MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: HostFileApp – Edit your Mac's hosts file without using the Terminal
by RichHickson | 2025-10-21 15:05:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small macOS utility called HostFileApp that lets you manage your /etc/hosts file with a simple visual interface — no Terminal required.

I’ve always found editing the hosts file manually a bit risky and inconvenient (especially when switching between dev and production environments), so I wanted something that felt native to macOS and handled the details safely.

What it does: • Add, edit, or disable host entries visually • Automatically back up before every save • Validate hostnames and IPs • Flush the DNS cache instantly • Optional lightweight local DNS server with wildcard domain support (*.example.com)

It’s built with Swift and SwiftUI, signed and notarised by Apple, and runs natively on Apple Silicon. There’s a small licensing component for updates and continued development, but you can try everything freely for a week — no email required.

I’d really appreciate feedback from other Mac devs or sysadmins: • Is there anything missing that would make this more useful? • How do you handle local domain mapping in your workflow today?

You can download and run it here: https://hostfileapp.com

Thanks, Rich
by chuckadams | 2025-10-21 15:05:14+00:00
The owners see you as just another rube to be fleeced, and well, they have no reason to change their behavior. You still bought the tickets and you still bought their concessions. The team is not a gang of hometown heroes offering a slice of Americana, they are a faceless corporation whose sole purpose is maximum revenue extraction. The only thing that will ever send them a clear message is voting with your feet.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-21 15:05:15+00:00
Humans that read (at least) Indo-European languages can read texts in their native language with all the vowels removed. Does that suggest that it would be a good idea to remove the vowels from text before using it for training text-based LLMs ?

Presumably you want to train on as rich a set of data as possible, even if some of that data is redundant or irrelevant when it comes to human perception.
by stirfish | 2025-10-21 15:05:17+00:00
It's okay if a function is only used once. It's worth it to separate it from the context it doesn't need.

Well, twice, including the test. If a block is complex enough to warrant a high level explanation, you might as well capture that intent in a test too.

Edit: in my example, `applyCouponCode` takes in a `shoppingCart` and a `couponCode`, so you know that's all you need to apply a coupon code. You'd change it to something like `applyCouponCode(shoppingCart, couponCode, user.memberStatus)` so you can tell at a glance that `memberStatus` has something to do with how coupons work. You wouldn't want to pass in the whole `user`, because giving the function more than it needs makes it hard to infer what context the function needs and, therefore, what it does.
by nashashmi | 2025-10-21 15:06:02+00:00
Amazon doesn’t do a good job of handling workers. So I guess this is a good thing. Mistreatment is a bad thing.

Prices will be lowered. And the appeal of warehouses will go up this way. But for the remaining workers, I don’t think Amazon will come up with a better work environment. I don’t think they have that skill set.
Show HN: I built a 3-tap YouTube summarizer for iOS
by sanderbell | 2025-10-21 15:06:02+00:00
How it works: Copy a YouTube link → open app → it auto-detects from clipboard, pulls metadata + transcript, and generates a structured summary (key points + narrative) in seconds. No inputs, no pasting, no prompting. Supports 60+ languages for summaries, the video's language doesn't matter.

Why I built:

I had an endless queue of educational videos but no time to sit through rambling or clickbait. ChatGPT flow = copy → open → paste → prompt → pray it formats correctly. Existing summarizers felt feature-bloated or unreliable. I wanted something super minimalist: “clipboard → value” on repeat.

Decisions:

Stack — React Native 0.81 (New Arch) + TypeScript

Clipboard trick

— Monitors clipboard on app start/resume — no manual paste

Caching

— Stores transcripts + summaries in AsyncStorage with metadata

— fast image library prevents repetitive refetching

APIs

— YouTube metadata

— Third-party transcript provider (exploring Whisper)

— OpenAI for summarization

Output

— Structured prompts → consistent format across 60+ languages

— Easter egg: philosophical analysis for songs/poems

Time-saved calculation

— Uses actual video length (30% of cases)

— Fallback = estimated from average speech speed

Main headache:

Grandfathering legacy users without breaking App Review was harder than I expected. The first version was paid upfront ($14.99 or leave). Got some sales in the first two weeks, then traffic died. After some internal fighting, I switched to free-to-try with IAP. By then I already had thousands of users I’d promised free access forever, plus a dozen who actually paid. I wanted to keep my word and never show them a paywall.

RevenueCat’s originalAppVersion looked perfect… until I actually used it.. Turns out it’s not the marketing version (1.0, 2.3), but the build number (the variable name originalAppVersion is so misleading…). And Apple Review/TestFlight always report it as 1.0, so reviewers looked like legacy users and never saw the paywall (5 rejections). Everything worked for me, totally broken for them.

My mistake: I auto-entitled anyone with 1.0. First hacky fix: show a review-only paywall. Proper fix: if originalAppVersion === "1.0" (I never had such a build number anyways), treat as non-legacy. Days of digging and testing across devices/envs… finally approved.

Current state:

3800+ users and 12 sales within 2 weeks post-launch, 4.9-star rating globally. Now multi-tier subscription after 3 free summaries due to ongoing costs and long-term value.

Limitations/Challenges:

— iOS only for now. Android clipboard monitoring is restricted—would need a different UX.

— Some countries need VPN due to API restrictions; I notify users on app start.

— Dependency on third-party transcript API (evaluating OpenAI-based solution).

— YouTube's testing AI conversational tools, but it's very truncated, sandboxed only for some users and unlikely to roll out widely as it cuts ad their revenue from watching.

Happy to answer questions about implementation or share code snippets if helpful.
by vee-kay | 2025-10-21 15:06:09+00:00
The movie Don't Look Up is still an apt metaphor, because the variable (how the apocalypse will happen) may change, but the outcome won't.

The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-21 15:06:16+00:00
As a person who worked in an Amazon Warehouse on two separate occasions, one for roughly a year part-time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...

the desire to save money/replace workers is real (though I wish that they would start by recycling packaging/materials in the warehouses) and there are certainly a lot of ways in which this could be done --- the issue of course is how society will work through this --- I suspect we'd all feel a bit differently about this if Amazon were a public benefit corporation rather than one focused on profit for shareholders. Their motto is:

>Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History.

and it really should have included something about making the world a better place or doing good.....
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-21 15:06:24+00:00
Nobody has been talking about UBI except in the same sense that people talk about warp drives, i.e. as a nice-to-have-someday bit of speculative fiction. Everyone is aware that if UBI were actually proposed in the political sphere it would be killed immediately, by most of the some oligarchs who dishonestly talk about it now.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-21 15:06:31+00:00
Projects like this one are why something like Habbo Origins was possible in 2024 (note it is a Shockwave game!). There's a niche small community of developers who have been hacking away at Habbo's old shockwave client going on decades now, though it really kicked off in the late 2010s. There's been a dozen or more efforts to build a decompiler, but this one was one of the key efforts.

Using this knowledge users were able to decompile and reassemble the director client in such a way that it ran stand alone similar to how Sulake's newer Flash client can run on the desktop.

I also assume there's all sorts of old dead projects in Shockwave that if someone had the original DCRs / CCTs to could probably put in effort to recreate / resurrect in a modern setting as well.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-21 15:07:09+00:00
It definitely works on other DEs. As an extreme case, there's even a GNOME extension implementation: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

I can't specifically speak to systemd, but it'd surprise me if there was a dependency there; it's not running that deep in the system. Also there's a guix package and they don't use systemd, so that's another mark in favor.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-10-21 15:07:40+00:00
Future-of-work stuff aside, I’m always confused when I see bipedal robots. Doesn't make any sense unless one is dealing with rough terrain — and there, four or six legs would probably be better. I guess they're cool for Boston Dynamics investor videos.

For floor work, wheels seem the most logical. There is the issue of loading trucks (which I did at UPS for a couple summers), for that I’m thinking maybe a ceiling-mounted arm that could extend the length of the truck?
by jimbo808 | 2025-10-21 15:07:41+00:00
Karpathy was in charge of the autonomous driving unit, while Elon was in charge of playing video games, calling random people on Twitter pedos, making flamethrowers, poaching a bunch of NASA engineers and selling them back to the government, digging holes, gaslighting us about the Hyperloop, and uhhh... yeah, too busy to have been super hands on with this I'd imagine.
by FredPret | 2025-10-21 15:07:57+00:00
It's "anti-colonialist" in the sense that it encourages the mass murder of the descendants of the original colonialists.

I don't know the US well enough to give you an exact equivalent, but "shoot the WASP" might be more or less the same thing. It wouldn't be any better if the same song sang the praises of a white member of the Weather Underground.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-21 15:08:14+00:00
To be fair, running grep from Emacs is a mistake - you should be using ag, or some other parallelized version of grep :)

Ardour has around 800k lines of code, and ag (not even the fastest of the new greps) can search it all more or less faster than I can type.

The idea of some system that analyzes/caches/indexes the code just isn't necessary anymore.
by parpfish | 2025-10-21 15:08:42+00:00
i think another part of it is whether there's any meaningful difference in value for a mediocre vs good employee.

let say you ran a trucking company and decided that you'd pay more to ensure you cornered the market on 'good' drivers. but... it turns out that your customers don't care if you have good drivers or mediocre drivers, so you can't justify charging a higher rate.
by zahlman | 2025-10-21 15:08:44+00:00
> It helps you see how processors really work and brings back the old days when hardware was simple and easy to understand. I miss that time.

Just FWIW, you can still find Z80s listed for sale all over the usual e-merchants and people absolutely still design around them. It wasn't discontinued until last June, and there's an updated eZ80 design still made and sold by Zilog.
by kulahan | 2025-10-21 15:08:45+00:00
Fifty Celsius is an insane drop.

It sounds like the most important part of the article (and another cool quote) is this:

>Until recently we knew how to grow it only at circuit-slagging temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C.

So basically, the big breakthrough was low-temp growth of a diamond lattice. Very cool they can do it at such a low temperature. It must be a crazy low temp - probably under 100C?
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-21 15:09:18+00:00
You can try to train an adapter from a raw 400-byte MP3 frame to an embedding for a given LLM (4096+ floating point numbers, exact precision varies).

But you'd need that information to be digestible for a neural network. Otherwise, you'll have a very hard time getting that adapter to work.

As a rule: neural networks love highly redundant data, and hate highly compressed data at their inputs. Tokenized text good, GZIP compressed bytestream bad. But who knows, really. It's a rule of thumb, not a mathematical law. So you could have some success getting that MP3-based adapter to work. I've seen weirder shit work.
by rurp | 2025-10-21 15:09:40+00:00
I had a car salesman tell me he'd never met anyone else who cared more about the total purchase price than the monthly payment. That might not have been true, but it's probably rare. It was pretty maddening how he kept trying to charge me more, but over a longer term loan.

It's crazy how many people do just look at the monthly payment. It's not like X price over Y years is complicated math or anything.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-21 15:10:28+00:00
Very cool idea. A few bugs I found.

I was doing locations. I got something that looked like the parthenon. Like an idiot, I clicked Rome. Wrong. Chalkida, Greece.

Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Chalkida. Wrong. Orchomenos.

Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Orchomenos. Correct. And the accepted range was a huge square, covering most of Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean. Chalkida would have been within it as well.

So the location seems inconsistent with the pictures and the same pictures kept showing up.
by freedomben | 2025-10-21 15:10:28+00:00
I think you have to differentiate between professional (or collegiate) level football v. less formal games.

Having grown up playing lots of American Football all through school (for fun, not competitively), I think the rules are a lot more of a spectrum. For someone to play for fun or even watch the pros, most of the rules don't really affect the overall understanding. There will be some plays that get reversed or penalized on some weird technicality, but it's relatively rare. Things like "offsides", "false start", "delay of game", "intentional grounding", and personal fouls seem like the most common infractions, and those aren't really all that complex once you understand the basic mechanics of plays like the system of downs and line of scrimmage. "Illegal Formation" and various others get ridiculously technical and complex, but unless you watch a lot of football (and even then) it's not something that will have much impact and the refs/commentators nearly always explain what the infraction was.

Now that said, I don't mean to undersell the difficulty in learning the simple structure. Trying to teach my kids the rules when they've never played an informal game and were watching NCAA games with me was a helpful exercise at appreciating the weirdness. It's not the most intuitive for sure. If I hadn't grown up with it and had that informal experience as a baseline, I'd also struggle to make sense of the game just watching it without much explanation.
by rob74 | 2025-10-21 15:10:33+00:00
In the past, this has meant that people who had manufacturing jobs (i.e. producing something tangible that they could conceivably be proud of doing right) were moved to service jobs like call center operators, delivery workers, Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers etc. etc. Not really a step up, I would say. And in the foreseeable future all these jobs (and also some better qualified ones) will be replaced by robots - probably the most dangerous and least fulfilling of them, like delivery workers, will be replaced last. Yay, progress!
by somenameforme | 2025-10-21 15:10:58+00:00
It's not pinning anything on anybody. It's explaining the context to the probably 99% of people who have no idea what was going on here. Obviously this news was a shock to everybody, but it's also a case where you can kind of immediately understand why. Everybody could see he was fading before our eyes, but nobody realized quite how serious it was.

I can't imagine how awful his friend and boss feel right now. He was behaving extremely erratically on his final stream to the point that they dropped by at 1am (granted that's more like 3pm in typical chess player time) to try to get him to stop playing, calm down, and just go to bed. They're obviously going to be asking themselves if they could have done more. The same is even true of Hikaru who recounted his last conversation with Danya, which was again about trying to help him up, and he teared up while again wondering if he could have done more.

And the catalyst for his decline was the cheating accusations. Yet the one 'mitigating' thing for Kramnik is that Danya really fell out of touch with reality with regards to the accusations. He made it clear that he felt many, if not most, people felt he was cheating. But in reality, basically nobody did. Kramnik has become basically a meme to the point that his accusations hold about as much weight as being called a naughty name online.

Of course from Danya's perspective it was going to be much more painful because he mentioned that Kramnik was one of his chess idols growing up. And people don't understand the amount of work it takes to become very good at chess. To then have one of your idols turn around and claim you're cheating, which is essentially pissing on all your work, is going to sting. And Danya had an immense, substantially more than average, amount of reverence for the title of world champion, which he felt that was causing people to believe Kramnik.

He felt the world was turning against him, but it simply wasn't. And the catalyst for this change was the accusations.
by hylaride | 2025-10-21 15:11:07+00:00
There's a world where Sun did what you hoped (became a systems company) and created Joyent in-house. However, hyper-scaling means going fast and cheap before good comes along. Sun's habit was fast and good and that's an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome culturally. (By fast I mean growing a platform, not raw performance, FWIW).

Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.
by quanto | 2025-10-21 15:11:08+00:00
> Job losses could shave 30 cents off each item purchased by 2027.

This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
by AmVess | 2025-10-21 15:11:19+00:00
The same thing we are doing now: nothing. The poor already aren't customers, and what remains of the middle class is already being priced out of basic necessities.

Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.

History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-21 15:11:19+00:00
Yeah, Solaris and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had an IDE tooling story from the vendors.

Thanks to its origin, XEmacs also had for several years many graphical capabilities, that if I am not mistaken only landed on main Emacs during the late 2000's, by then I was back into IDE land.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-21 15:11:59+00:00
> With a binary, one can compare a hash

You lift a suspected binary from a machine that's under suspicion. You hash it and it matches a known good file. You declare victory, pat yourself on the back, and return it back into service. 3 months later all of your data is exfiltrated because you assumed that your attacker is an idiot.

> it needs additional effort by the attacker to search for the binary

Additional effort:

#include "stdio.h" #include "unistd.h" void main() { char path[512]; readlink("/proc/self/exe", path, sizeof(path)); unlink(path); printf("Poof, I disappeared from: %s\n", path); }

> You sound like the people who told me two decades ago that reproducible builds are a waste of time.

Except I wouldn't say that because these ideas are completely unrelated. Define your threat model and specify what problem you're trying to solve. Don't be the type of person who encrypts passwords because they heard that encryption is good for protecting data.

You demonized curl|bash because it "doesn't have a proper trust chain" and attacked the project for "not understanding security" with really weak arguments, now you're retreating all the way back to claim some fringe benefits to maybe-possibly discover the source of infection, and only if your attacker is lazy not to try to cover their tracks.

Continuing that argument like it's the same one you originally presented is quite a disrespectful way of wasting people's time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
by vee-kay | 2025-10-21 15:12:06+00:00
The aliens, if they exist, will certainly powerful enough to destroy humanity's paltry defenses (and our satellites will be first to fall during an alien invasion), but you are right, they won't bother negotiating or defeating us, they will simply annihilate humanity (via biological weaponry, perhaps), terraform this beautiful bountiful Earth to suit their needs, and use it as they deem fit.

For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.

If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.

Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.
by ddp26 | 2025-10-21 15:12:06+00:00
And to actually answer your question:

> Why would Karpathy's view be different for AI and non-AI-experts?

For people who understand AI, they can engage with the substance of his claims, about reinforcement learning, continuous learning, and his points about the 9s of reliability.

For people who don't, the article suggests thinking about AI as some black-box technology, and asking questions about base rates: how long does adoption normally take? What do the companies developing the technology normally do?

> It does not even give a statement about the reasoning behind why Karpathy said getting to https://ai-2027.com is unlikely.

That's the substance of the podcast, Karpathy justifies his views fairly well and at length.

> It also does not clearly define what AI 2027 is?

Dwarkesh covered AI 2027 when it came out, but for those who don't know, it's a deeply researched case of runaway AI that effectively destroys humanity in just 2-3 years after publication. This is what I mean by "short timelines".