MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LoMoGan | 2025-10-29 16:00:24+00:00
With the rise of vision-language models (VLMs) (such as Qwen-VL and GPT-4.1), new end-to-end OCR models like DeepSeek-OCR have emerged. These models jointly understand visual and textual information, enabling direct interpretation of PDFs without an explicit layout detection step.

However, this paradigm shift raises an important question:

If a VLM can already process both the document images and the query to produce an answer directly, do we still need the intermediate OCR step?
by mindslight | 2025-10-29 16:00:25+00:00
> someone tries to pressure you from talking to a lawyer

add that to the list of when one should pull the ripcord on DIY and find/demand an attorney

> It seems far more likely to result in a better (or at least neutral) outcome with a lawyer.

So in my case the outcome was a restitution payment of a few hundred dollars. I don't know what the bottom of the market for attorneys looks like, but I would be highly surprised if you could find one to get involved for less than a two hour commitment (let's say $500). So right off the bat, that would have tripled the cost of the outcome. Never mind when the detective now sees mom, despite being ostensibly "poor", has enough money to afford that attorney (and make the detective's job harder!). So he stops telling me that I should be content with a few hundred dollars, and I instead claim a much higher amount of actual damages including the time I had to spend.

(Note that my comments on this matter are all modulo assuming the kid is guilty. There was pretty strong evidence left behind the scene, and yes, I am mostly just taking the detective's word for it. Obviously if the kid was innocent and being framed by some other kid, then the downside to not hiring an attorney becomes a bit harder to stomach, despite the same financial incentives remaining)
by vidarh | 2025-10-29 16:01:02+00:00
Exactly. If someone has "Cloud Engineer" in the headline of their resume instead of "Devops Engineer" it's already warning and worth probing. If someone has "AWS|VMWare Engineer" in their bio, it's a giant red flag to me. Sometimes it's people just being aware where they'll find demand, but often it's indicative of someone who will push their pet stack - and it doesn't matter if it's VMWare on-prem or AWS (both purely as examples; it doesn't matter which specific tech it is), it's equally bad if they identify with a specific stack irrespective of what the stack is.

I'll also tend to look closely at whether people have "gotten stuck" specialising in a single stack. It won't make me turn them down, but it will make me ask extra questions to determine how open they are to alternatives when suitable.
by r_singh | 2025-10-29 16:01:05+00:00
As the legal history around scraping shows, it’s almost always the smaller company that gets sued out of existence. Taking on OpenAI or Microsoft, as you suggest, isn’t realistic — even governments often struggle to hold them accountable.

And for the record, large companies regularly ignore robots.txt themselves: LinkedIn, Google, OpenAI, and plenty of others.

The reality is that it’s the big players who behave like the aggressors, shaping the rules and breaking them when convenient. Smaller developers aren’t the problem, they’re just easier to punish.
by palmotea | 2025-10-29 16:01:08+00:00
> These examples add up to something bigger. As AI goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match.

Except that LLMs are not "a genius in your pocket." They'll definitely give you an answer, whether it's good or correct, who knows.
by everdrive | 2025-10-29 16:01:08+00:00
This is a game of cat and mouse -- to the extent that LLMs really give consumers an advantage here (and I'm a bit skeptical that they truly do) companies would eventually learn how to game this to their advantage, just like they ruined online reviews. I would even wager that if you told a teenager right now that online reviews used to be amazing and deeply accurate, they would disbelieve you and just assume you were naive. That's how far the pendulum has swung.
by pigcat | 2025-10-29 16:01:31+00:00
Woah, how did I not know about that tip about omitting the search pattern? Love it and will be using that lots!

As a thank you, I'll leave you with the way I learned to search/replace, just to give you a slightly different flavour: asterisk, cgn ([c]hange [g]o [n]ext), type replaced, then . (period, to repeat) until I'm done.
Show HN: Browser interface for Claude Code, edit any website by clicking on it
by kiranjohns | 2025-10-29 16:01:38+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Kiran (https://kiranjohns.com)

I've been using Claude Code a lot lately, and every time I wanted to make small UI tweaks, I found myself taking screenshots and explaining the changes in text.

So I built Visual Claude (I should find a better name, open to suggestions)

It’s an open-source browser tool that lets you edit any web app’s codebase just by clicking or dragging elements and prompting Claude Code right from the browser!

It's like wordpress-ifying any website + stack agnostic

Here's a demo: https://x.com/thetronjohnson/status/1983472717375664459

Open Sourced under AGPL-3

Would love your feedback
by piltdownman | 2025-10-29 16:01:39+00:00
But it always has - if a given user improperly gains access to an American computer system, they violate federal law, specifically the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of 1986. By making these activities federal crimes, the CFAA creates a legal foundation for pursuing alleged infringers, regardless of their location.

In deciding whether a U.S. statute may be applied extraterritorially, courts look to two potential foundations for jurisdiction: first, the jurisdictional basis, “territoriality, nationality, passive personality, universality, or the protective principle”; and second, legislative intent. CFAA Passes both these tests. This is clarified in U.S. Const. art. I, § 8s. 10, 3; art. VI, cl. 2. Cf. United States v. Baston, 818 F.3d 651, 666-67 (11th Cir. 2016) (“Congress’s power to enact extraterritorial laws is not limited to the Offenses Clause”).

i.e. the Chinese Military Personnel Charged with Computer Fraud, Economic Espionage and Wire Fraud for Hacking into Credit Reporting Agency Equifax, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-military-personnel-ch...

If you want a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting, the specific computers in scope are defined under section 18 U.S.C. § 1030(e)(2) - "...including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States."

Similarly, in United States v. Neil Scott Kramer (2011) it was determined that ALL cell-phones represent computers in scope - "...the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found that a cell phone can be considered a computer if "the phone perform[s] arithmetic, logical, and storage functions."

My favourite, however, is the precedent set by Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers' International Union (2011) - urging legitimate communications via official digital channels constitutes a DDOS and breach of the CFAA if the official channel cannot handle the subsequent spike in volume!

This travesty arose after Pulte fired an employee represented by the union and LIUNA urged members to call and send email to the company to express their dissatisfaction. As a result of the increased traffic, the company's email system crashed. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the LIUNA's instruction to call and email "intentionally caused damage".
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-29 16:01:42+00:00
Using a single DBMS for many purposes because it is so flexible and “already there” from an operations perspective is something I’ve seen over and over again. It usually goes wrong eventually with one workload/use screwing up others but maybe that’s fine and a normal part of scaling?

I think a bigger issue is the DBMS themselves getting feature after feature and becoming bloated and unfocused. Add the thing to Postgres because it is convenient! At least Postgres has a decent plugin approach. But I think more use cases might be served by standalone products than by add-ons.
by wiseowise | 2025-10-29 16:01:48+00:00
> I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.

It's the same argument as "why do you spend so much time and money on food, it's going to become shit anyway".

No, just no. You can close your eyes, chant lalala with plugged ears and inhale all sorts of copium, but listening uncompressed music and movies on expensive equipment is a completely different experience, period. You can't say that you enjoy it as much as they do, because you are you and they are they.
by alastairr | 2025-10-29 16:02:02+00:00
I agree, though it's hard to tell what people outside the tech sphere are signalling about what they think about the tech - many seem to be pretty positive about chatgpt.

What concerns me is that I don't think it's widely understood enough that there's a frantic, cultish mindset around the tech in SV and tech circles - a mindset that wants to see society upended in search of justifying the investments being made.
by blenderob | 2025-10-29 16:02:12+00:00
And if the OP hadn't done that, someone here would complain, why couldn't the OP use a larger CPU and test if Postgres performs better? Really, there is no way the OP can win here, can they?

I'm glad the OP benchmarked on the 96 vCPU server. So now I know how well Postgres performs on a large CPU. Not very well. But if the OP had done their benchmark on a low CPU, I wouldn't have learned this.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-29 16:03:15+00:00
Take a look on how to implement access control over GraphQL requests. It's useless for anything that isn't public data (at least public for your entire network).

And yes, you don't want to use it for public APIs. But if you have private APIs that are so complex that you need a query language, and still want use those over web services, you are very likely doing something really wrong.
by jb1991 | 2025-10-29 16:03:17+00:00
> That 100 dollars is just the fee to even make an app. Even if your iPhone never has an Internet connection. And even if you literally load the app via USB to your iPhone only.

This is incorrect.

You make it sound like you cannot even get started unless you pay a $100 fee. You do not need to pay Apple any fees to make an app and put it on your own device. You have to pay the fee once you want to distribute it on the App Store.
by satellite2 | 2025-10-29 16:03:20+00:00
I'm not sure about this.

If the job market is representative of this then we can see that as both sides uses it and are getting better it's becoming an arms race. Looking for a job two years ago using ChatGPT was the perfect timing but not any more. The current situation is more applications per position and thus longer decision time. The end result is that the duration of unemployment is getting longer.

I'm afraid the current situation, which as described in the article is favorable to customers, is not going to last and might even reverse.
by andy99 | 2025-10-29 16:03:36+00:00
Hot take - I’m sure this is true for early adopters. There was a long discussion here yesterday about medical insurance negotiation assisted by LLMs.

Longer term, there is a real danger that asymmetry will increase. Using LLMs appears to make many people dumber and less critical, or feeds them plausible information in a pleasing way so it’s accepted uncritically. Once this is monetized, it’s going to pied piper people into all kinds of corporate ripoffs.
by stared | 2025-10-29 16:04:11+00:00
> This mechanical revolution had a profound impact on child labor. Whereas children working was previously seen as an unfortunate necessity, the new wealth created from automation turned it into an excess. Families who no longer depended on their children’s wages stopped sending them to work. In response, society reoriented its perception of childhood, from a period of economic activity to one devoted to education and play. Mass public schooling was established, and child labor was widely outlawed.

No, that’s not how it worked.

Children were made to work in mines and factories to the point of exhaustion - so much so that, by adulthood, many were in poor health.

Prussia outlawed child labor and introduced public schools not because of Enlightenment ideas about human rights or education, but to train soldiers.

This idealization is not just a small historical omission; it’s the root cause of many core issues in the current education system. We take the current school system for granted - "either this or a lack of education" - but many features (e.g., teaching by age cohorts; the teacher as superior; everything organized in inflexible blocks of time; students expected to sit and stand on command, etc.) are not universal and are likely not optimal for growth. They were, however, very good for training infantry and factory workers - over 100 years ago.
by iLemming | 2025-10-29 16:04:13+00:00
"The Idea" here I think is in the revelation of the ultimate preeminence of text in a programmer's life. Plain text deserves our utmost attention, yet many programmers overlook its significance and rarely give it deliberate thought.

"Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."¹

Vim-navigation provides a mental and spatial "language" that enables efficient text manipulation through keyboard input. Rather than forcing your brain to process raw character chunks on the screen, it allows you to reason about text in meaningful units: letters, words, paragraphs, tags, nested structures - e.g., "delete everything between parentheses" - and more.

Sadly, we keep moving away from plain text conventions, making our work increasingly complicated. Have you ever tried quickly extracting text interwoven with code from Slack into your editor? Ever gotten mad when websites won't let you copy the content or use colors and fonts that make it unreadable?

I implore every programmer to reject the status quo and reclaim agency over text interactions - always find ways to deal with text on your own terms. For instance, I'm reading this thread and typing this very comment in my editor. Why wouldn't I? It has all the tools I need for it - vim-navigation, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, and tons of other tools.

Final point: do not assume code is somehow different. Code simply is structured text. Don't try to find perfect "code editor", prioritize plain text. Good plain text editors are the best code editors, but even the most sophisticated IDE at some points brings mostly frustration if it cannot nicely handle the simplicity of plain text.

___

¹. Graydon Hoare. Always bet on text - https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
by entaloneralie | 2025-10-29 16:04:29+00:00
I don't, sorry. I have played with rewriting systems a lot, but not within the lens of computability. One thing that I've noticed where that some rules can be inferred to be exhaustive(an exhaustive rule can be applied without searching for another rule for as long as the rule can be applied), and that a program where all the rules have less tokens on the right side than on the left side are not turing complete.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/pocket_rewriting
by tomaszsobota | 2025-10-29 16:04:31+00:00
And I'd love to make it for iPads too, just struggling to find the optimal UX for enabling and disabling the overlay.

On macOS you can just use the global hotkey or the app menu, on iPad I'd have to wire it up somehow else - supper happy to get ideas on what would feel seamless and unobtrusive for you. I'll definitely implement it then!
by Dnguyen | 2025-10-29 16:04:51+00:00
I think the author assumed things will be spread fairly across the board. I don't think wealth gain will be evenly distributed. The other issue I have with the article is that the author assumed unlimited resource to build the robots. Resources will be limited. Building those robots won't be a nice green field either. I think there will be a lot of dirty waste by products that will be a major health concern for the human.
by dangus | 2025-10-29 16:04:52+00:00
Interesting thought. I’d say a low to medium amount but you’re making a good point here.

Most services offer simple SMS two factor, and then if they offer an upgrade to Authenticator or passkey then I have no iOS/Android dependency.

My bank’s website works almost the same as the phone app, I think the only difference is the lack of mobile check deposit (but nobody’s writing checks anymore).

Some services like Venmo are most popular on apps but still have a website.

My remaining hooks are:

- iCloud shared photo libraries with my family. I can use those on iCloud.com but it’s a bit more of a pain. My paid iCloud storage has been migrated to more open alternatives.

- AirTags and Find My. There just isn’t a competitor that’s anywhere near as good. It’s thankfully not a very necessary product.

- Apple Watch. (AirPods actually work great on Linux, btw, even if they are missing some functionality)

- Apple Home. I could migrate this to Home Assistant.

- Apple Wallet. This is mostly convenience. Most things that use it have some kind of alternative, like printed boarding passes. But there’s…

- Ticketmaster. The mobile website tells me I must download the app or add to mobile wallet. Barcodes are dynamic and screenshots don't work. I think the only alternative is to go to the box office before the event which can be very annoying.
by btilly | 2025-10-29 16:05:04+00:00
Presumably the figures for Tether's holdings are based on their attestations. Should we believe those figures to be real?

There is no other source for estimates of their financial holdings than those attestations. For years, Tether has promised that they are working on an audit. No audit has emerged. This is suspicious because audits aren't particularly hard for legitimate organizations.

People have gone looking for evidence that Tether really has as much as it has said. Nobody has succeeded. For example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my.... Which, after noting Tether's settlement for past fraud, and prominent executives with suspicious criminal histories, famously said that Tether "is quilted out of red flags."

And yet, many strongly believe that Tether is for real. Given that nobody has produced evidence of their wealth, I regard this belief as a question of psychology.

Said psychological belief has a simple explanation. We humans have a strong tendency towards cognitive dissonance. Meaning that we reject evidence which questions our sense of identity.

If I'm a bitcoin millionaire, my likely identity includes, "I'm a millionaire." But the financial system does not allow us to directly trade bitcoin. What I can actually trade bitcoin for is Tether. And therefore my belief in my own wealth relies on trusting that Tether is equivalent to money.

How can I support that trust? I can point to someone smart and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can point to someone rich and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can get angry at anyone who doubts Tether. It is easy to observe all three behaviors from people into Crypto.

That Bloomberg article offers an ironic example. Back in 2021, many crypto enthusiasts pointed at Sam Bankman-Fried. Who was both rich and smart, and publicly believed in Tether. Therefore he was quoted on the topic. Today, of course, he is in federal prison for having run a Ponzi scheme. If we behaved logically, any crypto enthusiast who used to look up to him, should be saying, "Wait, am I sure I'm placing my trust in the right place?" But, predictably, few do that. Instead they dismiss this past mistake, and place their trust today in someone else.

Now everyone knows that crypto is full of Ponzi schemes on top of Ponzi schemes. People are often OK with trying to take advantage of the greater fool, because they don't believe that they will be the greater fool. Others see people apparently making money and get in, driven by FOMO. But statistically, most people in a Ponzi scheme will lose money. And yet they will look like really smart people - right until the scheme collapses.

So here is the real question. Does Tether really have the money? Or does the entire infrastructure of crypto Ponzi schemes rest on yet another Ponzi scheme?
by singron | 2025-10-29 16:05:13+00:00
Kafka also doesn't give you all those things. E.g. there is no automatic dead-lettering, so a consumer that throws an exception will endlessly retry and block all progress on that partition. Kafka only stores bytes, so schema is up to you. Exactly-once is good, but there are some caveats (you have to use kafka transactions, which are significantly different than normal operation, and any external system may observe at-least-once semantics instead). Similar exactly-once semantics would also be trivial in an RDBMS (i.e. produce and consume in same transaction).

If you plan on retaining your topics indefinitely, schema evolution can become painful since you can't update existing records. Changing the number of partitions in a topic is also painful, and choosing the number initially is a difficult choice. You might want to build your own infrastructure for rewriting a topic and directing new writes to the new topic without duplication.

Kafka isn't really a replacement for a database or anything high-level like a ledger. It's really a replicated log, which is a low-level primitive that will take significant work to build into something else.
Azure major outage: Portal, Front Door and global regions down
by sech8420 | 2025-10-29 16:05:52+00:00
Just started ~5 minutes ago: multiple global regions report that Azure is offline — portal won’t load (even cached), Front Door services unreachable, CDN failing — US East/Central, West US, Netherlands, UK, Italy, NZ all reporting issues. Status pages still show green. Heads up to anyone on Azure. Last week AWS, now this.
by camel-cdr | 2025-10-29 16:05:55+00:00
RISC-V is still at the point where open-source implementations (in rtl) are faster than purchasable proprietary ones (in silicon).

XiangShan is currently the fastest open-source CPU implementation: https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

uarch slides: https://tutorial.xiangshan.cc/hpca25/slides/20250302-HPCA25-...

uarch slides with WIP features: https://tutorial.xiangshan.cc/micro25/slides/Microarchitectu...
by state_less | 2025-10-29 16:06:31+00:00
For radios, the general idea of building radios to a spec and having them certified to be sold in country works pretty well most of the time. It might be nice to have a phone with plenty of flexibility on the radio, but I think most folks would be happy just to connect and send work-a-day packets OTA unencumbered by additional restrictions.

It seems like a hardware security device could act similarly to the radio in that the general OS can ask for service (e.g. a signature), but not have access to the internals of the MCU. I don't see why these systems need to be opaque either, in fact it'd be nice to know what is running on the security enclave or LTE radio, even if folks aren't generally meant to access/modify the internals.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop. In my case, I am looking for more experimentation with the smartphone form factor. I'd like to see better options in the market.