MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a Markdown to HTML converter that fixes AI-generated quirks
by zongheng | 2025-09-09 13:14:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a free Markdown to HTML converter that solves a pain I kept running into with AI-generated content.

For years, I relied on tools like ChatGPT and Claude to draft blog posts, but the Markdown they produced often broke existing converters. Instead of standard "*" or "-" for lists, I'd get odd symbols like ":" or "•". The converter would fail, leaving me to manually fix formatting every single time. It was frustrating and time-consuming.

So I decided to build my own: Markdownhtmlgen.com.

Key features: - Converts Markdown to HTML that actually works with AI-generated quirks - One-click emoji removal - Auto-IDs for headings (great for anchor links) - Adds rel="noopener" to links for better security - Runs entirely in the browser, no backend or registration required

I originally built it for myself, but it’s been saving me hours of editing, so I thought it might help others too.

I’d love feedback from this community: what works, what doesn’t, and what features you’d want in a Markdown converter.

Try it here: https://www.markdownhtmlgen.com
by totallymike | 2025-09-09 13:14:14+00:00
I do agree that just being nicer is a good idea, even when it's not required, and for largely the same reasons.

Incidentally, I almost crafted an example of whispering all the slurs and angry words you can think of in the general direction of your phone's autocomplete as an illustration of why LLMs don't deserve empathy, but ended up dropping it because even if nobody is around to hear it, it still feels unhealthy to put yourself in that frame of mind, much less make a habit of it.
by n8m8 | 2025-09-09 13:15:22+00:00
Good point. Has me thinking: In any field, over time, there's R&D for it to become more effective. How this progression might apply to marketing:

1. Printed ads, newspapers, billboards, magazines -- You can explain your product and show a picture of what it looks like to demonstrate the value to customers

2. Television ads, black and white -- We can demonstrate the value to customers so well!

3. Wait a minute, if we put music in the TV ads, the songs get stuck in peoples' heads, this is good for our brand

4. Color TV Ads -- We have all the previous benefits but can get more attention with color!

5. We can target regional TV ads in different parts of the country!

6. Oh, we can target any ad based on demographics on social media? This will be effective

7. Ok, now we want to keep targeting ads, but we're gonna A/B test multiple versions of the ads in real time to maximize effectiveness

8. Ok, I need to maximize effectiveness of this ad, let me generate an AI mockup of the product I'm selling to create an illusion of the lifestyle my brand represents

My point is, marketing has been optimized over time and will continue to optimize for profit in the future, and the result has been a divergence in the actual goal of marketing: We've gone from "Demonstrate the value of our product" to "Create an illusion of our lifestyle".
by Eikon | 2025-09-09 13:15:25+00:00
There's an NFSv3 COMMIT operation, combined with a "durability" marker on writes. fsync could translate to COMMIT, but if writes are marked as "durable", COMMIT is not called by common clients, and if writes are marked as non-durable, COMMIT is called after every operation, which kind of defeats the point. When you use NFS with ZeroFS, you cannot really rely on "fsync".

I'd recommend using 9P when that matters, which has proper semantics there. One property of ZeroFS is that any file you fsync actually syncs everything else too.
by arkey | 2025-09-09 13:15:41+00:00
You don't need to be fake in order to be nice. Become nice, then you won't have to fake it.

One way of becoming nice is to act nice. A nice person is a person who acts nice towards other people.

You can act different than how you feel, and that is not being fake, it's being nice.

If we all acted how we felt, we'd all be dead already.
by happymellon | 2025-09-09 13:15:56+00:00
You really twist yourself around here. But this?

> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!
by wqaatwt | 2025-09-09 13:16:04+00:00
It’s not like median (not mean) employee productivity at FAANGs and other major tech companies was ever particularly high. They always spent massive amounts of money hiring large amounts of people most of whom never provided that much direct value (due to structural/organizational reasons).

Same with AI. The business model is: spend massive amounts of money -> ??? -> success. Besides a handful of exceptions growing EU tech rarely were able to obtain enough funding without moving to the US.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-09-09 13:16:04+00:00
Yes, the intellectually curious discussion I am trying to have is about how the AGPL allegedly restricts your usage of derivative works.

In order to have that discussion, we need a specific example of such a restriction! You've evaded my request for one three times now, so the only conclusion at this point is that you can't come up with one because it just doesn't exist.
by simoncion | 2025-09-09 13:16:16+00:00
> So call them out for the bad stuff!

I am. I am also saying -because the companies involved have demonstrated that they're either frequently willing to do things that are scummy as shit or "just" have executives that make a habit of lying to the press in order to keep the hype train rolling- that's it's very, very likely that they're quietly engaging in antisocial behavior in order to make development of their projects some combination of easier, quicker, or cheaper.

> Don't distract from the genuine problems by making up stuff...

Right back at you. You said:

> There are definitively scrapers that ignore your robots.txt file Of course. But those aren't the ones that explicitly say "here is how to block us in robots.txt"

But, you don't have any proof of that. This is pure speculation on your part. Given the frequency of and degree to which the major companies involved in this ongoing research project engage in antisocial behavior [0] it's more likely than not that they are doing shady shit. As I mentioned, there's a ton of theoretical money on the line.

The unfortunate thing for us is that neither of us can do anything other than speculate... unless an insider turns informant.

[0] ...and given how the expected penalties for engaging in most of the antisocial behavior that's relevant to the AI research project is somewhere between "absolutely nothing at all" and "maybe six to twelve months of expected revenue"...
Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal
by mmulet | 2025-09-09 13:16:30+00:00
I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input).

If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and attract cool contributions (I do all drawing with the familiar Canvas2D api, so if there is interest, I can also fork this out into a cool Terminal canvas, let me know!)

I have a blog post here about how I did it, but it’s pretty high level and non technical, so please ask if you have any questions.

[How I Did It](<https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...>)

*technically only Wayland apps and x11 apps with Xwayland. But on Linux that’s mostly everything.
by photonthug | 2025-09-09 13:17:23+00:00
From the paper abstract,

> (4) we derive the optimal chain-of-thought length as [..math..] with explicit constants

I know we probably have to dive into math and abandon metaphor and analogy, but the whole structure of a claim like this just strikes me as bizarre.

Chain-of-thought always makes me think of that old joke. Alexander the great was a great general. Great generals are forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Four is an odd number of arms to have. Four is also an even number. And the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore, Alexander, the great general, had an infinite number of arms.

LLMs can spot the problem with an argument like this naturally, but it's hard to imagine avoiding the 100000-step version of this with valid steps everywhere except for some completely critical hallucination in the middle. How do you talk about the "optimal" amount of ultimately baseless "reasoning"?
by kergonath | 2025-09-09 13:18:10+00:00
That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.
by 542354234235 | 2025-09-09 13:19:02+00:00
>Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Life isn't fair and time travel doesn't exist. We are stuck with the world we have now and have to deal with the realities, including suffering the consequences for things not your fault. It isn't fair that a son gets cancer because his mother smoked around him all his life, but he is still the one that has to go through chemo.
by NickC25 | 2025-09-09 13:19:19+00:00
It's very sad, and very telling that our biggest corporations have become suckups to the reactionary side of the right wing and continue to carry the water for the most degenerate and attention-seeking members of said right wing.

None of these nutcases offer true help to society (note: neither do the extreme leftists, just so we're clear that I'm not team red or team blue), and it does no good that our corporations are actively picking a side.
by totallymike | 2025-09-09 13:19:25+00:00
I understand what you're saying, which is that the response it generates is influenced by your prompt, but feel compelled to observe that LLMs cannot want anything at all, since they are software and have no motivations.

I'd probably have passed this over if it wasn't contextually relevant to the discussion, but thank you for your patience with my pedantry just the same.
by coldpie | 2025-09-09 13:20:00+00:00
> Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.

Nah, this is just straight up false. Many pages work fine with NoScript blocking all scripts. For those that don't, you usually only have to allowlist the root domain, but you can still leave the other 32 domains they are importing blocked. It's actually surprisingly common for blocking JS to result in a better experience than leaving it enabled (eg no popups, no videos, getting rid of fade-ins and other stupid animations).

I won't argue if you think that is too much work, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for a non-technical user, but it's not nearly as bad as you described.
by stetrain | 2025-09-09 13:20:51+00:00
These more recent euphemisms have mostly come from creators on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. who are either rightly or wrongly concerned that using certain words leads to their content being demonetized.

Advertisers don't want their ads to appear next to certain keywords, platforms use content detection to match those criteria, so creators are monetarily incentivized to avoid them. Capitalism!
by brandmeyer | 2025-09-09 13:20:54+00:00
Nothing major, just some oddball decisions here and there.

Fused compare-and-branch only extends to the base integer instructions. Anything else needs to generate a value that feeds into a compare-and-branch. Since all branches are compare-and-branch, they all need two register operands, which impairs their reach to a mere +/- 4 kB.

The reach for position-independent code instructions (AUIPC + any load or store) is not quite +/- 2 GB. There is a hole on either end of the reach that is a consequence of using a sign-extended 12-bit offset for loads and stores, and a sign-extended high 20-bit offset for AIUPC. ARM's adrp (address of page) + unsigned offsets is more uniform.

RV32 isn't a proper subset of RV64, which isn't a proper subset of RV128. If they were proper subsets, then RV64 programs could run unmodified on RV128 hardware. Not that its going to ever happen, but if it did, the processor would have to mode-switch, not unlike the x86-64 transition of yore.

Floating point arithmetic spends three bits in the instruction encoding to support static rounding modes. I can count on zero hands the number of times I've needed that.

The integer ISA design goes to great lengths to avoid any instructions with three source operands, in order to simplify the datapaths on tiny machines. But... the floating point extension correctly includes fused multiply-add. So big chunks of any high-end processor will need three-operand datapaths anyway.

The base ISA is entirely too basic, and a classic failure of 90% design. Just because most code doesn't need all those other instructions doesn't mean that most systems don't. RISC-V is gathering extensions like a Katamari to fill in all those holes (B, Zfa, etc).

None of those things make it bad, I just don't think its nearly as shiny as the hype. ARM64+SVE and x86-64+AVX512 are just better.
by Eikon | 2025-09-09 13:21:33+00:00
> I'm referring to one client being able to do 1000s of operations a second

Again, I don't see any problems with "thousands of operations a second" if your single client is issuing parallel requests. Try any sequential workload instead.

> because of its minimal latency compared to raw object storage

That's not how it works. JuiceFS hits the object store for every file operation (except metadata, because it's backed by an external database). Latency cannot be lower, especially as JuiceFS doesn't seem to be implementing any buffering.

Above you also claim "allowing near instant synchronization and better performance", but near instant synchronization of what exactly? Metadata? Data blocks? And under what consistency model?

If you wish to run the benchmarks in bench/ on your setup and show better numbers, I'd happily update the JuiceFS benchmarks.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-09 13:21:53+00:00
ASML in turn wraps a bunch of companies for lenses (Carl Zeiss), lasers (Trumpf), etc [0]

Given lenses and microchips are both made from sand, I'm gonna conspiracy theory that LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.

[0] https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-09 13:23:22+00:00
> the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric

very much so, large companies are not really held accountable for their user's actions, and thats pretty much by design, for example:

If you hold a party every saturday, where the people that come along abuse residents in the streets and cause general damage, after the 5th or 6th time, and at about the point where the patrons of your parties are prosecuted, you will face legal penalties for letting it happen again. even if its different people at your party. (under a whole bunch of laws, ranging from asbos to breach of the peace to criminal damage, anti-rave laws, all sort.)

If you do that online, as long as you comply with the bare minimum(ie handing over logs), you're free from most legal pain (unless its CSAM, copyrighted or "terrorist" material)

I get your point, but thats where the we get into not a problem of the principle, but the execution. As its OFCOM who are doing the implementing, and they really don't have the expertise or leadership to make "good" guidance, we're going to end up with shit.
by graemep | 2025-09-09 13:23:31+00:00
Unmetered water is still common in the rest of the UK. There is a gradual move to metering.

I think there is a good argument for metering water - it provides an incentive not to waste it, and potable water is expensive to supply and has a significant environmental impact.

It does need to be affordable even to people on the lowest incomes though.
by const_cast | 2025-09-09 13:23:38+00:00
> I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point

Mr Krabs voice: money!

No but seriously, if the FBI is telling you to use an ad blocker, use a fucking ad blocker.

My workplace doesn't allow ad blockers for security. Except ads are a MUCH bigger security concern and everyone knows it.

I'm so sick and tired of everyone playing dumb and acting like it's fine. No, it's not fine. Its not okay that Google is serving you a phishing ad that drains your bank account. They should be held liable. Why is everyone acting like their balls have been chopped off?

Do something about it. Minimum is run an aggressive ad blocker. MINIMUM!
by quchen | 2025-09-09 13:24:08+00:00
I’m curious about those traps. I used to hate Soulslikes, Elden Ring made it click, and I binged them all on PC. Traps became part of some twisted humor, I started waiting for the (literal) punchline. I missed traps, or as I started calling them, »FromSoft bullshit«, when there weren’t any for a while. I’m super careful and alert in all games now.

I wonder whether Silksong’s traps scratch that itch, or whether they’re just annoying.
by jihadjihad | 2025-09-09 13:24:13+00:00
Often there is little or no substitute for plotting the data to see how it is distributed. A scatter plot, histogram, density plot, etc. is almost always going to tell you a "story" about the data that the summary stats will have compressed.

But sometimes you are at the mercy of the data and your visualization of choice. Box plots, for example, are great at showing more than just how the data is centered, but it is possible to encounter situations where the box plots of the data remain static while the underlying data is clearly changing [0].

As always it is good to know about these things and continue to add to the arsenal (violin plots, in the example above) of tools and intuition needed to tease out the story behind the data.

0: https://www.research.autodesk.com/publications/same-stats-di...
Show HN: DJI360 – DJI Product News and Buying Guide Platform
by sjdeak | 2025-09-09 13:24:27+00:00
Hi HN, I built DJI360 as a resource for DJI enthusiasts ahead of the rumored Osmo 360 camera launch. The site aggregates DJI product news and features a comprehensive buying guide covering their entire lineup—including update cycles and purchase timing recommendations.

Built it mainly to scratch my own itch as a drone hobbyist who was tired of scattered info across forums. The buying guide turned out pretty useful for timing purchases around DJI's release patterns.

Check it out: https://dji360.com

Feedback welcome, especially on the buying guide structure!
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-09 13:24:42+00:00
Government bonds are considered lower risk and the interest rate is lower, i.e they will attract the same money for less. Private shareholders are more expensive.

This also doesn't consider "debt recapitalisation" where these private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers and then suck out dividend cash "de-risking" their holding in the company. The government can bail it out or the can close it then, it's not their problem as they received the cash upfront.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-09 13:24:47+00:00
Revolutions are the norm in the American setup.

The first peaceful transfer of power from one party to another is sometimes called the "Revolution of 1800". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_presidentia...

Every constitutional amendment changes our government. The people who wrote the mechanism in expected this. I doubt they expected us to just... stop amending.
by wrinkl3 | 2025-09-09 13:24:55+00:00
Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.

In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
by scythe | 2025-09-09 13:25:36+00:00
>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.

In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.
by diggan | 2025-09-09 13:25:55+00:00
> npm is too slow to respond

Microsoft has been bravely saying "Security is top priority" since 2002 (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/gates-security-is-to...) and every now and then reminds us that they put "security above all else" (latest in 2024: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-sec...), yet things like this persists.

For how long time do Microsoft need to leave wide-open holes for the government to crack down on their wilful ignorance? Unless people go to jail, literally nothing will happen.
by everdrive | 2025-09-09 13:25:59+00:00
The extreme flip-flopping of the major tech companies provides a few small possibilities that don't paint a good picture no matter how you look at it:

- They never believed in progressive causes, and were just siding with what they believed was the social majority. (and so when they perceive the social majority has changed, they immediately follow and would follow _any_ social majority.)

- They don't agree with the current anti-progressive social movement (ie, they still hold their old beliefs) but none of them have any backbone whatsoever, and are getting in line with virtually no resistance or fight.

- All the tech company CEOs just happened to be radicalized at the exact same time.

I'm sure that #1 is the most reasonable answer, although perhaps there's a dash of #3 in there. In any case, you'd have to question whether a party-in-power (from a social movement perspective) wouldn't just encourage this trend when _they_ were the ones winning.