MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it impossible to generate this programmatically?
by unsupp0rted | 2025-10-21 20:12:03+00:00
Let's say you're asked to generate a vibrant "print" catalog from a db of 100 consumer products.

It can't look "generated" like a table of products- it has to be a nice layout catalog, NOT something like https://www.mcmaster.com

The goal is to hand somebody a color printed catalog on paper.

The existing print catalog is VIBRANT. Products appear fanned out, display racks are smartly positioned next to products, etc. But it's a nightmare for the designer to make by hand and keep updated x 5 regional versions.

Each product has 5 properties that can be shown in a floating table, which partly overlaps the product pic in a non-critical corner: price, SKU, foo, bar, etc

Question:

Is it possible to programmatically generate something like this without it ultimately looking like grid-based slop?

Would an LLM be able to generate this with content-aware styling per-page, so that one page doesn't look like the next? E.g. if a product has a "freeze/cold/winter" flavor, then that page is ice-blue, whereas the next page is about an egg cooking product so it's orange/yellow.

How would you approach programmatically generating a product catalog that doesn't end up looking generic and ugly?
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-10-21 20:12:07+00:00
> There is a significant amount of legal precedent that protects decompilation and reverse engineering and it is explicitly protected by copyright laws as fair us

This is mostly for _interoperability_ and _never_ as a way to sidestep copyright entirely. At most, you are able to redistribute the portion that is minimally indispensable for interoperability, and _not the entire friggin program_. That would completely defeat the point of copyright. And _even_ when you do this for interoperability, you have to walk a very tight rope (e.g. cleanroom as discussed by the sibling comment, albeit clean room is actually not necessary in many jurisdictions), but obviously _nothing_ of this applies if you're just going to distribute the entire program, interoperability be damned, which you simply _cannot_ do (clean room or not).

Otherwise, what is this legal precedent you are talking about?

N.B. I have dedicated a significant chunk of my professional career to reverse engineer (competitor's) industrial software: file formats, protocols, interfaces, the lot.

> People decompiling are not publishing binary blobs. They’re painstakingly writing C code that has never existed before. They own the copyright to that new, original, creative work.

Nah. You're looking at the original binary in one screen and writing code on the other one _to implement the same game_. Just by that, it would already be a pretty much straightforward copyright violation.

But there's more! By your own admission, it even compiles to the same binary. This is a process (decompilation) that can even be fully automated! What is the creative process here? You put fancier doodles on the margins and comments? You changed the variable and function names, like a freshman trying to hide the fact that his assignment is plagiarized from another student's? This is such a textbook violation of copyright I'm not even sure it would actually be worth to use as an example on a textbook.

What is next, if I get nuns to write out the binary in hexadecimal using a painstaking manual process (say knitting it on bed linen), then they can distribute the result and even use it to play the original game? I'm sure the knitting would be very original and creative!

For the record even if I was only looking at a gameplay video (not the binary!) while writing my "new C program", that would still be, very easy to argue, a copyright violation. How many Tetris clones have been shut down this way? Now imagine if you have something that produces bit-for-bit identical output, as you would from decompilation.

BTW which blog is giving out this often parroted non-sensical justification for violating copyright, since it's like the 3rd time I see it repeated here almost line by line? Then when Nintendo comes in and lawfully shuts down the repo, of course cue the crying.
Ask HN: Talk to your users. What is your opinion on an Online Farmers Market?
by flinstoning | 2025-10-21 20:12:45+00:00
I am working on an online market where people can buy locally grown/sourced fruits, vegetables, eggs, meats, etc., from local farmers. In addition, they can also buy small batch foods from artisanal food makers- breads, cheeses, jams, etc. The goal is to create access and make it convenient for people to order from their local farmers/food crafters, while at the same time allowing these small businesses to expand their online customer base.

In the back-end we are working on optimizing delivery routes and inventory management.

We have conducted about 300 orders and spoke with customers and non-customers which we consider our end-user, or households. Some of the feedback we have gotten has been insightful. Among some concerns from non-customers is: not being able to touch/see/feel the produce in person.

We would love to know the HN community's feedback on:

What would make you (or woudln't make you) try something like this? What are some concerns you may have? Pros and cons? Any advice for tech infrastructure, or community adoption?

Thanks in advance!
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-10-21 20:13:19+00:00
In crowd control, if your line is broken, you fall back. That's why rioters were allowed to walk through the Capitol. The police had no ability to stop them once their forward line was broken.

"The police were giving them a tour." I'm sorry, what did you expect them to do? Go home? Not try to keep an eye on what was happening?

> You do know they were subsequently pardoned?

Accepting a pardon is a formal admission of guilt. You literally cannot pardon an innocent person. That's the whole point.

And again, justifying or excusing political violence guarantees that more will come, which is why I'm particularly angered by what you're doing.
by Treegarden | 2025-10-21 20:13:25+00:00
The tone of voice suggests you dislike Musk, but I will still answer in good faith. From what I can see from the outside, he has consistently for many years stated the same goals and worked on them. Any or most financial gains he made, he invested into his companies which work on accomplishing those goals (for example, going to Mars). The most notable example was investing his PayPal money into Tesla and SpaceX when they both were at risk of going out. He also has a reputation for working a lot, though it may be exaggerated, but he looks fairly unhealthy so maybe not too far off. Compared to other super rich people, he seems to spend less time in lavish ways, for example on yachts or similar. He probably still spends more money than we can imagine on unnecessary things, but on the spectrum of rich people he doesn't seem to be the most frivolous. Finally, he has said on Twitter that he doesn't care about money but needs resources for his goals, for example going to Mars. And after everything I’ve seen and the examples listed, it doesn’t seem totally implausible that he means it.
by johnldean0 | 2025-10-21 20:13:30+00:00
Yea, the FAA does a lot and I think overall they do a great job, but I wish there was better systems for communications here. I think ultimately companies like WindBorne just have to go above and beyond what is required if they want to operate at scale safely in this space. And no one else operates balloons at the scale that we do, and safety has to be built into the design and operations regardless of how the official systems work.
by browningstreet | 2025-10-21 20:13:34+00:00
I don't disagree with your take in general, but I do think it's different reading about minutiae than being invested in it. If you actually are curing these requirements it's probably quite engaging. If not, the eyes and mind start to gloss over them.

As a different example: I'm moving this week. I've known I'm moving for a while. Thinking about moving -- and all the little things I have to do -- is way more painful than doing them. Thinking about them keeps me up at night, getting through my list today is only fractionally painful.

I'm also leveling up a few aspects of my "way of living" in the midst of all this, and it'd be terribly boring to tell others about it, but when next Monday comes.. it'll be quite sweet indeed.
by AtNightWeCode | 2025-10-21 20:13:35+00:00
No, they did not breach anything through SharePoint. The flaw is that IDIOTS exposed these servers to the Internet. I am very pro holding vendors accountable but this is just stupid. "Pro-tip" btw. SharePoint installations often have the pw sharepoint, sharepoint123, sharepoint-123 and so on in various casing and delimiters.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-21 20:13:46+00:00
The problem rather is that you still have to stay somewhat agreeable while calling out the bullshit. If you were "socially allowed" to treat colleagues like

> All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

as they really deserve, the problem would disappear really fast.

So the problem that you outlined is rather social, and not the LLMs per se (even though they very often do produce shitty code).
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-21 20:13:50+00:00
> Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it.

SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.
by okanat | 2025-10-21 20:15:11+00:00
Intel IoT boards generally hover around 10 W at idle. ARM SoMs usually 5 W. You need to order some prototypes for testing of course.

Pricing is quite different from supplier to supplier. Usually around 50 - 100 € Here are a couple suppliers for NXP boards:

Toradex (Switzerland): https://www.toradex.com/

Phytec (Germany / India): https://www.phytec.com/products/

Variscite (Taiwan): https://variscite.com/

Intel boards usually cost around 100 € - 150 €
by theothertimcook | 2025-10-21 20:15:25+00:00
$45usd/$70aud from aliexpress you can buy a Innioasis Y1 which is a modern knockoff of a click wheel iPod, smaller, lighter, bit more plastic.

They have 128gb of storage but can be upgraded to 512 and apparently 1tb by changing the internal sd card.

There is support for rockbox but I’ve found the default OS with an iPod theme is a bit more stable and less prone to endless tinkering.

Leaving the house without a phone and listening to an album end to end is amazing and changes music consumption from Spotify background noise to actual mindful enjoyment.

It’s not as frictionless as paying for streaming but if you’ve got the time and inclination I definitely recommend
by jewel | 2025-10-21 20:15:34+00:00
In my imagination, I thought that the large GPU clusters were dynamically allocating whole machines to different tasks depending on load.

So, hypothetically, if ChatGPT's peak load and their minimum load were a 3× ratio, they'd reallocate 2/3 of their servers to training when it's not peak time.

Doing the same thing inside an individual GPU seems irrelevant to anyone operating at scale when they can approximate the same behavior with entire servers or even entire racks.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-21 20:15:51+00:00
There's a lot of SpaceX fanboyism in this thread but there are three big problems with SpaceX's Moon project:

1. Starship is still far from being production-ready, proven to be reliable and rated for human transport, a goal that will itself take many launches beyond being proven for delivering payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits (as well, I guess, deep space missions?);

2. The market for commercial Starship launches is far from proven and the risk of this is being ignored or downplayed by so many. Starship's biggest problem and competitor is... the Falcon 9, something the Falcon 9 never had to contend with. The market for even larger payloads seem to be limited. The evidence? There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches a year. There's about ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year. And Falcon Heavy is pretty cost effective. The biggest customer seems to be the military who wants to get really large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. Now will Starlink bootstrap Starship demand in the same way that it did for Falcon 9 reusable boosters? Maybe. But it's not proven; and

3. Starship just doesn't make a great Moon lander. Why? You have to land this really tall vehicle in low gravity on unknown ground when it could possibly tip over in a way that Apollo landers never really could (because they were short, wide and significantly lighter). And then when you land? Your astronauts are ~40 meters off the ground. How are they getting back and forth?

Starship actually reminds me of the Steve Ballmer "Windows everywhere" era. Or the F35 jet-for-all-branches boondoggle. Ballmer wanted to run Windows on every device where Apple launched iOS alongside MacOS. Ballmer bought Sidekick, which was really successful at the time, and basically killed it by not innovating and trying to migrate it to Windows Mobile OS.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." as the quote goes.

These projects end up being not very good at any application in an effort to be able to do too much. I'm starting to wonder if this is Starship's core problem.

What might save Starship is that BlueOrigin is absolutely nowhere, ULA is a joke, the Europeans are nowhere and SLS is a massive jobs program. I have more faith in China's space program than any of those.
by neilv | 2025-10-21 20:17:15+00:00
I figured security researchers were always targets of multiple APT actors and random individuals. However...

> I've even caught them using their exploits on me after they made me an offer

Not only for exploit companies that eat their own dog food, nor only cybersecurity jobs, but I've heard of this happening to people interviewing for other tech area considered strategic.

The noticed ones weren't that subtle, and were presumably noticed because the attacker wasn't using the best methods, but maybe more routine SOP for lower-value targets.

I have no idea what the actors and motivations actually were. Speculation:

* the hiring company or its country, vetting the candidate by spying on them, including for corporate/national counterintelligence reasons (it's really not much different than a lot of the sneaky surveillance capitalism vetting that many companies quietly do, just unambiguously illegal in this case);

* the hiring company, spying to monitor the competitive offer situation (e.g., what counteroffers or concerns does the candidate have);

* other state, individual, and possibly corporate actors, for whom the imminent offer flagged the target as worth keeping an eye on (for, e.g., advance access to research they do individually, knowledge of attacks they do individually, possible technical entry point to the job-offering organization or others, or kompromat for getting access/actions); or

* random associated individuals acting on their own, recreationally enjoying the power over others that their cracking toys give them (which at least used to be not too uncommon, before cybersecurity was professionalized, when there were proportionally much more teens and alienated people, and they hadn't yet been told about color-coded hats for prefabricated codes of behavior from which they could choose; now, most people with skillz have the carrot of a lucrative job or respected status as researcher that they can pursue, instead of seeking power/status other ways and without guidelines).

Personally, I try not to work on strategic target areas, since I like to save my very limited guts for fighting product concepts and reliable systems into shape, not for being helplessly violated by lawless authoritarian institutions. Good luck.
by ValdikSS | 2025-10-21 20:17:15+00:00
The majority of desktop Wi-Fi cards/chipsets have buggy drivers that break mDNS discovery in one way or another.

To the point that I'd say that Wi-Fi drivers are the most offender in printer discovery problems, which also rely on mDNS.

Another issue that many mDNS applications, including KDE Connect, don't account on multi-interface setups and send respond to mDNS request using incorrect network interface: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507972 / https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507954
by paddy_m | 2025-10-21 20:17:27+00:00
I customized grep-find on my setup. I have a shell script so that it does the following (in typescript-mode)

first search ts, tsx, js, jsx files in the current project. Exclude .git, node_modules...

then search node_modules with the ts.. extensions, still exclude .git

finally search the whole tree for .py files still exclude .git, /dist...

This is coupled with consult-find-grep. I basically want to find a string in the most relevant file type. I never want a result from node_modules first in the results. It took some work, but the results are quite nice!
by mariusor | 2025-10-21 20:17:52+00:00
Wouldn't banning political ads, and large sum political spending, and PACs and lobbying (I assume you're from the US based on the comments) be a better solution than whatever the f*ck "don't vote if you don't understand" is?

Democracy means that everyone gets a vote, uneducated, bigoted, communist, fascist, everyone. If you don't accept that, you don't accept democracy.
by whycome | 2025-10-21 20:18:14+00:00
The whole integration thing is weird. Siri sucks. ChatGPT can be triggered in a similar way. Siri can use ChatGPT. AppleIntelligence is garbage. I think apple is in a weird crisis spot where they can't quite figure out how to integrate it all, and are scared of ditching Siri entirely. Or maybe any kinds of ChatGPT integrations have just been stopgaps.

Or, they go way deeper into integrations. They let ChatGPT in deeper. And they even give up that coveted 'default search' spot that Google pays them ~20b a year for. Atlas seems like it would compete with Safari?

It is interesting that OpenAI seems to be doing an Apple-first approach with some of its projects (sora2, Atlas)
by bdangubic | 2025-10-21 20:18:21+00:00
State of the industry both short and medium term is that you want to be the one doing replacing vs being the one being replaced. Not great but this is where we are at. If you are say SRE there are myriad of companies working hard to eliminate SREs but they need experts to set shit up so that SREs are not needed. Same thing will cascade to other Tech work, some faster than others. Career-wise I think it is wise now to position yourself as one that knows how to set shit up for the “great replacement”
by aeblyve | 2025-10-21 20:18:51+00:00
This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries. Programming has received a special treatment for the last few decades, and it's understandable that HN users would jump to protect their life investment, but it need not.

Hand-coding can continue, just like knitting co-exists with machine looms, but it need not ultimately maintain a grip on the software productive process.

It is better to come to terms with this reality sooner rather than later in my opinion.
by boznz | 2025-10-21 20:18:56+00:00
Interesting, I Had a similar design using ADS1115 for a customer, who manufactured the boards at JLPCB (Part of LCSC I believe). All failed the initial POST in the firmware, but after reviewing a sample of them we found after self-calibration they were just fine in the application he wanted them for, so I just changed the firmware so the POST occurred after calibration.

Like you I have Never had issues with fake stuff from LCSC before, but I guess it can happen.
by Aloisius | 2025-10-21 20:19:48+00:00
> I live in California, where the voting method is vote-by-mail and you sign your ballot. That breaks anonymity right there, plus there's a barcode that matches address and ballot for traceability, so in theory anyone involved in the election process could look at my ballot, cross-reference against address, and figure out how I vote

They actually go through quite a bit of effort to prevent breaking anonymity.

The incoming ballots are scanned and sorted by machine to record that they arrived. Later, signatures on the envelope are checked. The signature verified sealed ballots are then moved and fed into a high speed extractor separating the ballot from the envelope so the envelope label isn't visible, breaking any linkage between the ballot and the voter's identity. Ballots are stacked with other ballots, still folded and moved elsewhere to be counted. The empty envelopes are kept and scanned again.

All of this happens with multiple people and on camera.

The ballot barcodes don't record any unique information that can identify voters - they're just things like precinct, ballot language and page number.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-21 20:19:52+00:00
You're forgetting the Contact method where the actual signal is buried in a beacon signal. The beacon signal is very much a "primitive" non-random not noise signal...primes. Now that you've recorded enough of that beacon signal, someone analyses each of the pulses to realize there's a message embedded within. This way, you don't need a response to know someone go it. When they magically show up in the machine you've sent the plans as that message, you'll know the message was received.
by 05 | 2025-10-21 20:19:55+00:00
To play devil's advocate, the only purpose astronauts serve is PR. Anything that can be done is space could be done cheaper and better with automation/rovers. So it seems that having those astronauts risk their lives for a short term political win is just table stakes, because the alternative for them is to stay on Earth and maybe pay $100K for just an hour in orbit with any of the commercial space tourism companies.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-21 20:20:05+00:00
They should get a clear explanation of the problem and of the team expectations the first time it happens.

If it happens a second time? A stern talk from their manager.

A third time? PIP or fired.

Let your manager be the bad guy. That's part of what they're for.

Your manager won't do that? Then your team is broken in a way you can't fix. Appeal to their manager, first, and if that fails put your resume on the street.
by aurizon | 2025-10-21 20:20:16+00:00
Earth has a number of very high power semi directional transmitters operating. By this I mean the assorted 50 hertz and 60 hertz AC power systems. These are coherent in areas because there are separated adjacent systems that act to isolate them. These are long in wavelength at about 3000 miles and will penetrate the ionosphere via capacitance. If we had a long wave receiver in orbit past the earth, it could listen on an incrementally varying wavelength from 25 hertz to ~~300 hertz for any similarly radiating civilisation. This radiation would be reduced by square law spreading, but a phase locked loop receiver that gradually scanned this frequency space should be able to detect such radiation out to 100-500 light years. The PLL listens for a long integrating interval, and then steps to the next frequency. The antenna can be tuned to cover the 25 Hz to 300 Hz spectrum by use of mechanically adjustable loading coils. Such an antenna could be a simple long wire that is gravitationally solar stabilised so it would sweep annually. A similar one could be earth centered to enable sweeps at it's far from earth orbit much faster than annually? This is a project that Elon Musk could easily perform and it might get us a Nobel? if we found anything? It would sit there and sieve data in hope of success?