MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-05 13:48:01+00:00
Individual style choices (e.g. whether to use a shadow or not) are always going to be opinionated. Even if one choice is objectively better, it's not going to be so 100% of the time, in every context, to all users.

Consistency is always better. App A and App B should use the same save icon, without any caveats, regardless of what it actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
by bambax | 2026-01-05 13:48:09+00:00
> But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.

No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-05 13:48:27+00:00
It happens here I’m sure but, and maybe this I naive of me, I do not think we are seeing the organized, funded efforts like they see on Reddit. It’s usually someone self promoting here in my experience. I’m sure it’s happened but idk, it just doesn’t seem like seem as coordinated and large scale. If it is well done y’all, you’re hiding well!

My experience with HN is people generally prefer to dog pile onto whatever was mentioned, say it is the worst option, then bicker with each other about all the solutions being proposed. I say bicker, but those threads can be great sources of info.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-05 13:48:32+00:00
> than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow

Rare if ever happens. Maybe 5 times in your life time. I will pay that cost any day. I have made friends with spiders. Flies spread diseases, spiders eat them. Spiders seldom bite humans and when they do, it’s nowhere near as bad as getting scratched by a cat.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-05 13:48:52+00:00
> It has its own timescale, but that still traces back to NIST.

GPS gets its time from the US Naval Observatory:

> Former USNO director Gernot M. R. Winkler initiated the "Master clock" service that the USNO still operates,[29][30] and which provides precise time to the GPS satellite constellation run by the United States Space Force. The alternate Master Clock time service continues to operate at Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Observator...

The USNO does not seem to sync with NIST:

> As a matter of policy, the U.S. Naval Observatory timescale, UTC(USNO), is kept within a close but unspecified tolerance of the international atomic timescale published by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and Measures [BIPM]) in Sevres, France. The world's timing centers, including USNO, submit their clock measurements to BIPM, which then uses them to compute a free-running (unsteered) mean timescale (Echelle Atomique Libre [EAL]). BIPM then applies frequency corrections ("steers") to EAL, based on measurements from primary frequency standards and intended to keep the International System's basic unit of time, the second, constant. The result of these corrections is another timescale, TAI (Temps Atomique International or International Atomic Time). The addition of leap seconds to TAI produces UTC. The world's timing centers have agreed to keep their real-time timescales closely synchronized ("coordinated") with UTC. Hence, all these atomic timescales are called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), of which USNO's version is UTC(USNO).

* https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...

The two organizations do seem to keep an eye on each other:

> The United States Naval Observatory (USNO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) make regular comparisons of their respective time scales. These comparisons are made using GPS common-view measurements from up to approximately 10 GPS satellites. The table below lists recent differences between the two time scales.

* https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-05 13:49:18+00:00
> While the data itself is encrypted, notice how the values written by the first and third operation are the same.

The fact that Intel and AMD both went with ECB leaves me with mild disbelief. I realize wrangling IVs in that scenario is difficult but that's hardly an excuse to release a product that they knew full well was fundamentally broken. The insecurity of ECB for this sort of task has been common knowledge for at least 2 decades.
by guerrilla | 2026-01-05 13:49:39+00:00
I'm not even going to finish the article. I never want to see these kinds of icons again. You win. Good news is, I'm not seeing a lot of these in GNOME and Gtk+ apps, so I'm already okay. There's only a couple in Firefox. Actually, good luck even locating the menus in GNOME. They keep moving and becoming fewer and fewer with every generation.
by foltik | 2026-01-05 13:50:03+00:00
The average person can get used to arbitrarily terrible UX. See 87% of the workforce that uses sluggish corporate-bloatware-filled windows laptops every day. It’s only those who have experienced and gotten used to something drastically better that will be sensitive to all the shortcomings.

Apple software used to be that elevated experience for the average person.

Given the lack of basic consistency though, it’s evident that there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore. Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever.

I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same way?
by iamcalledrob | 2026-01-05 13:50:23+00:00
You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen.

But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos.

The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-05 13:50:28+00:00
I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible to work our way out again.

Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
by postalcoder | 2026-01-05 13:51:19+00:00
Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but perceptible delay. The devs have acknowledged it and said that it cannot be fixed.

Other petpeeves include the smallest window thumbnails are enormous, enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me to switch to the wrong window, and it often has stale thumbnails.
by guerrilla | 2026-01-05 13:51:28+00:00
> * Let’s assume the US is going to stabilise Venezuela quickly enough, that the Venezuelan oil will soon flow around, but only to “selected” countries (basically, …. Anyone but China)

This is a bad assumption. Trump has already promised China their oil on the first day of this nonsense. You don't need to steelman anything. Incompetence does exist in the real world. There's no more reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
by weinzierl | 2026-01-05 13:52:22+00:00
In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.

While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:

"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."

I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
by grumbel | 2026-01-05 13:52:38+00:00
> The question and buttons appear in that dialog.

The error/retry dialog is for the failure of moving an individual file, not for a failure of the move operation as a whole. Those individual error dialogs provide no means to deal with cascading errors. All you can do is "Skip All", but that means you get no further information on errors anymore.

The error reporting should be part of the Moving dialog itself and provide a list of everything that failed in the move, along with potential ways to resolve it. More detailed reporting than "Could not read" would also be welcome (io, permission, ...).
by le-mark | 2026-01-05 13:52:44+00:00
I once had an apartment in an old building. The building had high ceilings and equally high wood frame windows. The windows were drafty and had visible gaps to the outside. As winter approached, and nights grew colder I set out to cover the windows with plastic film (common here for this purpose).

While preparing one window in the bedroom I discovered a silken patch like a miniature of the one depicted in this article. I used my cleaning rag to wipe it away thinking any inhabitants had long since moved on. To my surprise a wisp tiny spiders scurried away from my swipe, disappearing into crevices, the base board, and carpet. Startled and not seeing any to kill, I bid them farewell, in my mind assuring myself they had moved on.

That same day or the next a cold wave came through and I lied awake in bed listening to the plastic I had applied rustle from the wind. The window gaps were bigger than I’d thought. Falling into a fitful sleep under not quite adequate blankets, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my lower leg! I jumped out of bed, turned a light, and found upon examination three red punctures on my left calf. Recalling the spiders from the day before I shook out my blankets and bed sheets. I checked below the bed. Nothing, I never found the culprits.

After sleeping that night on the couch, I awoke late the next. I felt feverish and disoriented. The wounds on my calf had become inflamed. The cold in the apartment added to my discomfort.

The next few days were a blur. I missed work and the few social engagements I had planned. Eventually the wounds began to heal but I was still bone cold and the light from windows hurt my eyes. Winter has set in and the plastic I’d applied to the windows had detached from the wind allowing icy drafts into the apartment. I diligently applied another layer of plastic on the windows, this time using packing tape to secure the corners!

It was a harsh winter and I repeated this process several times until the windows were opaque and along with the shades allowing very little light through.

One day as I sat in the dark slowly eating my meal there was a knock on the door. It was my close friend from work wondering what had happened to me. I must have been a sight judging from his startled appearance.

Summer came and I emerged occasionally to acquire food and other necessities only to scurry back home when the outside became too overwhelming. I eventually found remote work, and here I am today in my cold dark apartment with high ceilings and drafty windows.

Note if you made it to the end, thanks for indulging me. This is based on a real apartment, windows and spiders!
by gessha | 2026-01-05 13:53:19+00:00
> software update atoning for their UI sins

But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?

Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-05 13:53:22+00:00
Thanks!

The law of large numbers suggests that all of the hegemons:

bellatores military ML
laboratores economic IEF
oratores political DI

should optimise their practices and procedures for the population mean[0]: although one of them will obviously have slightly better people at any given point, which one is subject to time and chance, and the odds that that advantage would be larger get exponentially smaller.

(then again, the boundaries are more porous[1] than in the feudal days; I know of at least two MGIMO alums moonlighting in the economic realm)

[0] we've already covered 孫中山's triad, right?

[1] or are they? I think a typical "retirement plan" for an aging but rich bellator was to endow[2] a monastery with a comfortable amount of land, and then take orders there, because who would bump off an orator? In the modern world, I see RAK (https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/12/29/world/29FACEBOOK-...) has grown a long beard since I last saw him; is he in the process of transitioning from bellator to orator? Maybe not: he seems to be feeling acutely unwell.

[2] compare El Cid's provision for his wife and daughters; or even Goldmund's father "gifting" Blaze the pony
by mystraline | 2026-01-05 13:54:11+00:00
And also IPFS rats our to the whole world all your network interfaces, MAC addresses, and internal network configs.

And even after multiple requests of supporting a Tor mode, have routinely ignored that with "but its too hard!"

And, I quit running IPFS back in the .31 version after adding some chat logs to my local machine's share, and found a google crawler within 1 hour and fully indexed them.

No thanks.
by monerozcash | 2026-01-05 13:54:19+00:00
> physical address

Not unique to a person

> email address, phone number

Also often not unique to a person, although email addresses probably tend to have much longer lifespans as identifiers than phone numbers.

If the idea is to have a true opt-out system, it's really really difficult to implement given how these systems work.

If you look at the data provided by services like accurint, you'll frequently see the same SSNs used for decades by multiple different individuals, often with IDs from different states with the same name and DoB despite obviously being different people. With how the system works in the US, it can often be impossible for anyone to determine which physical person the SSN was actually originally assigned to.

Same obviously applies to other identifiers you suggested, but even the seemingly good ones are not very good at uniquely identifying people.
by perivamsi | 2026-01-05 13:55:09+00:00
Metabase | https://metabase.com/ | REMOTE | Full-time | Product, Design and Engineering

Metabase is an open source (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) business intelligence software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).

Here's a dashboard about us: https://stats.metabase.com/public/dashboard/92d6b7ea-7526-48...

People rather like the product (https://metabase.com/love). We're a remote team full of people who care about user experience, making complicated things as simple as possible and building things. We have a deeply pragmatic engineering culture and value building things that people actually use vs whatever closes a deal or makes for a good press release.

Tech stack: Clojure on the backend, Typescript and React on the frontend

We've posted in several "Who is hiring" threads in the past with good success, we hired quite a few folks from these posts!

Frontend Engineer role:https://jobs.lever.co/metabase/8f02d3fa-edf4-4433-a6d1-4f9e5...

Backend Engineer role: https://jobs.lever.co/metabase/85f454d8-e795-4978-8a2b-4b8bf...

Engineering Manager role: https://jobs.lever.co/metabase/5bf3233d-a162-47b2-8d85-d3650...

Product Designer role: https://jobs.lever.co/metabase/b6ab96a1-5d3f-4e5b-a611-5a79d...

Product Manager role: https://jobs.lever.co/metabase/98aa4a3d-58e4-4c69-895f-7cf50...
by goku12 | 2026-01-05 13:55:32+00:00
As long as there is centralization, there is always an avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries. Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds. But at some point, they won't have to worry about people who can actually do that.
by driscoll42 | 2026-01-05 13:55:35+00:00
When Roomba thought it was about to be acquired by Amazon, it did lay off 10% of its staff - https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-staff.... and after the deal was canceled, it was disclosed that they had reduced R&D and focused on margin improvements, and there was some brain drain as people left Roomba as it was in a 18 month limbo - https://www.verdict.co.uk/irobot-to-cut-over-a-third-of-its-.... And of course all this self inflicted pain only hurt them doubly as the Amazon deal fell through. If they had acted as if they weren't going to be acquired they might be fine, but they tried to maximize the shareholder revenue.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-05 13:56:01+00:00
Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple has, sort of, addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps.

Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app.

Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!
by sanskritical | 2026-01-05 13:56:24+00:00
You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content.

Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".
by philipwhiuk | 2026-01-05 13:56:25+00:00
> Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to channel coding agents

All channelling is broken when the model is updated. Being knowledgeable about the foibles of a particular model release is a waste of time.

> how to test code to our satisfaction

Sure testing has value.

> how to know if what AI did was any good

This is what code review is for.

> Testing without manual review, because manual review is just vibes

Calling manual review vibes is utterly ridiculous. It's not vibes to point out an O(n!) structure. It's not vibes to point out missing cases.

If your code reviews are 'vibes', you're bad at code review

> If we treat AI-generated code like human code that requires a line-by-line peer review, we are just walking the motorcycle.

To fix the analogy you're not reviewing the motorcycle, you're reviewing the motorcycle's behaviour during the lap.
by wcarss | 2026-01-05 13:56:55+00:00
All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.
by mrngm | 2026-01-05 13:57:30+00:00
You could have a _somewhat_ static blog and incorporate something like Webmentions[0] for comments or replies. For example, Molly White's microblog[1] shows the following text below the post:

Have you responded to this post on your own site? Send a webmention[0]! Note: Webmentions are moderated for anti-spam purposes, so they will not appear immediately.

I find this method to be a sweet spot between generating content on your own pace, while allowing other people to "post" to your website, but not relying on a third-party service like Disqus.

[0] https://indieweb.org/Webmention

[1] https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/202511101848
by xvector | 2026-01-05 13:57:34+00:00
Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business Insider, etc.

Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?

They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?
by bonesss | 2026-01-05 13:58:02+00:00
Re: Domain Specific Exceptions

Code snippets in IDEs like Visual Studio and refactoring tools like Resharper offer shortcut accessible auto generation of those kinds of entities with deterministic results. They also have routines to extract and move entities to their own files afterwards in a keyboard based workflow.

They are far less work than a prompt, faster, can be shared in the project or team, and are guarantee-able to confirm to coding standards, logging specifics and desired inheritance chain for your root domain exception. It works on-prem, offline, for zero tokens.
Show HN: OSS Sustain Guard – sustainability signals for OSS dependencies
by onukura | 2026-01-05 13:58:07+00:00
Hi HN, I made OSS Sustain Guard.

After every high-profile OSS incident, I wonder about the packages I rely on right now. I can skim issues/PRs and activity on GitHub, but that doesn’t scale when you have tens or hundreds of dependencies. I built this to surface sustainability signals (maintainer redundancy, activity trends, funding links, etc.) and create awareness. It’s meant to start a respectful conversation, not to judge projects. These are signals, not truth; everything is inferred from public data (internal mirrors/private work won’t show up).

Quick start:
pip install oss-sustain-guard
export GITHUB_TOKEN=...
os4g check

It uses GitHub GraphQL with local caching (no telemetry; token not uploaded/stored), and supports multiple ecosystems (Python/JS/Rust/Go/Java/etc.).

Repo: https://github.com/onukura/oss-sustain-guard

I’d love feedback on metric choices/thresholds and wording that stays respectful. If you have examples where these signals break down, please share.