MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-08-18 14:12:52+00:00
Calling it WYSIWYG is a misnomer: this is just syntax highlighting, it just so happens that the highlighting styles agree to an extent with the final rendering. And the idea is not exactly new: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Remember_the_dot/Syntax_high...

Two issues I saw:

- on my phone, the framerate noticeably drops as I scroll over the widget

- caret positioning within the textarea seems to desync against the letter positions in the highlighted div

And the whole concept severely constrains the styling choices that could be applied to the highlighted output, but I suppose that was a given.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-18 14:12:52+00:00
I've got an older friend that I help with electronics repairs. He's been doing this stuff since the 1950s, but he's got cognitive issues now, so I've become his apprentice. (I'm 61) He was taught by TV repair men, who emphasized getting things fixed quickly and effectively.

We recently repaired a TV he acquired from 1948.... we eventually got it working, albeit with a very dim display, as the CRT was older than most of us here on HN. All was well, but there was an intermittent... I eventually traced it down to a single wire... that looked like it was connected, but measured as an open circuit. It hadn't been soldered correctly in 1948, and percussive maintenance would make it contact well enough to then arc and stay connected (it was in a high voltage focus line)

We had a Kilowatt RF Power Amplifier that just wasn't working correctly, no gain, a "grounded grid" design. It turned out that after much grief, the grid wasn't grounded... the bolt grounding the grid looked like it was well connected, but measured as an open circuit!

In software, it's amazing how many times = and == get confused, one of the many reasons I prefer Pascal, with = vs :=

Of course the ultimate story is the "magic/more magic" story from MIT.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250713004447/http://catb.org/j...
by doubleg | 2025-08-18 14:12:54+00:00
Not surprised as Clojure is boring tech: slowly evolving with a big focus on stability (ie backwards compatibility).

Meanwhile: the core team has been extended the last couple of years. Also this summer NuBank (the company behind Clojure) announced the first 'Clojure Developer Advocate'. Their role will be to "focus on ways to support the existing Clojure community and grow the community through outreach and development."^1

[1]: https://building.nubank.com/clojure-developer-advocate-nuban...

EDIT: wording.
by dirkc | 2025-08-18 14:13:08+00:00
Initiatives like this that makes creating web pages more direct are great!

I've done something similar using IPFS for persistence [1]. The format is different - it's a tutorial starting out with the dev tools that guides you to build an editor + site.

I wish that IPFS was more usable and mature as a general web technology! I've considered trying this with Git as the backend, but I haven't done much research into what the tradeoffs or complications would be?

[1] - https://www.thebacklog.net/projects/agregore-web-apps/
by balamatom | 2025-08-18 14:13:21+00:00
More like anti-memetic. Dark forest full of things that actively resist being learned about, you know? And studying them by whatever little info can be gleaned from their outside manifestations.

Beyond the original PageRank algo (which should've been baked into browsers by now, if decentralization was more than a buzzword) Google's rankings work by being secret, no? Also things like app store acceptance criteria - also under the somewhat flimsy excuse that people would game them if they knew what they were. (Some rankings if they're that gamable, lol.) It's there that I draw a strong connection. (Personally I find it a little silly to comply with this modus operandi but the compute vendors are also mysteriously powerful, so that's what we have, complete with cottage industry of SEO ninjas, Agile facilitators, and similar technoshamans.)

Also copy protection and crackers, lol, all "informational arms race" scenarios, or ones where transparency has come to paradoxically erode instead of fortify trust, have a trace of what I've come to refer to as occult. That's why there's quite a bit of superficial similarities between hackery and occultism, and an overlap in aesthetics. But when there's also a conceptual overlap people usually tend to look away, lest they see a fnord or some other wild shit. There are not literal 17th century demons in there (unless someone is particularly fond of the goth out button), but the collective disavowal can occasionally be harnessed to work a lil magicks ;P
by DSingularity | 2025-08-18 14:13:38+00:00
I don’t think anybody other than Google and Apple have a chance to win AI and it’s because they are the only companys with both the user base and the capacity to design and produce hardware for models.

Facebook has a data advantage and a use base but at the end of the day they will always need to make Nvidia or a cloud provider rich to run/train their models.
by ceroxylon | 2025-08-18 14:13:56+00:00
What about the people who did not opt to share or index their chats, and the companies that claim to not train on user chats?

https://privacy.anthropic.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-yo...

> We do not actively set out to collect personal data to train our models

The 'snarky tech guy' tone of the article is a bit like nails on a chalkboard.
by raspasov | 2025-08-18 14:14:12+00:00
All of those other things you listed, while important, are second and third-order side effects that are harder to control directly.

I need a tool that helps with problem-solving and product development, and works reliably and effectively across a wide range of use cases, from basic mobile apps to high-performance computing.

Clojure delivers that better than any other language or ecosystem that I know of in a uniform, well-designed package, all the way from the core internals of the language to deps.edn.
by gigatexal | 2025-08-18 14:14:35+00:00
> If your money replacement involves dismanteling the little protection we have against money laundering and banking AlQueda (amonst others). I'm going to put you in the "Bad Blockchain" bucket. I am sure you can make a more efficient banking system if you don't do any checks at all. That's not an interesting observation.

Yup. Most crypto maximalists are unknowingly (knowingly?) aligned with terrorists and other criminals looking for anonymity online skirting existing banking rules.
by nolok | 2025-08-18 14:14:41+00:00
Amazon is the only company I regularly use that has implemented AI as a front that users very often interact with, and it's not a total disaster. Their customer service AI (when you have an issue) actually works well, and in many cases I didn't need to escalate to a human to get something sorted. YMMV, of course, but I hate about 99.9999999% of those "AI" customer service crap usually, and the recent "smart" ones are somehow way worse than the tree based ones of old.
by mmargenot | 2025-08-18 14:14:43+00:00
There is a tradeoff between quantity of tools and the ability of the model to make effective use of them. If tools in an MCP are defined at a very granular level (i.e. single API calls) it's a bad MCP.

I imagine you run into something similar with bash - while bash is a single "tool" for an agent, a similar decision still need to be made about the many CLI tools that are available from enabling bash.
by mdip | 2025-08-18 14:15:01+00:00
I didn't make that point clearly enough in my comment ... my point, somewhat lost due to lack of brevity was "looks like some of the least reputable HDD salvage outfits discovered some a way to ditch the last problem of selling refurbished HDDs by making them look 'new'."

I assume that was the original business this outfit was involved in, anyway, since most of those companies are shady, already. :)
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-18 14:15:08+00:00
I don't think so. In my state you get a few days to do a "neighborhood review." If you, as a prospective buyer, walk around to all your potential neighbors and they start telling you about all the ghost stories and freaky stuff that happens in your house at night, you'll probably pull your offer. In aggregate there's money lost. And where there's money lost, there are people trying to fill those gaps.
by bobson381 | 2025-08-18 14:15:22+00:00
this is like putting a wall in front of, or just beyond the edge of, the slippery slope. the need to make an intentional choice or pause before doing the "getting stuck scrolling" behavior is an opportunity for you to catch yourself and see if that's what you really want.

the platform is designed to capitalize on your slip ups in willpower. you can have great impulse control, but can you have it tirelessly, around the clock? this thing is lurking until you slip, as long as you're on it. attention capture is the goal.
by dmos62 | 2025-08-18 14:15:45+00:00
That's a somewhat sad question, because we hardly know. Not enough written record exists and "paganism" was increasingly outlawed during the past millenia to the point where we're out of people that had it handed down to them. The missionaries doing most of the recording were also the ones actively suppressing its survival. I'm aware of at least one revival movement that was active during the last 50 years, but the main instigator seems to have died without leaving a meaningful succession, and thus the preservation may very well have failed. Unless someone invents a time-machine a la Assassin Creed.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-18 14:16:03+00:00
Money laundering is an ill-defined made-up concept. Anyone can get accused of it without evidence and suffer disastrous consequences, without the actions. If is a discriminatory act used by fascists to deny people their rights. Who are you to tell anyone how they can spend their money. You are so full of hate that you think other people must do as you say and be servile to you, even if it means taking their liberties away without cause. Well they won't.
by Tanjim | 2025-08-18 14:16:32+00:00
Webhooks have quietly become the backbone of modern SaaS integrations — Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, Slack… almost every product relies on them.

On the surface, they’re just POST requests. But at scale, teams end up reinventing a lot of the same infrastructure:

- Retry queues and exponential backoff - Dead-letter queues for failed events - Signature validation and replay protection - Monitoring and observability - Customer support when “the webhook didn’t fire”

This got me thinking: are we overdue for Webhook-as-a-Service (WaaS) to be treated as a first-class primitive, the way cloud providers gave us databases, queues, and object storage?

I wrote up a guide exploring what WaaS is, how it works, and why teams are increasingly adopting it.

Curious: 1. Has your team built webhook infra in-house? 2. Do you see WaaS becoming as common as using S3 or RDS instead of rolling your own? 3. Or is webhook delivery “too small” a problem to deserve its own category?

Would love to hear HN’s take.
Show HN: Kool-Fetch – A Lightweight Fetch Wrapper with Axios-Like Interceptors
by webzz | 2025-08-18 14:17:00+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m excited to share kool-fetch, a lightweight (~8kb, 0 dependencies) fetch wrapper I built to simplify HTTP requests in JavaScript. It brings axios-like request and response interceptors to the native fetch API, cutting down on boilerplate code.

Key features:

- Interceptors: Modify requests (e.g., add auth headers) or responses (e.g., handle 401 errors) with ease. - Response Unwrapping: Simplify parsing with .unwrap("json") for typed JSON, text, or arrayBuffer. - Customizable Error Handling: Throw on HTTP errors with custom error messages. - Native Fetch Compatibility: Use it like fetch, with optional baseURL and default configs.
by reactordev | 2025-08-18 14:17:01+00:00
No, back then storage was a premium so everything aside from config, accounts, and billing was ephemeral. It really wasn’t until Cloud came along that storage made it so you could keep everything. About the time of the social media boom.

It wasn’t until around 2014 that I stopped building routes that did:

DELETE FROM <table> WHERE id = ? ON DELETE CASCADE;
by est | 2025-08-18 14:17:04+00:00
I spent a weekend making a self-host twitter alternative.

source: https://github.com/est/gitweets/

demo: https://f.est.im/ (renders via github API)

Basically it renders its self git repo commit history as a feed timeline.

Never lose your data on microblogging service providers again! Clone the repo anywhere anytime, make tweets by "git commit --allow-empty".

Everything is placed inside a single-html.
by creatonez | 2025-08-18 14:17:13+00:00
Can we please squash the idea of turning this into a product early, so no one starts to take it seriously? Agentic AI shouldn't be hooked up to any environment that doesn't have a flawless "undo" or "rewind 5 minutes" button. Would you hook up randomized mouse/keyboard input into a computer that you need to get work done on?

At the very least, display a very strongly worded warning message when the tool is run in a non-VM environment. Internet connectivity is still dangerous, but at least VMs can be snapshot. And it should not be packaged as an end-user product with a bar at the top of the screen, period.

This is a risky product and those who developed it have every ability to know that, based on the history of AI hallucinations. Not because it will escape or self replicate or other things claimed by the various idiotic AI religions, but because one of the first things it will inevitably do is screw up someone's work and cause data loss.
by Topfi | 2025-08-18 14:17:13+00:00
I couldn't tell one way or another, but honestly didn't choose that particular system for any reason beyond that being what was on offer where I live. My very limited reading prior to surgery though would indicate that currently there is no source showcasing a difference in subjective recovery experience between TransPRK and this Smartsurface. What has been used as a source when covering the technology is mainly focused on the first three months [0], rather than longer term as you are describing and does in my opinion not actually showcase a difference between Smartsurface and TransPRK specifically [1]. Full disclosure, I only include the name of the system because it felt like an HN thing to do. It wasn't some value judgement that these machines are superior or that others are inferior.

[0] https://crstodayeurope.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/0... referenced from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26871764/

[1] If you look at the source they are referencing, it compares TransPRK to aaPRK after three months and they were using Schwind machines, though did not clarify whether this was using Smartsurface. Very cursory search engine use tells me that this is toggleable, so an option on these machines. Even if this study did use Smartsurface though, that doesn't answer whether outcomes are different in TransPRK with Smartsurface vs TransPRK without Smartsurface. Additionally, I do not know whether this option was used in my case.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-18 14:17:17+00:00
I did some exploratory analysis on sqlc some time ago and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to parametrize which column to sort-by and group-by in queries.

It is quite neat, but I don't think it actually replaces a proper ORM for when ORMs are actually useful for. That on top of all the codegen pitfalls.

I personally quite like the Prisma approach which doesn't map database data to objects, but rather just returns an array of tuples based on your query (and no lazy loading of anything ever). With typescript types being dynamically computed based on the queries. It has its own pitfalls as well (like no types when using raw queries).
by hacker_yacker | 2025-08-18 14:17:29+00:00
Just wrong. Apple just acquired 7 AI companies (talent pool). And amazon's Bedrock has been solid and pushing envelope for years.

The problem is with your expectations. Apple is no longer winning all the time, so relatively, it feels like it's losing. And Amazon is the quiet beast lurking, it's just doing a poor job at marketing.
by gmays | 2025-08-18 14:17:32+00:00
I'm somewhat bullish on Google as well, they have the opportunity if they can figure out the product (which they are bad at) and they have the edge in cloud with their models + TPUs.

But your comment about the phone could have been about horses, or the notepad or any other technology paradigm we were used to in the past. Maybe it'll take a decade for the 'perfect' AI form factor to emerge, but it's unlikely to remain unchanged.
by kens | 2025-08-18 14:18:19+00:00
There are various test procedures. For ESD, there are official tests like the Human Body Model, where a capacitor is charged to a specific voltage and discharged into the circuit. Similarly, for latchup, there are official tests that apply specific pulses. Metastability can be tested by applying asynchronous signals, but I'm not sure how that scales when the MTBF is very large.

Human Body Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-body_model

Latchup testing: https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/scaa124/scaa124.pdf?ts=17555138993...
by regularfry | 2025-08-18 14:18:29+00:00
I think you're underestimating the market here. It's not just extremely technically proficient people, it's the glitch people, the "custom myspace theme" people, possibly even the jsfiddle people.

The `/save` endpoint looks almost trivial. Knocking up a mimic wouldn't take much. The client libs will be interesting, but from the looks of things they're not quite there yet.
by drumdance | 2025-08-18 14:18:30+00:00
Surprised to see so many people who dislike the article. The important background hum to this piece is that she's dating men in a place where the male-female ratio is in her favor. It's also a pressure cooker environment where the men often judge themselves against some of the richest people in human history.

So on one hand she gets to be more picky; on the other, there is a larger share of men likely to have status anxiety.
by camgunz | 2025-08-18 14:19:12+00:00
People are gonna pretty quickly quit paying for AI--we're well into the "let me see what everyone's talking about" phase and that'll wear off soon. The price is already skyrocketing way ahead of quality or utility, so that'll accelerate the decline. Businesses incorporating AI into their products will scale that back as costs increase, or as they replace the most commonly used functionality with purpose-built code.

The real question is how do we continue the grift? AI's a huge, economy-sustaining bubble, and there's currently no off-ramp. My guess is we'll rebrand ML: it's basically AI, it actually works, and it can use video cards.

AI is a great feature funnel in terms of like, "what workflows are people dumping into AI that we can write purpose-built code for", but it has to transition from revenue generator to loss leader. The enormity of the bubble has made this very difficult, but I have faith in us.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-18 14:19:21+00:00
The reason behind the banner reveals to us the incentives that drive the way the whole system functions, which in turn decides the quality of the majority of advertisements.

If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.

And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.

In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).

It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.

Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.

It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.
by hyperman1 | 2025-08-18 14:19:35+00:00
I forgot the details, but they did something like that just after one of the world wars in Antwerp. This was a time where anything was allowed to clean up and get the economy rebooted, to deblock a major port. They fired on a ship blocking the port until only iron dust was left. The resulting environmental damage was so bad, all involved decided to never do it again.
by drob518 | 2025-08-18 14:20:09+00:00
Apple and Amazon have huge resources and a large installed base to which they can readily sell almost anything. Couple that with a narrow or even non-existent moat for AI and I’m thinking Apple and Amazon will do just fine. In fact, I think the reason that Apple is delaying is that they are finding that AI just isn’t what it’s being sold as by the market and they’re afraid of getting a black eye like OpenAI just did with GPT5. Worst case, they spend a few billion dollars and buy someone.
by whalesalad | 2025-08-18 14:20:15+00:00
Yep. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/radar/next-generation-wea...

Not an API, but I really like supercell wx for a local radar terminal. Cross platform and works great on Linux. It does require an API key to do the map rendering, but the actual weather data is pulled from government sources (free)

https://github.com/dpaulat/supercell-wx
by taylodl | 2025-08-18 14:20:33+00:00
Apple critics have been beating this drum for the past 40 years. What's funny in this case is there's no accusation that Nvidia or Microsoft are greedy, even though they're presented as having a higher market cap. The reality is the mobile market is maturing. Phones have been 'good enough' for years, cameras outperform any point-and-shoot from the past 30 years, and tablets are more than capable. The smartwatch market is saturated, with even less incentive to upgrade. This isn’t greed - it’s just what a mature tech market looks like.
by andy99 | 2025-08-18 14:21:08+00:00
> People who see everything through a political lens want to make everything political, because that’s how they gain power.

Right- power over others seems to be the primary motivation for bringing up modern politics. I think it would probably be fine to have a classical political debate absent power dynamics at work - say discussing the relative merits of increased government spending vs tax reduction. But that's not the politics people mean now, it's all in-group signaling and getting people to submit.
by jpalomaki | 2025-08-18 14:21:12+00:00
The most useful AI feature for iOS I can image is actually intelligent Siri, which could use other applications installed on the phone as its tools to accomplish the tasks.

Apps would expose their functionality to the Smart Siri. Maybe there's already something like this with the shortcuts. Maybe I could give Claude Code style blanket permissions to some actions, some ones I would like to review.
by Etheryte | 2025-08-18 14:21:22+00:00
Both OpenAI and Claude average roughly one flagship release a year, and these are some of the best funded companies in the space. The bigger your model, the more expensive it is to train, so you want to do it as rarely as reasonably possible. Every other company will either work with smaller models and/or train even more rarely, aside from fine-tunes and customizations they put on top.