-20 16:58:46+00:00
Trump is a populist president who sees the value of US exports (on the back of blue collar work) being more important than global dollar dominance. This plays hand in hand with his championing of tariffs (foreign goods become more expensive) and hostility towards immigrants (apply upwards pressure on domestic wages).

If you cannot see this, or cannot believe it, you should probably check if you are in a ideological bubble.

Is the world going to de-dollarize though? Probably not, shy of an EU independence, which is about as likely as Europeans adopting an American work culture. Although, I won't rule out the possibility of the EU moving it's eggs to China's basket either. What a world that would be, a Sino-Euro axis and an North American axis. Whew
by wtallis | 2026-01-20 16:58:52+00:00
"The internet no longer exists" is a particularly extreme subset of off-grid scenarios. For the more plausible off-grid scenarios—the ones that have actually happened—the unavailability of the internet has been varying degrees of localized and temporary. In that context, being able to bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard requirement.

In particular, it seems obvious to me that any preparedness plan that requires a user to acquire in advance specialized hardware (eg. a battery/solar-powered long-range radio of some kind) to be used with an off-grid network can reasonably expect that user to also be prepared with the software to drive that hardware.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-20 16:58:53+00:00
it's true that if the bet of creating fragmentation in the EU works out, then the destruction of NATO might also work out, because the US would not have created another military power with a hostile attitude to balance them.

If that bet is actually being made by Putin, hmm, I'm worried, but then again the implementation of the anti-NATO project is being run by Trump, so I think the EU just might come out on top. The whole Greenland thing for example, seems like an EU solidifying step, at the same time as it is NATO destroying.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2026-01-20 16:58:57+00:00
So the new stewards of Nova Launcher posted an official statement:

https://novalauncher.com/nova-is-here-to-stay

Pretty much confirms that ads will become a thing. However:

> If ads are introduced, Nova Prime will remain ad free. Our guiding principles are clear: keep the experience clean and fast, avoid disruptive formats, and provide a straightforward way to keep the experience ad free.

That's probably why I wasn't seeing any ads even after I got the update.

I've still reverted to a previous version and disabled auto-updates, because I basically have zero faith that being a paid member will turn off any of their shady tracking stuff, even if ads are not visible.
by edude03 | 2026-01-20 16:59:10+00:00
> TDD helps here - write (or have AI write) tests first, review them as the spec

I agree, although I think the problem usually comes in writing the spec in the first place. If you can write detailed enough specs the agent will usually give you exactly what you asked for. If you're spec is vague, it's hard to eyeball if the tests or even the implementation of the tests matches what you're looking for.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-01-20 16:59:10+00:00
As time goes on, fewer people are alive that predate the EU and more people will perceive it as a lasting institution.

Additionally, we've now seen the EU survive the departure of a major economic power (the UK). More people are certainly willing to believe in the stability of the EU now.

Another major currency is the Yuan, and some countries may be as willing to trade in Yuan to improve relations with China, so perhaps we won't see one single reserve currency but two spheres of influence with most countries maintaining reserves of multiple currencies.
by iLemming | 2026-01-20 16:59:11+00:00
> Or do people use it for coding too?

Over time, you may discover one of the biggest truth about computing - the immense (and sadly disregarded) value of plain text¹. Code is nothing but structured text. The cardinal job of a programmer is text manipulation.

I'm reading this thread in my editor. Why? Because I'm dealing with text - browsers are great for presentation of text, not so nice for manipulating it. What kind of manipulations? Well, I can find, narrow, collapse/expand, translate, extract summaries for paragraphs, find all the URLs (including matching a pattern), etc. Good luck doing all that in the browser - even with the extensions.

Most developers don't even get annoyed by seemingly small things. Like how often do you need to bring the url of a given browser tab into your editor? Simplest thing, yet do it dozens of times a day and it gets vexing. For me - it takes milliseconds and a keypress - it even extracts the URL description and converts the link to markdown (if needed).

Or another example - whenever someone's screen sharing, or I'm watching a video and they show a piece of text (let's just for consistency say a url). How would you normally extract it? e.g, for your notes. For me - it takes selecting a region of screen and a keypress - my editor calls a CLI OCRing tool and voila. I don't really care that the source isn't "technically speaking" text - if I can read it, then computer for sure can "read" it too, am I right? That's text manipulation.

There may be dozens (if not hundreds) of such examples (including coding-related) in my workflow that work on top of the idea of manipulating plain text.

Once you grok the cerebral virtue of the idea of having complete and total control over text, you may find that modal editors - nvim/emacs/etc. - are the best instruments to achieve that control.

___

¹https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
by cjbgkagh | 2026-01-20 16:59:14+00:00
I think Taiwanese elites can be bought, they say they can’t but I think that’s just part of the bargaining for a higher price. The overtures towards a costly and destructive invasion is Chinas attempt at lowering that price. As is the strategy of building up an indigenous chip manufacturing industry. The aggressive rhetoric from China has the added benefit of keeping the US on a self sabotaging aggressive posture.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-20 16:59:21+00:00
I get the feeling. From someone outside looking in (haven’t done web work since the heyday of Rails), React and the associated modern stack looks a whole lot like a Homermobile built on the frame of a go-kart, all held together with duct tape and twine sourced from TEMU. The idea that this is the web’s “final form” is difficult to stomach.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-20 16:59:31+00:00
I actually have a greater disgust for those who see it but don't act. I think this line from an _incredibly prescient book_ is precisely this:

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better.

This entire book, but especially this exerpt, is a must read: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-20 16:59:48+00:00
Meshtastic is the most popular in my area. I can see about 150 nodes from my house in a US county of ~300K (though actually being able to talk to most of those remains questionable).

I am certain the popularity of Meshtastic is down to how easy they have made it to onboard. Buy the module, flash using the web flasher, install the app on your phone, done. There's a Youtube tutorial on every street corner for this, even though I (and seemingly many people) don't find Meshtastic to be all that reliable.

For reference, this is what Meshtastic has to say about their flood-based mesh protocol:
https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/
by SamuelAdams | 2026-01-20 16:59:58+00:00
Calculators are widely available for a low cost. The logic behind most calculators is able to be consistently duplicated across a variety of manufacturers, thereby lowering the cost to produce these to the masses.

LLM’s are not consistent. For example, having a new company make a functional duplicate of ChatGPT is nearly impossible.

Furthermore, the cost of LLM’s can change at any time for any reason. Access can be changed by new government regulations, and private organizations can chose to suspend or revoke access to their LLM due to changes in local laws.

All of this makes dependence on an LLM a risk for any professionals. The only way these would be mitigated is by an open source, freely available LLM that creates consistent results that students can learn how to use.
by epolanski | 2026-01-20 17:00:29+00:00
Just a reminder that NATO troops have always been rallied by Washington and on top of that the US is the only country to have ever invoked article 5.

The European allies have put their money and more importantly blood into these conflicts.

Yes, we can all look at a geographical map and state that the USA is blessed geographically by being split by two oceans from anything major in the world and thus conclude that the US does not need Europeans to defend its borders.

In essence you're completely ignoring how US allies in form of NATO allowed US to thrive as the global military power by providing a deep web of support, logistics, bases, ports, intelligence and allowing the US to have a huge influence it has consistently leveraged for decades to its own benefit or needs. And that includes financial reasons (like buying US weaponry).

If US wants to pull out of NATO it is what it is, but this whole nonsense of NATO benefitting only the European allies when it's always Washington asking for other's blood and bases and logistics is just it: nonsense.
Show HN: 4x faster Deep Learning training – we replaced the DataLoader with Rust
by yansoki | 2026-01-20 17:00:39+00:00
Hi HN,
We built a drop-in replacement for torch.utils.data.DataLoader in Rust.

The Problem: Python's multiprocessing isolates workers, meaning every batch incurs IPC and pickling overhead. Even on a T4, the CPU bottlenecks and the GPU sits idle.

The Solution: We bypass Python's data plane entirely. Rust Backend: Uses native threads (no GIL, no heavy process forking). Zero-Copy: Memory-mapped custom format (.kt) creates views into tensors without deserialization. Benchmarks (ResNet-18 / ImageWoof, Tesla T4, batch=64): Loader Throughput Speedup (Time taken per epoch/Total number of images) PyTorch ImageFolder 116 img/s 1.0x MosaicML Streaming 179 img/s 1.5x NVIDIA DALI 246 img/s 2.1x Kuattree (Ours) 512 img/s 4.4x

Compared to DALI, we are 2.08x faster. Compared to PyTorch, we are 4.4x faster. You have to pre-convert your dataset to .kt. It is similar to writing a TFRecord or WebDataset, but designed for random access, and 60x faster than MosaicML sharding.

Not open source yet, but we're running a private beta if you want to verify on your hardware.

https://www.kuatlabs.com

Happy to answer questions.
by alexfoo | 2026-01-20 17:00:40+00:00
Anyone know what the monitor is in the blog author's home setup?

https://www.ntietz.com/blog/my-portable-ergonomic-setup/

Specifically this image: https://www.ntietz.com/processed_images/keyboard-3.e1480955e...

I can't find the info in any of the blog posts and can't get anything useful by zooming in on any of the images.
by GJim | 2026-01-20 17:00:53+00:00
> The US military spent $4T-$6T in Iraq and Afghanistan, losing ~7k soldiers and ~52k wounded

Denmark and the UK (to mention just two countries) also lost men fighting alongside America in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Look how they are being repaid.

Here is a rather sobering video from a British perspective: The Prime Minister responding to JD Vance by simply reading out in Parliament, the names of British soldiers who died supporting American operations.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/pm-honours-uk-troops-killed-123537...
by axelthegerman | 2026-01-20 17:00:54+00:00
This! Sure you might need a Google account for your android but you don't HAVE to use all their services.

First just don't use Gmail, docs, search, chrome and co. But even better get a Pixel with Graphene and Google's invasive tactics are even more limited.

However it is sad that a company like Apple that used to produce superior hardware with superior UX is falling apart on all fronts - hardware (especially pricing), UX (hello glass design), software (macos just getting worse every release without adding ANYTHING of value)

And now introducing more and more ads while keep selling you "pro" laptops with 512GB SSD :-/
Show HN: Hayekian BTC Daily – a local-first Bitcoin market snapshot CLI
by sentientbeing | 2026-01-20 17:01:03+00:00
I built this for myself after getting tired of BTC dashboards that show everything but explain nothing.

Hayekian BTC Daily is a local-first, privacy-focused CLI that generates one clean daily snapshot of Bitcoin market structure: trend, multi-timeframe momentum, participation, ETF flows, and a short behavioral interpretation.

It runs entirely on your machine (no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud), uses real public ETF data sources, and is intentionally limited in scope. It’s descriptive, not predictive.

Happy to answer questions or hear what feels unclear or unnecessary.
by benterix | 2026-01-20 17:01:10+00:00
> The Euros also underfunded their defense obligations and received huge amounts of US investment in facilities, enabling them to upfund social programs, socialized healthcare and most egregiously 8 - 12 week vacations which are completely unheard of in the US.

It's hard to detect sarcasm through the screen but in case you're being serious and just repeat what Trump says, he does this because Americans are not stupid and are asking, why Europeans can enjoy free healthcare, education and 4-week holidays and we cant? The answer "because we sponsored them" makes no sense but finds fertile ground in the hearts of some people.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-20 17:01:16+00:00
> > People living comfortable lives don't want to die

Trump is the prime example , why did he decide to abandon the lifestyle afforded by his 500 million dollar net worth to pursue a job where 27% of his predecessors where shot at? Abandoning comfortable life to risk death.

Why don't rich celebrities quit after the first death threat letter, when they already have a huge bag of money?

The material wealth at the extremes is a recipe for unstable and unpredictable behavior , not for calm and collected behavior. People engage in ego battles and fall in love with their ideas and are willing to go to war for them as in a world of abundance they are the only thing that matters in order to 'win'.

The most abstract things (interest rates ring a bell) become personal because ideas about them were conceived in self reflection during the infinite hours of thinking and wondering free time afforded by material abundance, killing off ideas becomes akin to killing part of self and becomes unacceptable to the ego.

This Is true for individuals and countries alike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Show HN: PasteClean – A small tool to clean ChatGPT output for Outlook and email
by bdtrt | 2026-01-20 17:01:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PasteClean, a small, free, client-side tool to fix a problem I kept running into when pasting ChatGPT output into Outlook and other email clients.

When you paste AI-generated text into Outlook, bullet points and paragraphs often end up with extra spacing. This happens because of how lists and paragraphs are represented in HTML and how Outlook renders them.

PasteClean lets you:
- Paste content from ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity (or anywhere)
- Optionally edit it
- Clean up spacing, lists, and formatting
- Copy the result as cleaned HTML

Everything runs entirely in the browser — nothing is sent to a server.
This is intentionally a narrow utility, not an AI product. It just fixes formatting issues that show up in real workflows.

I’d love feedback, especially:
- Whether this solves the Outlook/email spacing issue for you
- Edge cases it doesn’t handle well
- Any formatting rules you’d want as options

Link: https://pasteclean.app
by JaggedJax | 2026-01-20 17:01:20+00:00
KISS looks nice and I'll give it a try. This reminds me a lot of Kvaesitso launcher also on F-Droid, although KISS looks a little more minimal. They seem to have a similar focus though. If KISS is a little too bare-bones, but you want something still fairly minimal, I found Kvaesitso to be a good balance.

The main purpose of these launchers for me is to avoid using my phone mindlessly. I won't just see an app and open it for no reason. I need to make a decision that I want to use an app on my phone.
Show HN: We built an OCR API to stop babysitting extraction pipelines
by tchop2020 | 2026-01-20 17:01:22+00:00
Hey HN — we built an OCR API for teams who are tired of constantly maintaining extraction pipelines.

If you’re running OCR in production, this is what it changes for you:
- You don’t have to maintain custom orchestration code across multiple OCR models. We run a managed, multi-model consensus engine instead.
- You don’t have to hand-tune prompts or schemas. The system auto-optimizes prompts and schemas against observed extraction failures.
- You don’t get silent failures. Every field comes with explicit error flags so downstream systems know what to trust.
- You don’t have to keep tweaking the pipeline as documents change. The extraction loop converges automatically toward higher accuracy over time.

Under the hood, we run extraction, analyze failure patterns, and adapt prompts and schemas without manual intervention. The result is fewer retries, fewer production surprises, and less ongoing maintenance.

It’s API-first and free to try with a single API call.

Docs: https://www.deepread.tech/docs?utm_source=hackernews&utm_med...

Happy to discuss the technical details, tradeoffs, and the joy (and pain) of building a less-lousy OCR
by Nzen | 2026-01-20 17:02:07+00:00
For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-20 17:02:13+00:00
The most important thing to understand is where the value of the US dollar comes from. It's the US military. More generally speaking, it's US foreign policy. The US military is the force that enables foreign policy.

Understand this and you'll avoid falling into various traps and conspiracy theories. For example, there are people who believe that the US invasion of Iraq was caused by Iraq wanting to sell oil in euros instead of dollars.

This is a nonsen theory because every oil transaction could be denominated in euros tomorrow and it wouldn't change anything. The same demand for US dollars would still exist so people would simply convert to euros, buy oil then convert back.

This same understanding debunks the "threat" of a BRICS alliance.

The real problem, if you can call it that, is we have an administration who is both incredibly inept AND intent on destroying the post-WW2 world order. Wealth inequality is getting so bad and the deficit is so bad. Worse, nobody expects either to improve anytime soon. I'm not saying the budget needs to be in balance. It doesn't. A country doesn't work like a business when you can print your own money. But at some point, crippling public debt (in terms of GDP) will devalue the dollar.

Put another way: the illusion of "safety" is at risk. It's just a question of when the vibes shift.
by ptero | 2026-01-20 17:02:22+00:00
It did not go into a hyperinflation after the WW2, when the US debt load as a share of GDP was even higher than today; and deflated in the same way US is likely to do it now (bond rates forced way below inflation with yield control).

I am not saying that the process will be pleasant for the US or its citizens. But it is not without precedent and is extremely unlikely to cause hyperinflation. My 2c.