MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noodlesUK | 2026-01-14 20:36:24+00:00
It really is pretty crazy that some of the more esoteric forms of citizenship have never been rolled into "British Citizen". Almost all BOTCs were given the opportunity to become British Citizens, but not all, and they kept the original status around. BNOs are similarly a somewhat silly situation especially now that it's possible to move to the UK on the special BNO visa (which gives them different/better family reunion rights than normal British citizens). British Subjects essentially don't exist in practice, but they also haven't just rolled that into British Citizen status either (British Subject is the residual status of certain Irish born people who chose to retain the status - they have the right to live in the UK on the basis of their Irish nationality, not on their British nationality which is insane). There's just a perpetual allergy to just rationalising the whole setup.

It would be perfectly politically acceptable to just do away with the statuses that have fewer than say 5000 people and grant them all full-fat citizenship. Generally people who live in the UK are shocked when they find out that holding a British passport does not entitle you to the right to live in the UK.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-14 20:36:27+00:00
Internet is a global service. If a european connects to my server in the US where was the service sold? American companies can easily argue the sale was made at the server in the US. European countries would of course disagree, but that doesnt actually mean anything because the company doesnt have any assets in the europe and then it's just a political battle of american government vs european governments.
by jberto | 2026-01-14 20:36:44+00:00
Adobe | Senior Software Engineer (Behance – Graph & Recommendations) | $173,500 – $331,050 base (US) | Full-time | New York, NY (onsite) / Remote-friendly (US)

Behance is Adobe’s network for creatives. We’re hiring a senior backend/graph engineer to own and evolve recommended content, creator discovery, and the social networking graph across Behance and other flagship Adobe products. You will:

- Design, build, and operate the Neo4j-based graph behind personalization, discovery, and monetization.

- Lead new recommendation surfaces (For You, Boost/Pro, hiring/search) end-to-end with product and design partners.

- Mentor engineers, drive architecture reviews, and dig into hard production problems where graph + recommendations really matter.

Email me at jbertouch@adobe.com with “HN – Behance” in the subject, or apply here: https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job...
Tell HN: Properly using dishwasher reduced friction with my wife
by xylo | 2026-01-14 20:36:44+00:00
We started loading dishes directly into the dishwasher throughout the day. Morning to night. No sink pile.

At night, we run the dishwasher.
In the morning, we completely unload it.
Empty dishwasher = ready to be used again.

That’s it.

No piles. No guessing whose turn it is. No dishwasher-as-storage. And surprisingly… way fewer fights.

Note before following this system we were washing by hand or bulk load and unload from dishwasher.
Show HN: VoiceMeetAI – a Chrome extension for real-time interview Q&A
by MrGrife | 2026-01-14 20:36:45+00:00
Hi HN, I built a Chrome extension that helps during live interviews.

Flow is simple: press Record, capture the interviewer’s question, it gets transcribed, and you get a structured answer in real time.

I recently added a screenshot feature because many interview prompts are visual (coding tasks, system design prompts, error output on screen). You can take a screenshot and the AI generates a response based on what’s displayed.
by overfeed | 2026-01-14 20:36:53+00:00
Tech guy reinvents half-assed taxes. More at 11.

Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"

Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
by sleepybrett | 2026-01-14 20:36:56+00:00
Here is what I will say. Drinking certainly is not a healthy choice. However hanging out with your peers for a few hours a night in public certainly is.

Unfortunately I haven't found any place that cracks that problem in america, especially into the later hours. There isn't really a place for people to hang out and socialize without it being a boozy bar. As someone who doesn't really enjoy drinking I don't even really want to go to boardgame/chess/trivia nights at bars because I feel like I'm freeloading. ( I imagine any given bar patron is having 1-3 drinks per hour and potentially ordering some food if that is an option. I might order some food and have a soda...)

I assume part of the problem being that alcohol has the helpful side effect of greasing the wheels socially. Coffee houses that are open late are generally library like affairs, a lot of people sitting around on laptops or with books, any attempt to start a more social night is, in my experience, refused because of this.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-14 20:37:05+00:00
Not even. When I lived in the boonies trash service was ~$75 a quarter, the local hardware store would deliver pallets of mulch for free, and furniture stores offered free delivery above certain purchase amounts. My buddy's dad would haul your boat between the marina and your house for a flat fee. Hell, I was able to cram a full PA with floor monitors and a few guitars into my Corolla for weekend band gigs.

I started looking into getting a trailer or hitch hauler but it didn't seem to make much sense. I could usually pay somebody on-demand to move stuff around and it always worked out to be cheaper than owning and maintaining a truck. I presently work from home and don't even own a car anymore; the math is quite similar with rideshare and motorcycle maintenance coming in significantly cheaper.
Ask HN: Make cemeteries in cities less offensive by using virtual headstones?
by amichail | 2026-01-14 20:37:08+00:00
Imagine a park where people are still buried, but there are no visible headstones. Instead, relatives and visitors use an app that reveals virtual memorials only when they are nearby. Photos, messages, or small digital tributes could appear while the park itself remains calm, open, and unmarked for everyone else.

This approach would:

* Keep urban green spaces welcoming to the public without confronting them with death.

* Give families a private, interactive way to remember loved ones.

* Allow the space to serve multiple purposes, with quiet reflection for some and recreation for others, without disrespecting the graves.

* Introduce a gentle way for people, especially children, to grow up around remembrance without it feeling overwhelming or morbid.

It is a way to honor the dead while respecting the living’s comfort, turning remembrance into something optional and personal rather than constantly in your face.

What do you think of this idea?
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-14 20:37:21+00:00
We don't talk about it much in these AI topics, but there's definitely the elephant in the room of the whole "low trust society" aspects that make a lot of actions automatically scrutinous from corporations, especially American.

But I've seen the discussion here on that's and we're pretty far away from being able to have a good discussion on that. Let along bridging the two topics together.
by frizlab | 2026-01-14 20:37:31+00:00
Tangentially related, I did a project (forked, but fully rewrote) to be able to avoid the Package.swift file for single file projects like these. [1]

The general idea is a bit like uv if I have understood uv correctly. Basically you do your imports normally and add a comment next to them that tells where the imports should be found. Then instead of running your project through swift directly you run it through swift-sh (or `swift sh`, swift will find the `swift-sh` binary automatically, just like git does for plugins). swift-sh will download and compile the dependencies, then add the proper options to swift so it will know where to find them.

It is even possible to add a regular shebang to swift-sh at the beginning of the file, chmod +x it, and just run it like a regular script!

Or use swift-sh to compile it.

(And installing swift-sh itself is as easy as `brew install xcode-actions/tap/swift-sh`.)

[1] https://github.com/xcode-actions/swift-sh
by epistasis | 2026-01-14 20:37:32+00:00
The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth.

The US was the envy of Europe with the IRA, which started to establish a huge manufacturing base for solar, batteries, etc., that would power cheap energy for the rest of the century for the US. The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment. And it worked! We were building so many factories, mostly in highly Republican rural areas, because that's where there's a lot of people looking for manufacturing jobs. But the factories that were built, that raised wages for entire communities, they couldn't even say that it was for renewable energy, that it was a benefit of the IRA, because the propaganda is so thick that it would poison the jobs. And now, all that's going away. All the lead. All so that we can steal nasty heavy sour crude from a South American country that US oil producers don't even want.

With the Greenland invasion insanity, Europe is finally getting a small taste of what it's like to be a normal person living in the US the past decade. Fantasy, vibes, and really bad values have taken over the semblance of sanity.

The US is missing out on the biggest technological transition of the century, far bigger than AI, because the masses have been negatively polarized against cheaper energy bills through misinformation.
by eli | 2026-01-14 20:37:33+00:00
All due respect, I do not think the substack of one of the world's leading proponents of the theory that screen time is harmful is a good source for evidence that runs contrary to that narrative.

Here's Nature reviewing his book:

> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers

> These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
by ngruhn | 2026-01-14 20:37:41+00:00
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?

Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
by sumtechguy | 2026-01-14 20:37:42+00:00
Also 'Verizon' is not really one company. It is 2. Telco and wireless. Each of those is a mashup of dozens of other phone companies VZ gobbled up over the years. With tech stacks going back decades. At one point while I worked there about 10 years ago they were running the 56k dialup for AOL. They also run a decent amount of stores. They are not going to automate a retail store in the same way you would amazon. You have to have people standing there. Then there is the "i need to talk to someone about why my phone keeps doing weird things" helpdesks/servicedesks. Then the line workers like you point out. Plus the backend people who might be able to work from home. But only if they are not in a secure area working (they have lots of that). That 15k of people was probably the result of several big projects that were scaling up but didnt work out. They have all sorts of projects to try to 'monetize the last mile they own'. Almost all fail.
by Calli0pe | 2026-01-14 20:37:48+00:00
This is great!

In my team we've used the open source https://craig.chat/ and hooked it up to a Whisper API which lets us (1) control security of the recordings / transcripts; and (2) is ultra cheap if you sequence the transcription as bulk rather than real time.

Once we have the transcript there is then a pipeline which uses [insert your LLM of choice] and chains together prompts which (1) isolates only work-talk and then (2) produces various summaries for knowledge management / issue tracking.
by turtletontine | 2026-01-14 20:37:53+00:00
Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.

No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
by browningstreet | 2026-01-14 20:38:01+00:00
I hope and believe that a screen map can't ever compete with the size of printed maps and the big boards they have on runs.

There's also something functionally superior to having someone who created an aesthetic and standard across ski maps.. someday they'll evolve and we'll have something different, but being able to show up to a new ski mountain and immediately understand the map: it's excellent UX.
by Privavault | 2026-01-14 20:38:05+00:00
Really like the Nostr approach here. The trustless calendar coordination problem is thornier than most people realize – you need to handle timezone conversions, availability windows, and preference weighting without leaking private schedule data to a central server.

One question: how are you handling the case where someone's availability changes after they've shared slots? With end-to-end encryption, you can't really do server-side invalidation. Are you relying on clients to broadcast updates, or is there a different pattern you're using?

I've been working on encrypted document workflows and ran into similar state synchronization challenges when you can't trust the intermediary.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-14 20:38:21+00:00
Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
by mkw5053 | 2026-01-14 20:39:15+00:00
It feels like Woit is just being a hater at this point. In a meritocracy, talent and funding gravitate toward the most promising options. If string theory took up a large proportion of people and resources, it’s because it solved technical problems no other framework could. Even if it hasn't yielded a Theory of Everything, the fact that its toolkit is now solving problems in other fields suggests the program has led to some success. Now that the field is in a lull, we're seeing a natural institutional rebalancing. Talent is simply self-allocating toward more fertile ground, which is exactly how a healthy scientific ecosystem should function.
by Propelloni | 2026-01-14 20:39:22+00:00
> the first is to end the historically unprecedented era of free and anonymous political speech by ordinary people. The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people. Young people will only hear the perspectives taught in government school and on corporate media. No choosing a different perspective early in life.

Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.
by danielfoster | 2026-01-14 20:39:29+00:00
Again, with all due respect, I’m not seeing how my comment is pushing a “life choice” on anyone, and the movement to restrict alcohol consumption equally qualifies as pushing a life choice on someone.

Commercial pubs have existed for hundreds of year. But drinking doesn’t have to be commercial. In Berlin where I live there’s a non-profit hacker space that has a bar with at-cost drinks. It’s also perfectly legal to buy a beer and sit in the park. And of course, nothing is better than having friends over for a wine tasting.
by Privavault | 2026-01-14 20:39:50+00:00
Nice work on the zero-knowledge implementation. A few questions from someone working on encrypted document storage:

1. How are you handling key derivation? I see Argon2 mentioned - curious about your iteration counts and memory parameters for the tradeoff between security and UX.

2. For the encrypted link approach, are you storing any metadata server-side (file sizes, timestamps, IP addresses)? Even seemingly innocuous metadata can be surprisingly revealing.

3. What's your threat model around browser-based crypto? We've been wrestling with questions like service worker persistence, CSP headers, and whether users should trust browser storage for keys at all.

The time-limited secret sharing is a great feature. I've found that immigration lawyers and journalists are particularly interested in this kind of temporary, verifiable sharing - curious if you've had similar feedback.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-14 20:40:26+00:00
It depends on what you're writing and what the scope is. Here's a good quote about this from Steve Yegge, from his time working at Geoworks (company that did an entire desktop OS written entirely in 8086 assembly as a competitor to Windows for low-end PCs). https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s...

> I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible.

> I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could!

> The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?

> This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.

> Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!

> Small systems are not only easier to optimize, they're possible to optimize. And I mean globally optimize.
by bahmboo | 2026-01-14 20:40:47+00:00
> Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.

By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?

I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.

Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...

The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-14 20:40:58+00:00
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.

Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
by another_twist | 2026-01-14 20:41:01+00:00
Disagree here. APIs are meant for using and not learning. But the context matters here. For some paid system, there better be an API thats easy to use or I am throwing AI at the problem or hoping someone else will do it. If its something worth learning - say Guava data structures or RocksDb core - yup I'll invest the time to learn. That learning transfers over. But trying to learn some shitty AWS api and its nuances, no thanks. Some payment system that a handful of people use - no thanks again.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-14 20:41:48+00:00
I'm also a recent Course 6 grad ('24), and I want you to know you aren't the only one feeling this way and going through the same process. I have fortunately been lucky with the hiring process but have seen the real brutality of it through my friends. You aren't a failure and a job/money isn't what defines one.

I know you are just venting, but please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to chat, share what I'm seeing, or ping a few friends I know who might be looking for engineers.