MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevinsync | 2026-01-05 17:18:19+00:00
CSS can be difficult (not hard, "difficult" like how we would describe a persnickety, sometimes erratic person in our life) but I get the feeling that when haters rant about how bad or illogical it is, they never even bothered to grasp the first principal that CSS isn't much more than an articulation of the visual characteristics of a nested structure of boxes. That's it.

You have to be able to visualize, from outside-in, the Matryoshka doll of naked structural elements that make up the component, page section, or entire page you're styling, ensure (or hope and pray) they have sane identifiers (id, class, attributes, etc), then start to write out properties like you're writing a recipe.

This was the whole point of CSS Zen Garden [0] -- offer a static, common structure and challenge people to reskin the same thing 1000 different ways.

Now, I do recognize that I'm coming off a little dismissive of the complexity of CSS, and that's not my intent.. I'm one of those people who is a good graphic designer, good developer, and often conceive, design, implement and deliver projects end to end, so when I'm in Photoshop I'm also mentally laying out how these designs will be structured in HTML to then be able to be implemented.

Naming conventions between markup and styling are also important to be able to translate from bitmap to browser without losing context, and I know we're "post-Sass" by a lot of opinions, but I still find writing nested SCSS far more manageable and readable than plain CSS.

Break everything up into discrete components and files, name them well, use box-sizing: content-box to make sure your borders and padding get included in dimensional calculations, imagine in your mind the physical structure/skeleton of the markup, then fill out each part, piece by piece. Browser dev tools to inspect and modify styles in realtime is critical to playing around until you get what you want.

That said, IMO the only way to really get comfortable with all of that is to do actual projects, not just tutorials. There are 1001 ways to achieve most things in CSS, and the sheer scope of the spec is impossible to grasp without constantly looking up what property does what, but it really does just boil down to taming all the boxes on the page one by one.

[0] https://csszengarden.com
by bentcorner | 2026-01-05 17:18:38+00:00
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements.

Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.

I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
by jmiskovic | 2026-01-05 17:18:49+00:00
Do an experiment. Take any single photograph and try to recreate any aspect of it with the AI. For example, try to match overall vibe of the color palette _exactly_ as it is on your photo. Or try to match the exact camera angle. Or exact composition. How many slot spins did it take? How many would it take to match multiple aspects of a single image?

Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.

The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
by kridsdale1 | 2026-01-05 17:18:56+00:00
This is even an understatement.

It’s not a stretch to say that Tim Cook created the whole Shenzhen microelectronics industry. The thousands of specialist component vendors and large integrators that assemble products trace to his instigation with Compaq and then Apple. The iPod, Macs, iPhone, copied the Swiss Watch model of vast redundant networks of component competetors working as an ecosystem to drive down costs.

This created the skill and machinery base that made it possible for other western design companies (such as Android vendors that were not Samsung or Japanese) to make clones of the iPhone quickly and easily. (Let’s be real, every smartphone is an iPhone 1 clone)

China owes a lot to this work.
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 17:19:04+00:00
Yawn. My concern goes far beyond monetary cost, given that political districts count illegal immigrants for purposes of representation (census) and that birthright citizenship exists.

By encouraging illegal immigration ("sanctuary cities"), you can "buy" depressed wages for the portion of society in need of the most help, House seats, electoral votes, and voters at the expense of the nation's citizenry at large.
by snyy | 2026-01-05 17:19:33+00:00
We're the maintainers of Chonkie, a chunking library for RAG pipelines.

Recently, we've been using Chonkie to build deep research agents that watch topics for new developments and automatically update their reports. This requires chunking a large amount of data constantly.

While building this, we noticed Chonkie felt slow. We started wondering: what's the theoretical limit here? How fast can text chunking actually get if we throw out all the abstractions and go straight to the metal?

This post is about that rabbit hole and how it led us to build memchunk - the fastest chunking library, capable of chunking text at 1TB/s.

Blog: https://minha.sh/posts/so,-you-want-to-chunk-really-fast

GitHub: https://github.com/chonkie-inc/memchunk

Happy to answer any questions!
by gmiller123456 | 2026-01-05 17:19:37+00:00
No, we don't learn CSS because it sucks. I have given up on the idea that I will ever be able to remember all of the rules and exceptions.

Just one example most people already know. If I set a height or width on an inline element, it's ignored. So, obviously there is a limitation in the renderer that can't do it. But wait, make it inline-block and suddenly it works! So why the f*k didn't it just honor the width and height to begin with? It's quite literally a rule for the sake of having a rule.

I don't doubt there is some deep dark reason for why it is the way it is, like optimizations, or backwards compatability, but it doesn't matter to the end user. It's an implementation detail they shouldn't have to bother with.
by tech_ken | 2026-01-05 17:19:49+00:00
You'll spend way more tax money to haul them across the border than you would to just print them a permit to live and work in the community they've been contributing to for years. Every study ever conducted on the issue has concluded that undocumented immigrants contribute far more to the economy than they consume in public welfare dollars. You've let the actual tax dollar parasites pawn the blame on a scapegoat because you're addicted to being angry.
by codyb | 2026-01-05 17:20:21+00:00
I always take January off from a variety of things...

This year I added in my phone which I keep across the room all day and haven't been taking when I leave the house.

I'd already gotten rid of social media, and blocked most news on my phone, and youtube... and have almost all notifications silent

And yet it's still amazing at just how much calmer the world feels with out the phone anywhere near me lol.
by joelthelion | 2026-01-05 17:20:43+00:00
I've been using vim for 20 years. It's gotten me through all the evolutions of programming, from ctags, to language servers, to AI with copilot.

There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-05 17:21:03+00:00
> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined

There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.

This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.

IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.

(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1pfl6os/zi...
by afavour | 2026-01-05 17:21:04+00:00
A payout in the million doesn't seem in disagreement with the OPs assertion that the payouts make economic sense for these companies.

I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old working in a poultry processing plant:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children...

These companies know what they're doing.
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 17:21:11+00:00
> This isn't true, it's a pillar of the USA to harbor refugees and welcome immigrants. It's our entire history. It's our entire identity.

All of these dreamy tales are from before the New Deal for a reason.

> I dont think so. There's a lot of people in this country, far more citizens than illegal immigrants.

The word "proportionately" means something: if you believe that the same percentage of illegal immigrants pay taxes as legal citizens, you are definitively wrong. Legal immigrants probably pay taxes at a higher rate (by systemic design), but there's simply no way this is true for border hoppers.

> capital punishment for every crime if you dont have a degree? what are you arguing?

Deportation is not capital punishment!
by xoa | 2026-01-05 17:21:18+00:00
>They (and other elements of our healthcare industry) already make a lot more than that on treating the side effects of widespread obesity.

This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.
by rwmj | 2026-01-05 17:21:51+00:00
I wonder if Amazon did that deliberately.

Back in the day (about 2002) I was working at an education software company which was trying to get itself acquired by Microsoft. MSFT came in and told us our software didn't conform to all these "standards" in the educational software space. Standards which, coincidentally, Microsoft themselves had written. These pseudo-standards did absolutely nothing to help our customers, and were pure bureaucracy and very very complicated to implement.

I'd recently read Charles Ferguson's book about how his company was acquired by MSFT, and recognized this part of their standard operating procedure, along with extreme and invasive due diligence where they spend a lot of time working out if you're stupid/pliable enough to jump through these hoops while buying themselves time to work out if they can clone your product. I tried to warn management (yes, really - even bought them copies of the book) but naturally no one would listen, and reading a book was too much like hard work. At some point MSFT simply ceased returning management's calls, and rolled out a similar product a while later.

The company imploded not long after, not for this reason in particular, but it was part of a general pattern of incompetence and mismanagement.
by texasbigdata | 2026-01-05 17:21:53+00:00
The clinical American definition is 14 servings per week for men and 7 for women.

Personally, I was what you call a dipsomaniac. Colloquially that is called a binge drinker. I drank 4 to 9 days at a time from morning to night (and night time) without a break. Luckily I only drank like this 7 times in 4 years but I almost died in my last binge.

We see alcoholics of all kind in AA: frequent and a lot, infrequent and a lot, and frequent and little. The frequent and little are the hardest to crack because they have the hardest time with step 1. Now step one is actually comprised of two components: realizing you have a problem (easy for me) and also admitting you were not in control of your own life anymore (hard for me). Its only through doing the 12 step work really arduously, going to meetings and having a great sponsor that I was able to change enough to where drinking no longer ran my life.
by WackyFighter | 2026-01-05 17:21:53+00:00
> Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.

No. That isn't my logic at all.

> Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.

That isn't what is happening. What people are doing is taking people from different online streaming shows, making new content based on jokes made on those show and turning them into music videos, which are usually a cover of a well known song.

People have been doing this online without AI for quite a while. Usually this was with various music software. All AI does, it make this process easier.
Show HN: Forwarding cloud credentials to remote machines in SSH-agent style
by yuedongze | 2026-01-05 17:21:55+00:00
I’m in the process of making my remote development environments truly secret-less. It means nothing sensitive is on the remote machine when I’m not using them. Access to all things becomes ephemeral only during an active session.

First step is applying the plain old ssh-agent forwarding for my GitHub credentials and anything that relies on remotely signing using a private key.

However, this is not the last step, as a lot of credentials are not backed by private keys, but rather OAuth credentials that doesn’t fit in the agent forwarding framework SSH provides.

Therefore, I coded up a dead simple tool that just reads those cloud credentials using existing tooling, and forwards them over a SSH session so they can be fetched on-demand. I’m glad that cloud tools all support this external credential route so it’s really effortless to set this all up.

AWS works as of now, GCP should also be relatively straightforward once I figure out account impersonation from an exported credentials.

Thought it would be interesting to share!
by lukan | 2026-01-05 17:21:58+00:00
The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.

Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)

An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)
by amluto | 2026-01-05 17:22:05+00:00
> How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?

I’d like to see this worked out for real.

On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.

On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in the last 50 years.

So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid compared to lower-productivity workers.
by rayiner | 2026-01-05 17:22:31+00:00
Will whoever replaces Trump do things any differently in this area? Harvard-Harris polled Americans last month and found strong majority support for the U.S. arresting Maduro: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP... (page 53). 83% of Democrats said Maduro should be removed, and 73% of Democrats who thought Maduro should be removed though the U.S. should do it. So 60% net. America seems to be in a Manifest Destiny mood, not just Trump.

Greenland has tremendous mineral resources and Denmark doesn’t have the capacity to extract them. If the U.S. decides that it needs to keep China from stepping in and developing Greenland’s resources, then it will do what it needs to do. Trump will just be boisterously upfront about it.
by taeric | 2026-01-05 17:22:31+00:00
I had to google this. If you count non-flashing bugs as fireflies, sure. Nothing like the typical experience in my backyard when I lived in Alabama. They are very different bugs.

Still, neat, to be sure. Indeed, my point in the original post was that I find the wildlife out here in the PNW to be very fun and I like all of the wildlife we have. Banana slugs, as a fun example.
by pembrook | 2026-01-05 17:22:44+00:00
> 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work.

Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum.

As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel.

If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.
by polvi | 2026-01-05 17:22:54+00:00
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association | Engineering Leader

Location: Frederick, MD or REMOTE (US), ET timezone

AOPA is a nonprofit that supports and advocates for general aviation pilots through safety programs, training, advocacy, and digital platforms used by hundreds of thousands of members.

I am part of AOPA’s leadership and am actively preparing to fill this role, with a formal job req planned for early 2026. I will personally respond to candidates.

You would lead a team of 6–10 engineers and various consultants working on AOPA’s core digital platforms.

Stack: TypeScript, Swift, iOS, Astro, Cloudflare Workers, .NET, Azure

Looking for: former senior engineer turned engineering leader, strong people leadership with solid technical judgment, clear communicator aligned with business outcomes.

If you love general aviation and supporting the GA community, this role is a strong fit. Perks include free flight training.

Email alex.polvi@aopa.org if interested. I am a former YC founder (Cloudkick W09, CoreOS S13), active pilot.
by iainmerrick | 2026-01-05 17:23:17+00:00
That's interesting, I hadn't heard that point of view before.

Empirical validiton did not really take off until the late 00s.

https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html

Hmmm, I don't quite see where that supports "Apple didn't do empirical validation"? Is it just that it doesn't mention empirical validation at all, instead focusing on designer-imposed UI consistency?

ISTR hearing a lot about how the Mac team did user research back in the 1980s, though I don't have a citation handy. Specific aspects like the one-button mouse and the menu bar at the top of the screen were derived by watching users try out different variations.

I take that to be "empirical validation", but maybe you have a different / stricter meaning in mind?

Admittedly the Apple designers tried to extract general principles from the user studies (like "UI elements should look and behave consistently across different contexts") and then imposed those as top-down design rules. But it's hard to see how you could realistically test those principles. What's the optimal level of consistency vs inconsistency across an entire OS? And is anyone actually testing that sort of thing today?

I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their principles and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.

I personally think Apple did follow their own guidelines pretty closely in the 90s, but in the OS X era they've been gradually eroded. iOS 7 in particular was probably a big inflexion point -- I think that's when many formerly-crucial principles like borders around buttons were dropped.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2026-01-05 17:23:17+00:00
Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.

"Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.

Person A put in a request to person B, pers. A receives a mockup or a draft from pers. B, pers. A and B might engage in convos to refine the work, pers. B delivers the final product to pers. A. AI "artists" are person A in that scenario.

Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic. The creative inputs in AI art is more directly the text in the prompt rather than the output. Editing the output afterwards is creative input afterwards, though. However, sign a work you commissioned from someone else as your own and people will probably roll their eyes, which I think describes most reactions to AI videos.
by burningChrome | 2026-01-05 17:24:36+00:00
>> as the fundamental concepts have changed a few times.

This is what got me. I exited development about eight years ago. Came back and was like, "WTF is going on with CSS now?" Completely lost and took me a few years working as an accessibility engineer to find my way back.

Its very hard having people telling you constantly how to "properly" use CSS, then learning all those techniques and approaches. Using those for a few years, then suddenly you have to completely unlearn it, then relearn it "the right way" again a few years later.

Completely maddening where front-end development has gone and continues to go.