MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-07-27 20:10:55+00:00
Two things I’m thinking on.

Firstly a DevManual - for “any” software team/IT dept - how to think about the philosophy, history and practise of basically everything - release management, backup and recovery or IAM and security and marketing-by-engineering or CSS

It’s kind of “this much I know” and a working docker based OSS “software team in a box”

And the second one is really expanding on the philosophy - how software is changing companies and how democracy works with software
by dm03514 | 2025-07-27 20:10:56+00:00
Productionizing duckdb :) I built a streaming tool around duckdb that allows for high performance stream processing and a rich connector ecosystem:

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

Building a company around a tool is hard. There's been some interest but streaming is kind of commoditized.

I'm taking everything I learned building it and working on a customer-facing security product, more to come on that :)
by bluebarbet | 2025-07-27 20:10:57+00:00
The system you are describing exists already, in China. And indeed it "makes many, many things possible". For one, it makes the concept of a ticket meaningless: either your "single living organism" (i.e. biometric ID) has permission to enter the movie theater, or get on the train, or whatever, or it doesn't. The hassle reduction is enormous! And it is also widely considered dystopian.

Clearly the crucial issue is the "untraceability" of the ID. In practice somebody is going to have to know who is who, and in practice the state is going to arrogate that role, as perhaps it should. So the fundamental question is whether it is possible to make the state democratically accountable.
by thepoet | 2025-07-27 20:11:25+00:00
I am working on a chess analytics tool, specifically a free and open source replacement of Chessbase in this age of LLMs that can run on all platforms. The idea is to lower the barrier of entry to use a chess improvement tool since Chessbase can be intimidating for a causal Chess.com beginner looking to go into serious chess prep. At present, it can do basic queries like H2H score of Magnus Carlsen vs Hikaru Nakamura, the top 10 juniors in the US, Magnus Carlsen's games with the London system opening and involving a queen sacrifice etc. Though getting it to work for advanced multi-step tactical patterns and finding games with certain imbalances in the query using natural language is getting challenging. DuckDB has helped a lot, along with modern LLMs for query generation with schema and some preprocessing of game PGNs and piece hashes. It can also import a user's Chess.com and Lichess games given the usernames and do similar queries as on Master level games.

I also used the tool to generate an Adult Chess improvers FIDE rank list for all federations around the world. Here are the July 2025 rankings though it still needs major improvements in filtering - https://chess-ranking.pages.dev

------------------

Another idea that I have been working on for sometime is connecting my Gmail which is a source of truth for all financial, travel, personal related stuff to a LLM that can do isolated code execution to generate beautiful infographics, charts, etc. on my travels, spending patterns. The idea is to do local processing on my emails while generating the actual queries blindly using a powerful remote LLM by only providing a schema and an emails 'fingerprint' kind of file that gives the LLM a sense of what country, region, interests we might be talking about without actually transmitting personal data. The level of privacy of the 'fingerprint' vs the quality of queries generated is something I have been very confused with.
by vldszn | 2025-07-27 20:11:33+00:00
I’m working on a free & open-source invoice generator:

- Live PDF preview

- 100% client-side

- No sign-up required

- Includes a Stripe-style invoice template

- Built with modern web tech – simple to self-host or fork

Repo: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

Demo: https://easyinvoicepdf.com

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features!
by jesse__ | 2025-07-27 20:11:38+00:00
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
by marginalia_nu | 2025-07-27 20:12:10+00:00
Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot.

I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-based index readers. I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.

[1] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf
by jitl | 2025-07-27 20:12:16+00:00
> just so a secret (of any kind) is never required on the client

This is how web clients usually work though not NextJS special at all. You have a HTTP only cookie for authentication and proxy requests through your backend to authorize client to perform actions that depend on secrets.

I’m not a NextJS proponent and have experienced frustrations running into its limitations but I think in this case it’s unfair to malign it.

If anything NextJS makes this easier, you just move your function call that uses a secret to a “use server” file and add an authorization check but your client code doesn’t need to change you keep importing it and calling it like a regular async function.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-27 20:13:33+00:00
I don't see why it couldn't be done in a crunch if we had to for some reason. SpaceX isn't pursuing such a thing because it would be a dumb idea rather than wait for the Starship program.

Falcon 9 regularly sends 17 Tons to LEO 2-3 times per week and is human rated. We could probably build a Mars shuttle in orbit, similar to how the ISS was constructed. We've already landed an SUV-sized robot on Mars. There are some open questions like orbital propellent transfer but it doesn't seem like it would be impossible to me.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-27 20:14:02+00:00
I’m a dev not a designer, but I’d personally point to a few things:

- An influx of print/commercial/etc designers into UI design, who lack the full suite of knowledge and skills to design usable UI, crowding out the UI designer old guard

- The likes of Dribbble and other social media kicking off self reinforcing minimalism trends within the field

- The rise of “UI as branding” which places brand identity far above practical usability in terms of priorities

There are other factors like indie devs not wanting to hire a designer for their projects and just phoning that part in (which flat is conducive to), but they don’t have nearly as much sway on industry trends at large.
by b_fiive | 2025-07-27 20:14:09+00:00
sibling comment with links to docs is the more accurate, but to summarize, it's some of both:

* all connections are always e2ee (even when traffic flows through a relay)

* relays are both for connection negotiation, and as a fallback when a direct connection isn't possible

* initial packet is always sent through the relay to keep a fast time-to-first-byte, while a direct connection is negotiated in parallel. typical connections send a few hundred bytes over the relay & the rest of the connection lifetime is direct
by valianteffort | 2025-07-27 20:14:12+00:00
> Experience has show we cannot build secure systems

It's an unpopular idea because its bullshit. Building secure systems is trivial and at the skill level of a junior engineer. Most of these "hacks" are not elaborate attacks utilizing esoteric knowledge to discover new vectors. They are the same exploit chains targeting bad programming practices, out of date libraries, etc.

Lousy code monkeys or medicore programmers are the ones introducing vulnerabilities. We all know who they are. We all have to deal with them thanks to some brilliant middle manager figuring out how to cut costs for the org.
by chidog12 | 2025-07-27 20:14:17+00:00
Working on Lunova — a QuickBooks Online app that you can create custom alerts via SMS/email such as when big deposits land, invoices go overdue, or vendor prices spike. Just cleared Intuit’s tech/security + marketing review (Took over 3 months... after building the MVP) and we’re now live on the QBO App Store. Feedback and feature requests welcome: https://uselunova.com
by nkristoffersen | 2025-07-27 20:14:30+00:00
We are working on Gossip: the future of media insights (think Meltwater, Brandwatch, etc).

It’s been a journey but getting close to launching our first version to pilot customers in August. We use an enormous amounts of AI tokens every month to extract data not possible with any traditional player in this media monitoring space. Benchmarking competitors, tracking impactful discussions, and receiving actionable brand insights.

If you are currently using one of the big media monitoring companies, I’d love to chat!

https://www.gossipinsights.com/en/top-companies/us/
by seanwilson | 2025-07-27 20:15:59+00:00
Thanks! To clarify, it's aimed at more than just Tailwind, but Tailwind popularized the color naming like red-500, blue-100, green-900 etc. so I went with that convention.

You can use the CSS export in regular CSS projects directly e.g. via `color: var(--red-900)`, or something like `--bs-danger: var(--red-500)` for Bootstrap projects with semantic naming. The same export format works for Tailwind too because since version 4, Tailwind is mostly configured via CSS variables now.

I probably need to make this more obvious, but if all your swatches have the linked/shared lightness option set, you can pick lightnesses where all grade 500 colors contrast against all grade 100 colors, all grade 600 colors contrast against all grade 200 colors etc. so when you're picking colors in CSS, you know by design which colors will contrast without having to go check them.
by nlitened | 2025-07-27 20:16:10+00:00
My opinion is that no change of climate (beyond external impact) would be able to wipe humanity from the face of Earth. Even world-wide nuclear war would merely dent the total human population numbers for a few decades at most.

Food production and logistics are getting more effective and more efficient over time, any hunger that has happened in the past century and will ever happen — was and will be entirely social/political in nature. We’re in no danger of food randomly disappearing naturally, as far as I understand.

We are in danger of social changes though. Current civilizations might collapse, bringing hunger and death to hundreds of millions.
by jvink | 2025-07-27 20:16:53+00:00
Working on sanctum [0] and reliquary [1].

Soon approaching a 1.0 release for sanctum once I get my brain out of vacation mode and into hacking mode again. A lot has happened this year and I am excited.

I will be talking about how sanctum and its cathedrals work at sec-t 2025 [2] so in full swing working on the demos and presentation.

[0] https://github.com/jorisvink/sanctum

[1] https://reliquary.se

[2] https://sec-t.org
by dang | 2025-07-27 20:17:21+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded below. Are there others?

Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685011 - July 2025 (806 comments)

Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (244 comments)

Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (52 comments)

Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (318 comments)

Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
by circuit10 | 2025-07-27 20:17:49+00:00
I wasn't annoyed about it, I just said it might be good to mention because people will notice anyway, and at this point there's enough AI slop around that it can make people automatically ignore it so it would be good to explain that. I'm surprised I got downvotes and pushback for this, I thought it was a common view that it's good to disclose this kind of thing and I thought I was polite about it
by allenu | 2025-07-27 20:19:12+00:00
I'm working on an update to my flashcards app, Fresh Cards. The current version has a lot of limitations, so I've been working on a rewrite that improves all aspects of the app, for nearly a year now.

Most recently, I've been incorporating a lot of improved UX design. The app has always used a playlist metaphor, i.e. your database of flashcards is your library and you can sort them in different ways and then hit Play to start reviewing. Within the review session itself, you go through the cards in the playlist in small batches so that it's less overwhelming, among other reasons. After every batch, the app returns to an overview screen so you can see what you've just reviewed so far in the session.

The challenge has been designing this overview screen so it's clear where you are in the playlist without making it overwhelming. I finally came up with a good design this week, which I was quite happy with: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/114921335089371494

I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement this new UI has made on how the product feels. The old UI only showed you the history of cards you've reviewed in the session and highlighted the most recent batch of cards. This new one shows you the full playlist, but redacts the contents of the playlist ahead, so you immediately get a sense of how much left there is to do, but without being shown what is in the contents of the cards. Interestingly, this has the effect of making you want to see what is in those cards, i.e. to keep reviewing!
by mertleee | 2025-07-27 20:19:16+00:00
This is an exemplary reason to not work for a startup.

Cash is king - never work for free or let some overzealous founder (who has tons of equity and is ok working for poverty wages) try to encourage you to work longer or harder "because equity go up one day".

The founders of Windsurf are clearly horrible people and the fact they were DM'ing people on twitter trying to explain being awful people really reflects the current state of the valley.

Garry Tan even deleted a comment on this tweet where to Windsurf employee #2 he said "looks like you left $20M on the table". These people see employees as replaceable widgets and to them this is just a game build around the "excitement of building".

Legitimately F*CK these people.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 20:19:37+00:00
Thank you very much!

I totally agree on reinventing the wheel. I think our biggest tool towards that will be Node-API, which is the one low-level building block that JavaScript runtimes seem to agree on (and heck, I'm sure non-JavaScript engines could implement a decent chunk of Node-API). The Hermes team are currently interested in it (https://github.com/facebook/hermes/pull/1377#issuecomment-29...) for implementing heavy chunks of the ECMAScript spec like Intl and Temporal as plug-in features.

It's interesting that you bring up tooling like npm and Cargo, I've never thought of sharing those. Although I'm no great shakes at Rust, I really, really liked how Cargo did things (e.g. optional dependencies and rigid library structure) and it'd be incredible to have that for the JavaScript ecosystem.

Also do keep hearing nothing but great things about Graal, I think it's being slept on.
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-27 20:19:44+00:00
A node in the Lightning network (to simplify a lot) become the payment processor that would be targeted.

(But it's kind of spurious- in practice, Coinbase, Block, etc. would be targeted far before someone running a Lightning node would be. The larger point is that very few people would interact with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a peer in the network.)
by _wire_ | 2025-07-27 20:20:00+00:00
The people of the organization are relentlessly expendable and always have been. What everyone should do is stop working for a living and buy bitcoin er... Microsoft stock... for generations to come, then there's no need for anyone including investors to even be involved in producing anything! Buy now and let the 10th generation pay for it. There are a potentially endless number of future generations so the system is perfect.

Ok so setting the CEO double-speak aside, what we find is that what is being explained by the "memo" is the perpetuation and refinement of a class system, by which, as the character of Niander Wallace put it, a "disposable workforce" can be perfected.

So what kind of robot will be infinitely adaptable to all purposes and able to calculate its own participation? A Rossum Universal Robot? An AGI robot?

Here's the class hazard that's being engineered into society by all these tech dweebs who happened to escape a vicious class system in another country just so they can reengineer it from the catbird seat of freedom land: The robot is supposed to be better than human and to do precisely what it is told. This paradox will only be resolved by a heretofore unknown intelligence.

The wackiest part of this whole weird plan of post-colonial slavers building a new army of slaver is that the tech dweebs want to upload themselves into such robots; presumably they'll get a special chip to make sure that they are confused with the "other," wink-wink, robots.

There's another way to look at all this which is more pragmatic, comprehensible, and in keeping with all forms of "progress" and that is concentrated wealth is simply taking one more step in a long history to further enrich itself according to the microscopically short attention spans and fetish of its leaders to rearrange the puzzle pieces of their corporate externalities without the slightest care for their society. And why should they care? They're rich and insulated from the negative determinations of their own plans, life is short, gotta make hay and hopefully they'll be loaded int... Whoops!
by barkingcat | 2025-07-27 20:20:42+00:00
There's also the Eclipse VScode-look-alike-reimplementation called TheiaIDE

https://theia-ide.org/

It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users. It has LSP support and the same Monaco editor backend - which is all I need.

It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.
by jonator | 2025-07-27 20:20:54+00:00
Even if you're working on a large complex system like that, I believe coding agents are still useful at at least taking highly specific prompts/instructions you write and doing the writing for you. Then doing other tedious tangential work like generating unit tests over a pure function, adding comments, generating documentation, etc that all increase the quality of the codebase without requiring toil on your part.

With especially novel or complex projects, you'd probably not expect to use the agent to do much of the scaffolding or architecting, and more of the tedium.
by reverseblade2 | 2025-07-27 20:21:01+00:00
Working on 3dpack.ing, an AI-powered 3D container loading tool.

It calculates optimal ways to load boxes into trucks or containers, considering stacking rules, fragility, and real-world constraints. You can drag boxes like 3D Tetris or upload photos to auto-estimate item dimensions. Recently added: batch-wise guided loading for warehouse use cases.

We're at ~$400 MRR and just opened up a 14-day free trial. Feedback, trials, and intros to logistics folks welcome.
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-27 20:21:40+00:00
It's disingenuous to call LLMs "translation software", and it's bad advice to say "don't pay attention those people".

Even if you don't agree with it, publishing AI generated content will exclude from ones audience the people who won't read AI generated content. It is a tradeoff one has to decide whether or not to make.

I'm sympathetic to someone who has to decide whether to publish in 'broken english' or to run it through the latest in grammar software. For my time, I far prefer the former (and have been consuming "broken english" for a long while, it's one of the beautiful things about the internet!)
by dang | 2025-07-27 20:21:44+00:00
Shepard Tone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148109 - April 2024 (1 comment)

Shepard Tone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750931 - June 2022 (41 comments)

Shepard Tone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20670966 - Aug 2019 (34 comments)

Shepard tone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679196 - Oct 2012 (34 comments)
by jedberg | 2025-07-27 20:22:06+00:00
I'm working on DBOS Transact [0], our open source library that adds durability and reliability to your codebase. We're about to launch support for Golang [1] and Java, and that's going to bring some really interesting customer problems. I can't wait!

[0] https://github.com/dbos-inc

[1] https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-go
by codingdave | 2025-07-27 20:22:31+00:00
> The most publicized sightings took place on consecutive weekends...

That is why so many of the UFO sightings are non-interesting to me. I'm open to there being extraterrestrial life. But even putting aside the question of why we would be interesting to them... why would they come here and match humanity's patterns? Why would they show up on weekends? Why would they have flashing lights that match our airplanes?

I just take the term UFO at face value and say, OK, we don't know what was up there.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-27 20:23:09+00:00
> Being forced to sit in a chair the entire day with nothing to do is torture; if they are picking that instead of doing their work there's a real problem somewhere.

I don’t know what you’re arguing at this point. I’m not talk about people sitting in a chair doing nothing.

> - I really doubt the people in question actually face "no consequences" and are not threatened all the time. That almost never happens in practice.

Are you just rejecting the existence of this situation because you don’t believe it?

I really don’t understand what you’re trying to even imply. I have anecdotes about different offices that accomplish the same exact task, but one was run very well and the other was not the slightest bit interested in running well. If you’re just choosing not to believe that a DMV office could be run poorly then I don’t know what to say, other than this conversation is going nowhere.
by benrutter | 2025-07-27 20:23:09+00:00
I suppose I think what you've said - not specifically regarding itch, but I'm on board with some kinds of curbs on speech like hate speech.

I don't think it's a complex position though, I think free speech is good. But I think other things like people's ability to leave lives free from abuse is good as well.

Sometimes free speech can be in conflict with something else that's good. You don't have to agree on the specific, but I think it's at least a coherent non-crazy position.