MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: WebP to PNG converter that runs in the browser
by msdg2024 | 2025-09-13 08:54:25+00:00
I built this tool because I was tired of uploading images to random conversion sites or setting up CLI tools for simple format changes.

Key features: • 100% client-side processing using Canvas API - no uploads, no servers • Batch conversion with drag & drop • Preserves original dimensions and quality

The entire conversion happens in your browser using HTML5 Canvas. I chose this approach for privacy and speed - your images never leave your device.

Would love feedback from the community, especially on performance with large batches or edge cases I might have missed.

Try it out: https://webptopng.dev
by b112 | 2025-09-13 08:54:33+00:00
Sure, but that's discussing the outcome of a goal. That doesn't make it the goal. To highlight this, they've been working on Optimus for what? A decade?

'Pump the stock' has more of a bait and switch, or a scammish connotation, at least to me. Every company must be aware of stock price to a degree, and tout their successes and products and goals. That's not pumping, which is often conjoined with pump'n'dump.

But anyhow.

What I like about that platform, is you could have that $35k electric Jeep, and I could have a $45k electric Jeep with built in generator and other fluff modz, but it would be built on the exact same platform. Same parts except for the generator+tank.

One of the benefits could be space for extra bling. You could put a water tank on the mounting brackets for the fuel tank, or something else interesting. You could convert your model to a gen model, even buying parts from the wreckers on the cheap, should your circumstances change. Or the reverse! Remove the gen+tank if desired.

I can imagine needed the gen+tank for 4 years, then maybe I suddenly have sufficient fast chargers locally...

Heck selling a model with the wiring + tank would add minimal weight. Even just the wiring. Imagine being able to rent an engine for a week, a month, a year? The mount rails and a generic, standardized connector is there, the software supports it, an open API.

So much could be done, but of course won't.

But I do, as maybe you can tell, really like the idea of a shared platform.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-09-13 08:54:50+00:00
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 08:55:49+00:00
> You're on one persons property to access other people's stuff who pay to be there.

I see it more like I'm knocking on people's doors (issuing GET requests with my web browser) and people open their door for me (the server responds with something) or not. If you don't wanna open the door, fine you do you, but if you do open the door, I'm gonna assume it was on purpose as I'm not trying to be malicious, I'm just a user with a browser.

> AI bots have been asked to leave. But, since they own the mall too, the store owners are more than a little screwed.

I don't understand what you mean with this, what is the mall here, are you're saying that people have websites hosted at OpenAI et al? I'm not sure how the "mall owner" and the people running the AI bots are the same owners.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-13 08:56:25+00:00
Most production parsers use their own handwritten recursive descent parsers, not only because of better diagnostics (error handling, language server hinting, etc.), but also for other reasons. One such major reason is that parser generators represent a very unstable dependency. They frequently change their APIs in newer versions, and some are becoming obsolete while new ones are constantly appearing. You don't want to risk the longevity of your parser by basing it on such unstable foundations. Flex/Bison is perhaps the only exception, as it hasn't changed much over time.
by vinhatson | 2025-09-13 08:57:13+00:00
This paper introduces a new domain of knowledge termed Physical Mathematics, defined as a derived space emerging from the interplay between abstract mathematical axioms and the physical axioms of the universe. Unlike classical mathematics, which exists in a perfect conceptual world, Physical Mathematics studies logical structures constrained by a quantized reality. Its foundation is the Axiom of the Minimal Domain of Existence, which posits that every physical object must oc- cupy a spacetime domain with a non-zero minimum measure, denoted as δ (corresponding to the Planck length, lP ≈ 1.6 × 10−35 m). A core consequence is that every mathematical theorem, when "compiled" into physical reality, carries a quantum signature ϵ(δ), representing the deviation between the abstract mathematical model and physical reality. Classical tools like calculus are repositioned as macroscopic approximations, smoothing a fundamentally discrete reality. Exploring this domain opens an ambitious research program: systematizing the reinterpretation of all mathematical fields—from geometry, algebra, to number theory and topology in the language of the physical universe, to decode the foundational rules governing both logic and reality.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 08:58:24+00:00
> but it’s my domain and my server and I get to say “no thank you” to your visit if you don’t behave [...] Blocking misbehaving IP addresses isn’t new

Absolutely, I agree that of course people are free to block whatever they want, misbehaving or not. Guess I'm just trying to figure out what sort of "collateral damage" people are OK with when putting up content on the public internet but want it to be selectively available.

> You have no innate right to access the content I share.

No, I guess that's true, I don't have any "rights" to do so. But I am gonna assume that if whatever you host is available without any authentication, protection or similar, you're fine with me viewing that. I'm not saying you should be fine with 1000s of requests per second, but since you made it public in the first place by sharing it, you kind of implicitly agreed for others to view it.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-13 08:58:43+00:00
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.

Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
by kherud | 2025-09-13 08:58:44+00:00
I'm a fan of antlr-ng. It's a solid upgrade if you're already using antlr. In my experience, they're fully compatible. antlr's ALL(*) parsing is relatively powerful for a parser generator, but it lacks support for incremental parsing. antlr-ng might improve things enough to be usable interactively in smaller settings, even if you need to reparse the document each time. It also comes with useful extensions like https://github.com/mike-lischke/antlr4-c3, which generates syntactic and semantic completions directly from the grammar.
by pydry | 2025-09-13 08:58:56+00:00
>It's not inevitable that North Korea is able to supply more shells

It is if American military exceptionalism is treated as an article of faith, which it was, so here we are.

Scaling up industrial production was never treated as a serious problem and still isnt because all you need, apparently, as OP said, is political will.

Putin made a bet on American and western hubris and it seems to have paid off.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-09-13 08:59:57+00:00
I've never encountered a bug

I've never hit any of the major bugs, but the iOS app is quite glitchy. The unread count never updates if the mailbox is externally modified (e.g. via the web app), sometimes it goes to zero or one. Sometimes my messages simply don't show up.

There was also that whole IMAP data loss issue. Unsure if that ever got resolved.
by 0-_-0 | 2025-09-13 09:00:54+00:00
Proton's response copied from a Reddit thread:

Hi everyone,

No, Proton did not knowingly block journalists’ email accounts. Our support for journalists and those working in the public interest has been demonstrated time and again through actions, not just words.

In this case, we were alerted by a CERT that certain accounts were being misused by hackers in violation of Proton’s Terms of Service. This led to a cluster of accounts being disabled.

Because of our zero-access architecture, we cannot see the content of accounts and therefore cannot always know when anti-abuse measures may inadvertently affect legitimate activism.

Our team has reviewed these cases individually to determine if any can be restored. We have now reinstated 2 accounts, but there are other accounts we cannot reinstate due to clear ToS violations.

Regarding Phrack’s claim on contacting our legal team 8 times: this is not true. We have only received two emails to our legal team inbox, last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline. This is unrealistic for a company the size of Proton, especially since the message was sent to our legal team inbox on a Saturday, rather than through the proper customer support channels.

The situation has unfortunately been blown out of proportion without giving us a fair chance to respond to the initial outreach.

Thank you for your understanding, The Proton Team
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-13 09:01:11+00:00
> It’s about user freedom.

I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about

Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
by rmunn | 2025-09-13 09:01:12+00:00
Probably a good idea, but when UTF-8 was designed the Unicode committee had not yet made the mistake of limiting the character range to 21 bits. (Going into why it's a mistake would make this comment longer than it's worth, so I'll only expound on it if anyone asks me to). And at this point it would be a bad idea to switch away from the format that is now, finally, used in over 99% of all documents online. The gain would be small (not zero, but small) and the cost would be immense.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 09:02:13+00:00
> Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!) so they can't do this.

For my own agent I have a `move_file` and `copy_file` tool with two args each, that at least GPT-OSS seems to be able to use whenever it suits, like for moving stuff around. I've seen it use it as part of refactoring as well, moving a file to one location, copying that to another, the trim both of them but different trims, seems to have worked OK.

If the agent has access to `exec_shell` or similar, I'm sure you could add `Use mv and cp if you need to move or copy files` to the system prompt to get it to use that instead, probably would work in Claude Code as well.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-13 09:02:31+00:00
I would rather work with persistent data structures, the least brittle of all, which would also in many cases trivially allow me to parallelize the work, but as far as I can see all the leetcode problems are low level mutation based problems with no clue about functional data structures. Clueless interviewers look to these problems as if they alone epitomized great programming, while they are often inflexible single core stuff, that may not even be appropriate for this day and age any longer.
by rootsofallevil | 2025-09-13 09:02:43+00:00
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.

The exemption being France and maybe China?

France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.

I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
by v9v | 2025-09-13 09:03:16+00:00
It seems all this package does is install and configure ada-ts-mode and eglot (to use ada-language-server) with some custom commands (defined in config.lisp). Here's how I adapted it to my config: https://pastes.io/ada-config

Note that I added a format-on-save hook in my config, and since I do completions using corfu and not company, I didn't include that part of the package.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 09:03:34+00:00
Well, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that.

AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
by Timwi | 2025-09-13 09:03:47+00:00
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.

I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
by boriskourt | 2025-09-13 09:04:46+00:00
Max MSP has RNBO [0] which provides a Pi image, and a quick deploy path for patches. I've used it for a few art installations, and the versions from this year have been super nice. Basically, you can design and test audio on your regular dev machine and quickly deploy to the PI. You don't need to mess with any Linux audio nonsense.

People also use this to make unique pedals.

[0]: https://rnbo.cycling74.com/
by Doohickey-d | 2025-09-13 09:05:00+00:00
One reason I can think of: when you rotate an image in the windows photo viewer (and probably lots of other apps), it stores that in the EXIF metadata. So the rotation is lossless, by not having to re-compress the JPEG.

I could also imagine that the earliest digital cameras wouldn't have had the processing power, or RAM to store the entire image in memory after reading it from the sensor, in order to do such a rotation. Hence EXIF rotation as a cheap alternative.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-13 09:05:52+00:00
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.

I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.

It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.

My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
by pndy | 2025-09-13 09:07:00+00:00
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.

What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
by m_fayer | 2025-09-13 09:07:06+00:00
HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-13 09:07:41+00:00
Project Euler 18. I tried 3 heuristic approaches, before accepting, that to get the real answer without brute forcing it (because it comes back later in non-brute forcable version anyway), I need to find another way. I came up with an optimal solution, but it is still not dynamic programming, which I would also consider inferior to the bottom up solution I have found.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-13 09:07:42+00:00
A synth is a device that generates sounds. They’re often (but not always!) controlled by piano-style keyboards, but so are lots of non-synth things. For example, although a piano emulator could be a synth, they’re generally not thought of that way. A sampling keyboard is not a synth: it’s playing back recorded sounds.

Lots of synths spent their whole lives never connected to a keyboard, but might live in rack mounts and be driven by sequencers or DAWs.
by tejuis | 2025-09-13 09:08:32+00:00
I've used Emacs for 30 years. In the very beginning swapped capslock and control. After 20 years started to have minor problems with the pinky. A lot of keyboard use. Did not like evil mode for several reasons. It meant a lot of configuration and relearning commands. Tried out god-mode for a short while, but had some sharp edges, and went back to normal. Retried god-mode with more effort to make it work for me and never looked back. At that point it took a long time to get everything to muscle memory, though. Maybe two months to feel ok and years to feel good.

I use "i" to get into editing mode (normal emacs mode) and control-backspace to get to god-mode. I mostly use searching for moving in the buffers. In god-mode it means pressing "s" and then typing the search text with enter marking the search text completion. Then I use "." to search forwards and "," to search backwards. If I want to search for the word(s) at point, I do "s" and "enter" and then "j" to grow the search word, word by word. When ready, again "." searches forwards and "," backwards.

The most common operations, like changing buffers and emacs windows, are under single key press. Everything is quite effortless.

The best properties for god-mode for me is that you can use the same key combinations as normally, just producing them in a sligthly different way, and that you can also do keychord edits in editing mode if that is convenient. You don't have to exit editing mode at all, if that helps.

The obvious compromise with modal editing is that you have to know in which mode you are in and that some of the useful commands are not available in the editing mode, and then you have to switch modes to get them. However, with god-mode related editing mode you always have all the keys available, and you only have to know the mode you are in (at least partly). I would never settle with evil mode, but god-mode works very well. A lot of benefits with moderate amount of downsides, therefore a win all in all.
by pydry | 2025-09-13 09:08:47+00:00
>War is not only the 155mm shells.

In this war it is most:

>Artillery has been known as the “king of battle” for centuries, and this largely remains true today. In the Russia-Ukraine war, artillery fire accounts for about 80 percent of the casualties on both sides.

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/weapons-war-race-between-ru...

>NATO has so many weapons stockpiled for war

Many, like the F16 proved expensive and fairly useless.

And, at some point they had to start deciding whether to strip their inventories bare or hold back weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

So, while there are many stockpiles, theyre not necessarily much help.

In a supreme act of irony the NATO member that stripped its inventories the most now has America threatening its territory.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 09:08:50+00:00
You do NOT get to constantly taut the low mortality rates of nuclear AND call for less regulation at the same time.

But even from a very matter of fact point of view, I'd rather have 1000 people die every year for 20 years, than have 20.000 people die on a single bad day/week. The economic and social impact is far, far bigger when it can't be "spread out" over multiple years.
by bubblethink | 2025-09-13 09:09:06+00:00
The ways to build the system you desire are simple; the political challenges though are insurmountable. This isn't rocket science. However, there has been no substantial legislative change in this area in over 30 years. The current morass of H-1B, PERM etc. is a carefully engineered compromise to keep all demanding factions - the restrictionists, the capitalists, the left and the right, acceptably (un)happy.
by tim333 | 2025-09-13 09:09:53+00:00
If you look at Russia's performance where there has been water in the way it's been kind of terrible. Their navy in the Black Sea kept getting hit by missiles and naval drones and has had to go hide and they've been largely unable to cross the Dnieper river.

The US would only need to bring an aircraft carrier to the general area and then could base aircraft in Taiwan. Even if the Chinese military was stronger than the US it'd be a difficult task for them.
by StefanBatory | 2025-09-13 09:10:31+00:00
It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...

My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 09:10:53+00:00
This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.

And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.