MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2026-01-24 19:40:59+00:00
We're all approaching this wrong.

Politicizing this was one of the greatest electoral innovations of all time.

Somebody realized that calling people ignorant and telling them they had to do something pissed people off and lionized them. So they took the vaccine issue and made it political. They knew the "nerdy folks" would just continue pushing and prodding, and that would continue to rile up the other side's voters.

The "institutions" (which are easy to throw shade at) telling folks they had to comply or lose work - that's a cause to fight. There's much more energy in this than in opposing it, and opposition just inflames the other side even further.

Genius political move.

The correct response to a vaccine critic isn't to call them stupid or tell them they must get a vaccine or lose their job. The correct response is, "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".

Hank Green had a nice video essay about this (I'll try to find the link).

I grew up in the South. These are reasonable folks, and they can be reached, but it's being approached the wrong way. The current methodology is only making it worse.

This is like a viral "meme" that actually causes harm. And the more you try to get rid of it, the deeper it digs. You have to try a new approach. The current one -- and it feels so righteous to call them out -- does the exact opposite of what you want.
by 12_throw_away | 2026-01-24 19:41:01+00:00
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip [...]

This all reminds me of a phrase that I have heard, repeatedly, in many different organizations: "We need to start working with a sense of urgency."

Aside from the complete lack of leadership (so, your plan is ... keep working, but moreso?), it's almost always insulting (all those people you've been praising for skipping vacations and working while sick, what "sense of urgency" were they missing exactly?)
by yongjik | 2026-01-24 19:41:03+00:00
At the rate things are going, I wonder if America can hold together until the midterm. The Trump regime is acting like it wants a civil war.

If anyone told me in 2024 that America may see its own Tiananmen, I'd have laughed, but I'm not so sure now. I can totally see something similar at a smaller scale, and millions of Americans defending it with "it was necessary to keep law and order."
by zahlman | 2026-01-24 19:41:16+00:00
> What counts as intellectual theft—and what is considered acceptable borrowing or inspiration—are the great questions of the AI era.... Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of plagiarism—it ranges from verbatim copying to the fudgier theft of concepts.

> ...

> Moreover, using ChatGPT, Mr Kreuz argues, does not make you a plagiarist, since it is not cribbing from a single “original” text. He suggests LLMs are doing unacknowledged “ghostwriting”. To many that is too generous: this is still plagiarism, but with an AI accomplice.

Meanwhile, the site itself offers AI-powered narration for the article. The AI voice's vocal characteristics had to come from somewhere. Is it any different for prosody than for prose?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-24 19:41:41+00:00
> and I wonder how much of your success / failure is luck vs advanced-anything

Well take someone who YOLO on a 0 DTE option and makes 80x (not unheard of) vs someone who wins the same amount over, say, four years and 8 000 trades... Well it's not impossible that the YOLOer is more skilled and has an edge (while also being a degen but that's not the point): it is just very unlikely.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of trades is not the same as "gambling one night in Vegas".
by AnfaB | 2026-01-24 19:42:04+00:00
What if I told you there's a material 200 times stronger than steel... and lighter than paper?

Graphene isn’t science fiction. It’s already starting to revolutionize electronics, medicine, energy, and more.

Find out why many say the future is written in a single layer of carbon.

Watch the full video here https://youtu.be/e772f2dikvE
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 19:42:17+00:00
> I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions.

You're not asking for the OS native widget though, you're asking for Apple's native OS widget to support that. The problem is that makes it up to Apple to lift a finger to support it. And Apple does whatever it wants. Sometimes those things are aligned with you as a user, sometimes not. And yes, showing ads is one reason some parties have for this. The other large one though, is codec support. If you're not in the game, codec support seems like such an inconsequential detail that it can't possibly be the real issue, but with money on the line, it's a bigger deal than you'd thing.

The thing is, unless you get in the weeds, the codec support is paid for when you buy the hardware. You don't have to deal with it. But when you're not Mr. Beast, showing videos on the big platforms, you aren't making giant piles of money. Thus, you need to optimize smaller details to make smaller amounts of money.

Which codec is being used becomes material because you can save money there with encoding and you can save money with content delivery as well. It's just about money. So it's not (just) about ad blocking money; it's about content creation and distribution costs.
by thomascgalvin | 2026-01-24 19:42:22+00:00
> I have a hot take that MAHA is a modern eugenics movement

The right wing in America isn't trying to improve the population, they're grifting and hoping that 1. they won't face the same consequences as their supporters, because they're rich enough to be shielded, and 2. that they're going to die before society collapses from the havoc they unleash.

This is also true of, say climate change.
by AnthonBerg | 2026-01-24 19:42:29+00:00
Beautifully, this reads like it came right out of Le Guin's rendition of the Tao Te Ching:

Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
by kingstnap | 2026-01-24 19:42:35+00:00
Wikipedia's actual hosting is not expensive and never has been.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...

If you look at the audited financial report of last year.

$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.

This is out of expenses of $190,938,007

Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.

Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.
by nradov | 2026-01-24 19:42:59+00:00
It's sad how software organizations refuse to learn from history. The US Navy was using PERT to manage huge, risky projects back in the 1950s with pretty good results. It can give you a Gaussian distribution of project completion dates based on best / middle / worst case estimates for individual tasks with dependencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_...
by kazinator | 2026-01-24 19:43:43+00:00
Motors spinning shafts that produce signals is a very old technique, dating back to the Telharmonium [1897], whose tonewheel technique was also used in Hammond organs [1935].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonewheel

Speaking of spring reverbs: you can use a cheap piezo transducer mounted on the tremolo springs of an electric guitar as a passive reverb. Waylon MacPherson demonstrates this in his YT channel: it actually sounds good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5pJLgHrgw
by firefoxd | 2026-01-24 19:44:00+00:00
We estimated a sprint to move from our plain text passwords. Easy! Add a new field in the db for secure pass, and one to force password update. Update the api to take the new fields into account...

It took 6 months. Why? Well it was a legacy app, and we learned that passwords were case insensitive because the customer sent a video of him entering his password that failed. On the video, we could see a sticky note on his monitor with the password written on it.

When we made all the necessary changes, the docker file failed to build. SRE accidentally deleted the deprecated image with PHP that had reached EOL.

Estimating is always fun.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-24 19:45:47+00:00
> He wore the standard Afghan outfit: a vest over a loose garment that I would describe as a “dress for men,”

Kurta

> with a scarf that could be used for warmth, covering his face from the sun, or blocking out dust/sand

Pattu/Shaal

> In a lot of post-2021 accounts, travellers say that the Taliban they encountered were extremely friendly

A lot of that was either PR or non-Firangi.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-24 19:46:18+00:00
> I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012.

Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound, on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-24 19:46:20+00:00
Speaking as someone who flagged this submission:

It’s not because I don’t think anyone should see what’s happening, or that I’m ignoring it.

It’s because… how do I put this delicately? Maybe I’ll just come out with it:

It’s because HN fucking sucks at discussing anything emotional like this. (So does nearly every other place of online discourse, but I hate to see just how bad it gets here.)

Nuance is completely thrown away. People immediately dial up the rhetoric to infinity. There’s no room for anyone to take a breath and approach what they’re seeing with a clear head.

It’s very apparent that the posters here are mostly doom scrollers. By the time we’re taking about it here we’ve already heard enough rhetoric from others already discussing how bad things are, so we take
that as the new baseline, and thus this newest event is now nuclear holocaust levels of bad, and America is now worse than Nazi Germany and the ICE agents are worse than the SS.

Since people are already angry before stories like this even break, they come in with their anger already showing and ready to throw all rationality out the window.

The conversation here just sucks when discussing emotional topics like these (note I didn’t say political topics, I’m saying emotional ones. I don’t even believe this is a matter of politics any more.)

So yeah, I flag it. Not because of the topic, but because of the tanking quality of discussion that happens.
Show HN: Stateless On-Prem JSON-to-PDF via REST (Java)
by TrqConverter9 | 2026-01-24 19:46:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a stateless, on-prem JSON-to-PDF generation service in Java.

Clients send JSON via REST and receive a generated PDF synchronously. No documents or payloads are persisted.

This is a commercial, proprietary on-prem product; the repository contains installation artifacts and documentation.

Feedback welcome
by otterley | 2026-01-24 19:48:13+00:00
We had XMPP, and even Google Chat used that in the early days.

It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.
by raffraffraff | 2026-01-24 19:48:16+00:00
Generally, across most DAP manufacturers, the android devices are all of those things that I don't want, and the non-android devices tend to be cheaper, lighter, with better battery life. I don't specifically choose non-android, I specifically chose those other parameters and have simply noticed a pattern. I don't doubt you, but you haven't given any examples and I'm not going to spend my life searching for the exception that proves the rule.
Show HN: I built a bedtime story web app in a weekend using AI tools
by ealpopa | 2026-01-24 19:48:18+00:00
Over the weekend I ran a small experiment to see how quickly I could go from idea → working MVP using AI-assisted development tools.

The result is a simple web app that generates short, personalized bedtime stories and narrates them in my own voice. The codebase is intentionally rough in places, but the app works and has been usable in a real setting.

What surprised me most was how easy it was to iterate on a real, deployed system without getting stuck on early architectural decisions.

Stack: FastAPI, Supabase, Fly.io, Vercel
Tools: Cursor, Lovable, Claude, ChatGPT

Curious how others here are approaching AI-assisted development, and where you draw the line before hardening things for production.

Link: https://sleepli.app
by mitchellst | 2026-01-24 19:48:34+00:00
I think this is actually where the study is interesting. Because the “no duh!” Comments actually have merit on their face. But the argument is that these are tiny slights—not harassment, not pervasive toxicity. By definition it’s the kind of thing management doesn’t notice. So I think the argument is that employers consider those employees to be some default percentage of the workforce, and the argument is that you can move the entire performance bar up by hiring/training managers to be thoughtful and consistent.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-24 19:49:14+00:00
> "What we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order — not public health but individual autonomy to the first order,” he added.

From the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I would have thought, and hoped, public health is their priority.

Individual autonomy is for the politicians to decide on, isn't it?

Medical professionals advise on medical matters, politicians decide based on the societal implications.

Medical professionals aren't elected, and I don't want their personal politics (on individual autonomy or abortion or anything else) infecting their medical advice.

What it sounds like to me is politicians getting the advisors to do both jobs because the politicians want to put their hands in the air and say 'I'm just following the advice'. If the outcome is unpopular then the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are the bad guys, not the politician(s).
by jmward01 | 2026-01-24 19:50:02+00:00
That is a great approach, but there can be multiple right paths here. Fundamentally internalizing as a nation a definition of 'freedom' that isn't 'freedom of consequences' as well as giving incentives to act responsibly aren't mutually exclusive. I totally agree that telling someone they are stupid never works. It is like the silly idea that taunting the bully will make them back down. I think both your suggested approach and mine share something in common which is we need consequences, not words. You don't want to vaccinate? It is a week long drive and that is it so you loose your chance, a consequence. You act irresponsibly and harm someone because of a 'freedom', you are charged with assault. Neither path is going on a talk-show and calling people stupid for their actions which, I totally agree, is completely the wrong path.
by greedo | 2026-01-24 19:50:25+00:00
Well the smaller a field, the larger proportion of end rows. And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field. A 5 acre field is pretty small, and my rough guess is that between end rows, rows shaded by trees and close to water sources, the loss could be pretty significant. Now if you're talking 500-1000 acres, end rows are nothing in the scheme of things.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-24 19:50:45+00:00
> Maybe it indeed ran on it, but Pentium was available when Windows 95 was released and it was probably far more likely to be sold along with such new Pentium multimedia machines, than someone getting it for their old 386.

I was definitely running Linux on a 486. I even had a big bulky laptop back then but I don't remember what CPU it had: I was running Linux on it too. And my 486 was sharing it's (dial-up, 28.8 or 33.6) Internet connection to the laptop using the PLIP protocol (IP over a parallel cable): I set that up and my brother and I were discovering the Web at the same time. Fun memories.

The jump was not 386 to Pentium. The 486 had its glory days.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-24 19:51:10+00:00
Video of a federal agent disarming the victim before the others shot him: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...

The lead up also does not show the victim threatening these agents in any way, with the gun or otherwise. Instead, they pushed a woman down and this guy tries to shield her and that's when they target him.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-24 19:51:12+00:00
The issue isn't closed vs open but business models. The reason most services don't support third-party clients is that their business model is based on advertising (aka wasting the user's time) and a third-party client would reduce said wasted time.

A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.
by graemep | 2026-01-24 19:51:35+00:00
The main argument for allowing abortion is that people have a right to do what they want with their bodies. The opposing argument is that this does not extend to a baby's body.

I do not see how either side can then say the government has a right to force people to do something to their bodies.

Vaccines are not mandatory in any country I know but most people have them bar hippies and conspiracy theorists.

I think its stupid not to have (most, at least) childhood vaccines but people should be free to be stupid.
by mitchellst | 2026-01-24 19:51:53+00:00
Agreed. 3 things are interesting.

How small the slight is.

How big the effect is.

Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)

Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.
by poisonborz | 2026-01-24 19:51:55+00:00
Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.
by jtolmar | 2026-01-24 19:52:12+00:00
Lovely page. Reminds me of the venerable Think Labyrinth (https://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm) page, but the live demos add a lot.

My favorite maze algorithm is a variant of the growing tree algorithm - each time you carve a cell, add it to a random one of N lists. When choosing a cell to visit, pop the last cell off the first non-empty list. It's considerably faster than the standard tree algorithm, but more importantly, changing N has a dramatic impact on the texture of the maze (compare 1 2 4 8 etc on a decently large maze).
by arter45 | 2026-01-24 19:52:12+00:00
Social networks and chat apps are mostly dominated by the network effect.

Since the purpose of these apps is literally putting you in contact with other people, you tend to use the same app/social network most of your friends and family are using.

This is not necessarily true for platforms you use to find new people, but even then, you're going to use the websites/apps people with your interests are using.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-24 19:52:40+00:00
The latter is not news, it's the way it has been for quite some time, not just for IT providers, but for businesses in general.

If you are running any kind of service, you should learn how warrants work in the country you are hosting in, come the time, if your service grows, eventually you will have to comply with an order.

If you want anything else you will have to design your system such that you can't even see the data, ala Telegram. And even then, you will get into pretty murky waters.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 19:53:09+00:00
Isn't it ironic that many world cultures wear garments that Westerners mock and belittle as feminine "dresses"? I mean, even kilts for Scotsmen?

It is very interesting to learn that the evolution of Roman Catholic vestments for priests began when the priests wore the same thing that other men of their class wore, but while fashions and cultures changed around them, the priests just kept wearing the same thing as always.

Likewise, for many nuns and sisters, they would dress modestly according to the local customs, and becoming standardized these were "habits", and stayed the same as the other fashions got updated.

This is why Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta modeled her institute's habits after the typical poor Hindu's sari. It was really going back to basics for them!
by moffkalast | 2026-01-24 19:54:07+00:00
Well on the other hand, at which point does it become wasteful to run something when it gets less and less power efficient compared to newer devices? According to OP's benchmarks, the Pi 1 burns 2W constant to do essentially zero work and running that on a more modern device that's already running would use almost no extra power.

Then again we use a kW or two to microwave things for minutes on a daily basis so who really gives a shit.
by echelon | 2026-01-24 19:54:50+00:00
0.0001% of people are going to do that.

After talking to your third and fourth friend and explaining which twenty menus they need to navigate through to enable this, you'll give up.

This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.

This is like "web installs" on Android. Navigate the complex menus (step 1) to toggle the setting. Then for every APK, find the file (step 2 - not everyone can do this), say okay to the "scare wall" (step 3), the permissions screen (step 4), and beware any app defaults. Let's hope Google doesn't negatively rank the app in the SERPs.

Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.

Every single one of these big tech companies needs to be muzzled and broken up. And as an innovation, I wouldn't even suggest partitioning them by product vertical, but rather creating 5 clones of each business entity that have to scramble to compete from day one on every business line. Ma Bell style.
Show HN: DocuDeeper – private document AI assistant,100% offline, GDPR-compliant
by takouzlo | 2026-01-24 19:55:09+00:00
I built a local AI tool for professionals who handle sensitive documents (PDF/TXT).

- Runs with Ollama (llama3.2)
- No data leaves your machine — 100% offline
- Automatic language detection (FR/EN/DE)
- Open-source core (MIT License)
- Lightweight, fast, and privacy-first

Perfect for lawyers, accountants, auditors, and privacy-conscious teams in Europe.

GitHub: https://github.com/erabytse/docudeeper
Demo: ![Demo](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/erabytse/docudeeper/main/d...)

Feedback welcome!
by otterley | 2026-01-24 19:55:27+00:00
The problem is that there's not much of a market for an ecosystem of commercial chat clients that use open standards underneath. It's not like it hasn't been tried. What ultimately ends up happening is the market becomes a race to the bottom, chat clients become a commodity product, and innovation ceases. It's essentially what happened with Web browsers and why we don't have a truly robust market in that space.