MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sparktype – a CMS and SSG that runs entirely in the browser
by mattkevan | 2025-11-04 12:24:40+00:00
Hi HN,

After trying to teach a non-technical friend how to manage a Jekyll site I decided there must be a way to make building a site with a SSG easier. Options like Decap, Contentful etc. do make it a bit easier but still take lots of tech knowledge to set up.

So I built Sparktype, a browser-based CMS that outputs statically-generated HTML and CSS. My goal is for it to be as easy to use as Substack or Medium, while providing all the benefits of a static site generator including openness, simplicity, speed, security and ownership.

It handles most things that you'd need from a CMS, including creating pages, image resizing, menu management, tags, collections, listings etc. I've only made two themes so far, but I'm working on a theme store and the ability to import custom themes.

Content is saved as plain Markdown + YAML frontmatter and JSON config files, so there's no lock-in and content is easily portable to other platforms. Generated sites can be exported as a zip file to upload via FTP, committed to Github or published via Netlify API.

I'm working on cross-platform client apps using Tauri which will enable more publishing options as its not limited by what can be done in a client-only environment.

The way the system works means that the Web doesn't need to be the only interface to the content - here's a simple Go-based CLI client that bypasses the HTML altogether https://github.com/sparktype-project/sparktype/tree/main/st-...

It's very early days and there are still plenty of bugs, but I'm posting now to hopefully get feedback and see what people think. Please do let me know!
by gempir | 2025-11-04 12:24:48+00:00
That means your code will stay old.

A new language feature is released, you cannot apply it to old code, since that would make a big PR. You need to do super slowly over time and most old code will never see it.

A better static type checker, that finds some bugs for you, you cannot fix them as your PR would be too big, you instead would need to make a baseline and split it up endlessly.

In theory yes, maybe a bit safer to do it this way, but discouraging developers to make changes is bad IMO. Obviously depends on your usecase, if you develop software that is critical to people's literal life, then you'll move more carefully.

But I wager 99% of the software the world produces is some commerce software, where the only thing lost is money.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-04 12:25:29+00:00
I was of course being facetious mentioning fortran but given a choice between working with an amazing group of people on a project which has a completely wrong tech/frameworks/... stack for the job at hand (e.g. fortran to built an e-commerce website) vs. working with average/subpar team utilizing some amazing stack, I'd choose the former any day of the week and twice on Sunday
by lmm | 2025-11-04 12:25:30+00:00
> Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period.

> Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.

WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-04 12:26:02+00:00
It's a great article... but a strange title?

This is about all the country-specific requirements for tax residency, visas, citizenship, etc.

But I don't know what downloading a border means. The title makes it sound like this is going to be about downloading national mapping data... If the author was looking for an evocative metaphor, I don't think this one works. Maybe it's supposed to refer to:

> It would be alright with a single source of truth, but all these facts are scattered across (semi)official websites and PDFs, and you're supposed to figure it out yourself.

But they got those all through... downloading. I.e. cURL.
by Yizahi | 2025-11-04 12:26:28+00:00
In our case, if such a thing happens (a few times per year across hundreds of people), a separate branch is created and a team working on that feature is completely autonomous for a while, while there is constant normal work in trunk by everyone else. Team tests their feature and adjacent code to an acceptable beta state but doesn't do any extensive or full coverage because it is impossible. Their code may be reviewed at that point if they request it, but it done as an extra activity, with meetings and stuff. Then they optionally give this build to the general QA to run full suite on it. This may be done in several cycles if fatal issues are found. Then they announce that they will do merge into trunk on days A to B and ask everyone to please hold off on committing into trunk in that time. Around that time they send a mail outlining changes and new functionality and potential or actual unfixed issues. QA teams runs as full cover of tests as possible. Merge may be reverted at this point if it is truly bad. Or if it good, team announces success and proceeds with normal work mode.
by aroberge | 2025-11-04 12:26:31+00:00
> Python is quickly turning into a crowded keyword junkyard

* Javascript (ECMAScript) has 63 keywords. * Rust has 50 keywords. * Java has 51 keywords + 17 contextually reserved words, for a total of 68. * Python has now 36 keywords + 4 'soft' keywords, for a total of 40. * Go has 25 keywords.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-04 12:26:50+00:00
> Yes, because if you get a leak in your air conditioner, instead of just patching the hole and refilling it with coolant, you have to replace your entire system in places like California because they require a more green, less gas, in the name of science, and still completely ignoring the simple fact that it doesn’t make a damn difference because we all live in the same globe.

I don't think you are holding an informed opinion. Ozone layer depletion was tied primarily with CFC emissions used in air conditioning units, and since the production of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals were banned in the late 1980s the ozone layer started to regenerate. In practical terms this means lower incidence of health issues such as skin cancer or cataracts. That sounds pretty neat.

But being able to use a 40+ year air conditioning unit is worth it?
by findthewords | 2025-11-04 12:26:58+00:00
Everything in economics always boils down to 1. supply and demand and 2. taxation.

One can simply look at historical income taxes in the USA and their progressiveness and conclude that over time taxes tend to regress until some economic calamity or war happens, after which taxes become extremely progressive again for a short while (top income tax rate bracket of 75% to 90%).

See for yourself, it's all there:

https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_r...
by gcanyon | 2025-11-04 12:27:12+00:00
That almost seems like cheating. Like the very very old joke where the guy is standing on the train station with two large briefcases beside him, talking on an impossibly small cell phone (this was a joke around 1995). Another man walks up to him as the guy ends his call and says,

"That cell phone is amazing! So small!"

"And it only weighs four ounces" the man replies proudly. "I sell them, if you're interested. They're $500, but you can talk for over 8 hours."

"I'll take it!" the other replies, and hands over the cash.

The man pulls a small box out of his jacket and says, "Here's your phone and cable," then picks up one of the briefcases, struggling with the weight, "And here's your battery."

All to say, claiming the lightest most powerful electric motor without at least mentioning how big/heavy the cooling system is seems wrong.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-11-04 12:27:14+00:00
Fight slop with slop. Use an AI to review it in excruciating detail and write a lenghty justification for the rejection. Make sure to really hit a couple thousand words.

Maybe getting their own time wasted will teach the submitter about the value of clarity and how it feels to be on the receiving end of a communication with highly asymmetric effort.
Ask HN: Why are most status pages delayed?
by 2gremlin181 | 2025-11-04 12:27:46+00:00
As I type this, Reddit is down. My own requests return 500s, Down Detector reports that there is an outage but Reddit itself says all systems operational.

This is a pattern that I have noticed time and time again with many services. Why even have a status page if it is not going to be accurate in real time? It's also not uncommon that smaller issues never get acknowledged.

Is this a factor of how Atlassian Statuspage works?

Edit: Redditstatus finally acknowledged the issue as of 04:27 PST, a good 20+ minutes after Down Detector charts show the spike
by drfrank3 | 2025-11-04 12:28:16+00:00
AI creates slop of dead or inefficient code that can be cleaned up. I think that developers that obsess over control have a difficult time adjusting to this.

The greater danger is that AI can create or modify code into something that is disconnected, stubbed, and/or deceptive and claim it’s complete. This is much worse because it wastes much more time, but AI can fix this too, just like it can the slop- maybe not deterministically, but it can.

And because of this, those that get in the way of creating source with AI are just cavemen rejecting fire.
by shoubidouwah | 2025-11-04 12:29:18+00:00
1) set a generous threshold over which your inheritance gets taxed, inflation adjusted (e.g, 2M not including the principal residence) 2) tax 100% above it. (should only concern a fraction of a fraction of cases) 3) put all this tax's proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund 4) at 21, a citizen gets access to her redistributed generational wealth 5) profit
by soulofmischief | 2025-11-04 12:29:50+00:00
Following the guidelines, I edited out a swipe. Multiple people have been honest about how awful you're being, but maybe you need a moderator to step in and give you tips on how to have a mature discussion?

This conversation started with you butting into another conversation I am having with another user, that user also having butt into a conversation I was having with yet another user. Your posts cannot be more off-topic. Your need to seek attention and make this about you, to flamebait and ignore nearly every HN guideline speaks for itself.
by 317070 | 2025-11-04 12:30:24+00:00
A common proposal I'm fond of, is that you get a budget (of say 1 million) you are allowed to inherit tax free across the span of your life.

This incentivises the rich to split up their fortune, and allows the poor to keep control of objects with emotional luggage.

That said, if the value of your house has grown tenfold, it is most likely because the community added that value. And so I don't think it is necessarily wrong if that same community sees some of that value back.
by andrepd | 2025-11-04 12:30:32+00:00
Unlike people, capital has no nation. It can just move effortlessly from France to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. That's why single-country initiatives to e.g. tax wealth (or even tax extremely profitable companies) are doomed to failure: those assets are easy to transfer and hide; if the UK passes a progressive wealth tax, all those global billionaires will just sell their empty houses in London and buy empty houses somewhere else.

Hence the proposal by many economists that the only solution is a broad agreement on a global progressive wealth tax, with at least the major blocs of the US and EU on board. See e.g. "A Brief History of Inequality".
by s-macke | 2025-11-04 12:30:41+00:00
copy.sh has the advantage of being x86-compatible and can run many different Linux distributions. However, this CPU choice also makes it quite complex and relatively slow (not sure, if this is still correct).

My own OpenRISC CPU emulation fits into just 1,500 lines of code, and I optimized every single line. To make it work, I had to compile my own Linux distribution completely from scratch. I stopped working on it about eight years ago, but I’ve completed a dozen other successful projects since then.

I’m still very proud that nearly every browser-based Linux emulator, including JSLinux and copy.sh, uses my 9p-virtio- filesystem approach. It makes running complex Linux distributions in the browser much simpler.

Overall, my thoughts about copy.sh’s work are entirely positive.
by CLPadvocate | 2025-11-04 12:30:51+00:00
Didn't you forget to mention the genocide of the so-called "palestinians" on jews, lasting for nearly 80 years?

Or would you rather prefer to discuss it in the context of 1300-year-long Arab occupation of the lands they absolutely do not belong to?

Or maybe you want to know why even using the word "Palestine" contributes to a 2000-year-long genocide on the jewish population of Israel?
by u_sama | 2025-11-04 12:30:53+00:00
I would not cite Piketty, Zucman or Saez who are the hardest fighters of the wealth inequality thesis as they usually mix political advocacy and have been criticized in their methodology and have been under a fair share of controversies. Btw I have grouped them because this is how they are usually treated, both by the fact they are all French economists but also on the fact they all push for the same inequality thesis

1: https://www.davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-2024-ReplyToPSZ....

2: https://philmagness.com/2014/12/an-empirical-critique-of-tho...

3: https://qz.com/1725562/elizabeth-warrens-economic-advisers-a...

EDIT: Here is the rebuttal for 2 by Piketty himself: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Tec... courtesy of andrepd
by skeltoac | 2025-11-04 12:30:56+00:00
I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-04 12:30:56+00:00
Paradox of Choice is a book by Barry Schwartz. It is not the same at all as analysis paralysis.

It is a much more pernicious idea. Barry gives the example of salad dressing. If you have the choice between 100 salad dressings, no matter what you pick you will like the salad dressing less than if you only had 3 choices because with a 100 you can't know how much better the others ones might be. It would be quite rational to suspect there is another that you would like more so you aren't going to be as happy with the choice you made relative to having less choice. That is the paradox.
by finaard | 2025-11-04 12:31:02+00:00
Reminds me of a project from two decades ago which also had a somewhat tricky part.

We needed to do a nightly transfer of data. We had a variable amount of data to transfer, but typically in the range of one to two TB. We had a 1GBit link between the data centres housing the two systems, but it wasn't an exclusive link - backups and other stuff would be running during the night as well, so if we hog all bandwidth we'd have to deal with unhappy people. Hard deadline for the transfer was start of the work day.

Now the data does compress easily - but the data is only available for compression at the beginning of our sync window. We definitely need to compress some of the data to sync everything in time, and keep other users of the line happy. But: If we spend too much time on the compressing we might not have enough time left to send the data, plus we're not alone on the systems - other people will be unhappy about their nightly jobs failing if we hog all the available CPU time.

So we needed to find the right balance of data compression and bandwidth utilisation, taking into account all those factors, to make things work in the amount of time we had available.

Thanks to AMD nowadays we'd just throw more CPUs at the problem, but back then the 8 CPU server we were using was already quite expensive.
Show HN: Meetily – Bot-free, self-hosted AI meeting notes-100% local processing
by zackriya | 2025-11-04 12:31:13+00:00
Hey HN! I'm a maintainer of Meetily, an open-source meeting assistant that runs entirely on your machine.

The Problem: Current AI meeting tools (Otter.ai, Fireflies) require visible bots joining your calls and send all audio to their servers. This is awkward for client calls and impossible for GDPR/HIPAA environments.

How Meetily Works: • Captures system + microphone audio locally (no visible bot in meetings) • Runs Parakeet / Whisper.cpp for live transcription (GPU-accelerated) • Generates summaries via local LLMs (Ollama) or API (Claude/GPT) • Everything stays on your hardware – zero cloud dependency

Tech Stack: • Desktop: Tauri (Rust) + Next.js • Audio: System-level capture (no virtual cameras/bots) • Models: Parakeet, Whisper, Open source LLMs, OpenAi / Claude / Groq • Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux (You might have to build. Build instructions available in Repo)

It's MIT licensed and designed for teams that can't send sensitive data to third parties (Gov, legal, healthcare, finance).

GitHub: https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/meeting-minutes Website: https://meetily.ai

Would love feedback on the architecture, especially around audio capture reliability and model performance trade-offs!
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-04 12:31:18+00:00
I'm always surprised more people don't know about Quanta. Seems like it's currently the best science journalism out there, and IMO a very strong candidate for the single best place on the internet that's not crowd-sourced. The mixture of original art and technical diagrams is outstanding. Podcast is pretty good too, but I do wish they'd expand it to have someone with a good voice reading all the articles.

Besides not treating readers like idiots, they take themselves seriously, hire smart people, tell good stories but aren't afraid to stay technical, and simply skip all the clickbait garbage. Right now from the Scientific American front page: "Type 1 Diabetes science is having a moment". Or from Nature: "'Biotech Barbie' says ..". Granted I cherry-picked these offensive headlines pandering to facebook/twitter from many other options that might be legitimately interesting reads, but on Quanta there's also no paywalls, no cookie pop-ups, no thinly-veiled political rage-baiting either
by lmm | 2025-11-04 12:31:27+00:00
> Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.

Nope. Plenty of countries still require 6 months' passport validity to enter.

> I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.

> Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.

The airline doesn't give a shit about whether you can legally or practically enter the country they're flying you to. They care about whether they're going to be held liable to repatriate you at their own expense, and their processes are set up to ensure they avoid that. If the requirement on them is that they check your document before you board, they'll check your document before you board.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-04 12:31:39+00:00
> It is for someone - the market price is pretty much always going to be around the point where a small increase causes a noticeable drop-off in customers (otherwise the only sensible thing for the seller to do is charge more).

I don't think this is realistic within the topic of air conditioning. No one is going to go without HVAC because of an hypothetical small increase in hypothetical trash handling fees, and definitely not the people in this thread complaining about regulation.
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-04 12:32:00+00:00
The HVAC technician working on your home accidentally discharges the propane based coolant while working on your cooling coil in the furnace. The mechanical room fills with flammable gas and then the pilot light for the water heater kicks on, igniting the gas and blowing up your house.

It turns out the technician was working for a shady company that didn’t have liability insurance, now what? Before responding, please read what your homeowners insurance policy says about hiring people to work on your home, then tell me if you’re covered. People always assume it’s lawyers when it’s actually insurance companies mandating risk management.
by Bender | 2025-11-04 12:32:49+00:00
Bureaucracy. Companies have service level agreements with other companies. They want to be damn sure they can not disavow an outage before something says there is an outage. There will in most cases be a process involved in updating the status page that will intentionally have many layers of bureaucracy hurdles to jump through including many approvals. The preference will often be to downgrade an "outage" to a "degradation" or "partial outage" or some other term to downplay it and avoid having to pay credits on their B2B service level agreements and such.
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-04 12:33:05+00:00
Journalists are stuck between a rock and a hard place: they want their articles available for people to read, but they want them hidden behind a paywall because that's how they get paid.

It reminds me a bit of the dilemma faced by authors of open source software. Collectively, developers have surrendered to the corporations, given up the GPL and given their work away for free. They don't worry about it because they can have a profitable sideline working for those same corporations, but journalists, writers and other artists don't have a lucrative fallback plan.
by mafriese | 2025-11-04 12:33:09+00:00
I am still torn on this issue. On the one hand, it feels like a copyright violation when other people's works are used to train an ML model. On the other hand, it is not a copyright infringement if I paint a picture in the Studio Ghibli style myself. The question is whether removing a ‘skill requirement’ for replication is sufficient grounds to determine a violation.
by meltyness | 2025-11-04 12:33:30+00:00
It's funny to me that the patch threads attempting to fix a concern with the CPU from the OS both immediately derail into "oh no, you broke something!!1"

the CPU is assumed to work, despite Linux being designed with portability, theres not really a programming interface to cleanly disable arbitrary features, I guess we just screw with it until it seems to work OK and no one is yelling.

Granted, Linux isnt a product, and a patch in a thread is unlikely to impact anyone
by Earw0rm | 2025-11-04 12:33:42+00:00
It seems pretty clear to me though that being good at intellectual tasks / the sort of usefulness we ascribe to LLMs doesn't strongly correlate with awareness.

Even just within humans - many of the least intellectually capable humans seem to have a richer supply of the traits associated with awareness/being than some of the allegedly highest-functioning.

On average you're far more likely to get a sincere hug from someone with Down's syndrome than from a multi-millionaire.

But I'm more interested in this when it comes to the animal kingdom, because while ChatGPT is certainly more useful than my cat, I'm also pretty certain that it's a lot less aware. Meaningful awareness - feelings - seems to be an evolutionary adaptation possessed by k-strategy reproducing vertebrates. Having a small number of kids and being biologically wired to care for them has huge implications for your motivation as an animal, and it's reasonable to think that a lot of our higher emotions are built on hardware originally evolved for that purpose.

(Albeit the evolutionary origins of that are somewhat murky - to what extent mammals/birds reuse capabilities that were developed by a much earlier common ancestor, or whether it's entirely parallel evolution, isn't known afaik - but birds seem to exhibit a similar set of emotional states to mammals, that much is true).