MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-20 13:08:41+00:00
Go comment on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.

Surely you will find the brilliant political discourse you seek there.

You’re right - there simply isn’t enough armchair layman political talk online. We need more venues to discuss politics, people, come on! If you’re not talking politics, are you even paying attention??

Are you so consumed by this that you also need to talk politics in your gym locker room? At your kids’ school play?
by e12e | 2026-01-20 13:09:06+00:00
True enough. On that note, I had a look at the language reference - there's arrays - but also this:

(char_at s index) # Get ASCII value at index (0-based)
(string_from_char code) # Create string from ASCII value

So, you can pluck a character... From an UTF-8 string? What if the rendering used multibyte characters?
by encyclopedism | 2026-01-20 13:09:23+00:00
Fundamentally these shortcomings cannot be addressed.

They can and are improved (papered over) over time. For example by improving and tweaking the training data. Adding in new data sets is the usual fix. A prime example 'count the number of R's in Strawberry' caused quite a debacle at a time where LLM's were meant to be intelligent. Because they aren't they can trip up over simple problems like this. Continue to use an army of people to train them and these edge cases may become smaller over time. Fundamentally the LLM tech hasn't changed.

I am not saying that LLM's aren't amazing, they absolutely are. But WHAT they are is an understood thing so lets not confuse ourselves.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-20 13:09:50+00:00
Maybe those people just wont get as good of grades, and that's acceptable. It is strange that the educational system determined it wasn't acceptable. If I go to a university and try to walk onto the NCAA Division 1 Basketball team, its fine for them to tell me that I am too short, too slow, too weak, can't shoot, or my performance anxiety means I mess up every game and I am off the team. If I try and go for Art but my art is bad I am rejected. If I try and go for music but my performance anxiety messes up my performances, then I am rejected.

Why aught there be an exception for academics? Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.
Show HN: repere – Local-first SQL data explorer using DuckDB WASM
by mattismegevand | 2026-01-20 13:09:51+00:00
Repere lets you drop CSV/JSON/Parquet/XLSX files into your browser and immediately query them with full DuckDB SQL. Nothing gets uploaded, everything runs locally via DuckDB WASM. Unlike Excel and Google Sheet it can handles millions of rows easily.

Features:
- Filter, sort, join, pivot across multiple files
Every transformation becomes a node in a visual pipeline (DAG)
- Full undo/redo, real-time recomputation
- Export results or replay pipelines on new files with the same schema
- Works offline
- Sparklines, themes and charts
Show HN: Modo – Describe hardware, get a buildable prototype
by Beefin | 2026-01-20 13:09:53+00:00
I’ve built hardware projects for years, and the gap between “I want X” and “parts ordered, files ready to print” always took weeks.

Modo compresses that. Describe what you want (e.g. “a portable CO2 monitor with a display and buzzer”) and it generates:

- A bill of materials with real components (MPNs, not hallucinated parts)

- A printable enclosure generated from actual part dimensions

- Wiring diagrams, firmware boilerplate, and assembly instructions

- Design validation (power budget, pin conflicts, mechanical fit)

Everything streams in real time as each phase completes.

The key idea is constraining the system to a curated component database so it can’t invent parts, then using datasheet dimensions to drive enclosure geometry.

You can try it without signing up: https://modo.is

Curious what people here would try building, and where this breaks down.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-20 13:10:04+00:00
Much of that was always in dispute and while the “freedom of states” stuff has intellectual appeal and often prevails over shorter periods, the trendline has always been towards one nation.

In the post constitution era, 17 amendments were passed by the house, including an amendment that would make states supreme by law. 6 years after the constitution was ratified, Marbury v. Madison established judicial supremacy for interpreting law, 11 years after that, the court ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland that states are subordinate to federal power.

Political compromise got it done, but centralized power is necessary for survival and prosperity. Congress and the courts realized this immediately. Most of the realpolitik of “states rights” is really about wielding tyrannical power locally.
by mickael-kerjean | 2026-01-20 13:10:27+00:00
I use it extensively in my OSS work (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) mostly around:

1. creating plugins that get executed in the browser to render files like Parquet, PSD, TIFF, SQLite, EPS, ZIP, TGZ, GIS related files and many more, where C libraries are almost always the reference implementations. There are almost a hundred supported file formats, most of which are supported through WASM

2. creating plugins that get executed in the server to generate your own endpoint or middleware while being sure you can't start exfiltrating data (which can be other people's files, and other sensitive stuff)

3. in the workflow engine to enable people to run their own sandboxed scripts without giving those a blank check to go crazy
by DonaldFisk | 2026-01-20 13:10:51+00:00
again,

capital(germany, berlin).
capital(france, paris).

is clearer.

Someone once told me you need humongous vectors to encode nuance, but people are good at things computers are bad at, and vice-versa. I don't want nuance from computers any more than I want instant, precise floating point calculations from people.
by Beefin | 2026-01-20 13:10:52+00:00
A couple implementation details for anyone curious: CAD previews and exploded views are rendered client-side using Replicad (WASM) + WebGL, so there’s no server-side geometry rendering.

I also recorded a short walkthrough showing a build from prompt → parts → enclosure → validation:

https://ggcupqakrqvppukwqqkv.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/p...

Some example builds:

- https://modo.is/b/macro-keypad

- https://modo.is/b/usb-volume-knob

- https://modo.is/b/on-air-light
by oliwarner | 2026-01-20 13:11:19+00:00
They could but they'd say that's not what the people of Greenland want. They don't want to be an owned territory when they're used to their autonomy. They don't want their land exploited for minerals and oil by the highest bidder. They don't want to be made a military target between the US and Russia.

I'm not saying there isn't a deal to be made but it's got to be with the people of Greenland.
by yoz-y | 2026-01-20 13:11:41+00:00
Don’t know about the parent, but in my experience it was sort of an “extreme introspection”, any thought you have is immediately scrutinized “why did I think about this, is this the right thing to say in this context, what are the implications”. Then of course the thought about thought is also introspected, leading into a spiral of thought that occasionally gets “popped” as a stack. The memory works in a very weird manner where you almost immediately forget a lot of context and then get reminded of it in one go when you “pop” a level.

It is quite hard to imagine, I think, and even myself I can only explain the idea of it but not how it actually felt.

I wouldn’t say this was anything spiritual, rather than the thinking stopped working as a stream of thought but more like a graph traversal.
by holbrad | 2026-01-20 13:12:04+00:00
I'm just genuinely really confused by this take.

It's a 100x easier to build products today than it was in the 1990's.
(I don't think that's an exaggeration in the slightest)

It would be basically be impossible to build anything like Maps, Excaidraw, Chat GPT etc.

Arguably people are reaching for the tools without those interactive requirements ?
by gauravguitara | 2026-01-20 13:12:38+00:00
We built an implementation using OpenBotAuth for this exact use case. We posted it on HN a while back. take a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110459

To be SCA compliant, you need to show the intent of the user in-session. We take the approach of signing the cart using a user owned agent, which is compliant with AP2/ACP and now UCP specs.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-20 13:15:12+00:00
Unrelated to the OP, but I ran across this IG repost where a social media post generated a visit from local police. Not because they’re threatening violence, but because they’re accusing a FL mayor of, I guess, being a dick.

I was struck by this policing of free speech.

So, not really a comment on this thread, but just timely and tangential.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTssjncDjbZ/
by larodi | 2026-01-20 13:16:27+00:00
we have some markup for architectures like - d2lang, sequencediagram.org's, bpmn.io xmls (which are OMG XMLs), so question is - can we master these, and not invent new stuf for a while?

p.s. a combination of the above fares very well during my agentic coding adventures.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-20 13:16:29+00:00
It's great that this is a case for you.

I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
by jeffrallen | 2026-01-20 13:16:36+00:00
Nope. I didn't feel like spending the time to read the code, but I did want an LLM to pull out specific pieces for me and compare them to other published info. This is a good way to use LLMs: ask them to organize data for you to consider yourself and come to your own conclusion.

In this case, the info I looked at changed my opinion (downwards) on how cynical this release really was.
by youngtaff | 2026-01-20 13:16:38+00:00
Interesting read on the impact that tariffs are having on US furniture prices and US makers

> US government consumer prices data shows furniture prices, which had been falling for 18 months before Trump came to office, up 4 per cent in many categories in the year to December 2025

https://archive.is/20260120061035/https://www.ft.com/content...
by y-curious | 2026-01-20 13:16:40+00:00
There’s an old adage that is very important to logical people (as software engineers are, for example).

“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battles.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-20 13:17:38+00:00
Nuclear is one of the cleanest sources of power, if not the cleanest period.

It requires least mining and materials over lifecycle vs any alternative per KWh. It requires least land. It's final waste volume is similar to renewables while both sectors do create toxic waste that must be stored forever (used fuel in case of nuclear and forever toxic chemicals like arsenic/lead in case of renewables)

Saying nuclear is dirty as hell means you either are ill informed or spreading lies on purpose

To give an example with Germany, probably being outpaced only by Austria in hate for nuclear power. Germans are concerned about small amounts of nuclear waste that will be stored in deep geo stable facilities (just like onkalo, soon fosmark, terradura and alikes) but germans are perfectly fine having the biggest near surface facility for storing forever toxic and dangerous chemicals on the planet, Herfa Neurode.

Not just that, many are unaware that having a repository longterm is still a must even if they don't have nuclear power at all, due to medical and research sectors
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-20 13:17:41+00:00
> The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.

Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solutions the first time you hear a story, but it's much harder when you hear the exact same story, with exact same underlying emotion, dozen+ times in the span of a few months. The other side is clearly not really processing their emotions - so if not that, and not practical advice, then what's the point of even talking about it?

It's really draining and in some cases I'm not in a position to disengage either.
by therealpygon | 2026-01-20 13:18:09+00:00
You’re discussing licenses, their concern is about calling a thing that cannot function without the associated proprietary back-end “open source” for marketing.

If you want to make the argument only about the license, then you should make sure you are consistent by referencing “open source license” every single time instead. Their point is that companies use releases like this to claim they “open source” simply by releasing some useless code under an open source license.

I think if you simply replace “license” with the word “software” in those same OSI tenants, you’ll suddenly find that this “open source” project doesn’t come close to being the “open source” most people believe in. They don’t just expect the definition to stop with the license if you’re going to call something “open source” instead of “has an open source license”. OSI only provides a definition of “Open Source” with respect to licenses.

So while you may consider only a singular definition by an American organization, founded by corporations, designed to focus on clarifying and promoting the licensing aspect of open source, as the end-all be-all all-encompassing definition for the words “open source”, others argue that there are more things in software than just a license and they hope the media won’t be fooled into reporting about X offering “open source” access.
by larodi | 2026-01-20 13:18:48+00:00
two points -

1) it becomes increasingly more dangerous to dl stuff from the internet and just run it, even its opensource, given normally people don't read all of it. for weird repos I'd recomment to do automated analysis with opus 4.5 or the gpt 5.2 indeed.

2) if we assume adversaries are using LLMs to churn exploits 24/7, which we should absolutely do, perhaps the time where we turn the internet off whenever is not needed, is not far.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-20 13:19:05+00:00
I guess for simple objects, 3D printing is already sufficiently useful.

I'd still like it to be much cheaper and simpler though. My own tinker
days are over; I kind of want to depend on what is cheap and reliable;
or at the least very reliable. I honestly can not warrant time investment
when things don't work or break down in yet-another-component of my already
way too many components heavy living conditions here. 3D printing should
be so simple that one never has to think about it. Or print a surrogate
3D printer, to have as a backup device. But what about the materials? I
guess plastics dominate.
by cartucho1 | 2026-01-20 13:19:12+00:00
For academic conferences in particular (I'm in philosophy, things may vary in other fields), I would add some (perhaps more cynical) advice.

For instance, it is true that the main goal of a presentation at a conference is to test and improve ideas before sending them to publication, by showing them to a specialized audience. But, congresses are also (very importantly) about networking and PR, and making yourself known in the field. A conference brings together specialists in a subject, who will be future editors, reviewers, and professional contacts in general.

I tell my students things like:

- Whenever you can, ask (pertinent) questions. This is important beyond helping the speaker, it is also a way of advancing your own career.

- Think about possible questions while listening to the presentation instead of waiting until the talk is over to start thinking about what to ask.

- If possible, raise your hand as soon as the q&a session begins. At some conference sessions there is little time for questions, and some members of the audience who want to may not get to ask.

- Even when that is not the case, you can help avoid a moment of silence right after the talk has ended, which (as a speaker) can be uncomfortable. The worst outcome for a speaker is for nobody to engage.

- It is useful for the speaker to hear many different questions and points of view. Do not give parallel presentations in the questions. Questions should be concise and to the point. Formulating your question should not take more than a minute.
by nobleach | 2026-01-20 13:20:01+00:00
They hype-train on all of this stuff is unreal. React+NextJS+Tailwind+ShadCN is just a mess. It's complexity piled on deeper complexity - for little gain! But suggest any of that in many circles and you'll get the standard, "skill issu bro" comebacks. Say what you want about Remix/ReactRouter 7 (there are plenty of issues to talk about there) but at least those guys _tried_ to stay closer to existing web standards. I could go on and on about the disaster of NextJS caching. I could point out RSCs being one way to solve a problem that could already be solved by loaders in other frameworks....

Tailwind was my moment of saying, "Nope, I'm gonna sit this one out". I have a few trusted friends that assure me I'm missing out. I've told them to come back to me after they've done their first major refactor. If they tell me it was a pleasant experience, I'll have another look.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-20 13:20:01+00:00
> It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!

In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good.

In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-20 13:20:11+00:00
This is a big topic in disability rights activism; there are a lot of people who can do some work some of the time, with a certain level of accommodation, and would benefit from so doing.

But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
by bArray | 2026-01-20 13:21:08+00:00
> This approach still works, why do something else?

One issue is that the time provided to mark each piece of work continues to decrease. Sometimes you are only getting 15 minutes for 20 pages, and management believe that you can mark back-to-back from 9-5 with a half hour lunch. The only thing keeping people sane is the students that fail to submit, or submit something obviously sub-par. So where possible, even for designing exams, you try to limit text altogether. Multiple choice, drawing lines, a basic diagram, a calculation, etc.

Some students have terrible handwriting. I wouldn't be against the use of a dumb terminal in an exam room/hall. Maybe in the background it could be syncing the text and backing it up.

> Unless you're specifically testing a student's ability to Google, they don't need access to it.

I've been the person testing students, and I don't always remember everything. Sometimes it is good enough for the students to demonstrate that they understand the topic enough to know where to find the correct information based on a good intuition.
by virtujoel | 2026-01-20 13:21:27+00:00
This library doesn't appear to be accessible. Just looking at two random components: The Drawer (https://daisyui.com/components/drawer/) doesn't trap focus inside itself (letting you tab to the page behind the drawer while it's open). The Accordion (https://daisyui.com/components/accordion/) first example is using radio buttons as a hack to avoid Javascript, which would be very confusing to screen reader users (announcing the radio buttons to them).

This is why there's so much complexity in libraries like Radix - accessibility in the real world usually requires a lot of Javascript.
by al_borland | 2026-01-20 13:21:41+00:00
> Keep it Simple and Stupid

I’ve never seen the KISS principle stated like this. I’ve see “Keep it simple stupid”, and people who try to make it less insulting with, “keep it stupid simple”.

However that “and” changes things a lot. “Keep it simple” and “keep it stupid”. Do we want to “keep it stupid”?

Semantics aside, I do like seeing minimal launchers. I’m not an Android user, but an happy to know projects like this exist.
by lime66 | 2026-01-20 13:21:55+00:00
Coni is an open-source, local-first AI workmate for fast, trustworthy delivery — with verifiable outputs on disk.

If you’ve tried Claude Cowork (or tools like OpenWork), Coni is in the same “AI workmate” category, but optimized for trustworthy delivery:

- Permissioned execution (allow once / always / deny)

- Observable runs (see what happened, when, and why)

- Reviewable artifacts as real files you can diff and verify

Feedback welcome:

1) What workflow should we nail first (bugfix/refactor/PR review/report/etc.)?

2) What would make you trust an agent tool enough to use it daily?
by Tade0 | 2026-01-20 13:22:07+00:00
> There is so much ecosystem power in having high-quality, blessed implementations of things.

Indeed. I work mainly in Angular because while it's widely regarded as terrible and slow to adapt, it's predictable in this regard.

Also now with typed forms, signals and standalone components it's not half bad. I prefer Svelte, but when I need Boring Technology™, I have Angular.

90%+ of all web apps are just lists of stuff with some search/filtering anyway, where you can look up the details of a list entry and of course CRUD it via a form. No reason to overthink it.
by Thorrez | 2026-01-20 13:22:12+00:00
>EV's produce 38% less tire & brake dust than ICE vehicles.

>non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.

https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219820
by opminion | 2026-01-20 13:22:23+00:00
I'm probably your wife.

It could be related to the personality trait of how much of our world model is "in our mind" vs "out there":

If I speak with your while working on the world model in my mind, it looks like I just "want to be heard". But your feedback is actually very important, it's just that it should only feed my mental world model.

I am then surprised that my math coprocessor reaches for the GPIO.