MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skwee357 | 2025-06-03 10:57:57+00:00
Had a chance to read the wiki/docs deeper. Quarkdown seems to use puppeteer and chrome-print-to-pdf to generate PDF from HTML [1].

So, aside from the more minimal format or Markdown compared to HTML, I don't see much appeal in quarkdown compared to feeding HTML to a headless chrome instance.

But it is a cool project if one wants to turn a bunch of markdown files to say a book or an article.

[1] https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/wiki/pdf-export
by Fredkin | 2025-06-03 10:58:07+00:00
My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code.

I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to use the agentic stuff but from what I've heard it's still too slow to run on a high end workstation with a single 4080.

Or have things got better lately, and crucially is there good VisualStudio integration for running local agents / LLMs?
by triplyhiring | 2025-06-03 10:58:15+00:00
Triply | Software Engineer (TypeScript) | Full-time | Onsite (hybrid) | Amsterdam, Netherlands (EU) | 45K - 65K EUR

Triply provides software and services for linked data production systems, enabling companies from all over the world to integrate their data into standards-compliant knowledge graphs so that they can harness the full potential of their data. Our TriplyDB software is used by organizations of any size, from startup to 10K+ employees.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer with strong TypeScript development skills to help evolve and maintain the API and data integration layer of our platform. You’ll work on backend features that are central to the platform’s architecture, such as role-based access control (RBAC), data transformation pipelines and data querying. Your focus will be on delivering robust, secure, and standards-compliant APIs, improving query performance, and implementing domain-specific features in the area of linked data and semantic technologies.

Visa sponsorship is possible, but only for exceptional candidates.

For more information, please see the profile here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTV0PoZ5UQXPAAra....

If you're interested, send an email to careers@triply.cc, addressed to Ivan. I check them personally.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-03 10:58:33+00:00
Do you think compilers helped teams ship more value faster from worse developers? IDEs with autocomplete? Linters?

At the end of the day, coders are being paid money to produce something.

It's not art -- it's a machine that works and does a thing.

We can do that in ways that create a greater or lesser maintenance burden, but it's still functional.

LLM coding tools detractors are manufacturing reasons to avoid using another tool that helps them write code.

They need to get over the misconception of what the job is. As another comment previously quipped 'If you want to write artisanal, hand-tuned assembly that's beautiful, do that on your own time for a hobby project.'
by samuel | 2025-06-03 10:58:51+00:00
Regarding the o3 "trick", if I understand it correctly, I'm trying to do something similar with the "MCP Super Assistant" paired with the DesktopCommander MCP.

I still haven't managed to make the mcp proxy server reliable enough, but looks promising. If it works, the model would have pretty direct access to the codebase, although any tool call is requires a new chat box.

I guess aider in copy-paste mode would be another solution for cheapskates like myself (not a dev and I barely do any programming, but I like to tinker).
by WillAdams | 2025-06-03 10:59:02+00:00
For a long while now, what seems to me a reasonably simple project (re-creating the UI of a drawing program and making it straight-forward to re-create program state with annotations/highlighting) has been stalled because I can't find a design tool which works better than just placing the screen grabs in a vector drawing program and annotating by hand....

I'm about at the point where I'm going to just code everything up in METAPOST....

Makes me wish for Display PostScript again....
by eviks | 2025-06-03 10:59:53+00:00
Actually, no, if markup takes more space than content, it hurts readability of the content. Especially for such common stuff like images.

But if you don't see this obvious barrier, I will unlikely be able to explain the issue with backslashes: it's partially about the number, but also visibility - .period syntax is a smart choice as it's unobtrusive and not part of the regular syntax, and it's more ergonomic to type, so a universal win.
by hyperbovine | 2025-06-03 11:00:11+00:00
> Who knows, in the end maybe this will kill off the group of students who enroll in CS courses “because mom and dad think it’s a good job,”

I see this so much. “Data science major” became the 2020s version of law school. It’s such a double edged sword. It’s led to a huge increase in enrollment and the creation of multiple professional masters programs, so the college loves us. We hire every year and there’s always money for just about anything. On the other hand, class sizes are huge, which is not fun, and worse a large fraction of the students appear to have minimal intrinsic interest in coding or analyzing data. They’re there because it’s where the jobs are. I totally get that, in some sense college has always been that way, but it does make me look back fondly on the days when classes were 1/4 as big and filled with people who were genuinely interested in the subject.

Unfortunately I think I may get my wish. AI is going to eliminate a lot of those jobs and so the future of our field looks a bit bleak. Worse, it’s the very students who are going to become redundant the quickest that are the least willing to learn. I’d be happy to teach them basic analysis and coding skills, but they are dead set on punching everything into ChatGPT.
by m41130 | 2025-06-03 11:00:12+00:00
I spent the last few months building BlogposterCMS, a self-hosted Node.js CMS where every feature is an isolated module (sandboxed). I got fed up with the endless plugin sprawl and vulnerabilities in WordPress, so I created my own event-driven core. It’s in alpha—UI is half-finished. Would love feedback on the modular architecture, performance, and security.

Thanks
by brailsafe | 2025-06-03 11:00:18+00:00
Well, I'd think of it like being car-dependent. Sure, plenty of suburbanites know how to walk, they still have feet, but they live somewhere that's designed to only be practically traversable by car. While you've lived that lifestyle, you may have gained weight and lost muscle mass, or developed an intolerance for discomfort to a point where it poses real problems. If you never got a car, or let yourself adapt to life without one, you have to work backwards from that constraint. Likewise with the built environment around us; the cities many people under the age of 40 consider to be "good" are the ones that didn't demolish themselves in the name of highways and automobiles, in which a car only rarely presents what we'd think of as useful technology.

There are all kinds of trades that the car person and the non-car person makes for better or worse depending on the circumstance. The non-car person may miss out on a hobby, or not know why road trips are neat, but they don't have the massive physical and financial liabilities that come with them. The car person meanwhile—in addition to the aforementioned issues—might forget how to grocery shop in smaller quantities, or engage with people out in the world because they just go from point A to B in their private vessel, but they may theoretically engage in more distant varied activities that the non-car person would have to plan for further in advance.

Taking the analogy a step further, each party gradually sets different standards for themselves that push the two archetypes into diametrically opposed positions. The non-car owner's life doesn't just not depend on cars, but is often actively made worse by their presence. For the car person, the presence of people, especially those who don't use a car, gradually becomes over-stimulating; cyclists feel like an imposition, people walking around could attack at any moment, even other cars become the enemy. I once knew someone who'd spent his whole life commuting by car, and when he took a new job downtown, had to confront the reality that not only had he never taken the train, he'd become afraid of taking it.

In this sense, the rise of LLM does remind of the rise of frontend frameworks, bootcamps thay started with React or React Native, high level languages, and even things like having great internet; the only people who ask what happens in a less ideal case are the ones who've either dealt with those constraints first-hand, or have tried to simulate it. If you've never been to the countryside, or a forest, or a hotel, you might never consider how your product responds in a poor connectivity environment, and these are the people who wind up getting lost on basic hiking trails having assumed that their online map would produce relevant information and always be there.

Edit: To clarify, in the analogy, it's clear that cars are not intrinsically bad tools or worthwhile inventions, but had excitement for them been tempered during their rise in commodification and popularity, the feedback loops that ended up all but forcing people to use them in certain regions could have been broken more easily.
by kubb | 2025-06-03 11:00:18+00:00
"I tried copilot 2 years ago and I didn’t like it."

Great article BTW, it’s amazing that you’re now blaming developers smarter than you for lack of LLM adoption, as if it weren’t enough for the technology to be useful to become widespread.

Try to deal with „an agent takes 3 minutes to make a small transformation to my codebase and it takes me another 5 to figure out why it changed what it did only to realize that it was the wrong approach and redo it by hand, which took another 7 minutes” in your next one.
by andy12_ | 2025-06-03 11:01:20+00:00
Honestly, I don't think that it would be too hard. With the grid function you can do a lot of things, specially because you can use grid.cell(rowspan:3, colswap:4) to make cells that span multiple rows or columns, use fractional sizes for the columns (1fr, 2fr, etc), and add independent insets and strokes for each cell, so you can already do a lot of the things you can achieve with css flexbox.

Though I suppose the docs could include tutorials for how to use them to make a more diverse kind of documents, and adding another layout function that behaves more like flexbox would be nice (though it wouldn't be too hard to create a function that re-creates the behaviour of flexbox based on the grid function).
by roxolotl | 2025-06-03 11:01:21+00:00
Yea I’d love to know what these look like. I’ve been using Claude and Claude code a bit for things I’m too lazy to do myself but know it’ll be solid at, for example a parser for iso dates in Janet. I set a $10 budget in February and have used $4 of it. I genuinely don’t know how to use these tools to spend $20 a month but at the same time they've been very helpful.

I similarly get confused about normal blocking. I genuinely don’t understand it. I get procrastination. I go for runs during work. But rarely is something genuinely so much that it’ll take hours of programming.

Edit: of course some tasks take multiple days. But visible progress is almost always achieved on the scale of hours not days.
by stevenoel | 2025-06-03 11:03:02+00:00
I'm not affiliated with OpenDNS (but I am a customer). I think you've misunderstood the process here.

Something you did (ie: a mass marketing campaign) made the filters think you're doing something that looks like phishing. There are a lot of reasons this can happen like actual recipients of your "marketing campaign" who reported you as phishing. In this case you're unlikely to just get whitelisted.

But it's not always that black-and-white. There are a variety of factors which go into assessing an org. Just some samples:

- How long has the domain been registered? - How much mail volume has been sent from a domain over time (and has there been a large deviation... for example if a domain typically sends 100s of emails per day for 5 years and then suddenly starts blasting emails in the millions per day this can be an indication of a problem) - Is there suspicious script (or perhaps specific scripts) running on the site - Is the site nothing but a URL redirection

These are just a few things that come to mind but there are many others. SO if you're blasting out emails by the thousand (or more) and you're redirecting people to your site which then installs some software surreptitiously and redirects people to another site invisibly, then yeah, your site probably looks like phishing. Compound this with reports from those email recipients who report your emails as phishing then OpenDNS is gonna list your site as phishing, too.

In my experience OpenDNS has been very responsive to challenges to their ratings at least from their customers. I'd say if the a perceived phishing site operator were the one to ask to be delisted they (OpenDNS) may not be inclined to do so... but if one of their customers (a paying OpenDNS customer) opened a support ticket they would likely get an answer. Not that the answer will necessarily be to whitelist your site, but they will look at the site and make a determination.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-06-03 11:03:57+00:00
> In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance

Context: Under the EU's Chat Control proposal, your private messages (Signal, WhatsApp etc) will be scanned by an on-device AI agent. The current debate is around scanning images and videos but the original proposals called for analyzing all text too (I wish I was joking).
by fsloth | 2025-06-03 11:04:46+00:00
By using the program? Mind you this works only for _personal_ tools where it’s intuitively obvious when something is wrong.

For example

”Please create a viewer for geojson where i can select individual feature polygons and then have button ’export’ that exports the selected features to a new geojson”

1. You run it 2. It shows the json and visualizes selections 3. The exported subset looks good

I have no idea how anyone could keep the callgraph of even a minimal gui application in their head. If you can then congratulations, not all of us can!
by dezgeg | 2025-06-03 11:05:25+00:00
I wish checksumming filesystems had some interface to expose the internal checksums. Maybe it wouldn't be useful for rsync though as filesystems should have the freedom to pick the best algorithm (so filesystem checksum of a file on different machines would be allowed to differ e.g. if filesystem block size was different). But so that e.g. git and build systems could use it to tell 'these 2 files under a same directory tree are definitely identical'.
by Michael9876 | 2025-06-03 11:05:34+00:00
A tutorial on setting up a personal news summarizer using n8n for automation, AI (Gemini) for processing, and Telegram for delivery. ServBay helps simplify the local Node.js/n8n environment setup. The core workflow can be up and running in about 10 minutes. Useful for cutting through information overload. Curious about other practical n8n automation people are using?
by nickd2001 | 2025-06-03 11:06:45+00:00
If genuinely feeling suicidal for any length of time, please reach out for help. :) From your many posts, some of which I replied to before, I believe you work at a soul-destroying place which isn't doing you any good, and I understand you're kinda stuck there cos of health insurance etc, but, what I'd say is try to live for today, not worry too much. IF they fire you, f** 'em. I bet your skills are better and more useful than you currently think. If you did get kicked out , you may well find something better. To me there doesn't seem evidence you'll be stuck working at Walmart. Maybe you could get a job in local state government? (OK not federal cos that's been gutted) Not stunningly paid but perhaps nicer working environment?
by theshrike79 | 2025-06-03 11:06:54+00:00
It also depends heavily on the language.

I can review 100x more Go code in a set amount of time than I can, say React.

With Go there are repetitive structures (if err == nil) and not that many keywords, it's easy to sniff out the suspicious bits and focus on them.

With Javascript and all of the useWhatevers and cyclic dependencies and functions returning functions that call functions, it's a lot harder to figure out what the code does just by reading it.
by palata | 2025-06-03 11:07:08+00:00
> I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.

What is objective? That profitability is good? We're destroying our environment to the point where many of us will die from it for the sake of profitability. We're over-using limited natural resources for the sake of profitability. In my book that's not desirable at all.

Companies are profit-maximising machines. The path to more profitability tends to be enshittification: the company makes more money by making it worse for everybody. AI most definitely requires more resources and it seems like those resources will be used to do more, but of lower quality.

Surely that's profitable. But I don't think it is desirable.
by pydry | 2025-06-03 11:08:05+00:00
Ive worked with people who write tests afterwards on production code and it's pretty inevitable that they:

* End up missing tests for edge cases they built and forgot about. Those edge cases often have bugs.

* They forget and cover the same edge cases twice if theyre being thorough with test-after. This is a waste.

* They usually end up spending almost as much time manually testing in the end to verify the code change they just made worked whereas I would typically just deploy straight to prod.

It doesnt prevent all bugs it just prevents enough to make the teams around us who dont do it look bad by comparison even though they do manual checks too.

Ive heard loads of good reasons to not write tests at all, Ive yet to hear a good reason to not write one before if you are going to write one.

Both of your articles raise pretty typical straw men. One is "what if im not sure what the customer wants?" (thats fine but i hope you arent writing production code at this point) and the other is the peculiar but common notion that TDD can only be done with a low level unit test which is dangerous bullshit.
by rxtexit | 2025-06-03 11:10:20+00:00
People have no imagination either.

This is all fine now.

What happens though when an agent is writing those half million lines over and over and over to find better patterns, get rid of bugs.

Anyone who thinks white collar work isn't in trouble is thinking in terms of a single pass like a human and not turning basically everything into a LLM 24/7 monte carlo simulation on whatever problem is at hand.
by ongytenes | 2025-06-03 11:10:38+00:00
I really dislike Flatpak because the humongous sizes of packages. I noticed that Telegram flatpak was 1.1GB in size and requires 3.6GB of the hard drive, whereas the regular DEB install was 28MB and needs only 82 MB.

And there was no DEB available for Signal in the LinuxMint package manager. It also was a 1.1GB download that required 3.6GB of hard drive. Reason there is no Signal app on my desktop.
by theknarf | 2025-06-03 11:11:18+00:00
The problem is mostly that there doesn't exist some kind of standard for animators where they can make their animations in their editor and then export it for web.

Lottie started out as a plugin for Adobe After Effects to try and let them export animations for use on Web. As far as I know this is the only "half-standardised" way of exporting animations between tools.

If you don't need animations from a dedicated animator then the better solution is using "a pile of JS + CSS transitions", and hopefully this is what Lottie for the web eventually "compiles" into.
by delduca | 2025-06-03 11:11:18+00:00
As you know, this blog is more focused on sharing code snippets than on teaching, so today I’m going to show you something I recently discovered.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve been working in my free time on a 2D game engine where creators can build games using only Lua — and I’d say, even fairly complex ones.

Right now, I’m working on a point-and-click game that you can play here: https://bereprobate.com/. It’s built using this same engine, and I’m publishing builds in parallel to Steam and the Web using GitHub Actions.

The thing is, Steam — which is the main target platform for this game — supports achievements, and I want to include them. But to use achievements, you have to link the Steam library to your engine. The problem is, doing that creates a dependency on that library in the binaries, which I don’t want. I also don’t want to maintain a separate build just for that.

Then I thought: “Why not load the Steam library dynamically? Use LoadLibraryA on Windows and dlopen on macOS. (Sorry Linux — it’s Proton-only for now.)”

I tried the experiment below, and it worked. If the DLL/dylib is present, the Steam features work just fine. If not, everything runs normally.
by basfo | 2025-06-03 11:11:30+00:00
> If a firm needs to perform project X that previously cost 10 engineers to do, but they only have the budget for 2, they will not tackle that project. Engineers used = 0.

0 on that Project, but those 2 engineers will still be used on a different Project that needs just 2 Engineers.

BUT a company that sees that project as a critical part of the bussines and MUST tackle that project, will only need the 2 engineers in the payroll. Or hire just 2 instead of 10.

Engineers not hired = 8

Or.. maybe they don't really need that project that needs 10 engineers. They are ok as they are today, but they realize that with AI, they don't need those 2 engineers anymore to produce the same output, probably can be handled by just one with AI assistance.

Engineers fired = 1
by hoseyor | 2025-06-03 11:11:31+00:00
I’m a bit disappointed that you resorted to deflection. You’re being defensive. It implies to me that you really know what I’m talking about and your subconscious is trying to ward it off.

Reality simply is that freeloading is a condition, not something you need to take personal. If you are equally benefiting from things you did not contribute to at the same total cost as those previously invested, then you are freeloading.

Should you be able to buy Bitcoin today at the original offering price? Should you have equal control as heirs of a company you did not build?

I fail to see why you and seemingly a few other people find that challenging to understand. If you pay the same price to, e.g., ride the “cheap and effective” public transportation in Europe that Europeans have been taxed hundreds of millions in capital costs over several decades to build up, how is that not freeloading?

Sure, you can’t even not freeload if you wanted to by paying higher prices and the real issue are the abusive and toxic governments in Europe in my example, but explain to me how a little old lady that gets €1000/month in pension after a life of turning Europe into what it was until recently, being taxed 40% all get life should pay the same price for a rail ticket as an American making double the European salary and paying around 25% taxes?

These are not challenging concepts. It’s a bit disheartening that presumably technical/dev type people do not understand basic systems.
by amarcheschi | 2025-06-03 11:12:35+00:00
I'm not an expert at all on cryptography so I can't comment on that, however when looking for info about thorn I found a ftm page where a uni researcher acknowledges it's not possible to do it yet. It should be either this https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start... or this one, I can't remember at the moment https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutcher-s-anti-childabuse...

Edit "possible" as in very computationally expensive to do it on a mass scale