MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A simple tool to convert a CSV to a polished PDF
by maxvmaximus | 2025-07-30 06:29:38+00:00
QuickReport is a simple tool to convert a CSV to a polished PDF without touching Excel or Sheets!

I built it because I wanted to quickly format raw tabular data in a presentable manner that I could send via email without having to use Excel or Sheets and spend 10 or more minutes to make the PDF look good.

It is an early MVP as of now with some limitations but I am actively working on improving it! I built it using React, Tailwind CSS, React-PDF, and Papaparse

I would love your honest feedback! Please let me know if you would find this tool useful and if there are any features that would really make it stand out.

Thanks!
Ask HN: Odd Traffic from Googlebot
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-30 06:30:21+00:00
I've been analyzing server logs and noticed some oddities with traffic originating from Google. I did verify the ASN and reverse DNS. Everything checks out.

Every Googlebot request has a forged or bogus HTTP Host: header, usually populated with some random third-world site I've never heard of. The Referer is likewise forged, and usually points to a page on the bogus Host: header domain.

Is this some coding bug in Googlebot or are they checking for some SSRF exploit I don't quite understand?
by jlebar | 2025-07-30 06:30:58+00:00
> [Trawling around online for information] trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit.

Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing.

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning), calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.
by schmorptron | 2025-07-30 06:31:23+00:00
I'm conflicted about this. Custom tutoring available at all times and at mass sounds like a great thing, if done right. On the other hand, the research skill you mentioned is something that I worry about atrophying as well. Where before, we used to read through 3 or 4 slightly related articles or stackoverflow questions and do the transfer of related topics onto our specific problem ourselves, with a tutor it's all pre-chewed.

Then again, human 1:1 tutoring is the most effective way to learn, isn't it? In the end it'll probably end up being a balance of reading through texts yourself and still researching broadly so you get an idea about the context around whatever it is you're trying to do, and having a tutor available to walk you through if you don't get it?
by mh- | 2025-07-30 06:31:51+00:00
Yes, I shoot in RAW by default most of the time. It can be quickly turned on and off from the stock camera app without even leaving the main screen.

You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
by whstl | 2025-07-30 06:32:55+00:00
Same way as before?

I had school teachers routinely teach me wrong stuff.

The only way is comparing notes, talking to peers and parents.

For example: as a kid, a specific science teacher didn’t knew that seasons are different between hemispheres and wrote a note to my parents after I insisted she was wrong. My grandfather, an immigrant, took it to himself to set her straight.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-30 06:33:20+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Specifically, the propaganda model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

> First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".
by menaerus | 2025-07-30 06:34:48+00:00
Too expensive from what I have seen - price for reasonably large GPU rigs that can host medium to large models is anywhere between ~5$/hr to ~9$/hr. That's ~40$-72$ for 8-hour working day or ~800$-1500$ for ~20 working days in a month. That's ~1000$ a month in average. This doesn't math for me.
by ta8903 | 2025-07-30 06:35:28+00:00
>Linux needs a killer app, not just equivalent-app or "linux flavored" app that does the same thing, a DAW, a font editor, a GIS app, something.

Those examples aren't killer apps because they could be ran in Windows/Linux through these compatibility layers. Linux's 'killer app', if it had one, would be things like better window management that doesn't get in your way, faster file I/O, being able to do more with your hardware.
by raphman | 2025-07-30 06:36:44+00:00
Nice user experience (though I'd hate waiting so long for the first response).

One of my major fears about always-available AI agents is that they will (and already do) infiltrate and disrupt communication in families. In a dystopian timeline, kids won't learn life skills and attitudes from their parents but from the AI nanny made by an American megacorp. Why should kids trust their parents on anything if the AI nanny provides faster and more well researched answers? No need to ask Dad for advice anymore. No need to ask Mom why your friend with dark skin hasn't come to school lately - AI nanny will provide a step-by-step learning experience for you.

That's definitely not the only possible outcome, and each family will have a different experience. Not everyone has parents that give good advice. However, I can't imagine such a tool not having wide-spread effects on intra-family communication and relationships.

Is this a concern to you? If so, how would one mitigate negative effects? Is it the responsibility of software developers to avoid mis-use of such systems?
by tmnvix | 2025-07-30 06:37:41+00:00
I was making no comment on the flagging or moderation of posts, only their submission.

For example, more posts will be submitted that support the view that individuals have a right to privacy than the opposite ('more wrong') view.

You don't seem to be accounting for this outcome - no flagging or moderation, accidental or intentional, just a difference in the number of submissions for each view.

The sun doesn't rise by accident or design, it just rises.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-30 06:37:59+00:00
> to not use LLMs for curiosity and other non-important situations is starting to seem more and more like tech luddism

We're on a topic talking about using an LLM to study. I don't particularly care if someone wants an AI boyfriend to whisper sweet nothings into their ear. I do care when people will claim to have AI doctors and lawyers.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-07-30 06:38:11+00:00
CSAM scanning has been around for at least 15 years. All service providers are required to do it by law.

You are absolutely correct with your "what-ifs" and this underlines the need for more oversight and transparency.

The process (my knowledge is a few years old) is that service providers or Law enforcement from countries can submit files to the CSAM database.

The database is owned by National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Once they receive the files they review them and confirm that the files meet the standard for the database, document its entry, create a hash and add that to the database. After that the file is destroyed.

This whole process requires multiple approvals and numerous humans review the files before the hash goes into the CSAM.

Also every hash has a chain of custody. So in the event of an investigation they know exactly everyone who was involved in putting that hash into CSAM.

So it's possible to submit an image that is not what CSAM is intended for, but the chances of it even remotely getting into the database is next to nothing. To add to this service providers can be sued for submitting invalid files.
by throw310822 | 2025-07-30 06:38:14+00:00
True, Palestine can't win against Israel with its own forces. No military can, in fact, as the world's sole superpower is ready to defend it unconditionally and at all costs.

So the only way out is to force the West to change their mind and break their ties with Israel. I don't know if those who planned October 7 had in mind only to use the hostages to keep the West's attention on Palestine, or if they had already taken in account Israel's barbaric reaction. Somehow though, at an absurd price, it's working. The public image of Israel is compromised for decades, people are horrified, Israeli lobbies are exposed, the ICC has issued arrest warrants against the Israeli PM, the call for sanctions is louder every day, the images of a new genocide are on everyone's screens.

What is incredible is the straitjacket that the Israeli lobbies have put the Western leaders in: two years into a televised genocide the Western powers have barely started to condemn it in words, but still have failed to take any meaningful action. Of this, too, the people are taking notice.
by rramadass | 2025-07-30 06:39:04+00:00
Samkhya gives you the Worldview/Model and Patanjala Ashtanga Yoga gives you a practical framework/discipline to implement it. Here is a older comment of mine which you might find useful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41538322

Also see the classic Yoga and Western Psychology: A Comparison by Geraldine Coster - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.189086/page/n1...
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-30 06:40:30+00:00
> Personally I'm more annoyed of async-Rust itself than not having a blessed async solution in-tree. Having to just Arc<T> away things here and there because you can't do thread::scope(f) honestly just demonstrates how stackless coroutine is unreasonably hard to everyone.

Yeah as annoying as this is, I think it actually played out to benefit Rust -- imagine if the churn that we saw in tokio/async-std/smol/etc played out in tree? I think things might ahve been even worse

That said, stackless coroutines are certainly unreasonably hard.

> Back to the original topic, I bring this up because I believe the performance advantages claimed in these "fibers bad" papers are superficial, and the limit is almost the same (think 1.00 vs 1.02 level almost), even in languages which consider raw performance as a selling-point. In case you need the absolutely lowest overhead and latency you usually want the timing to be as deterministic as possible too, and it's not even a given in async-await solutions, you still need to be very careful about that.

Yeah, I don't think this is incorrect, and I'd love to see some numbers on it. The only thing that I can say definitively is that there is overhead to doing the literal stack switch. There's a reason async I/O got us past the C10k problem so handily.

One of the nice things about some recent Zig work was how clearly you can see how they do their stack switch -- literally you can jump in the Zig source code (on a branch IIRC) and just read the ASM for various platforms that represents a user space context switch.

Agree with the deterministic timing thing too -- this is one of the big points that people who only want to use threads (and are against tokio/etc) argue -- the pure control and single-mindedness of a core against a problem is clearly simple and performant. Thread per core is still the top for performance, but IMO the ultimate is async runtime thread per core, because some (important) problems are embarassingly concurrent.

> Let alone Python.

Yeah, I' trying really not to comment much on Python because I'm out of my depth and I think there are...

I mean I'm of the opinion that JS (really TS) is the better scripting language (better bolt-on type systems, got threads faster, never had a GIL, lucked into being async-forward and getting all it's users used to async behavior), but obviously Python is a powerhouse and a crucially important ecosystem (excluding the AI hype).
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-30 06:41:49+00:00
I live in Minnesota and the struggle is tough. Either my yard is completely unenjoyable for the family due to mosquitoes and deer flies some years or I kill 50 insects that I don’t want for every one that I do.

I put up deer fly traps every year and that helps, but this year in particular has been awful for both them and mosquitoes. Luckily for the bugs my sprayer is broken and I haven’t had time to fix it.

I deliberately avoid the place on our property where fireflies are, on the years that I do spray. We really need a better solution.

Just to be clear, if we go outside right now we instantly have multiple deer flies trying to land on us and bite, which is only a distraction for the mosquitoes. Without swatting I’d probably get a mosquito bite a minute midday or maybe 5-10 a minute at 7pm.
by johntopia | 2025-07-30 06:42:05+00:00
totally fair concern. we’re actually on the same side when it comes to promoting good security practices like SSO.

the reason we’re gating the admin server under a business license is less about profiting off sso and more about drawing a line between individual and organizational use. it includes a bunch of enterprise-specific features (sso, access control, integrations, ...) that typically require more support and maintenance.

that said, the core app is fully open-source and always will be - so individuals and teams who don’t need the admin layer can still use it freely and privately, without compromising security.

we’ll keep listening and evolving the model - after all, we're still very early and flexible. appreciate the pushback.

(edit: added some more words to reinforce our flexibility)
by ge96 | 2025-07-30 06:42:15+00:00
I thought it was some TPM thing

My rig is not that impressive, i9 with 4070 what sucks is the ram is locked for some reason at 2400mhz even if I buy ram that is faster than that so idk. I swear it that was the specific cpu (10th gen)

I did go through a bunch of steps checking trying to get it to work, stuff in bios enabling settings
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-30 06:42:49+00:00
>I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

What social value is an AI chatbot giving to us here, though?

>You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning)

Yes, and as we speak countries are determining how to handle the advent of social media as this centralized means of propaganda, abuse vector, and general way to disconnect local communities. It clearly has a different magnitude of impact than etching on a stone tablet. The UK made a particularly controversial decision recently.

I see AI more in that camp than in the one of pencil erasers.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-30 06:43:16+00:00
I mean, isn't the point to remove the distinction? If you tell apt/dnf/zypper/apk/... to remove everything, then the thing that will stop you isn't the base OS being separate, it's that they mark the core packages as special and require you to force the matter. (And I agree with the other commenter that this should be done for pkg but that's why it's experimental right now)
by messe | 2025-07-30 06:43:16+00:00
> Consider this command:

# pkg delete -af

> [...]

> What the same "pkg delete -af" command does on a PKGBASE FreeBSD system?

> It kills/destroys almost all of the FreeBSD Base System [...]

> POLA is the principle that made FreeBSD such predictable system. Where is the POLA now?

IMO if you convert the base system to be installed via packages and then force delete all packages, then the principle of least astonishment says that you'll delete most of the base system too.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-30 06:43:18+00:00
I think you’re out of touch. A tsunami is a wave both from a pedantic perspective and an intuitive one and most people aren’t deceived into thinking that tsunamis aren’t dangerous at all because it’s a wave. That’s just made up garbage.

You’re like coming up to me and saying hurricane is not wind because it’s dangerous to think of a hurricane as only wind.

Dude. Nobody is thinking hurricanes are just chill just because hurricanes are wind. This is a fucking non-issue.

I think what you’re trying to say is that the wave length of a tsunami is much longer than the amplitude even though the amplitude is still epically high. But don’t try to conflate this with a safety issue of people dying because somebody called it a “wave” that’s just garbage.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-30 06:45:39+00:00
Put up a decent demo video on youtube so people can get an idea of how to use it, and start to see its potential.

This will be neither quick nor easy. You'll have to decide on what kind of angle to approach it from: cold and 'just the facts' or light and funny using appropriately light and funny demo material, or somewhere in between. Match it to the market or demographic you're aiming for.

Recent example of a great demo video that's gotten positive commentary on HN and in the YT comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0 (this has the advantage of being a wizard-level piece of software).

Also, use those differentiation examples on the homepage with the same "slide to show the difference" effect that the existing homepage example images have (they look generic, they give a very "just another AI image generator" vibe).

Lastly, but probably should be firstly: Choose the one coolest, differentest thing your software does, and create the coolest, differentest example of the use of that thing, and press heavily on that.

Lastly lastly, and probably should be firstly firstly, if you plan to do any of the above, then _fucking plan it out_ don't just go haphazardly into starting to make a video. Tell the boss the plan, including a rough idea of how long it might take to go from now to "available on youtube / homepage / anywhere else". By planning and scheduling, the boss can give you a yay or nay before you've actually done the work. It will also give the boss some confidence that you're thinking strategically rather than flying by the seat of your pants.

Internet engagement is a cruel game of chance though, so even if you do everything right, you can still fail miserably. If so, get up and go again.
by ookblah | 2025-07-30 06:46:15+00:00
leave it up to HN to once again choose the most black/white this or that extreme positions as if having a 24/7 tutor that isn't perfect is somehow worse than having nothing at all. if it hallucinates you keep digging and correlate with sources to figure out if it's true, or you ask other people.

the internet, wikipedia, SO, etc. all these things had the EXACT same arguments against it and guess what? people who want to use TOOLS that help them to study better will gain, and people who are lazy will ...be worse off as it has always been.

i don't know why i bother to engage in these threads except to offer my paltry 2 cents. for being such a tech and forward thinking community there's almost this knee jerk reaction against ANYTHING llm (which i suppose i understand). a lot of us are missing the forest for the trees here.
by MrManatee | 2025-07-30 06:46:59+00:00
Yeah. I can believe that this will improve in the future, and this is a technology preview and all. But my takeaway from the video is that it is still too vibey for me to trust it. If I was coaching a junior data analyst at my company, and they wrote this code, I would happily give some feedback so that they can improve. With AI, I'd probably just do the analysis myself.

In addition to the hardcoded lookup table, here are some other notes on the generated code:

1. Silently assuming that the first page of results contains all of the data feels a bit fragile. If we're not going to bother with paging otherwise, I'd at least assert that the first page contains everything.

2. Unlike the code comment claims, 2022 is not the latest year that has data available, 2023 is. The reason this is worrisome is not that the difference is massive, but because of methodological implications. It looks like the year 2022 came from "remembering" details from some other code that was analyzing this same data set instead of just looking at current version of the data set we're supposed to be analyzing.

3. The code for removing the world aggregate doesn't actually work (although it doesn't matter for the map). The place where it says d.country.id !== "WLD" should be either d.country.id !== "1W" or d.countryiso3code !== "WLD" instead. Also, if it would actually be important to filter this then presumably it would also be important to filter out a bunch of other aggregates as well.

4. The text says "darker colors indicating higher life expectancy", which is pretty much the opposite of how I would describe this color scheme.

5. The analysis given is: "Notice how certain regions tend to cluster together in terms of life expectancy, reflecting similar economic, healthcare, and social conditions". This is such a bland take. It feels like something I could have written before seeing the data. I would try to encourage the analyst to look for something more concrete and more interesting.

6. The actual thing that immediately pops out from the map is that the Central African Republic is a massive outlier with a life expectancy of 18.8 years, whereas every other country is over 50. This doesn't seem plausible. I would do something about that just so that it doesn't mess up the colors of the entire map.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-30 06:47:26+00:00
yeah agree. I decided I wasn't a photographer, though I'm still interested in it.

> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.

"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?