MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by farkin88 | 2025-08-04 00:32:19+00:00
That robustness-vs-throughput trade-off is such a staple of PDF parsing. My guess is that the new path is slower because the recovery scan now always walks the whole byte range and has to inflate any object streams it meets before it can trust the offsets even when the first startxref would have been fine.

The 10k-file test set sounds great for confidence-building. Are the failures clustering around certain producer apps like Word, InDesign, scanners, etc.? Or is it just long-tail randomness?

Reading the PR, I like the recovery-first mindset. If the common real-world case is that offsets lie, treating salvage as the default is arguably the most spec-conformant thing you can do. Slow-and-correct beats fast-and-brittle for PDFs any day.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-04 00:32:36+00:00
Warning to anyone who goes down this rabbit hole: If you set up a home lab, don't tell people who you're not close with. There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly. I wish this wasn't the case, but as a society, we're not ready to talk about bio outside of institutions and universities.

Also, the costs are deceptive, even with used or Chinese parts: I estimate $10k USD for a usable molecular bio lab, including equipment and reagents.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-04 00:33:29+00:00
> It seems strangely opaque for such a large-scale project.

They are taking very large calculated risks, attempting their first success, apparently with reason to believe it may work, in a market with enormous financial potential.

This a good period to shut-up and execute, and neither set themselves up to be a public debacle, or set up competition to arrive closer on their heals.
by userbinator | 2025-08-04 00:35:50+00:00
As someone who has written a PDF parser - it's definitely one of the weirdest formats I've seen, and IMHO much of it is caused by attempting to be a mix of both binary and text; and I suspect at least some of these weird cases of bad "incorrect but close" xref offsets may be caused by buggy code that's dealing with LF/CR conversions.

What the article doesn't mention is a lot of newer PDFs (v1.5+) don't even have a regular textual xref table, but the xref table is itself inside an "xref stream", and I believe v1.6+ can have the option of putting objects inside "object streams" too.
by rachou444 | 2025-08-04 00:36:11+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Rachel and I’ve worked on a bunch of devtools over the years.

One pattern kept coming up: support is always a mess.

Questions are scattered across GitHub Issues, Discord, Slack threads, and emails. Docs help, but only if people want to read them (they usually don’t). A lot of teams either burn time answering the same stuff over and over, or worse, get no signal at all because users silently churn or bounce.

Companies like Railway and Framer built great internal systems for this, but most lean teams don’t have time to build or maintain it.

So I built Paladin, a beautiful, OOTB, free, and AI driven support community that can be set up in seconds.

Here’s what it is: - A shared space for roadmap updates, questions, and feedback (public or private) - An AI support bot trained on your docs, playbooks, and past answers

Features coming soon: - AI-powered insights to help you understand what users are really asking for - AI moderation that flags issues without over-policing—keeps things safe while preserving real discussion - Discord integration that pulls in relevant messages and support threads from your existing community, so tickets and questions don’t get lost in chat

It’s designed to be the support platform you’d eventually build yourself, just available immediately. If you’re working on a product and want to see what this could look like for yours, spin it up in seconds here (https://dashboard.trypaladin.com/).

I would love your feedback! Either drop a comment here or post on Paladin’s support community ;) Thanks for reading!

Rachel
by inetknght | 2025-08-04 00:37:05+00:00
If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often.

There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-04 00:37:46+00:00
This is an unrealistic by definition.

No it isn't, this used to be the norm.

Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.

Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.
by simoncion | 2025-08-04 00:38:10+00:00
Weird. I got sustained symmetric gigabit speed out of an EdgeRouter Lite when it was loaded with a basic firewall and some port forwarding. At the time I purchased it, the thing cost about ten months of your ISP-provided equipment rental.

Maybe the later EdgeRouters are total trash, but the ERL could (and did) totally handle what you're describing.
by benreesman | 2025-08-04 00:38:22+00:00
It's not about restrictions on hiring, you keep repeating that even though no one has advanced that proposal in the whole thread. You have absolutely crushed that strawman argument, congratulations.

It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historically been kept out of the courts for the most part because for the most part it has been in everyone's interests to keep the wheels greased on this (you'll notice old school VCs like Khosla are against fucking around in it in public forums).

Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal. At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".

If the trend becomes to just dissolve a startup the minute its worth anything and immediately partition it into exactly the pieces a giant company wants and zero out everyone else, this will have a massively destabilizing effect on a historical engine of innovation (see: OGs are against it on Twitter).

And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.

Stop talking about the government restricting hiring, no one said that.
by nucleardog | 2025-08-04 00:39:43+00:00
> Honestly it's difficult to not grow the instant opinion that IT should just shut the fuck up and fire themselves. Who the hell do they even work for?

Management. Management whose goals and incentives don't align with yours. Or IT's.

If management cared about your experience and quality of life, then presumably they'd be riding IT to get shit fixed. They'd be providing staff and resources necessary to resolve the issues. They'd be consulting with the staff using the programs before buying/deploying them. They'd be consulting with IT before buying/deploying them. They're not because they don't care.

They went and bought some EHR system and an expensive support contract based pretty much entirely on price and/or how many golf games the vendor would pay for, dropped the steaming pile of turds into IT's lap, and had them implement it. They probably also told them to go ahead and integrate it with all the other systems in use that they sourced the same way.

Meanwhile, every time they've done a budget for the past 20 years they've cut IT just a bit more because it's a cost center so the lower you can get that on your spreadsheet, the better you look, so there's like two kids and a grumpy old balding guy who spends most of his day working on reports for audit and compliance and they're responsible for the entire hospital.

(At the hospital one friend worked at he was responsible for taking support tickets along-side the two other IT staff, working the on-call, and also _every single integration between systems in the hospital_. He wasn't a software developer or anything. He'd just started as purely help desk and seemed to have a vague idea how to write documentation and only cost like $35k/yr so he was clearly the best person to be responsible for communicating with all the vendors and making sure the EHR system could talk to the MRI machines.)

But don't worry, even if this comedy of errors somehow gets to a working state... when that contract's up for renewal, they're going to look at the price and if a better one comes along they'll do the same thing again. Same for every other system in use all of which will have a ripple effect across every other system.

Hey, at least you have job securi--what's that? The hospital was just bought by private equity and merged with another hospital and the entire IT department's laid off effective immediately?
by mrala | 2025-08-04 00:41:20+00:00
You are objectively incorrect almost across the board but especially about what “MLK was looking for.” See: https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15661878/ho...

> I'm presently in the most oppressed group -- I'm a white heterosexual male.

The group you are in is the perpetually seeking victimhood group.

> All the DEI training materials claim that I'm "inherently racist", which is a ploy to punish me unjustly.

Right, the problem is not the actual racism rather it’s pointing out things that could be racist and making racists feel bad about being racist.
by joaoalvarenga | 2025-08-04 00:42:25+00:00
Every time I travel solo, especially through airports or during flights, I spot at least one person deep into code — hoodie up, coffee nearby, focused. And I always wonder: Who are they? What are they building up there in the sky?

That small curiosity turned into a weekend project: I built a VS Code extension that lets you see public check-ins from other devs traveling around (or just working remotely), kind of like a passive "now coding" feed. No chat, no social pressure — just a glimpse into what others are hacking on.

I'm sharing this here because it came from a real itch I had — and I'd love feedback or crazy ideas on how to take it further

Still early stage, but working.
by fzil | 2025-08-04 00:42:51+00:00
> It's unfortunate I couldn't fit the full title "Free, Open-Sourced, Private, Unlimited PDF WebApp. No Registration. No paywalls. No Ads"

HAH!

Also, thanks a lot for building this utility. I've typically used mac's builtin "Preview" app to do some basic PDF operations like deleting some pages and merging two pdfs, but doing so on windows required using some sketchy websites.
by mitchbob | 2025-08-04 00:43:35+00:00
https://archive.ph/PlnQl

For me, the most interesting part is about 4/5 of the way in and starts with

> Some people are pushing back. Neil R. Malhotra is a boyish, energetic, forty-three-year-old neurosurgeon who has made his mark at the University of Pennsylvania as something of a tinkerer. He has a knack for tackling difficult medical problems. In the past year alone, he has published papers on rebuilding spinal disks using tissue engineering, on a better way to teach residents how to repair cerebral aneurysms, and on which spinal-surgery techniques have the lowest level of blood loss. When his hospital’s new electronic-medical-record system arrived, he immediately decided to see if he could hack the system.

A great example of participatory design.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-04 00:45:49+00:00
Popular in:

2023 (100 points, 116 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36903220

2020 (279 points, 319 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336039

2018 (157 points, 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381969
by johnfn | 2025-08-04 00:45:50+00:00
Some AI company needs to create a model that can delegate simple tasks to 'stupider' models. I often encounter a task which is complicated enough to require a strong model like Opus, but which subdivides into a number of tasks - the vast majority of which are enough that 3.5 Sonnet could pick it up. All Opus would need to do is subdivide the task into easy and hard bits, then spin up a bunch of 3.5 Sonnets for the easy stuff.

This seems like such an obvious idea that I'm sure everyone is already working on it!
by NoPicklez | 2025-08-04 00:46:34+00:00
From my experience going to boarding school, living on campus at University and living with housemates for almost a decade and having an enjoyable time throughout.

So much of this experience comes down to who you end up living with. I've been lucky to live with friends with fairly similar interests and career drives where it matters, and that changes the experience. If you enjoy the people you live with outside of just the fact you're living together, it changes everything.

If you have those things you get to live with people whom you enjoy their company, talk about topics, do activities together, build further relationships with others and benefit financially from shared costs that can help you build a future.

Absolutely you will need to be able to share and cohabit which can be more challenging as you grow up wanting your own space.
by spankibalt | 2025-08-04 00:46:54+00:00
> "This is exactly the reason why Computer Vision approaches for parsing PDFs works so well in the real world."

Well, to be fair, in many cases there's no way around it anyway since the documents in question are only scanned images. And the hardest problems I've seen there are narrative typography artbooks, department store catalogs with complex text and photo blending, as well as old city maps.
by serf | 2025-08-04 00:46:59+00:00
I'm having a blast -- but a lot of the contributing factor to that I think is that I had a long over-due journal full of software projects that I just didn't have the time to get at yet. Some of them were so simple, but time allowances have kept them on the list.

LLMs have let me knock out a few of the ones on The Big List that have been there for years and are now usable tools in my repertoire, and I think that's great. They're not human-quality artisinal code, but so what? It's mine and it works and I can now keep using it and polishing as I proceed.. it wouldn't have been available at all without the LLM assistance.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-08-04 00:47:22+00:00
There is a story about when Stephen Wolfram applied for a job at AT&T. The HR person asked him where had gone to college. Wolfram confessed that he had never gone to college. Well ok, did you graduate high school? Um no, I'm afraid not. GED? Nope. What about primary school? Wolfram looks more and more more embarrassed, and admits that he didn't even finish primary school. HR person by now is quite uncomfortable when Wolfram manages to think of something. He says "I do happen to have a Ph.D. Does that help?"
by Sidsaladi | 2025-08-04 00:47:32+00:00
What if Monday morning you could wake up to your first paying customer?

Most founders spend months perfecting their idea while someone else ships their "imperfect" MVP and starts collecting real feedback. The biggest barrier isn't coding—it's overthinking.

Last month, I watched a founder go from Reddit lurker to Product Hunt #3 in 52 hours. No team. No meetings. Just smart tools and the courage to ship fast.

His secret? He treated building like a sprint, not a marathon. By Sunday night: working micro-SaaS, 200+ signups, first $47 in revenue.

After 6 months perfecting this process (and building GetPrompts with 1000+ AI prompts), here's what I learned:

Friday: Find your unfair advantage. Don't start with an idea—start with people you understand. What communities do you belong to? What problems do you complain about?

Saturday: Validate with AI. Use Perplexity for market research, get strategic with specialized GPTs, then ask AI to roast your idea with 25 brutal questions.

Sunday: Build and ship. Tools like Lovable, Bolt, or v0 can turn your PRD into a working app in hours. Connect Supabase for backend, add AI APIs for intelligence.

The weekend builder's motto: Function over form. One feature done really well beats ten features done poorly.

I have published a comprehensive article on Substack that outlines all the steps required to go from 0 to 1. Check it out in the comments section below
by monster_truck | 2025-08-04 00:48:53+00:00
It's real fuckin bad, folks.

Most everyone I know, at all skill levels, go hundreds of applications deep before finally landing a real interview let alone a job these days (in far more than just tech, too). Their unemployment runs out and they can't even get in as a bartender or at a gas station. I used to love helping people find jobs they want, my own way of paying it forward from the people who did that for me, now nothing seems to work.

I interview extremely well, until 2022 I typically got the job I wanted on the first try, they used to find me! Now direct referrals to CEOs or founders from investors or employees result in them ghosting. I've also paradoxically been told that I'm overqualified and should be applying for eng lead/principal/cto positions... and that I don't have enough experience to apply for those roles when I do.

I've just been stringing together small bullshit contracts to pay for vices in the meantime, halfway coasting off passive income. Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.

I really do not think it's offshoring, either. The crews I have contracted work out to in the past (Eastern Europe, South Korea, Japan) are asking me if I've got anything for them, they've never done that before.
by DimmieMan | 2025-08-04 00:49:33+00:00
I think I kind of get you, there's something I find off putting about Bun like it's a trendy ORM or front end framework where Node and Deno are trying to be the boring infrastructure a runtime should be.

Not to say Deno doesn't try, some of their marketing feels very "how do you do fellow kids" like they're trying to play the JS hype game but don't know how to.
by nocoiner | 2025-08-04 00:49:46+00:00
Troop transports are kind of a red herring here. The issue isn’t moving troops, it’s moving their equipment. You can pretty easily move a division’s worth of troops by air (activate CRAF and requisition a few dozen 777s, boom, done), but it’s a lot harder to move their equipment (tanks, helicopters, artillery, air defense, ammo, etc.) that way. If the troops don’t have pre-positioned equipment in the battle area, then it really needs to get there aboard ships.

I’m of two minds about re-creating the logical and industrial capabilities of World War II (or, at least the subset of them needed to fight a major conflict with a near peer). On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.
by totallynothoney | 2025-08-04 00:50:33+00:00
If this isn't continuation of the analogy that I'm not getting:

- Salad A: Cut celery bite size, add lemon and salt to taste.

- Salad B: Cut cucumber in slices, add yogurt, spritz of vinegar, salt and pepper, small spoonful of sugar. Search Gurkensalat for decent instructions.

- Main A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuffed_peppers

- Main B: Any good cabbage stew / soup recipe, looks awful, is delicious.

- Main C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moussaka
by dherikb | 2025-08-04 00:50:34+00:00
This reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked.

Like anyone else, when I joined the company, I had various questions: how to access certain systems, how to handle permissions, how to debug specific services, etc.

I compiled all these questions and answers as notes in a Git repository that my teammates could access. I wrote the notes using QOwnNotes, utilizing its Git integration. So, when someone had a question for which I already had the answer, I could simply share my notes, or create/update a node and share it.

The names of the notes were straightforward and easy to follow, such as:

- aws.md

- azure.md

- kubernetes.md

- staging.md

- production.md

- useful-commands.md (jq, sed, base64, etc)

My teammates used this resource frequently. As I was preparing to leave the company, I suggested them to fork my notes repository. I later heard that they continued to use it for many months afterward.
by dredmorbius | 2025-08-04 00:51:10+00:00
Much of what I'm describing is in fact non-news content, which I find far more durable information than expiring-on-contact news.

Philosophy, history, issues and ideas, language instruction, narrative, amongst others.

Again, podcasts and streaming expand your universe markedly.

That said, terrestrial radio still has its place, which is depicted well in WNYC's "Divided Dial" series:

<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>
by bane | 2025-08-04 00:51:33+00:00
I've got a handful of 4-bay Mediasonic Proboxes, they're about as barebones of a JBOD enclosure as you can get and run about $110 each unless they're on sale. I have stuffed these things with over 40TB of drives and they've worked solidly for many years.

They typically present as 4 USB connected external drives, which you can softraid into whatever. They also support eSATA. At one point I had 3 of these plugged into a spare intel NUC and used it as a NAS running first Windows, then Ubuntu, then unRAID over about 5 years. It wasn't blazing fast, but got the job done for home use.

I love seeing these cheap builds like this. IMHO NAS boxes are way overpriced, and underpowered. I had multiples the performance and capability piecemeal hacking together my old setup than buying the all-in-one systems that will lose vendor coverage in 2 years.
by hyperold | 2025-08-04 00:52:01+00:00
Indeed, this is how it's supposed to work in an ideal world anyway. You only need to have some knowledge of the items and their tech to evaluate if they are useful second-hand or not for you. What parts wear and break and what are you able and willing to repair?

I have bought pretty much all my tools used. I usually buy low-tech solutions so my biggest concern most of the time is that the carbon brushes need to be replaced (and some models make this simple operation practically impossible, while in some models it takes under a minute). And I always look for dirty things that need a lot of cleaning since they usually go for cheap, and I'm cheap.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-08-04 00:52:14+00:00
Those... are not mutually exclusive as killer upgrade. No longer having to use a nonsense CJS syntax is absolutely also a huge deal.

Web parity was "always" going to happen, but the refusal to add ESM support, and then when they finally did, the refusal to have a transition plan for making ESM the default, and CJS the fallback, has been absolutely grating for the last many years.