MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: YouTube App Centered Around Language Learning
by yunusabd | 2026-01-22 10:40:25+00:00
Hello HN, here's my app that I built around language learning with YouTube. I'm posting to connect with language learners and people building in this space.

I know some people use YouTube for language learning, but I think it's still a bit under the radar for many. I mean, where else can you find millions of hours of video content with decent quality (mostly) and in virtually every language in existence, about basically any topic there is?

The app has two main goals:
1. Allow interacting with the transcript to copy and translate, which you can't do with the YouTube app.
2. Facilitate interaction with the video content through exercises, to improve understanding and retention.

I'm using it currently to polish up my Mandarin, which I learned to a decent level some 10 years ago. For this kind of casual use case I find it quite good, if I do say so myself.

There's currently around 1k users across Android and iOS. Korean seems to be popular as a target language, as well as Turkish, which interestingly is being learned in Somalia of all places. But according to my stats, it turns out that the most popular language pair is English->English. So right now I'm working on improving the experience for this kind of "monolingual" learning.

The app can be used for free, with an optional ad to unlock exercises per video.

iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lingolingo-language-challenge/...

Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lingolingo...
by viking123 | 2026-01-22 10:41:29+00:00
Yeah, wonder why Trump doesn't threaten North Korea? Because they actually have achieved all this, internal internet completely sealed, nuclear weapons and developing ballistic missiles to reach the USA.

So actually.. getting the nukes was the right play for them because eventually they would get sold out by China or Russia. Having nukes gets you to shake hands and send love letters to Trump. Frankly Trump sees Europeans as total cucks and has more respect for Kim Jong-un

If Iran actually had nukes, the Israeli lead bullying would immediately halt.
Ask HN: Can something motivate you to use an AI browser assistant?
by ProtosGalaxias | 2026-01-22 10:41:30+00:00
(apologies in advance for the long intro)

I’ve been looking at browsers that come with built-in AI assistants, and while the idea itself is appealing, I don’t want to leave the browser I already use. So I turned to the AI browser extensions.

I’m a curious person, but also a lazy one. Sometimes I find myself seeking answers to random questions, like “how heat propagates through space”, and I often don’t want to google it or switch context to a separate AI chat tool.

Because of that, the idea of an assistant that is always at hand and doesn’t force a big context switch feels like a good fit for me.

But I wonder, what would motivate you to use an AI browser assistant? And on the other hand, what would make you avoid such a tool entirely?
by pjc50 | 2026-01-22 10:41:53+00:00
The biggest piece of evidence for this worldview is the Twitter acquisition. A lot of people were very confident that it would quickly fall over after mass layoffs. That turned out not to be the case: the site can be kept running on a much lower staff.

They've not really been able to add new features to the backend, but on the other hand: old @Jack Dorsey Twitter was so bad about this that there were memes ("likes are now florps"). And the features they have added (indecent image autogeneration) have caused as much brand damage in Europe as the Nazi salute. Yet the site continues to stay up almost all the time.

(I don't think ZIRP is where the blame should lie, though. It's SaaS, which turns software into rentierism rather than purchase)
by rramon | 2026-01-22 10:43:04+00:00
Wow, didn't realize that you're the one behind the Webcrunch channel. Never got into Rails but I loved your Affinity videos back in the day, you're also one of the functional CSS/Tailwind early adopters on YT.

That's where I discovered TW back in 2018 I think. It was even before the Refactoring UI book and videos and the first official version of TW.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-22 10:43:21+00:00
Teams is needed if there are going to be lots of participants in the online videoconference (which was the only metric where Zoom trumped all rivals, especially during the pandemic lockdowns (when Zoom was the only videoconf app that worked for online classes or office meetings that could support lots (100+) participants), but its rivals quickly learnt to fix their issues and scale up, so they are good now.)

Otherwise Google Meet or WhatsApp are more than sufficient. They can support up to 20 participants with ease, based on my experience.

For bigger conferences, Microsoft Teams is the way to go. All it needs is the host to have an Office 365 subscription, then others can join on the browser or app with no restrictions.

Microsoft Teams offers a free version that allows users to chat, meet, and collaborate with others, although it has some limitations compared to the paid versions. The free version includes features like group calls for up to 60 minutes and 100 participants, along with 5 GB of cloud storage per user. Teams will warn in advance before the 60mins is up, so the host can simply end the Teams meeting session and start it again to get another 60mins of meeting time where everyone else can join in again.

No need for Zoom and its security issues.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-22 10:43:47+00:00
> 40 billion sent to Argentina

This is nonsense. The US has a 20B USD currency swap agreement with Argentina. Currency swaps aren't free money. It is basically a line of credit between central banks. When you use it, you pay interest on the borrowed money. You would be surprised how many of these exist with the Big Three (US/EU/JP) central banks with other, smaller central banks.

Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48780

> In October 2025, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced U.S. financial support for Argentina, including a $20 billion currency swap line financed through the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).

However, there is very little info about how and when Argentina used it. No tin foil hat here: I'm unsure if this lazy reporting, or lack of transparency (intentionally or accidental). Here is the best that I found: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentina-used-multi...

> Last Friday, Argentina fully repaid the US$2.5 billion it obtained from a US$20-billion swap line with the Trump administration

> “Our nation has been fully repaid while making tens of millions in USD profit for the American taxpayer,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a Friday post on X.

Final point: It seems like everything I read about highly developed nations: All of them have massive gov't subsidies for agriculture which makes sense from a food security (+influence) perspective. Weirdly, it also seems like most people involved in farming are also fiscally conservative and probably vote right of center. Are there any countries where this isn't true? (I think of one -- NZ has little to no farming subsidies now.)
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-22 10:43:52+00:00
>it’s like APL is actually the most human programming language

As an incompetent programmer who is far more comfortable with even the most experimental and abstract literature than any of the "easy" programming languages, I agree with this.

Edit: I was going to fix that sentence, but it is a good example of what thinking about programming languages does to my brain. The idea of a context free human language is alien, thinking in such absolute and concrete terms is weirdly abstract.
by Shank | 2026-01-22 10:43:54+00:00
> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.

I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high.

Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.
by imiric | 2026-01-22 10:45:22+00:00
This is a common myth. Debugging unikernels is indeed possible[1][2]. It may not be the type of debugging you're already used to, but then again, unikernels are very different from containers and VMs, so some adjustment is expected.

As for observability, why is that the concern of unikernels? That's something your application should do. You're free to hook it up to any observability stack you want.

[1]: https://nanovms.com/dev/tutorials/debugging-nanos-unikernels...

[2]: https://unikraft.org/docs/internals/debugging
by misja111 | 2026-01-22 10:46:24+00:00
> A decent APL program, like in any other programming language, would need good comments, but here comments are frequently desirable at the level of subexpressions.

I guess that might be true for APL, for other programming languages that's not true at all. The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory. Of course there might be some implementation choices that need a comment. Or in some cases the problem is so difficult that this is not possible.

But readability should be the goal and most of the time this is feasible without comments. E.g. by using descriptive variable and function names. And by breaking up your program into logical and cohesive parts, using functions, objects, modules or whatever construct your language is offering.
by hoooooooooome | 2026-01-22 10:48:14+00:00
I switched to DDG from Google some years ago, and then to Kagi around the start of 2025.

I find the Kagi results to everything I need, and often lead me to more niche personal blog posts specific to what I am looking for. Surfacing small blogs posts is not something I remember getting much of in DDG and I'm really enjoying that.
Show HN: It's a free vulnerability database that publishes fresh CVE data daily
by levberg | 2026-01-22 10:48:29+00:00
Threat Road is a free vulnerability database that publishes fresh CVE data every single day.
- No middleman.
- No delays.
- No paywalls.

Why I built it:

- NVD's interface feels like Windows XP and updates are slow

- CVE Details is just repackaged NVD data with the same delays

- Premium databases cost five figures and are overkill for most teams

What makes it different:

- Daily updates
- Clean, modern interface
- Filter by vendor, category, CVSS score
- Actually fast and usable
- Zero cost

If you want daily CVE tracking, that's where you'll find it.
by DrBurrito | 2026-01-22 10:48:30+00:00
this.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-helper.plist
by thornewolf | 2026-01-22 10:48:49+00:00
it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here.

and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would be absurd if it were - but instead its a real and difficult to construct value
by user34283 | 2026-01-22 10:49:00+00:00
The first has 300k users, while /r/pics sports 33M.
The second is for discussion rather than posting photos.

Good that you ask, because that's exactly what I get on X: after liking some photos, I see mostly photography in my feed.

This brings us back to the original topic here: this appears to work well on X, while it is Reddit that pushes politics into my feed via default subreddits.
by less_less | 2026-01-22 10:49:22+00:00
It's not supposed to be some red line absolute max price, but rather "how much is this item worth to you?" You set that as your max bid price. If you get it at auction for less than that, you got a good deal, but if you buy it for more, you got a bad deal. If someone outbids you, then maybe it was worth it to them, but you (supposedly) would not have wanted to buy the item for that much, and would rather use your money for something else.

For tricky-to-price items like unique art pieces, the idea that you can pin this down might be a fantasy, but for commodity items it's pretty reasonable. If you can buy the same thing at costco dot com for $500, then it's probably not worth more than $500 to you, and if at auction you get outbid and it sells for $500.01 then you'll shrug and go order the same thing for a cent less, having wasted only a few minutes of your time. If the item you're bidding on is discontinued (e.g. it's last year's model) but you can buy a slightly better one for $550, and you can spare that extra $50, then again you won't be too sad about getting outbid. Online auctions are more popular for used items, but again in that case you usually still have an idea of what a used item is worth to you.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-01-22 10:49:45+00:00
Self-nitpick (too late to edit my post above): I used the phrase "special case" wrongly here -- restricting the valid inputs to a problem creates a strictly-no-harder special case, but constraining the valid outputs (as I do here regarding left-deep trees) can sometimes actually make the problem harder -- e.g., integer linear programming is harder than plain "fractional" linear programming.

So it's possible that the full optimisation problem over all join tree shapes is "easy", even though an output-constrained version of it is NP-hard... But I think that's unlikely. Having an NP-hard constrained variant like this strongly suggests that the original problem is itself NP-hard, and I suspect this could be shown by some other reduction.

> with selectivity a function of only the two immediate child nodes in the join

This should be "with selectivity a function of the rightmost leaves of the two child subtrees", so that it still makes sense for general ("bushy") join trees. (I know, I'm talking to myself... But I needed to write this down to convince myself that the original unconstrained problem wasn't just the (very easy) minimum spanning tree problem in disguise.)
by d_sc | 2026-01-22 10:49:56+00:00
Loved the article, thanks for sharing. I’m curious if you’d share your setup. I haven’t made any macOS apps before, primarily because I never wanted to really learn XCode and obj-c. I like swift but still prefer simpler editors like Zed/VSC vs. What XCode offers.. so when you’re building these are you doing it in XCode or in another tool like Claude Code/codex/gemini CLI?

cheers
by maxglute | 2026-01-22 10:50:16+00:00
PR built ~550 GW of solar last year, ~300GW domestic, ~250GW export.
About 2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per year.

Assume 30 year lifespan, PRC build enough solar to displace ~70 million barrels of oil per day if assume 17% capacity factor = 820Twh/yr. About 210mb/d if 1 unit of solar = 3 unit of oil (30% work efficiency).

For reference global oil production is ~100 mb/d. Global lng = ~70 mb/d.

PRC solar capacity is like 1000 GW... lots of idle plants, but on paper PRC solar can produce more energy than all global oil + lng producers combined. But world (including PRC) can't absorb/transition that fast. That said another 1000 GW per year will also roughly cover global coal = ~110 mb/d equivalent. Or if doing 210mb/d substitution method, PRC solar production last year is roughly all global fossil Consider solar takes PRC like 18 months to build to scale vs 7-10 year lead for oil infra. That's basically what PRC brings to the table.

Another thing to consider is manufacturing all these panels, which are net carbon sink, count towards PRC emissions, vs oil/lng exporters who gets to shift emission accounting onto importers. IF PRC got credited for ~60 mb/d of fossil displaced via solar (-10 mb/d for very conservative carbon payback), PRC emissions would drop 75%, from 13 Gt to 3Gt using conservative method. Over 100%, i.e. net carbon sink 20+ Gt using substitution method.
by skissane | 2026-01-22 10:51:07+00:00
A lot of this sounds to me like common prejudices about the past.

Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?

And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-22 10:51:40+00:00
It’s easy to overlook what I think is the real value of these “home-built” tools.

We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.

Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.
by som | 2026-01-22 10:53:05+00:00
YouTube music support? (ᵕ•_•)

I set a (very) old phone into child mode total lockdown with only YouTube music installed to make use of my family account and streaming playlists ... only to find it (the YTM app) wouldn't open due to the social media ban in Australia (legislation which I otherwise - controversially - completely support).
by skissane | 2026-01-22 10:54:00+00:00
> Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport?

You aren't hunting the baby for sport. Sport is not among your reasons for hunting the baby.
by mlrtime | 2026-01-22 10:54:04+00:00
And every single time there is discussion from liberals talking about rural voters, they have to mention that they know whats best for them, how they vote against their interests. I keep telling them this strategy doesn't work. The smugness is real and all it does is a) push people farther away and b) get everyone who thinks like you to give you internet karma, both worthless.
by s1mplicissimus | 2026-01-22 10:55:02+00:00
I'll try to express this as a programming analogy:

You are correct that to the outside the EU market negotiates as a single entity, like, say, an interface:

interface Market {
interact(string payload)
}

on the inside though you will quickly realize that the payload format is XML in one country, Json in another, a completely custom format in a third. And that's not even talking fields, names, types, semantics etc. Hope this could clarify the confusion.
by input_sh | 2026-01-22 10:55:32+00:00
I don't know whose thoughts you're trying to attribute to me, but I've been pretty up-to-date myself (while still keeping myself to a $20/month budget that I switch between providers every few months).

Every generation has at best been a 5% improvement, and nothing revolutionary compared to the last generation. Absolutely no significant improvements between me selecting say Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude Sonnet 4, or Claude Sonnet 4.5. Still the same somewhat useful tool for specific purposes, still not good enough to be let loose on production, still not better than what I can do myself with 10 or so years of experience.

Genuinely useful from time to time? Sure, I agree completely. Anywhere near being revolutionary enough as people here insist on gaslighting themselves to be? Absolutely not. Not even remotely.
by Propelloni | 2026-01-22 10:55:52+00:00
Even more centralized than the USA? That must be an outsider's view. You are aware that each state has its own tax laws? Corporate laws? Even criminal laws and traffic laws? And so on? Obviously there is federal law, too, but that's more of an umbrella covering all states in addition to local laws. The USA is a federation, just like Germany, Switzerland, or Austria are federations, and one common complaint you get out of these nations all the time is that they are not centralized enough!

The EU, on the other hand, is not a federation, it is a association of nations trying to figure out how to go together, be it as a federation or something different, because in today's world you need size and power to survive. Any EU state alone would be insignificant on the world stage and being sidelined one way or the other. The most powerful inside the EU would suffer the most, e.g. Germany or France, because while the EU is second or third on many metrics, the individual nations are small. Depending on which ranking you look at, the EU is just behind the USA in military and economic power, sometimes it is behind China in economy, too.

The strongest individual economic power of the EU is Germany, which globally usually comes in 4th place after the USA, China, and the EU as a whole. But this is deceiving, when you look at the absolute numbers. Germany's output is impressive for its size, but is still only about a quarter of China's! Germany alone is a dwarf and without the EU would be inconsequential. The post-Brexit UK is just learning this the hard way and all the sovereignity does not matter a damn. The top leadership of EU nations are not stupid, even if they could explain their reasoning better, and thus try to keep the EU going, despite its many flaws.

This is a Chesterton's Fence situation.
by childintime | 2026-01-22 10:55:56+00:00
> 12000 objects spread over an area larger than the surface of the earth isn't all that much

People keep saying this, but the only way to assure there is no collision is to have non-intersecting orbits, but that is not going to work: not enough space.

It's a tell that SpaceX is now lowering the orbits, even though their satellites mostly move in flocks that maintain a formation relative to each other: because the other ways are exhausted.

Of course if they do cause a (low orbit) Kessler syndrom, then they don't have a business any more, and SpaceX will have achieved the opposite of its stated goals.

The major reason to lower these orbits is likely the risk of a terrorist state turning these constellations into a weapon, by willingly causing the Kessler syndrome. SpaceX isn't going to tell you that, just as it doesn't tell you it's the USA's most important military asset.
by mdrzn | 2026-01-22 10:56:45+00:00
Which is exactly why whenever I have an idea I just tinked with ClaudeCode for an hour or so until I have exactly what I need. It takes less time than trying to compare 10 similar products, none of which have the exact specifications or features that I need.

List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805