MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are vibe-coded self-contained HTML apps the future of personal tools?
by meistertigran | 2025-08-18 14:46:46+00:00
I came across this post today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937991 and also myself created https://htmlsync.io and wonder if there are other people who now choose to use vibe-coded self-contained HTML apps to replace other personal tools they were using.

Do you think these self-contained HTML apps in one form or another are going to replace most personal tools?

If not, what do you think is the big limiter?
by jcgl | 2025-08-18 14:47:38+00:00
> I think it should be done by the maintainer of the software not by the distro

Why would you say that? I would agree that the developer likely has better insight into what the software needs. But the security boundary exists at the interface of the application and the system, so I think that both application devs and system devs (i.e. distros) have something to contribute here.

And because systemd allows for composition of these settings, it doesn't have to be a one-or-the other situation--a distro can do some basic locking down (e.g. limiting SUID, DynamicUser, etc.), and then the application dev can do syscall filtering.

In any case, I agree that I'd like to see things get even more locked down. But it's worth remembering that, before systemd, there was basically no easy-to-use least-privilege stuff available beyond Unix users and filesystem permissions. The closest you had (afaik) was apparmor and selinux. In both of those cases, the distro basically had to do all the work to create the security policy.

Also, n.b., that pdns.service I noted is provided by PowerDNS themselves.
by jtbayly | 2025-08-18 14:47:55+00:00
Last time I used Gemini CLI it still couldn’t consistently edit a file. That was just a few weeks ago. In fact, it would go into a loop attempting the same edit, burning through many thousands of tokens and calls in the process, re-reading the file, attempting the same edit, rinse, repeat until I stopped it.

I didn’t find it entertaining.
by 9rx | 2025-08-18 14:47:56+00:00
We begrudgingly accept chat as the lowest common denominator when there is no better option, but it's clear we don't prefer it when better options are available. Just look in any fast food restaurant that has adopted those ordering terminals and see how many are still lining up at the counter to chat with the cashier... In fact, McDonalds found that their sales rose by 30% when they eliminated chatting from the process, so clearly people found it to be a hinderance.

We don't know what is better for this technology yet, so it stands to reason that we reverted to the lowest common denominator again, but there is no reason why we will or will want to stay there. Someone is bound to figure out a better way. Maybe even Apple. That business was built on being late to the party. Although, granted, it remains to be seen if that is something it can continue with absent of Jobs.
by Ukv | 2025-08-18 14:48:49+00:00
If goal is to improve access to information, favoring sources that don't paywall content seems reasonable, or at least it would be if they weren't easy to bypass. That doesn't mean not paying journalists (but noncommerical blogs are responsbile for a lot of interesting HN content too, probably disproportionately so when it comes to in-depth technical investigation).
by mnhnthrow34 | 2025-08-18 14:49:20+00:00
This is super interesting, thank you for the reference! Agreed the pricing is not transparent. There are many intangibles related to pricing b2b products that can affect the negotiated price of a specific line item.

Miravete's work still looks interesting though, "Firms engage in foggy pricing when the menu of tariff options aims at profiting from consumer mistakes". I'm not sure the cell phone plan study really translates to this context, but maybe he has other more relevant work. Definitely interested in learning more about pricing.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-18 14:49:34+00:00
I'm surprised they didn't count the root system as well, those are usually gargantuan for the trees I see raised for lumber.

Going by volume is also remarkably useless because if a tree produces some large non-dense structure like a leaf it skews the numbers. The issue with industrial forestry isn't waste, but monocropping and habitat destruction.
by perrygeo | 2025-08-18 14:49:45+00:00
My rule for discussing ANYTHING at work: Does this move the current project forward? Are we painting bike sheds and shaving yaks and beating around the bush? Or are we here to get shit done? Everything else is a waste of time, politics included. If you want to be friends after work, we do that after work where I'm more than happy to discuss my thoughts on the current government.
by gmays | 2025-08-18 14:49:55+00:00
That's fair, but it wasn't the point of the article because it's messy. Many would argue that core LLMs are 'trending' toward commodity, and I'd agree.

But it's complicated because commodities don't carry brand weight, yet there's obviously a brand power law. I (like most other people) use ChatGPT. But for coding I use Claude and a bit of Gemini, etc. depending on the problem. If they were complete commodities, it wouldn't matter much what I used.

A part of the issue here is that while LLMs may be trending toward commodity, "AI" isn't. As more people use AI, they get locked into their habits, memory (customization), ecosystem, etc. And as AI improves if everything I do has less and less to do with the hardware and I care more about everything else, then the hardware (e.g. iPhone) becomes the commodity.

Similar with AWS if data/workflow/memory/lock-in becomes the moat I'll want everything where the rest of my infra is.
by taylodl | 2025-08-18 14:50:21+00:00
Business favors predictability and consistency. It doesn't matter so much what politicians do so long as the business and financial market is predictable and consistent for long periods of time. Markets have enough volatility without politics adding to the mix. Businesses by and large aren't going to make significant investments in increasing US manufacturing without that predictability and consistency. There have been a few making promises to invest in US manufacturing, but you'll notice the details are always scant and a timeline is rarely mentioned. As such, it's understood to be posturing for the current administration in order to curry favor.
by nabla9 | 2025-08-18 14:50:36+00:00
It's not just Trump, it's also US public who thinks that domestic manufacturing brings jobs. Even Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every day guy) hinted it in a recent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

Manufacturing as share of jobs declines even in those countries that are big at manufacturing. China, Germany, Japan, South Korea. China buys half of worlds robots. Manufacturing can create only very low paying jobs that people do in third countries.

You can bring more manufacturing but not much more jobs. Most likely the lost comparative advantage means net welfare loss if you force it.
by longtimelistnr | 2025-08-18 14:51:01+00:00
Because for the typical office - documents are strewn about on random network drives and are not formatted similarly. This combined with the inability to nail down 100% accuracy on even just internal doc search is just too much to overcome for non-tech industry offices. My office is mind blown if i use Gemini to extract data from a PDF and convert it to an .xlsx or .csv

As a technically minded person but not a comp sci guy, refining document search is like staring into a void and every option uses different (confusing) terminology. This makes it extra difficult for me to both do my regular job AND learn the multiple names/ways to do the exact same thing between platforms.

The only solution that has any reliability for me so far are Gemini instances where i upload only the files i wish to search and just keep it locked to a few questions per instance before it starts to hallucinate.

My attempt at RAG search implementation was a disaster that left me more confused than anything.
by nottorp | 2025-08-18 14:51:06+00:00
Random bit of info:

I cannot log in to Linkedin any more on my default browser, which is Firefox with the built in privacy protections on and uBlock Origin (that one on the default settings). The front page redirects me to the cookie dialog which goes to the front page which goes to the cookie dialog again ad infinitum.

I suppose it would work if i accepted, but they shouldn't even ask me for the cookies absolutely required for the site to function so I'm viewing the rest as something optional that I should deny.
by codyb | 2025-08-18 14:51:19+00:00
What mental benefits are people getting exactly? Cause, pretty sure you'd get much more from reading a long form article that the 10s tik tak clip or whatever.

The majority of people seem barely able to form a coherent thought beyond what they've been reading in their bubble these days.

40% of the country doesn't even bother to vote most elections (here in the US)... I don't think "sensing ideological currents" is really at the forefront of most people's minds lol.

I read Hacker News once a day maybe, and use a couple discord servers. But have abandoned everything with an infinite scroll produced by rage inducing, bubble forming algorithms. I prune my discord servers down, and blocked HN on everything but my work computer (lol).
by imiric | 2025-08-18 14:51:30+00:00
This approach also breaks down for the same reasons the Waterfall model doesn't work. A lot of information is discovered during development, which causes specs to be outdated or wrong. At that point the LLM context is deeply poisoned, whether from the specs themselves, or from the rest of the codebase. You can try to update the specs or ask for major refactors, but that often introduces new issues. And as the context grows, the chances of producing working code diminish significantly. The only way forward at that point is to dive in yourself, reviewing, fixing, and refactoring the traditional way, and wondering whether this workflow has really made you any more productive.
by mothballed | 2025-08-18 14:51:39+00:00
IIRC the reason Texas cannot get 'assistance' from other states is that the feds made it illegal to connect to most interstate grids without following their regulatory regimes. I believe Texas does connect to Mexico and possible some other regional grids although I don't really understand the exemption for those.

In this case it's not really Texas 'not allowing' other states to help but the other states not allowing Texas. Conceivably federal law could be updated to remove those regulations and Texas would absolutely connect to the interstate grid at that point.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-18 14:52:16+00:00
I think the short answer is that there is not one yet, but similar how there is a level of movement behind lan by people that want and can do that, we may eventually see something similar for non-technical users. At the end of the day, security is not sexy, but LLM input/output is a treasure throve if usable information..

I am building something for myself now and local is first consideration, because, as most of us here, likely see the direction publicly facing LLMs are going. FWIW, it kinda sucks, because I started to really enjoy my sessions with 4o
by JohnFen | 2025-08-18 14:52:23+00:00
> They’re not “better” than mature OSS (in fact they are often brittle and narrowly scoped) but they solve my exact problem faster than learning how to install, configure and use a new tool.

Maybe this is an artifact of just having been around for a long time, but it's extremely rare that I need to use a new tool to solve a new problem. 99.5% of the time, the existing ones are just fine. In the rare cases they aren't, I'll write up a quick script or program to do the job. I don't use genAI for that because I can do it faster and better myself.

In any case, my answer to the main question is no, LLMs have had no impact on my use of OSS.
by hermitdev | 2025-08-18 14:52:35+00:00
> This is a terrible idea.

No, it isn't. Any decent datacenter will have on-site generation in event of power grid failure, anyway. When I was an intern, the company I worked for would routinely go off grid during the summer at a call from the electric company. The electric company actually gave us significant incentives to do so, because us running on our own 12MW generator was effectively like the grid operator farming out a 12MW peaker unit.
by csomar | 2025-08-18 14:53:02+00:00
This. If we plateau around current SOTA LLM performance and 192/386Gb of memory can run a competitive model, Apple computers could become the new iPhone. They have a unique and unmatched product because of their hardware investment.

Of course nobody knows how this will eventually play out. But people without inside information on what these big organizations have/possess, cannot make such predictions.
by tygra | 2025-08-18 14:53:03+00:00
Gotcha.

Sam Altman actually said this on a podcast with Theo Von recently.

“So if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and then there’s like a lawsuit or whatever, we could be required to produce that,” Sam told Theo.

He even asked Theo about his own ChatGPT usage, and Theo admitted he doesn’t use it much because of privacy concerns.

Sam’s response:

“I think it makes sense... to really want the privacy clarity before you use [ChatGPT] a lot — like the legal clarity.”

:O
by svara | 2025-08-18 14:53:25+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about or how anything I'm saying inverts a burden of proof (of what exactly?).

If you're saying "X can't do Y because Z" you do need to say what the connection between Y and Z is. You do need to define what Y is. That's got nothing to do with a burden of proof, just speaking in a understandable manner.

The Tesla tangent is totally unhelpful because I know exactly how to make those connections in that example.
by bluGill | 2025-08-18 14:53:30+00:00
I kicked the addiciton a few years back. However there are still things on facebook worth looking at, and there is no easy way to find those without also getting all the addicting things I don't want. I want to see my friend's life. However some of them don't have a life and instead are constantly sharing the "you won't believe what [other political side] just did" garbage.
by jrop | 2025-08-18 14:53:36+00:00
This is what I love HN for. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should".

This awakens things I've been thinking about Neovim for a while now: now that libuv is embedded, there's really no reason not to use it as a cross-platform application runtime (except for the fact that that's horrific).
by doubled112 | 2025-08-18 14:53:45+00:00
Reshape as in grind down and fill? Or reshape as in all of them with braces?

LASIK is almost the same as grind down and fille, isn't it? In the sense that the lens is a new shape when it's over. We replace lenses too.

Braces are essentially forcing teeth into new positions mechanically. Once they're in those new positions, we glue on wires and wear retainers to keep them in place, often for the rest of our lives. This doesn't sound like a comfortable eye procedure.
by bhickey | 2025-08-18 14:54:06+00:00
Probably the same way many other models are trained: autoregression or autoencoding. You'd either predict the next symbol, or you compress it into a latent space and reconstruct the original. My assumption is that birdsong is sequential, but this isn't something I know about. An entire song might be the smallest semantic unit, like the alien language in Arrival, though I think this is unlike.
by aogaili | 2025-08-18 14:54:25+00:00
Yes, for me, it is a form of narrow intelligence. Being unable to grasp the big picture.

I don't mean this offensively; it is what it is. If you are aware of who you are, then good, but if the issue is that a lot of those are not even aware of their strength or their limitations. Just like humans got humbled with chess, AI is humbling those coders.
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-08-18 14:54:27+00:00
I still remember the disappointment I felt when, as a kid, tried Linux for the first time ever thanks to a magazine-attached live CD.

After years of hearing about this "alternative" OS, I was horrified to discover a UI that's very close to that of Windows. It felt boring and not as thrilling as I expected.

Today, I still appreciate the courage of those who go off the beaten roads of OS Land; even those that aren't as fun as templeOS.
by rickcarlino | 2025-08-18 14:54:28+00:00
I want this to be true, but I think a big limiter is patchy support for things like a file system API as well as some special rules that place extra restrictions on HTML files versus webpages served over HTTPS. I have not tried it in a long time but I remember not being able to access things like the location API or the microphone via local file. This puts local files at a disadvantage over web applications. If anyone knows of a definitive list of these restrictions, I would love to see it.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-18 14:54:38+00:00
That's great news. I was discouraged of laser correction when I read some research that the layer they cut off and put back on doesn't really fuse back with the rest of the eyeball. The adhesion force is if I remember correctly 8% of the original. I wouldn't want to risk accidentally rubbing off an important chunk of my corona. The other option is just to cut it off completely and shape what's underneath but that heals slower and is also not great because the top layer is not the same as what's below.

I'm reading that flap detachment is very rare. It very well might be. Maybe the eye is vastly over-engineered and 8% is sufficient for most modern humans. But I'm sceptical.
by flail | 2025-08-18 14:54:43+00:00
Stories about CTOs heavily overrelying on their long-outdated coding experience are plenty. If that's an ego thing ("I can still do that and show them that I can"), they're going to do that with little care about the consequences.

At that level, it's the combination of all the power and not that much tech expertise anymore. A vulnerable place.

A lot of famous hacks targeted humans as a primary weak point (gullibility, incompetence, naivety, greed, curiosity, take your pick), and technology only as a secondary follow-up.

An example: Someone had to pick up that "dropped" pendrive in a cantina and plug it into their computer in a 100% isolated site to enable Stuxnet.

Were I a black hat hacker, targeting CTOs' egos would be high on my priority list.
by wildzzz | 2025-08-18 14:54:58+00:00
While true, it's important to remember that not all ham radios that can transmit on GMRS bands are legal to do so. GMRS and FRS don't have the same "anything goes" allowances that ham operators have. Radios for these bands must be purpose built for these bands. Of course no one is going to know your compliant GMRS/FRS transmissions are coming from part 97 radio. Although most quality ham radios don't allow transmission on anything but the ham bands. The increased FCC enforcement of these Chinese radios means that many now have extra filters to reduce spurious emissions outside the ham bands, meaning they shouldn't work as well on GMRS and FRS.

If you want to use GMRS, buy a GMRS radio.
by toast0 | 2025-08-18 14:55:18+00:00
> Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity.

If you know when the power will be cut, you can start the generators before the cut, and depending on your equipment, you may be able to synchronize the generator(s) with the grid and switch over without hitting the batteries. I assume big datacenters are on three phase, can you switch over each phase as it crosses zero, or do you need to do them all at once?
by vel0city | 2025-08-18 14:55:24+00:00
> We live in the digital age, so almost everything depends on data

Agreed, the datacenters need to be extremely durable. What's more durable than proving you're able to withstand a power outage event? The grid does go down from time to time; they need to be ready to handle it. That's not a Texas-only kind of thing; power outages happen all over the US.

If the datacenter can't handle the outage that was announced as a probability ahead of time, they have no business running critical applications.
by hammerbrostime | 2025-08-18 14:55:31+00:00
... I would like to up the anty and have web apps work in a portable vanilla HTML file WITHOUT needing a webserver to run it. E.g., double click and run. CORS be damned!

Webservers are a pain in the ass and a legitimate barrier to entry. Wouldn't it be great it you could literally send around a single file, especially to non-technical users who cant run a web server, to run your apps?
by funnybunny1 | 2025-08-18 14:55:31+00:00
Tried out this AI agent thing the today and was pretty surprised how well it worked. I asked it to find a specific detergent brand at the nearest Target or Costco — it pulled up what was in stock. Then I had it call CVS to check if my prescription was ready. It actually navigated the answering system, got through to someone and even connected me to the pharmacist when more details were needed. Kinda wild that it could just do that.
by lan321 | 2025-08-18 14:55:58+00:00
Doubt. The meaningful work in person is organisational, and it's only marginally better onsite due to whiteboard > Excalidraw. Who does what, how it'll all interact, architecture, etc. If an LLM can code the difficult bits and doesn't fall apart once the project isn't a brand new proof of concept, it'll surely be able to pick the correct pattern and tooling and/or power through the mediocre/bad decision.
by Someone | 2025-08-18 14:56:05+00:00
MacPaint had that in 1983, but it never shipped because Bill Atkinson “was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program” (https://www.folklore.org/MacPaint_Evolution.html)

Also shows a way to do that fast:

“ First, he wrote assembly language routines to isolate the bounding box of each character in the selected range. Then he computed a checksum of the pixels within each bounding box, and compared them to a pre-computed table that was made for each known font, only having to perform the full, detailed comparison if the checksum matched.”
by TheDong | 2025-08-18 14:56:07+00:00
I see we've decided to take the path of nodejs and npm, where 2-liners deserve their own package.

dir, err := os.Getenv("CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY") cred, err := os.ReadFile(filepath.Join(dir, "name"))

That's less complexity than left-pad.

I thought the go culture was that dependencies are bad, and abstractions (i.e. any function calls) are confusing and bad, so it's better to just inline stuff like this and write it fresh each time you need it.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-18 14:56:19+00:00
Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft started 9 years ago, but if you've got the numbers to say people are actually buying the latest Snapdragon option more often for web browsing than x86 laptops I'd be willing to believe something has finally changed. Otherwise there is always some special stat advertised about how "this time it really is better", yet it's never what people actually want.

Looking at the M1, there was no "if", "but", "for certain", etc wording. It was just better all around, even comparing gaming performance vs older MacBooks. Even running Windows ARM in a VM was better than buying a Windows laptop (x86 or ARM) in terms of both performance and battery. Based on your description, I don't think the Snapdragon X laptops are the same story?