MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-03 20:54:43+00:00
> "Formal verification" literally means that the implementation is proven to satisfy the formal specification, so by definition there won't be any gaps.

To quote Donald Knuth:

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Sure but proof itself might have gaps itself. A famous proved implementation of mergesort had a subtle flaw when array size approached usize. They proved it would sort, they didn't prove it won't experience UB. Or maybe you prove it has no UB if there are no hardware errors (there are hardware errors), etc.

The unbeatable quantum cryptography was beat in one instance because the attacker abused the properties of detectors to get the signal without alerting either sides of the conversation.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/01/quantum_crypto_hack/

> Or maybe you mean "specification" to be some kind of informal description?

I read somewhere that the secret to hacker mindset is that they ignore what the model is, but look at what is actually there. If they behaved as spec writers expected, they would have never been able to break in.

Reminds me of a place I worked. The doors were this heavy mass of wood and metal that would unlock with a loud thud (from several huge rods holding it secure). This was done to formally pass some ISO declaration for document security. The thing is any sane robber would just easily bypass the door by breaking the plaster walls on either side.

At least we can stop writing code made of plaster for start.
by Telemakhos | 2025-05-03 20:55:07+00:00
Or, better, "Server Side Includes" (SSI): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

SSI is still a thing: I use it on my personal website. It isn't really part of the HTML, though: it's a server-dependent extension to HTML. It's supported by Apache and nginx, but not by every server, so you have to have control over the server stack, not just access to the documents.
by ww520 | 2025-05-03 20:55:20+00:00
For my most recent project, it was Spring Boot with Java at the backend and Solid.js at the frontend, with REST api in the middle. It has work very well. Solid has a very solid signal based React-style stack. Spring Boot is mature and stable that covers pretty much everything you need at the backend. The only wrinkle is we need to connect to a number of different database systems and the default DataSource can’t do the job. We ended up writing our own multi tenant datasource. We code gen most of the backend code for the hundreds of db tables. The path from DB to the frontend is automated. The whole project took 4.5 months with 1.5 junior developers and .5 architect and senior dev. One advantage is the business side has been nailed solid, with firm spec and feature sets.
by terribleperson | 2025-05-03 20:55:42+00:00
Part of the justification for tarriffs is that America is somehow being 'taken advantage' of by the rest of the world and the tarriffs are the rest of the world finally paying their fair share. The reality is that (until now) America has had a uniquely privileged position in the world economy that got America, in general, very beneficial trade deals.

He's commenting on the attitude driving the tariffs.
by philjohnson | 2025-05-03 20:55:45+00:00
There's no VC backing behind this, it's just me. And it's actually a win-win to have all the PDF editing happen in the browser. It both offloads resource usage to a local computer and makes it private. All I have to do is render the page and that's it. Given that, it costs me almost nothing to keep it running, so there's no reason to take it down.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2025-05-03 20:55:49+00:00
oh no. Pooh, you ate all the propaganda instead of the honey.

> The systemic media control in authoritarian regimes is often inspired by China’s propaganda model. China (178th) remains the world’s largest jail for journalists and reentered the bottom trio of the Index, coming just ahead of North Korea (179th). -- https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...
by EA-3167 | 2025-05-03 20:56:29+00:00
Weaponized hypocrisy in politics is hardly new, this is just another example of it. The right wing has always benefited from a certain degree of shamelessness, as Trump epitomizes. By the same token the left benefits from an unearned certainty that good intentions are bound to lead to good results.

And the rest of us are just clutching our heads and moaning in pain at this point.
by ipdashc | 2025-05-03 20:56:41+00:00
Hm, you're right, I'd agree that access can be more controlled and filtered today than before. But how many websites/parents/devices actually enforce it?

And also, what I was trying to get at is that the total amount of (addictive) content on the Internet and the amount of time people, including kids, spend on the Internet has exploded. Sure, millennials could do whatever online, but there just wasn't that much to do and you would still spend the bulk of your day offline. Now we can (and do) spend basically all day on the Internet. Seeing something bad once is whatever, but seeing it constantly... IDK
by throw0101b | 2025-05-03 20:56:45+00:00
Contra:

> A common response I’ve seen to this is Warren Buffett repeatedly expressing concern about the trade deficit. Buffett’s main concern has always been that we’re sending pieces of paper abroad that give foreigners claims on US assets. And this is true, but I’d argue it’s been a massive net positive on the whole. First, as a percentage of total ownership, foreign ownership of US securities is actually flat since 2008. So despite 20 years of a persistent current account deficit there hasn’t been a huge change in foreign ownership as a percentage of the total. But the current account deficit also reflects the way many firms in the USA outsource their comparative advantage. And that accrues to US firms (and households) as increases in net worth. This is a big reason why corporate profit margins have expanded so much in the last 30 years. Global competition has made US firms more efficient and that’s accrued to Americans as a huge gain in net worth. So this isn’t a situation where we’re just sending Dollars abroad for no good reason. We’re doing it in large part because that is investment in our businesses that has added value to those very firms and their owners. Could that all reverse? For sure. And weirdly, the thing that would cause it to reverse is ultra protectionist measures thereby reducing demand for US Dollar assets and reducing investment in US firms.

* https://disciplinefunds.com/2025/04/24/three-things-you-gues...
by SEJeff | 2025-05-03 20:57:10+00:00
FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s radar. It’s so much more complex than legacy analog stuff.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spe...
by cpursley | 2025-05-03 20:59:10+00:00
Languages with stronger types like typescript (unfortunately) perform much better than dynamic languages like Ruby, Elixir or even plain JS in an AI editor world. Because the editors are type smart and you can quickly pop the type error into the AI chat and it will attempt to correct it. The feedback cycle is just insane. I really hate to say it, but Typescript has won.
by madethemcry | 2025-05-03 20:59:30+00:00
I truly wonder what people do when they want JS full stack both frontend an backend especially with a DB involved. ORM situation looks pretty fragmented or you write pure sql. And then you still have to decide on the backend. Going raw with express? Next.js, well known, but with a questionable agenda (, Remix, Astro, TanStack, and so on. It's a mess, because you always have to recalibrate and re-evaluate what to use.

I often see myself going back to Ruby on Rails for my private stuff. It's always a pleasure. On the other side, there are so few rails people available (compared to js) that it's not viable for any professional project. It would be irresponsible to choose that stack over js and often java for the backend.

Anyone have similar feelings?
Show HN: Modern News Brief built for brains in a hurry (now with social sharing)
by cfata | 2025-05-03 20:59:48+00:00
What it is: A daily news dashboard that delivers the most important stories across markets, geopolitics, tech, health, and science in a structured, skimmable format – designed to be read in under 10 minutes.

What makes it different: - Information architecture first: You don't scroll, you skim across structured sections - Source citations for all key points (no blind trust) - Theme-aware UI with smooth light/dark mode transitions - Fully responsive, works as a PWA for offline reading - One-click X/Twitter sharing of key insights in card layout sections

The sharing feature preserves headers and formatting while creating clean Twitter Cards, making it easy to share important insights with your network.
by nestorD | 2025-05-03 21:00:07+00:00
Nice! I will give it a try later today.

For people who want a non web-based alternative, these days I use Xournal++ (https://xournalpp.github.io/) to do that type of edition locally.

What I am still looking for is a good way to clean scanned PDFs: split double pages, clean up text and make sure it is in lack and white, clean deformations and margin, cut and maybe rotate pages, compress the end result.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-03 21:00:30+00:00
Hmm.

Almost makes sense to write emails with deliberate newlines--not counting the widths, but advancing the line as it were (ourselves), like how we'd do with a typewriter. Because (in Outlook) I didn't like seeing the message stretch out past where my eyes could scroll too far right; instead, to Enter when each line sort of looked alright, some length among their sentence homes.
by ivape | 2025-05-03 21:00:35+00:00
"Right-sizing" is probably the most diplomatic take on all tech churn. It's the right way to look at it. It's not that we're done with it once and for all, it's just it's not the end all be all that conferences/blogs/influencers make things out to be. It's more of an indictment of the zealotry behind tech evangelism.
by miragecraft | 2025-05-03 21:00:39+00:00
I too lamented the loss of HTML imports and ended up coming up with my own JavaScript library for it.

https://miragecraft.com/blog/replacing-html-imports

At the end of the day it’s not something trivial to implement at the HTML spec/parser level.

For relative links, how should the page doing the import handle them?

Do nothing and let it break, convert to absolute links, or remap it as a new relative link?

Should the include be done synchronously or asynchronously?

The big benefit of traditional server side includes is that its synchronous, thus simplifying logic for in-page JavaScript, but all browsers are trying to eliminate synchronous calls for speed, it’s hard to see them agreeing to add a new synchronous bottleneck.

Should it be CORS restricted? If it is then it blocks offline use (file:// protocol) which really kills its utility.

There are a lot of hurdles to it and it’s hard to get people to agree on the exact implementation, it might be best to leave it to JavaScript libraries.
by thunky | 2025-05-03 21:00:45+00:00
> What makes Rails stand out is the focus on convention-over-configuration as a guiding principle in the ecosystem which results in a lot less code

Convention over configuration and less code is fine, but unfortunately Rails is not a great example of it IMO. The "rails" are not strong enough; it's just too loosey goosey and it doesn't give you much confidence that you're doing it "the right way". The docs don't help much either, partly because of the history of breaking changes over releases. And the Ruby language also doesn't help because of the prolific globals/overrides and implicitness which makes for "magic".

So you're encouraged/forced to write exhausting tests for the same (normally dumb CRUD) code patterns over and over and over again. Effectively testing the framework moreso than your own "business logic", because most of the time there barely is any extra logic to test.

So I'm also surprised it gained the reputation is has.
by blibble | 2025-05-03 21:01:22+00:00
no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)

and now pork will end up on that list too

> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)
by metalman | 2025-05-03 21:01:41+00:00
ok, I get it, there whole gig is precision engineering and manufacturing of mechanical tools used in high tech plants..,seen there stuff, and wow they just completly engineered a process that eliminates any seperate accounting department, solved, cause if there is one thing mechanical engineers dont ever want to be asked, is to account for what they have done it must be horrible for any competitor loosing out to the company, as there is no one or anything to resent sort of a japenese version of the mondragon
by sepositus | 2025-05-03 21:01:45+00:00
I just had an interesting experience this morning with my oldest child. He wanted to write a letter to the Splatoon development team to show his appreciation for the game. He printed it out and brought it to me with a proud expression on his face. It took about five seconds to catch the AI smell.

We then proceeded to have a conversation about how some people might feel if an appreciation letter was given to them that was clearly written by AI. I had to explain how it feels sort of cold and impersonal which leads to losing the effect he's looking to have.

To be honest, though, it really got me thinking about what the future is going to look like. What do I know? Maybe people will just stop caring about the human touch. It seems like a massive loss to me, but I'm also getting older.

I let him send the letter anyways. Maybe in an ironic twist an AI will respond to it.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-03 21:03:08+00:00
What I think we have here is a problem with definitions and scope.

For example does your definition of problem demand a problem only exists if a human consciously thinks of it?

If no, then almost every single 'problem' that's ever existed was solved by the random walk of genetics. Nature has 'solved' some of the most difficult energy conservation optimizations in living systems with nothing but time and randomness. Think of how many problems had to be solved over time to go from an animal that swims to one that flys?
by nerdjon | 2025-05-03 21:03:37+00:00
That is not a problem with the act of making GMO's in the first place, which again is the point that I am trying to make here.

If the product that had these modifications is perfectly safe without being sprayed with it, the science behind the creation of that GMO is still sound. The problem is what is being done to it after the fact.

Meaning, it being GMO itself is irrelevant and goes back to the business practices. Grouping that into an "Anti GMO" crusade just continues to further an anti-science narrative.
by philjohnson | 2025-05-03 21:03:45+00:00
PDF editor is used as a broadly encompassing term. Yes, other tools can edit existing text, but they upload your PDF to their servers, so it's not private if that's something you care about.

There isn't anything off the shelf that enables editing existing text in the browser, but it's something I'll build from scratch. So you'll be able to edit existing PDF text without compromising privacy.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-03 21:04:31+00:00
You absolutely did. It was common practice to stuff things in cookies or query strings to retain state between trips to the server so that some JS could do its job.

Every form also normally ends up duplicating validation logic both in JS for client-side pre-submit UX and server-side with whatever errors it returns for the JS to then also need to support and show to the user.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-03 21:04:37+00:00
Has about as much value as "X rewritten in Rust". Which is to say, Rust and AI are both impressive technologies (though very different obviously) and marketing people hope to elevate X by mere word association. Unfortunately, this is an effective scam.

I don't have any problem with labeling yourself an AI business if you're actually objectively working to build AI tech. But if you're vibe coding an app with ChatGPT, you're not building AI-powered technology, you're just consuming it. Might as well talk about "Apple-powered X" if your team is using Macbooks. You don't list the rest of your operating expenses as part of your product, doing so with AI makes you look rather foolish.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-03 21:04:38+00:00
It is interesting. It is interesting in several different ways too:

- The timing is interesting as Altman opened US branches of his 'prove humanness' project that hides the biometrics gathering effort - The problem is interesting, because on HN alone, the weight of traffic from various AI bots seems to have become a known ( and reported ) issue - The fact that some still need to be convinced of this need ( it is a real need, but as first point notes, there are clear winners of some of the proposals out there ) resulting in articles like these - Interesting second and third order impact on society mentioned ( and not mentioned ) in the article

Like I said. Interesting.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-05-03 21:06:08+00:00
For splitting double pages, this is the best tool I’ve seen: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0

For the other issues, I haven’t found any single good tool, but I’ve stitched together things like unpaper, ghostscript and deskew ( https://github.com/galfar/deskew ).

Also, if you need OCR, hocr-tools and Google’s Document AI ocr API have worked really well for me (I tried Gemini, but you run into issues with big documents).
by nextos | 2025-05-03 21:06:10+00:00
Rick wrote jfli, a Java foreign language interface for Common Lisp, before working on Clojure. He was a seasoned lisper, and he wanted to do something both modern and practical.

It's very interesting to go through the bookshelf he read during his sabatical. He was inspired by many languages aside from CL, including Mozart/Oz, AspectJ, and Prolog.

The bookshelf list was originally on Amazon, committed by Rich, but now behind a login wall. However, a Goodreads clone is easy to access: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/137472.Rich_Hickey_s_Clo...
by dwheeler | 2025-05-03 21:06:38+00:00
HTML was historically an application of SGML, and SGML could do includes. You could define a new "entity", and if you created a "system" entity, you could refer to it later and have it substituted in.

<!DOCTYPE html example [ <!ENTITY myheader SYSTEM "myheader.html"> ]> .... &myheader;

SGML is complex, so various efforts were made to simplify HTML, and that's one of the capabilities that was dropped along the way.
by dehrmann | 2025-05-03 21:06:53+00:00
My point is that you have to put all of his wisdom and stories in the context of what he's good at and the environment he was in. He tried to apply his value investing playbook to early Google, and it looked like a bad investment. He later realized this (see my link), but that gets talked about less than value investing in its heyday. Aside: for debated reasons, value investing, which used to outperform, has been in a slump for a long time.

It's east to hear his story and think if you do the same thing, you'd be successful. If you did the same thing in 1970, you might be! And some of his wisdom is generally applicable, but reading his story as a guide for investing today isn't the right approach.
by danenania | 2025-05-03 21:07:07+00:00
I've raised a small amount of funding yes. The project wouldn't exist otherwise. I have a family to feed.

But the open source project is free, full-featured, MIT licensed, and will stay that way.

It also has paying customers via cloud-hosting options, and the economics are working out well so far, fwiw. Lots of work to do, but it's on track to be both a sustainable open source project and a sustainable business.

I'm sorry if that still doesn't meet your lofty moral standards—all I can really say is I'm trying my best to get the balance right.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-03 21:07:52+00:00
https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html

> XHTML 2 takes a completely different approach, by taking the premise that all images have a long description and treating the image and the text as equivalents. In XHTML 2 any element may have a @src attribute, which specifies a resource (such as an image) to load instead of the element.
by nerdjon | 2025-05-03 21:07:54+00:00
Then why require GMO labeling on food?

We don't require labeling for basically any other concerns about business practices and yet everyone seems to care about this one. When I buy chicken it doesn't have a sticker on it sayin "this chicken was probably kicked a few times". or slave labor was used on this chocolate. There are other voluntarily done labeling against both of those, but not a requirement to say it.

The problem is, the narrative is grouping them together. The general narrate is "concern over what it going into our bodies" which has nothing to do with business practices.
by 3sbi | 2025-05-03 21:10:07+00:00
I remember reading their blog post about how moving from pages router to app router in Next.js helped their SEO last year. This time they are moving from Next to React+Inertia.js because of growing bills from Vercel even though deploying the same app on your own VPS instead of relying on cloud provider would probably solve the issue. Nonetheless, I still don't understand their yearn for complexity - does book tracking app really need GraphQL, separate frontend framework and complicated build process or all that could have been solved by sticking to deploying monolithic RoR app with HTML templates on VPS from the very start?
by pier25 | 2025-05-03 21:10:40+00:00
I don't know.

Many interactions are simply better delivered from the client. Heck some can only be exclusively delivered from the client (eg: image uploading, drag and drop, etc).

With HTMX, LiveViews, etc there will be challenges integrating server and client code... plus the mess of having multiple strategies handling different parts of the UI.
by AdamJacobMuller | 2025-05-03 21:11:17+00:00
> Tens of thousands protested around her office

Germany has a population of 84 million people. 10,000 should not be able to dictate a policy decision of this magnitude, regardless of how loud they are.

> Nuclear is complicated (and mostly fear driven)

The politics of nuclear are complicated, the science (more engineering) of nuclear are complicated, the imperative is clear and simple. You are correct that it's mostly fear driven, but stoked by "green" advocacy organizations and/or manipulated by people with a stake in the continued use of fossil fuels (and largely the latter funding the former).

True leadership would stand up to both of these pressures, making people understand that the voice of 10,000 (or even 100,000) people can not dictate policy alone and educating people on the reality of nuclear power, while also fixing some of the real issues with nuclear power (an aging power plant fleet and an inability economically build better replacements).

Merkel totally flopped on energy policy.