MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: String Flux – Simplify everyday string transformations for developers
by eaglepeak | 2025-06-05 15:21:11+00:00
I built https://stringflux.io/ to make everyday string transformations a little less painful. It’s similar to CyberChef in the sense that it supports multiple string operations, but with a cleaner, more focused UI and smart suggestions based on your input.

You can also chain transformations — for example: decode base64 string which was base64 encoded from minified json → then json format (pretty-print) it — all in one flow. This is helpful when dealing with complex or nested strings, like encoded API responses or log data, where you need to apply multiple steps to make the content readable.

The idea came from the frustration of jumping between different tools just to handle common string tasks.

There’s a short GIF demo in the GitHub README: https://github.com/stringflux/stringflux

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
by 256dpi | 2025-06-05 15:21:47+00:00
We have not tested this properly (see my other comment on lab testing), but so far we have observed no effect during normal operation and only saw a slight increase when charging the device (~1°). We took great care to move the sensors far away from power management. Luckily, the display cutout also helps here.

You can find more infos here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/networked-artifacts/air-lab/upda...
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-05 15:22:05+00:00
> It's weird reading actual lawmakers refusing to put their names on the record, for fear of retaliation.

They've had that fear since 2016-2018, that if they werent kissing the ring, Trump waives them away and suddenly there is a new well financed primary challenger praising the GOP overlord and promptly replacing the years long incumbent. Even though no one had ever heard of them before the money'd kingmakers had them installed.

Lawmakers hiding behind fear not only hints of some form of GOP ptsd, but also that it would be the perfect time for them to realize they can change it by fixing the campaign expenditure spending.

I don't pretend to have a deep understanding of it all, but with the rise of the internet and the rise of foreign and domestic bot/astroturfing/disinformation farms, it's time the courts revisit it. And what better time than when the ones with all the power to change things come from the same money group.

Hopefully they get tired of being cowed into submission and decide they don't actually want to live in fear of doing the job they were elected to do.
by ahofmann | 2025-06-05 15:22:14+00:00
I'm doing both. A line of logging that looks like "[date without timezone] Foo: bar additional stuff, almost no context" so, almost all lines found in /var/log/*/*.log, are mostly useless.

Right now, I'm playing with the idea to log json in those files and send this also to Signoz, Sentry, graylog, or whatever. This way, my logfiles are still tail-able and grep-able. Very important for development and "the customer is furious, WTF is going on in production" situations.

And also some other software can email me, according to some rules. This helps to have less furious customers. And maybe it can draw some cute graphs, so I can tell management that prod runs great!
by paulvnickerson | 2025-06-05 15:22:47+00:00
It's ridiculous and offensive to call someone a nazi who is clearly not a nazi considering there are literally people targeting Jews and their supporters in this country [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://apnews.com/article/israel-embassy-jewish-museum-shoo...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/boulder-colorado-antisemiti...

[3] https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...
by dennisy | 2025-06-05 15:23:16+00:00
Appreciate the reply, but sadly disagree with all of it.

> If you already have the fundamentals neccessary to call yourself a software developer

Yes, but do you not need to learn more? Do you not need to train what you know to keep it at your fingertips?

I think most would agree our memory has gotten worse since we have access to digital phone books, web search etc. This is because the mind does not need to store these things anymore.

The process here would be the same, your coding ability will degrade over time if not used.

> I also think if your product idea is so sensitive to a launch timeline that precludes manual coding not to fail, then you have a bigger problem.

I think here you just over reached with your point. If I can test and iterate x features / ideas vs 10x in the same month longer period, its fair to say that 10x would be deemed a better velocity with more chance of success. It is not based on my "idea".
by em-bee | 2025-06-05 15:24:07+00:00
i don't know what you tried, but i found it by scrolling down and then a single click. then i went back and found that two clicks without scrolling would have done it.

you are right about the problem of hard to remember IP addresses, but i don't think it is that bad.

They don't care at all about all the stuff you care about.

i don't understand this argument. users who don't care would not even bother to change the DNS. and those that do will change their settings once and be done with it. a memorable IP mainly benefits those that set up devices frequently.
by paddy_m | 2025-06-05 15:24:12+00:00
An e-bike is one of the few places where DRM is actually attractive. I don't know the state of DRM on batteries, but I would feel significantly more confident parking an e-bike if I could remove the battery, and know that a replacement battery had to be paired with the frame/motor from a reputable dealer. Listing a bike as stolen would prevent this. I know that DRM can be cracked, but this would help a lot. note: I don't currently own an e-bike.

Note how infrequently iPhones are stolen since apple got serious about preventing it.
by mock-possum | 2025-06-05 15:24:16+00:00
The only reason I work on apps with build steps is because I’m paid to.

When I play with stuff on my own, I keep my toolchains real simple. Whenever possible, my rule is “I drag the html file into the browser and it just works.” As it was in the old days

Also, FTA - is ‘nerdsnipped’ distinct from ‘nerdsniped’?
by Hikikomori | 2025-06-05 15:24:47+00:00
Don't know about pg, but Yarvin was popular in silicon valley and investor circles. From what I know at least the people below are connected to Yarvin/Thiel and 'network states'. Likely more billionaires that hide it.

Thiel, Musk, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andressen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks.
by like_any_other | 2025-06-05 15:24:53+00:00
That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.
by samuelstros | 2025-06-05 15:24:54+00:00
100% agree with the sentimment. markdown is hell as a format for editors :D

the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST that rich text editor frameworks reliably operate on takes months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into parsing and serializing markdown :/

Anyhow, we took the learnings from the Markdown editor app and created "zettel" as a result: https://github.com/opral/monorepo/tree/main/packages/zettel/.... The goal is to have an interoperable rich text AST—basically Markdown but with an AST spec.
by hu3 | 2025-06-05 15:25:12+00:00
Whenever I have the chance, no-build is how I have been architecturing web applications for the last decade or more.

That plus no-compile/near-instant-compile tooling (PHP, Bun, Go) enables instant feedback during development.

It's liberating and force multiplier.

I also implement custom unit testing libraries that are simpler than industry standard but MUCH faster. It hits different when unit tests finish running 1s after saving a file versus 10s.

I also make unit test runner play sound for success and failures. So you don't even have to look at tests to know if they passed or failed. It's dopaminergic. And reduces cognitive load because you can offload unit tests feedback to auditive system, aliviating the already heavily overloaded developer visual system.

To this day I receive e-mails and direct messages of developers thanking me for their joy working in these projects. On average once every 2 months or so. Makes my day.

Everything in the name of reducing cognitive load. This is our bottleneck.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-06-05 15:25:18+00:00
> I find a certain humor in this, as elixir is more likely to be a fad than LLM's. I like and use elixir, but their lightweight processes are too restrictive for a lot of use cases

I'm not an Elixir user, but you're criticizing Erlang/OTP, which has been around way too long to be considered a "fad".
by duxup | 2025-06-05 15:25:50+00:00
>The latest claim comes after Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member had been spying on behalf of Deel. The employee locked themselves into a bathroom and smashed their phone with an axe when confronted with allegations, according to their own testimony.

I admire their enthusiasm!

>posed as a customer and accessed details of Deel’s products and business practices over the course of six months.

I've never seen anyone pretend to be a customer, BUT I've been given customer presentations made by sort of similar software in the past just to get a feel for what is out there. I assume that competitors possibly have recordings of presentations I've made ... once you show customers I assume the data is out in the wild.

The rest of the spying does seem, excessive but when you have roles like “competitive intelligence manager” I gotta think they almost certainly go overboard.
by dimal | 2025-06-05 15:26:48+00:00
How are people using Claude Code day to day without spending a lot? I tried it on a moderately complex task and it chewed through tokens at an alarming rate. I quickly spent $2 and hadn’t even arrived at an adequate solution yet. I’ve heard other people say they’ve spent $10-20 in a coding session. I don’t see how that’s sustainable for me, so I’ve stuck with my $20/month Cursor subscription.
by seveibar | 2025-06-05 15:26:50+00:00
That admittedly looks a lot more correct! Thanks for digging in, i will absolutely test and submit a correction to the article (i am still concerned the straight edges are misleading here)! And thanks to the original commentor as well! I think I will try to quickly output an animated version of each subdivision level, the animation would make it a lot more clear for me!
by latchkey | 2025-06-05 15:26:57+00:00
I used to code this way, then I started to write tests, as I was writing my code. I could ensure the behavior was expected with the test. If the code wasn't easily testable, I would refactor it right way and that would generally leave me with easier to read and follow code as well. The end benefit being that if I wanted to change the behavior later, now I knew if I was breaking anything. With everything tested, very little made it to production that wasn't working.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-05 15:27:39+00:00
The proposal doesn't need to address this because it doesn't even consider the global public IP of 128.130.0.0/15 in your example. If you visit a site on 10.0.0.0/8 that accesses resources on 10.0.0.0/8 it's allowed. But if you visit a random other site on the internet it will be (by default) forbidden to access the internal resource at 10.0.0.0/8.
by wilg | 2025-06-05 15:27:46+00:00
Rivian seems fine and makes the second best EVs.

But also it’s not hyperbole, though I agree it sounds like it.

Association comes in different strengths and forms. But currently owned and operated by a guy actively destroying my country is much more direct and urgent than most of these associations.

But the larger point is that it seems correct that the only people willing to buy a Tesla anymore have conservative politics.
by jeffhuys | 2025-06-05 15:27:55+00:00
It's still running fine for me with actual interesting content. I don't get this take, feels like only people who don't use it at all (anymore) say it's been a bad transition or "X sucks now" but they're not using it.

It's still just Twitter, but you're not being banned anymore. So ACTUAL discussions can take place without having the thought police running around with a banhammer.
by dani__german | 2025-06-05 15:28:36+00:00
Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common. Queer theory, for example, isn't like NASA creating cordless power tools for the people, or discovering the benefits of grooved pavement for space shuttle landings.

It is eminently clear to anyone with their head on straight that technical research will lead to a positive return overall. You are correct that the specifics about how inventions come about can be random.

Here[1] is a queer theory journal. Let me know if this is going to help us accidentally discover a new industrial process that feeds more people or saves lives in some other way. You don't need to have precognitive abilities to correctly dismiss this drivel and save everyone a headache.

[1] https://interalia.queerstudies.pl/issue-19-2024/artwich/
by smallnix | 2025-06-05 15:29:30+00:00
> Why do you think that this indicates a problem in identifying zombies?

I understood a zombie to represent a client that is dead and will never come back to live again. Since they came back to live they were not actually zombies. So manual action from actually alive clients was required. That may be ok, since they behavior was not acceptable, but in the spirit of not penalizing it would be better to not block those clients if they can be identified and sufficient resources are available to shoulder their misbehaviour.

> The pause may have simply been the reason that someone became aware there was even a problem.

I didn't take that into account and it would be neat. But why would they become aware after this change? Because the error message(/code?) is now different?
by nemjack | 2025-06-05 15:29:34+00:00
For sure, we can't process images the same way that we process sound, but the author argues for processing images and text the same, and text is fundamentally a visual medium of communication. The author makes a good point about how VLMs can still struggle to determine the length of a word, or generate words that start and end with specific letters, etc. which is an indicator that an essential aspect of a modality (its visual aspect) is missing from how it is processed. Surely a unified visual process for text and image would not have such failure points.

I agree that modality specific processing is very shallow at this point, but it still seems not to respect the physicality of the data. Today's modalities are not actually akin to human senses because they should be processed by a different assortment of "sense" organs, e.g. one for things visual, one for things audible, etc.
by grumpyinfosec | 2025-06-05 15:29:43+00:00
i always think about e911 calling for enterprise VoIP software phones. In order to make sure the calls go the right 911 local call center it is required to have the user enter the address they are using the computer at. It's the law and the fines for routing to the 911 center of last resort aren't cheap. And thats just the tip of iceberg if required employer surveillance just to follow the damn law.

https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/voip_and_911_service...
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-06-05 15:29:56+00:00
> It is virtually impossible for them to ship a backdoor [..] without the security community noticing.

OpenSSH was trivially backdoor'd [1] and distributed in several major distributions and the security community _did not_ notice until after it was already wild.

[1] https://www.ssh.com/blog/a-recap-of-the-openssh-and-xz-liblz...
by albru | 2025-06-05 15:30:26+00:00
We help people easily write keepsake books in their browser from single stories they write in separate sections. Meminto then assembles all the snippets into the finished book.

Currently, we display a preview using xpdfeditor.js – but some books have 300-500 pages, and if an unwanted line break occurs on page 50, it can't be easily adjusted in the PDF.

How could we solve this differently so that there is a clean page view, where the page breaks really match the printed book?
by vel0city | 2025-06-05 15:31:30+00:00
You can make those IPv6 IP addresses permanent and long-lived. They don't need to be short-lived addresses.

Also, I've seen lots of home firewalls which will identify a device based on MAC address for match criteria and let you set firewall rules based on those, so even if their IPv6 address does change often it still matches the traffic.
by velomash | 2025-06-05 15:31:52+00:00
This is why many developers are upset with AI. A lot of us love the craft of writing code. The last version worked. There was no need to rewrite other than enjoyment.

“Delivering value” without the craft of coding a project grates against many.

I too enjoy that process, but I’m also learning when and how the ultra boost of AI assistance can fit into a quality first / crafting mentality.

I suspect the author would shudder at the thought though
by solardev | 2025-06-05 15:32:48+00:00
Next was so good at first with just the page router and ISR. That solved like 90% of common front-end headaches, especially compared to the hodgepodge of other React Frankensteins at the time.

Then they pivoted to the overengineered insanity that is RSC and the app router.

I have yet to see a project or developer use that to its potential. I don't know who they're targeting anymore, feels like some sort of mythical 100x developer who loves hyper optimizing every paragraph differently.

I work in support (for another company) now and several times a week I see Next users confused by all the different options. Their documentation isn't great at explaining all the differences either. They're moving way too fast and leaving all the developers behind and adding more and more black box magic optimized for Vercel hosting.

Enshittification as always, I suppose.

Maybe it's time to fork it into something simpler and stabler? I would be perfectly happy with Next from four or five years ago. Prev.js?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-05 15:33:00+00:00
> "How do I use bits to represent concepts in the problem domain?" is the fundamental, original problem of computer science.

> It is, however, about concepts like binary place-value arithmetic

That is the original problem of using a particular digital machine architecture. One shouldn't confuse the practical/instrumental problems at the time with the field proper. There's nothing special about bits per se. They're an implementation detail. We might study them for practical reasons, we may study the limits of what can be represented by or computed using binary encodings, or efficient ways to do so or whatever, but that's not the central concern of computer science.

> In second year university I learned computer organization more or less in parallel with assembly.

Sure. But just because a CS major learns these things doesn't make it computer science per se. It's interesting to learn, sure, and has practical utility, but particular computer architectures are not the domain of computer science. They're the domain of computer engineering.

> The astronomer is, however, studying light.

No, physicists studying optics study light in this capacity. Astronomers know about light, because knowledge of light is useful for things like computing interstellar distances or determining the composition of stellar objects or for calculating the rate of expansion or whatever. The same goes for knowledge of lenses and telescopes: they learn about them so they can use them, but they don't study them.
by mindslight | 2025-06-05 15:33:38+00:00
As you've said, the problem is perception. Our academic and scientific research institutions are one of the pillars holding up our economic empire, supporting our extremely high standard of living.

We can rationally discuss the replication crisis, perfunctory DEI rituals, overgrown humanities departments etc. But as I said, at the moment these concerns are being used to empower a madman who is not looking to reform but rather wholesale destroy them (and at best, install his own flavor of Lysenkoism into what remains), to cripple our country.

We are long past the political point where the criticisms are doing anything productive, and as I said it is time to pull up out of the destructionist movement. And yes, the pisser is that if we successfully save our institutions, then these concerns will be taking a back seat for quite some time, having had their political capital exhausted. See also freedom of speech and every other lofty ideal put on the bad faith bonfire by the destructionists. If we had wanted to avoid this, then we needed to pull up much sooner from the easy answers of destructionism.
by orbital-decay | 2025-06-05 15:34:05+00:00
Base models are not that interesting, pure unsupervised shoggoths just don't know what you expect them to write and don't perform well. The only good thing about them is variance, as further training usually kills it. Alignment is not just censorship, it literally aligns the outputs with what you (or rather the developers) want and improves performance for the things they want.
by arp242 | 2025-06-05 15:35:01+00:00
I omitted some bits from the quote for brevity and HN's faux-quoting sucks, but that's not really the type of "cost" the article is talking about: "maybe they’re suffering from much more subtle neurological effects, like being prone to insomnia or hallucinations or sexual dysfunction. Or maybe they’re just a bit dim."
by seabrookmx | 2025-06-05 15:35:55+00:00
Possibly? I haven't found any public documentation that says specifically what hypervisor is used.

Google built crosvm which was the initial inspiration for firecracker, but Cloud Run runs on top of Borg (this fact is publicly documented). Borg is closed source, so it's possible the specific hypervisor they're using is as well.
by dogman144 | 2025-06-05 15:36:09+00:00
You raise good points but the target of your support feels misplaced. Want private ai? You must self-host and inspect if it’s phoning home. No way around it in my view.

Otherwise, you are picking your data privacy champions as the exact same companies, people and investors that sold us social media, and did something quite untoward with the data they got. Fool me twice, fool me three times… where is the line?

In other words - OAI has to save logs now? Candidly they probably were already, or it’s foolish not to assume that.
by Festro | 2025-06-05 15:36:20+00:00
Article needs to address the premise more clearly. Why can't we embody AI?

The author seems afraid that AI would replace and wipe out humans.

1) Is that a bad thing? 2) the author is literally anthropomorphising AI - giving it traits of humans (aggression, desire for conflict, genocide) just because they might look human.

These are not encessary truths and the article leaves them totally unaddressed. There may be valid evidence and support for 1 and 2 being bad/true but since they're not covered the article is just unsubstantiated fearmongering.

The real topic is "how do we ensure our bad traits aren't passed on to AI made in our image".
by solardev | 2025-06-05 15:36:31+00:00
Git is the one software that I know less about the more I use it. 10+ years now, and every month I learn some new quirk. It very much has that "designed by engineers, for one particular super smart engineer, gl everyone else" vibe. I'm like a 0.5x dev at best and my brain doesn't have enough folds to fit its mental model.