MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-18 16:45:24+00:00
You didn’t want to buy online but then were happy with the poorest quality stone harbor freight had to offer? That’s an odd choice.

There are many quality whetstones to choose from and a lot of debate on the absolute best. But TLDR, KING is generally highly rated:

https://www.hocho-knife.com/king/
by albert_e | 2026-01-18 16:45:32+00:00
offline is even great!

if you are able to share the repo - that's great - thanks!

i am toying with an idea of having a very light weight "idea capture" solution so i can capture my raw ideas with least friction .. and then channel them into more organized projects / drafts / blogs etc later.

experimenting with tools like obsidian+git, github.dev, wispr flow, etc as input and storage channels ... but a lightweight markdown style note editor woould probably be a useful addition. need to experiment to find out for sure though.
by Linux-Fan | 2026-01-18 16:46:02+00:00
UNIX provides the Makefile as go-to tool if a simple pipeline is not enough. GNUmake makes this even more powerful by being able to generate rules on-the-fly.

If the tool of interest works with files (like the UNIX tools do) it fits very well.

If the tool doesn't work with single files I have had some success in using Makefiles for generic processing tasks by creating a marker file that a given task was complete as part of the target.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-18 16:46:08+00:00
> The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual).

The reason the advertising budget is such a high number and a recurring charge is that effective advertising returns an ROI on each dollar spent.

If the software budget was increased 10X to $20 million, would the company get 10X as many customers? No.

What about the facility? If you 10X the facility budget to $30 million would you get 10X as many customers? No.

However, advertising is a customer acquisition activity. Every dollar you spend on advertising provides additional customers. This is saturable, but the ceiling is very high. Much higher than spending on software or facilities.

The reason your ad budget isn’t so high isn’t because Google and Meta invented the discoverability and distribution problems or basic economics. It’s because it has been determined that acquiring new customers via advertising has a high ROI and therefore it’s a smart move to pour as much money as possible into customer acquisition.

If every $1 you spend on advertising produces $2 in customer LTV then your company should be maximizing ad spend until evidence of saturation starts appearing.

This commonly frustrates engineers who think it’s a wasted investment. The question is: Compared to what? If you could have the same number of customers and same amount of revenue without advertising then you should do that! However, you can’t. This isn’t a licensing fee that’s being paid. It’s putting money into a machine that returns more dollars back than you put into it.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-18 16:46:31+00:00
I don't think it's outright corruption so much as quid quo pro. Think about PRISM and other such things. US tech companies operate globally, hoover up a vast amount of personal information, and pass it all right along to the US intelligence agencies.

So the more intrusive and vast these companies become, the more the US intelligence apparatus gains from it. Polls consistently there's extremely high levels of concern about what companies are doing what people's information, and we have a million 'real life' privacy laws. The complete absence of anything meaningful on the digital front, from either party, is highly conspicuous.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-18 16:46:41+00:00
The net result wouldn't change even if Harris was in office. The same arm twisting would happen but in the background as Sullivan did on multiple occasions.

What else can Europe do anyhow? The Russians want to invade the Baltics and the Chinese wish to continue to support the Russians [0]. Signing the FTA with India [1] means undermining "Make in Europe" [2]. MERCOSUR bigs like Brazil have begun negotiating REE deals with the US instead of the EU [3] and their oil majors are profiting from the regime change in Venezuela [4]

[0] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...

[1] - https://www.euractiv.com/news/exclusive-eu-india-trade-deal-...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-17/eu-aims-t...

[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...

[4] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-18/brazil-s-...
Show HN: Dcert – a CLI to debug TLS handshakes, certs and latency in one place
by api-py | 2026-01-18 16:46:44+00:00
Hello,

I built a cli tool called 'dcert' after repeatedly debugging TLS related issues where existing tools only answered part of the question or they tool me a lot of time to type all the options and flags.

Typical failures looked like:

- Certificate looks valid, but the handshake still fails

- TLS version or cipher mismatch that is not obvious from logs

- mTLS behaviour that depends on the server, not the client

Slow connections where it is unclear whether TCP, TLS or HTTPS is the bottleneck.

dcert is a small Rust CLI that either parses PEM files or connects directly to an HTTPS endpoint or against a base64 PEM file and shows:

- Full TLS certificate chain details and expiry

- Negotiated TLS version and cipher

- Validates hostname and its common name and alternative SAN validations

- Whether the server requests client certificates

- Separate latency measurements for TCP connect and TLS plus HTTP

It supports JSON output for CI or scripting, can export TLS certificate chains and works well for quick checks during incidents.

GitHub Repository and examples: https://github.com/SCGIS-Wales/dcert

Feedback welcome, especially from people who debug TLS regularly.
by anyonecancode | 2026-01-18 16:47:25+00:00
> In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.

The places people can find out about your product are controlled by a very small number of companies. And those companies not only own those spaces, they also own the means of advertising on those spaces. So if you have a product you want to advertise, you're not paying to distribute your message broadly to consumers, you're paying a toll to a gatekeeper that stands between you and your potential customers.
by mahaloz | 2026-01-18 16:47:43+00:00
A summary of our human study at NDSS 2026 on humans (of different skill levels) using LLMs to reverse-engineer.

Paper link: https://www.zionbasque.com/files/papers/dec-synergy-study.pd...
Challenges code: https://github.com/mahaloz/dec-synergy-study
by mkw5053 | 2026-01-18 16:47:54+00:00
This isn’t an aberration, it’s a continuation. Trump has repeatedly done things that would have been disqualifying for any normal president: threatening allies, undermining institutions, abusing power, normalizing coercion. The reason this moment feels different to some people isn’t that the behavior changed, it’s that they’re finally among those bearing the downside. That normalization, enabled by years of “it doesn’t affect me” neutrality, is part of how we got here.
by adammarples | 2026-01-18 16:47:57+00:00
Agreed, airflow and dbt have literally nothing to do with the size of the data and can be useful, or overkill, at any size. Dbt just templates the query strings we use to query the data and airflow just schedules when we query the data and what we do next. The fact that you can fit the whole dataset in duckdb without issue is kind of separate to these tools, we still need to be organised about how and when we query it.
by kentm | 2026-01-18 16:48:47+00:00
“Second Amendment solutions” are only OK to talk about if you’re a Republican (I.e. “Real American”).

I’m being sarcastic, for the record. Back during his first term, Trump talked about “second amendment people” doing something about liberal Supreme Court justices (iirc) and the right wing media treated everyone as crazy for thinking that was wildly inappropriate.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-18 16:48:53+00:00
I think that was a core plot point of a series of books by Niven I think. Humans are on a planet that has almost no phosphorus or maybe potassium in it's biosphere. Humans have to take it artificially by sprinkling a special salt on every meal. But it's very limited and expensive and so a significant part of the population are mentally handicapped to lesser or greater degrees, generation after generaion.

Ah, Destiny's Road, and it was Potassium.

"...dooming humanity to a slow mental extinction."

Great.
by treetalker | 2026-01-18 16:48:53+00:00
Consider this restatement: The link has been bookmarked, the passive voice is continuously complained about, and that continuous tantrum has never been understood.

Each assertion is somewhat accurate in a global sense, and somewhat accurate of parent commenter specifically. But each is also somewhat inaccurate and/or somewhat unsupported.

Who took these actions? We can presume that parent commenter bookmarked the link for themself, and we might even presume that others have bookmarked the link for themselves too; or maybe someone else bookmarked the link for parent commenter's benefit! It may be that parent commenter has never understood the tantrum, but has the tantrum never been understood? Is the tantrum continuous? For whom, and in what sense?

The passive has its place to achieve desired effects — primarily the shading of vagueness and ambiguity. But many assert that the default should be the active voice, presumably out of the belief that greater specificity usually provides greater social value and/or constitutes better expository expression.

Regarding its being specific to English, I'm reminded of the "gossip" tense in Turkish (and, as I understand, in Tajik and other languages too), which I learned about from a comment on HN a day or two ago.
by rectang | 2026-01-18 16:48:56+00:00
OT: It's difficult for me with my imperfect vision to read this web page because of inadequate contrast between body-text and background. Firefox dev tools measures a 3.52 contrast ratio — WCAG guidelines recommend 7:1 (AAA rating) or 4.5:1 (AA rating). However, viewing the page in reader mode seems to work as a solution.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-18 16:49:02+00:00
They're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment.

Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars.

I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre.

Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again.

In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.
by xg15 | 2026-01-18 16:49:43+00:00
I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)
by Ucalegon | 2026-01-18 16:49:48+00:00
Sigh... this is real life and I hate it as an American. The Danes had over 50 [1] Danish lives wasted in the NATO mission in Afghanistan and Iraq and this is how we pay the Danes back when they had America's back, paid in blood.

Its so disappointing and tragic.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmjewpkje9o
by Sharlin | 2026-01-18 16:49:53+00:00
Nah. He’s an asset of his American handlers. Stephen Miller is the person driving this Greenland thing (but what are his reasons?), Trump himself would’ve forgotten that the whole island exists if not reminded about it. Now, of course, it has also become an ego and legacy thing for Trump and he can’t walk back without being somehow convinced that he won even without getting Greenland. But that’s going to be almost impossible with Miller whispering into his ear.
by sbrother | 2026-01-18 16:50:01+00:00
I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work.

Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to bring an effective team to build something high priority or fix a dumpster fire.
by bjourne | 2026-01-18 16:50:06+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

You can still call your congressman, senator, local political, councilman, or someone else, spend 30 mins watching a demonstration, donate $10 to Amnesty, tell a random dude in fatigues "grateful for your service but please don't invade Greenland". The more people that do these kind of things the harder it gets for the Fascists to brand those that do as left-wing terrorists.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-18 16:50:15+00:00
I'm calling "Gríma Wormtongue". I find their response confrontational--You're going to *have* to (defend yourself)...Check! Check! Boom! Boom! Bang! Bang!

Not for nothing, our current American (extremist) government is raising stink about "professional agitators". I don't see them. I don't believe it's happening. But I have no proof nor experience to support my belief. I'm stuck with this Cat both dead and alive.

What I do witness are news stories such as "X's new feature reveals foreign origins of some popular U.S. political accounts" [1] "Pro-Scottish independence accounts on X go dark in Iran internet blackout" [2]. Therefore, I do believe people or governments or something else are creating anonymous accounts to sow division and agitate already upset communities.

I'm just pointing out the user is very fresh.

And I think that's a valid response. I also used to participate on /. back when it was more interesting, and I liked their use of "Anonymous Coward" for users who want to truck out their controversial take. I don't think that's what is happening here. It's more of a mike-drop comment. Bon mot. Spiked football. Wake up and smell what the Rock is Cooking. AH. NO.

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/x-foreign-origins-political-acc...
[2]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15458991/Pro-Scotti...
by bikenaga | 2026-01-18 16:50:39+00:00
Original article: "Indifferent or impartial? Actor–observer asymmetries in expressing and evaluating sociopolitical neutrality." - https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxge0001835

Abstract: "Opposing someone on a contentious sociopolitical issue often prompts criticism and conflict. People may be tempted to reduce such acrimony by expressing neutrality. Across 11 studies with North American samples, we find that, although people commonly express neutrality on controversial issues, observers are skeptical of others’ neutrality, judging them as similarly moral as those who oppose them those who explicitly oppose them. Unpacking lay beliefs about why people express neutrality sheds light on this disjunction between responses to the neutral self versus the neutral other. Specifically, people render more favorable attributions for their own neutrality (e.g., true indecision) than do observers (e.g., apathy, strategic behavior). Therefore, while neutrality is an often-invoked strategy to manage impressions, it is unlikely to succeed in doing so."
by lkey | 2026-01-18 16:50:41+00:00
The article is fine, except for the example, and I suppose by extension, the grammar of the lang itself.

The example: 2+3*4-1 should resolve to either
LR: 19
RL: -7
PEMDAS: 13

and never this: 15

Who would expect a language where add/sub is more tightly binding than mul?
Its feels akin to starting your indexes at 2, it's not illegal, if you remember everything works, but its a true foot gun in a scripting lang.
by tenchi39 | 2026-01-18 16:50:47+00:00
Track your journey away from habits holding you back. Add challenges like smoking, nail biting, or doomscrolling, and log slips honestly. BreakFree calculates your streaks and shows current, longest, and shortest streaks with a simple calendar: green for clean days, red for slips. Track multiple challenges, get milestone notifications, and use light and dark widgets. No accounts, ads, subscriptions, social features, or coaching. One payment, updates included. Your data stays on your device.
by cjonas | 2026-01-18 16:50:59+00:00
You have no idea what it's like to be American right now. The propaganda information war that's being waged in us is overwhelming and it appears to be working. The world needs to start preparing for a reality where the US can no longer be relied on for security or economic stability. For the sake of all of us, I hope that our European allies are taking serious steps to become more independent from US power and security.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-18 16:51:01+00:00
My aluminum X13 has taken that sort of fall, all that happened was it got a small abrasion on the corner it landed on. I know of a T14 which took a similar fall and did not survive. I think with either plastic or metal, that sort of accident is a matter of luck, exactly how it hits the ground, and if it was open or closed.
by deadbabe | 2026-01-18 16:51:16+00:00
We can’t. It’s over. Laws don’t mean anything anymore. Even if we had a full democratic congress, they would just be ignored. The Trump administration has already been grooming people to accept congress is useless, beginning with the month long shutdown. And the Supreme Courts will just go along with whatever the president wants now.

Start preparing for the post-American world.
by leviathant | 2026-01-18 16:51:30+00:00
If Trump were a Russian asset, would it look in any way different from how he's behaving today?

The thing I find morbidly fascinating is that all the Republicans I used to know, who were vehemently anti-Russia for decades, who worshiped at the altar of Ronald Reagan - have all become bootlicking Trump fanatics. It turns out, it was never about principles with so many of these people I knew - it was daddy issues, writ large.
by imiric | 2026-01-18 16:51:37+00:00
IMO the ThinkPad brand died after IBM sold its PC division. Lenovo has kept it alive because it is a cash cow, but the machines have shoddy build quality and are ludicrously overpriced.

My previous X1 Extreme Gen 1 (2018) had annoying coil whine and screen backlight bleed. One of the key caps broke off after a couple of years. Eventually I ended up doing a full keyboard and battery replacement.

My current X1 Carbon Gen 13 is nice and light, has no coil whine, but it's still made from cheap plastic. Considering it's a $2k+ machine, it sure doesn't feel like it.

In comparison, ThinkPads from the IBM era were built like tanks. Still plastic, sure, but they felt solid, and were reliable workhorses for years.

At this point the only thing keeping me on ThinkPads is the TrackPoint, but since trackpads are decent on Linux nowadays, I think I'm ready to finally ditch the brand. Some of the new Dell and HP machines look interesting. Frameworks seem nice, but I've read many issues about their build quality, and they're not cheap either.
by glenstein | 2026-01-18 16:52:13+00:00
I think you lost track of what I was replying to. Thorrez noted that "There are many cases where pure mathematics became useful later." You replied by saying "So what? There are probably also many cases where seemingly useless science became useful later." You seemed to be treating the latter as if it negated the former which doesn't follow. The utility of pure math research isn't negated by noting there's also value in pure science research, any more than "hot dogs are tasty" is negated by replying "so what? hamburgers are also tasty". That's the point you made, and that's what I was responding to, and I'm not confused on this point despite your insistence to the contrary.

Instead of addressing any of that you're insisting I'm misunderstanding and pointing me back to a linked comment of yours drawing a distinction between epistemic value of science research vs math research. Epistemic value counts for many things, but one thing it can't do is negate the significance of pure math turning into applied research on account of pure science doing the same.
by undersuit | 2026-01-18 16:52:47+00:00
Our Congress and Supreme Court are beholden to him. State and Individual resistance will be treated as rebellion. The legal pathways have us waiting until elections. The line of succession is GOP 40 levels deeps.

If we successfully revolt the US doesn't survive in any form to stabilize the world built around us and there is no guarantee that the ruling party isn't MAGA-like.

The rubicon was crossed. This is the new normal.
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-18 16:53:00+00:00
The apps by Rogue Amoeba on Mac are a great example of the trial model on Mac: https://www.rogueamoeba.com

I'm not affiliated with them, but I am a customer. They put a lot of effort into finding the right balance of what to unlock upfront in the trial. And their license/unlock process is pretty seamless.

I don't dispute the power of a free trial, but it can be a fair bit of work to get the details right.
by ComputerGuru | 2026-01-18 16:53:08+00:00
You’ll get a lot of responses but for me (excuse the nostalgia), icon design peaked with famfamfam’s (aka Mark James’s) Silk iconset from ~2005. It was a shame they were never available at higher resolutions (or as SVG), though I’m betting AI (either as Adobe Illustrator or Artificial Intelligence) can probably rectify that these days (and generate subpar additional icons to expand the set).

View: https://peacocksoftware.com/silk

Download: https://github.com/markjames/famfamfam-silk-icons/tree/maste...
by al_borland | 2026-01-18 16:53:42+00:00
That’s true, that’s why my mentioned the possibility of luck. But also the willingness to downsize as a means to pull money out of the home, as that real estate appreciation won’t put food on the table. HELOCs and reverse mortgages, as means to get money out, both seem predatory. Those are non-starters for me.

My dad talked about potentially downsizing to a condo about 5 years ago, but hasn’t done it and I don’t think he ever will. There is too much identity and emotion tied to owning a nice home for him.
by jmspring | 2026-01-18 16:54:22+00:00
I'm split three ways on this:
- he is a Russian asset
- he has serious dementia and the power brokers around him are doing what they can
- or, similar to 2 minus the dementia, he's just trying to grift and enrich himself and friends

Waiting on my passport for an EU country (already have citizenship) to figure out options.