MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: FormWing – AI Form Filler for Lead Gen and Testing
by acoyfellow | 2025-04-06 13:01:11+00:00
Built this to automate form filling across the web, for two main use cases: 1. Outbound Lead Gen – Skip paid ads and slow SEO. This hits public contact forms directly. Feed it a URL or list of URLs + a short prompt (e.g. “Looking for warehouse partners in TX”), and the system uses AI to analyze the form and submit your message. 2. Form Testing – Devs and marketing teams need to test forms constantly. Manual testing is slow. This autofills forms with realistic, varied data. Good for regression tests and sanity checks.

Stack: • Frontend: SvelteKit • Infra: Cloudflare Workers, Queues, and Workflows • Data: Firebase + Firestore • Runtime: Edge-native, async queue-based processing • Extras: Headless browser automation for screenshotting and fallback parsing

Early access live now. Free 7-day trial (100 form submissions/day, credit card required). Early bird perks for first 5 users.

Looking for feedback from folks doing outreach automation, scraping, testing, etc.

https://formwing.com
by 7952 | 2025-04-06 13:01:19+00:00
Its more complicated isn't it. People can be favourable towards one side in a conflict without fully identifying with their goals. And they can be sympathetic to people without fully supporting the nation or its institutions.

My guess is that the global political elite are a small social circle of wealthy powerful people. And that if an action is socially acceptable within that group then it has little cost in the real world. It is not a conspiracy or anything or an evil plot. It is just how people behave.
by brianolson | 2025-04-06 13:01:58+00:00
I built a 'slice of function pointers' bytecode interpreter in Go in 2019 for the Algorand VM (Blockchain smart contract stuff) and before that the same pattern in C for a toy JVM around 2005.

It's a good pattern!

The Algorand VM was focused on low overhead running thousands of tiny programs per second. Version 1 had no loops and a 1000 instruction limit.

The JVM was focused on low memory, towards possible embedded microcontroller use.

So, 'array of function pointers' is nothing new, but it is a good pattern.
by xrortrad | 2025-04-06 13:02:46+00:00
This is a ridiculous way to view things.

Of course, it is their job to try to upsell you insurance.

In the US though, the insurance is completely reasonable if you want to have no risk. Drop the car off with no risk of a ding or scratch for a few bucks.

Framing it like the mafia loan sharking is completely absurd.
by photonthug | 2025-04-06 13:02:48+00:00
There is of course absolutely zero chance of this happening. But I didn't actually expect that amongst people rather than lobbyists/corporations the very idea would actually be considered controversial, subversive or offensive. I'd have brought popcorn if I expected this incredible display of mental gymnastics. I guess I assumed that even people who are forced into the situation where ads are their bread and butter directly or indirectly still know about the damage and think the whole thing is gross. (I've been there and done that myself..)

Now I'm thinking of the "neighborhood beautification projects" in Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang though where the guys light up the cutting torches to cut down any billboards that get too close to the Grand Canyon. The fear of course is that police might drive by, since if you think about it the activity itself is really reversing vandalism more than anything else. Apparently today you would have to worry about mobs of concerned citizens tearing you to pieces for taking away their right to be advertised to? I'm so amazed by the very idea of this I can't even get that disgusted or angry about it. What else are these people up to, how do they live and what else do they think? Like, if the best food was determined by ad budgets, do they wonder what to have for dinner ever, and what's the most gourmet cuisine in that world? Best candidate for the election is the one with the biggest ad budget? Channel surfing to get away from the annoying so called "content" that prevent you from seeing ads? I feel a bit like I've discovered alien life or something
by halifaxbeard | 2025-04-06 13:02:49+00:00
I think it's disingenuous to suggest they're putting themselves at a disadvantage with an RTX 3090, especially in a comparison to an inferior product that isn't even shipping yet.

RTX 3090: 24GB RAM, 936.2GB/s bandwidth

Tenstorrent p150a: 32GB RAM, 512GB/s bandwidth

an extra 8GB of ram isn't worth nearly halving memory bandwidth.
by libertine | 2025-04-06 13:03:59+00:00
> You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda

Can you quote me on that? Because it's like you didn't even read what I wrote. How can I be more clear than:

> To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.

How is this implying that ALL claims, incompetence, or bias ARE the result of propaganda? And where am I wrong to say that this sort of thing is being amplified by, for example, popular US Podcasts that were, and some for sure still are, being funded by the Russian regime?[0]

This isn't a conspiracy theory by the way: it's well known that there are people being paid to promote propaganda, and there are people - like you said and well - that want to sow distrust for their ends, and also get paid by Russia to do it. There's still an ongoing investigation about the example I gave, but it's probably a mix of both.

But these aren't just the two types of people in the information space, that's just silly. Still, you should pay attention to who has, or gets, a big reach.

> Part of the solution is transparency and full information.

Is it? Because the solution seems to be about having a certain aesthetic, being loud, and disregarding everything else - you just need to make pauses to say "and that's a fact/the truth is/everyone knows this/it's common sense". Just look at the Trump administration, it's working pretty well for them.

[0]https://www.cdmrn.ca/publications/tenet-media-final-incident...
by stefanos82 | 2025-04-06 13:04:14+00:00
It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers.

Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible.

But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time.

Those who know this nightmare, know!
by Philpax | 2025-04-06 13:04:27+00:00
Be serious now. Plenty of useful, privacy-required queries can be run with 24GB of VRAM, especially given the existence of e.g. Gemma 3 27B and the heavy NVIDIA-targeted optimisation work that has occurred.

The Tenstorrent cards exist, but are low in availability and the software is comparatively nonexistent. I'm excited for them too, but at the end of the day, I can buy a used 3090 today and do useful work with it, while the same is not true of TT yet.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-04-06 13:06:03+00:00
Audiophiles are a niche manufactured market, not an elite group of super-hearers. Their existence is more of a result brand identity and bonding over a shared passion for spec purity than the natural result of their innate capabilities.

They love to show off their setups, but how many audiophiles do you know who post their wetware specs (ie- hearing test results)?
by salawat | 2025-04-06 13:06:44+00:00
Economizing is a uniquely human delusion whereby you suddenly think that principles of human centric markets somehow ascend to a primal force of the universe and aren't just a coping mechanism we use to try to peaceably coexist with one another without sinking all our time into killing one another to decrease competition like the rest of the life on the planet.

Nature doesn't do markets. We do. If you apply market thinking to the wrong things, bad things happen. You don't serve the market. The market serves you.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 13:06:58+00:00
Sorry, my mistake: the title is Permanence. Author is Karl Schroeder. If I remember correctly (and clearly my memory isn't to be trusted), Watts says in the afterword of Blindsight that he violently disagrees with Schroeder, or the perspective Schroeder offers, in that book, but I believe he recommends it as a rich exploration of many of the issue Blindsight explores.

Thanks for the write up. I'm completely sold on Sunflower series, and will probably read it next. It sounds very promising -- and probably short enough that I can slip it in between books 1 and 2 of the Culture series.

Thanks also for the encouragement to stick with Banks, too. I'll try. I'm not sure I'll be able to last for six full books though. The storytelling in Consider Phlebas -- which I'd call action-adventure sci-fi maximalism -- isn't working all that well for me. There's so much technobabble. There are so many lasers. So much ink is spilled filling out the world just for the sake of it. It's a massive overload and baroque overdose of sci-fi tropes. So far the most interesting episode has been, I think, the main character's interaction with the shuttle on the island.
by zie | 2025-04-06 13:07:36+00:00
I have seen it. Yes, they technically exist. Nobody buys them though.

They are ridiculously expensive. Their use-cases in modern compute is a rounding error towards zero. We just don't build computers like that anymore, for good reason. Memory and CPU rarely fail, and when they do fail, they fail the entire box and just replace it. In 99.99% of all cases it's cheaper and easier to do it that way.

There are vanishingly small use-cases where it makes sense to do hotplug CPU/Memory. They charge accordingly.

Like I said in my parent comment, virtually nobody needs uptimes measured in literal decades. If you are in the .01%(rounded up) of compute that actually needs that, the chances of needing to do it with x86 is even smaller.

One example are the VISA and Mastercard payment processing platforms. The way they are designed requires 24/7 literal decades of uptime. When they have partial outages, they make international headlines and end up writing letters like this: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com...
by Animats | 2025-04-06 13:07:52+00:00
The classic issue of who made the first tongs could be inserted here, with some hammering.

(It's a classic legend. There is an Islamic legend that Allah gave the first pair of tongs to the first blacksmith because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs. There's a Nordic legend that Thor made the first tongs. In reality, somebody probably used a bent piece of green wood, which didn't last long, but could be easily replaced.)

His piece "Vibe Coding, Final Word"[1] is relevant right now.

[1] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word....
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-06 13:08:42+00:00
I'm basing my VMS process memory layout comment on: Virtual Memory Management in the VAX/VMS Operating System by Henry M. Levy and Peter H. Lipman, Digital Equipment Corporation. It's an old paper, but I believe, still essentially correct.

I looked into Mach circa 1991, when I had a NeXT. The NeXT OS was based on Mach 2.0 as I recall, perhaps current Darwin docs will help there. I don't have any preferred modern references. Googling for "Mach operating system" pulls up quite a few.
by lewisjoe | 2025-04-06 13:09:09+00:00
A lack of universally recognized richtext format is really a problem. Why? practically any rich-text that needs to be rendered across platforms (web and mobile devices) are now being stored as html or markdown or app-dependent json.

HTML was never envisioned as a cross-platform richtext format and markdown lacks almost half of all formatting features. Specialzed json is even more evil because the content becomes unrenderable when the parent app goes out of existence.

op's suggestion (accomodating formattings as unicode bytes) might not be optimal however I'm happy at least somebody thought of this as a problem to solve.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-04-06 13:10:54+00:00
In practical terms there isn't an alternative. Sure there are websites without ads, but they won't tell me about what happens in my community. Sure, I could go to the town hall and watch sessions, but it's not practical.

Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
by sandreas | 2025-04-06 13:11:15+00:00
What I'm missing in modern ebooks (like epub format) is more metadata. Who's talking (character data)? What emotional aspects does the scene have (angry, happy, sad, in a hurry)? Where does the conversation take place (geodata)?

I'd love to see at least:

- character: ID, Name, Gender, Age - mood: ID, Name (Happy, Sad, Angry, ...) - place: ID, Name, Acoustic (Outside, Inside, Cave, ...)

This could be prepared by the author, work as a glossary, enrich the whole ebook experience and also would be a great preparation to teach AI voices how to convert a book into an audiobook.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-06 13:11:30+00:00
Not the OP, but one way to look at it is:

All Advertising is Marketing, but not all Marketing is Advertising.

I think the distinction should be thought of as Marketing (not Advertising) is to inform customers that opt-in to the information. Usually, marketing (excluding the Advertising arm) is for the benefit of a willing participant, where-as Advertising is for the benefit of both the willing participant and also the Advertiser (& advertising media) against an unwitting participant/user.

An example could be a product, company, political candidate's website that has a calendar for upcoming events, information pages about the product, etc. This can include tacky graphics and UI/UX, or even strategic language to stand out and show "personality". What it can not have are advertising boxes for unrelated advertising injections that the user did not go to the website to learn about. That would then be a Marketing site with banned Advertisements. The same for the Marketed product, they can not Advertise on unrelated media; basically inserting itself against the users will (the Advertised product being placed/injected/"forced" upon the person/user).
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-06 13:11:50+00:00
I'm not up-to-date at all, and never was that advanced to be able to judge.

There are so many real experts, and they're getting better all the time, I would like to see what some of them would want that would arouse their attention.

I do get the idea that you are outside the mainstream, but it sounds so realistic. I took action along these lines a little in 1980 for a couple years before that employer bit the dust with the recession that was imposed at the time back then. All the coding was still not really wasted, even though it was way outside my core responsibilities ever since. This was before PC's, I was already maxing out everything on the hardware anyway. But I'll always regret not being able to continue at the time. Running the code did help us earn income, so it was already paying for itself, but the rest of the company was not exactly profitable after such a downturn. By the late '90's I had reached stability with my own company, and started again in Windows 95 but that hard drive crashed, I'll always regret that too :( even though it was much less than two years' work. But I did continue my primary automation project by itself, which performed in excess of design criteria, alone leveraging my small business quite well beyond what artificially enhanced intelligence could ever be expected to add. Even though I've always known how it could add a good bit, without doubt. Never did try real ML again, since then mostly just logic to get more out of the low-hanging automation fruit. But bigger companies, woo hoo they could use a little more intelligence and it could add up to a lot of dollars at that scale, as long as it never fails an intelligence test with flying colors ;)

Maybe a dramatic demo of pattern recognition and interpretation which maximizes the capabilities of limited hardware is within reach, which could spark peoples' imagination about how much more impressive it would be with only "nominal" hardware.

Maximize the effect of intelligent potential by avoiding the complexities of accommodating language or even visual frameworks.

It may be even more difficult to make an engaging demo that way though, perhaps it's too early for much of a video demo until you just can't stop yourself :) A more widely accessible PC demo might be a good milestone, I'm not even qualified to run what you have here. Either way you are allowed to give an impression of what you know it can be like in the future, even if you are not there yet.

I think you are going to be good at that, your vision for the future seems to be on an enlightening path, that much I can determine already without any understanding of your code so far.
by dep_b | 2025-04-06 13:12:22+00:00
God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit.

Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it.

Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in.

I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?
by ben_w | 2025-04-06 13:12:43+00:00
The same fictional universe that gave us Khan, also gave us the characters of Julian Bashir, Una Chin-Riley, and La'an Noonien-Singh all having to deal with a socity that, in universe, had faced this as a history lesson rather than as a fantasy.

Were the Ferengi a warning against American capitalism? The Bajorans a promotion of terrorist tactics to expell imperialist colonisers? The Changelings a warning against… plastic surgery?
by contact9879 | 2025-04-06 13:12:52+00:00
this also somewhat surprised me at first but I think it's obvious in hindsight, though they don't have to be a full-blown web browser (you can go read the epub specs at W3C to see what's supported)

as for (2) I'm not sure why you think it would make it less easier? being html, text reflows automatically based on screen size, font size, line height, etc
by xrortrad | 2025-04-06 13:13:06+00:00
Seems like a feature and not a bug to me. Otherwise, we would still be living in small bands in caves.

All western man's "problems" to me seem to be the want of utopian trade offs that we get all the upside of a trade off without trading anything and then complaining when that doesn't happen in reality.

In reality, what was good enough yesterday, is expected today and not good enough tomorrow. Exactly the chemical reaction that causes progress.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-06 13:13:07+00:00
I don’t have much, except that it seems that the versions used by Safari and iTunes are different and port different amounts of the OS.

The Safari version was considerably more complete and included the entire text rendering system as well as several era-appropriate Aqua UI widgets. It feels very much like a Mac app.

The iTunes version seems much more trimmed down, using Windows text rendering and win32 widgets in place of Cocoa/Aqua in most places. Accordingly, it feels more Windows-like.

It might be interesting to try to build a toy app against the Safari version just for kicks.
by hyperman1 | 2025-04-06 13:13:17+00:00
I actually managed to get Oracle to fix a bug once. This in quite a big organization, with a huge amount of money going to oracle. I could explain them exactly what was wrong, how to fix it, and still they denied the very existence of the bug (and cited the expensive half-working workaround other companies used at the same time). Then they ignored what I told them and fixed it in a way that did not fix it. Then they fixed it, and did not allow us to use the fix until it was officialized in a real service pack.

The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the organization were completely awed because I was the first person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of oracle's service.

If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
by badsectoracula | 2025-04-06 13:13:54+00:00
Yeah (i guess you mean epub), though in practice readers support only a tiny subset and epubs avoid using anything fancier than basic XHTML. Epubs that try to use fancy stuff (like most CSS outside of setting fonts - that readers can ignore either because they do not support it, or because the user wants to use another font) tend to not display correctly.
by mentalgear | 2025-04-06 13:13:55+00:00
My understanding of the MCP problem space:

- internal: possibly rogue MCPs: as MCPs are opaque to the user and devs don't take the time to look at the source-code , and even then would need to pinpoint each inspected version.

- external: LLM agent poisoning

> There’s no mechanism to say: “this tool hasn’t been tampered with.” And users don’t see the full tool instructions that the agent sees.
by ookdatnog | 2025-04-06 13:14:01+00:00
> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.

While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.

If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.

In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.

Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.

But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?

But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.

So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.