MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-28 18:25:10+00:00
A way to merge multiple pdfs together/some features of sterlingpdf

Yes I know I could self host it but I felt really overwhelmed self hosting it.

So much so that I created a golang (LLM generated, funny how I am so AI skeptic when I use it, hey I just don't think its worth it economically no matter what) but yeah, its a simple golang code which just takes some pdfs, merges them. The code is shitty but I didn't write it and stores it in the server for some time so you definitely need to make some modifications.

https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/d925689d54fe7ccf79...

Please modify it as I (built?) this for my own use case but the main thing I want to take away from this is that pdfcpu for golang might be really nice library for golang for pdf's except the binary is 20MB of size and I would love to see it shrunk down a bit y'know.

Anyways, nice project.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-28 18:25:23+00:00
Often not even that. Samsung wants its proprietary Odin stuff to flash, Mediatek has their own toolsuite. Both need Windows to run.

Only ones actually using fully open source tools are Google's Pixel lineup.

But none, not even Pixel, allow for anything resembling actual "recovery" for common failure modes. Dead display at least for Samsung and Pixel means you have to install a new display if you want to access the data, otherwise it won't even pass the first bootloader stage, much less boot into the OS or unlock the encryption. Something gone corrupt with the OS? Same case. If you can't manage to boot at least to the Android Safe Mode, you're out of luck. And no HW self-test at all.
by xenobeb | 2025-09-28 18:26:07+00:00
This all depends on how you define "better".

I am an amateur programmer and tried to port a python 2.7 library to python 3 with GPT5 a few weeks ago.

After a few tries, I realized both myself and the model missed that a large part of the library is based on another library that was never ported to 3 either.

That doesn't stop GPT5 from trying to write the code as best it can with a library that doesn't exist for python 3.

That is the part we have made absolutely no progress on.

Of course, it can do a much better react crud app than in Sept 2023.

In one sense, LLMs are so amazing and impressive and quite fugazi in another sense.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-28 18:26:19+00:00
It doesn’t require a grand conspiracy, just nobody deciding to rock the boat. It seems that when academics try to measure how effective the ads are, the effect sizes are much smaller than expected or it turns out the companies haven’t run any actual experiments.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

> The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".

Sure, dump everyone who is skeptical of ads into this niche weird person case, and it makes it easier to ignore them. Have you actually talked to these “average people,” though? My experience has been that most people just find ads annoying.
by Jnr | 2025-09-28 18:26:54+00:00
I am not sure I understand why Headscale was excluded. As far as I know, it is made by people not related to Tailscale.

It would be like complaining Vaultwarden is bad because the Bitwarden project is not fully open source even though Vaultwarden is fully open source and has most of the features implemented.

And Headscale kind of ticks all the other boxes mentioned, except "not headscale", because:

* p2p mesh network - it is a mesh network. And even when mesh is blocked, you can use multiple relay servers (derp) which will relay to the mesh from closest location. And you can host your own derp servers.

* Open source and selfhosted - check

* Not Wireguard (Signature-based blocking) - in cases where wireguard is blocked, the derp relay servers run over https and are usually not blocked based on signatures. For example, I use it with Traefik proxy in TCP mode so I could run derp and other http services on the same 443 port and it works great. So - check?

Packaged in nixpkgs - check

On top of that, if you add Headplane admin UI you get nice graphical management, very similar to the one of Tailscale.
by Jensson | 2025-09-28 18:27:36+00:00
That is a myth, cpu time is time spent waiting around by your users as the cpu is taking seconds to do something that could be instant, if you have millions of users and that happens every day that quickly adds up to many years worth of time.

It might be true if you just look at development cost, but if you look at value as a whole it isn't. And even just development cost its often not true, since time spent waiting around by the developer for tests to run and things to start also slows things down, taking a bit of time there to reduce cpu time is well worth it just to get things done faster.
by cyberax | 2025-09-28 18:27:55+00:00
> I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.

So you're telling me that you've never seen a well-run people-oriented city like Houston?

And I grew up in Europe. I got my driving license around the age of 25, and my first car at 29.

> No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?

See?

> Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?

Care to list all the externalities of buses? Do bus drivers spring out of sea foam and dissolve after the shift? How about all of the opportunity cost for people who can't make commutes that are forbidden by the bus network? The entire human lifetimes wasted every day while waiting for buses?

> Injuries caused by impaired drivers?

Self-driving solved it?

> I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.

If buses don't affect your traffic flow, then you have enough road space so that residents can just use cars.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-28 18:28:04+00:00
If one had a trustworthy business-minded friend who was willing to work with you at starting something that might be the way to go.

However, as OP directly experienced (as have I) most startups will fail. That's the normal result. Employment is almost always safer, even if ultimately less rewarding. So try to do an honest assessment of your risk tolerance. If you only have yourself to worry about, you can live on beans and rice for a long time. If you have children or other dependents, it can be more complicated.
by kgwgk | 2025-09-28 18:28:28+00:00
> Define optional?

“Les personnes habitant en Suisse et les Suisses de l'étranger pourront demander une e-ID. L'utilisation de cette dernière ne sera toutefois pas obligatoire. En effet, la Confédération continuera à offrir toutes ses prestations dans le monde réel. Il faudra modifier la loi si l'on veut un jour déclarer obligatoire l'utilisation de l'e-ID dans certains cas. Un référendum pourra alors être lancé contre la modification décidée par le Parlement.”

Automatic translation: “People living in Switzerland and Swiss abroad will be able to apply for an e-ID. However, the use of the latter will not be mandatory. Indeed, the Confederation will continue to offer all its services in the real world. It will be necessary to amend the law if one day we want to declare the use of e-ID mandatory in certain cases. A referendum can then be launched against the amendment decided by Parliament.”
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-28 18:28:57+00:00
I agree, much of what we knew about the USG position on health care research has recently been called into question, and so it may already be that the author's contention is untrue.

But on the flip side, the problem they describe with the NHS -- namely, that no means no, is less likely to happen in the US. And I think suggesting that there is just one 'medical establishment' in Silicon Valley is painting with far too broad a brush.

Our problem is probably more with particular insurance companies (UHC is so egregious, it is hard to be surprised that so many people were not horrified when their CEO was gunned down in broad daylight). But at least you can easily pick a new provider.
by ploxiln | 2025-09-28 18:28:58+00:00
I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience that even non-technical users already have.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-09-28 18:29:06+00:00
The "crystals and horoscopes" part is such a cheap jab that's going to alienate a lot of the population. Astrology is a harmless introspective process for most people, they just like having a framework to characterise their beliefs and feelings. You find very few people who feel that it's prescriptive and limits their life.

Contrasted with very rational people who are chasing magical, unmoored valuations in the stock market for instance. We buy and sell equity based not on future cash flows, but on confidence there will be a bigger sucker down the line. This untethering of "value" from any productive work is a greater contributor to the hollowing out of the US economy than anyone buying a piece of amethyst.
by Certhas | 2025-09-28 18:29:35+00:00
The sort rules are simple (1). Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. So for example version numbers (which must be massively more common than decimals in filenames) work correctly, and 5.9 is indeed smaller than 5.10 and the latter is not identical to 5.1 .

Given that this idea goes back more than two decades, has been the default behaviour of the most used OSes for many years, with no major outcry, I think empirically we can be fairly certain that it does not routinely lead to a lot of surprises and confusion.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sort_order
by npteljes | 2025-09-28 18:30:37+00:00
It kinda does, but it's not as neat as SponsorBlock is. SB fully automatically skips the sponsor segment, as soon as other SB users define where the it is, of course. With YTP's solution, you need to seek, and then click the white Skip button.

I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
by systoll | 2025-09-28 18:30:50+00:00
The entire idea that numbers would be treated on a character by character basis rather than as numbers is somewhat intuitive for developers and not for non-technical people.

The answer to all of those questions is no for lexicographic ordering. Lexicographic ordering leads to surprise and confusion as a result.

> It's like a feature request that initially sounds reasonable and useful but once you explore the requirements in detail you realize there are too many edge cases to be able to meet the request in a non-brittle way.

It's been on windows and macOS for coming up on 25 years, and is in practically every modern UI. It’s reasonable.
by pengaru | 2025-09-28 18:31:02+00:00
I'll defer to Kurt Vonnegut Jr:

“The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we can even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.”

Have you already tried positioning yourself as deep into your country's "money river" as possible? It's by far the biggest knob, location location location. You can be the most qualified amazeballs whatever of something in a resource desert devoid of opportunity and you'll starve.
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-28 18:31:09+00:00
Far right communities are replete with conspiracy theories. One such theory is that there is a technology (medbed) that is pretty much just a cure-all and is being withheld from society by nefarious actors. The details are almost unimportant, as this sort of conspiratorial thinking fluidly moves between claims.

Somebody created an AI video of Trump talking about this technology. It is a fake video. Trump, presumably because he saw people praising in the context of this video, decided to repost it to his Truth Social account. This was apparently too embarrassing for the administration, so he deleted it.

The actual story should be that Trump's brain is completely cooked and that he platforms the most insane conspiracy theories and straight up false information to his audience of millions and millions people. No different than an off-the-deep-end person reposting insane shit they've seen on Facebook, except that this person is the president.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-09-28 18:31:21+00:00
He is gullible and wants to believe that there is a group of shadowy elites suppressing high technology, even though for the last 10 years, the shadowy elites have been backing him.

(And there isn't a huge spread in technology - Only in laws and money. Anyone could put up thousands of AI surveillance cameras, but only the government allows themselves to and can afford to)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-28 18:31:28+00:00
there is also uh, god, I always forget its name whenever I want to use it....

AHHHHH YESS, I FINALLY REMEMBERED IT AFTER 5 minutes of thinking.

https://cobalt.tools

This has definitely helped me a lot in a lot of times when I didn't have my pc or just in general too, their api was also pretty hackable too actually and they support more than youtube

Btw did I mention its open source?

Tho the last time I did try to install something from cobalt.tools it wasn't working

One time, I remember that a group of girls in my previous school were downloading yt vids on school lab via some sketchy website and I said to them to use cobalt.tools while I was walking & I definitely farmed some aura too I suppose which I am sure literally everyone involved in the scene have forgotten except me who is recalling it right now.
by drysine | 2025-09-28 18:31:28+00:00
>I extrapolate from Putin's allies really. ... they're all in the same bucket

Hamas, Hezbolla or Houthis are hardly Russian allies. Iran isn't fighting on the Russian side like North Korea did, but I guess you can call them an ally of sorts.

Here is a bit about Israel, which supports the Ukraine:

Two of the sources told the outlets that in the first few weeks of the war, the IDF allowed up to 15 or 20 civilian deaths for every low-ranking Hamas militant assassinated. That number could increase to up to more than 100 civilians if the IDF were targeting a single senior Hamas official, the sources said. "There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of operations," one source said, according to the report. "A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge." [0]

Assuming that's true, should we extrapolate that too?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-military-idf-civili...
by johnfn | 2025-09-28 18:31:34+00:00
Do you think that all managers and tech leads atrophy because they don’t spend all day “doing”? I think a good number of them become more effective because they delegate the simple parts of their work that don’t require deep thought, leaving them to continue to think hard about the thorniest areas of what they’re working on.

Or perhaps you’re asking how people will become good at delegation without doing? I don’t know — have you been “doing” multiple years of assembly? If not, how are you any good at Python (or whatever language you currently use?). Probably you’d say you don’t need to think about assembly because it has been abstracted away from you. I think AI operates similarly by changing the level of abstraction you can think at.
by jcynix | 2025-09-28 18:32:30+00:00
That's why we have all this LC_* stuff in Linux, which you can configure to your needs:

export LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE" export LC_MONETARY="de_DE" export LC_PAPER="de_DE" export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_RESPONSE="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8

Mix in your Swedish or Swaheli, maybe even the Vatican State:

e.g. de_DE, sw_TZ, it_VA (not guaranteed ;-).
by clickety_clack | 2025-09-28 18:32:43+00:00
According to this link https://www.kidsandcars.org/document_center/download/hot-car... (and I’m guessing any bias would be to overcount given the goals of the organization), 1125 kids have died in this way since 1990. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the hundreds of millions of people in the US, it’s vanishingly small.

Regulating this way leads to a straitjacket society where we are not allowed to take any risks whatsoever, no matter how minuscule. We’re not banning kids from being around kitchens, stairs or bicycles, which all present greater danger. Meanwhile, we are creating an environment where kids can only venture outside the home in highly regulated and supervised situations and wondering why things like social anxiety are rising off the charts.

If we wanted cars to be capable of letting kids out, car manufacturers would have to do it, much like they have to avoid creating all the other dangerous situations a car can create. The question is “should parents be given discretion to parent their kids”, saying no because car windows don’t roll down isn’t really engaging with that.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-09-28 18:33:30+00:00
There's something deeply ingrained in the American psyche that says that warnings and guardrails are for other, stupid people. You, personally, are no doubt an ubermensch who can perform every procedure flawlessly from memory every time. If there were a crisis you would be a hero and save everyone. This applies equally to "good guy with a gun" and human factors analysis of software.
by ghusbands | 2025-09-28 18:33:31+00:00
> This sort of stuff is actually doable just with just video chat and OBS.

If what each person is hearing is 100-400ms delayed from what each person is producing, how can they possibly mutually react or even get their music in time? If B plays in time with what they hear from C, C hears what B did 200-800ms later - that's far too much and will sound terrible.

Jamming would seem to require incredibly low latency audio just for the rhythm to work between two performers.
by tomp | 2025-09-28 18:34:02+00:00
It’s actually “imputed rental value tax”.

The point is fairness, not progressiveness.

The idea is, if you live in your own house, you’re no better off than if you lived in another property and rented out your property, and paid the tax on the rent you get.

It’s supposed to reduce friction / bias in the market (though you could also obviously argue the reverse).
by riazrizvi | 2025-09-28 18:34:06+00:00
This is the central struggle we are all facing throughout our lives, in different degrees: what do you hold on to, when do you let go, what do you replace it with? The local issue you have is with a career goal that has not panned out, do you hold on to the dream or do you ‘face reality’ as people in your life and here would urge you to do.

What adversity does is challenge our attachment profile. This helps the timid hoarder, who wants to keep everything, by forcing them to choose. They learn a stronger, purer, sense of self in the process. A lesson we can’t seem to learn as fast, voluntarily. Victor Frankl describes it in great detail as a holocaust survivor in Man’s Search For Meaning.

So embrace your hardship. Consider that you are exactly where you need to be in this moment, to move ahead. And make all attachments second to this - Never Give Up. But for the rest, maybe introduce flexibility, experiment more. You have an opinion on these other opportunities not being worth it, but what have you tried? You see things up close that the ruminating knee hugger simply won’t ever see by thought alone.
by sofal | 2025-09-28 18:34:09+00:00
Well, yeah. I like getting computers to automate things and solve problems. Typing in boilerplate and syntax is just a means to that end, and not even remotely the most interesting part. I don't like managing my own memory garbage collection either, so I prefer to use tools that handle that for me.

I mean, I guess when I was really early in my career I'd get a kick out of writing a clever loop or whatever, and I drank deep from all the low level coding wisdom that was available, but the scope of what I care about these days has long since expanded outward.
by dxxvi | 2025-09-28 18:34:11+00:00
There is this statement in the article: LLMs are lightning fast junior engineers. I don't know if that is right or wrong. To me, good LLMs are a lightning fast better version of me. That means that I can write code like some LLMs but it'll take me days to do it (if I use a language that I'm not good at, for example Rust) but with carefully crafted prompts, LLMs take maybe half an hour or less.
by hn8726 | 2025-09-28 18:34:28+00:00
I'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states

> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.

but OP claims it

> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme

I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.

Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.

These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.

I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.

In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?

[1] https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/com... [2] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecommen...