MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Turn any webpage into a Google Forms quiz using AI
by Verdierm | 2025-11-13 13:01:53+00:00
I've been exploring the Google Workspace marketplace lately, and honestly, it feels like a possible goldmine that nobody talks about.

Started tinkering with a simple idea - what if I could scrape any webpage and auto-generate quiz questions?

Basically you paste any URL and it creates quiz questions automatically in Google Forms.

What I learned about Workspace development:

Apps Script is way more powerful than people give it credit for The approval process is actually pretty smooth once you learn what they want It is still competitive because there are other apps on there Theres a constant stream of users trying your app every day.

Trying to learn how to better monetize it because I notice there are alot of users who just want to use it for free. Also learned that people use alot of fake reviews to boost there app which I wont do.

Try it here:

https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/examize/6083607...

Anyone else building stuff for Google Workspace? I'm curious what others are working on.
by acdha | 2025-11-13 13:02:01+00:00
Your post is very long on inflamed political rhetoric but short on coherent arguments or facts. After reading it, I would know that you’re a Republican but still have no idea that the Chancery judge’s “activism” wasn’t, say, seizing the means of production but responding to a allegations of conflicts of interest brought in a lawsuit by another very rich person representing a group of shareholders.
by RhysU | 2025-11-13 13:02:25+00:00
> The problem is that hiring in New York City government is subject to possibly the most insane rules in the country.... And I say that as someone who didn’t think anything could be worse than the federal hiring rules.

This piece is a great, accidental argument for smaller government in NYC.

> We have these supposedly merit-based hiring systems because in the mid- to late-19th century, positions in government were filled through patronage, or what’s known as the spoils system.

One can either have "supposedly merit-based" or definitely spoils (i.e. graft). Smaller government that accepts some (smaller) spoils to gain nimbleness is a good balance IF the free press calls out egregious graft and IF the electorate will throw out any bums.
by Woods369 | 2025-11-13 13:02:29+00:00
I totally agree with the closing questions and statements here.

Yes, there is an apparent fluctuation in pricing for said tokens/credits/etc.. and they are just finding the sweet spot.

I primarily use the https://www.warp.dev/ terminal and they have just released a new plan which outwardly states lower cost per request.

They mentioned 'At full usage, the plans didn’t scale sustainably'. This is encouraging to know.

Right now, I'm looking around and trying out. Nice read, thanks.
by exe34 | 2025-11-13 13:02:54+00:00
I think pretty soon I'll carry a "normal" phone in my bag for things like communication and banking/ticketing, but I'll carry a device I actually like in my pocket. It'll be the best of both worlds - content I want to see often and easily in my pocket, and the stuff I don't want to be distracted by will be harder to reach on a whim.
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-13 13:03:07+00:00
You see people (business people who are enthusiastic about tech, often), claiming that these bots are the new Google and Wikipedia, and that you’re behind the times if you do, what amounts, to looking up information yourself.

We’re preaching to the choir by being insistent here that you prompt these things to get a “vibe” about a topic rather than accurate information, but it bears repeating.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-13 13:03:17+00:00
those two words only describe AI models, as they are models. A "world model" is worse than those two words as it is oxymoronic.

The idea that words and space are being conflated as a formula for spatial intelligence is fundamentally absurd as our relationships to space have no resolution, both within any one language and worse, between them, as language is arbitrary. Language and thought are entirely separate forms. Aphasia has proved this since 2016.

AI developers have to face the music, these impoverished gimmicks aren't even magic, they are bunk. And debunkable once compared to the sciences of the brain.

https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2024/06/19/what-is-language-for/
by aatd86 | 2025-11-13 13:03:49+00:00
> the predicate is not used for anything at all at run time.

It is used for its value when declaring a new variable of a given type at runtime too. It has to be treated as a special predicate. The allocator needs to be aware of this. Runtume introspection needs to be aware of this. Parametric type instantiation also needs to know of this since it is used to create dependent types.

The point is that in the universe of types that seems to be built in dependent types, singleton Types are just Types decorrelated from their set of values. So they become indistinguishable from each other, besides their name. Or so it seems that the explanation is. It is abstracted from their value. The proposal was to keep the set definition attached. What I call unabstract them.

The point is exactly to avoid mixing up universes which can lead to paradoxes. Instead of dealing with types as some sorts of values with functions over types, mixed up with functions over values which are also types and then functions of types and values to make some sort of dependent types, we keep the algebra of types about types. We just bridge values into singleton types. Also, it should allow an implementation that relies mostly on normal constrained parametricity and those singleton types. The point is that mixing values and types (as values) would exactly lead to this type of all types issue.

But again, I am not familiar enough with the dependent type implementations to know exactly what treatment they have of the issue.
by MYEUHD | 2025-11-13 13:04:02+00:00
It's not speculation.

In order to build a custom Rom, you need three things: the kernel tree, the device tree, and the binary blobs.

The binary blobs can be extracted from a running phone.

The kernel tree is GPL-licensed, so almost all phones have kernel trees releases, and if they don't you can ask the manufacturer for it.

The device tree on the other hand, is created from scratch for each phone. As such, there is no pre-existing license, and therefore no legal obligation to release device tree sources, so almost no manufacturer does. The only notable exception is Google with their Nexus and Pixel phones. (But this has stopped since with the Android 16 release)

We can safely assume that the manufacturers that don't release the device trees, wouldn't have released kernel trees if they weren't obliged to.

To go into more details:

The device trees are relatively easy to make. So, their absence doesn't represent a big hurdle. See for example https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-how-to-make-a-device-tree-for-...

But adding support for a device to the Linux Kernel requires _huge_ reverse-engineering efforts. This is why there's still no fully functional Android build for iPhones.
by zahllos | 2025-11-13 13:04:08+00:00
Ah no I was just being snarky and not at you. We're all missing (hyper)text markup language as the UI markup layer, plus js. We previously had some kind of alternative "load app from internet" but the runtimes were external (and provided lots of fun security holes).

I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.
Show HN: Shadowfax AI – an agentic workhorse to 10x data analysts productivity
by diwu1989 | 2025-11-13 13:04:26+00:00
Hi HN,

We built an AI agent for data analysts that turns the soul crushing spreadsheet & BI tool grind into a fast, verifiable and joyful experience. Early users reported going from hours to minutes on common real-world data wrangling tasks.

It's much smarter than an Excel copilot: immutable data steps, a DAG of SQL views, and DuckDB for instant crunching over millions of rows. Our early agent prototype ranked #1 on the Spider2-DBT bench. https://spider2-sql.github.io

Try it out and we'd love your feedback!

Thanks, Di Wu & the Shadowfax team

P.S. Shadowfax is Gandalf's horse from LOTR. There's a hidden easter egg site with 3 different triggers, see if you can find them.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-13 13:04:36+00:00
Why "no thank you"?

I am very much thank you. I'm still waiting for Apple to support the driver's license from my state. It will be one less thing to carry.

There are literally no downsides. My state already had me in its electronic database because I'm a driver. The TSA already has me in its electronic database. Apple already knows exactly who I am from my many credit card purchases with them. It's not taking away any privacy. Having my ID on my phone gives me convenience and doesn't take anything away.

Obviously this isn't mandatory nor should it be. Physical IDs aren't going anywhere. But I already keep all my credit cards in my Apple Wallet. I want to keep my driver's license there too.
by vinioyama | 2025-11-13 13:04:38+00:00
Hi, I’m the creator of Eigenfocus.

Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting feedback from users and used it to guide a full layout redesign.

I also updated the landing page to better communicate what Eigenfocus is and clarify the value proposition.

The feedback from the community has been great so far and I’m still listening: every suggestion helps make it better.

I’d love to hear thoughts on balancing simplicity vs. flexibility in project tools, the landing page copy or even the business model.

Repository: https://github.com/eigenfocus/eigenfocus Website: https://eigenfocus.com

Happy to answer any questions or hear your thoughts!
by quantified | 2025-11-13 13:04:45+00:00
Your HN profile contains significant professional info. This is a group that might look up your commits to see how bad a word it is. For example, it's 4:30am and I myself am responding to your question out of boredom. If this post makes it to the top of HN, you could well be outed. You will be eventually. Will anyone care?

I'd say leave alone, but... By publicizing this in the first place, you will be contributing to a notion among the puerile that "I can add cuss words to my PR, this guy did". Which maybe doesn't matter that much? Does anyone care?

Is it colorful? What's it aimed at?
by klabb3 | 2025-11-13 13:04:48+00:00
You may be overthinking it. Verification of some sort isn’t the end of the world, it’s arguably an acceptable damage control stop-gap that has precedent on other platforms like special entitlements on iOS and kernel extensions on Windows.

Googles proposal was to require everyone to verify to publish any app through any channel. That would be the equivalent of a web browser enforcing a whitelist of websites, because one scam site asked for access to something bad.

If scam apps use an API designed by Google to steal user data, then they should fix that, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
by nthypes | 2025-11-13 13:04:51+00:00
Thanks for the input! I'm checking on Claude Code Max now - from what I'm seeing, even the $200/month plan has weekly rate limits (240-480 hours of Sonnet 4, 24-40 hours of Opus 4 per week).. so not quite unlimited tokens either, though definitely more predictable billing.

$638/6 weeks won't make me broke, but here's my main issue: for me it's about the value-to-token ratio feeling off.

What bugs me most is that many of those 340M tokens feel wasteful? Like the LLM will use 50k tokens exploring dead ends before finding a solution that could have been expressed in 5k tokens. The productivity gain is real, but it feels like I'm paying 10x more than what should be "fair" for the actual value delivered.

Maybe this is just the current state of AI coding - the models need that exploration space to get to the answer. Or maybe I need to get better at constraining the context and being more surgical with my prompts.

For me as a founder, it's less "can I afford this" and more "does this pricing model make sense long-term?" If AI coding becomes a $5-6k/year baseline expense per developer, that changes a lot of unit economics, especially for early-stage companies.

Are you finding Claude Code Max more token-efficient for similar tasks, or is it just easier to stomach because the billing is flat?
by timcobb | 2025-11-13 13:05:02+00:00
I think people this approach is overcompensating for over-apologizing (or, similarly, over thanking, both in excess are off-putting). I have a child who just says "sorry" and doesn't actually care about changing the underlying behavior.

But yes, even if you try to make a healthy balance, there are still plenty of times when an apology are appropriate and will go a long way, for the giver and receiver, in my opinion anyway.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-13 13:05:49+00:00
One weird trick to avoiding nuget breakage: treat packages as immutable. If you need a new or local build of a package, you must bump the version number (use -alphaNNN or increment the patch number) for every rebuild.

Or, if you're trying to temporarily use a local source tree, swap out <PackageReference> for <ProjectReference>.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-11-13 13:07:02+00:00
LLMs only really make sense for tasks where verifying the solution (which you have to do!) is significantly easier than solving the problem: translation where you know the target and source languages, agentic coding with automated tests, some forms of drafting or copy editing, etc.

General search is not one of those! Sure, the machine can give you its sources but it won't tell you about sources it ignored. And verifying the sources requires reading them, so you don't save any time.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-13 13:07:30+00:00
> That in turn means you must log along the way where you have more precise information about the failure

Yes, that's the idea. You split the information into a diagnostic with stuff you deal with now and data that the upper layer will handle. The intersection between the data in these two things should be empty.

> And that in turn means you must have lots of redundant logging, since each point in the stack doesn't know whether the abstraction it's invoking has already logged or not, or encapsulation would be violated.

No. You print a diagnostic, about what exactly THIS layer was trying to do, you don't speculate what the upper layer was trying to do and try to log that. Every layer knows the lower layer has already logged the primary error, because an error object exists, and it also knows that the upper layer will print a diagnostic about what was the intention, so it only prints exactly what the error was in this layer.

> doesn't know whether the abstraction it's invoking has already logged or not, or encapsulation would be violated.

It knows that the lower layer has logged all stuff that that layer considered to be important, and that none of the data that is available to this layer was logged, since that is the responsibility of the caller.

An example:

Document rendering incomplete, skipped publishing step. Thumbnail #39 missing. Failed to fetch image: Connection refused. [Discarded malformed packet with SYN flag. Invalid data in src/network/tcp.c:894 parse_tcp_packet_quirks_mode]

Depending on the log level, you wouldn't show the later diagnostics. If there is a debug flag set, you can also add the function/line information to every step, not just to the last. If you are outtputing to stuff like syslog, you would put each diagnostic on its own line.
by kragen | 2025-11-13 13:08:05+00:00
No, I don't mean that classifications are a matter of convention and utility, just word definitions. I think that some classifications can be better or worse, precisely because concepts can reflect reality well or poorly. That's why I said that the currently popular definition of "computer" has ontological problems.

I'm not sure that your definition helps capture what people mean by "computer" or helps us approach a more ontologically coherent definition either. If, by words like "computing" and "computation", you mean things like "what computers do", it's almost entirely circular, except for your introduction of observer-relativity. (Which is an interesting question of its own—perhaps the turbulence at the base of Niagara Falls this morning could be correctly interpreted as finding a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, if we knew what features to pay attention to.)

But, if you mean things like "numerical calculation", most of the time that people are using computers, they are not using them for numerical calculation or anything similar; they are using them to store, retrieve, transmit, and search data, and if anything the programmers think of as numerical is happening at all, it's entirely subordinate to that higher purpose, things like array indexing. (Which is again observer-relative—you can think of array indexing as integer arithmetic mod 2⁶⁴, but you can also model it purely in terms of propositional logic.)

And I think that's one of the biggest pitfalls in the "computer" terminology: it puts the focus on relatively minor applications like accounting, 3-D rendering, and LLM inference, rather than on either the machine's Protean or universal nature or the purposes to which it is normally put. (This is a separate pitfall from random and arbitrary exclusions like cellphones and game consoles.)
by Tarsul | 2025-11-13 13:08:10+00:00
It's weird to me as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good, if i had to guesstimate the general feeling - it was generally seen as inherently a-little-bit-worse-than-neutral (the saying "Reichtum stinkt" - meaning rich people stink, was quite common). However, and probably due to way too much cultural influence of US media (and tech) this general feeling changed a little bit more to the positive side (00s/2010s). But now that everything goes to shit, the feeling shifts again to more negative.

At least that's my nonscientific interpretation of the historical feeling in Germany since the 90s. But would love studies about it, in general.
by neurobloom | 2025-11-13 13:08:37+00:00
You're seeing something real in all three observations:

AI narrative consistency: Yes, this is infrastructure for maintaining coherent identity over time — whether human ↔ AI or AI-agent organizations. Niche packaging: Agreed. While the core is general infrastructure, entry strategy should be vertical-specific (customer support, coaching, education, etc.) Writers/world-builders: Great callout. Character consistency across long narratives is exactly the kind of "emotional continuity" problem StoryKeeper addresses.

The broader vision is relational infrastructure for AI systems. The go-to-market is specific solutions for specific communities. Writers might be a great early adopter group
by wickedsight | 2025-11-13 13:09:10+00:00
I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining.

Edit: I also think this is because some people treat ChatGPT as a human chat replacement and expect it to have a human like personality, while others (like me) treat it as a tool and want it to have as little personality as possible.
by vessenes | 2025-11-13 13:10:25+00:00
Yes, I had total PTSD reading that in the announcement. Whether it's just evolving a tone so that we don't get fatigue or actually improving, I'm happy we're moving on. My audio (still 4o I believe) interactions are maddening - somehow it's remembered I want a quick answer, so EVERY.SINGLE.ANSWER starts with "Okay, let's keep this snappy and info dense." Srsly. Wiping instructions / memory reset seems to have no effect, it comes back almost immediately.
by joshmn | 2025-11-13 13:11:12+00:00
It’s notable that there were ShinyHunters members arrested by the FBI a few years ago. I was in prison with Sebastian Raoult, one of them. We talked quite a bit.

The level of persistence these guys went through to phish at scale is astounding—which is how they gained most of their access. They’d otherwise look up API endpoints on GitHub and see if there were any leaked keys (he wasn’t fond of GitHub's automated scanner).

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/member-notorious-intern...
by contrarian1234 | 2025-11-13 13:11:48+00:00
I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling?

It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services
by viraptor | 2025-11-13 13:12:37+00:00
Breaks as in think block contains nonsense or the output finishes? I've had some thinking weirdness which doesn't seem to affect the final answer much.

Overall it still seems extremely good for its size and I wouldn't expect anything below 30B to behave like that. I mean, it flies with 100 tok/sec even on a 1650 :D
by rkangel | 2025-11-13 13:12:41+00:00
If you buy a Steam Deck and just use it as a handheld console and never select "reboot to desktop mode" it will act just like a closed console. The exceptions compared to something like a Switch:

- For some games (usually those oriented around keyboard and mouse) you need to go and select one of the community control configurations, and maybe tweak it a bit. For example, I needed to do this with FTL to make it easily playable

- Occasionally (and I've basically had to do this once, in my 2+ years with a Steam Deck) you need to go and select a different Proton version to make it work. ProtonDB tells you what to do

This is all rare though. The vast majority of games have a control setup for using a controller, and they definitely do if they've ever been released on console. And they will Just Work.
by bargainbin | 2025-11-13 13:12:42+00:00
The intent of the South Park sketch was to lampoon that BP were (/are) willingly doing awful things and then give corpo apology statements when caught.

Here, Checkout has been the victim of a crime, just as much as their impacted customers. It’s a loss for everyone involved except the perpetrators. Using words like “betrayed” as if Checkout wilfully mislead its customers, is a heavy accusation to level.

At a point, all you can do is apologise, offer compensation if possible, and plot out how you’re going to prevent it going forward.
by jlokier | 2025-11-13 13:13:06+00:00
> In most cases, F-Droid couldn't know either.

F-Droid is quite restrictive about what kinds of app they accept, they build the app from source code themselves, and the source code must be published under a FLOSS license. They have some checks that have to pass for each new version of an app.

Although it's possible for a developer to transfer their accounts and private keys to someone shady, F-Droid's checks and open source requirements limit the damage the new developer can do.

https://f-droid.org/docs/Inclusion_Policy/

https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/
by s20n | 2025-11-13 13:13:07+00:00
> Lie #3: Transpilers Target the Same Level of Abstraction

> This is pretty much the same as (2). The input and output languages have the syntax of JavaScript but the fact that compiling one feature requires a whole program transformation gives away the fact that these are not the same language

It is not really the same as (2), you can't cherry pick the example of Babel and generalise it to every transpiler ever. There are several transpilers which transpile from one high-level language to another high-level language such as kotlin to swift. i.e; targeting the same level of abstraction.

Wonder what this person would say about macro expansions in scheme, maybe that should also be considered a compiler as per their definition.