MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Osync – A Git and rsync tool for local syncing and backups
by kirurik | 2025-10-27 02:28:40+00:00
Hey everyone,

I made a small tool called osync, a setup that uses Git and rsync to sync and back up directories between devices. It started as a personal experiment to sync my Obsidian notes between my PC and phone without relying on cloud storage or overcomplicated tools. I thought it would be simple, just SSH and rsync, but it turned into a great learning experience.

Now the script can, once SSH, systemd, and the works are set up, automatically sync between two computers reliably while also backing up to a Git repository.

GitHub: https://github.com/Kena-Njonge/osync

I also wrote a blog post https://open.substack.com/pub/kenakiruri/p/how-i-backup-and-... that goes over the motivation and acts as a tutorial if you want to use the tool to sync your Obsidian vaults. It also covers some of the differences between this setup and other alternatives.

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially on how I could improve it from a software engineering perspective.

Thanks!
by gridspy | 2025-10-27 02:29:11+00:00
Thread exhaustion attack

1. Start <thread_count> connections to a server

2. Hold connections open

3. Do nothing else

Server

1. Incoming connection. assign a thread.

2. Wait for request <--- Attack causes us to get stuck here

3. Serve request

4. Close connection and thread / return to threadpool

Solution: Use a reverse proxy to handle the incoming connections. Typical reverse proxies such as nginx use event-based polling not a per-connection thread so they are immune to this issue.
by jdlshore | 2025-10-27 02:29:22+00:00
> for an astonishing number of tasks that a normal person could come up with, chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human.

That’s not my experience at all. Unless you define “typical human” as “someone who is untrained in the task at hand and is satisfied with mediocre results.” What tasks are you thinking of?

(And, to be clear, being better than that straw man of “typical human” is such a low bar as to be useless.)
by Raphell | 2025-10-27 02:31:01+00:00
I really enjoy lists like this. These days, recommendation systems tend to push the most popular and addictive content, which makes it harder to stumble upon hidden gems. But I’ve found that older or more obscure novels often carry a different kind of imagination. They’re not following formulas and they’re not tied to movies or franchises. It feels like reading someone’s raw creative mind before it got polished or filtered. I’m also curious if anyone has a book that barely anyone talks about, but left a lasting impact on you. I’d love to add it to my list.
by spicyusername | 2025-10-27 02:31:15+00:00
chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human.

I really don't think it is on basically any measure outside of text regurgitation. It can aggregate an incredible amount of information, yes, and it can do so very quickly, but it does so in an incredibly lossy way and that is basically all it can do.

It does what it was designed to do, predict text. Does it do that incredibly well, yes. Does it do anything else, no.

That isn't to say super advanced text regurgitation isn't valuable, just that its nowhere even remotely close to AGI.
by codedokode | 2025-10-27 02:31:37+00:00
What I notice, that large companies use their own private cloud and datacenters. At their scale, it is cheaper to have their own storage. As a side business, they also sell cloud services themselves. And small companies probably don't have that much data to justify paying for a cloud instead of buying several SSDs/HDDs or creating SMB share on their Windows server.
by Avi-D-coder | 2025-10-27 02:31:54+00:00
When I read these sorta of articles I ask if I would invest today if given the opportunity. Currently the answer is still yes.

They have barely even monetized users. I think it's possible the bubble pops and openai still continues to win.

So much of this article is copium pretending the world is not radically changing. Even if progress stops today massive numbers of jobs will be and are being replaced. I wish it wasn't true but what I wish has no bearing on reality.
by rajamaka | 2025-10-27 02:32:25+00:00
> You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs.

You do need to care when you move beyond a single server in a closet that runs your database, webserver and storage.

> No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.
by maxlybbert | 2025-10-27 02:34:13+00:00
Looking at the C 2011 standard, it looks like "_Bool" is implementation defined ( https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1548.pdf , pg. 57 of the PDF; the page labeled 39 section 6.2.5 paragraph 2): " An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1."

I believe everybody uses a single byte for that -- a single byte can store the values 0 and 1 -- but it looks like they aren't required to.

I believe C++ specifies "bool" is one byte; it's definitely never larger than a "char".

As far as std::vector<bool>, the fact that each value is defined at taking up a single bit inside the std::vector<bool> doesn't really say anything about how large each bool would be outside of the std::vector<bool>. std::vector<bool> was arguably a case of the Committee being too clever ( https://isocpp.org/blog/2012/11/on-vectorbool ).
by hekkle | 2025-10-27 02:35:18+00:00
On is website: https://maurycyz.com/projects/ai-tarpit/

He mentions that he had a "Chrome" browser send him 20 requests per second from the address: 43.134.189.59. If you look this address up on shodan.io you will see this address is for Tencent, a public company that makes AI, with an annual revenue of $92 Billion USD.
by tatersolid | 2025-10-27 02:35:43+00:00
One of my first jobs was as the programmer/IT/graphics guy at a newspaper. Everybody there was required to use em-dashes properly and regularly, and followed other esoteric rules from the Associated Press Stylebook that also regularly appear in LLM output.

This highlights just how much unlicensed copyrighted material is in LLM training sets (whether you consider that fair use or not).
by the_af | 2025-10-27 02:36:10+00:00
> then witness the org retcon their judgment into a staff-level promotion without any significant change in duties.

Isn't this good for the engineer, though? Presumably they are good at what they do because they like it. So they get a nice promotion and a raise without a change of duties, so everybody wins.

Why promote them out of their skill set, and possibly into a role they will hate and get them fired or willing to quit?
by kalkin | 2025-10-27 02:36:49+00:00
I don't think this robots.txt is valid:

User-agent: Googlebot PetalBot Bingbot YandexBot Kagibot Disallow: /bomb/\* Disallow: /bomb Disallow: /babble/\* Sitemap: https://maurycyz.com/sitemap.xml

I think this is telling the bot named "Googlebot PetalBot Bingbot YandexBot Kagibot" - which doesn't exist - to not visit those URLs. All other bots are allowed to visit those URLs. User-Agent is supposed to be one per line, and there's no User-Agent * specified here.

So a much simpler solution than setting up a Markov generator might be for the site owner to just specify a valid robots.txt. It's not evident to me that bots which do crawl this site are in fact breaking any rules. I also suspect that Googlebot, being served the markov slop, will view this as spam. Meanwhile this incentives AI companies to build heuristics to detect this kind of thing rather than building rules-respecting crawlers.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-10-27 02:37:16+00:00
I have only enjoyed those matches in person where sponsors and camera crew are missing. Everything else is just sports opera.

Of course, those local matches are something I have always loved. Local as in a few people just playing on some ground (rarely the full ICC size, which is good; otherwise, it becomes too difficult to track) - just playing for the sake of playing - with no intention or plan to show the game to anyone else, as sometimes I am the only spectator sitting near the fence. You know the ones where you are sometimes asked to join if they are short on players and they notice you are wearing sports/running shoes. At least for cricket, this happens.
by greenpizza13 | 2025-10-27 02:37:36+00:00
> Likewise, a METR report found that AI coding tools, which are meant to be the most promising application for generative AI, actually slow developers down. Both studies cited the same issue, “hallucinations”.

> AI hallucinations are one of the best bits of PR ever. The term reframes critical errors to anthropomorphise the machine, as that is essentially what an AI hallucination is: the machine getting it significantly and repeatedly wrong. Both MIT and METR found that the effort and cost required to look for, identify, and rectify these errors was almost always significantly larger than the effort the AI reduced.

> In other words, for AI (specifically generative AI) to be even remotely useful in the real world and have a hope in hell of generating revenue by augmenting workers at scale, let alone replacing them like it has promised to, it needs to cut “hallucinations” down to basically zero.

As someone who uses Claude 4.5 in Cursor every workday this rings extremely hollow. I am thinking to myself daily “I would have never had time to do this before.”

Have an idea for a script, you don’t have to lose a day building it. Wanna explore a feature, make a worktree and let the agent go. It’s fundamentally changed my workflow for the better and I don’t wanna go back, hallucinations and all.
by rudimentary_phy | 2025-10-27 02:37:41+00:00
I would love to have known. I would imagine the steel mill would have a larger turnover rate than other places.

The idea of an impact to the body that significantly disrupts the ability to keep it in homeostasis has intrigued me. It’s likely meaningless and my observations are anecdotal, but I keep my eye out for research on it.
by jdlshore | 2025-10-27 02:38:09+00:00
There have been a few attempts at “building a business by following ChatGPT’s instructions.” All the ones I’m aware of failed, and were really just a scheme to grab eyeballs.

There’s also a website showing a company’s attempt to use multiple LLMs to close its (real-world, but historical) accounting month-end books. They fail miserably with compounding errors.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-27 02:38:11+00:00
> I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

The end of the article has this:

> Consider custom infrastructure when you have both: sufficient scale for meaningful cost savings, and specific constraints that enable a simple solution. The engineering effort to build and maintain your system must be less than the infrastructure costs it eliminates. In our case, specific requirements (ephemeral storage, loss tolerance, S3 fallback) let us build something simple enough that maintenance costs stay low. Without both factors, stick with managed services.

Seems they were well aware of the tradeoffs.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-27 02:38:37+00:00
Hmm. I typically have:

- a prod server ( and a test server) with a git repo.

- a local machine with the git repo.

- a git server where code officially lives, nowadays just a github.

If I were to simplify and run my own git server of the third kind, I would probably not run a server for the sole purpose of hosting code, it would most likely run on the prod/test server.

So essentially I would be eliminating one node and simplifying. I don't know, maybe there's merits to having an official place for code to be in. Even if just semantics.

I know you can also use branches to have a "master" branch with code and then have migrations just be merging from master into a prod branch, but then again, I could have just master branches, but if it's on the test server then it's the test branch.

I don't know if spendint time reinventing git workflows is a very efficient use of brain juice though.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-27 02:38:40+00:00
Probably the case-study of how it caused America to collapse into a civil war in the next year or so, since the only way the Executive can continue its policy is by overtly ignoring rule of law and Americans appear to be growing weary of that from their Executive.

That'll likely ice the ambitions of the ultra-nationalists in other countries historically close to America for a generation, much like Germany trying its eugenics experiment iced the previously-quite-vocal eugenicists in the US for about a generation.
Show HN: AI that uses image context to translate and redraw manga
by Shawn1991 | 2025-10-27 02:38:46+00:00
Hi HN,

As a huge manga fan and a translator by training, I've always been in awe of the incredible amount of work that fan translators put in. The process isn't just about translation; it involves manually cleaning the original text from the bubbles, redrawing the background art (inpainting), and then carefully placing the translated text back in (typesetting). It's a true labor of love, but it's incredibly time-consuming.

I wondered if modern AI could help automate the most tedious parts of this workflow. So, I built AIFandom.

It's a web tool where you upload your manga pages, and it extracts the text from the speech bubbles and translates the text, but with a key difference: The model doesn't just read the text, it also looks at the visual context of the panel to better capture the original tone and nuance.

Then, It automatically removes the original text, uses an inpainting model to intelligently redraw the artwork that was behind the text, and then typesets the translated text back into the bubbles.

The end result is a fully translated and readable manga page that you can download.

I use gemini for the translation process and various models for OCR, inpainting, masking, rendering.

It's not a free tool. This whole process is computationally expensive and requires a good amount of GPU time. To cover these costs, I've priced it at $7/month for 1000 pages.

However, I really want you to see the quality for yourself, so there is a 50-page free trial for everyone to test it out, no credit card required upfront.

I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback.

- How is the translation quality and tone? - Does the automatic typesetting look natural to you? - Is the pricing fair for the value it provides? - What features should I prioritize adding next?

Thanks for checking it out! I'll be here all day to answer any questions.
by luxuryballs | 2025-10-27 02:41:01+00:00
sounds like you accidentally consumed media poisoned with FUD and propaganda, having a federal department of health or food for your nation is nationalist, running it properly and keeping it away from corporate influence is anti-fascist, the modern day fascism is when corruption steers the health department away from serving the people’s health and instead locking it towards allowing “big pharma” to dictate regulations and review for their own benefit at the expense of the people’s taxes and health, the irony is watching the people trying to dismantle this fascism being called fascists
by photonthug | 2025-10-27 02:41:14+00:00
Turing test isn't actually a good test of much, but even so, we're not there yet. Anyone that thinks we've passed it already should experiment a bit a with counter-factuals.

Ask your favorite SOTA model to assume something absurd and then draw the next logical conclusions based on that. "Green is yellow and yellow is green. What color is a banana?" They may get the first question(s) right, but will trip up within a few exchanges. Might be a new question, but often they are very happy to just completely contradict their own previous answers.

You could argue that this is hitting alignment and guard-rails against misinformation.. but whatever the cause, it's a clear sign it's a machine and look, no em-dashes. Ironically it's also a failure of the turing test that arises from a failure in reasoning at a really basic level, which I would not have expected. Makes you wonder about the secret sauce for winning IMO competitions. Anyway, unlike other linguistic puzzles that attempt to baffle with ambiguous reference or similar, simple counterfactuals with something like colors are particular interesting because they would NOT trip up most ESL students or 3-5 year olds.
by neither_color | 2025-10-27 02:42:55+00:00
Because Hyundai was not hiring 500 illegals, that is completely false. Everyone who got deported is allowed to return under the same visas they were on before. They were not allowed to stay without being ejected first because it would have made the current admin and the frozen water gang look really bad at a time where they're trying to establish a reputation as a fair and just law enforcement agency carrying out the mandate of the will of the people. If anything, the shot callers at the frozen water gang should have faced consequences but they didn't and they won't.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-will-allow-south-kor...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-27 02:43:10+00:00
https://fid.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/fidnvgov/content/Opinion/Fo...

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fortress-trust-compa...

Previous, Related:

Phishing Attack on Retool Led to $15M Crypto Theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561658 - September 2023
by exmadscientist | 2025-10-27 02:44:50+00:00
It's not 1.6mm, it's actually 1/16", and it's been the standard since the days of yore. It's a super common inch measurement so it's not really a surprise to see it here, if you know your inches. There's tons of 1/16" plywood, for example.

A "thick" PCB was commonly 3/32" (0.093") and a "thin" one 1/32" (0.031"). Now of course it's all made in Asia so the metric dimensions predominate (0.8mm, 1.6mm, 2.4mm), but the legacy remains.

And of course PCBs aren't really any of these thicknesses, they're whatever the glass weaves press down to in the lamination press....
by RiverCrochet | 2025-10-27 02:45:24+00:00
Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.
by georgefrowny | 2025-10-27 02:45:49+00:00
> If you took the current state of affairs back to the 90s you’d quickly convince most people that we’re there.

This is an interesting ambiguity in the Turing test. It does not say if the examiner is familiar with the expected level of the candidate. But I think it's an unfair advantage to the machine if it can pass based on the examiner's incredulity.

If you took a digital calculator back to the 1800s, added a 30 second delay and asked the examiner to decide if a human was providing the answer to the screen or a machine, they might well conclude that it must be human as there is no known way for a machine to perform that action. The Akinator game would probably pass the test into the 1980s.

I think the only sensible interpretation of the test is one where the examiner is willing to believe that a machine could be providing a passing set of answers before the test starts. Otherwise the test difficulty varies wildly based on the examiners impression of the current technical capabilities of machines.
by noduerme | 2025-10-27 02:46:04+00:00
I don't know. People in the 90s were initially fooled by Eliza, but soon understood that Eliza was a trick. LLMs are a more complex and expensive trick. Maybe it's time to overthrow the Turing Test. Fooling humans isn't necessarily an indicator of intelligence, and it leads down a blind alley: Language is a false proxy for thought.

Consider this. I could walk into a club in Vegas, throw down $10,000 cash for a VIP table, and start throwing around $100 bills. Would that make most people think I'm wealthy? Yes. Am I actually wealthy? No. But clearly the test is the wrong test. All show and no go.
by nawgz | 2025-10-27 02:47:14+00:00
It just contrasts expectations of the unwashed masses with more professional writing.

If most people are used to reading social media and texts from their friends and maybe subtitles for movies, an em dash is practically never going to appear, and so when everyone and their dog start using them, well, it’s obvious something is up.

Whereas the more literate individual used to consuming writing for pleasure will have seen them regularly, and may even have employed them while writing.
by kragen | 2025-10-27 02:47:15+00:00
Empty structs are supported in clang; I think it's a GCC extension to C. This program:

#include <stdio.h> typedef struct {} unit; static unit f(unit *p) { return (unit){}; } static void g(unit u) { } int main() { unit a = {}, b = {}; a = b; f(&a); g(b); printf("a is at %lx, b is at %lx, " "sizeof unit is %d\n", (unsigned long)&a, (unsigned long)&b, (int)sizeof(unit)); return 0; }

compiles without complaints on my cellphone and produces the output:

a is at 7ffb39805b, b is at 7ffb39805a, sizeof unit is 0

So you can declare empty structs as variables, return them, assign them, pass them as parameters, take their addresses, create them in struct literals, and dereference pointers to them. clang is assigning different addresses to different empty-struct local variables, but presumably in an array all of them would have the same address, unlike in C++.

I wouldn't be confident that you could malloc them, and I wouldn't be surprised if passing them by value uncovered compiler divergences in the interpretation of the ABI. (I spent most of last night tracking down a bug due to LuaJIT/GCC ABI differences in the implementation of parameter passing.)
by malshe | 2025-10-27 02:47:29+00:00
YT has a bad tendency for over-recommending. I watch one video about stock market and my next ten videos are about stock picking from random guys. I also immediately get advertisements for crypto platforms!

The only time I appreciate over-recommendations is when I search for old standup videos of Dave Attell, George Carlin, and others and it suggests more of these gems.
by EarthMephit | 2025-10-27 02:48:24+00:00
My partner 10+ years ago used to be very OCD about Asbestos when we had toddlers, and said that she would see tiny white fibers of it in the bark chips at a bunch of parks that the kids were playing at.

Turns out she was correct, its since been found in loads of mulch around Sydney.

We also came across a huge pile of it illegally dumped a bunch of years ago in the sand dunes at Kurnell beach, kids were happily playing in it.
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-27 02:48:49+00:00
> The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop

Remember that most of the technology industry today is primarily an ad delivery platform - either current one (aka there are ads there already), or a future one (so even areas where there aren’t ads yet aren’t safe).

Designers want you to always be in an act-look loop, because then you’ll either look at the ad which is already there, or at the very least generate more “engagement” which pumps up their analytics numbers (translates to promotions/salary) and ultimately translates to more ads (the company can now pitch this high-engagement screen real estate to the highest bidder).

The era where computers/technology did things as their primary function appears to be just a happy accident. It’s only a matter of time before you get ads for health insurance while you dial 911.