MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stef25 | 2025-05-13 19:59:05+00:00
We have universal ID cards here in Belgium. They have a chip and along with a special card reader usb device you can log in to govt websites related to taxes, pension and basically everything else.

If you have a smartphone you can use an app to scan a QR and log in that way. It's super convenient.

Where is the privacy problem if you use this system to consult your own civil data ? Privacy is a thing in the EU and it's a complex issue mainly because of these tech behemoths that need to know your shoe size before you can use their todo list app.

> Resist every single effort to make it easier for merchants and private entities to strongly identify users

How is this related to govt issued ID cards ?
by johnea | 2025-05-13 19:59:20+00:00
"See, I'm an idea man, Chuck. I got ideas coming at me all day..."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Night_Shift_(film)

The drop line is the funniest though:

"Wait a second... hold the phone! Hold the phone! [speaking into tape recorder] Idea to eliminate garbage. Edible paper. You eat it, it's gone! You eat it, it's outta there! No more garbage!"

What'll they think of next? Just wait till "vibe ideas" put the idea men out of work 8-/
by codedokode | 2025-05-13 19:59:22+00:00
Nobody, surprisingly, our regime doesn't require us to provide fingerprints yet (although that might change; our government loves to say "we just do the same thing all Western democratic governments do, so don't complain"). The punishment for not having valid "papers" is usually a fine (the fines for not having valid documentation related to military service were significantly increased recently for obvious reasons). Unless they close the border, I think we don't need to worry.

Also I always thought that it is weird, having to take driving exams to get an ID and calling an ID a "driver's license".
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 19:59:24+00:00
> Just slap things together until they work. As long as your problem's fixed, it's fine. It's not your baby you're taking care of. They should be grateful you even sent the patches in.

Thank you for a clear and concise illustration of why some contributions are really not welcome.

Just about the only thing I will agree with you on is that projects should indeed make it clear what the bar for the proper contribution is. This doesn't mean never saying "contributions are welcome", if they are indeed welcome - it's still the expectation for whoever is contributing to do the bare minimum to locate those requirements (e.g. by actually, you know, reading CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the repo before opening a PR - which many people do not.)
by favorited | 2025-05-13 19:59:24+00:00
I did some very broad testing of several PDF text extraction tools recently, and PDF.js was one of the slowest.

My use-case was specifically testing their performance as command-line tools, so that will skew the results to an extent. For example, PDFBox was very slow because you're paying the JVM startup cost with each invocation.

Poppler's pdftotext utility and pdfminer.six were generally the fastest. Both produced serviceable plain-text versions of the PDFs, with minor differences in where they placed paragraph breaks.

I also wrote a small program which extracted text using Chrome's PDFium, which also performed well, but building that project can be a nightmare unless you're Google. IBM's Docling project, which uses ML models, produced by far the best formatting, preserving much of the document's original structure – but it was, of course, enormously slower and more energy-hungry.

Disclaimer: I was testing specific PDF files that are representative of the kind of documents my software produces.
by elpalek | 2025-05-13 20:00:17+00:00
Recently tested a (non-english) pdf ocr with Gemini 2.5 Pro. First, directly ask it to extract text from pdf. Result: random text blob, not useable.

Second, I converted pdf into pages of jpg. Gemini performed exceptional. Near perfect text extraction with intact format in markdown.

Maybe there's internal difference when processing pdf vs jpg inside the model.
by akomtu | 2025-05-13 20:00:35+00:00
> Some may see this as manipulation

Because it is the dark art of manipulation for middle managers. This art boils down to creating a false reality to everyone who matters: you tell one set of lies to Bob, tailored to his personality, another set of lies to Jon, yet another set of lies to Jim, and when they come together, their vision is blurred by the lies you've skilfully created and they arrive with the decision you want.

You can up your game with tricks such as: backroom deals (give me what I want and I'll give you what you want) and blackmail (here is what I can do to you, so give me what I want). This dark art is an endless pit that to fully master you need to descend to hell.
by rmason | 2025-05-13 20:00:53+00:00
The Big 3 the last couple of years have been on a massive binge hiring developers. The reason is they are moving from accessory manufacturers writing all the cars software to the manufacturer.

In the EV era they realized they needed to be in charge of cars entire software stack to compete against Tesla and the Chinese. This is a pretty big hit in the Detroit area for developers, especially if GM and Stellantis follow Ford.
by konart | 2025-05-13 20:01:12+00:00
>The only folks who ever have problems are people who need to be told how to use their devices.

While this may be the case - many iPhone users love their phones (and iOS) for a different reason.

I've been with Android for some time: rooting, custom builds, different launchers, you name it. And it was fun back when I was in my early 20s, when had the time for this and when it was something new (HTC One, the very first model was my last Android phone).

Then I've bought iPhone 6 (I had switched from Arch to macOS few months earlier) and tried a few android phones since.

I simply don't need those "workflows".

I need about a dozen apps (the ones I use almost daily), I want them to be thought through (like Drafts) and I want my OS to work and behave the same way at least 5 years later (not to mention security updates and such).

This is where iPhone delivers and where Android quite often fails. I have iPhone 13 now and I can be sure that even few years from now everything will just work the same way does now.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-13 20:01:22+00:00
> Its not like you can write JS code with this that runs on browsers that lets you leak arbitrary secrets

That's precisely what Spectre and Meltdown were though. It's unclear whether this attack would work in modern browsers but they did reenable SharedArrayBuffer & it's unclear if the existing mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown stimy this attack.

> I personally disable all the mitigations because performance boost is actually noticeable.

Congratulations, you are probably susceptible to JS code reading crypto keys on your machine.
by nxobject | 2025-05-13 20:01:29+00:00
The author’s a little bit too optimistic about the longevity of old consumer market computers: having collected vintage compact Macs, you become keenly aware of all of the possible points of failure like CRT displays, storage devices, and even fragile plastics. We may have to go back to much more analog forms of I/O: typewriter teletype with decreasing levels of logic integration, random access DECtape-style magnetic tape, etc.
by bri3d | 2025-05-13 20:02:21+00:00
This; "quality" is such an unclear term here.

In an efficient market people buy things based on a value which in the case of software, is derived from overall fitness for use. "Quality" as a raw performance metric or a bug count metric aren't relevant; the criteria is "how much money does using this product make or save me versus its competition or not using it."

In some cases there's a Market of Lemons / contract / scam / lack of market transparency issue (ie - companies selling defective software with arbitrary lock-ins and long contracts), but overall the slower or more "defective" software is often more fit for purpose than that provided by the competition. If you _must_ have a feature that only a slow piece of software provides, it's still a better deal to acquire that software than to not. Likewise, if software is "janky" and contains minor bugs that don't affect the end results it provides, it will outcompete an alternative which can't produce the same results.
by kazinator | 2025-05-13 20:02:29+00:00
Funny you should mention screen and setuid. In one installation, I had to give screen chmod u+s perms to solve some weird issue, thinking what a gross thing to do.

Turns out, it has features dependent on setuid, and some systems ship it that way? Yikes!

(But, after I gave u+s to screen, it reads root's ~/.screenrc instead of mine (which I accepted as part of the workaround). Maybe that particular build of screen I'm using doesn't react properly to setuid; maybe it has to be built a certain way also to enable that support.)
Ask HN: What is your backup plan in case you don't get into YC S25?
by rblion | 2025-05-13 20:02:46+00:00
I'm a solo founder. Lived on Maui during the pandemic and a little after the fire to work at Red Cross. I got a job offer at a five-star resort as a concierge on Kauai and free housing at a very interesting farm-to-table operation, so I moved there.

I got invited to Idaho to work at a non-profit conservation project that is aligned with my startup. Our funding was cut by DOGE and Trump a few weeks ago, so I had to pivot.

I decided I'll just go for it and apply to YC with what I have and with my story. I've tied everything together as fast as I can but I don't have much beyond a vision, a plan, a business model canvas, a few screenshots to show how the app works.

I have a script for cold emails that I will send out while I wait to hear back. My other option is something like KickStarter or just bootstrap somehow with the help of an angel investor.

I've never raised money before, so this is all uncharted terrain for me.

Thanks for sharing any insight or encouragement. :)
by harmmonica | 2025-05-13 20:03:22+00:00
I was trying to stay away from the debate about the success of it by making that comment about it not failing even with a fraction of the former employees. My sarcastic reply to your question, though, is it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.

It brings you back to that old HN saw "why do these companies need so many people to do that?" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
Ask HN: What's the boldest white lie you've told your kids?
by rkagerer | 2025-05-13 20:04:33+00:00
In a recent news article[1] Tim Draper described how "At an early age, he learned there is precedent in the U.S. for currency crisis when his father gave him a million dollar confederate bill that was essentially worthless."

As far as I can tell[2], the Confederates never printed any bill with a million dollar denomination. Closest I could find was a souvenir note for admission to the Atlanta World Famous Cyclorama Painting of the Battle of Atlanta in 1959[3].

So, did Draper get bamboozled, in that loving way parents do to their kids?

What's the boldest "white lie" you've told your kids, in order to teach a lesson or prove a point?

----

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-news/2025/05/13/bitcoin-will-replace-us-dollar-in-10-years-says-billionaire-vc-tim-draper

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_dollar

[3] https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=84940
Show HN: Conductor Tasks MCP: Task Manager for AI Development
by hridyaagrawal | 2025-05-13 20:04:44+00:00
Excited to share a project I've been developing: Conductor Tasks

(Please consider starring if you find it useful!) What is it? A task manager and development assistant that integrates directly into your editor or works standalone. Think of it as a project manager, tech lead, and coding assistant all in one. Key Features (What makes it better than competitors like Claude Task Master) True Multi-LLM Architecture & Granular Control - Conductor Tasks seamlessly integrates with 9+ LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Gemini, Groq, Perplexity, xAI, OpenRouter, and Ollama/LM Studio). Crucially, you can assign specific LLMs to individual tools or task types. For example, use a powerful model for initial planning, a fast and cheap model for summarization, and Perplexity for research tasks – all within the same workflow. This optimizes both cost and performance far beyond single-provider or simple default-provider systems. Complete Development Lifecycle Support - Goes beyond basic task parsing to offer sophisticated implementation planning, AI-suggested task improvements, integrated research capabilities, and AI-assisted code modification. Powerful Templating Engine - Standardize workflows with reusable task templates, saving significant setup time and ensuring consistency, instead of starting from scratch each time. Sophisticated Codebase Understanding - Analyzes your project structure, identifies key files, and understands module dependencies to provide contextually relevant suggestions that are grounded in your actual code. https://github.com/hridaya423/conductor-tasks
by camcil | 2025-05-13 20:04:50+00:00
Articles like this terrify me, and recently they are plenty. I have had a lifelong interest and participant in development, doing freelance at times, always utilizing it in my career when approved, and contributing to opensource. I finished out my BS:CS while working full-time and although my general-IT career has been pretty successful, I have always planned on trying to pivot into a proper development team full-time from the public sector.

Now that the structure of my organization, benefits, and even my job existing is on thin-ice (again, public sector), I have been dropping my name in the hat to open positions. My numbers are much better OP’s (landing at least a 1st round with ~10% of apps), but the closer I get to potential offers with some [great] companies, I can’t seem but to get even more worried about the stability or if this is the right choice for me and my family. My physiological and safety needs are met (i.e. Maslows), for now, but I have a longing for the rest of the hierarchy.

Is the industry forecast as bad as these outlooks paint it?
by Brybry | 2025-05-13 20:04:54+00:00
While a driver's license does normally fill that role, it's not mandated and not everyone has a driver's license (or even a state issued ID).

Some stuff like voting you can use something like a utility bill. Some stuff will want your birth certificate. Some stuff will want multiple types of documents.

Americans have historically been against mandated government IDs (though mostly with the concept of a federal/national ID).
by MBCook | 2025-05-13 20:05:26+00:00
They have the hardware. They don’t provide ANY software for this kind of thing though. And there is a very real chance it could cannibalize some Mac sales.

I’ve always wondered if this kind of thing is actually that useful, but it’s not even an option for me because of the above.

Seems surprising Google didn’t act on this earlier. But maybe they didn’t want to cannibalize the Chromebooks?

I get the feeling very very few people know this exists at all on some Samsung phones. I’ve asked some tech-y people with Samsungs about it before and they didn’t even know it existed.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-13 20:05:28+00:00
I wish Google would stick with a design paradigm for a bit for once.

It's not just their own apps that need updating, it's everyone else's, too. Most of which will never happen, so users are stuck in a hodgepodge of several generations of different design paradigms.

Material was fine. So was Material 2. So was Material 3. So is Material 3 Expressive, I guess. Just stick with something!
by alphazard | 2025-05-13 20:05:32+00:00
Odin is great language. The creator GingerBill is an incredibly talented language designer and I would encourage anyone interested in programming languages to listen to some of the interviews he has done on various podcasts. The way he thinks about tradeoffs and problems when designing a language is exactly what is required to produce something like Odin. He has a level of craftsmanship that is rare.

A lot of it just comes down to good taste; he's upfront about the language's influences. When something is good there's no shame in taking it. e.g. The standard library package structure is very similar to Go's.

There are plenty of innovations as well. I haven't seen anything quite like the context system before, definitely not done as well as in Odin.
by Xylakant | 2025-05-13 20:05:59+00:00
Better (more expensive) Engineering. Different frame geometries, different materials, better quality control on the welding. One of the main reasons for the recall was that babboe did not follow up on reports of frames breaking until a regulator stepped in. And by then, it was too late to contain it to a few batches.

Babboe is a rather budget brand that uses a single round lower tube under the box. Compare that with the frame of an urban arrow or a R&M load that use multiple tubes and a proper stiff platform under the box. Even if an Urban Arrow Frame would crack, it would bend out of shape instead of failing catastrophically like the Babboe did.
by jfengel | 2025-05-13 20:06:08+00:00
Weirdly, yes.

He deserves credit for Project WarpSpeed, which developed COVID vaccines in record time. He should be telling everybody how wonderful the vaccines are.

Instead, he was more dedicated to insisting that COVID was never serious in the first place. So he's willing to throw his own most significant accomplishment under the bus.

He's also perfectly capable of contradicting himself if he thinks he can get credit, so he may well turn around and say he knew that mRNA vaccines were the goodliest vaccines all along and all of this is due to him. But he has surrounded himself with anti-vax conspiracy theorists and I suspect they will dominate his plans.
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 20:06:19+00:00
I remember OWL being somewhat weird in that it rendered quite a few stock controls itself, in ways that made OWL apps really stick out on Win 3.11.

MFC gets a lot of flak, but I think that a large chunk of it is undeserved because it's a fundamentally different kind of framework - a wrapper that tries to streamline the use of underlying APIs without concealing their fundamental nature, whereas OWL and VCL (and VB6, and WinForms) are higher-level wrappers that do quite a lot for you even when they use native widgets under the hood. From that perspective, if anything, the more appropriate criticism of MFC is that it tries to do too much - e.g. that whole document/view thing is clearly a high-level abstraction that always felt out of place to me given the overall design of the framework. WTL is basically what MFC tried to be but failed.
by jsnell | 2025-05-13 20:06:22+00:00
> You can now customize Quick Settings to squeeze in more of your favorite actions like Flashlight and Do Not Disturb.

I feel I'm missing something. Hasn't customizing the quick settings been possible forever?

In fact the only thing preventing me from having the single tap Do Not Disturb in the quick settings is that these same UX people removed the option in the latest version of Android, and buried it in a "Modes" menu for no reason at all.

Super happy to have that back, but good grief, trying to pitch a rollback as an innovative new feature is pretty audacious.
by noosphr | 2025-05-13 20:06:24+00:00
I've worked on this in my day job: extracting _all_ relevant information from a financial services PDF for a bert based search engine.

The only way to solve that is with a segmentation model followed by a regular OCR model and whatever other specialized models you need to extract other types of data. VLM aren't ready for prime time and won't be for a decade on more.

What worked was using doclaynet trained YOLO models to get the areas of the document that were text, images, tables or formulas: https://github.com/DS4SD/DocLayNet if you don't care about anything but text you can feed the results into tesseract directly (but for the love of god read the manual). Congratulations, you're done.

Here's some pre-trained models that work OK out of the box: https://github.com/ppaanngggg/yolo-doclaynet I found that we needed to increase the resolution from ~700px to ~2100px horizontal for financial data segmentation.

VLMs on the other hand still choke on long text and hallucinate unpredictably. Worse they can't understand nested data. If you give _any_ current model nothing harder than three nested rectangles with text under each they will not extract the text correctly. Given that nested rectangles describes every table no VLM can currently extract data from anything but the most straightforward of tables. But it will happily lie to you that it did - after all a mining company should own a dozen bulldozers right? And if they each cost $35.000 it must be an amazing deal they got, right?
by malux85 | 2025-05-13 20:06:40+00:00
Whatever it needs to be - some have pdfs, images, schematics, code, text files with links.

If a text file starts getting too big I’ll reorder it or split it out.

I think the key thing is developing the skill that suits you - don’t try and constrain it with some rule (all files must have structure X) because invariably something will not fit that pattern and then you’ll give up or spend too much effort trying to find the holy grail of data structures and then you’ll give up.

Let it flow naturally without constraints, it will settle on a form that is useful
by bsimpson | 2025-05-13 20:06:52+00:00
Google gave out the HTC Evo at I/O in 2010, which was what got me to switch to Android.

At the time, it had a much bigger screen than an iPhone and gave you more control over the device. It could play Flash games/apps, and let you use the apps/keyboards/etc you wanted without a company's blessing.

Apple is a lot more open now than they used to be, in ways that might have driven power users to Android before.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-13 20:07:03+00:00
Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption.

If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change.

When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now.

When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would be at a small desk doing books, whatever.

Have pickup truck will travel.

[1] The jobs are going to come from knowing people already employed that can say, "Hey, we have an opening — I'll send your resume to my boss."
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-13 20:07:28+00:00
> This doesn’t have anything to do with the 10th Amendment (little does).

Sure it does.

It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole again.

The Feds can't say "you can't regulate in a way we don't like" to the states. They can apply "reasonable conditions" along the lines of "if you do x we will take away related funding y" but the entire point of the Tenth Amendment is that states have more rights than the Feds unless otherwise stated.

Federalism as protected by the Tenth means California can require things like "may contain lead" on labels, even though some of those products may be sold outside of California.